The Gap Year

by Sarah Bird

  And, I remind myself, we aren’t anywhere near it. Not really. Aubrey’s not doing drugs. She’s not giving blow jobs in the boys’ locker room. She’s just changed beyond recognition in the past year.

  Forget anthrax. The greatest chemical threat facing our country today is the hormones delivered to our daughters at puberty. Hormones that, in Aubrey’s case, were not fully ignited until Tyler appeared.

  If only I can get her shipped off to college.

  I think of Aubrey twenty-four hundred miles away in the state of Washington, rushing to class across the Peninsula State College quad beneath towering evergreens that shelter the campus. It’s drizzling. It’s always drizzling there. But that was part of the appeal when we chose Peninsula at the start of her senior year, back before Tyler Moldenhauer scrambled her brain. Back then she wanted something as different from the sunbaked grids of Parkhaven as possible. She couldn’t wait to leave the world of megachurches and malls. Besides, Peninsula, her dream school, was close to Forks, Washington, where all her vampire books were set.

  In the shower, warm water pulses against the top of my head and I wonder again when it happened. When Aubrey went off the rails. A lightning-quick chain of associations takes me from there directly to a memory so strong and so familiar that it even brings back all the smells of the pivotal moment twenty-two years ago when my own life was decided.

  The cumin scent of body odor; the hot metal-and-grease smell of the iron wheels against the rails; a citrus aroma from the Berber grandmother sitting across from me feeding sections of blood orange to the three grandchildren crammed onto the seat next to her; the fragrance of mint tea and falafel from the vendors working their way through the car; and a whiff of cedar and rosemary from the arid plains and hillsides carried on the hot, dry air that blows against my face.

  Voices speaking a throaty language with volleys of glottal jerks fired back and forth rise above the clattering hubbub of an ancient train lumbering across Morocco. Back home, everyone would be plugged into their brand-new Walkmans. But here, the boom box is still king, so while one at the front of the car blares traditional, snake-charmer-sounding Moroccan music, another at the back rips loose with Whitney Houston pleading, “I wanna dance with somebody.”

  It is 1988. I am sitting on a wooden bench seat beside a glassless window. The aisles are crowded with men in turbans and striped djellabas. On the bench beside me is the battered backpack that I will be living out of for the next three months of hitchhiking and Eurailing around Europe, visiting as many of the places where my grandmother served during World War II as I can on this trip she financed. A reward for finishing nursing school.

  I glance at the Atlas Mountains rising in the hazy distance, and translate the tan, sage, and blue of the landscape into my grandmother’s black-and-white photos. Each picture is populated with the grinning faces of Bobbi Mac’s friends. All the game gals with nicknames like Pee Wee, Speedy, Slats, who called my grandmother Crazy Mac and turned World War II into the most fun sleepover ever. I’d heard their stories so often that they were like characters from a fairy tale.

  I wish that I were traveling with them, with a gang. I knew about all the amputations Mac had assisted at, all the handsome young men who died, but none of that was as real as the stories of cocktails made from rubbing alcohol, dances in airplane hangars, dating generals who took you to eat lobster at castles, wearing a long black slip that passed as an evening gown to a formal dance, singing silly Hawaiian songs for the troops in a grass skirt and a coconut-shell bra, arms and legs darkened with a mixture of Pond’s cold cream and Hershey’s cocoa powder.

  On the bench across from mine, the Berber grandmother and her grandchildren stare at me as the red fruit churns in their open mouths. The grandmother wears a djellaba of a rough weave the color of mulch and a cotton head scarf dyed indigo blue. The youngest child, a scrawny girl with bright, dark eyes and a wide smile in a grimy pink caftan with a beige turtleneck underneath it, picks her nose as she chews and gapes at me. The two grandsons beside her both wear ragged T-shirts that must have made their way to North Africa via Goodwill. One features the Ghostbusters logo. The other depicts a silver hand gripping a giant silver gun beneath silver letters that spell out ROBOCOP.

  I smile weakly, trying to prove that though I am an American I am a friendly person of goodwill and not a poltergeist hunter or android assassin.

  The tea vendor passes and in the shiny, round surface of his silver pot, I see my twenty-one-year-old face and find it just as round and gleaming and heart-stoppingly perfect as the pot itself. In the next instant my young self traveling on that train twenty-three years ago notices that her spiral perm has grown out, leaving the top of her hair and her bangs flat as a poodle that needs to go to the groomer. That her face is greasy and she needs to put on some lip gloss. And that a really cute guy is heading toward her.

  The first time I set eyes on him, Martin was swaying down the aisle of that packed train rocking across North Africa. He is thin in a haunted, poetic, punk-rock star/drug addict way that hints at secrets and reserves of worldliness. He is actually thin in a seriously ill way. He pauses beside my bench, indicates the seat next to me, asks, “Any chance?”

  Without a word, I move the backpack off the seat and he all but collapses onto it.

  He is surprised when I ask, “How long have you been sick?”

  “Do I look that bad?”

  “You don’t look good.”

  “How do you know that this isn’t the way I always look?”

  “I don’t think you’d be alive.”

  “Good point.”

  I ask about symptoms. He is nonchalant. He has Siddhartha in his backpack; he is above caring about “the physical apparatus.”

  I diagnose gastroenteritis and dip into the traveling pharmacy that Bobbi Mac insisted I take with me. I press tablets of Imodium into his hand and warn, “It may be amoebic dysentery. If it is you will have to go to a doctor and get a prescription for Flagyl.” I make him drink the mint tea I buy from the vendor walking the aisle.

  “Drink it all,” I coax. “You need to rehydrate and there’s lots of sugar in there to get your glucose levels back up. You know, if it is dysentery, you could always eat fresh camel dung.”

  “Did you just tell me to eat shit?”

  “My grandmother was an army nurse in North Africa in World War Two. She had a bedouin wardman who told her that cure.” I want to impress him, and my World War II army-nurse grandmother is the most impressive thing about me. “After the invasion of Sicily, they ran out of everything. Morphine, bandages, sulfa powder. So some of the boys who were the worst off, the ones who might have died, tried the camel dung, and it worked. Olive oil is also good.”

  “Excellent. Some camel shit with an olive-oil chaser.” He puts his arm over the back of the seat. He smells like really good pot. He scoots closer, whispers in my ear, “The old lady’s tattoos …” He nods toward the bedouin grandmother sitting on the bench seat across from us. A series of dots the color of strong green tea drip from her bottom lip down her chin. They are faded and almost lost in wrinkles elephant-hide deep.

  “They were done when she was a little girl to give her strength, power. To protect her. If her parents had wanted to enhance her attractiveness to a prospective husband, she might be tattooed along here.…” Martin traces his finger along an imaginary necklace across the tops of my breasts. “The designs would have all been geometric.” He draws cross-my-heart marks along the necklace. “The tattoos on her hands are hints, samples of the delights to come.”

  We both know that we will sleep together. All that is left for me to decide is how much it will mean and how I will make it mean that.

  After we drink mint tea with extra sugar, Martin fishes out his battered copy of Siddhartha. I lie and say that I love the book. One of my all-time favorites. Right up there with … with … As I know he will, Martin prompts, “The Tao Te Ching? The Gnostic Gospels? The Bhagavad Gita?”

&nb
sp; “All of the above.” I don’t know what makes me stop pretending that I, too, love books about spirituality. That we “share an interest.” Probably the calculation that I’d already made that we are going to be together, and figuring in how long I can act like a scholar of religious texts, then adding in that, even more than most men, he appears to like to be the one with the answers. I compute all of that and admit, “I don’t know. I’ve never read any of them.”

  “So you just said that? About loving Siddhartha…?”

  “To impress you? Yeah. Pretty much. Did it work?”

  “Absolutely. Would you be impressed if I read your favorite book to you?”

  And so, reciting from memory more than from the page open in front of him, Martin tells me the story of the handsome son of the Brahman, Siddhartha, his shoulders tanned from performing sacred ablutions in the river, his forehead surrounded by the glow of his clear-thinking spirit, who left his family and all his riches to search for enlightenment.

  I hear the words in my head again, in Martin’s caress of a voice carried on a breeze scented with rosemary and cedar: “ ‘In the shade of the house, in the sunshine on the river bank by the boats, in the shade of the sallow wood and the fig tree …’ ”

  If Martin had left me for another woman, I could store this memory and all the rest of them away in the past where they belong. But when he left, it felt as if he were going off to war. Next always seemed like something he had to do. That he hadn’t left me so much as been taken away against his will.

  I flip the shower lever to shut off the water and am momentarily scalded when I accidentally turn it the wrong way. I step out of the shower, briskly wrap a towel around myself, and rush back to my locker to check my phone. Maybe Aubrey called.

  I hear the metal door to the locker room open and the little girls—one with copper curls like Twyla’s and speech impediment like Aubrey once had—bounce in. The older one dictates to the younger girl, “You will be the baby manatee and I will be the mother manatee—”

  “And we migwate to the Amazon wain fowest!”

  “And we dive into the deep blue sea and there are dolphins and mermaids—”

  “And faiwies!”

  “Not fairies in the deep blue sea!”

  The younger girl looks stricken.

  “That’s silly!” the older one says.

  Demolished by her idol, the little redhead teeters for a second near tears. Then she laughs a child’s theatrical imitation of laughter and, game once again, says, “Yeah, faiwies in the deep bwoo sea. That’s siwwy!”

  Happy again, the girls run off toward the vending machines.

  As I scroll through all the unanswered calls I’ve made to Aubrey, they beep like a movie-submarine sonar, warning of the disaster of an approaching torpedo. I roll tape back to last August and try again to identify the moment that set my child on this course.

  As I try to connect the dots between Tyler Moldenhauer and heatstroke, from down the white-tiled hall that leads to the vending machines, the little girls’ voices echo back to me, silvery and faraway, like coins falling from a torn pocket, lost forever.

  AUGUST 12, 2009

  Back home, I help Pretzels to her feet so she can hobble with me and we both head for my room, where I plop down on my bed with the laptop and Google “Tyler Moldenhauer.” Someone has made a fan page for him on Facebook. He hasn’t posted any comments, but he is tagged in dozens of photos.

  The pictures of him on the field, face hidden behind a helmet, bring back his smell, like the ocean on a cold day. I watch and rewatch a video of him zigzagging through a field of players, vanishing so quickly that they lunge after him and grab nothing but air.

  But there is one photo I keep going back to. In it he has his helmet off and is laughing with his mouth wide open; his tongue is hanging out a little, and he looks like every smirking jock asshole I’ve ever hated.

  What is wrong with me? My type is, has always been, reedy art boys. The first crushes I ever had were on Jack White and Adrien Brody. Stick-figure boys. Though that was back when Twyla and I were friends. And, come to think of it, Adrien and Jack were both more her crushes than mine. Still, I can’t like Tyler Moldenhauer. A jock? Mom would flip out.

  Just to get my mind off this whole ridiculous thing, I click over to my Facebook page and see that I have one friend request. Before I check who it is my heart bumps. Tyler? Already? Tyler Moldenhauer wants to be my friend? Is this one of those Twilight Bella/Edward things where we don’t even really have to talk because just my scent alone drives him more insane than any other woman’s in all his centuries of vampire existence?

  I recall that my scent was bagel vomit, click on the Friend Requests icon, and see a name that I don’t recognize: Alex Well, which means that “Alex Well” is some clever business that targets teens through social media. No doubt “Alex Well” has some unlimited texting offer for me, since, of course, all teen girls just live for unlimited texting. And lip gloss. Earn Lip Gloss Using Our Unlimited Texting Plan!

  I don’t confirm the request, but, just to see what kind of scam Facebook thinks I should be targeted for, I click on the bogus name. Expecting to be taken to a page hectic with offers and great news about a great product and giveaways if I confirm the friend request, I am surprised to end up looking at a page with nothing on it except for the dippy white cutout of a person with that curlicue hairdo against Facebook’s blue-gray background. Alex Well has no friends. Not one. Nothing is filled in. Birthday, Hometown, Current City, Relationship Status, they’ve all been left blank. In his Info section there is no contact information, no groups he is a member of, no pages he follows. They are all blank.

  The only information on his wall is a status update next to the curlicued photo that says:

  11:56 A.M. AUGUST 12, 2009

  Hello, Aubrey. Thank you more than I can say for coming this far. I used a fake name because I didn’t know how you would respond to seeing my real name. More than anything in the world, I would like to know you. Even if it is just this. Just messages on Facebook. I can think of a thousand reasons why you wouldn’t confirm this. But I hope you will. This is Martin, your dad.

  I can’t say how long I sit on my bed staring at those three letters. D-A-D. The way, when you are standing on a skyscraper and you think you might—just accidentally—jump off, I start feeling like I might—just accidentally—hit the little “Respond to Friend Request” button. So I step away from the edge and slam the laptop shut.

  I lift my gaze to the teddy bears that Mom and Dad (D-A-D!) stenciled along the top of the walls before I was even born. I love thinking of them doing that together. Me still inside Mom, listening to them laughing. Maybe Dad painted a dot on Mom’s nose like in those old movies when husbands thought their wives were just so cute.

  So much is exploding inside of me that I feel like a bag of Orville Redenbacher’s in the microwave. Too much has happened all at once. I stagnated for years with nothing happening, and now, all in one day, too much is happening.

  I open the laptop, go back to Facebook, back to “Alex Well’s” page. I stare at the little box next to a faceless cartoon that is now a faceless cartoon of my father, and read and reread “Respond to Friend Request” roughly a million times. Then, like she always does, Pretzels—who can’t hear anything, but somehow manages to hear the refrigerator opening and the garage door going up, grumbles—and starts struggling to her feet.

  This is my signal that Mom is home. I quickly sign out of Facebook. She can’t know about the message. Thinking about my dad makes her so sad. And me going away to college next year is stressing her. I can tell by the way she stares at me so much more now that she’s imagining being here without me. If she knew about this? Dad contacting me? It would upset her so much.

  A few seconds later, she rattles the knob of my door, yells when she can’t open it, “Why is this door locked!”

  “Why do you never knock!”

  “Open the door!”

 
“I’m taking a nap!”

  “I need my laptop to see how many I’ve got registered for my class tomorrow!”

  Amazingly, it appears that her Siamese twin, Dori, hasn’t told her yet about picking me up from school. I crack the door a few inches, just enough to hand the laptop out. “I don’t see why I can’t have my own laptop. They’re not that expensive.”

  “That is a discretionary item.”

  This is her way of saying that I have to use the money I made working as a counselor at Lark Hill. “I would except that I don’t want to go to school naked, and, P.S., most mothers don’t count clothes as ‘discretionary’ items. For your information, Parkhaven is not clothing-optional.”

  She gives me Hurt Look Number 85. I hate Number 85, which translates to I am trying not to cry because I got totally screwed in the divorce and don’t make enough to buy us all the stuff we need. I am suddenly so sick of knowing what every twitch of her face means that I want to scream. I try to close the door, but she has her foot wedged into it.

  “How was band camp?” she asks in her fake, ultracalm voice, which means that she wants to scream at me but she is such a superior being that she won’t descend to that level. My level.

  “Fine.”

  The foot does not move. “Did you reconnect with your band friends? Wren? Amelia? You haven’t seen them all summer.”

  Great, now I am getting Anxious Look Number 113, which means Why don’t you have any friends? Exactly what is the precise nature of your loserhood?

  “Yeah.”

  “And?”

  “They’re fine.”

  “What did they do this summer?”

  “We didn’t really talk about it.”

  “So? Was it blazing hot out there?”

  I can think of no nonsarcastic answer.