The Accidental Book Club (10 page)

Dear Judy Blume:

I am writing to you about your book
Blubber
. I didn’t think I was going to like it because the title is kind of ugly, but it is the best book I have read in a long time. And trust me, I read a
lot
of books! Sometimes my mom yells at me for reading books instead of doing things like the dishes and stuff.

I am kind of fat. Not really huge or anything, but sometimes the kids say things to me about how my stomach wobbles when I run and that I can’t jump rope too many times. It is not as bad as what Jill and her friends did to Linda in your book, but sometimes it makes me feel bad when they say mean things. I think I am ugly. The boys think so too. I wish I was as pretty as my mom.

Last year I read
Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing
because sometimes I feel like a nothing. But that book was really funny instead. I still liked it, though.

I hope you keep writing.

Signed,
Bailey Butler
Age eleven

B
ailey lay on her bed and licked the icing off every centimeter of her fingers, going over them two, three times. Her stomach was growling so hard, it felt like thunder inside her body, and that cake had really been delicious.

But—and she didn’t know why, exactly—she couldn’t let them know that. As far as her grandmother’s friends were concerned, it was . . . meh. And her grandmother had failed. Bailey had no excuse for it. No explanation for why she needed to do things like obliterate that cake. To make someone else feel like crap about herself. To totally negate her worth. It was not like doing those things made her feel any better about herself. Not after the initial rush had passed, anyway. It never failed—she would do something shocking, and it would be followed by that amazing, alive sensation that was both giddy and dark. But within hours, or sometimes even just minutes, that giddiness fell heavy in her gut, leaving her with just the darkness. That rumbling might not have been hunger after all, but more of her gut growing unsettled. Maybe it was the feeling of guilt. Maybe it was the feeling of anger. Maybe she was ruining herself from the inside out. She didn’t know. She only knew that was what it felt like to be Bailey Butler these days—in constant, fluctuating states of fear, anger, euphoria, pain, and dread.

What was worse, she knew in her heart that her grandmother had been really making an effort and trying harder than anyone else. She’d heard her grandmother’s knock this morning, followed by a soft voice:
Bailey, do you want some breakfast?
But she didn’t answer. Had she become so closed off that she couldn’t reach back to the people who were reaching for her? Had she become unreachable altogether? The thought made her feel all the more desperate. She flexed her hand a few times, feeling for sticky spots that she could lick again, then got up and shuffled into the bathroom and washed it, considering herself in the mirror.

Not long ago, not long before her mom pulled her going-into-work-wasted stunt, Bailey had overheard her talking to her friend Becky, the one who’d taken her to the hospital on Laura Butler’s Great Big Embarrassing Day. They were both on the downhill side of drunk, which was what they did best, and were standing in the driveway.

It was prom night, and Bailey was going to be sitting at home alone, as usual, because what boy had any interest in a chubby, pissed-off girl with a drunk for a mother and ghost for a father, who was too ashamed of her house to ever invite anyone over? Bailey felt like the only girl at Cleveland Heights High School to have no prom date, not even a friend date. She tried not to let it hurt, tried not to even notice, but she noticed. She noticed every freaking day.

Even Chloe Roland, the dippy nerdgirl down the street, had landed herself a date. Bailey had seen them standing out in front of the flower bed, Chloe’s mom snapping photos like Chloe was a celebrity, her lavender and silver dress poofing out behind her with every breath of wind. Her date wore a matching lavender bow tie and a top hat with a silver band. Nerdboy. Nerdlove.

Bailey had stood next to her garage door, idly listening to the moms relive their glory prom days, watching Chloe, and imagining herself in that lavender dress. It all felt so very Cinderella, and for a moment Bailey allowed herself to feel really sorry for herself. If only fairy godmothers really existed. If only one would swoop in and snatch her away and take her, not to prom, but to a different life where she had a mom who could stay sober long enough to take prom photos of her. A mom who could wave good-bye to the limousine without stumbling into the rhododendrons.

A mom who wouldn’t, as the night fell and the rum kicked in, giving her a false sense of privacy, whisper loudly to her friends that if only Bailey would do some leg lifts or if only Bailey would put some makeup on or if only Bailey would smile every now and then, maybe she would have a prom date. Oh, how it broke Laura Butler’s heart to not take her one and only daughter prom-dress shopping. Oh, how it embarrassed her, made her feel like a failure, to not be heading up the after-prom committee, because her own daughter couldn’t even get the desperate boys to ask her out.
You know, even desperate boys have standards,
her mom whispered over the blazing fire pit, too sloshed to realize that Bailey was sunk into the shadows on the front porch, watching, listening like always, and also too sloshed to realize that whisper and Drunk Whisper were hardly the same thing.
Even those boys don’t like a girl with heavy thighs and a constant scowl. Even those boys appreciate a girl who makes a little effort.

How many of these very conversations had Bailey listened to? Conversations where her mother lamented how Bailey wasn’t smart enough, or how she wasn’t talented enough, or how she was too ugly for this or that. Once, her mother even said,
I don’t know where she gets those genes! I swear to God I have more than once wondered if they switched her at birth!
Bailey was used to these overheard insults, and the laughs that followed, but that one stung. After that one, she’d gone into her mother’s bedroom and had dipped each and every one of Laura’s lipsticks into the toilet and then put them back in her makeup bag. And if she could have done it to the lipsticks of every chuckling, nodding, mmming mom out there, she would have.

So the prom conversation hadn’t really been that big a deal, and in the end, Bailey was glad she didn’t have a date, because being too ugly and too fat and too unmotivated to even turn the eye of the loserest loser in her high school was the best way to get back at her mom. Did the woman really not think she knew those things about herself? Did she really think that Bailey didn’t notice she had no prom date, no friends outside of books? Did she really think for a second that Bailey wouldn’t have traded places with one of the girls at the dance in a heartbeat?

The thing was, she knew her mother didn’t remember saying these things. She definitely didn’t know they’d been overheard. Her mother remembered them just as little as she remembered the times she threw her arms around Bailey’s shoulders and leaned into her, breathing whiskey into her face and sobbing that she was the best daughter anyone could ever ask for. Thanking her. Calling her beautiful and kind and smart. Wishing aloud she could be a better mother for her. Patting her on the head like she was some stray dog. That was worse than her mother not remembering the mean things she’d said. She never remembered how awesome Bailey had been and how much she supposedly loved her, and that hurt most of all.

But at moments like this, when Bailey was hurting and scared and maybe even a little ashamed of her own behavior, she would look in the mirror and she would see it. She would see the things her mom talked about. She would see her pugged-up nose and her freckled forehead and the dullness in her eyes that practically screamed “loser.” And in those moments, she wanted to scrub her face until it shone and draw highlights in her hair and be someone else. She wanted to take hot, steamy showers and wash off the hate, wash off the pain so that she was looking out at the world through fresh, pink skin. She wanted to run marathons and eat nothing but fruit and lose fifty pounds and wear sexy clothes that clung in all the right places while not looking slutty, and . . . she knew in the back of her mind that the person those things described was . . . her mom.

But more than anything in this world, she did not want to be Laura Butler.

She just wanted Laura Butler to notice her, and to remember having done so in the morning.

Back in the bedroom, she rummaged through the side pocket of her backpack—which was filled with mostly useless school assignments that she never bothered to complete—and pulled out a wadded-up piece of notebook paper. She flopped onto the bed on her stomach and smoothed it out, looking at the phone number in her dad’s handwriting.

She’d dug it out of the trash back at home after her dad had plugged the number into his phone and thrown it away. It was the guest line at the rehab.

She pulled out her phone and dialed the number. It rang five times before someone picked up.

“Yuh?”

“Um . . . Laura Butler?” Bailey said into the phone, her heart pumping, creating lightning in her peripheral vision.

“What about her?”

“Can I talk to her? Um, please?”

There was a thumping, thudding sound, as if the phone had been dropped, and Bailey could hear someone shout, “Anybody know who Laura Buckner is?”

“Who?”

“Laura Buckner!”

Butler, you idiot. I didn’t stutter,
Bailey wanted to shout, but it would do no good. He was nowhere near the phone anymore as far as she could tell.

There was nothing for so long, Bailey was certain she’d been forgotten, but just as she was about the hang up, there was fumbling, and then a familiar voice.

“Hello?”

“Mom?”

“Bailey?”

Bailey smiled, despite herself. “Yeah.”

“What’s wrong? Why are you calling?”

“I just . . . I missed you.”

“Oh. I miss you too, but . . . I really don’t have time to talk right now. Group is in ten minutes, and I haven’t journaled.”

“Wait. Mom, Dad sent me to Kansas City.”

“I know. I told him to.”

Bailey paused, clenching and unclenching her hand, and it fell to the side, landing with a thump against something hard. Distracted, Bailey looked over. It was the Little Golden Book that she’d been sleeping with. “Why?” She picked up the book and propped it on her lap, her finger absently rubbing the illustration of the bunny. She’d rubbed that spot so many times over the years, she’d worn a white path over the ink. Touching the book and hearing her mother’s voice at the same time were nearly too much. She almost thought she could smell her mother’s perfume through the phone.

Her mother sighed. “He wasn’t handling things well, and I thought you could use a little change of scenery and . . . Bailey, I really don’t have time for this. We can sort it all out later.”

“Well, you were wrong. I didn’t need a change of scenery, and I want to go home. I don’t want to sort it out later. I want to come home now.
Home
, home. Not Dad’s apartment and not here.”

“Well, you can’t always get what you want, Bailey.”

“When, then?!” Bailey shrieked into the phone. She found herself up on her knees in the middle of the bed, shaking, tears streaking down her face. The book landed facedown on the comforter next to her.

“You need to stop shouting, and—”

Bailey plowed over her mother. “Because I can’t remember a time when I
ever
got what I wanted. Not once! It was all about you, you, you! Everything is always about Laura Butler the Great and what she wants.”

“Okay, well, I can’t talk to you when you’re like this.”

“Maybe you should go crack open a few beers, then. Can’t shut you up when you’ve had a few of those. It’s amazing, Mom, how ugly and disappointing I get when you’ve had a few of those.”

“Bailey, now, that’s not fair.”

Bailey sat back onto her heels, her chest hitching. She felt sweat trickle down her lower back, and the cake that she’d eaten sat disagreeably and huge in her stomach. “No, I’ll tell you what’s not fair. Growing up being the mom because my mom is too drunk to be one,” she said.

She pressed
END CALL
on her phone before Laura could even respond, then stared at the blank phone screen, watching her tears splat and spread across it, willing it to light up, willing her mother to call back so she could reject the call. So she could “not have time” to talk to her right now.

But the screen never lit up, and in a rage she picked up the book and heaved it toward the far wall. It landed with a clatter on the floor, and she blinked at the illustration that was showing—the bunny snuggling close to his new snowy white bunny friend, perfectly content. She stared, breathing heavy, for a few moments, then eventually sprawled out face-first on the comforter and cried it out.

L
aura arrived in the middle of the night. She pounded on Jean’s door as if the place were on fire, scaring Jean, who raced to open the door, clutching her robe closed at the throat with one hand and a baseball bat with the other.

Bailey peeked out an open crack of her bedroom door as Jean dashed by. She wandered out, but only to the top of the stairs, where she stood, rubbing her eyes with the heel of one hand like a child, wearing the same rumpled clothes she’d had on for days. Jean only glanced back at her before opening the door.

“Oh, my . . . ,” Jean said, stepping aside and throwing the door wide-open. “I had no idea you were coming. We were asleep.”

Laura, carrying a beat-up trash bag, stepped in through the open door, her eyes bloodshot, her hair disheveled, looking the rattiest Jean had ever seen her daughter look. In the driveway, a black Cadillac ticked and tinged as its engine cooled off.

“I couldn’t stay there,” Laura said, dropping her trash bag on the floor. “The house. It’s so dark and empty. I was going to wait till morning to come out, but I just . . . He’s doing something to it. He’s knocked out all the spindles on the stairs. And just left them on the floor. He’s thrown away all my dishes. He’s ransacked my clothes, Bailey’s. He’s totally dismantling my life.”

“I didn’t know you were out of rehab,” Jean said. “Curt never called.”

“He doesn’t know. I’ve been out for a few days, but after seeing what he did to my house, I just . . . I can’t even think about him right now. It’s all too depressing.”

At that point, Laura’s eyes tipped upward to the top of the stairs, and a look that Jean couldn’t quite pinpoint—fear? Regret? Relief?—crossed her face.

“I’m sorry I woke you,” Laura said. Bailey didn’t respond, just dipped back into the shadowy hallway, moving backward until the sound of her bedroom door firmly shutting echoed downstairs.

Laura made a slurry shushing sound with her mouth and shook her head. “He’s got her brainwashed against me, you know.”

“She’s having a hard time,” Jean said, and then, sure she smelled something acidic on her daughter, asked, “Are you sober?”

Laura rolled her eyes. “Jesus, Mom, I didn’t come here for a lecture. If I’d wanted that, I’d have stayed in that ridiculous clinic.”

“I’m sorry,” Jean said. “Of course you’re not here for that. I was just wondering if the rehab was a good move for you.”

“It got everyone off my back. Isn’t that what it was supposed to be about? But it destroyed me instead. Are you all happy now? Look at me.” Laura leaned over and picked up the trash bag again. “Is my bedroom still a bedroom?”

“Of course it is,” Jean said. “They both are. Kenny’s room is where Bailey’s staying.”

“Good move. Mr. I Shit Rainbows and Unicorns won’t likely be showing up in the middle of the night with gin on his breath, will he?” She trudged up the stairs, just as she’d done a million times before, and Jean watched with her mouth open, standing in the night-lit entryway, the front door wide-open and cool night air seeping in. It wasn’t until she heard Laura’s door shut that she finally closed the door and carried Kenny’s old baseball bat back up to her bedroom, where she couldn’t sleep anyway.

•   •   •

Neither Laura nor Bailey came down for breakfast, though Jean could hear movement and, once, a sneeze, upstairs. Jean tried not to think about what Laura’s presence in the house would mean. Would things make a drastic turn for the better? Would Laura get herself together and help Bailey? Would they fix each other and go back to St. Louis, and, if so, where would that leave Jean? Back in her quiet house, with her book club?

Or would Laura’s presence more likely mean outbursts? Would Jean be craving the quiet house and the book club in short order?

She poached herself an egg and ate it on toast as if it were any other morning. She went outside and watered her flowers just like always. She picked up the newspaper from the driveway and brought it in and read it.

She sank into the couch and leafed through the club’s next book choice, which Loretta had insisted be the Flavian Munney book she’d just finished.
To soothe us after this Thackeray book,
she’d said.
Nothing makes you feel better than being bound and gagged by a hot millionaire genius.

Speak for yourself,
May had countered, but she’d giggled and added,
I prefer dog collars, anyway.

I’d like to put a dog collar on Thackeray,
Mitzi had muttered.
A shock collar.

Oh, honey, Flavian’s got those too,
Loretta had stage-whispered, and they’d all laughed and agreed that a Flavian Munney book would be the best balm to soothe their aching egos after what they’d just gone through.

These weren’t Jean’s favorite kind of books, and she sometimes shrank at the thought of reading one aloud with Wayne. He and Chuck had teased Loretta mercilessly about them. Jean could hear him now:
Honestly, Jeanie? I thought you preferred a thinking man
. But she’d needed the escape badly, and she’d gotten so absorbed in it that she didn’t notice Bailey roaming around in the kitchen upstairs until she heard the sound of luggage hitting the floor. She closed the book and laid it down, then went up the stairs tentatively.

Other than necessities (“My bathroom’s out of soap”) and some unpleasant encounters (“Did I tell you to change my bedsheets?”), Jean had still never gotten Bailey to open up to her. She’d tried. She’d made cookies, more than once. She’d gotten a movie—a teen drama that she had zero interest in, but hoped would be the icebreaker she and her granddaughter needed—and popped popcorn, only to have Bailey snatch both out of her hands and disappear into her bedroom with them. She’d invited Bailey every time she left the house. And nothing. Her granddaughter seemed to hate her just for existing.

But as she always did, she pasted on a timid smile as she came into the kitchen, hoping against all hope that the smile would disarm Bailey’s foul moods and even fouler mouth. Bailey was leaning against the stove and eating a Pop-Tart. Jean glanced at the luggage that Bailey had parked in the entryway by the front door. Everything she’d come with, even the pillow and blanket she’d been holding when she arrived, was threaded through the handle of one suitcase. Jean felt a pang of something she couldn’t quite pinpoint. Relief that she’d once again have her house to herself, lonely and quiet as it might be, and sadness that her granddaughter was leaving before they ever got a chance to connect, mixed together. Was there an emotion for that?

“You can take those with you,” Jean said, motioning toward the Pop-Tart in Bailey’s hand. “For the trip.”

“Already done,” Bailey said around a mouthful of Pop-Tart. “I also took the lotion in that bathroom because I like the way it smells. It’s not too widowy.”

From the beginning, the word
widow
always stung, and Jean hated hearing it. It made her feel old and gnarled and terribly alone. She hated the sympathetic and uncomfortable way people looked at her when they found out she was a widow. It always seemed to Jean that there was less finality to phrases like
passed away
or
moved on
or is
up in heaven
, because those phrases connoted movement, and thus existence. Words like
dead
and
died
and
widow
all seemed so dark and final. He was deader to her somehow when she thought of herself as a widow.

“That’s fine. I’ll buy a new lotion. You can take the perfume up there too. I think some of it was your mom’s.”

“It’s skunky.”

Jean moved to clean up some of the crumbs that Bailey had left on the counter, which, thankfully, forced her to turn her back to the girl, where she could hide everything she was thinking, everything she was feeling. There were so many things she wanted to say to Bailey—how she understood and felt her pain, how she wished she would let other people in and stop with this tough act, how she missed her and hoped that she would come back and that maybe someday they could have a real relationship, how she regretted the way she’d raised Laura if that had anything to do with why Laura drank herself, and her life, into oblivion. But none of those things felt safe to Jean. They all seemed attached to feelings rooted so deeply inside of her, she feared that if she said them, she might eviscerate herself right there on the kitchen floor.

Soon there was the sound of footsteps coming down the stairs, and Laura plodded in, wearing a torn and filthy old sleep shirt and looking like hell.

“Coffee?” she croaked, turning in circles, searching for a coffeemaker.

“I’ve already tossed the pot. It was cold. I’ll make another,” Jean said, reaching for the carafe.

“Don’t bother,” Laura said. “I’ll just go back to bed. My head is killing me.”

“When are we leaving, then?” Bailey asked, swallowing the last of her Pop-Tart and sipping a glass of milk.

“For what?” Laura peered up at her daughter—who was taller than she was, Jean just noticed—out of one squinted eye.

Bailey let her shoulders drop downward impatiently. “Home. Duh.”

Laura shook her head, scratched her neck. “We’re not going home. Not right now. We’re staying here until I can get back on my feet.” She turned to Jean. “I assume that’s okay?”

Flustered, Jean didn’t even have time to think before she found herself nodding yes and saying, “As long as you need.”

“No, it’s not okay,” Bailey countered. “I want to go home. This place is lame. What did you come here for if it wasn’t to get me?”

“To get control,” Laura said, sounding frustrated and weary, then rubbed her hand over her forehead. “I don’t know. To get away. To get . . . better, I guess.”

“I thought that’s what rehab was for,” Bailey said. “I thought you were all ‘cured’ or whatever.” She made quote marks with her fingers when she said “cured,” and Jean half expected the milk glass to slip out of her hand and shatter on the floor.

“I did. I am.”

“Then why can’t you ‘get better’”—again with the air quotes—“at home?”

“Bailey, you don’t understand. Your dad left me with a lot of things to handle, and I just don’t think I can do it right now. I want to get some rest before I go back.” Laura pulled her hand away from her face. She seemed to sink down into herself, getting smaller and smaller before Jean’s very eyes. She’d never seen her daughter look lost and helpless before—not even when she was little. She was an angry infant, a bold toddler, a precocious little girl, but never once had she ever been helpless.

“But I mean, why can’t it ever be about what I want?” Bailey countered. “Why can’t I ever have any sort of say in my own life? I’m not the one who got all hooked on booze, so why am I the one who’s always suffering? It’s not fair. I don’t see why—”

“Because I can’t do it, okay?” Laura had gone taut like a fire hose, her voice, loud and sharp, bouncing off the kitchen cabinets. “I can’t do it all alone, Bailey. You know what it was like over there. Trash and dishes and the bill collectors and the water turned off. The house is broken and I feel broken, and now I’m afraid every time I drink, everyone will be eyeing me, judging me, saying I need to go back to rehab. Especially your dad. I can’t do that anymore.”

“But you’re sober now. You’ll do better,” Bailey said.

“I was not falling apart because I was drinking too much!” Laura shrieked, her hands balled up in fists at her sides. “I was falling apart because I was alone to do it all. I was falling apart because everyone expects me to just be able to handle everything with no help.”

Jean could see Bailey’s chin quiver. “Lies,” she finally said in a very quiet voice.

Laura closed her eyes and steadied her voice. “I just didn’t get much sleep there and need some time to get back on my feet. To work up a plan. We’ll go back when I get caught up on sleep. Everything will be better then.” Laura turned and rummaged through the pantry, then came out with a sleeve of saltines. “I’ll make some coffee later,” she said, and then trudged back upstairs.

After she’d gone, Jean felt more in the way than ever. She wasn’t sure what to make of Laura’s denial. Maybe Curt was making things sound worse than they were. Maybe Laura was simply heartbroken and overwhelmed, and couldn’t Jean, more than anyone, understand how that felt? But yet . . . Bailey was so very angry. Clearly there was more to it than maybe even Laura understood. Maybe it was possible that Laura truly didn’t realize she had fallen so far down into the hole she was in. Meanwhile, Bailey’s anger came off her in sheets and oozed out beneath their feet. Jean almost felt light-headed from it.

“Would you like to go to the pool today?” Jean asked quietly, knowing this question would do nothing but anger Bailey, but unsure what she could say that wouldn’t, and also unsure what silence would do.

Bailey gazed at her, teeth gritted, as if she’d never seen the woman before, and then lifted her milk glass and chugged what was left. When she finished, she slammed the glass in the sink so hard Jean winced and braced herself for flying broken shards of glass, which never came. “Bullshit,” Bailey mumbled, then spun on her heel and went the way her mother had just gone. “This is not fair!” she cried, much louder, when she reached the top of the stairs. The outburst was followed by yet another slammed door. If this kept up, Jean would have a splintered door on her hands.

But that would be the least of her worries.