The Gap Year (12 page)

I want to add that it’s everything that happens after nursing that they need to worry about. But new parents don’t need to know that. They’ll have plenty of time to discover what horrors lie ahead. Like the College Tour.

OCTOBER 25, 2009

H
ey, college girl! Rise and shine. The big day is here.”

Mom is in a superhigh, excited, bubbly mood. It is like being woken up by a Japanese game-show contestant. I slide my phone open, check the time. “It’s four thirty. Our flight isn’t until nine.”

“We need to leave a little early to beat traffic into the city.”

“Mom, it’s Sunday. There is no traffic.”

“Well, we have to allow time to get our bags through security.”

“Only because you refuse to check a suitcase.”

“Aubrey, that would add thirty dollars to the trip. Both ways. We can go out and have a nice dinner for that. Come on; security is going to be a nightmare.”

Getting through security at the airport
is
a nightmare. Mostly because Mom makes me wear the ultrajumbo, puffy, rainproof parka that she insisted on buying. I guess she thinks that the I’m-heading-to-the-Yukon-to-do-the-Iditarod look is in. I want to apologize to everyone in line behind us when she spaces out and doesn’t get her old waffle-stomper boots unlaced and off her feet before it is her turn to go through the scanner. Then the vast array of clinking bracelets she thinks are so cool and hip set off the metal detector, and there is another delay when she gets herded off into the Plexiglas cubicle and wanded.

When we finally get all dressed and ready for the dog sleds again, she goes, “Do you see why I insisted that we leave early? Getting through security is such a nightmare.” And I want to point out, “Don’t nightmares only happen when you’re asleep?” But I don’t say anything because she
is
in a superhigh, excited, bubbly mood and even I can’t tear the wings off that butterfly.

As for me, I am in a superlow, unexcited, dangerously undercaffeinated, sleep-deprived mood. Mom and I had a screaming fight last night in which I essentially begged her not to make me go on this tour. Her final big ultimate argument was that the tickets were nonrefundable. The fact that my whole entire life was going to be decided based on a couple of airline tickets caused my Inner Bitch to spring to life. My Inner Bitch will protect me from being stampeded into whatever version of life Mom has planned out for me. Inner Bitch is going to go on the tour with us.

On the plane, I immediately put my earbuds in and ignore the music while I remember the way Tyler’s voice had rumbled through me. I must have gone to sleep, because when Mom pokes me I feel as crabby and imposed upon as if she’d thrown on the light in the middle of the night. She is making it very hard for me to keep Inner Bitch restrained. I yank the earbuds out. “What?”

“The pilot just said that the Grand Canyon is coming up on our right.”

Instead of rolling my eyes or gasping like I want to, I just peaceably nod, and try to put the earbuds back in. But she stops me to rhapsodize about how beautiful the clouds are when viewed from up above. “Don’t they look like enchanted castles of feathers?”

“I guess.”

“You don’t seem very excited.”

“This is not the first time I’ve seen clouds.”

“But it’s the first time you’ve seen them on the way to visit your dream school.”

“When did Peninsula become my dream school?”

She is genuinely surprised. “Aubrey, we spent your entire junior year sifting through all those catalogs and going to all those College Nights.”

College Nights
.

Eating subpar cookies and listening to kids ask suck-ass questions. That’s when it started to sink in that I was running like a hamster on a treadmill just so I could prove what a very special, very speedy hamster I was and be allowed to spend a fortune for the privilege of running on an even faster treadmill. I guess Mom hadn’t noticed that all College Nights had ended up doing was making me very, very tired.

“You’re acting like you don’t remember any of this. That we didn’t jointly decide that Peninsula sounded like the only college that would really let you find your own path.”

“I’m tired,” I say. Then, before she has a chance to broadcast one of her Embrace Life lectures, I jam the earbuds back in, shut my eyes, and think about how much easier it would be to be an Asian kid. If you are Asian, the deal with your parents is clear from day one: “You have to be exactly like me except better or I will hate you and the whole community will hate you. Even all the ancestors will hate you.”

There is none of this “find your own path” bullshit. Asian parents are right up front: “Be a grade-getting android. Crush everyone around you in academics, music—as long as it’s classical—and forget about sports, friends, and sex. Be valedictorian or here’s the sword to commit hara-kiri.” Clear. Simple. Honest.

It is misting when we get off the plane six hours later in Seattle. We pick up our rental car, a Dodge Microdot, maybe a Toyota Flea, some ridiculously tiny clown car that my mother has gotten a deal on, and head south. For the entire hour-long drive, she issues bulletins about how gorgeous everything is. Even though she’s pretty much claimed every admiration molecule available, how can I argue with giant evergreens, misty rain, and this soft light that makes all the colors so deep and saturated that looking at a petunia hurts your eyes?

At Peninsula, the visiting seniors and their parents are herded into a big, open meeting hall that is decorated with carvings of salmon and whales and has an immense totem pole planted right in the middle like we are going to spend four years learning how to chew deer hide to make our moccasins all nice and soft.

The president welcomes us. He is African American. I look around the room. If a bomb went off, there wouldn’t be a Phish fan left alive. Almost everyone is not just white, but phosphorescent, Scandinavian white. Seems the only way they can get a black person to come to Peninsula is to make him president of the college.

Which doesn’t stop him from going on about “Peninsula’s commitment to diversity.” Since there aren’t any actual races to get diverse about, the next speakers are from the Ps & Qs, Peninsula’s queer alliance, the Transgendered Students United, then the Feminist Majority. If I was actually interested, I would mostly want to hear about majors and teachers, but instead I get schooled about Peninsula’s zero tolerance for pretty much anything that would hurt anyone’s super-evolved feelings.

Then we all march in a big group across the quad and into the campus dining hall.

“Can you believe this?” Mom asks, loading up her tray with heirloom tomatoes and baby arugula grown in the student-tended organic garden. The vegetables are displayed behind lights like they are Broadway stars. “You would pay a fortune for produce like this at Whole Foods.”

My mom’s celebrity vegetation euphoria makes me crave a cheeseburger, and I go outside where a grill has been set up for sad outcast carnivores like me. I decide that the diversity group I’d organize would be dedicated to bacon. I imagine saying this to Tyler. Imagine him laughing.

Back inside, Mom waves at me in her insane way that causes every single person in the entire cafeteria to stare. She is sitting with the woman who stood in line in front of us when we bought our dinner tickets. Naturally, Mom bonded instantly with her.

“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.