The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls (10 page)

7. MOOD: The mood of a book is kind of like the mood of a person. It can be funny or sarcastic or wacky or sad. I wonder if the mood of a book depends on the mood the writer was in when she wrote it
.

B
ack in what was quickly becoming our regular spot at the pool, CeeCee was turning the pages of a magazine. “Who has a theory about Wallis?” she asked.

Jill rolled her eyes. “I don’t want to start that conversation.”

CeeCee held up a picture of a model in a shampoo ad. “You should definitely dye your hair,” she said. “It’ll perk you up. Jill, don’t you think A should dye her hair?”

“
You
don’t dye your hair,” Jill told her.

“My hair is blond,” CeeCee said.

I had just reread the same paragraph for the third or fourth time. It was still hot and I was feeling peevish. My
knee was sore, my ear was probably infected, and Jill, who was on a fifteen-minute break from the snack bar, was usurping space at the foot of my chair.

“Maybe red highlights,” CeeCee said. “Brown is not an attractive color.”

I saw someone walking outside the fence. “Is that Wallis?” I asked. I thought I recognized her archaeologist’s shorts. But Jill pointed out that the person I was looking at was a tiny old lady.

“Right: back to Wallis. Here’s one possible theory,” CeeCee said. “Her mother is dead and divided into a bunch of plastic bags in the freezer. Or, theory number two: her mother is bat-shit insane, and Wallis has locked her in the attic and every night she slides her a tray of food through a slot in the door.”

Jill was staring at the side of my head. “Your ear looks like crap, Adrienne.” She leaned toward me. “There’s a bunch of pink crust growing around the hole.”

“Is anyone listening to me?” CeeCee asked.

“You should take that earring out and start over,” Jill said. “You have to use fourteen-karat gold or surgical steel.”

“Hello? That gold is easily sixteen karat,” CeeCee said. “And you probably shouldn’t let my mother see that you have it.”

I touched my ear. It was swollen. “This earring’s your mother’s? You said you found it.”

“I did. My mother’s always losing things. She’s very careless.” CeeCee adjusted the tiny battery-operated fan on the arm of her chair. “A, admit it. You want to know what Wallis’s deal is. You want to figure her out.”

Did I? I thought I wanted to figure
myself
out. “She has a rash on her legs,” I said.

“That’s probably psoriasis.” Jill picked up my water bottle and drank from it. “She can get a prescription.”

Mr. Vonn, our music teacher, walked by with a newspaper under his arm. His stomach was furry with black and gray hair, and he was wearing a bathing suit printed with musical notes. He wiggled his fingers at us, humming.

“Absolutely no comment,” CeeCee said.

I tried to go back to
The Left Hand of Darkness
, but now I was thinking about Wallis.

CeeCee noticed me staring into space. “I bet she’s got a little crush on you,” she said, turning another page in her magazine. “Didn’t I hear her say, ‘I’m like Adrienne’?”

“That’s only because we live with our mothers,” I said. “I didn’t skip a grade, and I didn’t magically appear in the middle of the school year, and I don’t live in the woods.”

Jill handed me my empty water bottle. “You make her sound like one of those feral children,” she said. “The ones that are raised by packs of wolves.”

An image of Wallis as Red Riding Hood filtered into my brain.

Jill picked up my copy of
The Left Hand of Darkness
. A postcard Liz had sent me fell out of the book.
Mosquitoes the size of raccoons here
, she’d written.
No shower for 17 days. All my clothes smell. I’m washing my underwear in the lake
.

“How much of this book have you read?” Jill asked.

I shoved the postcard into my purse. I had finished the first four or five chapters. The main character, Genly Ai, was a sort of ambassador to the planet Winter, where it
was always cold, and where there was no difference between men and women because everybody shifted back and forth from male to female. Genly had trouble understanding what was happening at first, and so did I.

Jill flipped through the book to chapter seven. “Look,” she said. “ ‘The Question of Sex.’ ”

“There’s a whole chapter about sex?” CeeCee asked.

“Not the kind you’re hoping for,” Jill said. “It’s mostly incest. Between two brothers—or maybe a brother and a pseudosister.”

“I don’t think it counts as incest if the people are aliens,” I said.

Outside the fence, two guys I recognized from school were throwing a basketball through a rusted hoop.

“Why are the only people in town this summer either unattractive or mentally ill?” CeeCee asked.

Jill gave me the book back. What had struck me most about the novel, so far, was the way the characters were allowed to change. On the planet Winter, you could be a certain type of person one day, but then the next day, or the next week, everyone you knew accepted you as someone else.

“Here’s a thought. We could pay her a visit,” CeeCee said.

“You want to visit Wallis?” I asked.

“Why not? You’re obviously concerned about her. And the two of you have a lot in common. Besides, we haven’t seen her in a couple of days. Maybe we could stop by and check things out.”

Like ambassadors
, I thought.
Like Genly Ai
.

“Or here’s a different idea,” Jill said. “We could leave Wallis alone. We could let her
not
shave her armpits. We could let her wear ugly glasses and have psoriasis on her legs.”

“They
are
ugly glasses,” CeeCee said. “And I notice you used the word
we
. There’s so much togetherness in this group. It’s really touching.”

A cluster of younger boys swaggered past us. I waved to Liz’s little brother, Max.

“I hope you aren’t flirting with that nine-year-old,” CeeCee said.

Jill groaned and got up. “I have to work. Break’s over.”

A dozen people were milling around, listless, in a scrap of shade by the concession stand. CeeCee and I watched Jill unlock the money box and corral the little kids into a line.

“Our only problem,” CeeCee said, filing her nails, “will be getting a car.”

Maybe it was the heat, or my knee, or the fact that Liz was away, but I felt irritable and restless. Maybe some sort of change would be a good idea, I thought. Nothing drastic or permanent—just something to make me feel more confident and less like a
blank;
closer to
edgy
and further from
bland
. I spent an hour in the beauty aisle at the drugstore and, remembering CeeCee’s suggestion, chose a box of Rich Auburn. It had to be better than my natural shade, which was probably best described as Playground Dust.

In case she might try to talk me out of it, I waited until my mother had gone to a coffee shop with a friend; then I
cranked the air-conditioning down to sixty-five, turned the radio to its highest volume, and took the hair dye into the tub. One of my favorite scenes in one of my favorite books is the part in
Little Women
when Jo cuts her hair. Because her family needs money, she sacrifices her “one beauty” and sells her long, thick hair to a man who makes wigs. My hair wasn’t long, and my mother didn’t need me to sell anything; still, squishing the color around on my scalp, I imagined myself whipping a scarf off my head and astounding everyone with my thoughtfulness and generosity.

I forgot the timer and probably left the dye in too long while I shaved my legs and invented a new kind of cheese sandwich, but I followed the directions otherwise, and then I rinsed and dried my hair and got dressed and reexamined the package, which probably should have been labeled
Firehouse Red
.

“Maybe it fades,” I informed the mirror.

The mirror suggested I immediately get into the shower and wash my hair several times. Forty minutes later the color had barely faded, and I noticed that the tips of my ears and an inch of my forehead were the color of blood.

My laptop had been acting a little funky, so I used my mother’s ancient computer to look up
how to get dye out of hair
. Solutions involved washing, washing with substances I didn’t have, and professional help. Eventually I ended up following a link—
need help?
—which had nothing to do with hair but offered me advice if I had an STD or was pregnant. This site, in turn, led to a page (had my mother been looking at it? was that why it cropped up?) for single parents.

At first I thought it was a dating service, but other than her once-a-month dinners with Carl Schunk, who ran the hardware store, my mother hadn’t dated in years. I scrolled through the site. It definitely wasn’t about romance. It outlined the risks of being the teenaged child of a single parent.

Apparently, without even knowing it, I had grown up in a scarring environment. Fatherless children, the site warned, were more likely to drop out of school, to be poor, to get addicted to drugs, and to be at risk for identity and gender confusion. I ran a hand through my hair, which was feeling stiff. Kids without fathers, the site said, ended up in jail more often than two-parent kids, and their lives were more likely to end in suicide.

Huh. I hadn’t thought about suicide much. And I hadn’t done anything—yet—that would land me in jail.
Identity and gender confusion? Really?
I thought of Estraven in
The Left Hand of Darkness
changing from female to male and back again.

By the time my mother came home I had almost forgotten about dyeing my hair. The shocked expression on her face was a quick reminder.

“You’re kidding,” she said. I could tell that words—entire sentences—were arriving in her mouth, and she was swallowing them back. “How many bath towels did you ruin?” she finally asked.

“What?” I hadn’t thought about the towels. The one resting next to me on the floor did seem to be stained.

Maybe she’s shocked because I look older and more sophisticated
, I thought.

My mother picked up the towel. “I suppose it’s not permanent.” She tilted her head as if to observe me from a different angle. “Why did you do it?”

To give you money so you can visit Father near his Civil War battlefield
. “No reason,” I said. “And thanks for the big vote of confidence.” I went to my room.

Twenty minutes later my mother knocked on my door. “Do you want to play Scrabble?”

If this was a peace offering, I thought, it was the wrong kind. “You always beat me at Scrabble,” I complained.

“I don’t
always
beat you.” My mother was ridiculously fond of Scrabble. “Adrienne,” she said. “I just wasn’t prepared to see your hair looking so … bright. Come out to the kitchen. I’ll set up the board.” She lured me out of my room—I put on a thick black headband—by promising to advance me fifty points.

“How’s your knee feeling these days?” she asked, once we sat down and picked our wooden letters.

“It’s getting better.” I flexed my foot.

“I know it’s stressful, being injured,” my mother said. “You’re probably sorting a lot of things out.”

I recognized a certain tone in her voice and started to wish I had stayed in my room. “Like what?” I asked. “What am I sorting out?”

“Well, I don’t know; maybe you should tell me.” My mother set down some letters. “Twenty-six points,” she said. “It’s your turn.”

The intriguing thing about playing Scrabble is that as soon as the board is set up in front of me, I don’t know any words. Other than
cat
and
bat
and
rat
, everything
disappears from the language drawer in my brain. My mother, on the other hand, who normally speaks English like a regular person, spells things like
qiviut
(“wool of the musk ox”) and
hake
.

“Hake?” I asked. “You got twenty-six points for
hake
?”

“It’s a type of fish,” she said. “You’ve probably eaten it.”

I stared at my letters.

“The reason I’m asking about stress,” my mother said, “is that you’ve got a newly pierced ear that looks infected, and you just dyed your hair, and—to be honest—you’ve been pretty moody for the past few days. Also, I noticed the website you were looking at on my computer. You left it open. It said something about ‘teens in crisis.’ ”

“Oh. That,” I said. “I wasn’t really looking at it. It just … came up.” I thought about the website. Was I at risk? Was my flame-colored hair a cry for help? I managed to get ten points for
beat
.

My mother wrote down my score. “Maybe later this summer, once your leg is healed,” she said, “we could go for a trip. We could drive to the Adirondacks or the Poconos.”

“We live forty minutes from the Atlantic Ocean,” I said. This was a source of tension between us. My mother said she didn’t like the ocean, even though she’d grown up at the New Jersey shore. She told me she got a rash from sitting on the sand.