The Gap Year

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 do 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 where 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 F*cked Cam Over?”

“I’m voting for Martin Could Be the Biggest A*shole 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—”

“You are not fine! You stole your college money.”

“That was my money.”

I am livid at her unapologetic entitlement. “That money was not yours. That money was for college.”

“It was for my future.”

“A future that you have allowed that … that …” No reason to hold back anymore. “That slimy jerkwad creep to steal.”

“You do not know the first thing about Tyler. He is not who you think he is.”

“So Coach Hines told us.”

“Coach Hines? He’s the jerkwad. Mom, you really, seriously don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“So tell me.”

“I can’t right now, but Tyler did not steal anything. This was completely my idea. I had to talk him into it. Renting a trailer this summer was my idea. We made money and learned how to run a business. Then, later, we learned how to cook real food.”

Those odors I’d smelled on her. I was right.

“A roach coach! That is what you threw all of your college money away on!”

“We also had to pay a year’s lease on the space in advance to negotiate a good price. We had to buy all our equipment. We had to put down utility deposits. It’s expensive to open a business.”

“Business? A freaking roach coach is not a business.”

“See? Just the way you keep saying that. Roach coach. Roach coach. Roach coach. That shows that you do not know what you’re talking about.”

I am almost too mad to think about the heavenly crepe with caramelized onions and chicken that I just ate. Or the mind-expanding tacos. Or the throngs of people shoving big dollars through small windows. I am certainly nowhere close to admitting, even to myself, that I don’t know what I’m talking about.

I start to speak, but Aubrey cuts me off. “That is exactly why I could never have told you about the plan. You would never have let me do this. You would have forced me go to Peninsula.”

“It didn’t have to be Peninsula. Aubrey, you never even talked to me about any of this. Told me how you felt.”

“What was the point? So you could make fun of it like you’ve always made fun of the only places where I remotely fit in?”

“I have never made fun of—”

“Band! Attendance office! The lunch wagon! Shit, you and Dori made fun of me for keeping my room neat.”

“For God’s sake, Aubrey, I made a couple of lame jokes about your band hat.”

“I’m sorry if I’ve been a big disappointment and that I’m not off singing in cathedrals or mapping the human genome or any of those other things you think I should be doing. I’m sorry that it turns out that this is what I’m good at. What I like.”

“You don’t know what you like. That’s what college is for.”

“For a lot of kids, maybe most, yeah. For me, if I had let you force me into going to Peninsula—which you somehow would have if I’d started talking to you about it—I would have hated it and flunked out and that money would be gone and I would have nothing.”

It’s disconcerting to hear Aubrey talk about me as some kind of unstoppable force in her life when it has been over a year since she even seemed able to hear me.

“This is so not what I had in mind for you. You do realize that, if I made this a legal matter, the law would be on my side.”

Then, with an unsettling calm, she says, “Yeah, it probably would.”

Maybe she’d take my threat more to heart if I’d actually called the police that first time she disappeared. Or maybe we’d have just devolved into a Jerry Springer–ready mother-daughter duo radiating hatred at each other.

I read once that it takes fourteen miles for an oil tanker to change course. The same change for mothers and daughters must take a nearly equal number of years. But in all those miles and years there does come one precise moment, one discrete point in an infinite vastness, when you start heading in an entirely new direction. I know that, for better or for worse, Aubrey and I have hit that moment when instead of arguing with me, fighting to convince me to accept what she wants, she states in a steady, even way that doesn’t ask for my permission or seem ready to bristle when I don’t offer it, “Mom, I have to go. We have to get ready for the opening.”

“Where, Aubrey? Tell me where you are. I need to see you. Make sure you’re all right.”

“I’d really rather not say. I’ll invite you when we’ve got the kinks smoothed out. But I’m too nervous now and you take my strength away. I have to go. Sorry.”

She hangs up. Before I even have a chance to be hurt by Aubrey telling me I take her strength away, the phone rings again.

“Mrs. Lightsey.” It’s Tyler. He’s whispering. “Come to Town Square. But, you know, just for a look. Don’t let her see you, okay?”

“Thank you, Tyler.”

“I know that the money was for college. Not what we used it for. We’re going to pay you back. With interest.”

I’m not sure why, at that moment, I look over at Martin, who has wandered off and is studying our old house and the cartoon-colored bungalows around it. Probably because of treacherous, atavistic brain wiring of the sort that made cavewomen look to their mates, the upper-body-strength ones, when a saber-toothed tiger approached, I think of him working Coach Hines and Randy. Whatever the reason, I’m strangely confident when I say, “Oh, there is no question about that, Tyler Moldenhauer. You will pay back every single cent.”





DECEMBER 12, 2009



As the sunset fades and the sky goes black, I flip over onto my stomach, prop my head on my hands like a third grader at story time, and ask Tyler to tell me, one more time, my favorite bedtime story. The one that answers the question, “Why me?”

“You’re beautiful, you’re smart, and you have a soul.”

“Madison is beautiful, and she got into Duke.”

“Right. And the soul part?”

We laugh. We are pretty much laughing at everything.

“I also like that you never wore brand names.”

“But I did. I started wearing brand names for you.”

“Yeah, I noticed those Nike shorts and I liked that too. That’s hard work, fitting in. I knew you were doing it for me.”

“How did you know that?” I play-slap at him like I used to when it was the only way I had to touch him.

“I knew. Plus you totally had the booty for them.”

“Really?”

“Oh. Really.”

He slides his hand down and pats my butt. I guess I have to thank Shupe and all that marching for something, because my butt is as springy as a bag of Gummi Bears. He strokes my hair; his fingers catch it, pull it into a fan, then let it fall slowly.

“What did you mean when you said that you wanted it to be different with us?”

“Different in every way.”

The rumble as he answers, my chest against his, makes me think of the girl I was with my head against his heart that first time and how long ago that seems. A lifetime ago.

“Different in the important ways.”

“But how? Different from what?”

“You do not want to hear any more of Tyler Moldenhauer’s loser redneck stories.”

“Don’t say that. Don’t talk about yourself like that.”

The wall heater clicks as it switches on. Out on the highway a car passes with a stereo playing so loud the bass pulses through us. “You know those vampire books that all the girls are reading now?”

“Oh, yeah, right. Twilight? Or something like that.”

“That’s how I always felt. I felt like a vampire.”

“You want to drink my blood,” I joke, tilting my head to offer my neck to Tyler, wanting his mouth there.

“Well, that goes without saying. But it’s the other part. That the vampires have lived forever and they’re older than everyone else and will always be older. That’s how I always felt. I mean, I was older. But it was more than that. I always had to pretend to be ignorant. Especially about girls.”

“Girls? You were pretending about girls? God, you’re a good pretender.”

He traps me in his arms, rolls over on top of me, his hair making a curtain that encloses both of us, moves against my crotch so that I can feel him. “Yeah, I may have to start pretending again right now.”

I brush his hair back from his face and hook it behind his ears. Him talking about us together is as good as sex. Better. “No, really, tell me. About vampires. About us being different.”

He flops back onto the pillow. “You know, all that locker-room shit that starts, like, in grade school or something?”

“Uh, not really.”

“At first, it’s just guys bragging or lying about touching some girl’s tit, scoring a hand job. Shit like that. But it made me feel about a thousand years old. I always wished I could be like them, wanting sex so much, wanting to touch a girl, just touch one, but you were so scared that you had to either lie or laugh about it with a bunch of dumb a-holes even more clueless than you were.”

“But you weren’t.”

“Clueless? Way I grew up? Foster care? Ah, no. Jesus, hand jobs? I blew past hand jobs in kindergarten. Those group homes they toss kids into?” He makes a face, starts to say something, stops. “Someone should go to prison just for what they let happen there; forget the shit they personally do themselves.”

“What? What did they do to you?” I think about things I’d heard on the news. About the things that happen to kids in foster care. I think about Tyler as a little boy with no one watching out for him.

He studies me, makes a decision. “No, not that part. I don’t want you to ever know that part. Being with you. Like how we were at the quarry? It’s like none of that ever happened. It’s like everything was the way it was supposed to be. Like I was a regular kid who’d had a mom who told him if he wasn’t home at this exact time she’d blister his behind for him if he was two minutes late. Then he’d go home and there’d be sheets on the bed and she’d hold up two things for dinner and ask him if he wanted chicken pot pie or steak fingers. And he’d pick the steak fingers. Then she’d make him eat peas with it. Help him with his spelling words. Make him turn the TV off, brush his teeth. All that shit. All of it.”

“I’ll make you eat peas.”

“I knew that you would.”

“Really? How did you know?”

“I just knew. Right from the beginning I knew.”





SATURDAY, AUGUST 14, 2010



Town Square is Parkhaven’s cheesy attempt at a downtown. The last time I visited here was almost ten years ago. Back then it had been an empty block with a few saplings no one had even bothered to remove the nursery tags from, surrounded on three sides by vacant stores abandoned after the tourists that they’d planned to sell fudge, T-shirts, and wind chimes to failed to materialize. There was a swing, but Aubrey and I were always alone playing on it and that had depressed me so much that I made a point of avoiding Town Square. A fact that Aubrey was well aware of.

As Martin and I approach, it is clear that Town Square is not quite so dire any longer. It certainly isn’t deserted. Signs of life abound. The scrubby trees have grown into broad-leafed oaks shading the park where a pack of boys in droopy shorts and thick-soled tennis shoes perform skateboard tricks on the sidewalks. Moms sit around on benches while their offspring romp on safety-engineered play equipment. Businesses have opened on the streets around the park: a card shop, a coffee shop with a display case of cookies and muffins in the window, an antique store, a Thai restaurant, a shop advertising custom tilework, and a clothes store with a rack of summer dresses marked for clearance displayed on the sidewalk.

The block at the far end of the park is still vacant except for an overgrowth of weeds and one single, solitary vintage Airstream trailer. Even shaded by the tall oaks, the polished aluminum pill bug’s mirror finish shines like a huge, segmented silver bead. In spite of the new life around Town Square, the trailer is still too shiny, too hip for Parkhaven. A Grand Opening banner flaps bravely above the trailer. A few twinkle lights twined over the trailer’s humped arc try for a festive touch. After the genuine gaiety of the street-fair atmosphere in Sycamore Heights, they seem forced and unconvincing.

We park out of sight and sneak in on foot for a closer look. Never taking his eyes off the trailer, Martin points to our right like the leader of a reconnaissance patrol silently signaling to his men, and we tack off at an angle that will keep us out of Aubrey’s sight lines.

We hide behind the racks of sale items outside the clothes store for a long time while Martin watches a form that I know to be Aubrey, moving about inside the trailer. Within the shiny frame of the silver window she moves with efficient grace, doing things I never taught her to do, off on a field trip I never signed a permission slip for.

Martin is mesmerized, grinning as he watches his daughter for the first time in sixteen years. He doesn’t seem to notice that there is no one, not one single customer, outside the trailer.