The Gap Year

by Sarah Bird

  “Is Shupe still a jerk?”

  “No, he had a lobotomy and he’s a prince of a fellow.”

  Mom laughs too hard at that, rewarding me for joking with her. Then, her eyebrows all crinkled up high and happy, she waits for me to say more. I have nothing.

  “Anything else happen today?”

  I pick through the avalanche of unbelievable things that happened today and try to grab on to one that she can handle. There isn’t one. I can’t even make something up. I’ve been at parties—everyone drinking, smoking weed—and listened to girls step out onto the patio, then chat happily with their moms about how they’re watching True Blood at Olivia’s house and can they spend the night? Then Olivia calls her mom and asks the same thing, then they both get wasted and stay out all night. I could never have gotten away with that with Mom. She knows me too well. One word and she would have been all, “What’s wrong? What’s going on?” She can literally read my mind. Obviously, until today there wasn’t much I cared if she read. She even bragged about it: “Aubrey and I don’t have any secrets from each other.”

  Tone, I guess. The words aren’t even that important; she just knows me so well that if I open my mouth, if I say one, single word now, it’ll be, “What’s wrong? What’s going on?” So I can’t open my mouth.

  When I don’t speak, she gives me the look that is under all the other looks. It is so basic it doesn’t even have a number. It is just Hunger, and if I pause even long enough to translate that one, it will eat me alive.

  She finally shakes her head, allows me to shut the door, and I have a few minutes of peace. I know it won’t last. I know that, at that very moment, she’s checking in with her twin, and the instant that Dori tells her about the “heatstroke” she’ll be all over me.

  Which she is. A few minutes later, she bursts back into my room with eighteen different drinks including Pedialyte, which she must have had left over from when I had measles.

  “Oh, hon, why didn’t you tell me? I’m so sorry that I snapped at you.” She perches on the edge of the bed next to me. When she feels my forehead, her hand is cool against my skin and makes me feel like I am really sick.

  “Baby, you’re hot. I’m going to see if I can get you in to see Dr. Queng.”

  Yeah, I really want to sit in a waiting room with a big LEGO table and an American Girl video playing to see the pediatrician who set my arm when I broke it falling off the deck in Twyla’s backyard. “No, Mom, I’m fine. Really.”

  “We can just go to emergency walk-in. I’m sure I can get them to work you in.”

  Mom knows every nurse in Parkhaven and they all love her so much that I always kind of get treated like a celebrity when I’m sick. Which I usually like. But not today. “Mom, how many times do I have to tell you? I’m fine. I just need to rest. I know my own body.”

  “OK, hon. OK.” She sticks a giant glass of ice water with a bendy straw poking out into my hands and I sip while she goes into nurse mode and arranges my covers, fluffing them up so that they float back down on me all cool and neat. I love nurse mode. She folds the sheet over the light blanket so that my chin touches only soft cotton. I feel tiny and taken care of. She’s about to leave, then stops and says, “Your lips look dry.”

  I hold up the ice water.

  She puts the back of her hand on my cheek. It feels so good I have to fight the desire to nuzzle against it. So good that, for a second, I almost think I can spend the whole, entire rest of my life riding the Teacups.

  AUGUST 13, 2009

  Early the next morning, Mom bursts into my room wearing her gray scrubs. She hates scrubs and says that the hospitals where she consults might be able to force her to wear them, but they can’t force her to wear ones that are pink or have bunny prints. In a lot of ways, Mom is kind of badass.

  Without a word, she puts her palm on my forehead. Instead of cool and nice, though, it now feels damp and gooshy, like it could melt right into my skin if she kept it there long enough. “You feel warm.” Then she does her ultra-annoying thing of telling me how I feel. “You’re not any better. I’m staying home.”

  “No. I’m fine, Mom.” I make my voice hit the right tone: sick enough not to go to band camp but not sick enough for Dr. Queng. “Really. You go on. You’ve got patients waiting for you.” Luckily, at that exact moment one of the many alarms Mom has set on her phone goes off.

  “Shit, I’m going to be late! Call me if you start to feel worse.” She rushes out, stops, tells me, “Just call me anyway, OK?”

  I promise I will, and then—score!—I have the house and the laptop all to myself. I can think about my dad with no fear that someone will burst through the door without even knocking, demanding to know what I am doing and when I am going to unload the dishwasher.

  From under the bed, I pull out the scrapbook Mom made for me of every photo she could collect of my father. She called it the Book of Palms. The name is supposed to be a joke because he has his hand up, shielding some famous person’s face in most of the photos. I think there might be a Book of Palms in the Bible. I never asked. Mom likes to pretend that I’ve lost interest in my father. That it upset me to hear about him. Actually, I stopped mentioning him when I saw how much it upset her. By that time, though, she wasn’t my only source of information. For the past few years, I’ve been Googling my father’s Next name constantly.

  I open the laptop and check my Google alerts to see if there is anything new. There isn’t. There hasn’t been anything on the Internet about my father for months.

  “My father.” I don’t even know what punctuation mark to put after those two words. Lots of exclamation points!!! One lonely question mark? I need a cartoon balloon with every symbol available in it. Something that stands for stunned/terrified/pissed off/excited/depressed/happy/mad.

  I go to Facebook and stare at his friend request until it starts pulsing and glowing like it is radioactive. I close the laptop, get back in bed, and pull the covers up so that just the soft cotton is touching my chin.

  THURSDAY, AUGUST 12, 2010

  I drop my swim bag on the floor as soon as I enter the house. In the kitchen, Pretzels—curled up on her rug in front of the refrigerator, strategically situated so that warm air from the vent blows on her and she’s in place to snap up any morsel that might fall from the heavens—doesn’t budge when I enter. We adopted Pretzels when Aubrey was five and always asking when I was going to get her a sister. A big sister, not a little one like Sharalynn Mahan’s mother brought home. A big sister who would come fully equipped with all her own Polly Pockets and be ready to play from day one. Aubrey was the one who noticed that our new mostly golden retriever puppy’s coat was the same color as pretzels.

  I get down on my hands and knees next to the sweet old girl and coo, “Hey, Pretz. Hey, girl, you need to pee?” Since she’s almost totally deaf, it startles her if she’s touched while sleeping. So I increase the volume of my cooing gently until she opens her filmy eyes and is transfixed by joy at the sight of my face with all its treasured food-bowl associations.

  “Come on, sweet girl.” I loop both hands around her belly and hoist her up, causing a release of one of the paint-stripping clouds of gas that is her signature move these days. The doggie door she’s used for the past dozen years has started to confuse and scare her, so I slide the patio door open and she totters out.

  Pretzels pokes her nose around in the grass. As I wait for her to snuffle up an odor that will remind her why she’s outside, I glance around behind me at what the real estate agent had called the “great room” when she invited Martin and me to imagine the entertaining we’d be doing beneath its twelve-foot ceiling. Had I hosted even one dinner party? One?

  At the moment every horizontal surface is stacked with extra-long twin sheets; towels; long underwear; two pairs of flannel pajama bottoms, one plaid, one printed with a cow-jumping-over-the-moon pattern; warm socks; turquoise mittens with a matching knit cap; a forest green rain jacket; a first-aid kit; collapsible storage b
oxes; a small sewing kit; three boxes of peanut-butter-cookie LUNA bars; vitamins; Midol; Advil; Theraflu; two tubes of triple antibiotic ointment. Everything a girl leaving home for college might possibly need.

  I’ve listened to other moms talk about their daughters having hysterical meltdowns in the middle of Bed Bath & Beyond because the store was out of the precise Tommy Hilfiger “Biscayne” comforter set they had their hearts set on and they’d already been to five other stores. I experienced no histrionics whatsoever with Aubrey because I did all the shopping by myself. By late summer, when dorm shopping kicked off, and Target filled up with mothers piloting shopping carts and holding lists followed either by a mortified young man praying for invisibility or a young woman tossing in extra hair products, Aubrey would no longer even talk to me about Peninsula. I stopped pushing on shower caddies; we had the much larger issue of Tyler Moldenhauer.

  So I took over outfitting Aubrey for college without her help just as if she were going off to sleepaway camp. But instead of buying bug spray and writing her name in her shorts with a laundry marker, I procured a coffeemaker and researched surge protectors. With each washcloth I purchased, I felt as if I were greasing the skids, paving the path of least resistance. I know that if I can only drag Aubrey to the bank to get the money, the wheels of college will be in motion and they will simply carry Aubrey away from Parkhaven. I visualize putting my daughter on the plane, happily paying extra for suitcases filled with shoe organizers and bottles of hand sanitizer.

  Continuing my visualization exercise, I imagine the great room empty, Aubrey’s bedroom empty, my nest empty, and though it is what I most desire I am stricken with grief at the prospect. I grab my laptop and contact the source of all wisdom: Shri Googlenami. My screen saver comes up. It shows a cartoon baby assuming some favorite breast-feeding positions: the Pop and Spray, the Look-see, the Combo Sleepy with a Toe Grab, the Pounce, the Super Distract with a Twist.

  I try to Google “empty nest syndrome,” but my left ring finger keeps hitting the x instead of the s so it comes out “empty next syndrome.” I finally, laboriously, fix two fingers and both eyes on the keyboard, type in n-e-s-t, and a jillion entries fill the screen. There are the posters who wail, “Who will I be when I’m not Jason/Caitlyn/Whitney/Brandon’s mom anymore?” Or they advise, “Look on the bright side: You and your husband can have sex anytime you want. Anywhere you want!” Since there is no husband or any other sex-having candidate in the picture, that bright side is noticeably dim. And because I’ve had to work—fortunately at work I love—I never had the luxury of baking my entire identity into the homeroom mom cupcakes I brought to school. So that’s not exactly relevant either.

  Though I’m not hungry, worry and regret drive me to the kitchen for comfort. Pretzels is curled up, guarding the refrigerator. “Pretz, honey, you’re gonna have to move.” Pretzels grumbles; she already moved once today. “Okay, hang on.” I haul her and her rug a few feet to the right and she grumbles a bit more. On the refrigerator door, held up by a daisy magnet from the Realtor who sold us this house—“We Make Your Dreams Bloom!”—is a list that reads:

  REMIND AUBREY TO:

  • wear flip-flops in the community showers

  • get a flu shot as soon as it comes out in October

  • use the white-noise machine if the dorm is too loud because she turns into a different person when she can’t sleep

  • never connect the red cable to the negative terminal when jumping a car battery

  I add, “• get a meningitis shot!!”

  Inside the refrigerator, tucked behind the white Styrofoam boxes of takeout that haven’t aged enough yet for me to toss them without guilt, is one lone can of Diet Cherry 7UP. This causes me to burst instantly into tears because I fear that this is the last can of my child’s favorite soft drink that I will ever buy. Before Aubrey began spending all her time with Tyler, I couldn’t keep the stuff in the house. She even used to drink it with breakfast sometimes. In fact, now that I think about it, she had a can the morning she got heatstroke.

  A week later, after she’d missed band camp entirely and set off on the first day of her senior year, there was something different about her. First of all, she’d worn a skirt. She’d never worn a skirt to school before. But it was more than that. There was something about her as she set off for the first day of her last year of high school; she was beautiful in such a defined and settled way. I saw that her beauty would age but never change again as it had when she was growing up. Had I told her how beautiful she was?

  Yes, I had. I remember saying those exact words to her on the day she started her senior year.

  AUGUST 19, 2009

  I outline my eyes with a pencil call Smolder, then smudge most of it away. I brush on a blush called Orgasm, so that I look barely flushed. With every stroke of the lip liner pencil, every puff of blush, I imagine Tyler staring back. I realize that this is delusional, which is why it is so important that absolutely no one knows that I am trying. Not Tyler, not any of my old friends in band, not my mom.

  Especially not my mom.

  Thinking about her and her freakish CSI ability to analyze everything about me, from the way I am breathing to my tiniest facial twitch, makes me rub off most of the lip gloss and blush. If she knows it is all for a football player she will implode. It will be like one of those FLDS Mormon girls in the Little House on the Prairie dresses telling her mom she is crushed out on Snoop Dogg. Even making an effort for Parkhaven High would worry her. Which it does anyway, because, when I appear, she analyzes me for so long that I am certain she knows everything. I feel like she is X-raying me and all the bones of my skeleton are spelling out, “She likes a football player!” and “BONUS REVELATION: She’s thinking about betraying you by being Facebook friends with the ex who ruined your life!”

  Then I feel her passing judgment and it is like being held underwater. So when she finally says, “Wow, pretty dressed up, aren’t you?” I am already sputtering for air.

  “Why? Just because I’m wearing a skirt? In case you haven’t noticed, it’s like a thousand degrees out there and skirts are not as hot as jeans.” I know she is going to bust me on my “tone.” But if I don’t tone her a little bit, she is like that robot annihilator in Terminator 2. Run him over with a semi and all his quicksilver innards just slurp back together and keep coming at you. I am already too nervous to deal with that level of unstoppability.

  “Sorry. You look nice is all.”

  “Uh, it is the first day of school.”

  “God, bite my head off. All I said is that you look nice.”

  “And all I said was that it’s the first day of school.”

  I cannot wait to get my own car. Not just so that I won’t be the only senior who doesn’t have one, but so I don’t have to start every single day of my life being laser-scanned to make sure I match someone’s standards. And, P.S., thanks, Mom. Way to destroy my confidence.

  The entire first day of school, I feel like I am looking through a pair of binoculars turned around the wrong way so that everything is happening far, far away. All the people jamming the halls are like extras in a crowd scene as I search for Tyler’s face. The teachers introducing themselves and passing out their grading policy sheets and either trying to scare us or charm us seem like someone is making them play charades and they all want to lose.

  After school, I find a spot in the shade at the very edge of the field where the band marches and right next to the adjacent field where the football team practices. The team hasn’t come out of the locker room yet, but most of the marching band is on the field, gathered around Mr. Shupe, who is passing out permission slips for trips.

  I sit with my skirt spread out around me in a half circle and my legs swept under it. I imagine my father, hidden away behind the bleachers next to the football field spying on me and wondering … what? If I have any legs? Realizing that I look like the Little Mermaid, I reposition and just sort of sprawl. Tyler especially has to believe that I
am a casual person with lots of options who hasn’t thought twice about him. Mr. Shupe finishes handing out the forms, catches sight of me languishing on the sidelines, and waves me over, yelling, “Lightsey, double-time it! I need you to work with Johnson on field blocking!”

  I don’t move.

  “Lightsey!”

  I don’t look up. After trying to get my attention two more times, Shupe gives up, orders the drum major, “Johnson, get them started on ‘Joy,’ ” and walks over to me.

  The thought of marching up and down a field with the words “Jeremiah was a bullfrog!” playing in my head makes me even more certain that, even though I don’t know how to have a new one, I can never, ever, ever go back to my old life.

  Shupe’s big, puffy white sneakers appear beside me. “What’s the deal, Lightsey? You’re section leader. We covered for you during band camp, but we need you out there now. Do we need to talk about electing someone else?”

  It is almost funny that he thinks that the threat of being replaced as section leader is going to make me leap to my feet and run for the plumed hat. “Actually,” I say in a weak, whispery voice, “the doctor says …”

  He can’t hear me, so Shupe squats down in front of me like he is Jeremiah the bullfrog. The up-close view of the Shupe crotch helps me sound woozy. “The doctor says I can’t be out in the heat yet. So I am just going to sit here in the shade and, you know, take notes on the formations and stuff.”

  “But it’s hotter than …” I appreciate that he stops himself and doesn’t say “balls.” “It’s really hot out here.”

  “Uh, actually, the doctor says I can be out. I’m just not supposed to march.”

  “But you’re section leader. These jabonies”—he jerks a thumb back to the chaos that is the first week with a bunch of incoming freshmen—“need a lot of work. A lot of work.”