The Gap Year

by Sarah Bird

  “So you don’t have any normal clothes?”

  “I could wash the shirt.”

  “You know, I think I might possibly have some of your old things stuffed away somewhere.”

  Yeah, like under my bed in a flat, plastic bin, wrapped up so that the tiniest hint of the smell of the man you were sixteen years ago still lingers.

  “I think, maybe, I might have saved an old pair of jeans to mow the lawn in. Or something. I’ll go check.”

  Though I stomp on the Levi’s and white shirt that I pull out from under my bed, they still look clean and crisp on Martin when he emerges from the bathroom, freshly showered, water dripping from the tips of his wet-darkened, curling hair. The way he used to look when we went out.

  “I’ll drive,” I say, wincing as soon as the words are out. Of course I’ll drive. Why wouldn’t I drive? Once again, I’m trying too hard to appear unkindled.

  I head to Coach Tighty Whitie Hines’s house. When we pull up in front of a massive construction of red brick with columns lining the front porch, Martin asks, “A high school football coach lives here?” A lamppost out front with an ever-flickering electric lantern twitches away. “Looks like a nineteenth-century English orphanage. How can a high school football coach afford this?”

  “With the bonuses he gets from the booster club, he makes more than the superintendent of schools.” As we walk to the front door, I ask, “You ready for this?”

  “Cam, I was on the team that got Next tax exemption from the IRS. Then all those years managing some of the most complicated egos on the planet? Yeah, I think I am ready for a high school coach.”

  The instant we ring the bell, dogs start barking. Coach Hines commands, “Baron! Big Shot! Silencio!” and the dogs bark even louder. Coach Hines opens the door. Shoving a pair of slavering rottweilers behind him with his leg, he edges out onto the porch and slams the door shut.

  Coach Tighty Whitie’s casual weekend wear is a crisp pair of khakis, a pressed madras plaid shirt, and shined lace-up shoes. As usual, he makes me feel slovenly.

  Martin has his hand extended and is invading the coach’s personal space before Hines has the door fully closed behind him. “Coach Hines, I’m Aubrey Lightsey’s dad.”

  The same sour look crinkles Hines’s freshly shaved face when Aubrey’s name is mentioned as it did when I first visited. The expression might be pain, though, since Martin is pulverizing the coach’s meat paw of a hand in a grip of crushing manliness.

  As soon as his hand is released, Coach folds his arms over his chest. “I told her”—he nods at me; I am “her”—“I have severed all contact with Tyler Moldenhauer.”

  Martin squints almost imperceptibly at the mispronunciation of “severed.” Anyone else would think that Martin was just an unusually “interested” sort. I know that he is assessing Hines with his Next-trained androidlike scrutiny.

  “Tyler Moldenhauer hasn’t lived in our home since school ended. I have no legal responsibility for Tyler Moldenhauer and/or his actions.”

  I vaguely recall some rumors about how none of Hines’s three children have any contact with him. I can understand why. His flintiness doesn’t offer much that could sustain life.

  “Coach,” Martin jumps in, “we understand that completely. She”—head nod my way, exasperated tone—“told me that already.”

  Coach tips the tiniest of go-on nods in response to Martin’s jab at meddling, overprotective mothers.

  “Anyway, I know you as a man of honor, a man dedicating his life to modeling young men.…” Before Coach has a chance to work up a wrinkle of skepticism at such blatant ass kissing, Martin asks out of nowhere, “Say, what did you play? Middle linebacker?”

  From the way that Hines draws his shoulders back, stands up a bit straighter, I have to conclude that Martin’s assumption is a compliment of some sort. A conclusion that is confirmed when Hines drops his gaze and answers modestly, “Well, I started out there but ended up defensive end. Played a few seasons at Beckwith A and I before—”

  “What?” Martin interrupts eagerly. “ACL tear?”

  I’m impressed. Hines does favor his right leg, a stance that could, indeed, hint at a torn anterior cruciate ligament.

  The coach nods modestly like a former astronaut admitting how he had to miss the moon landing because he had a cold.

  “They still honor your scholarship?”

  “Pretty much. Had to start going to class, though.”

  The two men laugh. If I didn’t know that he wasn’t, I’d have taken Martin for exactly what Hines does, a former jock who considered the concept of going to classes laughable. Hines not only drops his arms, he asks, “What can I help you with?”

  “We’d really like to track down this Moldenhauer character.”

  “This” Moldenhauer character. With one demonstrative adjective Martin has put himself squarely in Hines’s camp. Masterful.

  Hines asks, “Did he steal from you?”

  Steal?

  Martin locks Coach’s gaze in his with the creepy Next laser stare that, in this context, seems like plain old alpha-dog male intimidation and says in a confiding tone, “I think you know what we’re talking about here.”

  Tighty Whitie acts as if Martin has read his heart. “You do not have to tell me about Tyler Moldenhauer. God, that boy was promising. Most promising player I have ever worked with. I put my heart and soul into that boy and … You know how many schools were out here recruiting him? Southeastern was going to let him start. A freshman! Mitch Winslow, one of our biggest supporters, called the athletic director there and vouched for him personally. They guaranteed him a spot. Guaranteed! You know how many kids get that? This many …” The meat paw forms a goose egg.

  In normal circumstances, I would be extremely annoyed to listen to Martin being treated like the go-to parent. The circumstances aren’t normal. I’m thrilled that Martin is opening Hines up like a tube of Ben-Gay.

  “He turns his back on that? Walks away? After I put myself on the line getting his reels to those colleges, getting the recruiters to come down here, spending God knows how many weekends of my free time?”

  Martin amens each of his grievances with knowing head nods of boundless sympathy. “I hear you, Coach. You give time, you give help—most of all … most of all you give trust.”

  “I opened my home to that boy. I took him in and treated him like family.”

  “You open your home up,” Martin echoes. “You treat him like family.”

  “Then he just leaves. Walks out without so much as a bye or a leave to Mrs. Hines either. I guess that’s what hurts the most. The way he was to Mrs. Hines, who was nothing but good and gracious to him. He got special treatment. We went out of our way to help him, and this is the thanks we get?”

  “This is the thanks.” Martin shakes his head in mournful sympathy. “I hear you, Coach. Boy, do I hear you.”

  “That truck? Bought it with money he made working construction at Mitch Winslow’s company.”

  “Where’s the gratitude?”

  Coach shakes his head with sad resignation. “Raising always shows, doesn’t it?”

  Raising?

  “It does, Coach. That it does.” After many tsks of solemn commiseration, Martin concludes, “Well, then, I think we understand each other.”

  “I think we do.”

  I try to reconstruct when this understanding emerged.

  “I’ve been holding some mail that came to the house after he left. Couple of pieces of correspondence in there might interest you.”

  “Mind if we have a look? We will be sure he gets it.”

  “Oh, I know you will.” Hines’s confiding tone makes me realize that, most likely, he has assumed that Martin is the enraged father of a pregnant daughter.

  “Wait right here.” Hines leaves us on the porch and fights his way past the barking, scrabbling dogs.

  I start to say something to Martin, but, without changing his aggrieved expression, he bobs his head the t
iniest bit toward the camera mounted above the porch. I wonder again at all the things Martin has learned over the past sixteen years.

  Hines returns. The instant that Tyler’s mail is in Martin’s hands, I ask the coach, “Why did you ask if he’d stolen from us? Did he steal from you?”

  “I’m not at liberty to discuss the ins and outs of this whole deal, but let me just put it this way: Tyler Moldenhauer is not who everyone thinks he is.”

  NOVEMBER 22, 2009

  So Tyler isn’t gay and he clearly is attracted to me. Why hasn’t he made a move?

  Maybe some really bad STD? Herpes? HIV? And, also, what is going to be different with us?

  My favorite theory, though, on why he hasn’t ripped my clothes off is Unspeakable Sexual Desires. That the instant he lets himself lose control, he is going to be begging me to spank him or tie him up or he’ll plead with me to put on a badger costume.

  I can’t gather any more evidence, though, since there is a giant game coming up Friday, regional play-offs, day after Thanksgiving, and he needs to get his head into it, so he isn’t going to see me for the next week.

  This gives me time to consider other theories, like an abstinence pledge of some kind. If that is what it is, I decide that when he asks me to accept Jesus Christ as my lord and savior, I am going to say yes.

  I think about our wedding night. A lot.

  NOVEMBER 27, 2009

  He calls me up late Friday night after regionals and, like we always do, we talk about anything other than football. We have the dopey kind of conversations that my mom always rolled her eyes about when we overheard girls curled around their cells, twiddling their hair with their free hand, and saying things like “I don’t know, what about you?” And “No, you. You hang up first.”

  “How was your T-giving?” he asks.

  “Gruesome.”

  “No, seriously.”

  “Seriously. My mom’s friend Dori came over and they played old eighties songs and danced while they basted.”

  “Sounds fun. What did they make? Turkey? Stuffing? Yams with little marshmallows? Those baby onion things?”

  “Pearl onions? Yeah, we had all the usual, typical stuff.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing, except why do people get so worked up over turkey when the best thing you can say about it is that it’s moist? Who wants to eat moist meat?”

  “I’ll get a list to you.”

  I think that might be a sex joke but I’m not sure, so I just say, “You weren’t here.”

  “I will be. Soon as the season’s over, you’re gonna get so sick of me.”

  “So the season’s not over yet.”

  “Not quite.”

  That’s when I know the Pirates won and are going to be in the state quarterfinals. Then, like he always does when football comes up, Tyler immediately changes the subject and asks, “Did you go to sleepaway camp when you were little?”

  “Wow, that was a random segue.”

  “These guys on the drive home were talking about sleepaway camp. Made me wonder if you’d ever gone.”

  “Yeah, this one summer when I was ten I went to, like, YMCA camp, because it’s supercheap. I was the only girl who gained weight. I actually liked the food, since it was so much better than my mom’s.”

  “So did your mom write your name in all your clothes?”

  “Obsessively.”

  From there, he gets me to talking about how I gashed my head open in third grade on the jungle gym and how no one would hold my hand for Red Rover in first grade when I had a wart on my thumb and about the Christmas that I got BeeBee Pretty Hair Purple Puffalump.

  “Is that the Christmas your dad left?”

  “How did you remember that?”

  Then, the way he always does, he asks me all about myself, my childhood, what I remember about my father.

  “To me,” I say, “he was like a rocket-ship ride to the moon. I can’t say if this is a true memory, since I was two, but I remember how, when he’d pick me up, it was different from when my mom would. Everything would turn streaky with speed blurs as he lifted me up to him and his face would get bigger and bigger. There always seemed to be a light behind his head, which is what made it like a rocket-ship ride to the moon. But seriously, Tyler, tell me about you.”

  “I know about me. I want to know about you.”

  “Tyler! You always do this. You always make me talk about myself. I feel like some giant egomaniac. Tell me about when you were little.”

  He considers for a long time. “Different kind of deal.”

  “Tell me anyway. I want to know all about you. God, I bet you were such a cute little boy. Those big ears.”

  “Big ears?!”

  “Oh, yeah, big ol’ cute Furby ears. So tell me.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Everything. Something. If you don’t tell me something about when you were little, I’m going to hang up.”

  “Well, you know …” There is a silence that gets longer and longer. He is sad when he finally says, “Not a rocket-ship ride to the moon.” He hears himself sounding sad and this makes him mad. “OK?”

  I’d never heard him even close to mad before and it makes me wish I hadn’t forced him to talk about something he didn’t want to talk about. I am scared he’ll hang up and never talk to me again. I am scared my life will go back to exactly the way it was before him. So I tell him, “I had a dream about you.”

  “You did? What kind of dream?”

  “One of those kinds of dreams.”

  “Tell me.”

  “No!”

  “A.J., you cannot say that, then not tell me.”

  “You have your secrets, I have mine,” I say, making both our secrets equal. Nothing to get mad about.

  Finally, he gives up trying to make me tell him my dream, holds up his iPod to the phone, and plays a song he says reminds him of me. I think it’s a Rascal Flatts song or something even more mainstream and uncool.

  I am just glad that he’s changed the subject, because I never would have told him that I dreamed about us sleeping in the same bed and waking up together. And then sleeping and waking up together again the next night. And the night after that. And that sex, with badger costumes or spanking or whatever, sex of any kind, wasn’t even the biggest part.

  And I never, ever, ever would have told him that I wasn’t asleep when I dreamed it.

  NOVEMBER 28, 2009

  Tyler and I go to Holiday Formal. I decorated his locker; then, the night of the formal, he decorates me with a hanger from the booster club. The long silver-and-black ribbons strewn with tiny gold footballs and helmets cover half the front of my dress. They are beautiful floating against the slinky, wine-colored fabric of the formal I’d scored at Ross for $19.99 that, in the dark, looks like real silk.

  Tyler somehow even managed to find a tiny clarinet and has that pinned to the hanger as well. Or maybe whichever Pirate Pal he’d ordered it from came up with that touch on her own. I’m becoming kind of an idol to the quiet, ordinary girls who populate the booster club. A commoner like them, except that the glass slipper fit my foot. At the formal, they watch from the sidelines. Tyler splays his large, tan hands across my pale, bare back like he owns me. Like we are lovers.

  I wonder what they think he is whispering in my ear when he massages the muscles along my spine and jokes, “Shit, girl, you are ripped. How did you get so scary-mad ripped? What can you bench?”

  Laser lights strafe across the dark gym, which now, in addition to sweat, smells like Captain Morgan rum and Dolce & Gabbana Light Blue. The deejay plays the song that tells everyone to get “low, low, low.” Groups of girls dance with one another, hiking their strapless dresses back up every time they finish getting “low, low, low.” The deejay commands us to put our hands up and the gym looks like it is filled with born-again Christians.

  A slow dance comes on. Lights strafe us with a pattern that is like giant snowflakes falling
across our faces, our shoulders, spilling over onto the floor. Tyler puts his hands on my hips, looks down at me, and we sway to the music. The floor around us clears. A photographer crouches down and takes photos from several angles. Tyler whispers, “Smile.”

  It all makes me remember the Halloween when I was four and really, really, really wanted to be a princess. I can’t recall if I’d actually expressed this desire in words, but I was certain that I had communicated it through the entirety of my being. I was equally certain that my mom understood, since she told me all the time that I could be anything I wanted to be.

  But that Halloween, I guess, my mom really didn’t have a lot of time or money or mental molecules to spend coming up with a costume. Which is why, when she picked me up from day care, she had a costume in a bag from the grocery store.

  It was on the backseat next to where I was strapped into my booster seat and I immediately tore into the package, my chubby fingers aching for the touch of the fluttering pink princess dress I was certain would be inside. Instead I pulled out a Wonder Woman costume.

  I trick-or-treated that year in a red plastic cape like Superman and a gold belt like a professional wrestler. I had only just figured out that I was a girl and then she dressed me like a boy. That confused me. I wanted to be a princess. I wanted everything I wore and touched and ate to be pink. I didn’t want to leap and punch and fight crime and save someone. I wanted to float through life serene as a billowy cloud. I wanted to be pretty.

  I put my head against Tyler’s chest and he wraps his arms around me and I float across the floor serene as a billowy cloud.

  SATURDAY, AUGUST 14, 2010

  I glare at Coach Hines. “What do you mean, Tyler Moldenhauer is not who I think he is?”

  He purses his lips in a way that’s meant to be thoughtful but is just prissy. “Where that boy came from, I wouldn’t put anything past him.”