The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls Read online

  I forgot the timer and probably left the dye in too long while I shaved my legs and invented a new kind of cheese sandwich, but I followed the directions otherwise, and then I rinsed and dried my hair and got dressed and reexamined the package, which probably should have been labeled Firehouse Red.

  “Maybe it fades,” I informed the mirror.

  The mirror suggested I immediately get into the shower and wash my hair several times. Forty minutes later the color had barely faded, and I noticed that the tips of my ears and an inch of my forehead were the color of blood.

  My laptop had been acting a little funky, so I used my mother’s ancient computer to look up how to get dye out of hair. Solutions involved washing, washing with substances I didn’t have, and professional help. Eventually I ended up following a link—need help?—which had nothing to do with hair but offered me advice if I had an STD or was pregnant. This site, in turn, led to a page (had my mother been looking at it? was that why it cropped up?) for single parents.

  At first I thought it was a dating service, but other than her once-a-month dinners with Carl Schunk, who ran the hardware store, my mother hadn’t dated in years. I scrolled through the site. It definitely wasn’t about romance. It outlined the risks of being the teenaged child of a single parent.

  Apparently, without even knowing it, I had grown up in a scarring environment. Fatherless children, the site warned, were more likely to drop out of school, to be poor, to get addicted to drugs, and to be at risk for identity and gender confusion. I ran a hand through my hair, which was feeling stiff. Kids without fathers, the site said, ended up in jail more often than two-parent kids, and their lives were more likely to end in suicide.

  Huh. I hadn’t thought about suicide much. And I hadn’t done anything—yet—that would land me in jail. Identity and gender confusion? Really? I thought of Estraven in The Left Hand of Darkness changing from female to male and back again.

  By the time my mother came home I had almost forgotten about dyeing my hair. The shocked expression on her face was a quick reminder.

  “You’re kidding,” she said. I could tell that words—entire sentences—were arriving in her mouth, and she was swallowing them back. “How many bath towels did you ruin?” she finally asked.

  “What?” I hadn’t thought about the towels. The one resting next to me on the floor did seem to be stained.

  Maybe she’s shocked because I look older and more sophisticated, I thought.

  My mother picked up the towel. “I suppose it’s not permanent.” She tilted her head as if to observe me from a different angle. “Why did you do it?”

  To give you money so you can visit Father near his Civil War battlefield. “No reason,” I said. “And thanks for the big vote of confidence.” I went to my room.

  Twenty minutes later my mother knocked on my door. “Do you want to play Scrabble?”

  If this was a peace offering, I thought, it was the wrong kind. “You always beat me at Scrabble,” I complained.

  “I don’t always beat you.” My mother was ridiculously fond of Scrabble. “Adrienne,” she said. “I just wasn’t prepared to see your hair looking so … bright. Come out to the kitchen. I’ll set up the board.” She lured me out of my room—I put on a thick black headband—by promising to advance me fifty points.

  “How’s your knee feeling these days?” she asked, once we sat down and picked our wooden letters.

  “It’s getting better.” I flexed my foot.

  “I know it’s stressful, being injured,” my mother said. “You’re probably sorting a lot of things out.”

  I recognized a certain tone in her voice and started to wish I had stayed in my room. “Like what?” I asked. “What am I sorting out?”

  “Well, I don’t know; maybe you should tell me.” My mother set down some letters. “Twenty-six points,” she said. “It’s your turn.”

  The intriguing thing about playing Scrabble is that as soon as the board is set up in front of me, I don’t know any words. Other than cat and bat and rat, everything disappears from the language drawer in my brain. My mother, on the other hand, who normally speaks English like a regular person, spells things like qiviut (“wool of the musk ox”) and hake.

  “Hake?” I asked. “You got twenty-six points for hake?”

  “It’s a type of fish,” she said. “You’ve probably eaten it.”

  I stared at my letters.

  “The reason I’m asking about stress,” my mother said, “is that you’ve got a newly pierced ear that looks infected, and you just dyed your hair, and—to be honest—you’ve been pretty moody for the past few days. Also, I noticed the website you were looking at on my computer. You left it open. It said something about ‘teens in crisis.’ ”

  “Oh. That,” I said. “I wasn’t really looking at it. It just … came up.” I thought about the website. Was I at risk? Was my flame-colored hair a cry for help? I managed to get ten points for beat.

  My mother wrote down my score. “Maybe later this summer, once your leg is healed,” she said, “we could go for a trip. We could drive to the Adirondacks or the Poconos.”

  “We live forty minutes from the Atlantic Ocean,” I said. This was a source of tension between us. My mother said she didn’t like the ocean, even though she’d grown up at the New Jersey shore. She told me she got a rash from sitting on the sand.

  I dipped into the packet of wooden letters and came up with a J, an X, and a V.

  “It occurs to me that you’ve been thinking about your father more often.” My mother turned hake into shake by spelling quips. Forty-four points. Why were we playing a game that always proved that she was smarter than I was? “And I noticed CeeCee brought the subject up at book club.”

  “I can’t help it if CeeCee brings it up,” I said.

  “Are you thinking about your father more often?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I’m trying to think of a Scrabble word,” I said.

  My mother filled up the kettle and heated some water for tea. “It was an odd discussion at book club,” she said. “But I liked hearing from Wallis about her Rule of Three Thousand. She’s an interesting girl. You should try that: try keeping a list of all the books you read.”

  I felt a prickle of irritation. What was so interesting about Wallis? Actually, I had looked up Rule of 3,000 on the computer, assuming that she had plagiarized the idea from somebody else, but all I had found were a few scattered references to the dangers of climbing more than three thousand feet at a time in the mountains, and some miscellaneous information about a magic card game involving warriors, dragons, labyrinths, beasts, and typhoons.

  We each took our turns. Despite the fifty points my mother had advanced me, I was ten points behind.

  My phone started buzzing—a text from CeeCee: What R U doing?

  Not much, I answered. Hanging out w my mom. You reading L H of Dness?

  Oui. Highly influential. Am planning sex change on ½ of my body.

  I turned the word band into husband.

  “Clever,” my mother said. “But you might have used the S for a plural.”

  “I don’t like making plurals.” Why had my mother said I was moody? Just because I was annoyed with her didn’t mean I was moody. “Did anybody ever want to marry you?” I asked.

  My mother’s hand paused on her tray of letters.

  “I was just wondering,” I said. “Because you raised the subject. Did anybody—you know—ever express any interest?”

  “Someone did,” she said. “Before you were born. But he wasn’t the right person.”

  “Are we talking about my father?” And why didn’t you ever tell me that?

  “No. This was a different person,” she said. “Besides, in my opinion, a father or a parent is a person who raises a child. I think of your biological father as … an anonymous sperm donor.”

  You made him anonymous, I thought.

  CeeCee texted again. U around later?

  “We used a condom,�
� my mother said. “You’re living proof that they aren’t a hundred percent effective.”

  I didn’t want to be talking about condoms with my mother. I looked at my letters on their wooden rack: Yukturx. Krutyux. Tyuxruk. I used my X to spell ax, then texted CeeCee: Can’t do tonight. Talking to my M @ the guy she slept w.

  My mother was eighty points ahead.

  Ask her how hairy he was, texted CeeCee.

  I tried to come up with another word: Nuktury. Tunkyru. I seemed to be losing my grasp on my native language.

  “I guess the moral of the story,” my mother said, “is that sex always involves a risk. And I’m glad that—”

  “Why are we talking about this?” I asked, louder than I had intended.

  “I thought you brought it up,” my mother said. “I don’t understand why you’re getting so angry. I assumed that you wanted to ask me a question.”

  This was our bargain, from the very start: Answer only what Adrienne asks, and nothing more. I felt like I was playing a game I didn’t understand.

  It was my mother’s turn, but she wasn’t looking at her letters. She was looking at me.

  2morrow night then, CeeCee texted.

  I put the phone down and picked a blank. Of course, I thought: a smooth wooden square with nothing on it.

  I bumped the edge of the Scrabble board and jogged the tiles from their places. “You win,” I said, tossing the blank back in with the other letters. “I don’t want to play this game anymore.”

  8. SYMBOLISM: I don’t think symbolism comes up very often in real life. It seems mostly to exist in books so that people who like puzzles and hidden meanings can find it.

  “That’s a weird color,” CeeCee said, when I showed up at her house the following night with my fiery hair. “Are you going to redye it?”

  “No. My mother hates it, so I’m going to keep it,” I said.

  “That makes sense.” CeeCee nodded.

  I caught sight of myself in a mirror. The color made my head look burned, but it seemed to have attached itself to me, as if making a statement: You are what you say you are, yet you’re a joke, a hoax. That’s what someone said to Genly, in The Left Hand of Darkness.

  I followed CeeCee upstairs. I’d never been in her house, which was four times the size of mine. In her room she had a queen-size canopy bed, an antique dresser and dressing table with a dozen tiny, elegant drawers, and an Oriental rug.

  “How did the sex talk go the other day?” she asked. “Did you get any good info?”

  “I don’t think I want that kind of info,” I said, but I told her about the websites I’d consulted about fatherless teens. “I’m a ‘person at risk,’ ” I said, explaining that statistically I was more likely than other people to end up an alcoholic or an addict and to be arrested for a serious crime.

  “What kind of crime do you want to commit?” CeeCee started sorting through her underwear drawer.

  “I don’t know. I don’t want to rob a bank,” I said. “And I don’t want to kill anybody.”

  “Not yet anyway,” CeeCee said. “You probably have to work up to that sort of thing.” She threw a tangle of colored fabric into the trash. “I hate old underwear,” she said. She nodded at my backpack. “What did you bring with you?”

  I showed her: a T-shirt to sleep in, a toothbrush, and The Left Hand of Darkness. Was I supposed to bring anything else?

  “No, I guess not.” CeeCee walked into her closet and emerged a minute later wearing a blue kimono. “I have to take a shower. My hair feels like string.” She checked her phone. “You should read to me,” she said. “Like you did at the golf course.”

  “You want me to read to you in the shower?”

  “I don’t want you to get into the shower,” she said. “I just want you to read.”

  Like a walking SparkNotes guide, I followed CeeCee into the bathroom, which had two matching sinks, a separate little enclave for the toilet, and a strategically placed marble wall, about four and a half feet high, that divided the rest of the room from the shower. “So I can talk to people and not see their ugly bits,” CeeCee said. “I’ve even talked to my grandma in here; and believe me, under no circumstances do you ever want to see my grandmother naked.”

  Now and then I had seen my mother naked. Once I had opened the door to her bedroom and seen her walking around wearing only a necklace and a pair of socks. Are you going out in that? I had wanted to ask.

  CeeCee stepped around the marble divider, hung her kimono on a peg, and turned on the faucet. “God, I love water,” she said. “You’ll have to read kind of loud.”

  I leafed through the book, searching for a chapter that would pull her into the plot so she’d read the rest. “You know what kemmer is, right?” I asked. “Every twenty-eight days the people on the planet Winter become male or female, depending on who they’re attracted to and who they’re with.”

  “Yeah, weird,” CeeCee said. “Like getting your period. But I don’t get how it happens. Are they all built like Ken dolls most of the time? And then all of a sudden something either sprouts or—”

  “The book doesn’t go into that kind of detail.” I started to read. Estraven had rescued Genly Ai from prison. They hadn’t trusted each other before, but now the two of them were thrown together. They were both in danger and had to rely on each other as they tried to escape across the Gobrin Ice.

  Fifteen minutes later CeeCee turned off the water and reached for a towel. “You really like this book, don’t you? I can tell from the sound of your voice when you’re reading.”

  I did like the book. Though he was middle-aged and black and male, as well as a diplomat and a time traveler, I knew how it felt to be Genly Ai. He was supposed to understand and communicate with the people on the planet to which he’d been sent. But he sometimes felt like he was missing a set of instructions, or a crucial portion of his own brain, and he spent a lot of his time feeling jumbled and alone.

  CeeCee put her kimono back on and stepped out from behind the marble wall. “Do you think Genly’s gay?”

  I flexed my knee. “I don’t think that question makes sense on their planet.”

  She wiped a circle of steam off the mirror. I realized I was watching her and not reading. She turned around.

  “What?” I said.

  “I’m just wondering. Are you a lesbian?”

  “Me?” I laughed—a high-pitched, nervous whinnying sound, like an aging horse with its leg in a trap.

  “You don’t have a boyfriend,” CeeCee said. She was combing her hair.

  “But I’ve … been with guys,” I said. As recently as February, in fact, I had several after-school kissing encounters with Jason Fenn, who I might have liked better except that he was about eight inches shorter than I was. We met under the bleachers. I had thought about lifting him under the armpits so that his mouth could be closer to mine, but in the end I had just hunkered down and bent my knees.

  “What about you?” I asked. “Are you going out with anyone?”

  “I don’t like the term going out,” CeeCee said. “Anyway, we’re talking about you. We’re trying to establish your orientation—whether you’re gay or straight.” She finished combing her hair, sending drops of water and flecks of conditioner onto the floor. Then she set her comb down by the sink and pressed her mouth against mine.

  Iamnotreallydoingthis, I thought. My hands hung at my sides like a pair of dead fish. What did Genly say when Estraven told him he had entered kemmer? My friend, there’s nothing to fear between us. CeeCee’s tongue flickered and crept across my upper lip. Her hair smelled like artificial fruit. “Any reaction?” she asked.

  I tried to make a gesture that meant No comment. Jason’s lips had been crusty and chapped; I’d wanted to bite the little pieces of dead skin from his mouth.

  “The problem with guys,” CeeCee said, “is they kiss too forcefully. It’s like they want to show you their lips have been pumping iron. And they open their mouths too wide. You know what I mean?” />
  “Right,” I agreed. Am I a lesbian? I imagined myself wearing a black leather jacket and torn pants with chains, like some of the girls in the gay-straight alliance at school. I picked up The Left Hand of Darkness; we walked back down the hall to CeeCee’s room.

  She put on some music and stepped behind her closet door to get dressed. “Try this on,” she said, throwing me an emerald-green scarf. “It’ll look good with your hair.”

  Whenever Liz and I had sleepovers, we spent our time talking, eating junk food, and making fun of shows that we secretly liked on TV. Draping the scarf around my neck and watching CeeCee step out of her closet wearing a short denim skirt and a white tank top, I had a feeling that we were going to do something else.

  Her phone let out a beep. She opened it, smiled at the screen, then snapped it shut. “That was Jeff,” she said. She retied the green scarf for me and stood back. “He can’t find his car keys.”

  “Was he going to come over tonight?” I asked. He was probably lying about the keys, I thought: he was probably afraid that if he showed up, he would have to heft me through another window.

  CeeCee opened one of the tiny wooden drawers in her dressing table and drew a thin arc of brown liner above each eye. “Do you want me to set you up with him?” she asked.

  “You mean, with Jeff? I thought he was going out—or in a relationship—with your sister.”

  “My sister’s in Paris, A,” she said. “And I have a prediction. Ready? You’ll end up making out with Jeff before the end of the summer.”

  I thought of the stubble on Jeff’s chin and the way his face was shaped: like a shovel. “Really?” I asked.

  “Absolutely. It’s going to happen.” CeeCee held out the eyeliner. “Do you want to use this? You should keep it and use it; I have one I like better.” She tossed it into my backpack. “Let’s go downstairs.”