The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls (17 page)

“Have you started the new book?” she asked.

“No. We just finished the last one,” I said. I missed Genly Ai.

“I read the first twenty pages,” Jill said. “It’s short but you have to go slow. I can’t tell if these little sections are paragraphs or chapters. And I don’t know who this person is talking to—this Esmeralda or Esperanza: is she talking to me?”

“
I’m
trying to talk to you,” I said. “What if Wallis doesn’t want to leave? I don’t want her living here forever.”

“Well, you can’t kill her off. Not in real life,” Jill said. “Unbelievable: we’re out of fudge pops.”

“Tragic,” I said. “So am I going to like this book?”

“Not sure,” Jill said. “At first I felt like I was reading a little kid’s book, but I think there’s a creep factor coming. Somebody’s going to end up dead or abused.”

“Great.” I looked down at the pile of books on the floor and thought about Wallis’s Rule of Three Thousand. “Do people really drop their kids off in Nebraska?”

“Yeah. I guess they have extra room out there,” Jill said; then she hung up the phone.

After talking to Jill I had a brainstorm: I realized I could alphabetize the books on my mother’s computer. I finished typing in the authors whose last names started with
A
and hit “sort.”
Ding!
I was a genius. I rewarded myself with a dish of strawberry ice cream (Jill’s mention of fudge pops had made me hungry) and used a dish towel to get rid of the spiders so I could shelve through the
C
’s. Sitting back down at the computer, I noticed that my mother had left her email open. This was obviously not an invitation to read her email; still, without giving it much thought one way or the other, I clicked on her in-box.

She had gotten a bunch of boring messages from people at work (
Please note meeting time change
) and several pleas from a Nigerian lawyer representing our long-lost millionaire relatives killed in a plane crash.

Farther down in the queue was a message from my aunt Beatrice, my mother’s sister. My finger dangled above the mouse; then, as if making up its own little fingery mind (my mother didn’t have any secrets, did she?), it punched down.

There was a long string of emails going back and forth, so I scrolled to the bottom. My aunt was going to Thailand in September and my mother was jealous. My mother told my aunt about the book club. My aunt asked about me.

She’s doing okay, I think
, my mother answered.
It’s a difficult age
.

Difficult how?
my aunt asked.

My mother said she had caught me drinking. She said I’d dyed my hair.
Not terribly flattering
, she wrote.

I felt my face heat up. Did I email people in order to comment on my mother’s appearance?

A few lines later, she told my aunt that I’d been asking about my father.
And she’s been out all night once or twice. She denies it but I suspect there are boys involved
.

So my mother assumed I was a liar.

What does she want to know about her father?
my aunt asked.

I’m not sure. And it’s hard to know what to tell her
.

How about trying the truth?
I thought.

I know what you’re saying. You don’t want her repeating your biggest mistakes
, my aunt wrote.

“You did a lot of work here,” said a voice behind me.

I almost leapt out of my skin.
Wallis
. “Where did you come from? I locked the doors.” I logged out of the email account, then realized (I didn’t have my mother’s password) that I wouldn’t be able to get back in.

“I wasn’t outside. I was in the basement,” Wallis said.

“What were you doing in the basement?” My mother thought I was “difficult.” The cursor blinked mindlessly on the screen. “Are you wearing my shorts, Wallis?” I asked.

“Yes.” Wallis looked down as if to double-check. “Your mother said I could go through the bags near the washer and dryer.”

“Oh.” The shorts—and now I also recognized the
T-shirt—had probably been rescued from a collection of clothes I’d outgrown.

“You’re up to
D
,” Wallis said. She started moving books around on the shelves. From the back, wearing my shorts, she looked like a smaller, neater version of me. “Have you read
The House of the Scorpion
?” she asked.

I said I hadn’t.

“It’s about clones.” Wallis knelt on the floor and started sifting through the
E
’s and
F
’s on the rug. “Your mother has a lot of good books. Have you read
Rebecca
?”

My aunt said my mother had made a mistake. “No.”

“Have you read
Brave New World
?” Wallis asked.

The mistake was my mother getting pregnant
, I thought.

“Or how about—”

“No,” I said.

The mistake they were talking about—the big irreversible error of my mother’s life—was me.

13. HYPERBOLE: For a while I thought this was pronounced “HY-per-boll,” which made me picture a giant bug—the hyper boll (weevil). But actually it’s pronounced “hy-PER-bo-lee,” and it just means “exaggeration.”

W
as I making mountains out of molehills? Was I stretching or embroidering the truth? Was I letting my emotions run away with me?

Or was it true that Wallis was sucking up to my mother, creeping into my life like an invasive species, and that my mother thought my very existence was a horrible and humiliating mistake?

That night at dinner my mother and Wallis chattered away like best friends while I shoveled my food into my mouth and then went to bed early. The next day I gave up shelving the books. What was the point? I might as well shut myself in my room like a hermit, listening to music and waiting for my mother to come home and announce that Wallis was going to live with us forever.

I kept my earphones on and my bedroom door closed, which is why I didn’t notice that Wallis was leaving. Maybe she knocked on my door to say goodbye, but I didn’t hear her. I only knew she was taking off because I looked out the window and saw a small white truck pulling into the drive. I assumed the driver was just turning around, but then I saw Wallis scuttling into the passenger side.

I pushed the curtain out of the way and pressed myself against the window. Was that Wallis’s mother? When the truck pulled out I barely got a glimpse of her, a dark-haired, pale, petite woman driving quickly away.

Though I felt sort of slimy while I did it, I sent a celebratory text to CeeCee and Jill.
Wallis gone at last
, I said. Glancing at the clock and seeing that CeeCee would be done with summer school in twenty minutes, I also suggested—even though she had ignored me for several days—that she and her mother might want to pick me up on their way to the pool.

Relieved to have the house to myself again, I went into the kitchen and spread some cream cheese and marmalade on a bagel. The trick to bagels, I had discovered, was in not allowing blobs of cream cheese—or worse, marmalade, which was very sticky—to escape through the hole.

No answer from Jill, but I got a text from CeeCee.
No can do
, she said.
The fam and I are leaving town
.

Going where?
I asked her.

Beach
.

I wondered if it would occur to her to invite me. I stared at my phone while devouring my bagel: apparently not.

I picked up my laptop and my book club book—only two more meetings and the Literary Punishment Guild would be over—and went out to the porch.

Jill was right about
The House on Mango Street
, I thought: it was short but you had to absorb it slowly, as if you were sipping its tiny chapters through a straw. I read the first few pages several times, pushing my way through the printed words until they disappeared.

Esperanza, the main character, wanted a house. She wanted a
real house
with
running water and pipes that worked. And inside it would have real stairs, not hallway stairs, but stairs inside like the houses on TV
.

I licked a dollop of cream cheese from the back of my hand and felt the words planting themselves inside me. I had a house with stairs (to the basement and the attic) and running water, but I still felt the tug of Esperanza’s wanting, a wish for an unnameable
something
I had been denied.

I probably should have been nicer to Wallis. I should at least have said goodbye to her. Why had she changed her last name? It made sense for her mother to change her last name, but wouldn’t Wallis have kept hers?

Never mind: I went back to the book. Esperanza’s name, in Spanish, meant “hope.” She was named for her great-grandmother but wanted
to baptize myself under a new name, a name more like the real me, the one nobody sees
.

I wondered what name I would choose if I renamed myself. Who would I be if I wasn’t A. Haus? I opened my laptop and checked a website of baby names. Under
Adrienne
there were three different listings:

    
1) Adrienne: French form of Adria

    2) Adria: feminine form of Adrian

    3) Adrian: a famous Latin name of unknown meaning

Unknown meaning
, I thought. That was me.

I went back to
The House on Mango Street
. Jill had said she thought one of the characters was being abused. Who was it? I finished my bagel and texted Jill again but she still didn’t answer.

CeeCee’s name, Cecille, meant “blind” in Latin, according to the baby name guide. Jill’s name meant “sweetheart.”
Wallis
wasn’t listed under girls’ names, but under boys’ names it was defined as “Welshman” or “foreigner.” I pictured Wallis, with her skinny marionette’s jointed limbs, holding a bagpipe and dressed in a kilt.

There was a smear of cream cheese on my keyboard. I wiped it off and typed
Unbearable Book Club
and checked CeeCee’s blog. She had made a few changes: Jill’s stick-figure icon was now linked to a beef-processing plant, and I was listed as “in a relationship with an alien.” And there were several new pictures—one of Jill reading
The Left Hand of Darkness
at the snack bar, one of Wallis (CeeCee must have taken it without her noticing), and one of me at the pool with my eyes half closed. My hair looked horrific—as if I had borrowed it from a woodchuck. (
Not very flattering
, my mother had told my aunt in her email.) When I clicked on my photo a caption appeared:
Will you be my dad?
Under Wallis’s photo were the words
Teach me to swim!

My mother sent me a text, asking if Wallis had left.

Yes
, I said.

And are you still crabby?
she asked.

I didn’t answer. Let her think what she wanted. But a minute later I remembered something and sent her another text:
We need marmalade w/extra orange peel
.

Will convey asap to my personal shopper
, my mother said.

Back on Mango Street again, Esperanza described the smell of her mother’s hair. She paid another girl five dollars to be her friend.

“Pathetic,” I said. But I could imagine, when I was younger, doing the very same thing.

I am always Esperanza, Esperanza said
.

I stopped and read the line again. I didn’t feel like I was “always Adrienne.” CeeCee was probably always CeeCee and Jill was always Jill and Wallis was Wallis. Though I wasn’t Catholic like Esperanza, I sometimes wished I could feel my own soul buried inside me, as small and undistinguished as a grain of rice.

I checked my phone. Where the heck was Jill? I decided to call her at her parents’ number. She picked up. “Hey. Why are you at home today?” I asked.

“I live here,” she said.

“But you aren’t at work. And you haven’t been answering your cell.”

“That’s because I didn’t want to talk to you.”

“Oh.” This struck me as somewhat unwelcoming. “Wallis left. Can you come over?”

“No, I can’t,” Jill said. “I’m grounded.”

“Really? Ha. You always think I’m grounded. And now you’re grounded. That’s kind of funny.”

“Hilarious,” Jill said; then she hung up the phone.

Because she wouldn’t pick up after that, I had no choice but to haul my bike out of the garage, remove the cobwebs from its spokes, and travel the mile and a half to Jill’s by pedaling uphill with one leg. The sun blazed overhead, relentless. My tires clung to the asphalt, which was oozing tar at the seams.

“What happened?” I asked when Jill answered the door. I noticed that she kept the screen latched between us. “You’re not allowed to have visitors?” A slow-motion avalanche of frigid air was cascading toward me. “What the heck did you do?”

“Nothing,” Jill said.

“Okay. Well, I just dragged my handicapped self over here in ninety-degree weather to find out why you’re grounded. Can I at least have some water? When you showed up at my house I fed you sausages.”