The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls (9 page)

I folded a pillowcase and matched up a couple of pairs of socks; then, when my mother left the room, I went back to the computer. I typed in
lawyers’ fees
and learned that most lawyers charged around two hundred dollars per hour. My mother had put my canoeing money back in my savings account at the bank. I could afford about eleven minutes of a lawyer’s time.

My mother rumbled into the den, pushing our ancient vacuum. “Are you researching something?” she asked.

“Yeah. Miscellaneous … book stuff.” I clicked out of the
lawyers’ fees
window and looked up
Frankenstein
, then
The Left Hand of Darkness
, which appeared to be about hermaphrodites on another planet. While my mother vacuumed, I looked up
hermaphrodites
and found a link to
Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor
. These sorts of random connections: what did they mean?

Still surfing around, I stumbled across an anagram finder and typed my name into it: Adrienne Haus. Among the possible anagrams:
Sunnier Ahead
. That was nice.
Use Hind Area
. Not so nice.
Hide Near Anus
. Hm.

The anagram finder didn’t come up with much that was interesting for
CeeCee Christiansen
or
Jill D’Amato
, but it turned
Wallis Gray
into
Always Girl
,
A Swirly Gal
, and
Lily War Gas
. Strange.

The vacuum roared along the carpet in front of my feet. Swinging my legs over the arm of the couch, I typed
Unbearable Book Club
and there it was, CeeCee’s “essay” on a new blue background. She must have spent some time updating it. There were a few more photos, including one of Jill—now listed as our book club’s Financial Officer—sitting at the snack bar, clutching a wad of dollar bills. I clicked on the stick-figure icon next to my name. Under
personal
I was listed as
widowed;
and under
goals
it said,
I need to dye my hair and get a tattoo
. Wallis’s section was
under construction—please check back later
. And under CeeCee’s name (she was still identified as our Motivational Speaker) there was a picture of ten perfectly pedicured red toenails in front of the pool.

Jill’s house was thick with rugs and curtains, every room wallpapered, as if in homage to the book we’d discussed the week before. There were fuzzy yellow bamboo shoots in the hallway, pink and blue roses in the living room, and,
in the kitchen, golden faceless men and women pushing wheelbarrows and carrying sheaves of wheat. “What’s that about?” CeeCee asked. She took a picture of the kitchen wallpaper with her phone.

The house was air-conditioned to about sixty-five degrees. Jill’s father was partially disabled from multiple sclerosis, and he hated the heat.

Eventually Jill’s mother called us to order, and we clustered around two flowered couches in the living room, where the pink and blue upholstery matched the ruffled drapes. There were seven of us again, instead of eight. CeeCee raised her eyebrows in my direction when Wallis told us her mother couldn’t come.

As a contribution, Wallis had brought three bananas with her, each dotted with bruises. Jill’s mother had set them on a plate. She peeled one and ate it, exclaiming as if it were a marvelous and exotic hors d’oeuvre.

For a while we ate button mushrooms and yogurt-covered pretzels and talked about monster books in general:
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
,
Twilight
,
Interview with the Vampire
,
Dracula
, and
Lives of the Monster Dogs
. CeeCee summarized a few of the slasher films she’d seen, at which point we learned that Wallis didn’t own a TV.

“Why not?” Jill asked. She wanted to know if Wallis was Amish.

“Show us your butter churn,” CeeCee said.

The collective motherhood in the room seemed to think the lack of a TV qualified Wallis for a Nobel Prize.

“You’ve probably read more books than the rest of us,”
my mother said. She had apparently forgotten that I was spending my summer reading.

“I read one book a week,” Wallis said in her animal’s voice. “I made a rule. One book a week, times roughly fifty books per year, over a reading lifetime of sixty years: that’s three thousand books.” She paused. “I call it the Rule of Three Thousand.”

“Three thousand books,” my mother said. “But that’s so few, for an entire lifetime.”

Apparently thrilled with this encouragement, Wallis went on to explain that people who read two books a week, with a few weeks off for travel or sickness, would be abiding by the Rule of Six Thousand.

No one said anything, probably because—mathematically speaking—three of us were humbled and three were annoyed.

CeeCee took out her phone to snap a picture of Wallis, but Wallis immediately turned away.

“I don’t want my picture taken,” she said.

“Can we talk about the book for a while?” I asked.

Jill tucked her feet under one of the flowered cushions on the couch and started us off. She said she didn’t understand why Victor Frankenstein insisted on keeping his creation a secret. “Why didn’t he just bring his family together and sit them down and say, ‘Hey. Guess what? I made a dead guy, and now he’s roaming around killing people’?”

“He was probably ashamed,” her mother said. “He must have realized that creating the monster was wrong.”

“Maybe,” CeeCee said. “But wasn’t it worse for him to run away after he brought it to life?” She put her cell phone
back in her purse. “He’s like a parent who takes one look at his newborn baby and then abandons it.”

Jill’s mother stared at the two remaining bananas.

“I hope I’m not touching on a difficult subject.” CeeCee balanced a plate of stuffed mushrooms on the palm of her hand. “But it does seem relevant, now that I think of it. Right here in this room, we have one person abandoned at birth”—she looked at Jill—“one abandoned
before
birth”—she looked at me—“and one question mark.” She looked at Wallis.

“Why am I a question mark?” Wallis asked, without sounding curious.

“Anyway,” CeeCee went on, “it’s no wonder the monster is screwed up. He has no mother, and his father turns out to be a deadbeat dad. He’s a poor nameless orphan.”

I had never thought of myself as
abandoned
; the word had a pleasant, dramatic ring to it. “Jill thinks if the monster was alive today he’d be a school shooter,” I said, noticing that Jill looked a little snarly.

“That makes sense to me. Neglect breeds violence,” CeeCee said. She offered me a mushroom, which gave way in my mouth with a squish and a pop: it had been injected with some kind of cheese.

My mother proposed her theory about Frankenstein and his monster being somewhat the same. Maybe that was the point of most monster books, she said: to point out that everyone had good and evil characteristics, like Jekyll and Hyde.

Finally we talked about the women in the book, who were prone to fainting spells and to getting themselves
strangled, and Wallis explained that strangling someone could take up to five full minutes of continuous pressure around the neck. It wasn’t as easy to kill a person as most people assumed.

CeeCee said she would remember that information for future use.

The phone rang. Jill’s mother excused herself and went off to answer it.

We took advantage of what seemed to be a break in the proceedings. CeeCee’s mother and mine talked about yoga, Jill stacked some plates, and I ate another mushroom, wondering whether an evil person lived inside me and was quietly waiting for a chance to emerge.

CeeCee stood up and plucked at my sleeve. “Meeting in the conference room,” she said.

I followed her down the hall and into the greenest bathroom I had ever seen: four green walls with green ruffled hand towels and a green furry rug and green-and-white curtains and—on top of the toilet—a crocheted toilet paper–roll cover in the shape of a green hoopskirted doll. I felt as if I’d tumbled into a bottle of kiwi shampoo.

Jill stuck her foot in the door as CeeCee started to close it.

“Why do you want to come in?” CeeCee asked. “You don’t like this book club.”

“Neither do you,” Jill said.

“Good point.” CeeCee opened the door and let Jill in. “I think I might be getting used to it, even though it is extremely unbearable,” she said. “We should be the
Extremely
Unbearable Book Club—for Irresponsible Girls. I might
change our name.” She picked up the toilet-paper doll. “What’s with the deep-forest theme, by the way?”

“Leave that alone. My mom likes to decorate. And we’re not all irresponsible.” Jill straightened the crocheted hoopskirt. “Why are we always meeting in bathrooms?”

“I think that’s explained in our founding documents,” CeeCee said. She opened the medicine cabinet, found a bottle of aspirin, and pried off its lid.

We heard a knock at the door. “That’s probably Lily War Gas,” I said. “I mean Wallis.”

“This group gets weirder by the minute,” Jill said. She let Wallis in. Behind the specks on her thick glasses, Wallis’s watery eyes glanced quickly at mine. She stepped over the threshold and took in our surroundings as if she were a tourist in a cathedral. “This is beautiful,” she growled.

“It’s green,” said Jill.

CeeCee picked up a bottle of cough syrup and examined the label. “I’m glad we’ve decided to start making personal comparisons between these books and our lives,” she said. “I was afraid our group was going to be too scholarly.”

“You aren’t even reading the books,” Jill said. “And no one else is making comparisons.”

CeeCee put the cough syrup away and picked up a can of air freshener—mountain pine. “But don’t you want our group to be
relevant
?” she asked. “Isn’t that the purpose of a book club? The books don’t matter: it’s what we find out about each other. We know Jill is an orphan, and we’ve learned that Adrienne is half an orphan, and—”

“How can I be
half
an orphan?” I asked.

“The point is …,” CeeCee said; she shook the air freshener and pointed the can like a weapon at Jill. “Shouldn’t we be telling each other our secrets?”

“No. And stop fishing through our stuff,” Jill said. “Put that away.” She tried to get control of the air freshener but CeeCee was taller and held it over our heads. “I’m the Statue of Liberty,” she said. She pressed the button, releasing a long, wet blast in a circle above us. The piney fragrance trickled down on us like rain.

“You are a seriously disturbed individual.” Jill finally wrestled the spray can away from her.

Wallis wiped pine scent from the back of her neck. “I thought the idea of the book club was to get ready for AP English,” she muttered.

“That’s only if you aren’t insane,” Jill said.

“Where on earth did they go?” It was CeeCee’s mother, out in the hall.

In the bathroom, all four of us, as if by previous agreement, went quiet and still. We heard a pair of shoes click-clacking away.

Browsing through the medicine chest again, CeeCee picked up a container of baby powder. “So, twice in a row, Wallis,” she said. “Why did your mother decide not to come? I’m starting to think she doesn’t exist.”

“My mother exists,” Wallis said. She turned to me. “I’m like Adrienne. I live with my mother. It’s just the two of us. She got divorced.”

“Being divorced shouldn’t keep her away from the book club,” CeeCee said. “Does she think she’s better than our mothers?”

“No.” Wallis’s face was expressionless.

“We obviously have different kinds of moms in the group,” CeeCee went on. “A’s mom is the teacher/librarian model, and Jill’s is the business executive or ruffle queen. My mother’s the tennis-playing trophy wife, complete with vibrator in the bedside table. I doubt your mom would feel out of place.”

“Your mother has a vibrator?” I asked.

“Everybody over twenty has a vibrator,” CeeCee said. “It reduces stress.”

Jill took the baby powder away from her. “Sit down over there and stop talking.” She pointed to the toilet, then turned to Wallis. “Are we going to meet at your house next week? We’ll have to meet your mother eventually, won’t we?”

For some reason Wallis looked at me as if I could answer this question for her, or as if there were something about her life that I understood.

“Does your mother even know about the book club?” I asked. “Did you invite her?”

No answer from Wallis.

“Oh. Amazing,” CeeCee said. She sat down on the closed lid of the toilet. “You never told her. I’m so impressed! The three of us are showing up every week with our mothers like good little girls, and you waltz over here with your three bananas—”

Jill cut her off. “Wallis, do you want us to meet at your house next time? Yes or no?”

“No,” Wallis said. Her hair looked like it had been cut with a kitchen knife.

“Okay. Then we’ll meet somewhere else. And I guess we’re finished with
Frankenstein
now,” Jill said.

There was a knock at the door. “Girls?”

Back in the pink and blue living room, we agreed to move on to Ursula Le Guin’s
The Left Hand of Darkness
. My mother had brought a stack of well-thumbed library copies from work. I announced to the group in general that we would be reading about hermaphrodites.

“I don’t think that’s an accurate description,” said my mother, sounding annoyed.

“Hermaphrodites that live on another planet,” I amended. “Sometime in the future.”

Jill’s mother turned to CeeCee’s mom. “Dana? Could we meet at your house next week?”

Dana examined an imperfection on her arm
—Is she really a trophy wife?
I wondered—and then said that we could.

My mother hunted around for her car keys and said that she and I would drive Wallis home.

But Wallis was gone. I had seen her leave a few minutes earlier and opened my mouth to tell her to wait, but she threw me a look so cool and bloodless, the words caught in my throat. So I didn’t stop her. I watched as she picked up her two uneaten bananas and walked out the side door.