The Gap Year

by Sarah Bird

  “He is not from district. He is a student and he is not allowed.”

  Tyler turns around, “Um, I’m sorry, ma’am.”

  I wait for Miss Olivia to go into lockdown mode, because no one, not even her pinup boy, is allowed into her forbidden realm. I know that she will summon Miss Chaney, who will then suspend Tyler. And probably put me on probation for not dying to prevent access to the sacred excused-absence slips. But instead of turning into a shrieking lunatic, Miss Olivia bubbles out, “Tyler Moldenhauer, how can I help you? Do you need an excused absence?” She snaps at me, “Get Tyler an excused absence.”

  Get Tyler an excused absence?

  I begin to understand why varsity players never have to come to the attendance counter. I guess administration doesn’t want anyone seeing the special treatment they get.

  “Stay right there, Ty-Mo,” Miss Olivia orders, then chugs around to the entrance at the far end of the office that admits only the officially approved.

  “OK, I’m out,” Tyler says. And just like that, like a flea disappearing from one spot, he hoists himself back onto the counter and is gone before Miss Olivia circumnavigates her way around to our station.

  She is huffing a little when she reappears. “Where is he? Where did he go? What did he need?” When I don’t answer, she informs me, “Aubrey, that was Tyler Moldenhauer.” Her voice and face are like she just said, Aubrey, that was Jesus.

  “OK …” I give a vague nod, acting like I can’t quite place this Tyler Moldenhauer person she speaks of.

  “All-state three years in a row? Runs the forty in four-point-five? His junior year he was two thirty-two of three sixty-eight for three thousand ninety-four yards with twenty-seven TDs and only six interceptions? He’s met with recruiters from six Division One colleges already, and I have excused absence requests for him to meet with two more.”

  Everything she tells me is obviously a giant deal on Planet Football. But it all just makes me wish that the person she is referring to didn’t have all sorts of numbers attached to him. That he was just an ordinary boy who smelled like the ocean on a cold day.

  FRIDAY, AUGUST 13, 2010

  Under the Book of Palms is an assortment of Aubrey’s old school papers, book reports, stories, assignments. They are festooned with stars and happy faces, thumbs-up stickers, and rainbows. Notes scribbled in the margins exclaim over what a good writer Aubrey was. I pick up an essay from sixth grade on the topic of school uniforms, written in her careful cursive.

  I know that there will be many who will attack school uniforms and say they are a bad idea because they hinder a person from being an individual. I disagree and say the exact opposite. School uniforms would actually help someone be who they really are. Instead of being forced to choose a group and try to fit into it through a certain exact kind of clothes, everyone would start off on an equal—

  “Are you searching Aubrey’s room?”

  “God, Dori, don’t sneak up on me like that.”

  “If by ‘sneak up’ you mean pound on your front door, then come in and yell, ‘Cam! Cam! Oh, Miss Cam Lightsey! Hello! Are you in here!,’ then, getting no response whatsoever, come back here in order to start CPR or locate your corpse, then I’m sorry that I ‘sneaked up’ on you.” Dori’s sproingy curls, dyed a mauvey brown this month, quiver as she whips her head around. “You are, aren’t you? You’re searching Aubrey’s room.”

  “No,” I answer, and she joins me in searching Aubrey’s room.

  I had been friendless for more than a year when Dori showed up for back-to-school night at the start of first grade. Dori and I never would have been friends back in the city, where her tattoos and transgressions would have made her blend in rather than stand out. But, like two Americans who wouldn’t have talked to each other in their homeland, Dori and I became fast friends in the alien land of Parkhaven. We bonded over being single outcasts in a place where everyone was paired up like they were boarding the Ark, and over our shared amazement that none of the other mothers had any lives—past or present—outside of being supermoms obsessed with their children and with Parkhaven Elementary.

  When I met Dori, I was still smarting from being dropped by the inner circle of Parkhaven moms, and I knew the instant I saw the armband of tribal tattoos encircling her biceps and the crescent of diamond studs curling around the top of her ear that she was my soul mate. Or the closest thing to one that I was going to find at Parkhaven, where Joyce Chaffee once caused a minor sensation when she got a few magenta streaks put in her hair. Streaks that were gone a day later.

  Dori happily admits that she is an “attention whore.” Even when it is negative, she has to have it. Being the official Parkhaven Weirdo Mom inspired her to new heights of outrageousness. During rare playdates with other moms, Dori openly shared details of how her ex had taken up with a stripper, and how she got up every morning and balanced her Zoloft, Xanax, and Claritin with a couple of Red Bulls. There were never any second playdates. I was only too happy to let Dori take over as Parkhaven’s biggest Weirdo Mom, a role I felt I’d been assigned because I had no husband or garments made of khaki.

  Dori called Parkhaven her “witness protection program.” She fancied herself a fugitive, hiding out from a scary ex-husband in the last place on earth where he’d come looking for her. After a few years during which the scary ex was revealed to be a rich boy living on a trust fund while he pretended to be Steven Tyler, I began to suspect that inertia more than anything was holding Dori hostage in suburbia. That and the fact that out here the attention addict was a showstopper, but back in the city she was just another former riot grrrl with tats starting to sag.

  “Let’s sell our blood” was one of Dori’s many suggestions for how we could afford to move back to the city. She also thought we should turn tricks behind the concession stand at soccer tournaments and sell crack along with the Girl Scout cookies. But, even if we split a place in the city, the math never worked out. As part of the divorce settlement, Martin had paid off just enough of the house—sadly bought near the top of the market—so that I could barely afford the mortgage, but not enough that I’d have much left if I sold it. And even less since I was still paying off the home equity loan I’d taken out when Aubrey needed braces. Then I went even further into the hole when I broke some bones in my foot and couldn’t work for three weeks. Besides, in spite of the facts that Parkhaven Elementary was far from the exemplary school its test scores had led me to believe and Aubrey never made many friends there, I hated to think about how hard it would be for my shy girl to adjust to a new place. Which is another reason why, at first, Dori was a godsend. Twyla and Aubrey became best friends for the rest of their time at Parkhaven Elementary.

  The girls had sleepovers almost every weekend. They watched Cinderella, Charlotte’s Web, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and Little Mermaid together so many times that the VHS tapes got streaks, while Dori and I split endless bottles of Australian kangaroo wine and debated who’d gotten screwed worse in her divorce and what giant outcasts we were in Parkhaven.

  Another favorite topic of discussion was the impossibility of meeting men in the suburbs. This led to us signing each other up—at first as a joke, then for real—for online dating services. We spent endless evenings culling through the candidates. Dori delighted in poking fun at the gooniest of them, the ones with hair transplants that looked like a connect-the-dots puzzle, or who bragged about “owning my own business,” which we’d find out meant the guy drove a cab. We both went on dates and ended up doing unforgivable things like calling each other from bathroom stalls and whispering about dodgy odors and tasseled shoes. We both endured periods where we boldly declared that we needed “friends with benefits,” and, for a few weeks, a month or two, managed to look past a guy’s icky mom issues, green-ringed toilet bowls, and compulsions to correct how we drove, cut our meat, and pretty much everything else, except the one unforgivable deal breaker, how we raised our daughters.

  Once I realized that the pos
tmortems with Dori were far more satisfying than any of the actual liaisons, I took my profile down and lived vicariously through her.

  Now, as I search through Aubrey’s drawers, Dori asks, “Didn’t we have a pact that we’d never be like our moms and read our daughters’ diaries and violate their privacy?”

  “I’m not violating anyone’s privacy. Short of discovering a syringe, I don’t care what I find.” I bite my tongue, but Dori doesn’t seem to take any notice of my syringe comment. I guess she believes that it doesn’t apply to her, since, before she left, Twyla was abusing prescription drugs she stole from her babysitting customers, instead of shooting up or doing anything that involved syringes. I want to ask Dori if she regrets our pact, since Twyla clearly could have benefited from a few room searches.

  I comfort myself with the thought that at least Aubrey never had any interest in drugs. Then I feel bad that Twyla is my At Least. All mothers have them. The child who—no matter what our own offspring is smoking or drinking or failing at—we can look at and think, At least. At least my child is not pregnant or in prison. Or gone off to live with her drugged-out, Aerosmith-wannabe dad. Surrounded as I am by all the Parkhaven overachievers trying to decide between Duke or Stanford, I desperately need an At Least. I just wish that it weren’t Twyla.

  “So what are we looking for?”

  “Nothing, really. Okay, I’d love to find some proof that she’s using birth control.”

  “You should have gotten her on the pill.”

  “Don’t ‘should’ on me, Edith Piaf.”

  “I think my mother crushed up birth-control pills and sprinkled them on my Pablum. Oh no, wait, now I remember. She had me locked up in a chastity belt. So you think Aubrey’s pregnant? Our little rule follower? No way.”

  Dori eliminates the possibility. Twyla was the wild one. Aubrey was the sensible one. Until Tyler came along she was the diligent student, the neat freak, the conscientious grade-grubber who was going to keep us all organized.

  “Jesus. Aubrey and I should be cruising the aisles at Target, arguing about minifridges like all the other mothers and daughters.”

  “Well, not all.”

  Dori flops down on Aubrey’s bed. She strokes the hardened remnants of BeeBee’s purple hair. “Remember when the girls went through their fairy period?”

  Instantly, Aubrey and Twyla are back in this room with us. They sit together on Aubrey’s bed dressed in their fairy getups: gauzy wings from the dollar store and Goodwill prom dresses scissored into fluttery Tinker Bell creations. Twyla’s copper curls are dark, almost mahogany compared with Aubrey’s duckling-down blondeness. Like the two little girls in the locker room, they talk to each other with the solemn intentness that only girls of that age can bring to a conversation with a friend.

  “You are the mama fairy,” Twyla dictated to Aubrey. “And I’ll be the baby fairy.”

  “And you’re lost in the deep dark forest,” Aubrey improvised. “And I come and find you.”

  “No!” Twyla shouted. Strong-willed and loud, like the little girl in the locker room she automatically vetoed any changes to her script. “I find the hidden treasure and there are jewels and rubies.”

  Aubrey didn’t respond.

  Our daughters were in sixth grade when they watched their last movie together, Moulin Rouge. Aubrey had liked the film all right, but Twyla, who’d recently gone as boy-crazy as any girl I’d ever seen, became obsessed. No matter what you asked her, she’d sing a lyric from Moulin Rouge in response. The last time Aubrey invited her to sleep over, Twyla stayed up all night watching the movie again and again while Aubrey slept. In the morning, I asked Twyla if she wanted waffles or cereal and she sang something back to me about the greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return. Aubrey rolled her eyes, shook her head, and went to see what was on TV.

  Another Twyla-Aubrey memory crowds in. It was early in the summer, the girls had just finished first grade, Dori and I were sitting on my rarely used front porch while the girls played inside the house. We had citronella candles burning, a bottle of kangaroo red working, and were deep into telling each other the stories of how we’d lost our virginity when Aubrey yelled out to us through a crack in the front door, “Guys! Listen, guys! Shut your eyes! Are they shut? Are you ready?” This was before she had grown out of her speech impediment, so it came out, “Aw they shut? Aw you weddy?”

  After Dori and I both covered our eyes with our hands, and assured Aubrey that we couldn’t see a thing. The door creaked open and the nails of our wild young rescue dog, Pretzels, clicked on the floor as she bolted out. She bumped against my legs, then swatted them with her tail as she bounded down the porch steps, rushing to check what Dori called her pee-mail.

  Twyla announced, “Okay, you can look now!”

  Aubrey collapsed in giggles the instant I uncovered my eyes and beheld the two little girls, Aubrey, the shy blonde, and, Twyla, the wild redhead, both done up with cartoon-sexy makeup jobs and draped in every scarf and shawl and flimsy, sheer bit of fabric that might be considered slinky in my sadly utilitarian wardrobe.

  Twyla’s copper ringlets bounced as she pointed a showstopping finger at Aubrey’s pink boom box and commanded in her husky, baby Ethel Merman voice, “Hit it!” Aubrey, still the faithful handmaiden, rushed to press “play” and the girls sang along with an old CD of mine, “That’s the way, uh-huh, uh-huh, I like it!” They put their hands on their hair and wiggled their skinny hips back and forth. Aubrey had glittered brightly at her own audacity, delighting in how shocking and outrageous she was.

  But Dori, far from being shocked and outraged, jumped up and joined right in. She dragged me onto my feet so we all could have a girls-just-want-to-have-fun bonding moment. Dori and Twyla and I bumped our butts together and tried to outthrust one another. But Aubrey’s face had fallen the instant she saw that Dori, Twyla, and I were intent on outdoing her. When I’d tried to drag her into the fun, she’d gone back in the house and sat on her bed arranging her My Little Ponies by color.

  Dori settles BeeBee back on the bed. “Well, at least on the untimely-pregnancy front, it’s a relief that Twyla is gay.”

  I don’t say anything; I am still a bit dubious about Twyla’s lesbianism. Plus, I can’t get “That’s the way, uh-huh, uh-huh” to stop running through my head. Finally, I ask, “You talked to Twyla?”

  “Yeah, she called last night. For money, of course. I told her to ask her father. He’s the one with the rich, ridiculously indulgent, terminally screwed-up parents who destroyed their son’s marriage. Then she told me to forget it and that I was a bitch and had ruined her life.”

  “Oh, Dori.” I take her hand as the scarlet patches bloom like geisha makeup beneath her skimpy eyebrows. She turns from me, scrubs the palm of her hand against her eyes. They come away clean; she’s stopped wearing mascara since Twyla left. Cried it off too many times.

  I open another drawer. Dori peers in and asks, “Jesus, how many pairs of identical running shorts can one human own?”

  Aubrey’s Nike shorts are folded neatly as a store display. Dori picks up a pair, maroon with a pink insert, and says, “I never figured Aubrey for a brand whore.”

  I pluck the shorts from her, tuck them back where they were—precisely placed between the powder blue with white inserts and the burnt orange pairs—and slam the drawer closed. Dori has broken the Mommy Pact: It is fine for me to criticize my kid, but woe betide she who jumps onto that dogpile. I don’t snap at Dori, though; if focusing on Nike shorts for a few seconds helps, I’ll give her that. Maybe at that moment she’s even thinking, At least. At least I didn’t raise a brand whore.

  Dori, struck with a sudden realization, claps her palm against her chest. “God. She’s not really pregnant, is she? I mean, seriously? Oh, shit. With Tyler Moldenhauer? The way she is now, she’d probably want to keep it. Oh, well, always room at PCC. If Kyle Dunmore and Stacy Adovada can get in, they’ll put Aubrey on the faculty.”

  A
bowling ball crushes my solar plexus. I can’t draw in a breath or release the one stuck in my chest. Dori has just put names to my worst fears: pregnancy and Parkhaven Community College, where Kyle Dunmore and Stacy Adovada, everyone’s favorite drug burnout and teen mom, are currently attending.

  “Dori, could you please shut the fuck up?” I always liked that I could say “fuck” to Dori. Now I’m sorry that I ever gave up that word’s power to shock, because I would seriously like Dori to zip it.

  “Sorry. Bad joke. Really, though, you have nothing to worry about. Aubrey is not like that.” She puts her hand on my arm. “Really, Cam, don’t worry.”

  Don’t worry?

  Dori, mother of a daughter who left home with a stash of stolen pills, who only calls her for money, stands in front of me like a living memo, a breathing reminder of all the terrible things that happen when mothers don’t worry.

  After Twyla left, I hired Dori to help me with my classes. At first it was sort of a charity move, something to keep my friend distracted, but Dori has turned out to be surprisingly good at handling registration, getting students to pay up, invoicing hospitals for my consultations, and, generally, keeping me and the business going. She is even working on helping me “establish a Web presence.”

  Dori glances at her watch. “Just FYI, we’ve got class in twenty-five minutes.”

  I jump up. “Shit! How did I lose track of an entire hour? Where’s my bag?”

  “Chill. It’s all out in the great room. I’ll go pack up. You …” She eyes me, doing a quick triage. “Brush your hair, put on a clean top. Then we gotta hit the trail like a steaming cow patty.”

  I run a comb through my hair with one hand as I gather up cell phone, car keys, keys to the classroom where I teach, and purse. In the great room, Dori is stuffing my class materials into the striped canvas beach bag I haul back and forth to classes.

  “Where’s Britney?” she yells. Her years as a roadie girlfriend, then wife to a musician husband have left Dori with a sense of urgency about any show, even a lactation class.