The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls (11 page)

I dipped into the packet of wooden letters and came up with a
J
, an
X
, and a
V
.

“It occurs to me that you’ve been thinking about your father more often.” My mother turned
hake
into
shake
by spelling
quips
. Forty-four points. Why were we playing a
game that always proved that she was smarter than I was? “And I noticed CeeCee brought the subject up at book club.”

“I can’t help it if CeeCee brings it up,” I said.

“
Are
you thinking about your father more often?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I’m trying to think of a Scrabble word,” I said.

My mother filled up the kettle and heated some water for tea. “It was an odd discussion at book club,” she said. “But I liked hearing from Wallis about her Rule of Three Thousand. She’s an interesting girl. You should try that: try keeping a list of all the books you read.”

I felt a prickle of irritation. What was so
interesting
about Wallis? Actually, I had looked up
Rule of 3,000
on the computer, assuming that she had plagiarized the idea from somebody else, but all I had found were a few scattered references to the dangers of climbing more than three thousand feet at a time in the mountains, and some miscellaneous information about a magic card game involving warriors, dragons, labyrinths, beasts, and typhoons.

We each took our turns. Despite the fifty points my mother had advanced me, I was ten points behind.

My phone started buzzing—a text from CeeCee:
What R U doing?

Not much
, I answered.
Hanging out w my mom. You reading L H of Dness?

Oui. Highly influential. Am planning sex change on ½ of my body
.

I turned the word
band
into
husband
.

“Clever,” my mother said. “But you might have used the
S
for a plural.”

“I don’t like making plurals.” Why had my mother said I was moody? Just because I was annoyed with her didn’t mean I was moody. “Did anybody ever want to marry you?” I asked.

My mother’s hand paused on her tray of letters.

“I was just wondering,” I said. “Because you raised the subject. Did anybody—you know—ever express any interest?”

“Someone did,” she said. “Before you were born. But he wasn’t the right person.”

“Are we talking about my father?”
And why didn’t you ever tell me that?

“No. This was a different person,” she said. “Besides, in my opinion, a
father
or a
parent
is a person who raises a child. I think of your biological father as … an anonymous sperm donor.”

You made him anonymous
, I thought.

CeeCee texted again.
U around later?

“We used a condom,” my mother said. “You’re living proof that they aren’t a hundred percent effective.”

I didn’t want to be talking about condoms with my mother. I looked at my letters on their wooden rack:
Yukturx. Krutyux. Tyuxruk
. I used my
X
to spell
ax
, then texted CeeCee:
Can’t do tonight. Talking to my M @ the guy she slept w
.

My mother was eighty points ahead.

Ask her how hairy he was
, texted CeeCee.

I tried to come up with another word:
Nuktury. Tunkyru
. I seemed to be losing my grasp on my native language.

“I guess the moral of the story,” my mother said, “is that sex always involves a risk. And I’m glad that—”

“Why are we talking about this?” I asked, louder than I had intended.

“I thought you brought it up,” my mother said. “I don’t understand why you’re getting so angry. I assumed that you wanted to ask me a question.”

This was our bargain, from the very start:
Answer only what Adrienne asks, and nothing more
. I felt like I was playing a game I didn’t understand.

It was my mother’s turn, but she wasn’t looking at her letters. She was looking at me.

2morrow night then
, CeeCee texted.

I put the phone down and picked a blank. Of course, I thought: a smooth wooden square with nothing on it.

I bumped the edge of the Scrabble board and jogged the tiles from their places. “You win,” I said, tossing the blank back in with the other letters. “I don’t want to play this game anymore.”

8. SYMBOLISM: I don’t think symbolism comes up very often in real life. It seems mostly to exist in books so that people who like puzzles and hidden meanings can find it
.

“T
hat’s a weird color,” CeeCee said, when I showed up at her house the following night with my fiery hair. “Are you going to redye it?”

“No. My mother hates it, so I’m going to keep it,” I said.

“That makes sense.” CeeCee nodded.

I caught sight of myself in a mirror. The color made my head look burned, but it seemed to have attached itself to me, as if making a statement:
You are what you say you are, yet you’re a joke, a hoax
. That’s what someone said to Genly, in
The Left Hand of Darkness
.

I followed CeeCee upstairs. I’d never been in her house, which was four times the size of mine. In her room she had a queen-size canopy bed, an antique dresser and dressing
table with a dozen tiny, elegant drawers, and an Oriental rug.

“How did the sex talk go the other day?” she asked. “Did you get any good info?”

“I don’t think I want that kind of info,” I said, but I told her about the websites I’d consulted about fatherless teens. “I’m a ‘person at risk,’ ” I said, explaining that statistically I was more likely than other people to end up an alcoholic or an addict and to be arrested for a serious crime.

“What kind of crime do you want to commit?” CeeCee started sorting through her underwear drawer.

“I don’t know. I don’t want to rob a bank,” I said. “And I don’t want to kill anybody.”

“Not yet anyway,” CeeCee said. “You probably have to work up to that sort of thing.” She threw a tangle of colored fabric into the trash. “I hate old underwear,” she said. She nodded at my backpack. “What did you bring with you?”

I showed her: a T-shirt to sleep in, a toothbrush, and
The Left Hand of Darkness
. Was I supposed to bring anything else?

“No, I guess not.” CeeCee walked into her closet and emerged a minute later wearing a blue kimono. “I have to take a shower. My hair feels like string.” She checked her phone. “You should read to me,” she said. “Like you did at the golf course.”

“You want me to read to you in the shower?”

“I don’t want you to get
into
the shower,” she said. “I just want you to read.”

Like a walking SparkNotes guide, I followed CeeCee into the bathroom, which had two matching sinks, a separate little enclave for the toilet, and a strategically placed marble wall, about four and a half feet high, that divided the rest of the room from the shower. “So I can talk to people and not see their ugly bits,” CeeCee said. “I’ve even talked to my grandma in here; and believe me, under no circumstances do you ever want to see my grandmother naked.”

Now and then I had seen my mother naked. Once I had opened the door to her bedroom and seen her walking around wearing only a necklace and a pair of socks.
Are you going out in that?
I had wanted to ask.

CeeCee stepped around the marble divider, hung her kimono on a peg, and turned on the faucet. “God, I love water,” she said. “You’ll have to read kind of loud.”

I leafed through the book, searching for a chapter that would pull her into the plot so she’d read the rest. “You know what
kemmer
is, right?” I asked. “Every twenty-eight days the people on the planet Winter become male or female, depending on who they’re attracted to and who they’re with.”

“Yeah, weird,” CeeCee said. “Like getting your period. But I don’t get how it happens. Are they all built like Ken dolls most of the time? And then all of a sudden something either sprouts or—”

“The book doesn’t go into that kind of detail.” I started to read. Estraven had rescued Genly Ai from prison. They hadn’t trusted each other before, but now the two of them were thrown together. They were both in danger and had
to rely on each other as they tried to escape across the Gobrin Ice.

Fifteen minutes later CeeCee turned off the water and reached for a towel. “You really like this book, don’t you? I can tell from the sound of your voice when you’re reading.”

I did like the book. Though he was middle-aged and black and male, as well as a diplomat and a time traveler, I knew how it felt to be Genly Ai. He was supposed to understand and communicate with the people on the planet to which he’d been sent. But he sometimes felt like he was missing a set of instructions, or a crucial portion of his own brain, and he spent a lot of his time feeling jumbled and alone.

CeeCee put her kimono back on and stepped out from behind the marble wall. “Do you think Genly’s gay?”

I flexed my knee. “I don’t think that question makes sense on their planet.”

She wiped a circle of steam off the mirror. I realized I was watching her and not reading. She turned around.

“What?” I said.

“I’m just wondering. Are you a lesbian?”

“Me?” I laughed—a high-pitched, nervous whinnying sound, like an aging horse with its leg in a trap.

“You don’t have a boyfriend,” CeeCee said. She was combing her hair.

“But I’ve … been with guys,” I said. As recently as February, in fact, I had several after-school kissing encounters with Jason Fenn, who I might have liked better except that he was about eight inches shorter than I was. We met
under the bleachers. I had thought about lifting him under the armpits so that his mouth could be closer to mine, but in the end I had just hunkered down and bent my knees.

“What about you?” I asked. “Are you going out with anyone?”

“I don’t like the term
going out
,” CeeCee said. “Anyway, we’re talking about you. We’re trying to establish your orientation—whether you’re gay or straight.” She finished combing her hair, sending drops of water and flecks of conditioner onto the floor. Then she set her comb down by the sink and pressed her mouth against mine.

Iamnotreallydoingthis
, I thought. My hands hung at my sides like a pair of dead fish. What did Genly say when Estraven told him he had entered kemmer?
My friend, there’s nothing to fear between us
. CeeCee’s tongue flickered and crept across my upper lip. Her hair smelled like artificial fruit. “Any reaction?” she asked.

I tried to make a gesture that meant
No comment
. Jason’s lips had been crusty and chapped; I’d wanted to bite the little pieces of dead skin from his mouth.

“The problem with guys,” CeeCee said, “is they kiss too forcefully. It’s like they want to show you their lips have been pumping iron. And they open their mouths too wide. You know what I mean?”

“Right,” I agreed.
Am I a lesbian?
I imagined myself wearing a black leather jacket and torn pants with chains, like some of the girls in the gay-straight alliance at school. I picked up
The Left Hand of Darkness;
we walked back down the hall to CeeCee’s room.

She put on some music and stepped behind her closet door to get dressed. “Try this on,” she said, throwing me an emerald-green scarf. “It’ll look good with your hair.”

Whenever Liz and I had sleepovers, we spent our time talking, eating junk food, and making fun of shows that we secretly liked on TV. Draping the scarf around my neck and watching CeeCee step out of her closet wearing a short denim skirt and a white tank top, I had a feeling that we were going to do something else.

Her phone let out a beep. She opened it, smiled at the screen, then snapped it shut. “That was Jeff,” she said. She retied the green scarf for me and stood back. “He can’t find his car keys.”

“Was he going to come over tonight?” I asked. He was probably lying about the keys, I thought: he was probably afraid that if he showed up, he would have to heft me through another window.

CeeCee opened one of the tiny wooden drawers in her dressing table and drew a thin arc of brown liner above each eye. “Do you want me to set you up with him?” she asked.

“You mean, with Jeff? I thought he was going out—or in a relationship—with your sister.”

“My sister’s in Paris, A,” she said. “And I have a prediction. Ready? You’ll end up making out with Jeff before the end of the summer.”

I thought of the stubble on Jeff’s chin and the way his face was shaped: like a shovel. “Really?” I asked.

“Absolutely. It’s going to happen.” CeeCee held out the
eyeliner. “Do you want to use this? You should keep it and use it; I have one I like better.” She tossed it into my backpack. “Let’s go downstairs.”

We left the music on and went down to the kitchen, which was large enough for several chefs to cook in: oversized refrigerator, oversized sink, mile-long stretch of immaculate cabinets, and six-burner stove. “The only thing we use is the microwave,” CeeCee said. She got a glass from the cabinet and punched the refrigerator in the stomach, so that it rumbled and then gave her some ice.