An Off Year Read online

  “TAKE IT,” she said in a voice that was nearly a shout.

  “Jesus Christ, okay,” I said. Gina shot me a very evil look, but then fortunately her phone rang and it was time to escape.

  The frosted glass door closed behind me, and the rest of the day stretched ahead. So. I officially had a year to fix whatever was currently wrong with me. That seemed easy. I just had to figure out what it was that I needed to fix.

  I walked home, kicking up little bunches of dried leaves on the sidewalk where they’d begun to fall, saying under my breath, “I’m taking the year off,” to practice it. In case I ran into Mrs. Garfield again, in case I had to explain it on a job application or something, in case I just needed to convince myself.

  “I’m taking time off.” That sounded good. I had heard people use that phrase before. It sounded nice, relaxing, practically professional. I was taking time off from school—to do something. I just wasn’t sure what. If anybody asked, I would just say that it was personal. I was going on sabbatical. My dad’s colleagues did that sometimes. That seemed very serious and somehow almost religious to me. But those people seemed to be actually doing something with their time. I was pretty sure they were working on a book or some project, not sitting at home in their slippers watching All My Children.

  “So?” said Dad later that day when he got home from work.

  “It was fine,” I said. “It was whatever.”

  “Can you use some more specific words, please?”

  “She thinks it’s a good idea for me to take the year off. You know, to relax.”

  “Just relax? I didn’t know that you were stressed out to begin with.”

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  “Did she say if I need to come in? Did she say what she thought the problem was?” he asked.

  “No, you don’t. And she said that maybe it’s anxiety.”

  “Anxiety?”

  “Yeah, anxiety. Why?”

  He just shook his head and muttered, “The women in this family . . .”

  “The women in this family what?” I’d never heard myself lumped together with my mom and sister. If Dad complained about us, it was usually because Germaine and I were fighting, or I didn’t want to go visit Mom, or Mom and Germaine were both pains in the ass. But never all three of us together.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “What?” I asked again. I knew there was something mean coming, but it felt like it was time for Dad to get mad at me. I wanted him to get mad at me.

  “Well, none of you is exactly an overachiever,” he snapped. I opened my mouth, but I knew that whatever I was going to say wouldn’t make it untrue. What could I do? Demand that he take me seriously for having skipped out on my first year of college? Doing the dishes every now and then didn’t really count. This conversation needed to be steered elsewhere before I started feeling too ashamed. I didn’t want to be a letdown like Mom and Germaine.

  “I’m fun, though, right?” I asked, deciding to play the fun card. That was always a fun card to play.

  “You’re sometimes fun,” he said.

  “And at least I’m around,” I said.

  “Germaine is around,” he said.

  “But I’m fun,” I said, poking him in his black sweater. “I’m fun and around. Germaine is just around but no fun at all. Josh is sometimes fun, but he’s not around. I’m both. Do you see what I’m getting at here? I’m fun and around.”

  “There is no denying that,” he said. “And I actually do like having you around.” He gave me a smooch on the cheek, and I wiped it off in pretend disgust and went upstairs before he asked me to do anything. I felt guilty, like I was getting away with something.

  november

  Dad’s little comment about Mom, Germaine, and me was still bugging me by the next time I went to see Jane, which I didn’t do entirely willingly. I felt nervous that I didn’t have much to tell her, like I was supposed to come up with something to explain myself but I had failed. I kind of hoped I could skip the therapy thing and work my issues out magically on my own.

  I intended to lie low until Thanksgiving, emerge to eat, and then hide away again until Christmas, but stupid Gina from Dr. Stern’s office had to go calling the house to confirm my appointment. The worst part was that Germaine got the call.

  “Dr. Stern’s office called to remind you of your appointment tomorrow,” she announced one night over dinner.

  “Ah. Interesting! Thank you,” I said, hoping to avoid drawing attention to the matter, as I tried unsuccessfully to twirl a neat forkful of spaghetti. I shoved the pasta and its dangling tendrils in my mouth.

  “Oh yeah,” said Dad. “Do you need a ride? What time is the appointment?”

  “It’s at two,” said Germaine. I shot her the death stare.

  “I don’t think I really need to go,” I said. “I’m fine. Really!”

  “Really!” said Dad. “What have you done for the last two months?”

  “I’ve been helping out around the house,” I said. This was true. I had organized our DVDs alphabetically, cleaned out the closets (except Germaine’s, which I wasn’t allowed near), and untangled all the knots of electrical cord in the house. And yet somehow that didn’t satisfy Dad.

  “Cecily, it’s probably a good idea for you to go,” said Germaine. “What’s the worst that can happen?”

  “You stay out of this,” I said. “You haven’t been doing shit, either.”

  “Okay,” said Dad, raising his voice just enough. “Germaine, you shut up. Cecily, you’re going. No complaining.”

  Germaine and I rolled our eyes in unison and then glared at each other suspiciously.

  “Hey, Gina,” I said as I entered Dr. Stern’s office the next day. I was curious to see if maybe she was a decent human being and we’d get along better this time—maybe she was just having a bad day last time. However, instead of returning my hello, she immediately picked up the phone to make a call. But before I could plan my next move, the door opened, and within a few minutes I was telling Jane what my dad said about “the women in this family.”

  “What did he mean by that?” She was wearing a little cape, which seemed very expensive and would probably look ridiculous on me, but was perfect on her.

  “Well,” I said. “We have kinda all done a bad job making something of ourselves. I blame Mom.”

  “That’s what they all say,” said Jane, and I made a face at her and told her about my mother.

  I don’t remember too much about what it was like when Mom lived with us, except that she wasn’t around a lot. I mostly remember that she left Dad the summer we trapped raccoons.

  It was a very exciting summer for me, at first. It turned out that the previous winter, raccoons ripped up the shingles on our roof to try to get inside for warmth. Horrified, Mom called exterminators, but she was told that with this particular kind of raccoon problem, there was only one thing that could be done.

  We procured a raccoon-size trap from Animal Control, which was to be baited nightly after we set it up on the side of the house near the tree the raccoons used to clamber onto the roof. The trap, which looked like an oversize wire shoe box, would shut its door after the raccoon stepped on a spring-mounted switch on its way to the food. There it would wait, unharmed, at least until morning, when the Animal Control man took it away and, as I understood it, let it loose into a happy, sunny woodland area to rejoin its cute raccoon families.

  Germaine surprisingly excelled at trapping the raccoons, despite being generally grossed out by most animals. Every time Dad set the bait, we’d end up with an empty trap, the neighbor’s cat, or a possum, which the Animal Control man would haul out of the trap and carry by the tail, splay-limbed and stoic, and throw in the back of the truck for relocation. Germaine really had a knack for baiting the raccoons, though. She checked online to see what foods raccoons liked and added the ingredients to the grocery list. Every night she would carefully bait the trap with corn on the cob, fruit, tuna, and peanut butt
er, varying the meals and scattering them throughout the trap. It was really quite artful. She would step out after dinner armed with a flashlight, ignoring the mosquitoes that were excited by her minimal tank top, and carefully place each piece of food as if she were setting a table for some important diplomat. Every time Germaine set the trap, we trapped a fat, angry raccoon that would try to dig its way out. It could have been a career for her.

  The traps were laid on the side of the house, directly under my bedroom willow. If I stayed awake late enough, I’d inevitably hear the snap of the trap as a raccoon stumbled into it, another victory for Germy. Sometimes I’d hear the raccoon crying, a ghostly noise that sounded like a loon.

  One morning I woke up to pouring rain. I knew that the trap had caught its prey from the familiar snap and the crying that had gone on all night. It was only 6:30 A.M., though, and I realized the animal must have been sitting in the rain for hours, with hours still to go before the Animal Control truck arrived. Although I felt so comfy in my bed and had just woken up from a great dream where we had beds in school instead of desks, I decided to do something for the poor creature. I ran down to the kitchen, congratulating myself on my selflessness, pulled out a large garbage bag, and cut apart the seams. Throwing on Dad’s raincoat, I ran outside and faced the raccoon. It did not look any different from the other raccoons, but I liked to think it held an expression of misery, combined with gratitude at my presence, as it hunched over, sopping wet. I draped the bag over the cage, providing a shelter from the rain, and ran back inside, upstairs, and into bed, feeling like I had done a good deed.

  I woke up around 10:00 A.M., after the rain had stopped, and found my family downstairs at the breakfast table, with the exception of Mom, who had gone out to play tennis.

  “Did the Animal Control man come yet?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Josh said. Nobody looked at me.

  I frowned. I had expected at least one of them, especially Dad or Josh, to say something about my kindness. “Did you notice anything about the cage?”

  “Yeah, actually, there was a garbage bag inside the cage,” said Germaine.

  “It was inside the cage?” The spaces between the mesh were barely large enough to stick the tip of your finger between, were you so brave.

  “Yes,” she said testily. “What were you doing?”

  “I put a garbage bag over the cage.”

  “Oh,” said Germy, pretending to read the classifieds section. “I guess he pulled it inside. Why did you do that?”

  “Because he had to sit out there in the rain,” I cried. “Even if he’s in a cage, he didn’t have to get soaked.”

  Dad patted me on the head. “Our Lady of Mercy,” he chuckled.

  “Yeah, right,” said Germaine. “More like Our Lady of Uselessness.”

  “Our Lady of the Slightly Less Uncomfortable Fate,” added Josh.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You don’t know?” asked Josh.

  “What?”

  “Oh!” said Germaine, clearly relishing this. “They kill the raccoons after we catch them. We thought you knew.”

  That day didn’t feel that much different from when I learned about Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy and the not-existing.

  Dad must have told Mom about it, because when she came home she handed me a Blow Pop and could barely suppress one of those infuriating “Oh, this kid is so angry but it’s really pretty funny” smirks. I felt like a baby. I hated it. I hated being treated like a baby.

  That was the last memory I had of my mom, good or bad, living at home with us. And then, one day a few weeks later, she just went out in the morning and never came home. We had heard nothing of a luncheon with her girlfriends, a doctor’s appointment, a tennis lesson, anything. Well, we kids hadn’t, anyway. The phone rang around dinnertime, and Dad answered it. He called us all downstairs to the kitchen to tell us that Mom would be away for a little while, to figure things out. I didn’t see her go or even notice that her stuff was gone. She would take care of that a few weeks later while Dad took us on a trip to visit Mom’s parents (an excruciating stay, in that normally-quiet-but-kind Grandma and Grampa treated us like we were preemies, whispering around us and stroking our heads). By that point, we knew what was going on and it was no surprise.

  “Are you guys getting a divorce?” Germaine had asked bluntly the night that Dad first gathered us together around the kitchen table.

  “We’ll see,” said Dad. “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  They all turned to me as if they expected me to say something, or cry, or yell. But all I could say was, “Is that all?”

  “For now, I suppose, yes,” said Dad.

  “So then I ran upstairs to watch TV,” I told Jane.

  “That’s how you responded?”

  “I know,” I said. “I felt bad about it later. I was sad, but I knew it was going to happen. Mom and Dad had been arguing, it seemed, my entire life. They didn’t even seem to like each other. It was just a matter of time. I was sad that Dad was sad, but I knew there was nothing I could do about it.”

  “Hmm,” said Jane. “That makes sense.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “So. It’s been just Dad ever since, which is fine because I think even before they got divorced I liked hanging out with him much more. He gets me or something.”

  “And he likes the idea of you taking a year off?” Jane asked.

  “I think so. I think he thinks if I think it’s a good idea, then it is.”

  “And you think it was the right choice?”

  I tried to think of what I’d be doing if I were at school that very moment and not sitting with Dr. Stern. An image of high school all over again popped into my head: going to school with, eating with, and worst of all living with people I didn’t necessarily like. “I guess . . . how could it be better to be in college and be around all these strangers—and have to blend in with them and get along with them—than to be at home? It might be boring, but I know what’s up here. I’m not cool, but nobody’s decided I’m uncool.” I wasn’t sure if I had made this up just to please her or if it was true.

  “Have you always worried about being uncool?”

  “No,” I said. “I mean, not that I know of. Maybe. I don’t know.” A few uncomfortable flashbacks popped into my head, like finding my one solitary picture in the yearbook, and going to junior prom with Meg, who ended up leaving with a guy, so I had to get home by myself.

  “But you think you’ll either be cool—or just not care if you’re cool—by next year?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Yeah, maybe I won’t be as stressed about it.” Jane was asking tougher questions this time, firing back with more questions. “What about you, do you think I’ll be ready?”

  “Well, I don’t know you well enough yet,” she said. “Although at first glance I’d say you’re probably already more ready than you know. There was a part of me that wanted to tell you to go right back where you came from.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  Jane smiled. “Because I think just choosing not to go is a bigger deal than you think it is. Even if you’re choosing not to do something, you’re still making a choice. Maybe it’s not a bad thing. But it’s something worth taking your time to consider—don’t just pretend it didn’t happen.”

  “Hmm.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with taking the year off,” Jane said. “But I think you need help making the most of it and using it to prep for what lies ahead—even if it’s not school.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Sounds good.” I resisted the urge to spin around in my chair.

  “Cecily, what I typically offer is something called cognitive-behavioral therapy, which basically means that I give you some exercises to try to make this year a good one, to prepare you to take the next steps, and we see how that works. Eventually I want you to get out of the house more, and I also think down the line it might be interesting to see what happens after some planned one-on-one time with your sister.”r />
  “That sounds like a nightmare,” I said. “Anyway, it’s not like we don’t spend time together now. Maybe we spend too much time together.”

  “Well, that might come later. Right now, I’m going to give you an assignment,” said Jane. “But you need to be willing to work with me. Do you think you can do that?” I nodded and tried to appear cooperative. I was so bored from the last month, I was willing to take orders from a stranger. And even if I still couldn’t figure out why I had turned around in August, maybe it wouldn’t matter as long as I’d be able to move forward eventually. “I want you to just get in touch with at least one old friend from high school that you haven’t yet. Won’t your friends be back soon for Thanksgiving break? It’s not healthy for you not to hang out with anybody your age. And maybe it’ll help you talk to someone you trust. You’ll feel better.”

  “I’m embarrassed,” I said.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Because I’m lame and they’re in school,” I said. I couldn’t believe I was saying this. I wish I at least had a more mature way of getting this across. “I mean, I feel like a baby or something.”

  “So what?” she said. “Do you really think they’ll think you’re a baby?”

  “No,” I said. “I guess not.”

  “And even if they do, what happens then?”

  “Um, I guess I won’t have any friends then?”

  “And then what?”

  “And then what what? Then I’d be really screwed and really pathetic. And then I’m sure you’d get really rich because I could come and talk to you about that all the time.”

  Jane laughed. “Okay, take it easy. See your friends—I’m sure they’ll be happy to hear from you. I’ll see you afterward, and we’ll discuss what went down.” She wrote on a piece of plain white paper my name, the date, and “Rx: See @ least 1 friend.” Her handwriting was unexpectedly cramped and scrawly.

  “Is this an official document?” I asked. “Did they not get you a prescription pad yet?”

  “I don’t write prescriptions,” she said. “This is just a reminder for you. Or you can toss it when you leave.”