The Slippery Year

by Melanie Gideon

  I wake my husband up.

  “You let Ben watch this?”

  “It was good for him,” he says.

  “I can’t believe you let him watch this.”

  “What?”

  “He dies in the end. Violently. Alone. He starves to death and then goes crazy. How could that be good for him to see?”

  “Can we talk about this later?”

  My husband punches the pillow a few times, rolls away from me and within two minutes is snoring again.

  In the morning I ask Ben if he liked the movie. He shrugs.

  “What about the ending?” I ask.

  He shrugs again.

  “Did you understand what happened at the end?”

  “He starves to death.”

  “Was that hard for you to watch?”

  How could I have not been there with him? Explaining everything to him. Reassuring him this would never happen to him. I would never let him do a stupid thing like go out into the middle of the Alaskan wilderness with nothing but a sack of rice, a journal and a guidebook to edible plants.

  “Actually it was kind of boring. I was pretending to watch but really I was playing my DS. I didn’t want to hurt Dad’s feelings. Am I doing a good job of manning up?” he asks, stuffing his mouth full of French toast.

  I wipe the corners of his mouth with a napkin. I picture him wandering around camp with a mouth encrusted with food.

  “Yes,” I say.

  A few days later while we’re in Lake Tahoe, spending the weekend at the Resort at Squaw Creek, a kind of last hurrah before we drop Ben off at camp, I die. At least my husband thinks I do. My last words, according to him are, “Oh God, oh God, oh God, not yet,” and then I pitch forward onto his shoulder.

  He sends Ben to get some water and then puts his ear to my mouth to see if I am still breathing. Then he spouts out a stream of nonsense: lyrics to a Green Day song, a list of shows we have TiVo-ed at home, movies we’ve yet to see. He doesn’t know what else to do. I can hear him, and, although I can’t respond, I find his recitation oddly comforting. It feels like he is talking me back from Jupiter with incantations of pop culture.

  If one has to go, and we all have to go eventually—to camp, to the dentist, to the next world—there could not be a better way. Drift off while your husband whispers things in your ear like Curb Your Enthusiasm and American Idiot and Live Free or Die Hard. We should all be so lucky.

  Obviously, I do not die. I faint from heat exhaustion because I am stupid enough to go for a run at an altitude of 6,000 feet a half hour after arriving in the mountains on a 100-degree day.

  When I come to a few minutes later I am surrounded by people: my husband, Ben and Parker clutching Dixie cups full of water, an anesthesiologist and his nurse wife. Apparently I have caused quite a scene, slumped over as I am on a bale of fake hay outside a Ben & Jerry’s, unconscious but with my eyes wide open (this detail provided to me gleefully by the boys).

  The couple sits with me while my husband goes to get the car. The nurse takes my pulse and pronounces it a bit ragged but fine. I confess to the anesthesiologist that I love anesthesiologists, especially the one who gave me my epidural during the birth of my son. He says he gets this reaction quite a bit. I ask him if he would mind taking my pulse. He declines.

  It is to be a weekend of firsts. Sending your kid away to camp or, in my case, watching my kid sprint away from me as fast as his legs will carry him to camp, is as big a moment as all the other firsts: walking, peeing in the toilet and cracking the code of the alphabet. A first for me—fainting in public. A first for Ben—seeing what his mother might look like dead.

  But something is wrong. My experience is that some sort of emotion accompanies Ben’s firsts, like a blast of fear or a trumpeting of anxiety—at the very least, a few sniffles. So, when the morning of his departure for camp finally arrives, I brace myself for all sorts of breakdowns: begging at the last minute to go back home, or pleading when he realizes that sleep-away camp really means sleeping in an eight-by-ten room with ten other stinky boys and no Nintendo, cartoons, or air conditioner for a week. Instead, he steadily and happily pulls away from me.

  Finally, when I can’t take it any longer, I ask if I can just have a little hug. He says he is too busy to hug me, so I remind him of the fainting incident. He shrugs and jumps into the pool.

  “This is good,” my husband says. “He needs to separate from you. He’s too much of a mama’s boy.”

  “This is good,” Renee says. “He’s compartmentalizing.”

  “This is not good,” I say. “Tell me again what I said right before you thought I died.”

  One of my jobs, perhaps my most important job, is to educate my son. I don’t mean to scholastically educate him—I leave that to his teachers. The education I’m talking about is much more ordinary but no less significant, and what every mother needs to teach her child: why Gummi Bears trump Skittles, why you should always sleep on the top bunk, why people are mean sometimes when they really want to be nice.

  He breaks down, finally. Two hours before we drive him to camp, I hear him weeping in the shower. I run into the bathroom and peel back the shower curtain.

  “I can’t see!” he cries. “There’s shampoo in my eyes. I’m blind!”

  “Of course you can see,” I say. “You’re not blind. It’s tearless shampoo.”

  “It’s not tearless!”

  “Yes, it is,” I tell him. “It says so on the bottle.”

  I hold up the bottle to show him, and sure enough it reads “tearless.” In fact, it is so tearless that it’s called Baby, Don’t Cry, but it seems this shampoo has the opposite effect, as my baby is crying. I wrap him up in a towel. I drape a cold washcloth on his head and let him watch SpongeBob.

  A few hours later, he’s gone.

  Dear Parents,

  If the phone keeps ringing and ringing and you are listening to this message for the tenth time and are wondering what the hell kind of camp this is that has nobody manning the phones, we would like to ask you to please calm down. It’s only been twenty-five minutes since you dropped your child off and it’s a beautiful drive back to the Bay Area. It’s rare that you have four hours alone in the car with your husband and we suggest that you take advantage of this time and discuss things you couldn’t normally discuss with your child sitting in the backseat.

  Sincerely

  The Staff

  “Well,” says my husband, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel as we drive out of the mountains toward home, “our life with Ben is half over.”

  “Jesus, what kind of a thing is that to say?” I yell at him. “Do you want me to faint again?”

  “Well, it’s true. This is just the beginning of us dropping him off and leaving him places. Eight more years at home and then he’s gone.”

  “Could we please talk about something else?”

  “Okay. Did you get the Indigo Girls tickets?”

  “Yes, for Wednesday night.”

  He’s silent for a moment. “Do you think Renee might want to go with you?”

  “You love the Indigo Girls!”

  “Okay. I’ll go. If you go to see Batman with me.”

  “What about that Mongolian movie? We need to do adult things. Things we wouldn’t normally do because Ben’s around. Six nights of freedom,” I remind him.

  I bite my lip. Why do six nights of freedom feel like six nights of imprisonment? Six nights that need to be filled before I can see my baby again and know that he’s okay.

  “It was really, really hard for me to leave him there. I felt like Sophie,” I admit.

  “Your Auntie Sophie? The hairdresser?”

  “No, Meryl-Streep-Sophie. Sophie’s Choice,” I say.

  And because my husband is a kind man, he doesn’t laugh at my comparing myself to a woman having to choose one of her children to send off to the gas chambers.

  Monday morning I check in with Renee.

  “This is Renee!” she sings in
to the phone.

  “How are you holding up?” I ask.

  “I’m great! I’m on my way out the door to get a pedicure and then acupuncture.

  “You’re not worried about them?”

  “Not one bit,” she says.

  “Well, me either,” I say. “This is going to be so good for Ben. I know it. It’s just what he needs.”

  “Absolutely,” she crows.

  “They’ll come back filled with confidence.”

  “And improved dribbling skills,” she says. “Gotta go!”

  Tuesday morning I check in with Renee again.

  “This is Renee!”

  “Hi, it’s me. How are you holding up?”

  “I’m fabulous. You know, it’s the oddest thing. I don’t miss him at all. I don’t know why we didn’t send them earlier. They could have gone when they were seven!”

  “I wonder if they got our cards today,” I say.

  “Today, tomorrow. It doesn’t matter. They’re so busy and happy they probably don’t even have time to open them.”

  I think about Ben’s contraband Gummi Bears. He probably ate them all the first night and as a result got a huge stomachache. His counselor must know he broke the rules. I hope he isn’t being punished. I should have put a package of wet wipes in his sleeping bag, too.

  “Do you guys want to come to dinner with us tonight?”

  “No thanks, I’ve got plans.”

  Tonight is game night, which means all sorts of fun games, like the This Is What It Would Feel Like If He Was Dead game, which entails wandering into Ben’s room and picking up various pieces of soiled clothing and pressing them to my face and imagining he is dead, and the This Is What It Would Feel Like If He Was Gone to College game, which entails wandering into his room and picking up various pieces of soiled clothing with rubber gloves while holding my nose.

  Dear Parents,

  Please, we beg you, stop faxing us. We are aware of your child’s peanut allergies, gluten sensitivities, blankie that must be hidden from all his other bunkmates until lights out at which point Counselor Ari will deliver it secretly under cover of darkness, bed-wetting (stress-induced), mild case of Tourette’s (i.e., potty-mouth, i.e., fuck you I’m not playing goalie I am a striker, also stress-induced), constipation, nose picking and then sticking it on the bedpost compulsions. Yes, your son/daughter is wearing sunscreen and bug spray and yes, we force them to shower every day. Yes, with soap. Yes, we are administering their Ritalin, Adderall, Prozac, Allegra and fish oil capsules. No, we regret to inform you they are not their counselor’s favorite. In fact, their counselor only pretends to like them and when they are asleep runs around the soccer fields wearing nothing but their size twelve Pull-Ups while smoking a joint. Parents, that was a joke. The Good Enough Camp has been operating for nearly forty years. Our point is we have seen everything. Nothing can surprise us. So please, please stop faxing us.

  Sincerely

  The Staff

  On Wednesday something shifts. I begin enjoying myself and barely think about Ben at all. I am not responsible for dropping anybody off or picking anybody up or asking anybody if they’ve brushed their teeth. I feel, well, I feel a little like Alexander Supertramp, in the good days, before he poisoned himself and began starving to death. I take a long hike. I write some nice sentences. I eat flan for lunch. In the evening my husband and I go to see the Indigo Girls at an outdoor amphitheater and we both get weepy when they play “Closer to Fine,” which was the song that was on the radio the summer of 1989 when we first met.

  We sing along. So does everybody else.

  I’m trying to tell you something about my life.

  Maybe give me insight between black and white

  We rock back and forth and look up at the stars and let those sweet voices soak into us and we don’t talk about our son. He’s out there, somewhere, having a life without us, a life we can’t track or know anything about. This is both terrifying and liberating.

  *

  Thursday morning I call Renee.

  “This is Renee.”

  “Uh-Mike?” I say. She sounds like her husband.

  “No, this is Renee,” she says.

  “Oh. Hi. You sounded kind of weird. The Indigo Girls were amazing!”

  “I miss him so much,” she confesses. “I’ve been sleeping in his bed. Don’t you miss Ben? I think we should go tomorrow for the World Cup and pick them up.”

  “But they’ve got two more days. We’re not supposed to pick them up until Saturday.”

  “Well, officially. But the counselor told me the semifinals for the World Cup are Friday night and we were welcome to come. Apparently a lot of parents do.”

  “But that’s not in the literature. Are you sure?”

  “I am not missing the World Cup,” says Renee.

  “Well, I’m not missing it either,” I say. “We’ll go together. The guys can meet us there on Saturday.”

  We are giddy on the drive back up to the mountains. It feels like Christmas morning.

  “They are going to be so surprised,” I say.

  “Imagine their faces,” says Renee.

  We are so busy planning our surprise reunion that Renee plows through a small town going 50 mph in a 35 mph zone.

  I see the cop on the side of the road. I see him crane his neck as we go by. He holds up a hand and I hold up a hand and wave thinking we must be a common sight: two mothers tearing down the highway to pick up their children at camp.

  “I think that cop just gave me the peace sign,” I say. “God, I love California.”

  “What cop?” says Renee.

  A few seconds later he’s chased us down.

  “License and registration,” says the cop, leaning in the window.

  “Our kids are at camp.” I lean over Renee to explain. “We’re coming up early to surprise them. We were just so excited. You understand,” I say.

  He just looks at me.

  “You’ve got kids?”

  He looks at me again.

  “Not that you look old enough to have kids. In fact, I’m sure you don’t have kids. You look so young. Did you just graduate? From police school?” I ask.

  He takes Renee’s information and walks back to his car.

  “Damn,” says Renee.

  “Maybe he’ll give you a warning.”

  “Great idea.” Renee sticks her head out the window and yells, “How about a warning? Sir? A warning?”

  I stick my head out the other window and yell, “We promise we won’t do it again. Please, Officer?”

  “Do not get out of that car,” he yells at us.

  Once, when I was in my twenties and got stopped for speeding, the cop took one look at me and said, “Goddamn,” and just walked away. Those days are clearly over.

  “You’re getting a big fat ticket,” I say, leaning back in the seat.

  Renee smiles. “It doesn’t matter. It’s my son’s first World Cup.”

  She reaches into the backseat. “Another Red Bull?”

  *

  We arrive a little early for the evening’s festivities.

  “Maybe we should kill some time before we go in. We don’t want to be the first ones there,” I suggest.

  “We’ll go to the snack bar and get a smoothie,” says Renee. “Besides, I want to get good seats.”

  We pass a coach dressed all in blue. “Can I help you?” he asks.

  “We’re here for the World Cup,” says Renee.

  “Oh, yes, the World Cup. Well, that way, I guess,” he says, pointing to the main field, his brow furrowed.

  We continue on.

  “I see flags. Do you see flags?” I say, trying to peer through the redwoods.

  “Are those bagpipes I hear?” asks Renee.

  I’m a little afraid Ben will have a heart attack when he sees me, so my plan is to get his attention from far away. Give a little wave. Then let it sink in that I’m here. Then give him a bigger wave. Then he’ll run into my arms and I’ll do
my best not to sniff him to try to decipher exactly how long it’s been since he’s had a shower. I think that’s Renee’s plan, too, but we haven’t discussed it.

  We get our smoothies and sit down on the wooden stairs in front of the snack bar. Kids are drifting down from their cabins and milling about. I feel like my heart is going to rocket out of my chest. It’s almost unbearable—the waiting. I have to fight my urge not to go tearing up to his cabin.

  “Are we in the right place?” Renee asks after a while.

  “It must be at a different field,” I say.

  “No, this is the right place, the flags are here.”

  Then our sons walk out onto the field and we both give a little groan of relief. They look so happy. Parker is giving Ben a piggyback. Their socks are mismatched. Their hair is sticking up. Their mouths are rimmed Slurpee blue. They are fine, they are so fine without us and suddenly it hits Renee and me that we are the only parents who have come for the World Cup. The only parents so desperate to see their sons that they showed up a day early.

  “Quick, hide,” says Renee, ducking behind a bush.

  I crouch behind her.

  “We are hiding behind a bush,” I say, and we begin laughing uncontrollably, so hard that we are bent over holding our stomachs.

  “Oh my God, they’re looking over here,” she says. “Shut up, shut up, shut up!”

  We freeze.

  “He’s going to recognize your legs,” I whisper.

  Renee’s got great legs, muscular and tanned and well turned out in a pair of white shorts. But apparently muscular and tanned legs are not in short supply at the Good Enough Camp and Parker soon toddles away with Ben still on his back.