The Gap Year

by Sarah Bird

  “That last time?”

  “When that family of jackwad hillbillies took the space next to us?”

  “In a Winnebago!”

  “Hauling a trailer of dirt bikes. Oh, that was fun. Listening to them revving up the bikes at six in the morning.”

  “And they used the park’s barbecue grill as a stand for the television set they kept turned on all day so loud that Aubrey told us that she liked the ‘nay-choo’ back at our house better?” I see Aubrey, solemn, steadfast, as she makes her pronouncement about nature. Her sunburned nose is peeling; she wears a Pocahontas T-shirt.

  “Stupid idea.” I dismiss the whole cabin-in-Maine fantasy. “My busiest season is summer.”

  “Yeah, all those moms who were drunk-dialing on New Year’s Eve need to learn how to breast-feed.”

  “And it’s not as if I’ve ever made enough for a cabin in Maine anyway.”

  “So, no cabin in Maine. Boo-fucking-hoo. You get Aubrey to the bank tomorrow, even if you have to do it at gunpoint. Day after tomorrow, you shove her on a plane to Peninsula. Done and done.”

  “God, I wish that my only begotten child was as clear on all of this as you are.” The five-o’clock masters swim class starts trickling in. “I gotta blast. Aubrey should be finished microwaving burritos for construction workers now. I’m going to call and tell her that tomorrow is nonnegotiable.”

  “You go on. I need to drag my fat ass through a few more laps.”

  I heave myself out of the pool and pad into the locker room. My wet footsteps dry on the hot cement a second after I leave them.

  Heat. That was the whole problem. Aubrey was never really the same after she got heat exhaustion at band camp. I knew I should have insisted that she see a doctor.

  AUGUST 12, 2009

  Since school has not officially started yet, the assistant principal, Miss Chaney, who wears blazers and keeps a walkie-talkie clipped to the belt of her Dockers, takes me to the nurse’s office even though the nurse isn’t there, gives me a cup of lukewarm blue Gatorade, then leaves. I hear her talking to the campus cop about spotting potential signs of gang activity as she walks down the empty hall.

  I sip the fake-sweat drink and wonder if it is possible that I hallucinated Tyler Moldenhauer cradling my head in his lap, since, although band completely exists for football, no football player has ever acknowledged the existence of any band geek. Him doing that, helping me, is like Brad Pitt stepping out of the movie Troy, walking into the audience, and giving some random girl a sip of wine from his golden goblet.

  I finish the Gatorade and study a chart that shows the bones of the ear. Though I actually feel fine and figure I must have just passed out from sheer boredom, I sit in the nurse’s office and am deciding what my new look for senior year is going to be when Miss Chaney returns and asks, “You OK in here?”

  I give her a wan look and shrug.

  “Outstanding! Head on back to practice then.”

  The thought of going back out to that field makes me sick. Actually, physically ill. When I don’t move, Chaney prompts me, “You don’t need a pass. You’re good to go.”

  As if I need her to tell me that. Me, who’s worked in the attendance office for the past three years. She waits for me to jump up and run back out into the heat and dust so that Shupe can march me around. My whole being is so repelled at the thought that I can’t make myself move. She’s still waiting when she’s called away again.

  I see my life branch into two paths. One … I don’t know where One leads. But Two, the other, the one where I go back to band practice, is certain to end up with Tyler seeing me at some point in that stupid pirate hat. And no matter what, that must never happen. I go to the nurse’s computer, boot it up, log on with my attendance office aide password, and Google “heatstroke.” When Miss Chaney comes back, I report to her that I am “dizzy, nauseated, weak, disoriented, and having difficulty breathing.”

  Her diagnosis is immediate: “Heatstroke. God, how many times do I have to warn Shupe? You require immediate transport to an emergency room. Let’s get a parent or an ambulance over here, stat!”

  Since Mom is doing her morning consults at Parkhaven Medical Center, I call Dori. Dori lives to be a bad girl. This will be right up her alley.

  “Aubsie Doodle,” she answers on the first ring. “What’s up, buttercup?”

  “Mom,” I whimper as Chaney eyes me sharply. “Can you pick me up? Mom? I’m sick. Mom.”

  As expected, Dori is rarin’ to go. “Gotcha. A little cutting action, you’re getting a jump on the old senioritis. Hells to the yes.” Dori works so hard at being hip that half the time I don’t know what she is saying. “You shouldn’t be in school in the middle of summer anyway. I am so there. Daughter.”

  “She’s on her way,” I whisper to Miss Chaney.

  A minute later, Chaney gets a call to “inspect suspected contraband” and rushes off after warning me not to leave until she returns. I am grateful to all the stoner kids who like to spend the summer leaving baggies of grass clippings and oregano planted around the school just to start the year off with Chaney’s paranoia in high gear.

  When Dori shows up, I rush her out before Miss Chaney can stop us. Outside, Dori can’t wait to announce, “Welcome to the dark side. Really happy I can help bust you out of Parkhaven Penal Colony. You gonna go hook up with your besties and blaze up or just chill?”

  “I actually don’t feel good. I just didn’t want to bother my mom.”

  Her hectic eagerness falls away. “Oh.”

  Out on the field between us and visitor parking, I can see the team practicing. I step back so that the school building hides me from view and ask, “Can I wait here?” I try to sound especially weak and pitiful.

  “Sure, Aubsie. I’ll go get the car.” She is so nice that I feel bad about not wanting to be seen with a woman who has hemoglobin-colored hair and a barbed-wire bracelet tattooed around her arm.

  The instant she leaves, I peek around the corner of the building. Through the distance and the dust, a hunched-over player shoves the ball between his knees and Tyler takes it. Everyone on the field—players, coaches, the water boy—they all focus on Tyler as he dances away, pulling his arm back like a Roman javelin thrower or the tribe’s best hunter, the one all the rest depend on for food. He yells orders at the others tramping aimlessly around the field. Pointing with his free arm, he hurls the ball in such a way that it spins as it flies through the heated air, landing in the hands of the exact player he had pointed to.

  Dori pulls up in her Toyota RAV4. Still staring at Tyler, I get in and, for one second, Dori watches with me. What the players are doing is suddenly so obvious that I can’t believe I have never seen it before. I take Dori’s silence to be a sign that she is seeing what I am. I am wrong.

  She clucks her tongue and goes, “Can they be any more ridiculous? All those steroid cases in their tight pants. Why don’t they just drop trou, whip it out, and decide once and for all whose dick’s the biggest? Just get it over with already. All that butt patting and sticking their hands under each other’s asses. Football is more homoerotic than a gay pride parade in San Francisco.”

  Dori automatically assumes that I agree with her. I don’t. For the first time I understand what has been happening right in front of me all these years. Maybe because for a few seconds I was close enough to have heard one beat, I can now see how football lets all those ordinary boys show what is in their hearts: They want to be heroes. They each want to be loved and admired for their courage and skill. They want to be the one who saves the tribe. They want to be the hunter who brings home the deer, the warrior who slays the enemy. Or, at least, they want to help the one who does. What is wrong with that?

  As we drive away, I wonder what it would have been like to grow up in the polygamy part of the Mormon Church believing that the Lord wants your mom to be one of fifteen wives and that it is holy and righteous that you are going to get married off as soon as you have your first period. To bel
ieve that your way is right and that the rest of the world—the normal world—is deluded and doomed to burn in hell, and that the normal world persecutes you only because they haven’t been saved. Or are reading the Bible wrong. Or are secretly jealous.

  Then one day, something happens, and you see that everything you were taught to believe your entire life is wrong. You see that the whole time you were the deluded one.

  THURSDAY, AUGUST 12, 2010

  In the locker room, hands still dripping, I fumble with the lock in my haste to get to my cell phone and see if Aubrey has returned any of my half-dozen increasingly shrill messages. I fish the phone out and, of course, there are no messages. I punch in her number. When, as usual, it goes straight to voice mail, I clench the phone, and my fist hovers two inches from the locker as I fight the impulse to smash it to pieces.

  I calm myself and send a text message. Cursing my spastic thumbs, I type, CLA ME NOW!! HV 2 GET $$$ 2MRW!!! MST IMPT DAY OF YR FILE!!!

  I peel off my wet swimsuit and am standing naked in front of the locker when a woman in a tankini with a slenderizing tummy panel spots me and squeals, “The boob whisperer!”

  I wince and consider not answering. I should strike a blow for the dignity of my profession and ask her to please not refer to me or to any lactation consultant as a boob whisperer. Or even her bosom buddy. But she’s already rushing over, wailing, “Oh, Cam, you are just the person I need to talk to!” She yanks a shoulder strap down, scoops her left breast out of its cup, and holds it up for my inspection.

  I can’t recall the woman’s name, but remember her raisin-colored areola and writing “dense tissue” on her chart. A ring of raw, badly chapped skin outlines her nipples.

  “Oh, sweetie,” I coo. “Todd does not like whatever it is that you’re doing now.” Even though all the moms become Sweetie, I can almost always recall their babies’ names. I see Todd and his mother together again as they were when I visited her at her house a few days after delivery and found her weeping in despair, and it comes back to me: infant with a small mouth, mom with dense breast tissue.

  “It’s painful, isn’t it?”

  “What am I doing wrong?” Her eyebrows arch together in anxious pleading. “I’m not making enough milk, am I?”

  Kristin. Amazingly, out of all the thousands of names, I recall hers. If only I had that level of command in other areas of my life. Like with Aubrey.

  “Kristin, no, don’t stress about that. I’ve seen about a thousand moms a year for the past fifteen years, and do you know how many couldn’t make enough milk? Four. I am not worried at all about your supply.”

  Kristin nods, relaxing a bit.

  Always looking for the teachable moment, I ask rhetorically, “Todd is not getting a good latch, is he? And so, in spite of your more than adequate supply, he’s not getting full. And he struggles when he nurses. And that tires him out. And he falls asleep. And you can’t bring yourself to rouse him. But then when he wakes up he’s too frantic to nurse right.”

  “Yes!” Relief floods Kristin’s face and she looks at me as if I’m psychic. This lasts for about a second until the relief is replaced by a look of puzzled disappointment that is very familiar to me as Kristin realizes that she might not be the first woman on earth to nurse a child.

  “Okay, remember what I taught you? About putting the two pieces of the puzzle together?” If we were in one of the hospitals where I consult right after delivery, I could touch her and demonstrate what I am talking about. Instead, using my own breast, I have to mime the lesson I gave her when she attended one of my classes, about pulling Todd and her breast together at the same time. “Remember, Todd has no neck muscles. You have to shove and hold. Keep the pieces together.”

  “I thought I was doing that.”

  My cell phone starts playing “Slipping Through My Fingers” by ABBA. Dori put the song on as the ringtone because I started sobbing halfway through Mamma Mia when Meryl Streep was singing to her bride-to-be daughter about letting her childhood slip away. Maybe it was because of the thermos of margaritas Dori and I had sneaked into the afternoon matinee, but I lost it when Meryl, wondering what had happened to all the adventures she’d planned to have with her daughter, answered herself, “Well, some of that we did, but most we didn’t.”

  As the song plays on my phone, I tell Kristin, “I’ve got to get this. Work on Todd getting a good latch. Just shove that mommy muffin as far as you can into his little mouth, okay? You have my number. Call me if things don’t improve.” I make myself turn away even though I see another fifteen minutes of questions in Kristin’s eyes. The one thing that can pull me away from being an endless source of reassurance to my moms needing help with their children is my own child needing help.

  Miraculously, I catch the call in time to answer, “Hey, punkin.”

  “Ee-yeah?” my daughter responds in the tone that makes her sound like an annoyed drug addict, both testy-hostile and nodding out. It is a tone she uses only with me.

  “What’s up.” She can’t even summon the energy to make it a question.

  Instead of shrieking, What do you mean, “What’s up”?! What have I been screaming at you about? What have we been waiting for for the past sixteen years!, I bank the anger that flares up at her cavalier response and invoke my inner Zen Mama.

  Zen Mama is made of Teflon. Delayed-adolescence annoyance and college jitters expressed as surly crabbiness slide right off Zen Mama. Zen Mama understands that her only child’s extreme bitchiness is a necessary and natural part of the separation process. Because Zen Mama has been reminded repeatedly for the past two weeks that her child is one day away from being eighteen, or “legal age,” as said child prefers to call it, and can vote, drink in certain states, be drafted if she were a boy, sign a binding contract, and run her own life, Zen Mama sounds like Hal the robot as she repeats a version of the bulletin that she has been hammering into her daughter every day for the entire summer: “Aubrey, you can’t put me off another minute. I’ve already had to get two extensions from the university, and now tomorrow is the absolute last day we can collect the money from the trust fund to pay for your first year’s tuition without having to pay a huge late penalty.”

  “Oh, yeah. That.”

  It helps me to pretend that my only offspring has either just landed on Earth from a distant planet or has suffered a head injury. “ ‘That’? That, Aubrey, is your college money. That is your education and ticket out of here. We have been waiting for this day most of your life.”

  “Well, you have.”

  “I have? What does that mean?”

  “Uh, I really gotta go. Tyler needs me to set up the coffee for tomorrow.”

  I squeeze my eyes shut, shift into my highest gear of über–Zen-Mamadom, and say, “Aubrey, I sense some reluctance on your part about going to college. Sweetie, if you’re not ready, you know, we talked about gap-year options. Gap years are getting really popular. You can get credit for working on an organic farm in Wales. The trust will pay as long as the program is accredited. Or there’s another one where you study with the monks in Tibet. If you’re not ready—”

  “Can we talk about this later?”

  “There is nothing to talk about. You will come home tonight and you will be with me when the bank opens tomorrow morning.”

  “Uh, yeah, okay, I’ll see.”

  Was it me? Did I teach her to say that? To say, “I’ll see”?

  “Aubrey, there is nothing to see. You have to come to the bank with me. You know this. They won’t release the trust funds if you’re not there to sign off. I have your letter of acceptance from Peninsula and the invoice from the bursar’s office, so they can just transfer as much as you need for the first year.”

  “Sorry, tomorrow morning is impossible. Two new crews of framers start tomorrow, so Tyler and I are going to be slammed.”

  Zen Mama cracks and morphs into Prison Matron Mama. “Oh, you will be slammed, Aubrey Lightsey. If you do not get your behind home this
instant, you will be most definitively slammed.”

  “Okay, I gotta go.”

  “Aubrey, baby, don’t do this. Not for some guy who’s working in a roach coach.” I am apologizing before the last two words are out of my mouth. “Sorry, sorry, I meant catering van. Erase. Erase. Not ‘roach coach’—catering van. Lunch wagon. Food truck.” But it is already too late; I have spoken the forbidden words.

  “I cannot keep having this conversation with you. If you insist upon belittling me and demeaning what Tyler and I are trying to do, the business that he and I are trying to build, our discussions are at an end. Your disrespect totally invalidates all the initiative and discipline and hard work and everything else you supposedly want me to show that I am, in fact, already showing.”

  It stuns me how anger can transform my daughter from a monosyllabic mope into Rumpole of the Bailey. If Rumpole had a degree in counseling.

  “Aubrey, please. I’m sorry. I slipped.” I grovel to no avail. She hangs up. I call back and it’s straight to voice mail.

  I consider driving to the dump of a shack that Tyler rents with a rotating crew of dead-enders and miscreants, and dragging my daughter home by her hair. But ever since Black Ice Night I’ve known exactly what that would accomplish: She’d move into that shack with Tyler.

  A Jerry Springer montage plays in my mind, featuring some blob of a skanky trailer-trash mom sitting next to her blob of an even skankier trailer-trash daughter—both of them wearing Daisy Dukes and radiating hatred toward each other—while someone in the audience stands up and, neck veins bulging, index finger stabbing toward the sullen daughter, who is rolling her eyes onstage, yells with self-righteous, Old Testament wrath, “If she were my kid, I’d lock her sorry ass up!” Or, “I’d call the police on her sorry ass!” Or, “I’d toss her mother-bleeping duh bleepitty-bleep-bleep sorry ass out on the motherbleeping street! S’what I’d do!”

  I try to recall who I was when I watched these hillbilly jamborees. I have vague memories of being a puzzled, superior, teen-free mother who knew sure as gravity that she and her daughter would never go down that path. We would read The Secret Garden together and pick blueberries in Maine. We would never even come anywhere near that path.