The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls (13 page)

—The word is
borrowed
.

—The car you drove into a ditch?

—A pothole, Jeff. And that’s what a spare tire’s for. You got a ride here fast enough, so it’s not a big deal. Come on. Take her feet.

—Man, she’s deadweight. Is this the same girl from the mini-putt? She looks different. She looks …

—Be careful of her knee. She has a bad knee. You can’t drag her like that!

—Make her stand up, then. What’s she saying?

—“I don’t speak Voidish.” It’s from a book.

—She’s a real intellectual, huh? She better not puke up my car.

—Jeff, stop! Stop it! Just take her feet. I’ll get the door.

—Why don’t we drop her somewhere and make her parents come and get her?

—Because she only has one parent—and that parent isn’t going to see her like this, or find out.

10. POINT OF VIEW: In this essay, I am using the first person, because it’s my point of view. If Dr. Ramsan had written this instead, he’d probably use the third person (“she” or “Adrienne”). He would also get a higher grade on this project, because he’s older and has to be smart if he went to medical school
.

“A
water tower?” Dr. Ramsan asked. We both stared at
my
knee, inflated to twice its normal size. “You were actually climbing it? A rusted ladder? In the middle of the night?”

My mother was pretending to read in the waiting room. She had driven over to CeeCee’s first thing in the morning, having consulted her kitchen calendar and discovered that I had an appointment with Dr. Ramsan (he had clinic on Saturdays) at nine a.m. I had woken up on CeeCee’s Oriental rug to the sound of my mother’s voice repeatedly demanding, “Are you
drunk
? Adrienne?”

Dr. Ramsan bent and straightened my leg several times. “May I ask—” He paused. He was so polite.

“It’s not a very big tower,” I said, with one hand on my skull; I was trying to keep my brain from exploding. “And the ladder doesn’t go all the way up anymore. I was climbing it because …” I tried to remember what my reason had been. Something to do with symbolism? “I guess I wanted to see … the view.”

“A view at night. Of what?” He pushed on either side of my knee with his thumbs.

“Ow. We were trying to find somebody’s house. It’s a person we know. We wanted to find out where she lives, but—” I remembered the wallpaper woman and the murdered bride and—had I seen a gun? “I need to lie down.” I felt twirly and nauseated and, though I had just showered, I could still smell the stench of the clothes I had slept in. My mouth was a saliva-filled marsh, boggy with pockets of vomit and gin.

Dr. Ramsan moved a pillow to the head of the paper-covered table. “And if you had found the person you were looking for and located her house? Then what?”

“Um, I’m not sure. But I think—” Trying to remember what had happened once we reached the tower was like pulling fish from a muddy pond: flashes of memory kept darting and slipping beneath the murk. “I think I did see the person we were looking for. But how did she know we were there? It was confusing.”

“As I suppose climbing a tower in the dark most often would be. You should have a tetanus booster because of
this scrape.” Dr. Ramsan circled my wrist with his thumb and fingers and examined my forearm. “I notice your mother hasn’t come in with you this time.”

“She’s kind of sick of me lately,” I said. I had staggered behind her out of CeeCee’s bedroom, steering myself down the stairs by the handrail, a ribbon of vomit snaking its way up my throat. My head was pounding and my knee was on fire. My mother had looked for CeeCee’s parents (someone from their cleaning service had let her in), but they were apparently out playing golf. “So much for ‘I don’t drink,’ ” my mother had said when we got in the car.

“Being a parent is difficult,” Dr. Ramsan said. I saw him notice my hair. “And people your age are often attracted to danger. It’s a—what do you call it?—an elixir.”

He wiped something that stung into the cut on my arm; I closed my eyes. But as soon as I closed them, I felt dizzy and saw the dreamlike figures from the night before. I had definitely seen Wallis; she was the little dead bride in the nightgown, and she had warned me that I wasn’t “safe.” (Safe from what?) But had I seen her mother? And was she really holding a gun? “Can alcohol cause hallucinations?” I asked.

Dr. Ramsan took a coil of gauze from a package. “Typically, hallucinations occur with withdrawal rather than occasional use. How much, and how often, are you drinking?”

“It was only last night,” I said. “My mother probably won’t believe me anymore, but I don’t drink.”

I sat up, and Dr. Ramsan bandaged my arm. If he had
kids of his own, I thought, they were probably mild-mannered boy and girl geniuses, happily doing calculus and physics in the second grade. “What sort of hallucination did you have?” he asked. “Do you mind my asking?”

“I don’t mind.” I liked Dr. Ramsan. “Two people,” I said. The inside of my head seemed to be coated in an oily fog. “They came out of the trees. And they were either dressed up, or they were wearing costumes—or maybe nightgowns. At first I thought they were characters out of a book.”

“Go on,” he said, as if he heard this sort of thing often.

“One of the people was definitely real,” I said, concentrating on Dr. Ramsan’s perfect black beard, like a garden of hair on his chin. “But the other one seemed more … fictional. And when my friend came to get me and bring me home”—I remembered Jeff’s hands gripping my legs—“they disappeared.” I felt for a lump on the side of my head. Maybe I was insane. “Do you think the entire thing was a nightmare?”

“I don’t think you dreamed you were climbing a tower,” Dr. Ramsan said. “So part of your evening must have been real.” He shined a penlight into my eyes and then noticed my ear. “This doesn’t look good.”

“Yeah, sorry about that,” I said, as if my ear—not to mention my knee—were something I had borrowed and was supposed to be taking care of.

He cleaned the piercing and told me to soak my ear twice a day in salt water.

“By the way, I’m not usually attracted to danger,” I said. “Up until now I’ve led a pretty boring life.”

“Boredom is good!” Dr. Ramsan looked pleased. “Boredom is why God invented books. Are you still in your book club?”

“Yeah. We’re reading
The Left Hand of Darkness
,” I said. “By Ursula Le Guin. I don’t usually read sci-fi, but I like it.”

“I will look for it at the library,” Dr. Ramsan said. “In the meantime: ice for your leg, after any activity and at least twice a day. The pool is fine: but no towers, no climbing through windows, no mountaineering, no high-wire acts, no parasailing, no bungee jumping. Am I leaving anything out?”

“Probably not,” I said. “Thanks.”

“You’re very welcome. Take good care.”

We shook hands. I went to find my mother in the waiting room.

On the way home in the car, I rolled down my window, sucked up a lungful of hot, damp air, and said, “I already apologized twice. Maybe you didn’t hear me.”

“I did hear your apology,” my mother said. “Now I’m hoping for an explanation.”

“I don’t think I have one of those,” I said. The only explanations I could come up with sounded odd or substandard:

    1) I was trying to live up to my potential as a troubled child in a one-parent home;

    2) I had been pressured by a whiskered man in a bright red uniform;

    3) I was being a jerk.

“People
die
from alcohol poisoning, Adrienne,” my mother said.

“I know that.” We were driving along the world’s curviest road: I felt like I was strapped into a roller coaster. “I don’t drink,” I said. “If I knew how to drink, I wouldn’t have had that much, would I?”

We stopped at a light. My mother turned the vents in my direction; they exhaled a puff of warm air on my legs. Near the side of the road, an old woman was sitting in a plastic wading pool with a dog, rinsing herself and the wagging, furry animal with a garden hose. “Then what’s this about?” my mother asked. “Was it just a whim? A failed experiment? Was it CeeCee’s idea?”

That’s a good strategy
, I thought.
Let’s blame someone else
.

The woman was soaping up her dog; I wondered if she was using shampoo or—

“Adrienne?” my mother asked.

“It wasn’t CeeCee’s fault,” I said.

The light turned green. “I wasn’t suggesting it was her
fault
,” my mother said. “Still, maybe CeeCee isn’t someone you should be spending a lot of time with.”

I pointed out the
irony
of that statement, given that my mother, along with CeeCee’s, had created the Unbearable Literary Society for Impossible Girls.

“The what?”

“It’s just a nickname,” I said.

My mother turned left onto Powell, the street where we lived. She wanted to know if CeeCee and I had gone to a party. She wanted to know if we’d been seeing boys.

I paused. “No.” Technically, I hadn’t
seen
Jeff (I’d had
my eyes closed), even though he had dragged me into his car. And if he was over eighteen, he didn’t count as a boy. I decided it was preferable not to explain that CeeCee and I had been driving around in a borrowed car without a license.

We pulled into the driveway.

“I hope this doesn’t have anything to do with our conversation the other night, when we were playing Scrabble,” my mother said. “You’re only fifteen, Adrienne. That’s very young. I was twenty-eight years old when—”

“I know how old you were,” I said. “And I haven’t had sex, or anything close.” I remembered CeeCee leaning toward me in the bathroom, the fruit-and-syrup smell of her hair. “I don’t have a boyfriend and I’m not a lesbian, so you can stop worrying about me; I’m probably … frigid.”

My mother frowned at the steering wheel. “I’m not sure why you’re saying that,” she said slowly. “Do you—”

“Mom, please. Do we always have to talk about sex? That’s all we talk about anymore.” I unbuckled my seat belt, but my mother grabbed my wrist and kept me in the car.

“I want to understand what’s going on with you,” she said.

I pulled away; I felt like a book she was trying to open.

“I mean it, Adrienne. What are you doing? Who are you turning into?” She was shouting now.

“Don’t ask me that!” I shouted back. Then I threw up again, barely managing, before I did so, to open the door.

Maybe because she felt bad for yelling at me when I was clearly in a weakened condition, my mother made a bed
for me on the couch. She brought me a can of ginger ale, a pair of aspirin, and a plateful of crackers.

“Thanks,” I said.

“You’re welcome.” She stuck a straw in the ginger ale. “I need to run some errands,” she said. “And then I’m getting my hair cut. I guess you could spend the day reading. Did you finish
The Left Hand of Darkness
?”

“Almost,” I said.

She brought me a grocery bag, in case I had to be sick. “You’re done with sleepovers for the rest of the summer.”

“Okay,” I agreed. It seemed we were talking about how to punish somebody else—some foolish, risk-taking person we were both exasperated with and yet fond of.
I sure hope the kid straightens herself out
.

My mother handed me the TV controls. “What was that name you used for the book club?”

I repeated it for her. “We made up a bunch of names,” I said.

She nodded, then took a sip of my ginger ale. “It’s hard for me to get my mind around the idea that a book club could be a bad influence on a person,” she said. “I don’t want to believe that it can. I remember when you were ten or eleven, I read you
To Kill a Mockingbird
, and for a year you wanted to be a lawyer like Atticus Finch.”

I bit the edge off a cracker. “I was ten, Mom,” I said. “I barely knew what a lawyer was.”

“Of course you knew. You were very bright.”

I noticed she had used the past tense: I
was
bright. She probably thought my IQ was diminishing.

I remembered the guy in
Flowers for Algernon
, getting
gradually stupid. “I don’t think it’s fair for all my role models to be taken from books,” I said. “How am I supposed to stack up against Atticus Finch or Anne Frank? I don’t know any Nazis. Why don’t you just compare me to Aslan?”

“I don’t think I’ve been comparing you to anyone,” my mother said. “Where did that come from?”

“Nowhere,” I said. “Or from the backseat of my brain.”

The phone rang, and my mother went to the kitchen to answer it. When she came back, she said, “Some people see Aslan as a stand-in for Jesus, by the way.”

“Perfect.” I bit into a cracker. “I just saw him as a really important lion.”

“I guess it’s all in how you look at him,” my mother said. Then she picked up her car keys and left me alone.

I spent an hour or so sleeping and channel surfing and licking the salt from an assortment of crackers. I texted CeeCee:
You get in trouble for last night?

Non
, she texted back.

I told her I was flat on my back with a case of the whirlies.
Come over?
I asked.