The Dirty Book Club

by Lisi Harrison

  Addie laughed at the simplicity of it all. “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  Addie took a victorious shot of Grey Goose. “So, who had fun at my party?”

  Jules’s lashes fluttered. “You’re not even going to think about it?”

  “Nope,” Addie stole a side-eyed glance at Bungee, fluffed her hair, and then tipped her chin, offering him a view of her photogenic side. “Can we please talk about my birthday? Did you like the vibrators?” she asked, loud as a mating call.

  “What do you say we get started?” Jules said, lifting her Prim-covered copy of Fifty Shades of Grey.

  “Five stars,” Britt said, refilling her glass. “Am I right?”

  Jules nodded vigorously. “That moment when Ana e-mails Christian and says she doesn’t like him anymore because he left after sex and”—she fanned off a rush of tears—“and minutes later he appears at her door and says, ‘You said you wanted me to stay, so here I am.’ That was the most romantic thing I’ve ever read.”

  Britt agreed.

  “You bought that crap?” M.J. gasped.

  “Full price, paid in full.”

  “The sex scenes were great but you have to admit the prose was a bit unrefined,” M.J. said, fingers longing for the feel of her red editing pencil.

  “Prose?” Britt sneered. “Honey, reading Fifty Shades of Grey for the prose is like drinking wine to be heart smart. That is not why we’re here. We’re here because everyone wants to be Ana. Including me.”

  “You’re into . . .” Jules glanced over her shoulder, then whispered, “that?”

  “If by that you mean getting my tits smacked around by a gorgeous, fit, well-endowed billionaire pilot who speaks French, plays the piano, books my wax and gyno appointments, and wants me to eat even more than I normally do, then, yes, Jules, yes I am.”

  “Doesn’t that make you a prostitute?”

  “No, it makes me a goddamn genius.”

  M.J. sat back and folded her arms across her blouse. “I don’t know what’s more shocking. That you gave Fifty Shades five stars or that Addie isn’t keeping the bookstore.”

  Addie looked at her like, Really, we’re still doing this? “Those women are trying to handcuff me to Pearl Beach and I’m not going to let them. So can we drop it?” She liberated the wing necklace from her cleavage and gripped it like a security blanket. “Is it me or are my boobs getting bigger?”

  Jules respectfully looked away. “Speaking of handcuffs . . .” She jangled the key around her neck like a dinner bell. “It’s time.”

  With that she unfolded Dot Crawford’s letter and began reading.

  THE DATE: Wednesday, May 2, 2012

  THE DIRTY: Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James

  THE DETAILS: By Dot Crawford

  When I told the girls that Fifty Shades of Grey, with all its whipping and flogging, was the novel I identified with more than any of the others we’ve read, they nearly pooped their pantsuits. Because Dot Crawford doesn’t choose pain—not anymore.

  I’ve always believed that those who do must have an abundance of pleasure in their lives. Why else would they doff their caps to suffering if not for the thrill of an irregular experience? And I’ve suffered enough.

  So it wasn’t all that Red Room nonsense that grabbed me, it was the question Anastasia had to ask herself each time she entered it—How much torture will I endure in the name of love? It was a question I asked myself for almost fifteen years, and the answer was always the same: “As much as I deserve.” But unlike Anastasia, my tormentor wasn’t a Renaissance man with a sex fetish. It was my husband, Rob.

  We met the summer after I graduated high school. I got a job as a checkout girl at Crawford & Sons Grocery and spent my shifts checking out the twenty-year-old “Son.”

  He was Paul Newman handsome, drove a Ford Fairlane convertible, and was the heir apparent to Frank Crawford, owner of thirteen stores statewide. It didn’t discourage me when the other checkout girls told me Rob got kicked out of his father’s country club for stealing a golf cart or that he named his surfboard Johnnie Walker—it inspired me. I was Dotty Snip after all—head cheerleader, valedictorian, and best friends with Marjorie Shannon (the biggest troublemaker at Pearl Beach High!). And I still graduated with honors. I welcomed a challenge like a neighbor with a swimming pool.

  Rob and I fell in love that summer. We spent our days off at the beach, going to drive-ins, and necking in the back of his Fairlane. In the fall, I started teachers’ college, Rob was promoted to produce manager at the store, and we saw each other on the weekends. I was happy. And he was, too. But as time went on he complained more and more about his job. He was bored. Uninspired. Obligated. Trapped. Doomed to decades of answering to his father and smelling like vegetables. “Thank God for Dotty Snip and Johnnie Walker,” he’d say. “The two things that keep me going.”

  I assumed he was talking about me and his surfboard. He wasn’t. Though I didn’t realize it until after we were married.

  “Alcohol helps me relax,” Rob used to say. So I’d make sure he had plenty of it when he got home from the store. It was the least I could do, especially since I left my teaching job to raise Jenny. He worked so hard for us. But the odd thing was, he seemed more relaxed before he drank. After, he’d become angry, impatient, critical, mean.

  I’d tell myself that that wasn’t Rob. It was the alcohol. If it was Rob he would have woken up the next morning and known why I was covered in bruises. He would have known why the trash can was filled with broken china. He would have known why my lip was swollen or why our daughter was scared to be in the room with him. He would have known. And he didn’t.

  So I blamed Johnnie Walker for those things and Johnnie Walker blamed me. “If you could make Jenny stop crying I wouldn’t be so angry,” Johnnie would say. “If I didn’t have to work all day to support you I wouldn’t be stressed.” And when he got that speeding ticket, which led to a Breathalyzer test and a DWI, somehowit was my fault again. . . .

  I apologized because Rob was my husband. I placed him on a pedestal and wanted him to stay there. Because if he fell off, who would I look up to?

  I apologized because if it was my fault I could work hard, just like I always did, and make things right. But if Rob was the one who needed changing, then everything would stay the same. And I couldn’t live with that.

  I apologized because I was afraid of what would happen to me and Jenny if I didn’t.

  After every “incident” the girls would ask how much more I would put up with. I never had an answer. I didn’t know. I didn’t think I had a choice. Rob was addicted to alcohol, and I was addicted to Rob’s potential. I believed he would return to being the sweet boy I met in 1961, just as soon as I stopped making him so angry.

  I clung to my belief the same way that Anastasia clung to hers. The idea that love and patience were enough to rid Christian of his vices and turn him into the man that he wasn’t—the man she wanted him to be—was just as naive.

  August 14, 1982, was the day I stopped being naive.

  I was home in bed with a terrible stomach flu and needed Rob to get Jenny and her friend from their tap lesson. He said he would and I was relieved—maybe he wasn’t so terrible, I thought, and I drifted off to sleep. Thirty minutes later I was woken up by a phone call from Gloria. She had been at the grocery store and saw Rob stumbling to his car. He looked blitzed and she wanted to make sure he arrived home safely.

  I thought of Candy Lightner, the founder of Mothers Against Drunk Driving and how her thirteen-year-old daughter was killed by a drunk driver. Jenny was also thirteen. In a swirl of nausea and panic I gave the police an anonymous tip.

  Rob had driven three blocks with the girls before he was arrested and charged with blowing five times over the legal limit and two counts of child endangerment. He was sent to jail for thirty days.

  When Rob returned home he found a Tupperware full of my tears and a note that said Jenny and I would not move back in
to the house until he was sober. The choice was his: Dotty or Johnnie?

  Five days later, Jenny and I were back home, but not because Rob stopped drinking. He drove through the window of Crawford & Sons, split his head open on the steering wheel, and died instantly. Rob chose Johnnie.

  Once again, I blamed myself: It was my fault for moving out. My fault for not being good enough to fix him. My fault Jenny would grow up without a father. It was years before I realized that there wasn’t anything I could have done. That there were things in this world that Dotty Snip couldn’t control. And Rob Crawford had been one of them.

  I, like Ana, was seduced by the soft licks of hope into believing that I could change the man I loved. Then flogged by whip-sharp reminders that I couldn’t. So, like Anastasia, I turned myself over to grief and eventually came to accept that the only person I can change is myself. At which point, I got the help I needed, learned how to cut the ties that bound me to guilt, and set myself free.

  Shit happens is life’s dominant; wishful thinkers, its submissive. And happy endings? Well, they don’t come until we accept the sad ones. And so, Anastasia, with the help of this club, I did.

  —Dotty Snip Crawford

  * * *

  “GOD.” ADDIE SIGHED. “I knew Uncle Rob liked his whiskey, but I had no idea he was an Abe.”

  “Abe?” M.J. asked.

  “Abe User,” she said. “It’s what we, at the old women’s clinic, call a wife beater.”

  Jules blew her nose. The solemn peal, like reveille from a bugle, drew M.J.’s thoughts away from Dotty and placed her back in the Oyster Bar.

  “Poor Dotty.” Jules sniffled. Tears stumbled drunkenly down her cheeks. “She really loved him.”

  “That wasn’t love,” Addie stated, as if a parquetry of Harvard degrees decorated the walls behind her. “How could she love a man who popped her in the lip every time the baby cried? It’s not possible.”

  “Then why did she stay?” Jules pressed.

  “Pity, fear, denial, maybe a bit of Stockholm syndrome. You know, he breaks up the abuse with bits of kindness to give her hope that he’ll change. But hoping that someone will change is a red, heart-shaped herring, there to distract romantics from the truth. It’s what we in the biz call ‘trauma bonding.’ Trust me. I see it all the time.” She punctuated her statement with a swift shot of vodka.

  Britt and Jules watched Addie slam down her glass with wide-eyed fascination. Like M.J., they were probably struck by the unexpected reach of her knowledge. How many men, if any, saw this side of her? How many knew that front, back, and doggy style weren’t the only points of view Addie Oliver had to offer?

  “And for the record, Anastasia doesn’t love Christian, either. She was seduced by his power.”

  “Too far!” Britt announced.

  Jules nodded in agreement.

  Addie poured herself another shot. “Do you honestly think she’ll be melting over Christian’s ‘gray gaze’ when he’s sixty-five, bald, and chasing her around the apartment with a riding crop and a leaky colostomy bag? No! She’ll shackle him to the radiator and Facebook the nice guy . . . oh, what was his name . . . ?” She rolled her wrist as if invoking a sneeze. “José!”

  “You read the book!” Jules cried.

  “More like skimmed.”

  “That’s so depressing,” Britt said.

  “Well, it shouldn’t be. I told you I’m not much of a reader.”

  “No, the visual of Christian chasing Ana around with a leaky colostomy bag and a whip.”

  “Only because it’s true,” Addie said. “Love is accepting someone for who they are, not who they’ll be once you change them. Because guys won’t change unless they want to, and most of them don’t want to. If you think otherwise, you’re in for a shit-storm of disappointment.”

  M.J. thought of her struggle with Dan. How she admires his white knight complex, benefits from it even, and at the same time resents it and, at times, wishes it away. Did that mean she didn’t accept him? Because she did. She loved Dan whether it suited her or not. She couldn’t help it. Love was impervious to logic, uncontrollable as the weather. “Feelings don’t make sense, Addie. We can’t decide who to love.”

  “And people do change,” Britt insisted. “We grow up and do all kinds of things we never thought we’d do when we were younger. Take those twenty-year-olds at my gym who say they’ll never get boob jobs. They can’t picture themselves with ape tits any more than I could picture myself cheating on Paul, and then next thing you know—”

  Jules’s breath hitched. “You cheated on Paul?”

  Britt froze, stunned by her accidental admission.

  With a toss of her hair, Addie leaned forward. “Tell us everything, don’t leave one thing out. Start with ten minutes before it happened. Back when you were still innocent.”

  Britt evaluated the three women staring expectantly at her. After a moment of grave consideration she reached for the plate of bruschetta. “I’m not going to tell you anything until you jam an entire piece of this toast in your mouth.”

  They exchanged glances and then did what they were asked. As M.J. suspected, Britt waited for them to gag, then said, “That’s the feeling I want you to have every time you even think about repeating what I’m going to say.”

  Chewing, they agreed.

  “Do you love him?” Jules asked when Britt finished her story.

  “Who, the Brazilian?” Britt answered.

  “He’s Brazilian?” Addie asked, impressed.

  “No,” Britt said. “Just bald.”

  “Do you love him?” Jules asked again, now gripping the arms of the rattan chair bracing herself for what was sure to be a disappointing response: If Britt said yes, Jules’s heart would break for Paul. If no, it would bleed for the premature death of a fairy tale—a romance that never made it to term.

  “I love my husband,” Britt said. “And I want to stay married, but I think he’s—”

  “Not what you hoped for?” Addie asked smugly.

  Britt cut a look to M.J., a plea for guidance. Do I tell them about Paul’s affair or not? To which M.J. mouthed back, “Wait.” There was no sense in riling everyone up until they were sure.

  “How’s the sex?” Addie asked.

  “With Paul?”

  “No, the Brazilian.”

  Britt grinned. “Toe-curling.”

  Jules giggled. “Toe-curling?”

  “You know.” Britt hugged her knees to her chest. “The way it probably was when you started dating Brandon.”

  Jules’s Tweety Bird–blue eyes blink-blinked. M.J. could almost hear a cartoon’s high-pitched piano notes.

  “You have had sex before, right?” Britt teased.

  “Um, I have a daughter, remember?”

  Addie snorted. “So you’ve only done it once?”

  “Of course not, silly, but I—” She leaned forward and whispered, “I have a shy vagina. So it’s never been like . . . you know, the way it is with Anastasia and Christian. I mean, is that whole thing even realistic?”

  “What whole thing?” Addie laughed.

  “The orgasm thing. It’s so easy for her. That doesn’t happen to real people, does it?”

  “Definitely not in the bath,” M.J. said.

  “Yeah, I’m calling bullshit on the bath orgasms,” Britt agreed. “All that sloshing and jabbing makes me feel like a plunged toilet.”

  “Then you’re doing something wrong,” Addie said.

  “You can come in the water?” Britt asked.

  “How hard can it be?” Addie said. Then, with another toss of her hair, “David used to say I could come from a hiccup.”

  “What ever happened with you two?” M.J. asked. He was the only guy Addie ever seemed to reference. The only one who seemed to last longer than a holiday weekend.

  “Gloria happened. She thought we were a bad influence on each other and did whatever she could to keep us apart. But I didn’t care. I wasn’t out to change David, and he wasn�
��t out to change me. We liked each other exactly as we were—genital warts and all. The only reason we’re apart now is because he got a job coaching a high school snowboarding team in Colorado and I don’t do puffy outerwear or long-distance relationships. But if he lived here . . .”

  “Well, then, you must be excited about the news,” Britt said.

  Addie pinched a lone tomato chunk off the bruschetta plate and dropped it in her mouth. “News?”

  “About David. He didn’t tell you?”

  “Tell me what?”

  “Gloria took her house off the market. David is moving in on Friday.”

  Addie checked her phone as if expecting to find a flurry of missed messages and plausible explanations as to why she was just finding this out now. After a moment she looked up, her face lit frostbite-blue from the screen and said, “That little fucker! He’s going to surprise me.” Then, with a one-two slap of her palms, “Are we done here?”

  “What’s the rush?” Britt asked.

  She aimed her cleavage at Bungee who was signing his tab. “He’s leaving,” Addie said as if it should have been obvious. “He looks a little dirty, don’cha think?” She stood and smoothed her dress. “I think we could both use a bath.”

  “What about the closing ritual?” M.J. asked, once again.

  “And our next book,” Britt added. “It’s Henry and June, right? I have the letter. It’s from Liddy. Not that I read it. It slipped out of the sleeve when I was unpacking the box and I might have seen a few sentences, something about her getting kicked out of the DBC. But that’s it.” She raised her right hand. “Swear.”

  The music suddenly became louder and the hostess flashed Jules a terse nod. She held up her hand—Five minutes. Long enough for them to charm four cigarettes off the bartender and complete the closing ritual before they were told to snub them out.

  “Now what?” M.J. practically whined after Addie took off. She didn’t want to trade this warm, giddy feeling for the sound of CNN on the TV or the soft whistle of Dan’s nose as he slept. “Should we hit the restaurant for a nightcap?”