The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls

by Julie Schumacher

  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.”

  Was 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.”

  Slowly, as if moving her hands took a lot of effort, Jill unlatched the screen. “I’m letting you in because I feel sorry for you.”

  “How very generous,” I said.

  I followed Jill to the kitchen, where she filled two smiley-face glasses with water; then we went to her room. “I
’m not technically grounded,” she said. “I grounded myself. It kills my mother to have to punish me, so I make things easier for her by taking matters into my own hands.”

  This made an odd kind of sense, because it was Jill. I gulped down my water and looked around at her room, which was totally pink. There was a pink rug, a pink quilt on the bed, a pink beanbag chair, and a row of teddy bears on a shelf. The bears were arranged in size order, and they were wearing an assortment of pink raincoats, tutus, aprons, shorts, and shoes. “Nice bears,” I said.

  Jill scooped up the largest in the row of animals, took off its pink plastic rain boots, and then put them back on.

  “So: are you going to tell me why you grounded yourself?” I asked.

  Jill licked her finger and cleaned the bear’s black plastic eyes. “You don’t actually know? Can you guess?”

  “Why should I guess?” I asked. “Is your bedroom always this neat?”

  Jill put the bear down. “Actually, I don’t think I should talk about it. I don’t want to be accused of spreading gossip.”

  “I rode all the way over here,” I said. “If you don’t want to say why you’re grounded, can you write it down? Send smoke signals? Or maybe you want to act it out.”

  Jill picked up a Magic 8 Ball from her shelf. “It has to do with something that’s missing.” She shook the 8 Ball, a little violently I thought, then turned it over and peered into the tiny inky window. “The 8 Ball says, ‘Maybe Adrienne has heard something about the thing that’s missing but doesn’t want to admit it.’ ”

  “That must be in very small print,” I said. “I didn’t know 8 Balls were that specific.”

  “Oh, sure. They can tell you lots of things,” Jill said. She shook the 8 Ball again, accidentally smacking it against her dresser. “Now it says, ‘Adrienne has been acting like a suck-up all summer.’ And it says that CeeCee is a snake—‘a venomous, two-faced, treacherous beast.’ ”

  “That’s kind of over-the-top,” I said. “Are you exaggerating?”

  Jill said she wasn’t.

  “Then maybe you’re reading the messages wrong. Or misinterpreting.” I grabbed the 8 Ball. I shook it, then pounded it several times on the floor. “Huh,” I said. “Look at this. Now the little window says that Jill D’Amato should unpack that truckload of shit from her ears and listen to me for half a second, because I have no idea what she’s talking about.”

  “I think you cracked it,” Jill said.

  “Good. You’re too old for an 8 Ball.”

  “I still have a Ouija board,” Jill said. She ran her finger along a seam in the 8 Ball, which did appear to be leaking. She tossed it into the trash. “Have you ever stolen anything?” she asked.

  “Like what?” I touched the earring at the top of my ear.

  “Not counting accidental thievery,” Jill said. “That was CeeCee, not you.”

  I quickly shuffled through my mental “Crimes of Adrienne” file, the list of boneheaded moments, idiotic remarks, and regrets. “I stole a bag of cashews once,” I said. “I was in first grade.” I remembered lifting the blue plastic package from its metal arm on the revolving display and quietly tucking it under my shirt. When my mother and I left the store, I assumed she would find the cashews and be shocked, and she would lead me back to the store to confess. But she never found them. They were delicious. “And I took a chocolate milk from the school cafeteria. I think that lunch lady, Denise, is blind in one eye.”

  “She’s blind in both eyes,” Jill said. “But I’m not talking about milk and cashews. I’m talking about expensive things. Things that are stolen from people you know. You wouldn’t, for example, walk into my house and steal something valuable from my parents. You wouldn’t steal my dad’s medication.”

  “What kind of medication?” I asked, as if I might have happily stolen one type but not another.

  Jill raked her fingers through her hair. “My dad needs those pills, Adrienne. It’s not a joke. When he doesn’t have them he feels like his nerve endings have been set on fire. And they’re really expensive. You should have seen my mom’s face when she found out they were gone. And nobody has been to our house since we hosted book club.”

  “Book club?” I asked. “But no one in the Unbearable Literary Society would steal your father’s pills. No one would comb through someone else’s—” I heard my voice slowing down. I remembered CeeCee checking the medicine chests.

  Jill plucked a piece of fuzz off the carpet. “I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “And neither one of us has even mentioned her name.”

  “But—” I was confused. I felt like my brain had been cut loose from its usual mooring and was sloshing back and forth in my skull, like a fish in a tub.

  “I’ve taken the shit out of my ears now,” Jill said. “But I don’t hear you saying anything.”

  “I don’t have anything to say,” I said. “CeeCee wouldn’t have taken them.”

  “Why not? Do you think being a member of a book club makes her a good person?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. It wasn’t doing much for my moral character. “Did you at least ask her if she stole the pills?”

  “You are a class-A idiot,” Jill said. “She’s not going to admit it. I asked her to come over here and talk. I said it was important, but she went to the beach.”

  “But … why are you mad at me?” I asked. “I didn’t do anything.”

  “Yes, you did. You started this book club.”

  “I didn’t start it,” I said. “And I didn’t steal your father’s pills.”

  Downstairs, we heard a door close.

  “That’s my mom,” Jill said. She tilted the pink plastic wastebasket so we could see inside it. The 8 Ball continued to leak.

  “None of this makes sense to me,” I said. “And I still don’t understand why you’re grounded. Does your mother think you took the pills?”

  “No. Hold this. I’ll get some tissues.” Jill handed me the wastebasket. “The thing is, I told my mother I could guess where the pills might have gone, because I’d seen someone poking through the medicine chest. And my mom started crying. She’s very sensitive. So I told her I would talk to a couple of ‘suspects,’ and I might be able to get the pills back. Now she probably thinks I loaned them out, or … I don’t know what she thinks.”

  “Jilly, honey? Are you upstairs?”

  “In my room,” Jill called.

  “So, basically,” I said as we listened to her mother’s approaching footsteps, “you told your mom that Wallis or CeeCee or I—one of the three of us—stole your dad’s medication.”

  Jill shrugged.

  “That doesn’t strike you as unfair?” I asked. I thought about hiding under the bed or in the closet. But the door opened and there I was, red-handed, holding a dripping wastebasket over the rug.

  Jill’s mother held out her arms. Not sure what the proper response should be, I set the wastebasket down and let her press me to her chest.

  “It’s so good to see you, Adrienne!” she said. “That’s very sweet of you to visit. We don’t see enough of you, outside of book club. How’s your mother? And how’s little Wallis?”

  “Everyone’s fine. It’s good to see you, too,” I said.

  Her eyes thickened with tears. “Well. Can I make you two something to eat? Adrienne, honey, can you stay for dinner?”

  “No, I should get going,” I said.

  Jill’s mother squeezed me again. “Oh! You girls. I know we’ll survive all these challenges, won’t we? You’re still so young!”

  “Mom? You should let go of Adrienne,” Jill said.

  Her mother nodded and dabbed at her eyes. “I’m fairly emotional these days. Jilly can tell you. Maybe it’s all this literature we’re reading. Some of it is so powerful!” She picked up The House on Mango Street. “Where do you think these writers get their ideas?”

  I said I didn’t know.

  “Well, I certainly hope they aren’t all true,” Jill’s mother said. “S
ome of the characters go through such terrible things. It’s just … upsetting. What do you think, Jilly?”

  Jill patted her mother’s arm. She suggested that writers might be an unusual group, and that more well-adjusted people—people like us—probably kept busy with work and hobbies and didn’t feel a need to write anything down.

  14. ANTAGONIST: the character who is against the main character. The monster is Frankenstein’s antagonist. The husband in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is the antagonist of his wife. I don’t know if most people in real life have antagonists, but everyone in a novel seems to have at least one.

  In books, it’s never the obvious person who’s guilty. The person who’s found standing over the corpse with a bloodstained weapon in her hand almost never turns out to be the killer. The killer is the person you would never think of, the one who wandered through the second chapter in a friendly way, or the person who—up until the minute she confesses—wouldn’t seem to be capable of the simplest crime.

  I didn’t think CeeCee stole the pills.

  Did she? Maybe anything was possible. Maybe my mother was lying to me, and maybe Wallis’s mother was a figment of my imagination, and maybe CeeCee had ransacked Jill’s bathroom cabinet so she could steal the pills for someone who would know how to sell them—let’s say an unemployed guy who liked to run errands at three a.m.

  CeeCee wasn’t answering my texts. Was that incriminating? Or did it just mean she was tired of me? I checked her blog. It didn’t seem to have changed, but I saw a number 44 in the Post a comment section. Forty-four comments? Who would bother to comment on a book club blog?

  Oh.

  Hey CeeCee, great blog, most of them said. I like the bikini. One person asked about my hair (Does that chick have a mullett?) and several people sent links—these were probably obscene—that CeeCee might want to use for her project. One person offered to be the daddy I had always wanted.

  Nice. A pedophile.

  The last few comments were from Jeff Pardullo. Hot, he said, commenting on the picture of CeeCee’s toes. In another post he wrote, Call me. I wanna hang out with your high school friends.