The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls (7 page)

“The monster’s a good character,” CeeCee said. “I like it when he gets ticked off. A total stranger sews him together out of spare parts and then leaves him to wander around and figure out who he should be. No wonder he’s pissed.”

I agreed. I felt a wave of sympathy for the monster, who eventually decided to kill a few people off. Of course he shouldn’t have done it, but I understood his reasons. Even though he was huge and strong and ugly, he felt powerless. The world had set him aside. It had no interest in him and nowhere to put him. Every moment of his life he felt he was staring at a giant stop sign, so he finally took hold of it with his oversized corpse’s hands and decided to
shake
it.

CeeCee twitched.

“Are you awake?” I asked. Something crawled across my leg but I brushed it away.

She sat up. “I think we should read only monster books,” she mumbled. “Vampires, zombies, werewolves. Hunchbacks and lepers.” She opened her phone.

“Lepers and hunchbacks aren’t monsters.” I stretched, feeling stiff. “When is Jeff coming back?”

“Yeah, that’s the problem with Jeff. He’s not very reliable.” CeeCee stood up. “I texted him a couple of times but he won’t text back. He probably went to bed and turned his phone off.”

I stared at her. “But we can’t walk home from here. It’s too far.”

She shrugged. “Call him yourself. Or is there someone else you want to ask for a ride?”

I pictured my mother tugging off her sleep mask, spitting out her bite plate, and switching off her ocean on her way to the phone. Shoving my book into my purse, I stood up. CeeCee handed me the golf club, which I started using as a cane.

“If you were a character in this book,” she said, “which
one would you be? I’d have to be the crazy doctor. I’d be robbing graves and sewing flesh together.”

“I guess that means I’d be the monster,” I said. I was clumsy and large, and here I was, limping down a gravel road at four in the morning, lurching along. Besides, in terms of personality, I seemed to be a little bit of this and a little of that. I was probably some sort of gruesome composite, a hybrid quilted together from other people’s moldy castoffs.

I started to worry that I was bending the golf club. A circle of pain had ignited itself within my knee. “Shit,” I said.

CeeCee turned around. “What?”

I opened my purse. I had remembered my house key but I’d forgotten that my mother always locked the dead-bolts when we were in for the night. And climbing
up
into my bedroom window—without Jeff—would be impossible. I explained this to CeeCee.

“Do you want to stay at my house?” she asked.

“No.” That would make things worse. It wasn’t that my mother would be mad; she would be … confused. And that would make two of us. Dead people had told me that I should let CeeCee pierce my ear, but why had I climbed out my bedroom window? And why was I dragging a golf club around in the dark, with my knee on fire? Inexplicable. “Why didn’t Jeff come back for us?” I asked.

“Because he’s a jackass,” CeeCee said. “He only showed up in the first place because he owes me a favor.”

“What kind of favor?” I stopped to rest my leg for a minute.

“I’m going to cut through this way,” CeeCee said. “To my house, it’s shorter.”

“You don’t think it’s better if we stick together?” I had just spent an hour reading aloud about a patchwork corpse with a special talent for strangling people. From the side of the road, the weeds seemed to reach for us like fingers.

“We can’t stick together if we’re going to different places,” CeeCee said. She told me to keep her father’s golf club. “He has plenty of other ones.” She walked away, fading into the night like a blot of ink on a piece of dark paper.

When I finally got home, my leg was throbbing and my ear felt like it had expanded to twice its size. I stood, exhausted, on the front lawn, thinking about my mother calling the police to report me missing. But our windows were dark, so she must not have noticed I was gone.

I sat down on the sidewalk in front of the house. It was after four-thirty. I propped my aching leg on a flowerpot, knowing that my mother, as predictable as a metronome, would wake up at six-forty-five, make a pot of strong coffee, and then open the front door to get the morning paper, at which point she would undoubtedly be relieved and amused (ha ha!) to find Adrienne Kathleen, her only daughter—seeker of experience!—her injured leg carefully propped on a terra-cotta pot full of pink geraniums and a battered copy of
Frankenstein
in her hands.

5. CONFLICT: The stuff that goes wrong and ticks the characters off in a book so they get motivated to do things. I guess if nothing went wrong in a book, you’d end up with three hundred pages of somebody watching her grandmother sleep
.

R
elieved
and
amused
were not the right words for my mother’s reaction. She stepped outside in her yellow bathrobe to get the paper and to nip the dead flowers from her potted plants, and even before she looked up and fully noticed me sprawling across the sidewalk, I knew the more accurate term for what she was feeling was
pissed
.

“Adrienne? What are you doing?”

I waved at her in a gruesome, exhausted attempt to be cheerful. “Hey.” I had barely slept, and I was wearing pajama pants, a shirt with blood on its collar, and a dew-dampened Velcro brace on my leg. I had ditched the golf club in the bushes because it was bent and would
require the divulging of information. And although I had worked out a speech in my head—a speech full of reasonableness and calm explanatory phrases—what I ended up saying was, “I went out.”

My mother stared at me, a dead geranium leaf in her hand.

She wanted to know who I’d been with, and if I’d been drinking.

“Drinking?”
I laughed, making an unfortunate cawing sound. “I was reading a book.
Frankenstein
.” Brushing some dirt and a few crushed insects from my clothes, I pulled myself up. “I climbed out the window. CeeCee came to get me. She has insomnia.” Maybe the insomnia wasn’t relevant. “I don’t drink,” I said.

“But you climbed out a window in the middle of the night. And there’s blood on your neck.” My mother’s partially flattened hair made her head look uneven.

“I pierced my ear,” I said. “CeeCee pierced it. But most of the time we were reading.” I explained that CeeCee had showed up outside my window to get my cell number, so I climbed out to talk to her. I skipped the part about Jeff and the car and the mini-putt and staggering home in the dark. “So that’s it,” I said. “End of story. I got locked out.”

“Let me look at your ear,” my mother said. “And how did CeeCee get here?”

“My ear is fine.” I tried to fluff up my hair to cover the injury. “I’ll take a shower; then I’ll go back to bed.”

“You can’t go to bed. You have a doctor’s appointment at eight-fifteen.” My mother glanced down at the
sidewalk. Near the place I’d been sitting there was a cigarette butt. She nudged it toward me with her foot. “Is that yours?”

“No.”

My mother bent down and picked it up. “I’m going to make some coffee,” she said. “And I’ll read the paper while you take a shower. And after we both have breakfast and get ourselves dressed, I’m going to take you to your appointment. So maybe we should continue this conversation later.”

“We don’t need to continue it.” I tried to sound confident. Dismissive. I limped up the three cement steps to the house. “I wasn’t drinking. Or smoking. I was reading a book.”

“Go take your shower.” My mother unfolded the paper and started to read it.

I looked at her asymmetrical hair and her yellow bathrobe and I knew she wished I were up in Canada with Liz, paddling my way toward physical and spiritual fitness. “You don’t need to assume I’m screwing up all the time,” I said.

My mother said there was no reason to be so touchy, and we went inside.

My knee was swollen. And sore. Dr. Ramsan frowned and handled my leg as if it were a roast he intended to put in an oven. “It is still bothering you?” he asked, his voice an elegant singsong. Dr. Ramsan wore a turban and had a black beard thick enough for birds to live in. “I’d hoped it would heal a bit faster.”

My mother, in a chair in a corner of the examining room, suggested that leaping through a bedroom window in the middle of the night might not have helped.

“You leapt through a window?” Dr. Ramsan looked impressed. “What for?”

“She had some reading to do,” my mother said.

I explained to Dr. Ramsan that I’d been out with a girlfriend, and we were reading
Frankenstein
because my mother had coerced us into joining a mother-daughter book club, even though we were too old for such a thing.

“I didn’t coerce you,” my mother said. “Your teacher is the one who assigned the books. I asked you a few weeks ago about the idea of the book club.”

“I wasn’t really listening when you asked me, though,” I said.

“I remember reading
Frankenstein
!” Dr. Ramsan smiled. “The tormented doctor! I think it inspired me to apply to medical school. Of course, the cadavers we worked with didn’t have to be brought to life, so our job was simpler.” He positioned my leg so my knee was bent. “Hubris! Does that hurt?”

“No.”

“And this?” He pushed at a fleshy spot near the base of my kneecap. I flinched.

“Still tender,” he said. “Make another appointment to come back in two weeks. And I advise you to go in and out of houses by walking through doors, no matter the time of day or night. Will you do that?”

“Okay,” I said.

My mother went off to make an appointment at the
reception desk, and I asked Dr. Ramsan to check the new piercing—CeeCee’s big fake diamond stud—in my ear. He lifted my hair away from my face; I saw him frown. “Literature,” he said, turning away to get a piece of gauze. “Books can be very powerful. They bring a feeling of freedom, isn’t that right? You almost feel, while you are reading”—he wiped my ear with an ointment that stung—“as if you have entered an alternate life. As if you could be an entirely different person.”

I nodded, and he let my hair fall. “Are you doing your exercises?” he asked.

“Yeah. Most of the time. I might go swimming later today.”

“Very good. Walk in the water. Swim with your friends. Read for your book club. But no more windows.”

“No more windows,” I agreed.

An hour later, to save CeeCee’s mother the trouble of coming to get me, my mother handed me a beach towel and a bottle of water and my copy of
Frankenstein
and dropped me off at the pool.

It had just opened. I flashed my pass at the gate and, at the shallow end, walked past a dozen little kids lined up in a fleshy, squiggling row for swimming class. I thought about CeeCee showing up at my window. Why did she ask if my mother would lie to me?

I put on some sun lotion and spread out my towel. Dr. Ramsan was right about books, I thought. Books were powerful and appealing because the things that happened in them added up and made sense. In life—at least in my
life—a lot of things seemed pointless or random; it was hard to find a pattern in them at all.

I lay down on my towel-covered recliner, propped my open book over my face, and dropped off a cliff into the land of nod.

“Yo. Adrienne. Hey. Are you alive? You haven’t moved for two hours.”

“What?” I pushed the paperback away from my face. The sky was blinding. I felt like a lower order of species that had recently pulled itself out of the ooze and into the sun.

“Wow.” Jill was looming above me. “That’s something I haven’t seen before. You’ve got words stuck to your face. I can’t quite read them. Hold still a second.” She plucked at my forehead.

“Quit,” I said. Shreds of Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
—it was an old and crumbly copy—had cemented themselves to my skin.

Jill sat on the edge of my recliner. “This is not what I was hoping for in a book club. I’d definitely quit if my mom didn’t love the mother-daughter idea.” She crossed her legs. “Look at you sweating. You’ve got a jacuzzi full of sweat in your belly button.”

“Don’t you have to work?” I asked. “I thought you had a job.”

“I’m on a ten-minute break,” Jill said. “And I don’t see why
Frankenstein
is on that reading list. It’s not even scary. The monster wanders around wringing his hands and wishing somebody liked him. If he were alive today
you know what he’d be? King of the misfits: a school shooter.”

I pictured the monster in a soiled black trench coat, holding a gun. He’d done some strangling here and there, but I didn’t think he had random mayhem or mass murder in him. “You could have brought me a Popsicle,” I said, peeling another word from my chin.

“I don’t remember you forking over any money.”

A line was already forming at the snack bar, a row of kids shoving each other and vying for position in the shade. But Jill didn’t seem to be in a hurry. She started flipping through my copy of the book. “I’m about halfway through this. Are you already working on your essay?” She pointed to a passage that was circled in pen:
It is true we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another
.