An Off Year Page 15

  “That’s okay. What about clubs? Are you in any clubs?”

  “Clubs?” Angie thought for a second. “Oh yeah. I guess there are clubs here, aren’t there? No, not those, either.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “College isn’t really like high school,” said Angie. “Mostly you just do whatever you’re really interested in, you know? Sometimes I go on community service trips or something like that, help do food collections and stuff. But I’m not doing it so that when I graduate, I can say on my résumé that I did that. I don’t think people really care about that when they’re giving you a job. I think that college is training wheels for real life. You’re more independent than you are in high school, but you sort of still have people looking after you, unlike when you get to the real world and you’re on your own.”

  “Hmm,” I said. I couldn’t tell if that sounded good or bad.

  “For the first time, you can do whatever you want as long as it feels like you’re doing it because it’s you. It takes a while to find out what that really means, of course. Sometimes you think you’re doing something because you think it’s fun, but you realize you’re just supposed to. So it’s cool when you realize what you really want to do and what things just aren’t your scene. But it’s not, like, mind-blowing or anything. I won’t lie, when I left for school, my dad was like, ‘Have fun, because these are the best days of your life.’And I am having a lot of fun, but that’s pretty depressing if these are the best days of my life. I think my older sister is having the best days of her life. She lives in New York in a shitty little apartment and has a job that’s killing her, but it seems awesome.” She smiled and was quiet for a second. “I’m really relieved that we get along,” she said.

  “Oh whatever,” I said, getting shy all of a sudden.

  “I think Josh was excited to show you a good time. And I think he was nervous, too. I think your dad might have put some pressure on him to, you know, show you around and all that.”

  “I guess that makes sense.” I felt embarrassed, realizing what an idiot I must have looked like to Angie. And yet she still liked me, or seemed to. “I’m just nervous. I don’t know about what, even. And that’s what worries me, that I should have had stuff figured out by now. I feel like a big baby.”

  “Cecily, everyone feels that way when they start school. I mean, yes, it’s exciting, and you should look forward to it. But it’s also scary as hell. Anybody who acts like they’re not scared or that they have any idea what they’re doing at first is totally lying. Things will be awkward for you probably at times, but they are for everyone—that’s the best thing I can tell you, that you might feel out of place at first but so does everybody else. And things just get more fun after that.”

  “They’d better,” I said. But I had to admit it: I was having fun on a college campus with a few people who actually seemed to have personalities, and it didn’t hurt too much.

  We then heard some screaming, and three naked guys came racing down the street and into the night.

  “Ah, college,” said Angie, and something in her voice sounded affectionate and yet embarrassed at the same time. I started laughing, and laughed hard.

  june

  “Rx: Sister.”

  “Hmm,” I said to Jane. “Can I refuse treatment?”

  “Come on,” Jane said, glowing from a perfect summer base tan. “You know you can do this stuff now.”

  “She probably doesn’t want me there anyway,” I said.

  “I think you blow the animosity in your relationship out of proportion,” she said. “And anyway, I think you need to reach out to her. You pretty much just don’t talk to her or your mom, right? Do you think that’s healthy?” I shrugged.

  “You and your mom will have to work things out one day,” she said. “But I don’t think it’ll be that hard to try to just hang out with Germaine. You might need her one day. Or she’ll need you.”

  “She’d need me for a kidney,” I said.

  “Or you might need hers! See?”

  Dad loved Jane’s idea and thought it would be nice for me to go visit Germaine in her new place, which I still hadn’t seen. Going to check out some strange, sad little apartment was not going to be fun for me, and I’m sure Germaine wasn’t looking forward to spending time with me. But Dad wouldn’t be stopped. He even volunteered to set it up.

  “Because, it’ll be nice,” I heard him explaining on the phone to Germaine. I’m sure she was wondering if it was a trap.

  I think he just wanted me to get out of the house. Dad and I had finally had our fight, a fight resembling what I thought had been coming since the second I turned around from the dorm room door. And since neither of us seemed to have the balls to talk about it directly, it came out of something stupid.

  “Cecily, Superhero needs to go for a walk,” Dad had said a few days earlier, coming into my room as I was doing some art history reading.

  “I just took him out,” I said, which was true. Sometimes Superhero was a filthy liar.

  Dad sighed heavily. I put the book down.

  “What?”

  “What do you mean, what?” Dad said. “Your dog wants to go out.”

  “I JUST TOOK HIM OUT.”

  “You know, I don’t ask that much of you, Cecily,” Dad said. “Especially this year. I think I’ve given you a lot of room. I just don’t know what’s up with you.”

  I’d had it. There was nothing up with me. “You know what? I was always good. I’m maybe not as perfect as Josh, but I think I’ve been doing pretty fucking okay. I’m not a bitch like Germaine. And I didn’t sleep around or get fucked up or even get bad grades. And just because I didn’t do this one thing—no, it’s not that I didn’t do it, it’s because I didn’t plan on it—everybody thinks I’m nuts? Well, fine, maybe I am, but whatever, I don’t think I am. I think you just need to lay the fuck off me and let me do my own thing. I don’t know what that thing is yet, but Jesus Christ, I’ll get to it, okay? Now where is the fucking leash?”

  I clapped my hands to get Superhero’s attention, stormed out the door, and headed out toward the lake path. I fumed: it felt good to be mad. Typically, whenever I thought Dad was mad at me, I felt sick to my stomach. If he ever seemed disappointed in me, I wanted to kill myself. But I didn’t feel that way.

  After the fight, we ignored each other for the rest of the evening and ate dinner quietly in front of the TV. Since then, we had been avoiding each other and gradually pretending that the fight didn’t happen, so it was nice to have this visit for Dad to arrange to get me away from him on a weekend.

  In Chicago, summer comes later than it does for the rest of the country. When Dad took me to hang out with Germaine, we’d finally had our first week of warm weather. The sun shone so brightly that the glare off the lake was making traffic on Lake Shore Drive slow down. We exited near a giant Indian totem pole that, for some reason, stood in the park between the high-rises and the water. Dad turned onto a little residential street lined with trees and old brick apartment complexes. Couples strolled down the sidewalk. I would rather live in a neighborhood like this than on a college campus.

  “Be good, have fun,” Dad said as he dropped me off.

  “I’ll try,” I said, opening the car door. “I will,” I amended my statement. Why not? If Germaine really didn’t want me over, she wouldn’t have allowed me to come over. And Angie had said that her sister was having the time of her life living in the city and working at her job. Maybe Germaine was, too. Maybe we would have fun.

  I hit the doorbell with our last name next to someone else’s and was let in with a loud, obnoxious buzzing. As I opened the door, I wondered if Germaine had picked the building on purpose for the annoying buzz. It sounded uncannily like her voice.

  She lived in a big brick apartment complex, with a dark, dank hallway inside. I hiked up to the third floor, wondering how long the stained old carpet had been on the floor, and whether the windows on the stairwells opened, or if they had been pai
nted shut forever.

  I got upstairs, and Germaine was laughing.

  Not at me, though. She stood in the doorway with her phone to her ear, laughing at something being said on the other end of the line. She looked good. She usually wore her hair down, flat-ironed and straight, which I thought looked really severe. Now it was pulled up in a messy half-ponytail-half-bun, with parts of it flying around her face. She wore a pair of red running shorts and a lime green T-shirt and stood in her bare feet. I hadn’t seen her since she moved out in May; she looked like she’d lost some weight. She looked like she had been exercising, which was very unlike Germaine.

  She waved me in, barely glancing at me, and said, “What? No. Really?” She gestured with her arm to mean, I think, Have a look around. I had some flowers with me, which were also Dad’s idea, but I had no idea what to do with them and Germaine was clearly engrossed in her phone conversation, so I walked around, holding the flowers like some pathetic lover boy.

  Once I started looking around, I had to admit, the place was kind of cool. The building was old, there was too much white paint chipping off the windows, and there was permanent dust in between the cracks on the hardwood floor. But the windows were flung wide open and sunlight poured into the living room. Little knickknacks covered the shelves and the small mantel over the decorative fireplace. Tiny little vases and plants and figurines. Were these Germaine’s? I was in her room at home so rarely that I couldn’t remember what she had in there, or what she liked. I checked out the bookshelf, crammed with old paperbacks, many with an orange sticker on the spine that said USED. A lot of poetry and philosophy.

  “Hey,” Germaine said, coming back into the room, now off the phone. “Sorry about that.”

  “Who was that?” I asked.

  “No one,” she said, and I wanted her to ask who the flowers were for, so I could say, “No one,” but she didn’t.

  “These are for you,” I said instead.

  “Oh thanks,” she said. “These are pretty. Let me go put them in some water.”

  “This is a nice place, Germaine,” I said, following her into the kitchen.

  “Yeah,” she said. “We like it.”

  “Who? You and Conrad?”

  “What? No, remember, I’m living here with Melissa?”

  “Who’s Melissa?”

  “Just a friend from high school.”

  “I don’t remember her.”

  “I wasn’t really friends with her in high school. She and I rode the same train to work and got to talking and we started hanging out and decided we’d move in together.”

  “Oh,” I said. The kitchen was packed with containers filled with rice, spices, chocolate chips, and some grains I couldn’t identify. The pantry was stuffed with boxes marked “All-Natural” and “Organic.”

  “Is this all your stuff, too?”

  “No, most of it is Melissa’s,” said Germaine. “She’s really into cooking. We’ve already had a dinner party and a cookout so far. You should come sometime.”

  “Really?” Then a small orange cat wandered into the kitchen. “What’s that?” I asked.

  “That’s Mr. Henry,” Germaine said. “He’s Melissa’s.”

  “No, not who. What is that?” I said. “Since when are you a cat person?” We had never owned a cat in our family, ever. And neither had my mom and neither had my dad. Cats were a weird tradition that some other families had that we never practiced.

  She shrugged. “We thought it would be fun.” She pulled a blue glass vase out from under the sink, filled it with water, and stuck the flowers in. “So, do you want the tour?” she said.

  “Sure,” I said. “Sure, I’ll take the tour. Nice to meet you, Mr. Henry.” The cat looked at me and then looked away.

  The apartment had a porch in the back, which seemed rickety compared to our nice little patio back home. There were too many layers of brown paint and there was a lot of dirt, it seemed, but Germaine and Melissa had made the spot look nicer with some flower boxes and a little wrought-iron table and chair set. The whole back of the building looked like a cute little community. All the other porches were adorned with dangling ferns, barbecues, herbs in pots, wind chimes. “Sometimes we sit out here on Sunday mornings and drink coffee and just talk about the weekend,” said Germaine. “It’s so nice.”

  Germaine’s room was small—there was barely enough room in it for her bed, but a window next to her bed was open so that the breeze blew about a sheer white curtain, which made everything look more intimate than cramped. Also, her bed was new—we had twin beds at home but Dad had bought her a queen-size, and she’d debated for a long time before deciding to splurge on some designer sheets. I bet I could spend a whole day lying there, watching that curtain from under her fluffy powder blue duvet cover on the huge bed.

  Melissa’s room featured a big four-poster bed, with red gauze strung between the columns. It looked like something I probably would have begged for when I was eleven. I was secretly jealous.

  “I have to tell you, I really thought you were moving in with Conrad,” I said. “I thought you were just making up Melissa for Dad’s sake so he wouldn’t go ballistic.”

  “Conrad and I broke up,” Germaine said, smiling.

  “I didn’t know that,” I said. “I’m really sorry.”

  “No, you’re not,” she said.

  “Well, sort of. I’ve grown accustomed to his face.”

  “Yeah, right. It was right after I moved out,” she said. “I think he was mad that I wasn’t moving in with him.”

  “Why didn’t you?” I asked.

  “Because he’s a loser,” she said. “I hate to say it. I mean, he was really nice. And really cute. But he didn’t do anything.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “And I feel like such a yuppie, but when I finally started working and thinking seriously about moving out, I think he got jealous or something, like I was betraying him by getting a life.” Like Kate did to me.

  “You’ve gotten to be kind of responsible, haven’t you?” I asked.

  “Sure,” she said, irritable again. “Why wouldn’t I be?” But her crankiness was amusing this time, like she was Oscar the Grouch. I didn’t take it personally, and she didn’t really seem to be that mad.

  Suddenly, I had a real reason to be sad about going to college. It seemed like there was a glimmer of hope that Germaine and I might actually start getting along like human beings. And I was going to be leaving.

  “What time is Dad coming to get you?” Germaine asked. I’d been there about a half hour.

  “Not for another hour,” I said. “Do you want me to leave or something?”

  “No!” Germaine snapped, and then softened, tried again. “I mean, no, don’t be silly. I was just asking. Do you want some iced tea?”

  “Sure,” I said. We headed back to the kitchen, and she poured two glasses. We went to sit outside on her deck. It was actually adorable as hell. Someone in a big hat was kneeling over a flower bed in the courtyard below. Two guys with huge arm muscles were drinking margaritas and grilling on a balcony across the way. Germaine waved to them.

  “This is really good,” I said. I usually hated iced tea: it was the blandest of drinks. But this was minty fresh.

  “Thanks,” Germaine said. “So, uh. Your year is almost up, huh?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I guess it is. Time flies.” Or did it?

  “Do you think you . . . you know, figured everything out?”

  “Absolutely not,” I said. “I don’t have anything more figured out than before. But, well, I’m not nervous. Right now. I’m nervous that I’m not nervous. I don’t know.”

  “I feel kind of bad for you,” Germaine said, pulling a cigarette out of a pack that was sitting on the table. She offered me one, and I waved it away. “I bet a lot of people think a year off sounds like a lot of fun, but you had to feel all this pressure to figure out life. And you can’t do it in a year. You can’t do it in a year at home, anyway.”
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  “You’re right,” I said.

  “I still would have traveled,” she said. “Although I don’t think traveling abroad for a year when you’re eighteen is the same as doing it when you’re twenty. I don’t know.” Germaine had spent a semester in London when she was in college, which I kind of thought was cheating, since I thought the whole point was to go somewhere where they didn’t speak English. But, obviously, what did I know?

  “I guess,” I said. “It’s hard to know what I don’t know. You know?” I was trying to be funny, sort of.

  “I know,” Germaine said, but she didn’t seem like she was playing along. “You’re pretty spoiled.” I took a big gulp from my iced tea, because I didn’t know what that meant.

  “But I’m also pretty spoiled, I guess,” she said. “Dad let me sit around at home for a while without doing anything, too. Maybe I don’t give him enough credit sometimes. That was sort of nice of him. I had friends who had to work through college and everything, or went to their new jobs the day after they graduated. The time after college is just tough. You’re in school and you’re in this make-believe land where you can do whatever you want, and then you come out again and it’s the real world. It’s a hard adjustment.”

  “So do you miss college?” I said.

  “Not really, actually,” she said. “I love my apartment. I even love having a job—I mean, it’d be nice if I had a more exciting one, but I like that when the day is done, I can just go home and do whatever the hell I want and not have homework or projects or anything like that. And I like that I can stay in on a Friday night and not feel like I’m missing out.”

  “That’s what I’m worried about,” I said. “I’m worried that I’m going to have to pretend to have fun when I don’t want to.”

  “You’re not pretending to have fun,” said Germaine. “It is fun. But when you get out, you realize that there are many more kinds of fun out there. You didn’t seem like you had that much fun this year.”