The Gap Year

by Sarah Bird

  Then he goes directly back to slurping slurps of such blithe obliviousness that I demand, “What? You think you apologize and sixteen years disappear? Martin, you’re not some televangelist who blubbers on TV and tells everyone how sorry he is for sleeping with whores and Boy Scouts and Shetland ponies and all is forgiven.”

  “I didn’t ever think I was. And I didn’t realize you knew about the ponies.”

  Without a word, Martin hands me the shaved ice and I slide the cupcake toward him. We always did this, shared bites. You get one, I’ll get the other, and we’ll split.

  He holds the cupcake up, asking if I want the rest. I shake my head, he finishes it, and says, “Move back to Sycamore Heights.”

  “Right.” The shaved ice is cold and sweet.

  “No, seriously.”

  I gasp at the condescension of his ridiculous oversimplification; he is as bad as Dori.

  “Why not? No doubt you’re underwater in Parkhaven. You either take some lowball offer on the house or just mail the keys back to the bank. Jingle mail. Happens all the time now. Then move. There’s enough from the car sale—”

  “Car theft. Yeah, that’s a great idea. Next traces that money back to me—”

  “Next will never come after you. Or me. Or Aubrey. I have guaranteed that.” He speaks with Next’s laser-lock intensity. “Nobody as high up as me has ever defected. I’ve counseled every major celebrity in their stable. They know that the papers and talk shows will be lining up to interview me if I ever go public. I could seriously mess with them and half a dozen of the biggest careers in Hollywood. They will never risk that. Never.”

  “Okay, let’s just say that that’s true. I now have a college fund to replace in case you haven’t noticed.”

  He leans forward, excited, hooked on his own idea. “Right, right, sure. But try this: You give the house back and, since the trust is now gone, you have nothing on the books and the financial aid rolls in. You rent in Sycamore Heights or buy the cheapest place you can get into.”

  “It’s a teensy, tiny bit more complicated than that.”

  “Cam, I know your thoughts on my work, but this is a big part of what I was doing for all those years. Helping people visualize what they want, and then actualizing that. I’ve strategized entire Oscar-winning careers.”

  “ ‘Oscar-winning careers.’ ” I snort. “Yeah, that’s what I need help with.”

  Martin ignores my sneering. “What you want is insanely easy. And, P.S., the housing bubble has burst, so we could not be having this discussion at a better time. Especially since you’re buying, not selling.

  “Look.” He directs my attention to the For Sale sign in front of a house down the street. “They’ve still got the asbestos siding on it. You think those owners aren’t scared? Wouldn’t take a lowball offer? Seriously, Camille, if it would make you happy, you could have that house. Just go with me for a moment and visualize yourself back here. Beats worrying about a situation we can do absolutely nothing about at the moment, doesn’t it? I mean, all we can do now is wait for Aubrey to call.”

  Though I intend to resist, a vision of me in the neighborhood I never should have left, where I should have raised Aubrey, where Martin and I were happy, fills my head. All these years, it was the dream I had left behind. The dream I hadn’t even really analyzed because it was so impossible. But now, sitting here with the hot cash in my shaved ice–chilled hands, I consider the idea. The “good school” concerns that had imprisoned me in Parkhaven are over. I could actually get many more clients in the city than in Parkhaven. And it’s not as if I’d have many emotional connections to uproot.

  A realization hits me: I could do it. I could actually move.

  DECEMBER 12, 2009

  For a motel cabin by the side of the highway, the room isn’t horrible. The windows rattle when an eighteen-wheeler passes, the carpet is done in a pattern like pepperoni pizza, and the paintings—a mill on a stream, a pelican in front of a beach sunset—are bolted to the wall. But it is clean and there are no gross smells.

  Tyler goes in. I hesitate at the door and wonder what I have done. He takes my hand, rubs it between his. “You sure about this?”

  No.

  “You can change your mind.”

  I step in and shut the door behind us. Tyler closes the curtains, blocking the view of the giant red arrow sign outside that is shooting right at us, and the room gets dark. He adjusts the thermostat on the wall heater until it switches on and the coils heat up and glow orange like a fireplace.

  We stand in front of it without touching. Tyler puts his arms out. I look at his fingers, knowing now that, like his teeth, his hands were ruined when he was very young.

  He opens his jacket and rolls me into it so that I am between him and the heater. He says, “Heat sandwich.”

  The coils ping in the silence. I wish I had a week, a month, to figure out what to say. But I don’t, so I say the first stupid thing that pops into my head: “I think you’re brave.”

  “Brave? What’s brave about being a complete and total fraud? About never, not for one day, not to one person, telling the truth about who you really are?”

  I tilt away so that I can look up into his face. “That is so wrong. Think about all the guys who hang out at Paige’s. Cody. Colt. All of them. They got it all, the whole eighteen-course banquet handed to them on a platter. All they had to do was pick up a silver spoon and start eating. You, you …” I try to figure out how to say this. “It’s like you had to grow the wheat and harvest it and grind it and bake it into bread. Like you had to earn your place at the table by building the whole damn table.”

  “Did I grow the trees?”

  Tyler’s joking, but I’m serious when I answer, “You absolutely grew the trees.”

  “Did I chop them down and mill them?”

  “Yes! You chopped them down and milled them and set the table and … everything, Tyler. Everything most kids get handed, all the stuff parents are supposed to do, you had to do it all yourself.”

  “Thanks, A.J. That’s sweet of you to say.”

  “Tyler, no. It’s not sweet. I’m not saying this right, but, listen, could a single one of those guys—Cody, Colt, any of them—could they have survived in the world you came from? Could they have made it through a single day with your grandfather? With the Termite Queen?”

  A reluctant smile creeps over his face as he imagines one of the guys in flip-flops and Oakley sunglasses bucking bales of hay off the back of a flatbed.

  “Is anything you’ve ever done on the football field a lie?”

  “You mean, aside from the fact that I stopped giving a shit about it years ago?”

  “Which makes what you did even more amazing.”

  “Hot,” he says, stepping away from the wall heater. He tosses his jacket over a chair, tugs off his boots, sprawls out on the bed, pats his right shoulder. “Come here. Right here.”

  I am woozy with wanting to lie down next to him, but still have to say, “I just want you to understand how much this means to me, your telling me the truth about yourself.”

  “There’s more,” he says. “But I’ve been good long enough.” He sits up, takes my hand, pulls me down onto his chest.

  I’ve been with two guys before—Damon Shapiro, a trumpet player and fellow counselor at band camp, and Raj Rodke, the really handsome, really spoiled son of two doctors from India. With both of them, sex had been something I was supposed to like. The “normal, healthy human need” my mom was always talking about. Also I was supposed to know what to do. With Damon and Raj, I felt like I was getting graded and not passing. Those boys had learned everything they knew from watching porn on the Internet. So, in their heads, the girl was supposed to be hairless as a newt, with beach-ball tits bouncing up and down, groaning and begging for harder, faster.

  With Tyler, it is like being at the quarry. We enter suspended animation together. It is clear that he has had a lot of practice with real human girls. He knows what bodies can d
o and how to make them do it so well that that part seems to happen all on its own. There aren’t any words like “Less teeth.” He isn’t imagining that I am a Japanese girl in pigtails and knee socks down on her hands and knees. He is not imagining anyone except me.

  After the second time, he buries his head in my neck and, for a moment, I think that he is crying. Before I can be sure, though, his mouth is on my neck and I can’t tell if the wetness is his tongue or tears. But I know that he is sad and will always be sad. I wrap him in my arms and kiss the top of his head and say what my mother always said. I say that it is all right, that everything will be fine.

  I don’t know when we fall asleep or how much later it is when I wake up. Tyler is heading to the bathroom when I open my eyes. There is a hitch when he walks, a bounce from the arches of his feet that swings upward to his broad shoulders. He is the only person I’ve ever seen who looks better, more relaxed, without clothes.

  He pees with the door open. For a boy with nothing but secrets in his past, he has none in the present. He pushes open a curtain on the small window beside the toilet.

  “Oh, shit, Aubrey Julie, you have got to see this. Close your eyes! Close your eyes!” He rushes back into the room, makes me shut my eyes, then I hear the scrape of rings rattling along the metal rod as he opens the curtains.

  “OK, you can open them now.”

  I do and there is so much beauty framed within the cheap aluminum sides of the motel window that I gasp. The giant red arrow, lighted now and blinking, shoots through a sky that vibrates with colors shimmering and bouncing like the aurora borealis. Compared to this every other sunset I’ve ever seen seems painted on. These colors—swimming-pool aqua, pomegranate ruby, neon green—go all the way through like stained glass.

  “Do you like the sunset I ordered for you?” Tyler stands to the side of the window, the stained-glass colors reflecting across his face and chest.

  “I love it. I want to swim in it.” I reach up and sweep my arms out as if I could breaststroke into the pools of colored light.

  He jumps back into bed. It creaks and rattles when he lands. I rest my head on his chest and we watch the colors fade to deep, shadowy tones that make the room feel snug. Like we are alone together in a submarine on the bottom of the ocean with a view of a world that has been hidden from me until this moment.

  SATURDAY, AUGUST 14, 2010

  Imagine that that house is yours,” Martin prompts, excited, genuinely excited about making me happy. “What colors would you paint that house?”

  I study the gray siding and imagine the colors I would choose. A few seconds later, I freeze, unable to conjure up any combination fantastic enough to enter into the bohemian competition playing out up and down the street. I’d need more time, a lot more time, to pick the palette that would, essentially, express to the world who I am. I am not ready for that level of public declaration.

  “Martin, seriously, it’s not that simple. I wanted to be in Sycamore Heights when Aubrey was little.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Why do you think?” I point to the two women chatting next to the swings while their children play. My voice wobbles when I express the irretrievable. “I could have been part of a community. I could have been around people, women, mothers I had something in common with. Mothers who felt the same way I did.”

  The instant I put my longing into words, I see myself in the circle of my old Sycamore Heights friends, surrounded by the comforting animal smell of users of crystal deodorant, their hair in spikes, dreadlocks, the rockabilly girls in cowboy shirts with the sleeves torn off, interesting shoes, Doc Martens, Converse high tops, the kind of shoes no one in Parkhaven ever wears, all of us nursing infants wrapped in organic cotton receiving blankets, suckling babies in tie-dyed onesies, breast-feeding sturdy toddlers. I’d have been part of a milk sisterhood, a circle of constant, supportive friends, a happy tribe as we watched our children, who were also the closest of friends, grow up together.

  I brace myself for Martin to tell me how this is possible. I can’t wait to ask him how, precisely, with all his Next superpowers, he will travel through time and give me back the childhood Aubrey should have had.

  I turn away and notice that the nursing mother has finished feeding her infant. She buttons her blouse and her “baby” sits up. As he clambers from the sling, I see that this child has to be close to three years old. The instant he climbs down, the older child scales his mother. Mom never stops talking to her friend as she sweeps the sling aside and lets the four-year-old in the POTTY LIKE A ROCK STAR T-shirt plug in.

  This tableau of perfect Sycamore Heights motherhood causes me to recall all the random communications—phone calls, e-mails—I’d had with my amigas over the years since I left the ’hood.

  That loose group of former friends had morphed into a Sycamore Heights Listserv that eventually evolved into a Facebook page. By the time chats with my old mom friends had faded into mass postings, maybe only those with grievances were writing. But at some point it seemed that they all had divided up into teams and staked out positions on pacifiers, circumcision, sugar, war toys, the family bed, cloth diapers, television, strollers. Women who had never competed in their lives, whose last sport had been Red Rover, chose sides. Stands were taken with an inbred Hatfield/McCoy blood feud intensity. Ultimately, even the sacred of sacreds, breast-feeding, became a hot button when a new team emerged proclaiming that nursing was a deeply antifeminist act, a plot to keep women trapped at home.

  Friendships were cremated in the flame wars that erupted around that one.

  I replay Aubrey’s life now if we had lived here and wonder how my daughter with her early, inexplicable passion for all things pink and princess would have done in this hothouse of political correctness. Even in Parkhaven, Dori had chided me about raising a little Barbie doll.

  Dori, my fellow exile. For the first time, now that it is an actual possibility, I imagine myself living in this neighborhood, a neighborhood filled with Dori clones. A neighborhood where—judging from recent postings that I’d not taken seriously until this moment—if you weren’t tattooed up like the Illustrated Man and blogging about the many ways your husband/lover/whoever was begging you for anal sex, you would probably be far weirder than a little armpit-hair ranching had made me in Parkhaven.

  Though I am damned if I will reveal it to Martin, I suddenly feel more like an exile than ever. A homesick exile from some Middle Eastern country who has just recalled that her lost paradise was run by the Taliban. I don’t know what Martin reads in my face, but he says, “You’re a true rebel, Camille.”

  Camille. Again, he summons up the self I had to leave behind.

  “It’s what I loved about you. You always knew exactly who you were and what you wanted.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  Martin, genuinely caught off guard, blinks. “Cam, don’t you remember how Amy and Gianna and that whole Sycamore Heights group used to call you Cammando?”

  “They made up nicknames for everyone.”

  “Yeah. Nicknames that stuck because they were so perfect.”

  “Me? Cammando?”

  “Absolutely. How could you forget that? You made up your mind what you wanted and you went after it.”

  “I did?”

  “Sure. A baby. Good schools. Getting certified. You were the woman with a plan.”

  “We made those decisions together.”

  “Back then? Make a decision? That was my Downfall.”

  Downfall. A tiny pinprick to the brain. Next worms its way in by giving free sessions with their Breathalyzer contraption in which they identify the mark’s “Downfall,” the thing that’s wrong with the person’s life, then promise to cure it.

  “Not you, though,” he continues. “Knowing who you were was always such a given to you. You were my anchor and I held on as long as I could.”

  “Held on? Martin, what was you setting us up in Parkhaven except you letting go? You planting me someplace whe
re you could leave me behind?”

  “Real estate would never have changed what happened to us. What I had to do.”

  “ ‘Had to do’?” I don’t bother restraining the acid in my tone. I put hydrochloric quotation marks around his words.

  “Okay, should the name of this production be Let’s Help Our Daughter or should it be All the Ways Martin Fucked Cam Over?”

  “I’m voting for Martin Could Be the Biggest Asshole in the Universe.” Going beyond sarcasm straight to out-and-out insult is delicious, like wriggling out of a pair of Spanx. Martin seems to take no notice. He’s more Zen than Zen Mama. I can see now why Aubrey hated my mask of implacable calm.

  “I know that you, that we, want her to go to college, but why? What is our root desire for her?”

  “Oh, gosh, I don’t know. Maybe that she won’t end up scrubbing out toilets at Applebee’s. Is that a good ‘root desire’?”

  “Lot of baristas with college degrees. Probably even a few toilet scrubbers. No, what is your dream for her?”

  I almost say “adventures,” but remember how Aubrey chastised me for that and turn the question on him: “What’s yours?”

  Without hesitating, Martin says, “I hope she will have what we ha … had.”

  The drag before he says “had” was Martin catching himself almost saying “have.” That is Martin almost letting it slip that I am as changeable a fabric for him as he is for me. That within my double-faceted weave the iridescent person I was when we first met will always wait, will always sparkle. That is when I realize that I have the same gift he does: We can give each other back our youth. This is the crack cocaine that Dori was talking about, and I am stunned to realize that Martin might be smoking it too.

  My phone rings. I check it, tell Martin, “It’s her.”

  Martin tips his head back and slaps his hand on his chest with relief, then steps away from the table, out of earshot.

  “Aubrey?”

  “I’m fine. Don’t worry. I’m sorry I couldn’t call. But I’m fine so—”