The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls (5 page)

I looked at the paperback in my hand. I found it almost impossible, after I’d just finished reading a book, to formulate an opinion about it. To me, a recently read novel was like a miniature planet: only a few hours earlier I had been breathing its air and living contentedly among its people—and now I was expected to pronounce a judgment about its worth? What was there to say?
I enjoyed that planet. I believe that planet and its inhabitants are very worthwhile
.

“I liked it,” I said. “It was good.”

“That’s it?” My mother passed me the crackers.

“I thought the story was about claustrophobia,” Wallis said. “All the characters are trapped. They’re limited by the perspectives they were born with. Even the husband.”

“The husband’s a total creep,” Jill said.

Frowning, Wallis examined a stalk of celery. I was going to have trouble not thinking about her as a little brown
cub. “He thinks he’s being good to his wife,” she growled. “He thinks he loves her. But he can’t see beyond the conventions of his time.”

The three mothers were nodding. In another hour, I thought, everyone would be gone, and I could be in bed eating an ice cream sandwich.

“It is no use, young man,”
CeeCee said, tossing her hair.
“You can’t open it.”

“I beg your pardon?” her mother asked.

“That’s what the wife tells her husband.” CeeCee nudged the fan with her foot. “You should try to keep up with the reading next time.”

“ ‘It is no use, young man,’ ” Wallis echoed.

I stared at CeeCee.

“It’s at the very end,” she said, leaning back in her chair. “The wife is telling her husband that he can’t open her bedroom door because it’s locked. Of course there are multiple interpretations. She’s saying that he can’t understand her—he can’t open her mind. And she’s obviously talking about sex, too, which they probably aren’t having anymore because of her little breakdown. She’s closed herself up in her yellow room, or maybe her
womb
, and now she’s telling him he can’t
come in
. She won’t let him knock down her personal entryway and—”

“I think everyone has finished writing down suggestions,” Jill’s mother said. “Should we see what they are?”

CeeCee stood up. “It must be time for a bathroom break,” she said.

Like an old-fashioned butler in a mansion, I said I’d show her the way. Jill stood up as if attached to us by a
string, and a minute later the three of us were bumbling into the bathroom, Jill nudging us from behind and then closing the door.

“Okay, what was that about?” Jill asked. “Were you making fun of my mother?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t think I needed to,” CeeCee said. She sat on the counter next to the sink, swinging her pedicured feet back and forth. “This is going well so far, isn’t it? Our first meeting? My sister gave me the lowdown on the book; she had to read it in college. I might have read it myself but it sounded slow.”

“How inconvenient for you,” Jill said. “First you have to be in a book club; then you’re expected to read the books.”

“I know. It sucks.” CeeCee opened the medicine chest and examined the contents of its sticky shelves: a bottle of aspirin, a package of bandages, a wrinkled sponge, some cleanser, a box of stomach meds, a thermometer, a lipstick, a container of baby powder, a toothbrush missing most of its bristles, and a plastic jar full of safety pins.

“What are you looking for?” I asked.

“Just browsing,” she said. “What did you and Jill talk about before I got here? Have you told her about your missing dad?”

“He isn’t ‘missing,’ ” I said, glancing at Jill. “He’s just … not around.”

CeeCee unscrewed the lid on a plastic jar and peered inside. “Absent, missing, whatever,” she said. “If I were you, which I’m obviously not,
I
would be curious. I’d want to know where fifty percent of my cells were from.”

Jill pulled back the curtain in front of the window, which looked onto the porch. “I wonder if it’s too late to switch to regular English.”

There was a knock at the door. “Hello? Is this the bathroom?” It was Wallis. She stood on the threshold when Jill opened the door. “They sent me to find you,” she said. “Why are you meeting in here?”

“The best book clubs always meet in bathrooms,” CeeCee said as Jill and I shuffled aside to make room.

Wallis scratched at a scaly patch of skin on her leg and glanced quickly at each of us. “There were only four books that got more than one vote,” she announced. She seemed to be speaking to the towel rack behind me.

CeeCee closed the bathroom door with her foot. “Before we get caught up in business details,” she said, “I need to ask you a question, Wallis. Why are you not shaving your armpits?”

Wallis lifted one arm as if to check beneath it. “In most of the world, the women don’t shave,” she said. The hair under her arms was a thick black tangle, as if twin dark animals had crawled up there to die.

“Is this meeting over yet?” Jill asked.

I told Wallis to hurry up and let us know which books we were going to read.

CeeCee said she was hoping for
The Kama Sutra
,
The Joy of Sex
, and
Your Difficult Teen
.

Wallis cleared her throat. “The books are
Frankenstein
, by Mary Shelley;
The Left Hand of Darkness
, by Ursula Le Guin;
The House on Mango Street
, by Sandra Cisneros; and
The Awakening
, by Kate Chopin.”

Frankenstein
was the only one I had heard of. “The mothers must have voted together,” I said. “They probably cheated.”

Through the open window overlooking the porch, CeeCee and Jill and I heard our mothers starting to laugh. The sound was high-pitched, sharp, and female; it made me wonder whether people consciously changed the way they laughed as they grew up, whether a switch in their heads made them shift from teenage snickering to what my friend Liz called martini laughs.

Jill filled a paper cup with water. “What do you think they’re talking about?” she asked.

“Us,” I said.

“Definitely,” CeeCee agreed. “That’s the whole idea behind this book club. They’ve arranged for us to read the same books they’re reading so we can think their thoughts and start living their lives. They want
us
to turn into
them
.”

Jill muttered something about conspiracy theories, but I thought CeeCee might have a point. Sometimes I imagined that growing older meant that, at twenty-five or thirty, I’d be forced to weave my own awful cocoon and climb inside it, emerging several years later wearing ill-fitting pants and yammering on about the price of gas and milk. “The Mother-Daughter Book Club and Conspiracy League,” I said.

More laughter filtered through the window.

“That’s a good idea. We need a title—a name for our book club,” CeeCee said.

“Titles are hard.” Wallis scratched the rash on her leg.

“What about The Literary Enslavement Society of West No Hope?” CeeCee asked.

“Catchy,” said Jill.

I suggested The Involuntary Book Bondage Guild.

After exchanging a few more title ideas we went back to the porch, where someone had switched on the overhead light. Outside the screens, fireflies were puncturing the night with their yellow bodies. To them, we might have looked like a collection of oversized creatures in a very large jar.

Wallis picked up the crackers she had brought. We confirmed our next meeting.

“I wish your mother had been able to be here.” Jill’s mother patted Wallis on the shoulder. “I don’t think I’ve met her. What sort of project is she working on?”

“A book. It’s about philosophy. My mother is a philosopher,” Wallis said. The lenses of her glasses were covered with specks.

“I thought philosophers were extinct,” I said.

Jill asked Wallis if we could read her mother’s book.

But Wallis said the book wasn’t intended for people like us. We wouldn’t be able to understand it. It was only for other philosophy professors to read.

There was an awkward pause.

“Well, this is very exciting!” Jill’s mother beamed. “We’re like characters in a book ourselves. We were almost strangers to each other a few hours ago, but now here we are, getting ready for something to happen. For the plot to begin!”

“Mom? It’s time to go,” Jill said.

My mother asked Wallis if she wanted someone to drive her home. Where did she live?

Wallis opened the screen door, letting several moths flutter in. “Weller Road,” she growled. “Past the tower.”

“Past the old water tower?” CeeCee’s mother looked surprised. “I didn’t think anyone lived out there.”

“We’re renting,” Wallis said. “I don’t need a ride.” She pushed through the door and headed into the dusk beneath the trees.

CeeCee raised an eyebrow in my direction. “
There’s
a plot waiting to happen. Don’t you think so, A?” From that moment on, all summer, she called me A.

4. PLOT: This word has kind of a bad feeling about it because of terrorist plots and plots to commit murder and plots in graveyards. But in a book it just means the main events in a story and the order they’re in
.

F
rankenstein
was slow going at first. It starts with a sea captain writing letters to his sister. He complains about his lousy education and tells his sister he’s lonely on his ship and wants a friend. Then, as if by magic, a friend appears: a crazy half-starved castaway who tells the captain that he built a monster.
Now we’re getting somewhere
, I thought. I could feel myself sinking into the story. I dug into the box of cereal I was feeding myself by the handful and turned the page.

The phone rang. It was my mother, calling from work. Was I awake yet? she wanted to know.

I reported back in the affirmative.
Every night I was oppressed by a slow fever
, I read, my fingers combing through
the crunchy depths of the box.
I became nervous to a most painful degree
.

“Adrienne? Did you hear what I said?” my mother asked. “I won’t be home until six-fifteen.”

“Okay,” I said. “Why don’t we ever buy donuts?”

“We had donuts last week. The problem with my getting home later,” my mother said, “is that I won’t be able to drive you to the pool.”

“Huh.” I had reentered the book. Victor Frankenstein’s family had sent him to college, where he had apparently signed up for Immortality 101: he was spending most of his classroom time watching bodies decay.

“Have any of the girls from the book club called you?” my mother asked. “Adrienne?”

I shunned my fellow creatures as if I had been guilty of a crime
.

“Adrienne?”

“What? Don’t worry about the pool,” I said. “I don’t have to get there every day.” My mother spent fifty hours a week teaching people about the different uses of
in
,
at
,
on
, and
of
, and she was worried about
my
being bored. She must not have realized that I had an impressive to-do list.

    Adrienne’s list:

    1) Read advice columns online.

    2) Find out whether a donut-delivery service exists in West New Hope.

    
3) Train hair to part on the left side.

    4) Talk to self in a British accent.
Wot did yew saaay?

“Put the book down for a second,” my mother said. “The problem is that my schedule at work has changed. I won’t be able to drive you to the pool at all.”

“Oh.” I ate a handful of cereal and noticed the trail of crumbs that had followed me—how did these things happen?—across the kitchen floor.

“Which is why I asked if you’d heard from anyone in the book club. I spoke to CeeCee’s mother—I think she’s going to have CeeCee call you.”

Wot did yew saaay?
“Why would CeeCee call me?” I asked.

“Because I asked her mother if they could give you a ride to the pool. And it turns out they can, at least Monday to Thursday. They can pick you up after CeeCee’s summer school class. I think it ends at twelve-thirty.”

I picked up my cell phone and checked for messages: none. “CeeCee doesn’t want to hang out with me.”

“Well, you don’t know that,” my mother said. “She’s probably as bored as you are. And you need to get to the pool. I’m trying to do you a favor.”

“I don’t want you setting up playdates for me,” I said. Did my mother think I was entirely helpless? “It makes me look pathetic.”

“Fine.” My mother said she had to get to a meeting. “But answer your phone if it rings. And you saw the note I left on the counter? You’ll clean up the kitchen and take out the trash?”

I grew alarmed at the wreck I perceived that I had become
.

“What? Yeah,” I said. “You don’t have to remind me.” But in fact I did forget, and the dirty dishes and the trash were still in the kitchen when my mother got home.