The Gap Year

by Sarah Bird

  “Aubrey, this is Julie and her daughter, Tinsley.” I nod, but Tinsley, who is wearing a lilac jacket identical to the one her mom has on, sticks her hand out and I have to shake it.

  “Tinsley plays clarinet too!” Mom announces in her hectic, separated-at-birth way.

  I nod and try very hard to keep Inner Bitch under control. “OK. I don’t. Play clarinet. Haven’t really since last year.”

  “Aubrey got heatstroke—”

  “Heat exhaustion. And it wasn’t that bad.”

  “—from not wearing her hat at the beginning of the year and is sitting out for a little while. She’ll hate my saying this, but she’s been first chair for the past two years.”

  Mom, did you forget to tell them about how you couldn’t potty-train me until I was three? And, seriously, they’re going to want to know all about the ringworm episode in second grade.

  “Actually,” Tinsley says, light flickering across the silver ball stud in her tongue, “I play in my boyfriend’s band.”

  Of course you do. And your boyfriend is Win Butler and his band is Arcade Fire.

  “And I am seriously done with the clarinet.” I stuff my mouth with cheeseburger while everyone else picks at their yellow beets and snow peas. My mom looks away. Great. Now she is hurt because her playdate isn’t working out. I wonder at what point she’ll stop thinking that any random girl sort of near my age is my soul-mate-waiting-to-happen? Like the whole Paige/Madison thing worked out so well for me. To say nothing of Twyla. How about if I went out and set up a dinner for her with the first middle-aged woman I ran into at Walmart, then sat back beaming, waiting for the instant, lifelong friendship to start?

  My mom goes to the dessert carousel and returns with a plate loaded with sweets. “Can you believe this? They’re all vegan.”

  I stab a piece of cake and take a bite. “Yeah, it’s amazing that just by taking out eggs and butter and sugar and pretty much everything else that makes cake cake, they can create a product with the exact texture and taste of a pink sponge. Super yum.” I smile a big fake smile as I chew. If nothing else, I’ve given Tinsley permission not to be a suck-up. I figure she is finding this process as excruciating as I am. I am wrong.

  Tinsley takes a delicate bite of the cake and mutters, “Actually, Mama and I have been vegan for almost three years.” Her eyes meet her mother’s. “We always were vegetarian. Then, three years ago, Mama witnessed to me about the suffering of dairy cows and egg-laying chickens. We prayed over it and I just knew I could not be part of that cycle of unconsciousness any longer.”

  Mmm, thanks, Mom. How do you do it? A tongue-studded, Christian, vegan suck-up. You know me too well.

  As we leave the dining hall, my mom informs me that she has signed me up to spend the night in the dorm.

  “Without asking me?”

  “I’m sorry, I noticed that the deadline was coming up, so I just went ahead and signed you up. I meant to tell you.”

  “So I’m supposed to what? Spend the night with some random person? Gee, I hope it’s a transgendered Mennonite who only eats pine needles.” Did I say that out loud? Inner Bitch has arrived to protect me.

  “It’s a great opportunity to get a real feel for the Peninsula community.”

  “Oh, I’m getting a ‘real feel.’ ”

  “Aubrey, please. Come on.”

  “What? I’m supposed to be Riverdancing at the prospect of spending the night with some stranger? Who, I’m really sure, is going to be just as thrilled as I am about getting some high school kid dumped on her. Or him.” Thank you, Inner Bitch. You get off some good lines.

  “Aubrey, they would not put you in a boy’s room.”

  “Why not? Wouldn’t it be sexist or antifeminist or gender-specific or something like that?”

  “Aubrey, you’re being—” A bitch? Bingo.

  “God, Mom, you love this place so much, why don’t you just buy one of those caps with the weird dog-ear flaps and go here yourself?”

  “There is no need for that tone or that attitude. This trip is for you. I took off work. Canceled classes—”

  “Fine! OK, I’m an ungrateful bitch. I’ll spend the night in the dorm.”

  “No, never mind. We’ll just tour the dorms tomorrow.”

  Mom is quiet for a long time and I almost apologize and muzzle Inner Bitch, but before I can, she jumps in and starts telling me about all the different kinds of dorms there are. “They have all these learning communities. The art students have a wing. And the science kids. I read online about how one semester all the drama students picked someone from Shakespeare and stayed in character for the entire term.”

  Mom goes on about “quiet dorms” and “substance-free dorms.” But she isn’t doing her usual superexcited sell job, so I don’t have to push back so hard.

  “Yeah, Mom, we’ll check them all out tomorrow.”

  We stay at a Red Roof Inn near the campus. As we pull into the parking lot, Mom gets a little smile on her face and I know that she is remembering how when I was little motels were this gigantic treat for me. Since we’ve never had cable, motels meant I could gorge on Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel.

  In the room, I crawl into bed with the laptop and Mom throws the blackout curtains open. “Oh, my God, this view! I can’t get enough of this view! Want to get something delivered?”

  I try to sound neutral when I say, “Fine.” The second after I say it, though, I remember that she always tells me that “fine” really stands for Effed-up, Insecure, Neurotic, and I can’t remember what the e is supposed to mean. Evil? Evasive?

  “Too bad they don’t have room service.” She leafs through some flyers on the nightstand. “What sounds good? Pizza? Thai food? Oh, look, there’s a place that delivers sushi. You choose.”

  “Mom, we just ate.”

  “All I had was a salad. And you hardly touched your burger. Come on, we’re on vacation. Let’s live a little. What about sushi? Sushi was always your favorite.”

  Yeah, when I was in middle school, and it was mostly always Twyla’s favorite. Macaroni and cheese was my favorite.

  She picks up the remote and starts flipping around the channels. “Oh, hey, Aubrey, look, Mystery Science Theater. They’re doing Hercules.”

  Mystery Science used to be a staple of our Friday-night dates. I remember when she rented the one playing now, a fifties epic set in ancient Rome. We baked brownies with expensive Belgian chocolate, she drank her kangaroo wine, we snuggled up together under a quilt and laughed at the snarky comments the narrators made about how cheesy Steve Reeves was all shaved and oiled up and flashing his six-pack in a minitoga, and I thought she was the funniest, coolest mom in the entire world. For one second, I wish that brownies and a movie with Mom were still the most fun I could imagine having.

  “I thought they were supposed to have free Wi-Fi in all the rooms,” I say the third time my connection gets dropped.

  “Maybe if you sat closer to the patio doors.”

  “Maybe if it wasn’t pouring rain, I could sit on the patio. But it is pouring rain and it appears it will always be pouring rain.”

  “It’s not ‘pouring rain.’ The English would call this kind of weather ‘soft.’ And besides, that is one of the things you liked about Peninsula. A completely different climate.”

  The word “whatever” forms in my brain without my willing it to. I can tell from her expression that Mom reads it like a thought bubble above my head.

  She makes it almost five minutes without saying anything, then starts sighing, and finally announces, “I’m PMSing madly.”

  I force myself not to respond to her unbelievably irritating comment. Mom has this idea that our periods are synced up the way some study she read a couple of decades ago says happens to sorority girls. What she is actually saying is that I am a moody, irrational bitch, but that it is OK because she is getting her period too and understands and excuses me.

  I remember something from my human development class sophomore y
ear about how, at first, babies don’t understand that their foot or their hand belongs to them and isn’t just another part of the alien world they’ve been dumped into. Before they figure out where they stop and the world begins, they also think that their mother’s bodies are part of their bodies.

  They need to add a section to that chapter about how some mothers never get past the developmental stage of thinking that their daughter’s body is actually theirs.

  I shut the laptop and say as pleasantly as I can, “I think I’ll try downstairs.”

  “Good idea,” my mom bursts out. “They might still have cookies left. They’re supposed to put cookies out in the afternoon.”

  “Yeah, OK. Cool. I’ll bring some back.”

  “Chocolate chip!” she yells after me.

  The instant I get into the motel stairwell, I plop down, open the laptop, and play and replay Tyler’s interview. Especially the part where he calls the kid with the microphone “son.”

  I feel like a sad Justin Bieber fan. And even though I am, in a pathetically literal, emo-poetry sort of way, between floors, for the only time that whole horrible day, while I listen to Tyler’s voice, I feel like I am exactly where I belong.

  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 en
ough 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.