The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls (3 page)

2. METAPHOR and SIMILE: A metaphor is a fancy way of describing something by comparing it to something else. Instead of saying, “He has bad breath,” you could say, “His mouth is a fiery pit of odorous garbage.” A simile is the same thing but you use
like
or
as
. So you would say, “His mouth is
like
a fiery pit of odorous garbage.”

“H
ow would you describe me?” I asked. “If we weren’t related.”

It was Sunday, our first book club day, and my mother and I were in the front yard, weeding the lawn. This was a completely pointless activity: my mother refused to use pesticides, so most of what was green in the lawn needed pulling.

“How would I describe you to whom?” my mother asked. My mother is the sort of person who uses the word
whom
. She teaches English to immigrants, mostly adults.

“You answered my question with a question,” I said,
“which probably means you’re stalling for time. Which means you think I’m not describable.”

“Would that be good or bad, if you were indescribable?” My mother tossed a dandelion into the plastic bucket between us. I was in charge of removing tangled networks of creeping Charlie with a tool that looked like a witch’s hand, while my mother was extracting—with a big two-pronged metal fork—the rat-tail roots of dandelions.

“Probably bad,” I said, remembering my conversation at the pool with CeeCee. “Other people can be described.” I thought about a phrase I had read somewhere—“neither fish nor fowl.”
That sounds like me
.

“If you want a description,” my mother said, “I’d be happy to describe you.”

“Okay,” I said.

My mother moved on to a new crop of weeds. “I’d definitely describe you as imaginative,” she said. “A little absentminded. And certainly impressionable.”

“What do you mean, ‘impressionable’?”

“
Impressionable
means … susceptible. Open to influence,” my mother said.

“I know what the word
means
,” I told her.

She sat back on her heels. “When you were younger you used to act out parts from the books you liked. Do you remember? For weeks you followed me around and finger-spelled into my hands because you were pretending to be Helen Keller.”

“That makes me sound like an idiot,” I said. But I remembered the Helen Keller phase. And I suddenly wanted
to shut my eyes and put on a pair of sound-canceling headphones and plunge my hand in a stream of cool
W-A-T-E-R
.

“And I think you’re amusing and good-natured—most of the time,” my mother said. “You’re fairly independent. Easygoing. How’s that?”

“That’s it?” I asked.
“Impressionable? Easygoing?”
She might as well have looked up
bland
in a thesaurus.
Easygoing
described the interchangeable roster of strangers who delivered our mail.

“How would you characterize yourself?” my mother said. She plunged her metal fork into the ground.

This was the same question CeeCee had asked me. It reminded me of my discovery, a few years earlier, that at the beginning of a lot of books, there’s a Library of Congress classification. It might say
World War II, biography
or
Elephants, fiction
. It made me wish that the Librarian of Congress, whoever he was, would make some categories like that for me:

Haus, Adrienne. 1. People with knee ailments—Biography. 2. Bored fifteen-year-old Delawareans—Nonfiction. 3. People without hobbies who have only one friend, and that friend is away for the summer. 4. People who have never met their fathers.

But I seemed to be a person without a category. I was
impressionable
. Easily molded, average, shapeless. When I opened my closet door in the morning and looked in the
mirror, I almost expected to see a paramecium wearing a wig.
Who are you supposed to be?

“Do you think I should part my hair on the other side?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” my mother said. “Would that make you look different?”

“It might.” I had a low and irregular forehead. Even Liz had once told me I had the hairline of an australopithecine. I swept my bangs from right to left, but they immediately flopped back into place as if to say,
Don’t joke around; we live over here
.

My mother wiped the sweat from her neck. It was hot again. Every day it was hot, as if the weather had been imported from a place where people sewed palm leaves together and used them for clothing. “How’s your knee?” she asked. “Have you been doing your physical therapy?”

“Yes, on land and at sea,” I said. “I walked through the pool the other day. It was very exciting.”

My mother sighed. “I’m sorry you couldn’t go on your canoe trip. I’ve probably said that already. I know it’s a terrible disappointment.”

Of course she was right. It was a disappointment. But it occurred to me, maybe because she’d mentioned it several times, that my mother was at least as disappointed as I was. She had bought me a new sleeping bag and a backpack and hiking boots (she had managed to return everything except the boots) and had been looking forward to seeing me off for the entire summer. She had probably imagined that after forty days of wilderness adventure (followed by a
week at Liz’s grandparents’ farm in Minnesota) I was going to return to West New Hope fit and decisive, like Ernest Shackleton or Admiral Peary. My mother believed in goals and projects and self-improvement. She might have thought the trip would improve me. She might have wanted me to be improved.

I adjusted my brace. Maybe CeeCee was right about the smell. I detected a subtle mix of eggshell and roadkill and pee.

“What time are they coming tonight?” I asked.

“Seven-thirty. Did you finish the book?”

“Twice,” I said. “It was only around thirty pages.”

I don’t know why I should write this
, wrote the woman in the yellow room.
I don’t want to. I don’t feel able
.

Feeling limp, I lay down on the lawn. “Just so you’re warned ahead of time,” I said, “this book club is probably going to be a disaster.”

“Why’s that?” My mother speared another dandelion.

“Because, first of all, fifteen is too old to be in a mother-daughter book club. Second of all, the thing about books? They’re made for one person at a time. That’s why they’re small. You can hold them in your hand. Movies are made for groups of people. It’s a different thing.”

My mother thanked me for this explanation and said that we didn’t have to read simultaneously; the book club was based, instead, on discussion.

“And third of all,” I said, “Wallis and Jill and CeeCee and I are too different. We’re not the same types of people.”

“Wouldn’t that make the meetings more interesting?” my mother asked.

“Actually, no.” I rolled onto my stomach. Deep in the grass, a group of caramel-colored ants was migrating from one ant village to another, probably carrying ant-sized tables, chairs, dishes, pillows, and lamps into their tiny homes. “You’d have to be sentenced to high school all over again to understand it,” I said, “but you can’t force people my age to talk to each other. Bad things will happen.”

“Why are you staring at the ground like that?” my mother asked. She tugged the bucket of weeds across one of the anthills, wiping out half a civilization. “The book club’s not permanent,” she said. “It’s just for the summer—once a week—and it’ll give you a chance to widen your social circle.”

This was my mother’s tactful way of pointing out that, since Liz was in Canada and every other able-bodied person in town was gainfully employed, I would probably be spending most of my summer alone. Liz and I had been best friends for six years. She had earned my eternal affection at the end of fourth grade by intercepting a series of scribbled insults directed toward me by Billy Secor. She had opened the crumpled sheet of paper and read it, then put the entire thing in her mouth and chewed and swallowed it, saying only that Billy had spelled
retarded
“redarded.”

“People my age don’t have ‘social circles.’ ” I sat up, hauling my leg behind me like a suitcase. “And I don’t want to have ‘story time’ with these other girls. I barely know them.”

“You’ll get to know them,” my mother said. “That’s what happens when you spend time with people. It’s good to be social.”

“Hm,” I said. I watched as the neighbors’ cat, Mr. Finkle, his orange belly nearly touching the ground, carried a chipmunk along the sidewalk in his yellow teeth. The chipmunk was obviously dead, and Mr. Finkle, swaying side to side, somehow managed to look mournful about it. He ambled slowly across the sidewalk, our local Charon, a furry ferryboat king.

“Are you weeding or daydreaming over there?” my mother asked.

I pulled up a cluster of creeping Charlie as thick as a bath mat and threw it, Frisbee-style, into the bucket. I felt sticky and restless.
There is something absent in me
, I thought.
Something incomplete
. Even my mother couldn’t describe me. There was something empty in me that in other people was full.

“Do you think it screwed me up that I never met my father?” I asked.

My mother stopped weeding and turned to face me. “Where did that come from? Do you think you’re screwed up?”

“Not necessarily,” I said. A beetle crawled toward me, its blue-gray body like a metal toy lost in the grass. “But maybe that’s why I’m not describable. I never met my father but I might take after him. Maybe it’s his fault that I’m clumsy and average and boring and bland.”

“I didn’t realize that you were clumsy and average and boring and bland,” my mother said.

Mr. Finkle tenderly positioned the departed chipmunk on a bed of grass in the shade of the house. His usual pattern was to devour the body, then deposit the head—with
its terrified milky-white eyeballs—next to the driver’s-side door of my mother’s car.

“Do you think I’d have turned out different if I had two parents?” I asked.

“Of course you would have. And you’d have turned out different
ly
if you had three parents. Is there a reason you’re bringing this up? Something you want to ask?”

We hadn’t talked about my nonexistent father for a while. My mother had always been honest about him. If he’d known about me, she always said, he would have loved me. But my mother had no idea where he lived and didn’t know his last name. When I got older and asked her more specific questions, she told me that her (very brief) relationship with my father was “consensual”—but that he wasn’t a boyfriend. She also assured me that I wasn’t an “accident.” She was twenty-eight when I was born. “And if I had decided I didn’t want a baby, you wouldn’t be here,” she said.

I cleaned some dirt from my fingernails. My mother’s policy about father-related questions was clear and consistent: she would answer any question at all, at any time—but she would not
over
answer. I suspected she had taken this question-and-answer idea from a parenting book.

“It’s not like I spend a lot of time thinking about him,” I said.

My mother was waiting, but I wasn’t sure what to ask her. When I was little, I mainly wanted to know what my father looked like. Given my own indefinite shape, I wanted to know if he was fat. (She said he wasn’t.) For a while I pictured him as Professor Bhaer from
Little Women
: a
roundish, full-bearded man whose pockets had holes in them. Later, I imagined him as Herman E. Calloway from
Bud, Not Buddy
, and then as Sergeant Flannigan from
Mrs. Mike
.

My mother shaded her eyes. “What’s that cat doing over there? He’d better not be heading toward my car.”

“He is,” I said. “And he’s got a severed head in his mouth. He wants you to add it to the collection.” Mr. Finkle glanced sadly toward us, then meandered across the driveway, clasping his prize. “What if it turns out I’m related to a psychopath?” I asked. “Or a serial killer?”

My mother seemed to consider this possibility. “Do you feel you have psychopathic blood in your veins?”

I looked down at my forearms, where a couple of bluish veins were visible. “I don’t have the energy to be a murderer,” I said.

“And you feel queasy at the sight of blood,” my mother added. “Which would be a deterrent.”

I picked up the witch’s hand again. “I just want to be … interesting,” I said. “And don’t tell me
you
think I’m interesting. That doesn’t count. You have to be interested in me, because you’re my mother.”

“What? I’m sorry,” my mother said. “Did you say something? I might have dozed off.”

“Ha ha,” I said. “I’m trying to have a serious conversation here. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m almost an adult.” I paused. “If you died—if you were hit by a bus—would I still have to live with Aunt Beatrice?”

Aunt Beatrice was my mother’s sister, who lived in Atlanta.

“I suppose, now that you’re ‘almost an adult,’ you’d have the option of moving in with Liz,” my mother said. “We could talk to her parents.”

“Okay.” I scratched at the ground with the witch’s fingers. “That would probably be better: you don’t get along all that well with Aunt Beatrice.”

“I wouldn’t have to get along with her. I’d be squashed by the bus, remember?” She tapped the back of my wrist. “You don’t need to claw at the ground like that.”

“Oh. Sorry.” I looked at the patch of earth between us: it was nearly bare, with narrow fingermarks streaking the dirt.

My mother went back to her dandelions. “Is there anything else you want to ask, while we’re having our Serious Adult Conversation?”

Several questions jostled for position in my brain.

    1) Why did my mother always answer my questions with a question?

    2) Why did I feel like half a person sometimes?

    3) What kind of wacky nine-year-old liked to pretend to be Helen Keller?

“What other books are we going to read?” I asked. “I mean, in this book club.”