The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls (12 page)

“Are your parents asleep?” I asked. I hadn’t seen them.

“They might as well be.” She started surfing through the cabinets, picking up boxes of cereal, tins of chocolate, bags of rice, baking soda, almonds, pancake batter, and coffee beans. “Why, hello there,” she said. From behind two jars of spaghetti sauce she plucked a small bottle of gin.
Beefeater
, it said. The label showed a whiskery man in a red uniform.

“Won’t somebody notice that’s missing?” I asked.

She tucked the bottle under her arm. “Are you always this nervous?”

We walked through the dining room and down the hall, CeeCee swinging a set of keys on a silver chain. She unbolted the door.

“I don’t want to walk a long way,” I said.

“We’re not going to walk.”

We stepped outside and ducked through the puddle of light from the motion detector. The warm air smelled of asphalt, mown grass, and charcoal grills recently extinguished.

“So we’re not going to Wallis’s, then,” I said.

“Of course we are. That’s what we’ve been talking about all week.”

“We have?” I asked. “But what about Jill?”

“She wasn’t exactly enthusiastic when we mentioned the idea to her,” CeeCee said.

We crossed the neighbors’ driveway. CeeCee was still swinging the set of keys on their silver chain. When we cut across to the next block, I saw a rusted blue four-door lurking under the trees.

“Is that Jeff’s car?” I asked. It was probably near midnight. There were no crickets chirping; there were no cicadas, no barking dogs. “I thought he couldn’t find …” I looked at CeeCee. “You took his car? How did you do that?” I was trying to piece the evening together, to understand where it might be headed before we arrived.

“Do you want to stand here
talking
about the car, or are you going to get
in
it?” CeeCee asked.

I was a person with horrible red hair and a mound of pink crust surrounding a diamond in her ear. I was at risk, and I had just made out with a girl in a bathroom.

I got into the car.

We slammed the doors and CeeCee unscrewed the cap on the gin, which made a series of ominous clicks as if she were breaking a small animal’s neck.

I had taken sips of my mother’s beer or wine before, and I had seen my mother drink gin and tonics. But I had never tried plain gin. For which there was probably a fairly good reason. “I’m not very thirsty,” I said.

CeeCee held the open bottle toward me. “This,” she said, “does not have anything to do with thirst.”

A pop-up window in my brain reminded me of three things:

    1) the drug and alcohol awareness units we had been subjected to in school;

    2) my mother’s reaction, if and when she found out—but how would she find out? And look what she’d done, after all, getting pregnant with me by some total stranger;

    3) the well-known quotation—but I forgot how it went—about experience being the best teacher.

I put the bottle to my lips and drank.

I had read about people who were alcoholics. I had read
A Million Little Pieces
and
Smashed
, but I didn’t remember anyone explaining that gin tasted the way gasoline smelled. I felt it crawl down the back of my throat on a thousand sparkling, poisonous legs. I gasped. CeeCee put the key in the ignition.

“Have you taken driver’s ed yet?” I asked. To keep from coughing, I took another sip of the gin.

CeeCee fiddled with something on the dashboard. She turned the windshield wipers and the blinker on and then off. At the bottom of the street, a car chuddered past.

I fastened my seat belt. “How bad was that accident you were in last spring?”

“A, I’m trying to concentrate here.” The engine moaned
and then screamed. “Driving is easy,” CeeCee said. She licked her lips. “People like to pretend that it’s complicated. But it’s not much different from bumper cars.”

“Except”—I wanted to clarify this point—“that we don’t want to bump into anything. Did you turn on the headlights?”

“Whoops: no.” We jerked down the street for a few blocks until CeeCee remembered the parking brake. “Now we’re smooth sailing. Wave to the family.” We drove past my house, which was dark and quiet, and past the bowling alley and through the Towne Centre.

“I thought the plan was to go to Wallis’s,” I said.

“Yeah. But I can’t remember where Weller Road is. I’m not very good at navigating.” CeeCee ran her tongue across her teeth while looking at herself in the rearview mirror. “I think we might have gone past it. It’s right near that eye doctor’s office.”

“The eye doctor?” We cruised past a playground and a Gas-n-Go. We weren’t in West New Hope anymore.

“You know, the one with the billboard above it. And there’s a kind of hill …”

“What does the billboard say?” I asked, taking a sip from the bottle. The gin had created a fog in my stomach.

“I don’t remember,” CeeCee said. “It’s an ad. There’s a guy’s face on it—he looks demented, and he’s got his mouth open. And the hill—Hang on a second: it isn’t the eye doctor I’m thinking of. It’s the dentist.”

“Should I look up directions?” I asked. I reached for her phone, which was on the seat between us, but with the car still moving I was getting dizzy. “Maybe we should pull
over,” I said. “In case one of us has to get glasses or have our teeth pulled.”

“What’s wrong with your voice?” CeeCee asked. “How much of that gin are you drinking?”

I screwed the cap back onto the bottle.

CeeCee talked to herself for a couple of minutes, then pulled a U-turn, the scenery swinging loosely past my window. The front wheel on my side slammed into a pothole.

“Something doesn’t sound very good,” I said as a
thuppa thuppa thuppa
noise came from the car.

“It’s probably just a flat tire. Look. There it is: Weller Road.” CeeCee turned left. “Why do they make places like this so hard to get to?”

Wondering who “they” might be—was this a philosophical question?—I drank some more gin.

Weller Road was a meandering county highway. Most of the streets in West New Hope were tidy and short, and featured ramblers or colonial houses surrounded by artificial wishing wells and fake spotted deer. But the old county highway at the edge of town was overgrown. The houses were scattered, without sidewalks or numbers, and most were set back from the road, among the trees. Turning left onto Weller was like driving from the suburbs onto Easter Island.

CeeCee stopped and took the keys from the ignition, and we left the car, slouched to the right because of its flat tire, at the side of the road.

“Jeff’s a little freaked out,” CeeCee said. She was texting
while we walked. “I told him he shouldn’t have left his keys where I could find them if he didn’t want me to borrow his car.”

We crossed the narrow asphalt roadway, and I tried to remember why we had come. We were looking for something, or saving someone, or doing something important.

Up ahead, all I could see was a cluster of trees with a path leading toward them. I consulted the red-uniformed beefeater on the bottle of gin in my hand: he seemed to understand our quest and know where we should go.

“Is that the old water tower?” CeeCee asked, pointing at the thicker swath of darkness over the trees.

“Yes. Don’t worry; I can find it,” I said. Beefeater in hand, I led the way, bushwhacking along past an ancient couch with exposed springs and a crumbling stone skeleton of a building that had long been destroyed. I was Marco Polo and Vasco da Gama and Columbus all rolled into one.

“A, wait. Where are you going?” CeeCee called.

But I forged ahead until we reached it. There it was: the tower, surging up out of the darkness, a fat stone cylinder at least six stories high, with a pointed cap on the top, like a rocket. Or an arrow. Or maybe a finger. I tipped back my head and looked up.

“What are you doing?” CeeCee asked.

I told her to look at the tower carefully. “It’s pointing at something.”

“It’s not pointing at anything,” she said.

“What do you think it means?” I asked. I found an old oil drum next to the tower and climbed onto its lid.

“I think it means you drank too much,” CeeCee said.

I told her to get me the plastic milk crate I’d just seen in the weeds.

She hesitated but then gave it to me. “What about your leg?”

I stacked the milk crate on top of the oil drum. I looked at my leg. Was that a brace on my knee?

“You’re really going to climb that thing?” CeeCee asked.

I apparently was. The evening had acquired its own momentum, the wheels of fate turning, so to speak, and I was reaching for the rusted ladder that seemed to cling, as if barely attached, to the bulging wall. Large flakes of rust were peeling off the metal crossbars onto the palms of my hands.

“Tell me what you see up there.” CeeCee laughed.

I held on to the ladder and leaned back. As if by prior arrangement with the universe, a wall of clouds above the tower shifted, revealing a billion silver stars. I was riding toward them on a stone rocket. Soon I would look down at myself on the earth and understand who and what and why I was. “I’m very close to the sky now,” I said.

“You’re not even ten feet off the ground. But you definitely drank too much,” CeeCee said. I heard her rustling in the weeds. “Half the bottle, it looks like. Unless you spilled some of this. Did you?”

My lips were numb.
So this is why people drink
, I thought.
It loosens the ties that hold us to the world
. “My ties are loose,” I said.

“Do you mean your shoes?” CeeCee asked. “You aren’t wearing them.”

I tried to look at my feet, which seemed far below me on the ladder. First one foot and—“Oops.” The earth spun slowly, once, and then sped up and hammered itself against me. “Ouch.” The pain arrived at different parts of my body one after another—first a poisonous scrape above my wrist, then a cracked bell tolling away in my skull, then the familiar lightning flame in my kneecap. “I have fallen from the sky,” I said. And then I threw up.

“Jesus, A.” CeeCee was next to me. “Are you all right? Can you move?”

I did a sort of backstroke in the weeds.

“You probably got the wind knocked out of you.”

I tried to nod in agreement, but CeeCee’s features were revolving on her face like the hands on a clock.

“No sleeping,” she said. “Don’t go to sleep.” A minute later she seemed to be dragging me along the path. “Listen to me, A.” My head smacked a rock. “Can you sit up? I need you to focus.”

She said something about lousy reception and about Jeff and a tire. “Don’t go anywhere.” She tucked the gin under her arm. “I’ll be right back.”

The horizon rocked like a boat. I belched, a small heap of foul-smelling liquid spilling into the grass. I tried to drag myself away from it.

“Hello?” I called. “Is anyone here?” A bead of light flashed on and then off. Several centuries drifted by. Finally I noticed two small creatures coming toward me out of the trees. The larger one turned out to be a woman. She was covered in wallpaper, and she was holding something toward me: it looked like a loaf of bread or a gun.

Politely, I asked her not to kill me.

“How did she get here?” the wallpaper woman asked.

The smaller creature peered into my face. She wore a long white dress: was this Frankenstein’s bride?

I tried to explain that CeeCee had kissed me and made me an honorary lesbian, and if they decided not to shoot me, we would all turn back into men before sunrise.

The wallpaper woman put her hand on my forehead. “You didn’t tell her to come here?”

The murdered bride shook her head.

“I’ll get a blanket.” Someone used a cloth to wipe my hands and face.

Another decade crawled by. The dark sky with its unreliable stars was revolving around us.

“You shouldn’t have come here,” said the murdered bride, kneeling beside me. “It isn’t safe.”

A set of headlights appeared on the horizon.

I waved to them as if flagging down a ship.

“I see her; she’s over there,” a voice said; and as if they were only products of someone else’s imagination, the wallpaper woman and the murdered bride turned back into fictional characters and disappeared.

9. DIALOGUE: Conversation between characters. Which makes me wonder why conversation between three characters isn’t called trialogue. Which would lead to quadralogue and pentalogue. Quotation marks are usually used
.

—
S
hit. You left her like this? When did she pass out?

—I don’t know. Twenty minutes ago.
A, wake up
. She didn’t have this towel around her when I left her.

—What do you want to do with her? Disgusting: there’s puke all over the place. I just stepped in it.

—A, can you hear me? It’s CeeCee. You have to wake up.

—Where did she get this towel if you didn’t give it to her?

—I don’t know. There’s all kinds of crap out here; she must have found it. We have to get her into your car.

—The car you stole from me?