The Gap Year

FRIDAY, AUGUST 13, 2010



I run back into the house to get the trust agreement. In the short time I’ve been gone, the house has stopped being mine. When I step into the great room, it’s as if I’d just walked in for the first time with the Realtor, lifted my face to the high windows far above me, put my hand on my pregnant belly, and fallen in love with the weightless feeling of a room with a ceiling I couldn’t have touched standing on a chair.

The great room.

I traded Aubrey’s life, the life she should have had in the city with a swirling tribe of creative, diverse friends who had creative, diverse moms, for this. For a great room. The great room and the allegedly great schools had convinced me to talk Martin into moving. If we’d stayed in our tiny duplex in Sycamore Heights, I’d told him, not only would we not have had a great room; she wouldn’t have had a big yard with soft grass where she could run barefoot with friends. Or a safe, quiet street for her to ride her bike on. But the real problem, I’d said, was that Sycamore Heights Elementary was a disaster, with the worst reading scores in the district.

“What do you think?” I’d asked Martin the first time he’d set foot in this cathedral-ceilinged room. I’d already previewed dozens of houses and narrowed the choices down to two. That was two too many for Martin. Still, I’d managed to drag him out to have a look.

He’d glanced around, his expression stunned, distracted, and answered, “Good. Seems good. I guess.”

To which I had wanted to scream, Could you be any less involved? Like it or not, buddy, we’re having a child.

But since the Realtor in her navy blue knit jacket with gold buttons was hovering beside us, all I’d said was, “The schools are excellent.” I hoped Martin would see the same picture in his mind I had in mine of Sycamore Heights Elementary. The rust stains beneath the rain gutters and splintery play equipment the parents had put together themselves and set on a field of hard dirt. Parkhaven Elementary was brand-new and had a safety-engineered playscape nestled on giant, spongy, head-injury-preventing mats made from recycled tires.

Martin was not convinced.

“We can be at Gwock’s in twenty minutes.” I named our favorite Mexican dive. We loved their margaritas and guacamole. “What’s twenty minutes? A couple of songs on the radio? An NPR commentary?”

Martin had nodded and said nothing. He didn’t want to move. He didn’t want to have a baby. He didn’t even want to admit to not wanting those things. He wanted to read the Gnostic Gospels and Edgar Cayce and the Bhagavad Gita and The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Which had become much less charming than it was on a train traveling through Morocco with all the time in the world to take a detour up to Spain and stay for weeks in a cheap hotel getting high and making love.

After we’d viewed the house in Parkhaven, our dinky duplex in Sycamore Heights felt like a cave, a claustrophobic, airless den. “Where will we put a crib?” I’d moaned. “A high chair? A swing?”

“Do we need all those things? Right away?”

“We will, and I can’t move with an infant. We need a settled place to bring our baby home to.”

Martin had nodded, still not convinced. But, at the time, high on hormones, I was sure enough for both of us. “Look,” I’d argued, “house prices are skyrocketing. If nothing else, this will be a great investment, and if we don’t like it, we’ll sell, make a nice profit, and move back to the city.”

We bought the house. We moved out of Sycamore Heights and into Parkhaven.

The drive was never twenty minutes. Traffic seemed to double every few months. Plus, after Aubrey was born and the colic kicked in, twenty minutes was all the time in an entire day that I had to myself. Twenty minutes was either a shower and brushing my teeth or reading one-half of a magazine. I had dreamed of being one of those moms who slung her baby into a piece of kente cloth, then headed out for the early show. Instead, I became a pack animal. It was a sherpa-level effort just to gather up the diapers, wipes, change of clothes, bottles, formula, ice packs for the bottles and formula, sunscreen, diaper rash ointment. Then, the few times that I could muster the energy and organization to get us out the door and put up with Aubrey—who never really made peace with the car seat—howling through the car ride, I’d arrive to discover that I’d forgotten my purse. Or the one pacifier that would soothe her. Or something. Always something.

After the colic siege ended, Aubrey and I did manage a few trips into the city so that she could clamber around on the oversize hamster tubes at the children’s museum and throw stale bread to the ducks in the lake, but we came as visitors. The city no longer felt like mine, and it had never been Aubrey’s.

Those arduous, early months when I failed at everything—trips into the city, nursing, marriage—were one of the reasons I became a lactation consultant. Therapists would say it was my compulsion to reenact this drama in order to “get it right,” master it, make it turn out the way it should have. Maybe. But no matter how many classes I teach I still end up divorced and living in Sprawlandia.

It takes me a few minutes of searching through my hopeful stockpile of off-to-college items to remember that I had squirreled the trust documents away in a special spot on my bookshelf between The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding and a journal with an article I intend to read about inducing lactation in the female transsexual. I grab the papers, check the reassuring words at the top—“Irrevocable Trust Agreement”—carefully fold the packet into my purse, and run back to the car.

I take a shortcut to the hospital that leads me through a neighborhood I haven’t entered for years. Before I can even consciously recall why, I remember that, in fact, I have done all I could for Aubrey’s immune system: As Recent Studies advise, I did let her play with livestock.

It was Aubrey’s first-grade field trip to Pioneer Farm. Aubrey had asked me so many times when I was going to be a room mother, or bring cupcakes, or read to the class like all the other moms, that I’d signed up to drive. I couldn’t exactly explain to Aubrey about how some moms had to work while others just got to stay at home and worry about which spinning class to take.

It turned out that Madison Chaffee was one of the three little girls—Paige and Kelsey were already strapped in the back—assigned to ride with us. This, the neighborhood I’m driving through now, is Madison’s neighborhood. That field trip started to go wrong when Joyce came out of her Tara-columned house in her dry-cleaned jeans and a celery-colored sweater, with expensive highlights gleaming in her hair. It was the first time Joyce and I had been face-to-face since Aubrey and I were dropped from her pool-mom gatherings.

“Cam! How have you been?” Joyce had greeted me with a high-pitched effusiveness that made me remember that she’d been a sorority girl.

When Joyce went to set up Madison’s booster seat, it was bad enough that one of the back doors on the old Corolla I drove at that time was broken and that I had to redirect Joyce to the functioning one. But did that side of the car have to have a stalagmite of bird shit crusted on top? After loading her daughter up with enough Fruit Gushers and Goldfish to cross the Kalahari, Joyce had pointed to the other two girls already strapped in the backseat and told me, “You can just drop Paige and Kelsey off back here after the field trip.”

But not Aubrey? I wanted to ask. You’re having a playdate and not inviting my little girl?

The pain of that rejection was exponentially stunning: It was the pain I knew Aubrey would feel when the other three girls skipped off to a playdate that did not include her, multiplied by not only my own rejection as a fit Parkhaven mother, but by every slight I had ever endured in my own life. The experience showed me that the instant she gives birth, all the defenses a person has built up in her entire adult life are stripped away.

Consequently, Joyce’s unkindness, and the $115 I was losing by not teaching my usual Tuesday-morning class, were what I was dwelling on while Aubrey fed a pink piglet from a bottle. I wasn’t really paying attention to any of it. Not the smell of wet hay. Not that the piglet had a spot of gray over his right eye. Or how the sunlight shining through his ears gave them a salmon-colored glow. Not how the hood of her pink parka trimmed in fake white fur had fallen down, and staticky strawberry blonde hair floated around her face in the dry winter air. Or how her lips were chapped to a perfect, tender red, and tiny, saw-toothed ridges of white enamel glinted in the space left where her two front baby teeth once were. Or even how Aubrey shrieked with delight as the piglet power-sucked down the milk, almost tugging the bottle from her hand.

And then, without a single connecting thought, I switch from regret–time traveling to creating alternate universes. In this new and improved version of “Piglet,” I am actually fully present at that field trip. Instead of toggling from imagining Joyce Chaffee with a meat cleaver buried in her thoughtless, behighlighted head to wondering how I am going to pay my property taxes on what I make as a lactation consultant, I am focused entirely on Aubrey as she feeds that baby pig. This time around I savor her joy like crème brûlée and notice that for just one second, piglet and girl, their eyes shut in contented slits, wear identical expressions of bliss. In this version of Childhood Done Right, Aubrey has two straight-arrow parents like Madison and Paige and Kelsey do, instead of a crazed single mom driving around in the Bird Shit Mobile encouraging women to flash their boobs in public, and a father who has joined a cult. Aubrey is the girl all the moms want for playdates.

I speed out of Joyce Chaffee’s neighborhood, check my phone, and see that I forgot to turn it back on. When I power it back up, the phone plays cheerful notes, alerting me that I have a message. I hit the “voice mail” button, praying it will be Aubrey but expecting the freaked-out preemie dad.

After some electronic sputtering, I hear the message, clear as a bell: “Cam. Sorry, reception is impossible. I’ve finally got a signal, but I don’t know how long it will last, so I’ll cut to the chase. I hope that you’re back from your trip to Europe, because I need to warn you that there might be … I’m not saying there will be, but there might be a problem with the trust. So you and Aubrey should probably get over to the bank as soon as—”

Scattered words blip in and out, then nothing.





OCTOBER 26, 2009



The next day, after getting dragged to a couple of classes meant to show how open and cool all the professors are, sitting next to my mom who won’t stop beaming at all this open coolness, I snap and Inner Bitch reemerges. The thought of spending four more minutes in this place, much less four years, freaks me out so much that I can’t breathe. Literally. I get such a bad asthma attack that Mom wants to take me to the hospital until I get enough breath to tell her to calm the eff down.

She and Dori have pretty much made it that I have to drop the F-bomb to get taken seriously. Still, Mom lets me spend the rest of the day at the motel and she has a great time going to all the sample classes.





OCTOBER 27, 2009



Too much of the asthma medicine combined with my usual too much thinking keeps me awake most of the night so that I am a total crab by the time we drive to the airport.

Mom, meanwhile, continues with her one-woman-show monologue all fakethusiastically, like an old-pro actress playing to a bad audience, until she finally gives up and asks, “Can we just start over today? Is that possible? I was up most of the night trying to figure out what I am doing wrong, and I remembered how your grandmother used to drive me crazy.

“I hated everything about her. I hated the way she chewed, and put on lipstick. I hated the way she smelled. I hated it when she stared at me like she was looking in the mirror and wasn’t sure about her hair or the outfit she was wearing.”

I don’t say anything, but I hate that my mom assumes that my mood and entire being are totally determined by her. I also hate the way she chews. I hate the way she puts on lipstick. And I really hate it when she stares at me the way she is right now, like she is looking in the mirror and isn’t sure about her hair or the outfit she is wearing.

“Anyway, I know that it’s all part of the separation process. I guess that the closer you are, the more it hurts. With you and me. The single mother/daughter, it’s even more intense. Maybe I wanted too much closeness because I didn’t have that with my mother. My mother, your grandmother Rose, and I, we were never … We were always such very, very different people. And then she was sick so much of the time when I was growing up. Maybe I was closer to Bobbi Mac, your great-grandmother, because I never had to go through the whole separation process with her. God, I wish you could have known her.”

She starts to get sniffly, the way she always does when she brings up the legendary Bobbi Mac. Fortunately, she reins herself in and goes on. “For a while I thought that, maybe, your father’s family might, you know, fill in.”

This is another story I know too well. I pray that she won’t retell the sad tale of her schlepping me to visit Dad’s family back when I was too young to remember and how his super-Catholic parents were all griefstricken about their son joining this weirdo cult and for some bizarre reason they blamed her for not being able to hold on to her man. As if she’d driven him to leave us.

Thinking about grandparents who never really wanted to know their own grandchild makes me wonder how bad it must have been for Dad to have had them as parents.

By the time I tune back into my mom, she is telling her favorite story, the one about meeting my father on the train in Morocco and seeing strange tribal people and eating strange tribal food.

“That’s all that I want for you, sweetie.” Her voice has that icky wobble that means she just might start bawling in the hopes that her tears will melt my callous-bitch heart. “I just want you to have adventures. Adventures like my grandmother had. Even the adventures that all kids used to have when we’d go out the front door first thing in the morning and not come home till after dark and our parents didn’t know where we were. We were with our friends, riding bikes, building forts, getting sunburns, mosquito bites, breaking our arms. I hate it that you never had a friend whose house you could walk to. That no kid has ever knocked on our door and asked if you could come out and play.”

“Sorry I’m such a pathetic loser.”

“No! No, that’s not what I mean. It’s not your fault. It’s Parkhaven. It’s always been Parkhaven. I thought it would be kid paradise. Then, once we were stuck there, I realized that, yeah, there are lots of kids, but they are all in Mommy and Me or select soccer or Space Camp. Or something. I was stunned. Honest to God, you could see more children on Wall Street than you could out playing in our neighborhood. Anyway, this is your chance to start your life.”

I want to thank her for negating my entire childhood and pretty much everything that made me me, but that would definitely have made her cry.

“To meet new people,” she adds.

Meet new middle-class white people with parents who never got over being hippies.

“To have adventures.”

Have your adventures.

“Aubrey, don’t shut me out. Please, I love you more than anyone on this earth. I want to know you. I want to know what’s in your beautiful brain.”

Yeah, right. Just so long as it happens to be exactly what is in your brain.

“Please, can’t we talk?”

“Sure, Mom.” Then, because I have been, I say, “I’m sorry I’ve been so churlish.”

At the word “churlish,” Dad’s signature word, she whips her head in my direction so fast it’s like she just got an electric shock. Dad must have still been using the word when they met. She studies me until I get scared and have to say, “Uh, Mom, the road,” because we’re driving on the shoulder.

Her reaction pretty much confirms my suspicion that if I utter one wrong word, she will know everything. I also see really clearly how upset the slightest mention of my father would make her.

We drive in silence for a long time and the car fills up with her sadness. I stare out at a drizzly, gray world that looks like the inside of an oyster and try to think of something to talk about to comfort her, to get her bubbly mood back, even if it was fake. But honestly I can’t think of one thing to say.





FRIDAY, AUGUST 13, 2010



Get the f*ck out!” Dori squeals when I tell her that Martin called. Really called. That it really was him.

We’re sitting in the parking lot of Parkhaven Medical Center while I figure out what to do. “He said he hoped I was back from my trip to Europe.”

“Was he kidding? Does he know that the only trip you’ve taken in the last ten years was the College Tour from Hell?”

“It wasn’t that bad.”

“ ‘Trip to Europe’? Does Martin have a really bad sense of humor?”

“Actually, he had a good sense of humor. Before Next. Forget Martin’s sense of humor; he said there might be a problem at the bank.”

“Call him! Call him! Call him!”

I try. Several times, but don’t get through.

Dori gasps in wonderment. “You just heard from the love of your life for the first time in sixteen years.”

“Dori, calm down, okay? This is not an episode of Gossip Girl, and who said he was the love of my life?”

“You. On more than one occasion.”

“Had there been drinking beforehand?”

“There is always drinking beforehand with us. Um gee!” she bursts out, her abbreviation for the abbreviation “OMG.” “Do you remember that article I e-mailed you?”

“Dori, you e-mail me roughly half a dozen articles a day. I don’t always have time to catch up on Cosmo’s ‘Seventy-five Crazy-Hot Sex Moves.’ ”

“No, the one about rekindled romances.”

“Dori, please.”

“Seriously, this researcher wrote about why Classmates-dotcom and Facebook and all these sites where you reconnect with old sweethearts are causing this epidemic of divorces. A person’s first big love gets stored in the brain in the exact same place as crack cocaine does and just even seeing the old flame’s picture on Facebook can, like, reactivate the addiction. So are you all rekindled?”

“Dori, no kindling. No crack. Okay? I have got to focus.”

“No, really. This is all true. The researcher did a whole study on it and found out that the most amazing thing is that these couples who get back together, you know, leave their wives and husbands of thirty years for their first big love, have incredibly successful relationships with the first love. I mean, it’s a delusion, but a delusion that totally works in the real world. So are you blown away? You seem blown away.”

“Dori, you’re not following the plot here: There is a very real possibility that something has happened to my daughter’s college fund.”

“You don’t know that. Maybe he was just checking to make sure you got the money.”

“He said there was a problem.”

“Where was he calling from?”

“He didn’t say. Sounded like he was driving. I heard traffic.”

I hit Aubrey’s number. For roughly the thousandth time, her voice mail picks up and I scream at the phone, “Answer, damn you!”

Dori states the obvious: “Call Tyler the Defiler.”

I hesitate. Not just because Tyler is the last person on earth I want to talk to, but because when, under great duress, I did manage to extract his number, Aubrey made me swear that I would use it only under very precise circumstances. Like if I were bound and gagged in the trunk of a kidnapper’s car. For the past six months, Aubrey has done everything in her power to keep Tyler and me as far apart as possible.

I dial his number and, of course, it’s straight to voice mail. I put his message on speakerphone for Dori to hear, and slump back as I wait for whatever cocky, football-hero attempt at lame humor will follow. I predict white-boy ghetto wannabe, “wigger,” as Aubrey so charmingly calls such poseurs. Instead, we hear a polite young man tell us, “Hello, you have reached the number of Ty-Aub Enterprises.”

Dori pops her eyes, mouths, Ty-Aub Enterprises?

“Please leave a number and one of us will return your call as soon as possible.”

I press the phone to my mouth. “Tyler, this is Aubrey’s mother. I need her to call me right now! Immediately. There might be a problem at the bank. So, seriously, when you get this have her call me. Stat.”

I hang up. “ ‘Ty-Aub Enterprises’? That delusional a*shole has upgraded his goddamn roach coach to ‘enterprises.’ God, I hate that cocky little bastard.” I calm down, turn to Dori. “So, you up for coming with me to drag Aubrey to the bank?”

“Absolutely.”

“Thanks for being on my side.”

“Is there any other?”

We drive in silence as I beeline along the fastest route to the roach coach. A horn honks when I cut a pickup off. I wiggle through a yellow light, then floor it, blasting down the road, swerving from lane to lane, passing nothing but an endless loop of Best Buy–Ross–Home Depot–Joe’s Crab Shack–TJMaxx–Best Buys.

A person looks at his or her surroundings in completely different ways depending upon whether they are temporary or permanent. Parkhaven, for the eighteen years we’ve lived here, has been softened for me by the gauzy scrim of impermanence. It was just the place Aubrey and I had to be to get her an education good enough that she’d never have to live in a place with no sidewalks, where no one knew their neighbors, and all physical activity started with loading children into a minivan. With that scrim now in danger of being ripped away, with Aubrey’s college escape plan threatened, Parkhaven’s awfulness hits me in a whole new way and I speed up even more.

“Uh, just FYI,” Dori says, gripping the sides of her seat. “That light? The one you just barreled through? It was red. A deep, dark, hemorrhaging, corpuscle red.”

I recognize in a distant, abstract way that if Dori Chotzinoff is scared, I should slow down, but I am too intent on my mission. I nod without taking my mind off passing a dump truck overloaded with gravel.

Pebbles are ricocheting off my windshield when Dori asks, “So?”

Even though I know exactly what she means, I say, “So what?”

“Oh, come on. Any tingles?”

“Dori, please, this really is not the time.”

That’s what I say, but I am remembering the split second after Martin said, “Cam.” Before the more orderly parts of my brain had processed what was going on, there were, in fact, nothing but tingles. Massive, heart-stopping tingles. Colossally irritating, humiliating tingles that I will never acknowledge.

I blast past the truck. It is several miles before I warn Dori, “Look, when—if—if he calls back, there will be lying.”

“God, of course. Will it be of the I-am-surrounded-by-hot-hunky-lovers-lining-up-to-kill-for-what-you-tossed-away variety or the my-life-without-you-has-been-an-impeccable-dream version?”

“The impeccable-dream one.”

“Great. In that case, Aubrey is all packed and ready and eager to go to college and she has a major picked out and her roommate has already invited her to spend Thanksgiving with her family on Cape Cod.”

“Yeah, the Cape Cod version. Sign me up for that one.”