The Gap Year

AUGUST 12, 2009



Since school has not officially started yet, the assistant principal, Miss Chaney, who wears blazers and keeps a walkie-talkie clipped to the belt of her Dockers, takes me to the nurse’s office even though the nurse isn’t there, gives me a cup of lukewarm blue Gatorade, then leaves. I hear her talking to the campus cop about spotting potential signs of gang activity as she walks down the empty hall.

I sip the fake-sweat drink and wonder if it is possible that I hallucinated Tyler Moldenhauer cradling my head in his lap, since, although band completely exists for football, no football player has ever acknowledged the existence of any band geek. Him doing that, helping me, is like Brad Pitt stepping out of the movie Troy, walking into the audience, and giving some random girl a sip of wine from his golden goblet.

I finish the Gatorade and study a chart that shows the bones of the ear. Though I actually feel fine and figure I must have just passed out from sheer boredom, I sit in the nurse’s office and am deciding what my new look for senior year is going to be when Miss Chaney returns and asks, “You OK in here?”

I give her a wan look and shrug.

“Outstanding! Head on back to practice then.”

The thought of going back out to that field makes me sick. Actually, physically ill. When I don’t move, Chaney prompts me, “You don’t need a pass. You’re good to go.”

As if I need her to tell me that. Me, who’s worked in the attendance office for the past three years. She waits for me to jump up and run back out into the heat and dust so that Shupe can march me around. My whole being is so repelled at the thought that I can’t make myself move. She’s still waiting when she’s called away again.

I see my life branch into two paths. One … I don’t know where One leads. But Two, the other, the one where I go back to band practice, is certain to end up with Tyler seeing me at some point in that stupid pirate hat. And no matter what, that must never happen. I go to the nurse’s computer, boot it up, log on with my attendance office aide password, and Google “heatstroke.” When Miss Chaney comes back, I report to her that I am “dizzy, nauseated, weak, disoriented, and having difficulty breathing.”

Her diagnosis is immediate: “Heatstroke. God, how many times do I have to warn Shupe? You require immediate transport to an emergency room. Let’s get a parent or an ambulance over here, stat!”

Since Mom is doing her morning consults at Parkhaven Medical Center, I call Dori. Dori lives to be a bad girl. This will be right up her alley.

“Aubsie Doodle,” she answers on the first ring. “What’s up, buttercup?”

“Mom,” I whimper as Chaney eyes me sharply. “Can you pick me up? Mom? I’m sick. Mom.”

As expected, Dori is rarin’ to go. “Gotcha. A little cutting action, you’re getting a jump on the old senioritis. Hells to the yes.” Dori works so hard at being hip that half the time I don’t know what she is saying. “You shouldn’t be in school in the middle of summer anyway. I am so there. Daughter.”

“She’s on her way,” I whisper to Miss Chaney.

A minute later, Chaney gets a call to “inspect suspected contraband” and rushes off after warning me not to leave until she returns. I am grateful to all the stoner kids who like to spend the summer leaving baggies of grass clippings and oregano planted around the school just to start the year off with Chaney’s paranoia in high gear.

When Dori shows up, I rush her out before Miss Chaney can stop us. Outside, Dori can’t wait to announce, “Welcome to the dark side. Really happy I can help bust you out of Parkhaven Penal Colony. You gonna go hook up with your besties and blaze up or just chill?”

“I actually don’t feel good. I just didn’t want to bother my mom.”

Her hectic eagerness falls away. “Oh.”

Out on the field between us and visitor parking, I can see the team practicing. I step back so that the school building hides me from view and ask, “Can I wait here?” I try to sound especially weak and pitiful.

“Sure, Aubsie. I’ll go get the car.” She is so nice that I feel bad about not wanting to be seen with a woman who has hemoglobin-colored hair and a barbed-wire bracelet tattooed around her arm.

The instant she leaves, I peek around the corner of the building. Through the distance and the dust, a hunched-over player shoves the ball between his knees and Tyler takes it. Everyone on the field—players, coaches, the water boy—they all focus on Tyler as he dances away, pulling his arm back like a Roman javelin thrower or the tribe’s best hunter, the one all the rest depend on for food. He yells orders at the others tramping aimlessly around the field. Pointing with his free arm, he hurls the ball in such a way that it spins as it flies through the heated air, landing in the hands of the exact player he had pointed to.

Dori pulls up in her Toyota RAV4. Still staring at Tyler, I get in and, for one second, Dori watches with me. What the players are doing is suddenly so obvious that I can’t believe I have never seen it before. I take Dori’s silence to be a sign that she is seeing what I am. I am wrong.

She clucks her tongue and goes, “Can they be any more ridiculous? All those steroid cases in their tight pants. Why don’t they just drop trou, whip it out, and decide once and for all whose dick’s the biggest? Just get it over with already. All that butt patting and sticking their hands under each other’s asses. Football is more homoerotic than a gay pride parade in San Francisco.”

Dori automatically assumes that I agree with her. I don’t. For the first time I understand what has been happening right in front of me all these years. Maybe because for a few seconds I was close enough to have heard one beat, I can now see how football lets all those ordinary boys show what is in their hearts: They want to be heroes. They each want to be loved and admired for their courage and skill. They want to be the one who saves the tribe. They want to be the hunter who brings home the deer, the warrior who slays the enemy. Or, at least, they want to help the one who does. What is wrong with that?

As we drive away, I wonder what it would have been like to grow up in the polygamy part of the Mormon Church believing that the Lord wants your mom to be one of fifteen wives and that it is holy and righteous that you are going to get married off as soon as you have your first period. To believe that your way is right and that the rest of the world—the normal world—is deluded and doomed to burn in hell, and that the normal world persecutes you only because they haven’t been saved. Or are reading the Bible wrong. Or are secretly jealous.

Then one day, something happens, and you see that everything you were taught to believe your entire life is wrong. You see that the whole time you were the deluded one.





THURSDAY, AUGUST 12, 2010



In the locker room, hands still dripping, I fumble with the lock in my haste to get to my cell phone and see if Aubrey has returned any of my half-dozen increasingly shrill messages. I fish the phone out and, of course, there are no messages. I punch in her number. When, as usual, it goes straight to voice mail, I clench the phone, and my fist hovers two inches from the locker as I fight the impulse to smash it to pieces.

I calm myself and send a text message. Cursing my spastic thumbs, I type, CLA ME NOW!! HV 2 GET $$$ 2MRW!!! MST IMPT DAY OF YR FILE!!!

I peel off my wet swimsuit and am standing naked in front of the locker when a woman in a tankini with a slenderizing tummy panel spots me and squeals, “The boob whisperer!”

I wince and consider not answering. I should strike a blow for the dignity of my profession and ask her to please not refer to me or to any lactation consultant as a boob whisperer. Or even her bosom buddy. But she’s already rushing over, wailing, “Oh, Cam, you are just the person I need to talk to!” She yanks a shoulder strap down, scoops her left breast out of its cup, and holds it up for my inspection.

I can’t recall the woman’s name, but remember her raisin-colored areola and writing “dense tissue” on her chart. A ring of raw, badly chapped skin outlines her nipples.

“Oh, sweetie,” I coo. “Todd does not like whatever it is that you’re doing now.” Even though all the moms become Sweetie, I can almost always recall their babies’ names. I see Todd and his mother together again as they were when I visited her at her house a few days after delivery and found her weeping in despair, and it comes back to me: infant with a small mouth, mom with dense breast tissue.

“It’s painful, isn’t it?”

“What am I doing wrong?” Her eyebrows arch together in anxious pleading. “I’m not making enough milk, am I?”

Kristin. Amazingly, out of all the thousands of names, I recall hers. If only I had that level of command in other areas of my life. Like with Aubrey.

“Kristin, no, don’t stress about that. I’ve seen about a thousand moms a year for the past fifteen years, and do you know how many couldn’t make enough milk? Four. I am not worried at all about your supply.”

Kristin nods, relaxing a bit.

Always looking for the teachable moment, I ask rhetorically, “Todd is not getting a good latch, is he? And so, in spite of your more than adequate supply, he’s not getting full. And he struggles when he nurses. And that tires him out. And he falls asleep. And you can’t bring yourself to rouse him. But then when he wakes up he’s too frantic to nurse right.”

“Yes!” Relief floods Kristin’s face and she looks at me as if I’m psychic. This lasts for about a second until the relief is replaced by a look of puzzled disappointment that is very familiar to me as Kristin realizes that she might not be the first woman on earth to nurse a child.

“Okay, remember what I taught you? About putting the two pieces of the puzzle together?” If we were in one of the hospitals where I consult right after delivery, I could touch her and demonstrate what I am talking about. Instead, using my own breast, I have to mime the lesson I gave her when she attended one of my classes, about pulling Todd and her breast together at the same time. “Remember, Todd has no neck muscles. You have to shove and hold. Keep the pieces together.”

“I thought I was doing that.”

My cell phone starts playing “Slipping Through My Fingers” by ABBA. Dori put the song on as the ringtone because I started sobbing halfway through Mamma Mia when Meryl Streep was singing to her bride-to-be daughter about letting her childhood slip away. Maybe it was because of the thermos of margaritas Dori and I had sneaked into the afternoon matinee, but I lost it when Meryl, wondering what had happened to all the adventures she’d planned to have with her daughter, answered herself, “Well, some of that we did, but most we didn’t.”

As the song plays on my phone, I tell Kristin, “I’ve got to get this. Work on Todd getting a good latch. Just shove that mommy muffin as far as you can into his little mouth, okay? You have my number. Call me if things don’t improve.” I make myself turn away even though I see another fifteen minutes of questions in Kristin’s eyes. The one thing that can pull me away from being an endless source of reassurance to my moms needing help with their children is my own child needing help.

Miraculously, I catch the call in time to answer, “Hey, punkin.”

“Ee-yeah?” my daughter responds in the tone that makes her sound like an annoyed drug addict, both testy-hostile and nodding out. It is a tone she uses only with me.

“What’s up.” She can’t even summon the energy to make it a question.

Instead of shrieking, What do you mean, “What’s up”?! What have I been screaming at you about? What have we been waiting for for the past sixteen years!, I bank the anger that flares up at her cavalier response and invoke my inner Zen Mama.

Zen Mama is made of Teflon. Delayed-adolescence annoyance and college jitters expressed as surly crabbiness slide right off Zen Mama. Zen Mama understands that her only child’s extreme bitchiness is a necessary and natural part of the separation process. Because Zen Mama has been reminded repeatedly for the past two weeks that her child is one day away from being eighteen, or “legal age,” as said child prefers to call it, and can vote, drink in certain states, be drafted if she were a boy, sign a binding contract, and run her own life, Zen Mama sounds like Hal the robot as she repeats a version of the bulletin that she has been hammering into her daughter every day for the entire summer: “Aubrey, you can’t put me off another minute. I’ve already had to get two extensions from the university, and now tomorrow is the absolute last day we can collect the money from the trust fund to pay for your first year’s tuition without having to pay a huge late penalty.”

“Oh, yeah. That.”

It helps me to pretend that my only offspring has either just landed on Earth from a distant planet or has suffered a head injury. “ ‘That’? That, Aubrey, is your college money. That is your education and ticket out of here. We have been waiting for this day most of your life.”

“Well, you have.”

“I have? What does that mean?”

“Uh, I really gotta go. Tyler needs me to set up the coffee for tomorrow.”

I squeeze my eyes shut, shift into my highest gear of über–Zen-Mamadom, and say, “Aubrey, I sense some reluctance on your part about going to college. Sweetie, if you’re not ready, you know, we talked about gap-year options. Gap years are getting really popular. You can get credit for working on an organic farm in Wales. The trust will pay as long as the program is accredited. Or there’s another one where you study with the monks in Tibet. If you’re not ready—”

“Can we talk about this later?”

“There is nothing to talk about. You will come home tonight and you will be with me when the bank opens tomorrow morning.”

“Uh, yeah, okay, I’ll see.”

Was it me? Did I teach her to say that? To say, “I’ll see”?

“Aubrey, there is nothing to see. You have to come to the bank with me. You know this. They won’t release the trust funds if you’re not there to sign off. I have your letter of acceptance from Peninsula and the invoice from the bursar’s office, so they can just transfer as much as you need for the first year.”

“Sorry, tomorrow morning is impossible. Two new crews of framers start tomorrow, so Tyler and I are going to be slammed.”

Zen Mama cracks and morphs into Prison Matron Mama. “Oh, you will be slammed, Aubrey Lightsey. If you do not get your behind home this instant, you will be most definitively slammed.”

“Okay, I gotta go.”

“Aubrey, baby, don’t do this. Not for some guy who’s working in a roach coach.” I am apologizing before the last two words are out of my mouth. “Sorry, sorry, I meant catering van. Erase. Erase. Not ‘roach coach’—catering van. Lunch wagon. Food truck.” But it is already too late; I have spoken the forbidden words.

“I cannot keep having this conversation with you. If you insist upon belittling me and demeaning what Tyler and I are trying to do, the business that he and I are trying to build, our discussions are at an end. Your disrespect totally invalidates all the initiative and discipline and hard work and everything else you supposedly want me to show that I am, in fact, already showing.”

It stuns me how anger can transform my daughter from a monosyllabic mope into Rumpole of the Bailey. If Rumpole had a degree in counseling.

“Aubrey, please. I’m sorry. I slipped.” I grovel to no avail. She hangs up. I call back and it’s straight to voice mail.

I consider driving to the dump of a shack that Tyler rents with a rotating crew of dead-enders and miscreants, and dragging my daughter home by her hair. But ever since Black Ice Night I’ve known exactly what that would accomplish: She’d move into that shack with Tyler.

A Jerry Springer montage plays in my mind, featuring some blob of a skanky trailer-trash mom sitting next to her blob of an even skankier trailer-trash daughter—both of them wearing Daisy Dukes and radiating hatred toward each other—while someone in the audience stands up and, neck veins bulging, index finger stabbing toward the sullen daughter, who is rolling her eyes onstage, yells with self-righteous, Old Testament wrath, “If she were my kid, I’d lock her sorry ass up!” Or, “I’d call the police on her sorry ass!” Or, “I’d toss her mother-bleeping duh bleepitty-bleep-bleep sorry ass out on the motherbleeping street! S’what I’d do!”

I try to recall who I was when I watched these hillbilly jamborees. I have vague memories of being a puzzled, superior, teen-free mother who knew sure as gravity that she and her daughter would never go down that path. We would read The Secret Garden together and pick blueberries in Maine. We would never even come anywhere near that path.

And, I remind myself, we aren’t anywhere near it. Not really. Aubrey’s not doing drugs. She’s not giving blow jobs in the boys’ locker room. She’s just changed beyond recognition in the past year.

Forget anthrax. The greatest chemical threat facing our country today is the hormones delivered to our daughters at puberty. Hormones that, in Aubrey’s case, were not fully ignited until Tyler appeared.

If only I can get her shipped off to college.

I think of Aubrey twenty-four hundred miles away in the state of Washington, rushing to class across the Peninsula State College quad beneath towering evergreens that shelter the campus. It’s drizzling. It’s always drizzling there. But that was part of the appeal when we chose Peninsula at the start of her senior year, back before Tyler Moldenhauer scrambled her brain. Back then she wanted something as different from the sunbaked grids of Parkhaven as possible. She couldn’t wait to leave the world of megachurches and malls. Besides, Peninsula, her dream school, was close to Forks, Washington, where all her vampire books were set.

In the shower, warm water pulses against the top of my head and I wonder again when it happened. When Aubrey went off the rails. A lightning-quick chain of associations takes me from there directly to a memory so strong and so familiar that it even brings back all the smells of the pivotal moment twenty-two years ago when my own life was decided.

The cumin scent of body odor; the hot metal-and-grease smell of the iron wheels against the rails; a citrus aroma from the Berber grandmother sitting across from me feeding sections of blood orange to the three grandchildren crammed onto the seat next to her; the fragrance of mint tea and falafel from the vendors working their way through the car; and a whiff of cedar and rosemary from the arid plains and hillsides carried on the hot, dry air that blows against my face.

Voices speaking a throaty language with volleys of glottal jerks fired back and forth rise above the clattering hubbub of an ancient train lumbering across Morocco. Back home, everyone would be plugged into their brand-new Walkmans. But here, the boom box is still king, so while one at the front of the car blares traditional, snake-charmer-sounding Moroccan music, another at the back rips loose with Whitney Houston pleading, “I wanna dance with somebody.”

It is 1988. I am sitting on a wooden bench seat beside a glassless window. The aisles are crowded with men in turbans and striped djellabas. On the bench beside me is the battered backpack that I will be living out of for the next three months of hitchhiking and Eurailing around Europe, visiting as many of the places where my grandmother served during World War II as I can on this trip she financed. A reward for finishing nursing school.

I glance at the Atlas Mountains rising in the hazy distance, and translate the tan, sage, and blue of the landscape into my grandmother’s black-and-white photos. Each picture is populated with the grinning faces of Bobbi Mac’s friends. All the game gals with nicknames like Pee Wee, Speedy, Slats, who called my grandmother Crazy Mac and turned World War II into the most fun sleepover ever. I’d heard their stories so often that they were like characters from a fairy tale.

I wish that I were traveling with them, with a gang. I knew about all the amputations Mac had assisted at, all the handsome young men who died, but none of that was as real as the stories of cocktails made from rubbing alcohol, dances in airplane hangars, dating generals who took you to eat lobster at castles, wearing a long black slip that passed as an evening gown to a formal dance, singing silly Hawaiian songs for the troops in a grass skirt and a coconut-shell bra, arms and legs darkened with a mixture of Pond’s cold cream and Hershey’s cocoa powder.

On the bench across from mine, the Berber grandmother and her grandchildren stare at me as the red fruit churns in their open mouths. The grandmother wears a djellaba of a rough weave the color of mulch and a cotton head scarf dyed indigo blue. The youngest child, a scrawny girl with bright, dark eyes and a wide smile in a grimy pink caftan with a beige turtleneck underneath it, picks her nose as she chews and gapes at me. The two grandsons beside her both wear ragged T-shirts that must have made their way to North Africa via Goodwill. One features the Ghostbusters logo. The other depicts a silver hand gripping a giant silver gun beneath silver letters that spell out ROBOCOP.

I smile weakly, trying to prove that though I am an American I am a friendly person of goodwill and not a poltergeist hunter or android assassin.

The tea vendor passes and in the shiny, round surface of his silver pot, I see my twenty-one-year-old face and find it just as round and gleaming and heart-stoppingly perfect as the pot itself. In the next instant my young self traveling on that train twenty-three years ago notices that her spiral perm has grown out, leaving the top of her hair and her bangs flat as a poodle that needs to go to the groomer. That her face is greasy and she needs to put on some lip gloss. And that a really cute guy is heading toward her.

The first time I set eyes on him, Martin was swaying down the aisle of that packed train rocking across North Africa. He is thin in a haunted, poetic, punk-rock star/drug addict way that hints at secrets and reserves of worldliness. He is actually thin in a seriously ill way. He pauses beside my bench, indicates the seat next to me, asks, “Any chance?”

Without a word, I move the backpack off the seat and he all but collapses onto it.

He is surprised when I ask, “How long have you been sick?”

“Do I look that bad?”

“You don’t look good.”

“How do you know that this isn’t the way I always look?”

“I don’t think you’d be alive.”

“Good point.”

I ask about symptoms. He is nonchalant. He has Siddhartha in his backpack; he is above caring about “the physical apparatus.”

I diagnose gastroenteritis and dip into the traveling pharmacy that Bobbi Mac insisted I take with me. I press tablets of Imodium into his hand and warn, “It may be amoebic dysentery. If it is you will have to go to a doctor and get a prescription for Flagyl.” I make him drink the mint tea I buy from the vendor walking the aisle.

“Drink it all,” I coax. “You need to rehydrate and there’s lots of sugar in there to get your glucose levels back up. You know, if it is dysentery, you could always eat fresh camel dung.”

“Did you just tell me to eat shit?”

“My grandmother was an army nurse in North Africa in World War Two. She had a bedouin wardman who told her that cure.” I want to impress him, and my World War II army-nurse grandmother is the most impressive thing about me. “After the invasion of Sicily, they ran out of everything. Morphine, bandages, sulfa powder. So some of the boys who were the worst off, the ones who might have died, tried the camel dung, and it worked. Olive oil is also good.”

“Excellent. Some camel shit with an olive-oil chaser.” He puts his arm over the back of the seat. He smells like really good pot. He scoots closer, whispers in my ear, “The old lady’s tattoos …” He nods toward the bedouin grandmother sitting on the bench seat across from us. A series of dots the color of strong green tea drip from her bottom lip down her chin. They are faded and almost lost in wrinkles elephant-hide deep.

“They were done when she was a little girl to give her strength, power. To protect her. If her parents had wanted to enhance her attractiveness to a prospective husband, she might be tattooed along here.…” Martin traces his finger along an imaginary necklace across the tops of my breasts. “The designs would have all been geometric.” He draws cross-my-heart marks along the necklace. “The tattoos on her hands are hints, samples of the delights to come.”

We both know that we will sleep together. All that is left for me to decide is how much it will mean and how I will make it mean that.

After we drink mint tea with extra sugar, Martin fishes out his battered copy of Siddhartha. I lie and say that I love the book. One of my all-time favorites. Right up there with … with … As I know he will, Martin prompts, “The Tao Te Ching? The Gnostic Gospels? The Bhagavad Gita?”

“All of the above.” I don’t know what makes me stop pretending that I, too, love books about spirituality. That we “share an interest.” Probably the calculation that I’d already made that we are going to be together, and figuring in how long I can act like a scholar of religious texts, then adding in that, even more than most men, he appears to like to be the one with the answers. I compute all of that and admit, “I don’t know. I’ve never read any of them.”

“So you just said that? About loving Siddhartha…?”

“To impress you? Yeah. Pretty much. Did it work?”

“Absolutely. Would you be impressed if I read your favorite book to you?”

And so, reciting from memory more than from the page open in front of him, Martin tells me the story of the handsome son of the Brahman, Siddhartha, his shoulders tanned from performing sacred ablutions in the river, his forehead surrounded by the glow of his clear-thinking spirit, who left his family and all his riches to search for enlightenment.

I hear the words in my head again, in Martin’s caress of a voice carried on a breeze scented with rosemary and cedar: “ ‘In the shade of the house, in the sunshine on the river bank by the boats, in the shade of the sallow wood and the fig tree …’ ”

If Martin had left me for another woman, I could store this memory and all the rest of them away in the past where they belong. But when he left, it felt as if he were going off to war. Next always seemed like something he had to do. That he hadn’t left me so much as been taken away against his will.

I flip the shower lever to shut off the water and am momentarily scalded when I accidentally turn it the wrong way. I step out of the shower, briskly wrap a towel around myself, and rush back to my locker to check my phone. Maybe Aubrey called.

I hear the metal door to the locker room open and the little girls—one with copper curls like Twyla’s and speech impediment like Aubrey once had—bounce in. The older one dictates to the younger girl, “You will be the baby manatee and I will be the mother manatee—”

“And we migwate to the Amazon wain fowest!”

“And we dive into the deep blue sea and there are dolphins and mermaids—”

“And faiwies!”

“Not fairies in the deep blue sea!”

The younger girl looks stricken.

“That’s silly!” the older one says.

Demolished by her idol, the little redhead teeters for a second near tears. Then she laughs a child’s theatrical imitation of laughter and, game once again, says, “Yeah, faiwies in the deep bwoo sea. That’s siwwy!”

Happy again, the girls run off toward the vending machines.

As I scroll through all the unanswered calls I’ve made to Aubrey, they beep like a movie-submarine sonar, warning of the disaster of an approaching torpedo. I roll tape back to last August and try again to identify the moment that set my child on this course.

As I try to connect the dots between Tyler Moldenhauer and heatstroke, from down the white-tiled hall that leads to the vending machines, the little girls’ voices echo back to me, silvery and faraway, like coins falling from a torn pocket, lost forever.