The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls (14 page)

It took her a while to answer.
Busy
, she finally said.

My thumbs hovered, indecisive, over the keypad. Was CeeCee mad about something? I wanted to ask her if she’d seen Wallis. I wanted to ask her if Jeff had carried me—preferably in his arms and not over his shoulder—up to her room.

Feeling antsy, I got off the couch and tried soaking my ear. Then I tried on the eyeliner CeeCee had given me, but it made my eyes—maybe because they were bloodshot—
look as if they’d been surgically implanted in my face. Just looking at myself in the mirror, I vacillated between thinking that my funky new look had potential and understanding that I was stuck in a no-fly zone between ridiculous and bizarre.

It was time to get out of my own head and into someone else’s. I found my mother’s copy of
The Left Hand of Darkness
and went out to the front lawn with an oversized beach towel and a bag of ice for my leg. I spread out the towel and lay down. “Hi, Genly,” I said when I opened the book. Soon Genly was explaining both to me and to Estraven, his hermaphrodite frenemy, what it was like to be a permanent member of a particular sex. Turning the pages, the ice bag leaking all over my leg, I tried to imagine the people I knew shifting back and forth: my mother periodically growing a beard and impressive pectorals, and our neighbor, Mr. Burgess, stopping by to complain about his PMS.

A shadow darkened the page; I turned around.

Jill was behind me, straddling her bike. “Wow. Something happened to your face,” she said.

“I dyed my hair,” I told her. “And put on some makeup.”

She climbed off her bike and let it drop to the ground.

Inside the novel, marked by my finger, Genly Ai and Estraven were poised at the edge of the Gobrin ice field. I imagined them tapping their feet and consulting their watches, waiting for the moment when I would open the book and allow them to get back to the business of being alive.

“Did you get grounded this time?” Jill asked.

“Why do you always think I’m grounded?”
Was
I grounded?

“Welcome to the information age. Word gets around.” She sat down in the grass. “You didn’t call me, I noticed. You put on your makeup and trotted off to Wallis’s without me.”

“CeeCee thought you wouldn’t want to come.”

Jill spun the wheel of her bike. “Are you going to tell me what happened?”

“I’m not sure yet,” I said.

Across the street, two little girls were prancing through the spray of a sprinkler.

“How come you’re not at work?” I asked.

“I was. But then somebody pooped in the pool,” Jill said. “They’re closed for cleaning. My sincere advice to you? Don’t ever put your mouth near that water.” She straightened her businesslike black ponytail. “I figure if I sit here long enough you’ll probably tell me what happened,” she said. “Because you probably want to tell someone. And I’m the only person available.” She combed her fingers through the lawn. “You have a lot of quack grass in your yard,” she said.

I tried to go back to
The Left Hand of Darkness
, but I couldn’t read with Jill waiting next to me. “All right.” I put down the book. “CeeCee invited me to spend the night. I didn’t know we’d be going to Wallis’s. But somehow she took Jeff’s car—she must have taken the keys from him earlier—and we drove around and opened a bottle of gin. We were drinking—or I guess
I
was drinking—and we got a flat, because it turns out CeeCee’s a lousy driver.”

“What a shock,” Jill said.

“And we weren’t sure where Wallis’s house was,” I went on, feeling as if I were explaining the evening to myself as much as to Jill, “so we ended up in the dark at the water tower.” I paused, because the rest of the story was unclear. “And for some reason I climbed the tower, partway, and then I fell. And I got sick because of the gin.”

“We’re talking about puking,” Jill said. She spun her bicycle wheel again. “So after all that, you never made it to Wallis’s?”

“We didn’t have her address,” I said. “And you know Weller Road. The houses are all stuffed back into the woods. They look almost abandoned—like railroad cars. But we were definitely near Wallis’s.”

“How do you know?”

The little girls across the street were squirting each other with water guns.

I hesitated. “Well, I’m not positive,” I said, “but I’m pretty sure that I saw two people. One was Wallis, so the other one had to be her mother.” I was trying to work through the fog in my head. “They were wearing long dresses that were probably nightgowns.”

Jill blinked. “Did you talk to them?”

“Not really.”

“So they were just standing around in their nightgowns,” Jill said. “What was Wallis’s mother like?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “It was dark. But I woke up at one point and it seemed like she was taking care of me. You know what it was like? It was like that scene in
A Wrinkle in Time
where those nameless creatures find Meg and they touch her with their tentacles and end up bringing her back to life.”

Jill nodded slowly. “Wallis’s mother touched you with her tentacles.”

“I didn’t say she had tentacles.”

“Okay.” Jill asked me what CeeCee’s reaction to “Aunt Beast” and Wallis had been.

“I don’t think she saw them,” I said. “She went to meet Jeff so he could change the tire. And when she got back, Wallis and her mother had disappeared. I guess they went—”

“Poof: back to their railroad car,” Jill said. “And left you choking on your vomit out in the woods.”

I hadn’t thought about that. But they had probably known that Jeff and CeeCee would be driving me home. I decided not to mention the possibility that Wallis’s mother had been holding a gun. “Forget the railroad car,” I said. “Forget the whole thing.” I moved the melted ice off my leg. “How did you even know I was out with CeeCee last night? How do you always seem to know what I’ve been doing?”

Jill pulled up a dandelion puff. “Duncan got a phone call last night. He lives next to Jeff, and Jeff needed a ride somewhere because two girls absconded with his car.”

Duncan—a grade ahead of us—had gone out with Jill for a few months; they were still friends. “Duncan texted me about it this morning,” Jill said. “He told me to make sure I was never alone with Jeff. He calls Jeff ‘the eel.’ ”

“He doesn’t seem that bad,” I said, remembering that CeeCee had predicted I would kiss him.

“Jeff does what CeeCee tells him to do.” Jill stood up. “Who knows what the two of them have going on?”

The little girls across the street had gone indoors. I told Jill what my mother had said about the Unbearable Book Club: that we were the only group she had ever heard of who could experience book club membership as a negative influence.

“I think she’s right,” Jill said. “By the way, do you have anything to eat? Maybe a hamburger? That’s part of the reason I stopped by. I’m really hungry.”

I hadn’t eaten anything but crackers all day and my stomach felt like an empty cavern. “What do you want? Frozen waffles? Noodles?”

“No, I’m craving meat,” Jill said.

“Meat?” I grabbed her arm so she could help pull me up. “You’re a vegetarian.”

“That’s only at home,” Jill said. “I took a stance, so, you know, I feel like I should stick with it. But I really like meat, so I eat it as often as I can at other people’s houses.” She chained her bike to the metal railing by the front steps and we went inside. In the kitchen, she turned the radio to a country station and opened the freezer. “Aha: this looks promising.” She held up a package of frozen sausage, then rummaged through the cabinets for a frying pan. On the radio, a singer howled out his love for a cheatin’ wife.

“I hope your mom knows that not everyone in the book club is a criminal,” Jill said. “I mean, look at me: I have an
actual job, and I don’t steal cars or trespass in the middle of the night or have a drug or a drinking problem.”

“CeeCee doesn’t have a drinking problem,” I said. “She didn’t drink. I’m the one who got drunk.”

“Go ahead. Defend her,” Jill said. “Just don’t fool yourself into thinking that, outside this book club, you’re going to be friends.” She dumped the entire package of links into the frying pan. “I sincerely hope you have maple syrup to go along with this sausage.”

I gave her the syrup.

Jill wielded a metal spatula against the spattering links.

“Do you still want to be a nurse?” I asked. There was something disturbing about the idea of waking up in a hospital bed with Jill’s face being the first thing you’d see.

Jill said she did.

The voice on the radio clawed its way through an octave.

“But how can you already be sure of that?” I asked. “I mean, you could join a motorcycle gang or hitchhike to Alaska. We don’t have to graduate high school and head straight to college.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Jill said. “We
are
the people who go on to college. That’s what we’ve been raised for.”

“You make us sound like farm animals,” I said.

Jill nudged the links around in their cauldron of fat.

I got two plates from the cupboard. “You made sixteen sausages,” I said, staring into the pan.

“Yeah, I like sausage.” She created a bed of paper towels on one of the plates. “Anyway, I’m going to graduate
and go to college and become a nurse. Because that’s what I’ve always wanted to do. Pretty soon we can drain these little piggies.”

Twenty minutes later we were dipping the last of the sausage into a greasy plateful of maple syrup.

“Man, I feel sick again,” I said. “My mother told me I should stick to white bread and crackers. Now the house reeks of pork.” I put our dishes in the sink. “Sorry we didn’t call you last night.” I walked Jill to the door. “I don’t think CeeCee’s as bad as you say she is. But you’re right about Wallis. If she wants us to leave her alone, we should leave her alone.”

Jill unlocked her bike from the railing. “It’s probably too late for that,” she said.

11. FORESHADOWING: This is one of those words teachers write on the board and draw a line through. Fore/shadowing. A shadow/before. It means a hint or a clue, and it usually doesn’t point to anything good
.

“T
he most important thing,”
Jill said, quoting from
The Left Hand of Darkness, “the heaviest single factor in one’s life, is whether one’s born male or female
. I’m not sure I agree with that. What about being born poor? Or being born with one arm?”

“Or being born with an
extra
arm,” CeeCee said. “One that sticks out of the middle of your forehead.”

We were gathered in CeeCee’s living room for round three of the Society of Feminine and Literary Despair. The meeting hadn’t started, and still I had a bad feeling. My mother had made a beeline for CeeCee’s mother as soon as we arrived, and she didn’t look happy; then there was the paper grocery bag Wallis was carrying tucked under her arm. Wallis and CeeCee and Jill and I were
circling the buffet table, trolling for food; but even with a plate and a fork in her hand, Wallis didn’t put the grocery bag down. I remembered Jill’s word from our first meeting:
ominous
.

“What do you think they’re talking about over there?” Jill asked. She gestured toward the mothers, three of whom (Wallis’s mother hadn’t come—she was busy, or she didn’t exist, or both) were huddled in a corner near the grand piano. We couldn’t hear what they were saying—the living room was huge, with a cathedral ceiling, a fireplace big enough to cook a human being in, and a U-shaped leather couch that probably seated a dozen people—but given the recent tension between my mother and me ever since “The Episode of Adrienne and the Booze,” I had a good idea about their topic of conversation.

Mom #1 (mine): I didn’t raise Adrienne to turn out to be such a lush. She was supposed to be normal. And smart. It turns out she’s an idiot
.

Mom #2 (Jill’s): We chose our daughter from a lineup of millions, making sure we picked one who wasn’t a derelict
.

Mom #3 (CeeCee’s): I certainly hope that Adrienne, who has no more personality than a fruit fly, isn’t going to try to blame my daughter for her absurd behavior
.

“Maybe they’re discussing the book,” Wallis said.

My mother was gesturing, slicing the air with the blade of her hand. About an hour before we left for book club, she had found the bent golf club in the bushes. “Why do I think you might know something about this?” she’d asked.

“Or,” Jill suggested, “maybe they’re talking about Adrienne’s evening with Aunt Beast.”

CeeCee pursed her lips and nodded; Jill had taken it upon herself, about ten minutes before my mother and I rang the doorbell, to fill CeeCee in.

I stared across the table at Wallis, who was filling her plate with deviled crab. I’d definitely seen her that night. But here she was, as if nothing had happened—except for that creepy paper bag clamped under her arm.

CeeCee added a radish and a hunk of cheese to the edge of my plate. “They might be setting up guidelines for tonight’s discussion,” she said. “No graphic references to transsexualism. No drawing diagrams of what might have happened between Genly and what’s-his-name, out on the ice.”