Free The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls by Julie Schumacher Page A

you want it?”
    “It’s just that I don’t remember seeing it. I don’t know what it looks like.”
    My mother described it as a piece of paper. “A piece of white paper with writing on it. Time and date. December twenty-first, seven-twenty-six p.m., Sea Haven, New Jersey. It’s pretty straightforward.”
    Why hadn’t I ever seen my own birth certificate? Should I be keeping it in my wallet, to prove I existed?
    My mother nudged the laundry basket toward me. “You know, folding is something that even an injured person can do, while sitting down.”
    I stared into the basket. “You put towels in there,” I complained. “It doesn’t matter whether towels are folded.”
    “Humor me,” my mother said. “They fit in the closet better that way.”
    I picked through a collection of socks and T-shirts. A disturbing truth: my mother’s underwear and mine were the same shape and size.
    “Book club is at Jill’s tomorrow,” my mother said. “Did you finish Frankenstein yet?”
    “Yeah.” Plunging a hand into a tangle of clothes, I remembered a dream I’d had about the book the night before. In the dream I had opened my bedroom closet so I could get dressed, and in the center of the closet (which in the dream was very large, with a chandelier) the monster was rearranging my shoes, ironing my shirts, hanging my jeans on hangers, and mutely offering advice on what I should wear. I felt guilty about him because it seemed to be his job to stand in my closet by himself until I opened the door. His hands were knitted to his arms with thick blackstitches, but he was doing his best to keep my wardrobe organized.
    “Mary Shelley was a teenager when she wrote it.” My mother watched me struggle with a fitted sheet. I could imagine what she was thinking: My daughter can’t even fold laundry. How will she ever write a novel that will be admired for centuries?
    “You don’t have to supervise me,” I said.
    She held up her hands as if to ward me off. “I wasn’t supervising. I was asking you about the book. I thought it was sad. I felt bad for Frankenstein and for the monster. They seemed like two sides of the same coin.”
    This had occurred to me also. I knew what the monster felt, at times, trying to be dignified and mature but ending up behaving like a slob and a jerk.
    I folded a pillowcase and matched up a couple of pairs of socks; then, when my mother left the room, I went back to the computer. I typed in lawyers’ fees and learned that most lawyers charged around two hundred dollars per hour. My mother had put my canoeing money back in my savings account at the bank. I could afford about eleven minutes of a lawyer’s time.
    My mother rumbled into the den, pushing our ancient vacuum. “Are you researching something?” she asked.
    “Yeah. Miscellaneous … book stuff.” I clicked out of the lawyers’ fees window and looked up Frankenstein , then The Left Hand of Darkness , which appeared to be about hermaphrodites on another planet. While my mother vacuumed, I looked up hermaphrodites and found a link to Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor . These sorts of random connections: what did they mean?
    Still surfing around, I stumbled across an anagram finder and typed my name into it: Adrienne Haus. Among the possible anagrams: Sunnier Ahead . That was nice. Use Hind Area . Not so nice. Hide Near Anus . Hm.
    The anagram finder didn’t come up with much that was interesting for CeeCee Christiansen or Jill D’Amato , but it turned Wallis Gray into Always Girl , A Swirly Gal , and Lily War Gas . Strange.
    The vacuum roared along the carpet in front of my feet. Swinging my legs over the arm of the couch, I typed Unbearable Book Club and there it was, CeeCee’s “essay” on a new blue background. She must have spent some time updating it. There were a few more photos, including one of Jill—now listed as our book club’s Financial Officer—sitting at the snack bar, clutching a wad of dollar bills. I clicked