An Off Year (2 page)

Holy shit,
I thought.
I can't believe I just did that. What now?

After about a half hour of me lying around like that, Dad called me to come down and help bring the boxes in from the car; he must have been explaining what had gone down to Josh and Germaine. I knew I'd be able to stall for about ten minutes before he really started getting fed up with asking me. That was how it usually was, anyway. Dad and I got along fine most of the time, as long as I did what he asked in a timely manner. And even when I did get in trouble, we'd be joking about it soon after. Like, every once in a while, I'd get home late after hanging out with my friend Kate, and it would go something like this: I came upstairs to find Dad in the leather chair in the living room, reading some nine-hundred-page manuscript he was editing.

He'd say: “It's late, Cecily. You should have called.”

“Oh, I just wanted to make my arrival home a surprise.”

“And what a horrible surprise it's turned out to be. I was thinking I was finally free of you. How's Kate?” And then I'd tell him that she'd grown a third arm and was still figuring out how to use it to her advantage, and he'd say that was nice, and I'd kiss him good night and go to bed.

As we'd stood there in the freshman dorm, I suppose Dad could have said, “The hell you're not going to school,” shoved me in the room, and run back to his car. But that wasn't really his style. He was mellow. A history professor, not a shover.

But I didn't know what he was thinking at this particular moment. I didn't want to push it and risk getting yelled at/ thrown out of the house/murdered for something as minor as boxes. But I really didn't want to go downstairs, since I still didn't have a good explanation as to why I had made that one split-second decision earlier that day. When I left that morning, I hadn't felt scared or sad about leaving Dad. I'd felt pretty ready. But, staring at that dorm-room door, something just didn't feel right.

It was strange. I never got that homesick, either, after all those summers spent at camp or trudging after Mom in Europe. Sure, I was close to Dad, but not won't-go-to-college close. Before he could give me a second warning about the boxes, the phone rang. Dad yelled, “Cecily! It's your mother!”

I sighed and walked down the stairs as slowly as possible.

“Why would you do a thing like that?” she asked with no greeting as soon as I picked up the phone on the kitchen table. Dad was rinsing some cherry tomatoes in a colander for dinner, his back to me.

Apparently I didn't need to break the good news to Mom myself. I put the phone against my shoulder and sat down on the terra-cotta floor to give Superhero some tummy rubbing.

“I don't know.”

“Huh,” she said, sounding distracted. I heard laughter in the background.

“Where are you right now?” I asked. Mom rarely called from the same city twice in a row.

“Florence. It's fabulous. Anyway, that sounds like something I would have done at your age. You know, spur of the moment. These gap years are really the thing to do, apparently—a lot of my friends' children are doing it lately, from what I hear.”

“Awesome.” I was surprised to hear that she was friends with other parents, let alone discussed child rearing with them.

“Well. You know, you should do something amazing if you're taking time off, like write a book or learn to paint or something. . . . Listen, I need to get going. Maybe if you want, you can meet me here or later in Portugal,” she said in her cool, crisp voice. It sounded like a horrifying idea. Mom technically lived in Miami, but she was constantly traveling, for no particular reason, with no particular guy.

“No, thanks. Not now.”

“Well, have fun,” she said. “Bye.” And then a click. Mom hung up first, always. I put the phone on the cradle, a waste of conversation. Obviously all of this wasn't important enough to merit a trip back to flyover country. When Mom came for my high school graduation, all she did was show up for the ceremony, which isn't a special family moment when it's held in a twenty-thousand-seat stadium and you're the five hundredth out of seven hundred people in your class to graduate. She stayed for a three-mimosa lunch at the Cheesecake Factory, and then she was off to catch a connection to Maui.

With the phone put away and nobody talking to me, I had nothing left to do but check out the unpacking situation. The boxes I was supposed to unload had miraculously reappeared in the kitchen, stacked next to the stairs. Maybe if I waited long enough, whatever magical elves had transported them from the car to the kitchen would then spirit them up to my bedroom and back into the closet, where I could reorganize everything the way it was supposed to be. Right now my closet stood sad and empty, with a few skeletal hangers rattling around inside.

 

 

The kitchen radio played the White Sox game. Germaine and I didn't care about baseball, but Dad and Josh liked to listen on summer nights while we ate dinner, with the lights off if it was a clear evening. If I were at school right now, I would probably be eating with my new roommate, or in some forced group out at some picnic or something. I wouldn't be listening to baseball, or the neighbors' kids playing, or the motorboats on the lake, or the mechanical sounds of the cicadas. The lightning bugs began to blink in the yard and the flagstones on the kitchen floor cooled as we ate hamburgers Josh had grilled out on the brick patio. Superhero lay under the table with his head on top of my bare feet. The night was lovely, but I felt like my being there was ruining it a little bit.

Dad asked Josh about heading to school, if he had gas in the tank, if he was all packed up, what his friends had done over the summer. I watched them talk. Neither looked in my direction. Germaine stared at me, so I looked back and blinked, hard, sort of like
I Dream of Jeannie
; maybe I could make her disappear. But she just kept staring, her narrow eyes a mixture of boredom and hostility. She looked kind of funny, giving me such a mean look while sitting in front of the happy, flowered lilac-and-green wallpaper, and when I started to smile, she rolled her eyes.
Nice
. She was in a snit because Dad had snapped at her earlier about her failure to volunteer to take on more household duties when she was home. Earlier I had made a point of offering to set the table, which Dad declined.

After dinner, Josh helped me carry up the boxes, which I opened with a little paring knife from the kitchen. I finally felt a little regret. It seemed like such a waste of energy, all that packing and taping and carrying from the weeks before. We'd gone to an office supply store and bought boxes in three different sizes, shiny brown packing tape, and a roll of bubble wrap. There was much fun to be had with packing supplies: I had tried to get Superhero to walk across a sheet of the bubble wrap (to no avail) and liked repeatedly solving the puzzle of turning the flat pieces of cardboard into actual boxes with just a little bending and folding. I didn't want to admit how much pleasure I had gotten out of perfectly filling those boxes and sealing them shut neatly with a big plastic tape dispenser. I had spent weeks packing, first the new stuff that I wouldn't need until I got to Kenyon, then slowly the things from home that I wanted to take with me. It made me sad to watch my room get barer and barer as posters, pictures, and favorite books all went in the boxes.

But it was going to be unpacked all at once.

Unhappily I discovered that despite my precise folding, after the long day of loading and driving and unloading, my clothes were all shifted and wrinkled inside the boxes, which irritated me. I hung most things up and put the stuff that needed ironing in a separate pile on my desk. Putting things away was one of my favorite hobbies.

Dad knocked on the door.

“Cecily?”

“Yes?” Here it was. Here was where I was going to have to explain what the hell was going on. I had better come up with something good, unless I could continue to avoid the whole conversation.

He came in and closed the door behind him. He took off his black-rimmed glasses and wiped them on a corner of his shirt.

“You're unpacking?”

“Yes.”

“So . . . I suppose that means you're not thinking we'd try this again tomorrow.”

“No, Dad. I just can't do this now.”

“And you're completely sure? Because I'm willing to try this again tomorrow, no complaining, no questions asked. Or we can see if there's someone you can talk to at Kenyon, or anywhere else for that matter, if you're having doubts.”

I shook my head. “No.”

“Is everything okay, Cecily? This is just . . . very surprising.”

I knew what he meant. I wasn't a dramatic gesture kind of girl. I just wished I could explain what had happened, or say that I knew what would happen next. I still really couldn't believe that I had done it. “Yeah, Dad. I need to figure some stuff out, I guess. I don't know what yet.”

He glanced around my room, and his eyes landed on a little wooden toy chest I kept in the corner to house a few old stuffed bears and rabbits from childhood that I never took out anymore but couldn't bring myself to get rid of. “I suppose . . . I guess . . . I don't see how it could hurt to have you stick around here for a bit longer. If you're really not ready yet.”

“Yes. That's what I want. Lucky you, right?”

“Yeah, right. Although . . .” He hesitated. “I won't lie. It won't be bad having you here at home for a little while longer.”

“Especially since Josh is leaving and Germaine sucks so bad. I'm the only fun one.”

He smiled, but he rubbed the corners of his eyes with his index fingers. He was trying to be nice but was exhausted.

“I'm sorry I made you drive all that way for nothing.”

“There's more to it than that,” he said. “We have to talk to the people at Kenyon. We have tuition money to deal with. We need to figure out what exactly is coming next.”

Suddenly that gut-sick feeling that had been absent all day came to me: I wasn't sure if it was the realization of what I had done, or what I had almost done. My life would already be completely different if I were back in Ohio. But I couldn't deal with that at that moment. I needed to act like I knew what I was doing.

“Of course,” I said, “but not tonight. Is that okay?”

He nodded, sighed, turned around, and closed the door behind him, leaving me with the boxes I still had to empty and fold up.

 

 

When I woke up the next morning, everything felt the same as before I left. I could hear lifeguard whistles coming from the beach. My comforter smelled like clean. Superhero stuck his nose in my face. Only it was all totally different. It was like taking a sick day from school and realizing what happens at home during the day—nothing.

I listened for the telltale signs of Dad leaving for work: the radio getting shut off, the dishwasher door slamming, the old lock turning. I went downstairs in boxer shorts and a T-shirt and ate cereal and read the paper. At that particular moment, I felt kind of smug. I wasn't doing anything—no camp, no job, no homework, no packing for college, no unpacking
at
college. I knew, though, that the remorse would come soon, and then I'd soon have to justify my existence. I wondered if Mom's advice was right: should I do something amazing with my time? I had nothing amazing planned. Unless maybe I had already done it: turning around and leaving college. Now I had who knows how long—maybe all year—to think about why and figure out what to do.

I'd never not had a plan for myself. Or made for me.

I could only avoid my best friend,
Kate, for about a week before I let her in on the big news. I felt horrible not talking to her—the only times we hadn't spoken daily in high school were when one of us was traveling—but I was just embarrassed. She was off at college doing whatever it is you're supposed to do. I . . . wasn't. I missed her, was dying for someone to talk to about what I had done, and felt ashamed of avoiding her. I tried to pretend that we both needed the week to get settled. She had been e-mailing me since she got to school, but I'd just respond with a noncommittal “ha!” and smiley faces. Finally, one gorgeous day when everyone was out of the house and I couldn't stand how bored I was, I called her.

The funny thing was that Kate and I had a running gag prior to her leaving for school where neither of us was actually going to college. We kept pretending that we were just leaving for summer camp and that we'd be back at high school in the fall. We called it Double-Secret Senior Year.

“Have a good time,” I said earlier that summer, lounging on the green velvet chaise in her gigantic bedroom as she packed up her clothes in boxes. “Make sure to bring your swimsuit and your bug spray.”

“I'll make you lots of bead bracelets,” she said.

I didn't know if she'd think that the fact that I actually did not go to school would be funny-ha-ha or funny-strange. I was terrified of the latter, of her discovering that all along she was too cool to be friends with me. I worried about her coming home and looking at me and laughing, realizing what a baby I was. But I had to talk to someone. It felt like I didn't exist, almost—my dad, Josh, all my friends were taking part in that transition from summer to school year, but I was just
there
. I needed to talk to Kate, to feel better, to hear what life was like in the outside world, even if I didn't want to know.

“WELL, HELLO THERE!” she screamed into the phone when I called. I smiled.

“Hello yourself.”

“How are you?”

“Fine, you?”