An Off Year (4 page)

“Fine, I'll go see the stupid shrink,” I said, finding Dad at his desk in his office off the kitchen when I got home from the beach. I never understood how the whole house was usually spotless, but piles of papers were eternally stacked four feet high in his office. Or how he still never seemed to misplace anything.

“Good,” he said. “Eleven o'clock on Thursday. I hope you can pry yourself out of bed that early.”

“What's this?” asked Germaine, as she and Conrad passed by on their way to the living room.

“Cecily has a doctor's appointment,” Dad said, glancing at Conrad.

“A headshrinker!” I said. No need to hide the fact. I was a little excited. I felt kind of special.

“Why don't you just
tell
Cecily to go to school and save some money?” said Germaine. She pointed at me. “Go to school!”

I rolled my eyes.

“Maybe I need to see a shrink, too, to help me find out what kind of job I want,” said Germaine. She was just jealous.

“I think all you need to see are the want ads,” said Dad.

“Ha-ha,” I said to Germaine. She punched me on the arm. Superhero got overexcited and jumped around, almost knocking Germaine over. I felt it was fair.

I was starting to look forward
to seeing the therapist. Kate was busy with classes and, oh, I don't know, her life, so she couldn't talk all that frequently. I was feeling kind of lonely.

There actually was someone else whom I had been avoiding other than Kate, and it was Mike. Thinking about how I wasn't talking to him only made me feel worse than if I had no one else at all.

I had known Mike since preschool. We spent almost all our free time together when we were kids. Mike was kind of quiet, my listener as I babbled. We'd go to the movies and then out to the only greasy spoon in town for french fries as I jabbered away about whom I would have cast in the movie if I had directed it (usually myself). I'd coax him into making silly home movies with me, or he'd write songs on the piano and I'd make up lyrics about the people who went to our high school.

Then, around junior year, something happened to Mike. Maybe it was when Danielle Hoffmeyer, a senior with a mile of white-blond hair, asked him to prom. Maybe it was when his neck suddenly got thicker. Maybe it was when he let his black hair grow out and suddenly his pale green eyes became a lot more noticeable. Most likely it was just the age when girls start realizing that nice boys like him can be fun to date. Suddenly he became a hot commodity.

I had never really thought about Mike as a dateable person, but a lot of girls started to look at me as either competition or a bailiff they had to bribe to get to him. I got invited to a few pool parties and weekends at summer houses in hopes that I'd bring Mike and then settle quietly into the background while Mike was feted. I quit going after a while: I enjoyed myself when it was just the two of us but became incredibly self-conscious when we hung out with other people. And, while he used to be a music nerd, he somehow suddenly became a music god. When he played his guitar, girls clustered around him, hoping that he'd write a song about them. He wrote one for me called “Cecily, Why You So Silly?” but I was the only one who ever heard it, that I knew of. I kept a copy of the file saved with my special e-mails to listen to if I ever needed it.

I always knew Mike was smart, but I was vaguely surprised and nauseated when I found out he'd gotten into Harvard. The last time I spoke to him was the day he left, heading up early to try out for the crew team. I already felt like we'd been growing apart, and this, going to go participate in a weird East Coast sport up at a famous school, felt like he might as well have been going away to Mars. Since he was still a good guy, Mike didn't leave without saying good-bye—he came over and gave me a stiff hug. He was on his way back from Wendy Maloney's house. She had claimed him as her boyfriend, and he had to comfort her before their departure—as if she had a hope in hell that they'd stay together when she was at the University of Kansas.

“What are you going to do when you don't make the team?” I asked while we stood awkwardly in the driveway, smashed acorn bits from one of our trees poking my bare feet. “You'll never be able to row with those tiny little arms.” He flexed one of his not-really-tiny arms like he was on the cover of a bodybuilding magazine and grimaced.

“I guess I'll cry first,” he said. “And then I'll just take the extra time to move in. What are you going to do before you head out?”

I shrugged. “Kate and I were thinking about going up to the House on the Rock.” It was a crazy tourist attraction in Wisconsin, full of strange collections that a Midwestern eccentric had amassed. Carousels, old nautical equipment, hundreds of thimbles and player pianos. It was going to be awesome.

“I went there once. That place is insanity. You'll love it.” I smiled. “Well, I better shove off,” he said. “My mom's being really weepy, so I'd better get home so she can talk some more about how I'm all grown up. Good luck with school, Cecily.”

“Thanks, good luck at . . . where are you going again?”

He laughed and punched me in the arm. Both of my good friends were smart. I was on the smarter end of average, or maybe the more average end of smart. I took pains not to hang out too often with the two of them at the same time, because I suspected that if they realized how smart they both were—and how dumb I actually was—they would completely cut me out and I'd have to find more mediocre friends for myself. Also, the last time I had introduced Mike to one of my girlfriends, it had ended in disaster.

“Keep in touch,” I said.

“I will. You, too.”

He gave me a weird, awkward kiss on the cheek and then turned away. And he got into his little brown Volkswagen, backed out, and drove off.

The idea of calling Mike and dorkily saying hi, explaining that I wasn't in school and why, made me physically uncomfortable. We never really had deep talks, anyway. We just goofed around together. I'd call him someday. When I knew what to say for myself.

 

 

A week or so after he first mentioned me seeing a therapist, Dad dropped me off in front of the Rotary building, a sad little suburban office building that probably really wanted to be a grown-up office building like the ones in Chicago but instead found itself housing mostly two-bit dentists. It smelled like rubber, antiseptic, static electricity, and office supplies. The security guard didn't even bother to look up as my turquoise Pumas squeaked through the black marbled lobby. I looked up Dr. Stern's name on the backlit directory board and took the elevator to the third floor.

On the third floor, I walked past the doors of several doctors' offices with old-fashioned gold writing on the frosted glass doors. On my door was printed MEDICAL OFFICES. That didn't seem very promising.

The waiting room was lit with warm, soothing lamps, probably to prevent any fluorescent-light-related freakouts. A pretty Hispanic girl, maybe a few years older than Germaine, sat behind the desk, ignoring me. A nameplate stood on her desk: GINA, surrounded by pink Valentine heart stickers.

“Hi,” I said. She raised her eyes but didn't say anything. She looked annoyed. In fact, she looked just like Germaine did when I walked into the living room when she and Conrad were watching a movie: not happy to see me.

“Um, I'm here to see Dr. Stern.”

Still the look.

“I'm Cecily Powell?” Maybe a name would spring her into action.

“She'll be with you in a few minutes,” she said, sighing. “Have a seat.”

“Thanks, thanks a lot,” I said. We were off to a good start.

“You're welcome,”
she snapped back. If Dr. Stern was as much fun as her receptionist, this was going to be interesting.

All the magazines in the waiting room were terrible. They catered only to rich people, old people, or women with babies. I picked up a
New Yorker
and started flipping through, looking at the cartoons, which were boring, too.

I kept an eye on the receptionist to see if she was shooting me some sort of hex, but she kept her head down in her paperwork.

I didn't have any idea of what Dr. Stern would look like, other than a vague memory of the woman who sometimes played a shrink on
Law & Order
, which I liked to watch when I was sick. But a woman barely older than the receptionist came out into the lobby.

“Cecily?” she said. “Hi, come on in, I'm Jane Stern.” She shook my hand quickly and then scurried off down the hall, leaving me to practically run after her. She was a tiny woman (shorter than me, which is pretty shrimpy) but was powering along on her little legs in four-inch dark green alligator heels beneath a belted khaki-colored dress. She wore her hair in a layered, highlighted brown bob and looked like she should have been working in a high-end department store, not a doctor's office. She waved me into a room that felt more like a bathroom than an office. The floor was linoleum, and plastic cabinets and counters lined the wall. We sat down in two desk chairs, the kind that spin around and have seats that you can raise and lower.

“Isn't it awful in here?” she said, apparently reading my mind. “This used to be a medical doctor's office back in the day, and they haven't put in carpeting or anything yet. Anyway, so tell me why you're here.”

Jane Stern still didn't strike me as being BFF material, but to be honest, I hadn't really talked to anyone in a while other than Dad or Germaine. So I was kind of in a chatty mood. I told her about what had happened.

I told her what I thought about high school—how I graduated and then spent a long, lazy summer (which went by too quickly) going to the pool and driving around with friends, going to the city and sitting in the backyard with Dad, trying to make sure each hamburger we barbecued, each lemonade we drank outside was perfect, because who knew what life would be like the next time I came home. I could become like Josh or Germaine, not wanting to hang out with him, and that would be sad.

I told her how the summer was tainted with these thoughts and the stress of getting ready for school, thinking about school, thinking about what stuff I needed to get and what my roommate would be like and how my classes would be. It started to seem so bizarre to me—this huge life change that most everybody I knew was going to go through—and we all had to do it. But as soon as those kind of thoughts crept into my head, it was time to go to Target and Bed Bath & Beyond to buy a shower caddy, pillows, and a blanket, just like you're supposed to. It was just so completely, abruptly different from the last eight years, but none of us questioned it. I e-mailed with my future roommate, Molly, so we could check each other out. She seemed decent enough. I felt mostly ready. I thought.

Then it was time. Dad and I loaded up the car, left at an ungodly hour, and made a mostly quiet six-hour drive to Ohio. And then, just like that, it was time to go back.

“So here I am now.”

“And what did your dad do when you told him you weren't staying?”

I shrugged. “Nothing. He asked if I was sure. Then he asked where I wanted to have lunch.”

“Was that it?”

“Pretty much.”

“Is that a typical response from your father?”

“What do you mean?”

“Somebody else's father might have rejected your decision.”

“Or they'd just go ahead and kick their kid's butt.”

She smiled. “That, too.”

“I've never really thought about it. But Dad's always pretty much let me do what I want.”

“Is that so?”

“Yeah, but that's just how we get along. I guess I maybe should have expected more of a reaction from Dad, like, I don't know, yelling or something. But we didn't talk about it on the way home, or when we got home, or anything. We've talked about it a little bit since then, but not much.”

“Have you talked to any of your friends from high school since you've been back?”

“A little.”

“Did you have a lot of friends in high school?”

“Not, like, a ton. A few close friends.” She made a note, and I examined the floor beneath my feet like there was going to be a test on it later.

“So why do you think you ended up not going to school?”

“I don't know.” I said. “I just got there and it didn't feel right. Like, I had just gone with the flow with the whole application process and didn't really think about what I was doing, and I got there and was just like,
Holy shit—wait a second.
I freaked.”

“Have you ever had problems leaving home before? Home-sickness?”

“No. Not really. I mean, I never loved traveling with my mom that much, but that was mostly because it sucked, not because I was homesick.”

“Ah.”

We talked for a while more, about what I expected to happen in college, about Dad, about Mom, about Josh and Germaine. I felt the gist of what she was writing down was that I was a big baby and I was completely spoiled by Dad. Fortunately, for a therapist, there are only fifty minutes in an hour, and we were done quickly.

“Well, Cecily,” Dr. Stern said at the end, “I think it's a good idea to go ahead and take your year off. Relax, enjoy the time you have with your family—you might just get sufficiently sick of them so that you'll just want to go back. However, I'm still not totally clear on why you're here right now, and I don't think you are, either. I'm thinking that it's a mild anxiety issue, but it's hard to know after just one visit. I'd like you to come back next month.”

Damn. I was hoping that miraculously she could tell me what was wrong with me and perhaps give me some sort of pill to fix it, all in one visit.