The Gap Year

THURSDAY, AUGUST 12, 2010



I grab the Diet Cherry 7UP, dump most of the can into a glass—a giveaway from the breast-feeding conference I attended last March, inscribed with the proclamation, I AM A LACTIVIST!—dig out a half-finished bottle of merlot, pour a healthy jolt in, and hope that the chemical cherry taste and aspartame will be enough to sweeten the vinegar tang of the old wine. Since Dori isn’t around to slug me on the arm, I need at least a modest buzz to disrupt my current cycle of regrets.

I take the drink and settle into my usual spot on the sofa where I’ve sat up more nights than I care to recall listening for the rumble of Tyler’s truck. To take my mind off my fear that this will be one of the nights when Aubrey doesn’t return, I listen to my messages. The first one is from Simone, who reminds me that I saw her late last week in the hospital after her delivery. The message breaks up but sounds frantic enough that I call right back.

“Thank God you called!”

When someone asks why I do the work that I do, that’s what I should tell them. Those four words. “Thank God you called.” How many people ever get to hear that at their jobs? Her problem is engorgement. I walk her through expressing by hand. “That should help soften the breast a little. The nipple won’t be so flat and little Joaquin”—as usual I remember the baby’s name—“will be able to get a good latch.”

“My mother-in-law says I should use cabbage leaves.”

“Great idea if you’re making cabbage rolls, but there’s really no evidence that they work any better than a nice cold compress. An ice pack will help with tissue swelling.” I tell her that it’s safe to use acetaminophen or Advil.

I know Simone will be fine, but she’s still uncertain and pleads, “Could you come over tomorrow?”

“I’d love to, but my daughter’s leaving for college and I’ve had to clear my schedule for a few days to help her tie up some loose ends.” I promise to check back as soon as Aubrey is safely winging her way toward a bright and shiny future.

“College,” the new mom whimpers while Joaquin cries in the background. “Will we ever make it that far?”

“Blink twice, Simone.”

She laughs. Always a good sign. I give her my colleague Janis’s number. “If Joaquin is not drinking like a frat boy by tomorrow, Janis can help you.” I think about Janis, who I split shifts at the hospital with—late thirties, married, two sons, kind eyes, an inexplicable affection for animal prints—and am relieved that there is finally another competent lactation consultant in Parkhaven who can fill in for me.

I hang up and notice that among the many things annoying me are the misbegotten Betty Page bangs I’m trying to grow out. They’ve reached the sheepdog stage and are driving me crazy. I pin them back before I return the rest of the calls.

The calls—each one so absorbingly unique, yet all variations of problems I’ve dealt with hundreds of times before—occupy me so completely that a couple of hours slip by before I finish the last one, switch the light off, and stretch out on the couch to listen in the dark for what I want to hear most: Aubrey coming home.

As I strain to detect the muffled squeak of the front door being quietly opened, I drift into the cozy place that floats on the outskirts of actual sleep. Memory overtakes me with the vividness of a dream, and I am back with Martin in our sweet little duplex in Sycamore Heights. We are eating the dinner we’ve spent a couple of happy hours making together—chiles rellenos with raisins and pecans stuffed into the peppers—on the postage stamp–size deck behind our rented house. We have recently discovered that there are other white wines besides chardonnay and that they are all delicious with chiles rellenos. It is sunset. Swallows dip through the air chasing late-spring insects. The smell of newly cut grass wafts over to us. Someone across the alley is playing Lucinda Williams’s new CD. We are cocooned in the simple opulence of being together.

Most mothers say that the happiest moment of their lives was when their child was born. Aubrey’s birth was the most intense moment of my life. But happiest? My pick for pure, simple happiness would be on that deck with Martin. I will never understand how, if he’d been even a fraction as contented as I was, he could voluntarily have given up that feeling.

I jerk fully awake, force the dream-memory aside, and listen for any sound that might indicate that Aubrey has come home. But the snuffling whistles of Pretzels snoring at my feet are all that disturb the utter silence.

My mother hovered and clung more than any helicopter mom that was ever invented after her. But even she couldn’t control any of the most important events in my life. She couldn’t control that she died young, and she couldn’t control who I fell in love with. My future was decided on that train in Morocco when I fell in love with Martin.

I pray that my daughter’s future has not already been decided. That it wasn’t decided twelve months ago, at the start of her senior year, when my business finally really took off and I was gone all the time and I didn’t intervene when I should have. I pray that Aubrey won’t pay the price for my negligence. That she will come home tonight and have the life she was meant to have.





AUGUST 26, 2009



The entire first week of school is a weird limbo zone. My old life is pretty much over, but what I am heading for is mooshy and vague. At the same time, the feeling that Tyler’s face can pop out at me at any second is sharp. That and thinking about my dad getting in touch with me are these random adrenaline spikes in the endless boredom.

So I come home and, as usual since Mom’s business has gotten so busy, there is nothing decent to eat. She calls, but I don’t answer, and she leaves a voice mail saying there is some kind of population explosion and she will have to stay late at the hospital. Which is fine except for the lack of edibles and me being starved, since I was too nervous at lunch to eat.

I make some cinnamon toast and watch while the butter melts and the cinnamon sugar turns all bubbly under the broiler. I take it out, put both pieces on a plate, pour a glass of milk. Consume. Suck butter-sugar from my fingers. Repeat.

Then, without any planning at all, I get the laptop out, go to Facebook, and, like pulling a Band-Aid off with one fast rip, I confirm my father’s friend request.

I have barely begun to believe that I’ve actually done it when Facebook makes the bloopy sound it does to alert you that someone wants to chat.

Chat?

I hadn’t considered the possibility of chat. Since I’ve already jumped off the cliff, though, I click on his message, and keep on falling while the first real words my father has communicated to me in sixteen years appear on the screen.


4:34 P.M. AUGUST 26, 2009

=Aubrey, hello. Thank you for confirming me.

I come so close to slamming the laptop shut and calling Mom and telling her everything. About Dad. About Tyler. Everything. But I know that if I hesitate for one second I will freeze up and this will turn into an impossibly big deal, and I’ll never do it, so I just dive in and start writing whatever pops into my head.

=How could I not after I went to your page and saw that, essentially, you’d set it up just to be friends with me?



=God bless Facebook! Because of my situation here, it’s the only way I could contact you without being monitored.



=Monitored?



=Long story. Not what I want to talk to you about. What I want to talk to you about is YOU!



=OK …



=Seriously, I want to know everything about you. What music, books, movies you like. Which ones you hate. What your favorite subject is in school. Everything. Aubrey, I’ve missed so much. We have so much to catch up on.



=Oops. I hear the garage door going up. Mom’s home. We share this laptop, so I have to shut this down and log out. Sorry. GTG.



I quickly sign out, because I don’t actually Got To Go. I actually have GTB, Got To Breathe. Breathing. Something that pretty much stopped the instant that chat box blooped open.

I don’t know how long I spend reading and rereading what he wrote and what I wrote back, but it startles me when Mom pounds on my door, yelling, “Hey, punkalunk! There’s groceries in the car. Can you at least get the ice cream and milk in? I’ve got to pee like a racehorse.”

Thanks for the image.

I open my door. As she sprints to the bathroom, she yells back at me, “How was your day?”

“Fine.”

She stops dead in her tracks and studies me. One word. One single word and she knows. I am certain that she knows about me chatting with Dad. “What happened?”

“Nothing! God! I’m sorry my life is so boring.”

She laser-scans me, gathering clues.

“Groceries,” I say, and rush out to the garage, to the safety beyond her force field.





FRIDAY, AUGUST 13, 2010



I’m asleep on the couch when Pretzels, whimpering patiently by the patio door, wakes me. My first thought is, It’s Aubrey’s birthday. When I hear the sound of water rushing through the pipes in the slab beneath my feet I almost burst into tears of joy: Aubrey is home.

I help Pretzels out the patio door, then rush to the kitchen to make a Happy Birthday breakfast of Miggy Moo. While butter bubbles in the frying pan, I press a Mickey Mouse cookie cutter into a piece of bread to make a big-eared bread cutout that I slide into the pan and break an egg into. This breakfast will make up for last year, when I was gone too much and not paying enough attention. It will atone for all the dry Cheerios eaten from a Tupperware container as she was strapped into a car seat driving to day care. It will redeem all the salt and grease abominations picked up from McDonald’s on the way to drop her off at school. It will counteract an entire adolescence of breakfasts that Aubrey slept through. It will welcome my daughter into her eighteenth year of life and send her off to college.

Aubrey named this creation when she was eighteen months old, back when I was a stay-at-home mom who still had a husband and time to make special breakfasts. Aubrey was with me in the kitchen, strapped into the blue plastic high chair that Martin called the Space Pod. With the intensity of a heart surgeon, she was occupied chasing bits of pear, slippery as goldfish, around the tray. When I put the Mickey Mouse cutout toast filled with egg on the high chair tray, Aubrey had gazed up at me, her mouth rounded in a perfect O of awed amazement. Then I’d painted eyes and a big smile on the egg Mickey with a bottle of ketchup and, dazzled by my magical skills, Aubrey had cooed, “Miggy Moo.”

Why hadn’t I made Miggy Moo for my daughter every day of her life?

“Where’s my inhaler?” Aubrey bursts into the kitchen, sucking in broken, staccato breaths that pull her pale, freckled shoulders up to her ears and scoop out shadowed hollows behind her collarbones.

I squelch my desire to sing “Happy Birthday,” jump up and down, hug her, and congratulate her for coming home; I know she’s short on sleep and that makes her grouchy. Plus she’s told me repeatedly that she doesn’t want me to do anything for her birthday. Cool as a double agent trying to act normal, I answer casually, “There’s an extra inhaler in my purse.”

As she dumps out a flurry of old grocery receipts, wadded-up tissues, and an assortment of nonworking pens, I analyze Aubrey’s face. I check her color and listen to her breathing to gauge how serious the attack is. For a moment, all I register is her beauty. The simple, luminescent beauty of youth, the beauty of her being mine and still being under my roof. I complete my analysis and exhale. This is a serious attack of annoyance more than asthma.

Aubrey is wearing an old T-shirt of Tyler’s and one of the many pairs of ridiculously overpriced Nike shorts she inexplicably squandered her Lark Hill money on during her senior year. Her hair is squashed down on one side and feathers up in a cock’s comb on the other. We used to laugh at the comical forms her baby-fine hair took during the night. But it’s been a long time since we laughed together about much of anything, and it certainly doesn’t appear as if we’ll start this morning.

Still, whether she likes it or not, I hug my baby and whisper, “Happy birthday, sweetheart.”

For just a second, she relaxes into my embrace and I am certain that we have reached a turning point. That it is all going to be fine. Really fine. But then I add, “We’ll head over to the bank right after we eat,” and she stiffens and pirouettes out of my arms. At least she didn’t refuse. Right after we claim the money, I’ll take her to Best Buy and see what kind of laptop I can afford. A girl going away to college, a birthday girl, needs her own laptop. I’ll pick up a cake while we’re out. Maybe set up a farewell dinner and see if she’ll invite Tyler over.

When she can’t find an inhaler in my purse, she rummages through hers, pulling out three kinds of lip gloss, several tiny bottles of hand sanitizer, a white bib apron with coffee stains dribbled down the front, and more keys than most janitors carry. All held together by a chain with Tyler’s senior picture in a small pewter frame in the shape of half a heart. Of course, Tyler carries the other half.

An inhaler finally rattles out. Aubrey shakes it, huffs on it a couple times, and her shoulders relax. Without a word, she brushes past me, tears my list of college reminders off the magnetic pad on the front of the fridge, and on a clean sheet writes, “Refill inhalers!!!!”

The fourth exclamation mark is overkill. Unneeded. All the fourth exclamation point communicates is Aubrey’s belief that I am a loser dipshit airhead who can’t be counted on to do things like keep her alive.

Being blamed for the lack of refills makes me ask, “You’ve sort of been going through the inhalers lately, haven’t you?”

The universe that lies in my simple observation.

Though I qualify it with “sort of” and couch it as a question, Aubrey still bristles. It’s never the words. Not between a mother and a daughter. It’s what lies beneath the words. It’s every asthma attack Aubrey has ever had. It’s her having to quit the soccer team when she was eight because Dr. Queng thought that exercise triggered the attacks. It’s the fact that she had her first serious attack in a long time on the day of graduation three months ago and they’ve continued through the summer and, judging from the one empty and one nearly empty inhaler, have skyrocketed in the past two weeks. It’s that we both know that anxiety is a much worse trigger than soccer ever was. It’s that we can both turn our heads and see that the great room is filled with supplies for a four-year journey she won’t even talk about making. It’s that I’m starting to suspect that something far more ominous than simple grumpiness and reflex resistance is at the heart of her reluctance to claim her college money.

She gives me a look that encodes an encyclopedia’s worth of information and I translate every buried meaning: Stop hovering. Stop knowing enough about me to monitor, to judge, every single, solitary breath I take.

I go into Zen Mama state, refuse to mirror back her mood, and say with as much perk and pep as I can manage, “So, today has to be the day we collect your tuition. For the first year.” No reaction. Though it’s a strategic weakness, I am so desperate for signs of life from her that I ask, “Are you excited?”

Aubrey glances at me as if I’d inquired brightly, “Triple root canal today! Are you excited!?” Since Aubrey shut me out after Black Ice Night, almost nine months ago, I have been reduced to gathering clues about her in nonverbal ways. So I step close enough that I can smell her breath. It is metallic from the inhaler. Before her expression curdles and she backs away, I inhale more of her smell and analyze it as if I were a perfume maker. I detect the odor of burned coffee and Fritos that clings to her no matter how many times she showers. I can also smell the enemy: Tyler Moldenhauer. Besides those familiar odors, though, there is a new one that I’ve been catching hints of for the past few weeks. Amazingly, it is the aroma of actual cooking, the last thing that might occur in the lunch wagon. I try to identify the novel odor’s components—garlic, cumin, lemon, parsley, and an earthy aroma that for some inexplicable reason causes me to recall the moment I met her father on that train lumbering through Morocco.

Aubrey reaches out and flicks the clips I used to pin my sheepdog bangs out of my face. “What’s this? What’s going on here?”

Delighted just to be interacting, I run my fingers along the bristly hedgehog array poking out behind the clips and explain, “Oh, you know, my bangs are in that awful stage when they’re too short to pull back behind my ears and just hang in my eyes.”

“You look like a Chinese gymnast. I don’t see why you cut bangs in the first place.”

“You’re serious?” I ask her, flabbergasted. “I cut them because of what you said.”

“I never told you to cut bangs.”

“Not in so many words.”

She pretends not to remember what I’m talking about. Not to remember that moment right before we set out for her high school graduation in the middle of May when she studied me with the laser intensity that only a teenage daughter can bring to bear upon her forty-four-year-old mother, then asked, “You know who you remind me of?”

“Who?” Grateful that Aubrey had tossed me a rare conversational bone and thrilled by the unusual experience of eye contact with my daughter, I wondered who she’d name. It had been a while, but people used to tell me I reminded them of Joan Cusack. It might be because I too have a barely perceptible lisp, since both of us seem to have tongues a tiny bit too big for our mouths. Would Aubrey even know who Joan Cusack was?

“Who do I remind you of?” I prompted. I’d also heard Maggie Gyllenhaal. I knew she knew who Jake Gyllenhaal was.

“Benjamin Franklin.”

“Benjamin Franklin!” I’d laughed and swatted at Aubrey, pretending the Benjamin Franklin comment was a joke. “You bitch!” Back before Tyler, when I used to know who her friends were—the sweet, gawky girls from band, the boys who hoped they were gay rather than permanent misfits; before them, Twyla—Aubrey called them all “bitch.” Especially the boys.

Aubrey squinted in irritation. “Don’t do that.”

“Do what?” I asked, though I knew immediately what she meant: Don’t try to talk like me. Be like me.

I had wanted to tell her that I couldn’t try to be like her because I no longer knew who she was. Later that day, though, after graduation, when Tyler had yelled out, “Go, Aubrey!” so loudly that everyone in the megachurch where the ceremony was held had laughed, I’d come home and examined my forehead. Beneath the harsh overhead light in the bathroom, I saw it, the Benjamin Franklin resemblance. Where my hairline had once been thick and dark as Wolfman’s, spindly, sparse hairs now barely held the line above a dome of a forehead that did indeed suddenly appear huge and shiny as any Founding Father’s. I’d recently had to start wearing reading glasses, and the wire-framed numbers I’d grabbed at the grocery store after the cool leopard-print pair I’d started with had broken didn’t help.

So I experimented a little. I brushed down a few strands of hair, then snipped them into the barest of feathery wisps. It was such an improvement that I snipped more. Then some more. Improvements continued right up to the moment when Aubrey barged in, blinked twice, and said, “Oh, my God. Miss Tarketti.”

“What?” I play-screeched. “Miss Tarketti?!” Miss Tarketti was her second-grade teacher who wore her hair in a tight pageboy with a Mamie Eisenhower sausage roll of bangs. I squashed my new bangs down and added, “I think they’re cute. I was going for a Betty Page look.”

Aubrey squinted. “Who?”

“The fifties pinup girl. She’s very in now.”

“With who?”

“Hipsters?” I supplied.

“Uh, in case you haven’t noticed, Mom, not too many ‘hipsters’ here in Parkhaven. Unless you’re counting yourself. You probably just spaced out again and cut too much off.”

Aubrey took the scissors out of my hand as if I were a mental patient. I began growing my bangs out that very moment.

“Oh, hey,” I ask Aubrey now, casual, as if the thought had just that second popped into my head. “Have you gotten in touch with …” I pause and snap my fingers as if I can’t quite recall the name of the girl assigned to be her roommate. “Sierra! Have you written Sierra back yet?”

Aubrey shakes her head, as annoyed as if bees were swarming around it. “I told you, I will.”

The Jerry Springer audience in my head screams at me to Whup her sorry ass! Lower the boom! Quit p-ssyfootin’ around!

“When? Aubrey, you’re leaving tomorrow. All this girl has ever wanted to know is what your colors are so she can get a rug that coordinates. Did you even tell her that you most definitely do want to go in on a minifridge and a microwave?”

Inexplicably, Aubrey reacts to my innocuous questions as if I’d gone after her with a blunt object. She splays out her fingers to silence me and shrieks, “I will! I told you I will! Do you ever believe or even listen to one single thing I ever say to you?”

I know she’d rather engage me in a big, screaming argument about whether or not, in her entire eighteen years of life, I, her oppressive, paranoid mother, have ever, for one second, believed anything she’s said to me than actually answer my questions, so I don’t oblige her and instead invoke Zen Mama and answer in my Hal the robot voice, “Aubrey, I’m not being unreasonable here. We don’t even—”

“Amethyst and turquoise.”

“What?”

“Or sage and heather.”

“Sage and heather what?”

“Her colors, I’m sure those are what this roommate’s colors are going to be. I mean, her name is Sierra. And her last name is hyphenated. How much more über–crunchy granola can anyone get? She’s probably got a nose ring and major tats and creepy white-girl dreads.”

“You’re reading an awful lot into a name. Sierra did take the initiative to get in touch with you. That’s friendly, isn’t it? She’s reaching out.”

“Stalkers reach out too.”

“Aubrey, she’s your roommate. You could be living with her for the next four years.”

She starts to speak and her right nostril twitches. This is Aubrey’s “tell.” It unnerves me because Martin had the same giveaway twitch. If we were playing poker, I’d know that he was considering bluffing. With Audrey it means that she is hiding something. She was always a horrible liar, and I can feel now that there is something she wants to tell me. For a fraction of a second her eyes widen with panic and I am certain that she is about to reveal everything.

I lean forward, reach out, and she whirls away. “I cannot be having this conversation now. Tyler will be here any second and I have to—”

I grab her arm before she can rush off. “What do you mean, Tyler will be here any second? You don’t seriously think that you’re going to work today. I have canceled all my appointments except for the class I have to teach later this morning to get this done. Why are we even discussing this? You’re coming to the bank with me right now. We’re going to transfer the money to pay for your first year’s tuition. Then we’re going to pack all of this up.” I wave at the college supplies. “Then we’re going to put you on a plane. Tomorrow. End of discussion.”

“Okay! All right! I’ll go. I just can’t do it right now. Tyler and I are running a business and he needs me.”

“You’re working at a frigging lunch wagon, and if we don’t go today, right now, that is exactly what you are going to be doing for the rest of your life! Is that what you want?”

“I am not ‘working at.’ We rent it. We’re partners. We’re building something, but just because it doesn’t exactly fit your perfect-daughter image, you don’t want to know anything about it.”

“About what? What is there to know? Seriously, tell me.”

“Why? So without you knowing anything, I can listen to you tell me what a loser I am?”

“Tell you you’re a loser? Aubrey, when have I ever told you you’re a loser? I have bathed you in toxic levels of self-esteem your entire life. I adored every drawing you ever held up for my approval and cheered every spelling test you ever passed. Your entire childhood was nothing but a Milky Way of gold stars awarded every time you brushed your teeth or pottied. Come on. We have been waiting for this day for sixteen years. We can finally claim your get-out-of-town money. Please, sweetie. For me. Let’s just keep all the options open.”

She jerks her arm away. “I said I’d do it! I can go this afternoon. I’ll meet you back here after the lunch rush.”

“I can’t believe you don’t want to be at the bank as soon as the doors open. What is so hard about this?”

“Uh, honoring your commitments. Ever heard of it?”

“How about your commitment to your future?”

“Whatever.”

“ ‘Whatever’? Did you just say ‘whatever’ to me?”

I stare at this surly stranger planted in the middle of my kitchen radiating disgust at me in her inevitable pair of Nike shorts and one of her redneck boyfriend’s old T-shirts and wonder if she is my penance for once believing that I was a parenting genius and that puberty was a tale invented by old wives who didn’t know how to accept and love their children and let them follow their own unique path to become the unique human they were intended to be. The way I, in all my enlightenment, had.

At just the moment when I want to scream, “You bitch!” and not in the chummy BFF way, I see tears, staunchly unshed, glaze her eyes. Mossy green with thick lashes, her eyes are exactly like Martin’s. Exactly like the one other person I loved most in the world who also became a complete and total stranger to me.

“Aubrey, sweetie. What is it? What’s going on? You can talk to me. You know you can tell me anything.”

Her chin quivers. The past year of hardness and distance falls from her and she is the little girl who collected dinosaur stamps and begged me for a pink bedroom with a canopy bed. There is a second of clarity, a truce. An umbilical connection joins us and I feel her anguish as surely as if she were kicking inside me beneath my heart.

“Aubrey, what’s wrong, baby? Please. Tell me. Whatever it is, we’ll figure it out together.”