The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls (2 page)

“Actually, no,” CeeCee said. “I know nothing about you. You’re like an Etch A Sketch to me. Or a dry-erase board. You know: blank.”

“Thanks,” I said.

She crossed her legs and waved halfheartedly to someone on the other side of the diving board. “It is a coincidence, though,” she said. “I’m not supposed to be here, either. I should be in France. My sister’s studying there, for the year. But my parents canceled my trip because I dented their car.
One
of their cars. They got all freaked out because I don’t have a license.”

“You have a permit?” I asked.

A little boy wearing dinosaur swim trunks paused by our chairs.

“Not yet. Anyway, as punishment,” CeeCee said, “because I was such an ‘irresponsible girl,’ the parentals signed me up for summer school. Apparently, sitting in an unair-conditioned classroom with Monsieur Crowne every day for six weeks is the perfect way to learn French. It’s much better than spending the summer in Paris. I don’t like little kids,” she said to the boy in the dinosaur trunks. He wandered away.

With her phone, CeeCee took a picture of her painted toenails in front of the pool. “When I think about being stuck in West New Hope in a literary play group with my mother I want to scoop my eyeballs out with a spoon,” she said. “This town is hell during the summer. There’s nobody here.”

I knew what she meant. The only things to do in town involved the pool and a Softee Freeze and a decrepit mini-putt and a handful of unpopular stores in the badly spelled Towne Centre. The joke about West New Hope was that there was no East New Hope, and there was
No Hope
. We lived in a flat, oversized suburb west of nothing, a dot on the map in a state people drove through to get somewhere else.

Besides, most of the people our age who had hung around during previous summers had gotten jobs (all of which were taken by the time I applied, with my leg in a brace), or had left town to do something fulfilling and educational: they were working in orphanages or curing diseases or preventing war. My plan for the summer? Relax, read, and spend some unstructured leisure time not being at school.

I looked around the pool for people over the age of twelve and under thirty. “There’s Jill D’Amato. She’s in our book club.” I pointed. Past the lifeguard stand and the shuffleboard court and the baby pool, between the men’s and women’s locker rooms (a series of dripping cinder-block caverns that always smelled of Band-Aids and feet), Jill was working the snack bar. She sat in a folding chair under an awning, selling Italian water ice and soda and chips and ice cream. When I’d walked past her earlier, she was reading an SAT prep book and a thesaurus. Jill’s mother had also attended the infamous yoga class that spawned the idea of the mother-daughter book club of No Hope, DE.

“Oh, good God,” CeeCee said. “I know that girl. She
was in choir with me last year. She likes country music. And she’s sitting there studying. Bizarre. Is she a friend of yours?”

“Not really.”

Jill looked up as if she had heard us.

“So who do you usually hang out with?” CeeCee asked.

“Usually … Liz,” I said, adjusting the top of my bathing suit, which appeared to be losing its elastic. “Liz Zerendow. But she’s—”

“Gone for the summer,” CeeCee finished. “I already heard.”

I didn’t bother to ask her who she was friends with because the answer was obvious: the ruling class of glamorous despots who floated like rare and colorful aquatic creatures through the toxic fishbowl that was our school. My general goal—and it appeared to have succeeded—was to remain forever undetectable to their radar.

CeeCee seemed to have temporarily run out of questions. I leaned back in my chair. The heat was barbaric. The sky, cloudless and flat, was pressing down on us like a steam iron. I shut my eyes and slipped into a coma for a little while, dreaming about Liz paddling away in a silver canoe on a strand of blue water.

I woke up when the lifeguards blared their whistles. They called for a buddy check—CeeCee lightly touched my wrist and said “Check”—followed by fifteen minutes of adult swim.

I rubbed my eyes and sat up and found my place in “The Yellow Wallpaper.” The story was strange, but I liked it. It was about a woman who was depressed and whose
husband thought she would feel better if they rented a house in the middle of nowhere so she could spend all her time doing nothing in a yellow room.

I am glad my case is not serious! But these nervous troubles are dreadfully depressing. John does not know how much I really suffer
.

“Are you ignoring me?” CeeCee asked. “I
said
, why did you agree?”

“Why did I agree to what?” I tugged at my bathing suit again. Bathing suits never seemed to look good on me. My body was thick in the middle, almost cylindrical. The word
trunk
—as in trees and elephants—often sprang unfortunately to mind.

“Why did you agree to be in the book club?” CeeCee watched me struggle with my bathing suit. “You said it wasn’t your idea.”

I noticed the waterfall of her hair and the silver rings on three of her fingers and her hip bones poking out on either side of the perfect flat plane of her golden stomach. “I burned our house down,” I said. “I had a choice between book club and jail.”

CeeCee turned her head slowly and looked straight at me for the first time. “That was funny,” she said. “Unless you think you’re making fun of me.”

I went back to my book.

Nobody would believe what an effort it is to do what little
I am able—to dress and entertain, and order things
.

“I wouldn’t mind as much if it was a
father
-daughter book club,” CeeCee said. “Fathers aren’t as annoying.” She popped the top on a can of soda. “Are your parentals fairly normal?”

“I just have a mom,” I said, still looking at my book. “I don’t have a dad.”

“Cool. He’s dead?” CeeCee sipped from her drink.

“No. He’s just not around.”

“So he ran off? Is he a deadbeat?”

“I never met him. He’s not … part of the picture.” I went back to the yellow room and the gate at the stairs and the bars on the windows.

John has cautioned me not to give way to fancy in the least
.
He says that with my imaginative power and habit of story-making, a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies—

“I bet you think about him subconsciously.”

“What?” The noise and splashing and heat and commotion filtered into my brain; I pulled the book closer.

He says that with my imaginative power and habit of story-making, a nervous weakness like mine—

“That’s probably why you couldn’t answer my question.”

… a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to—

CeeCee pressed her icy can of soda against my arm. The yellow room fizzled and disappeared. “What question?” I asked.

“About what kind of person you are,” she said. “You couldn’t tell me and now I’m curious. You couldn’t even describe yourself. Don’t you think that’s”—she glanced at my knee—“lame?”

“Why are you talking to me?” I asked.

CeeCee tipped back her head and finished her soda. “This chair was empty. I saw the book in your hands. You could say that literature brought us together. Also, I felt like messing with your head.”

“Thanks.”

“You’re extremely welcome,” she said, and for the first time since she had sat down, I didn’t dislike her.

Another blast from the whistle. Adult swim was over. CeeCee stood up and stretched. “Time to get in the water. Are you coming?”

I told her I’d rather stay in my chair and finish the book. “There are too many people in the pool right now.”

“There are always too many people in the pool,” CeeCee said. She tied her hair into a perfect golden knot. “The water’s just a big tub of chlorine full of skin flakes and gobs of hair and snot and bacteria. But you can’t let that stop you.”

I hesitated. “I don’t want anyone bumping into me,” I said. “My leg’s really sore.”

CeeCee was poised at the lip of the pool. “You said you’re supposed to be exercising. I’ll run interference for
you.” She hopped in, holding her elbows above the surface. The water was full of little kids diving for pennies and swimming through each other’s legs. She turned to face me. “Jump to Mommy.”

Different moments in my life remind me of books. Looking at CeeCee holding her arms out in front of her, I thought about Heidi coaxing Clara to walk. I limped to the stairs and took hold of the handrail. Two little boys came churning toward me, thrashing their limbs.

CeeCee grabbed the nearer kid by the ankle. “Out of my way,” she said, “or I crush you.” She turned him around and launched him like a boat in the other direction. “Let’s go, Grandma.” I walked down the stairs, the water a cool blue bandage against my leg.

Liz was probably swimming in a lake somewhere. She was taking AP English, too. She was planning to read the books in the tent the two of us were supposed to have shared. She would probably write the entire essay in an afternoon—Liz was a model of efficiency—when she got back.

“Why is that strange little person staring at you?” CeeCee asked. She created a narrow lane at the edge of the pool, where I paced back and forth.

“What strange little person?” I wiped the chlorine out of my eyes. Behind our recliners, on the other side of the diamond-chain-link fence, was a scrawny girl wearing oversized shorts and a shirt and sneakers.

“That’s Wallis,” I said. She was the final daughter in the mother-daughter book club. Unlike CeeCee and Jill
and me, Wallis had apparently found out about the group and asked to be included.

“Is she … in special ed?” CeeCee asked.

“No. She skipped a grade,” I said. “It might have been two.”

“Unsettling. Why is she
outside
the fence?” CeeCee shaded her eyes. “It’s a hundred degrees. And isn’t Wallace a guy’s name?”

“No, it’s spelled
W-A-L-L-I-S
,” I said. “She was in my history class last term. She moved here in January and made a speech on her first day, telling everyone in the room that she was named for the woman who was supposed to be the queen of England.”

“Do you mean Elizabeth?”

“No. Elizabeth
is
the queen,” I said.

Wallis had turned away from us and was shuffling through the uncut grass between the parking lot and the locker rooms. She had a book with her. I didn’t have to see its cover to know what it was: “The Yellow Wallpaper.”

CeeCee stiff-armed a little girl wearing orange floaters out of our way.

“Do you want me to tell you what the book’s about?” I asked.

CeeCee shrugged. “Don’t worry about it.”

I paused at the edge of the pool, where a filter was sucking and spitting out water like a plastic mouth. “It’s set about a hundred years ago,” I said. “The main character, the protagonist, is a wealthy woman who’s depressed. She has a baby, and—”

“Did you say ‘protagonist’?” CeeCee asked. “Are you deliberately using the words on that literary terms list?”

I noticed that Jill, beneath the awning above the snack bar, was staring at us. “I’m not using them
deliberately
,” I said. I tried to ignore a stabbing feeling at the base of my knee. “Anyway, the woman is married to a doctor who spends all his time hovering over her and making her rest in a yellow room. Whenever she looks at the wallpaper—”

“You don’t have to tell me the end,” CeeCee said. She caught a dead bug in her hands and threw it out of the pool. “I read that part already.”

Wallis shuffled past the pool’s main entrance, still outside the fence, head down and reading. She didn’t stop to buy a ticket or a summer pass.

“So you read the end but not the beginning?”

“Yeah. There are a couple of lines in the last few pages that made me laugh.”

I tried to imagine which parts of a story about a person losing her mind would be funny.

“Hang on.” CeeCee swam to the ladder and climbed out and flipped through the book. “Here it is. The ‘protagonist’ keeps telling her husband that she feels like crap but he doesn’t believe her. He calls her a ‘blessed little goose.’ And when she says she wants to get out of the yellow room because it’s making her sick”—CeeCee tossed the book back onto her chair—“her husband says, ‘Bless her little heart. She shall be as sick as she pleases.’ ”

I pulled myself to the ladder and got out, feeling thousands of drops of water chatter and prickle against my skin. The cement cooked my feet.

“ ‘She shall be as sick as she pleases,’ ” CeeCee sang. “You don’t think that’s hilarious?”

I shrugged. Having done nothing all day, I was exhausted. Lying down on the plastic slats of my recliner, I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the scene from above: a flat green park, a silver fence with one scrawny girl positioned outside it, and set in the center, like a gaudy gem in a ring, the shimmering turquoise body of the pool.

I listened to the
whap-ap-ap-ap-ap
of the diving board. “This heat could kill a person,” I said.

“Blessed little goose,” CeeCee said. “I wonder who it will be.”