An Off Year Read online

  “I got some ice cream,” added Dad.

  “Okay,” I finally consented. What can I say, I like ice cream. Who doesn’t?

  Upstairs with our ice cream, as What About Bob? began, I kept sneaking glances at Angie. It was weird being in close proximity to another girl, one who wasn’t my sister, our cleaning lady, or my mother. She ate her ice cream without looking at it, just sticking her spoon into the blue ceramic bowl and lifting it to her mouth. She wasn’t messy or anything, but she didn’t take care to parcel out tiny portions of ice cream into her spoon the way Germaine did, didn’t wipe her mouth constantly the way Mom did. Her hair was really blond, unlike Germaine’s, which was sort of dirty blond. It was pulled back in a ponytail with little pieces falling perfectly around her face. She had a little turned-up nose and big brown eyes. In order to have an excuse to stare at her, I started talking.

  “So how did you and Josh meet?”

  “He stalked me,” she said. “For a year.”

  “I had a Dante class with her that I couldn’t stand, but she told me she was signing up for a Chaucer class, and I did it, just so I could hang out with her,” Josh said.

  “Finally, at the end of the term, he told me that he was only doing it so he could study with me. So I told him to go screw himself.”

  “And she kicked me in the groin!”

  “Wow,” I said. “That’s cute.”

  I shut up, and we went back to the movie. I liked that Angie laughed at the movie, loudly and without waiting to see if we were laughing, too. I had always thought the movie was okay, but I never enjoyed it as much as I did watching it with Angie.

  I had another appointment with Jane coming up, so I decided to go the extra mile and try calling Kate again. We had been speaking less and less often, or actually, she was. I had been leaving voice mails and e-mails—not any more than I usually would have, but I felt like a pathetic stalker. Without her, I’d have no friends to talk to and I knew that wouldn’t be good. We had meant to get together while she was home for Christmas, but the one time that we made an actual plan, she had canceled, citing “family plans,” which I thought was total bullshit. I had never heard of her canceling fun to do something with her family, especially if her parents were on the verge of killing each other. My hands shook when I dialed. Stupid Kate.

  “What’s up?” she asked when she picked up the phone. They had caller I.D. in her room, which had been making me paranoid.

  “How’s school?” I came up with lamely, after running out of preliminary conversation.

  “School is cool,” she said. “It’s cool to be in school. And follow the rules. And drool. While wearing mules.”

  “Shut up.” I didn’t even have a clever comeback.

  “Seriously, things are going good.” She started telling me about some guy named Greg that she had been e-mailing me about. He was really cute. He was in her Spanish class.

  “So, we kind of hooked up on Thursday night at happy hour.”

  “Now, is he the one who lives on your floor? The football guy?”

  “No, the football guy and I were just friends. That’s Quinn. The other guy on my floor is Randy, and we don’t speak anymore. That was just a one-time thing. He has a girlfriend anyway.”

  “Ah, I see.”

  “Actually, they’re having some kind of Round-the-World party thing outside in my hall right now, so I have to go. See you!”

  “What’s a Round-the-World party?” I asked, but Kate had already hung up. A Round-the-World party, as I later found out, is an excuse to get drunk. Everything in college that is not class is an excuse to get drunk, it seems. St. Patrick’s Day is an excuse to get drunk. The fifth of May is an excuse to get drunk. A warm day is an excuse to get drunk. A Round-the-World party is just another one, only in this case people wear togas and yarmulkes and sombreros.

  Kate and I tried to get drunk once or twice in high school, not because we were going anywhere special, but almost as an experiment. We wanted to see what it was like, if it was really that great. One time, she slept over at my house, and we took a bottle of kiwi-strawberry Snapple, crept downstairs to Dad’s sparse liquor shelf in the kitchen, and put about a drop of vodka in the bottle. We shared sips, watching Saturday Night Live and giggling together about what we’d act like once we got drunk (start beating each other up? cry and call ex-lovers?), but not surprisingly, we didn’t get drunk. We tried it again another night at her house, with the same flavor of Snapple, only we added her mother’s rum. A lot of it. Probably too much, because after a few sips we agreed it tasted bad and poured it down the toilet.

  I really never got drinking. I guess my parents had unwittingly sabotaged that whole thing, since I had been around alcohol my whole life. Not that either one of them was a big boozer, but they just didn’t treat it like it was anything too special. Dad would have a drink of wine every now and then and Mom, when she lived with us, liked her Manhattans, and I thought both tasted like crap. I much preferred to sneak sips from Dad’s creamy, sugary coffee.

  I tried to get drunk; I just never got there. I’d get tired before I got to the giggly, laughing point that my friends did. I remember one particular Christmas dance. Meg had smuggled a bottle of white wine from her parents’ house over to Kate’s, and Meg swigged from it as we got ready for the night. I remember that it was the sophomore-year dance, because I let Kate do my makeup and was surprised that she actually did a good job—she did something with some eyeliner that made my eyes look fascinatingly gray and not that drab-gray that was too indecisive to be blue or green. I also let her do my hair, some twisty thing she had accomplished so that I had little tendrils along the sides. Who knew that Kate had such skills? I had expected her to make me look like a cartoon character. I guess we got too into it because Meg sat on the toilet (seat down) the whole time and drank from her bottle, and by the time we left she had drunk almost the whole thing, which we didn’t realize until we got back.

  At the dance, we acted stupid as usual, shaking our butts on the dance floor in inexpensive formal wear, and Meg began throwing herself around harder and harder.

  “Do you think Jaash likes me?” she yelled in my ear. My brother had graduated from our high school the year before.

  “No,” I said. I was positive that Josh didn’t even know who she was.

  “Shut up!” she squealed, and slapped me across the arm, hard. “I think he’s sooooo haaht,” she said, and this time I could smell her hot breath, and it smelled like ass.

  “Hey, is she okay?” yelled Kate.

  Meg rested her hand heavily on my shoulder to tell me something else that I’m sure was very important, but she fell down, bringing me to the floor with her. She screamed with laughter, and I tried to pretend to laugh along with her, but soon she dissolved into tears.

  “What is wrong with you?” I asked, even though I knew what was wrong with her.

  “Nobody luh-huh-hoves me,” she blubbered. Kate and some of our other friends came over and were trying to pick her up, but Meg was playing the wet noodle game with her bones and felt like she weighed three hundred pounds.

  “We gotta get her out of here before she barfs all over the place,” Kate said. “Or before she gets in trouble.”

  “Or before people start sliding around in her barf,” I said. We started giggling and then laughing. For some reason, the deejay made the music even louder at that point, so we couldn’t hear anything, not our laughing, not Meg’s groaning, just Sir Mix-a-Lot’s approval of big butts.

  We eventually hustled Meg to the gym exit and found a cab. Kate and I had to do rock-paper-scissors for who was going to sit with her in the backseat, and I won, for the first time in my entire life (scissors). Kate propped up Meg against the window behind the cabbie so he couldn’t see her, sticking her mouth and nose out like a dog so that her little bursts of clear puke would slide down the outside of the window. The driver didn’t notice, or at least he pretended not to.

  Maybe getting drunk in college wa
s different from getting drunk in high school. Everyone in college seemed to do it, it seemed. Everyone expected that you’d do it, so maybe it was more . . . what? I didn’t know. It was more relaxing? You weren’t as worried about getting caught? You didn’t have to do it in such a hurry? It made you charming and delightful, as opposed to barfy?

  After the night of the Round-the-World party, I tried calling Kate a few more times. She was so busy with classes and a fun new boy named Adam that as our talks grew fewer and farther between, it was harder to catch up. Our conversations would have to be an hour long for me to hear everything she was up to. When I called, I usually got either her roommate or their voice mail, which consisted of them singsonging that they weren’t home. Even though I didn’t know her at all, I grew to hate the roommate, with her loud voice and New York accent that, I’m sorry, sounded fake. Otherwise, Kate was just using that caller I.D. and wasn’t picking up because she didn’t want to talk to her stupid former friend who was too much of a baby to leave home.

  For New Year’s, Josh and Angie ended up going down to Navy Pier to watch the fireworks. Germaine was out with Conrad. I realized that this was a good reason for me to be talking to my friends, the way Jane had recommended. I had no plans, and while I didn’t mind sitting at home with Dad on any other night, tonight just seemed extra pathetic. I told Dad that Kate and I were going to a party, even though I knew she was going out in the city with some friends from college. He seemed so happy that he offered to give me cab money. I promised him I wouldn’t touch any alcohol and borrowed the car. I spent the night slowly driving up and down the lakeshore, through the towns that got richer and smaller the farther north I went. I listened to music and sang to myself and would feel pretty hollow when certain songs would come on, and I felt like if life were a music video, I’d be crying beautifully at that moment, but it wasn’t and I didn’t, not at all. I brought myself home around one o’clock, when I knew Dad would be asleep already. The next morning, I told him that Kate and I didn’t go out; we just stayed in and watched movies. He didn’t question me further.

  january

  I was aware of how pitiful my New Year’s Eve was, so I made one resolution for myself: get out of the house more. Surely good things lay for me outside our door! New friends! Inspiration! Perhaps a model scout who would say, “You are clearly too short for this job, but you have a certain I-don’t-know-what. Are you in school? No? Good, come with me!”

  Yes, getting out would solve everything.

  The problem with that was, once I had promised myself to do so, it felt like a huge imposition. Dad had gotten me a membership at the university gym after I complained that the groceries I carried in from the car were too heavy, and for the first few days of the new year, I dutifully put on my workout clothes and then sat around waiting for an excuse not to go out: snow, a really good rerun on TV, the need for a nap. After a few days, Dad pointed out that it was pretty crappy of me not to use the membership that he had paid for, so the first Friday of the new year, I promised myself I was really, really going to go. As soon as this episode of What’s Happening!! was over. Then the phone rang.

  “Hello?” I answered, expecting that it would be for Dad or Germaine. I had gotten used to being their secretary. I didn’t mind it. I liked practicing my handwriting as I took down messages.

  “Hey there,” said a friendly guy’s voice.

  “Uh,” I said smoothly. Who the hell was this? Then my heart sped up. It was Mike.

  “Hi,” he said again.

  “Um, how are you?”

  “Fine,” he said. “How are you?”

  “Good,” I said.

  “Good,” he said. I still couldn’t get my head around the fact that Mike had called. He hadn’t e-mailed me back after I had written him. That first week, I checked my e-mail compulsively. The week after that, I felt hideously embarrassed that I had been so foolish as to actually e-mail Mike. The week after that, I told myself to forget it, that I wasn’t friends with Mike after all, and that who cared anyway. By last week, I had almost forgotten about the whole thing. Now this.

  “I got your e-mail,” he said. “But honestly I didn’t feel like typing everything down that’s new. And I don’t know what you know. So I put it off. But I’m home now. I’m going back after break in a few days. So I figured we could just talk.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “You’re not a real treat to talk to on the phone, do you know that?”

  “I hate the phone,” I said. “A phone killed my mother.”

  “Shut up,” he said. “Want to come over tonight?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I’ll call you later after dinner.”

  “Yeah, you will,” he said, and hung up.

  I turned off the TV. That thinking feeling again. I used to go over to Mike’s house all the time in high school before he started seeing Wendy. It was no big deal. We’d sit in his small bedroom on the blue carpet and look up old music videos online or play records and talk, sometimes just sit there in silence and listen to whatever he put on. The door was always open, and his mom would walk by sometimes, doing laundry, occasionally stopping to chat. It felt good to be around her, too, a short-haired, rather big-butted mom who seemed fine with being a mom, not trying to impress anyone with her fabulousness. Was any of it going to be the same? Why did I feel nervous? I went to the gym and had to quit jogging after just two laps around the track because I felt like I was going to throw up.

  “I’m going over to Mike’s later,” I announced over dinner. Germaine looked up.

  “Oh yeah?” said Dad. If I knew him, he was trying not to look surprised or excited or happy as he served himself some salad. “Tell him we miss him.”

  “I don’t miss him,” said Germaine.

  “Tell him I miss him and Germaine doesn’t,” said Dad.

  “Will do,” I said. I kept pushing around the thin piece of breaded veal on my plate, trying to decide if I should change out of my ancient brown thrift-store corduroys or put on some makeup or something before I went over. I didn’t do that before. I didn’t know why I wanted to now. I decided that I wouldn’t change anything.

  I drove to Mike’s house, an exactly five-minute drive as always, and parked outside. The driveway was empty, so his parents were probably out.

  He opened the door before I got to it.

  “Dang, you know how much I love ringing doorbells,” I said, walking up the cobblestone path, which lay in a swervy line for some reason. “Thus explaining my dream to be a door-to-door doorbell salesman.”

  “Hello, Cecily,” he said, and opened his arms up wide for a hug. I wrapped my arms around his middle. He felt thicker. Not fat, but more solid. Or something? Maybe my arms were hallucinating.

  “Want something to drink?” he asked as I closed the door behind me. I took off my peacoat and hung it in the hall closet. It felt like it had been forever since I used to act like his house was my own. He looked pretty damn good. He had cut his hair quite short, and it looked thick and shiny. It had been a few years since he had had short hair, and now it showed off what was almost a pretty-boy face. His dark eyebrows and light green eyes made him look sensitive, almost sad, although that wasn’t the case, at least with the old Mike I knew, anyway.

  “Do you guys have any hot chocolate?” I asked. “I like the hair, by the way.”

  “I think so, and thanks,” he said as we walked to the kitchen. I sat at the dark gray marble counter in the middle of their snug kitchen as he rummaged through the cabinets.

  “So, what have you heard?” he asked, pulling out a tin of Ghirardelli hot chocolate. Score.

  “What have I heard about what?” I asked. “I’ve heard many things, Mike. Children laughing. Birds singing. Cars backfiring.”

  “I mean how much have you heard from other people about my year thus far?” he said. “I’m sure some people have told other people.”

  “Kate told me a few things,” I said. “Like how you got pregnant and they kicked
you out of school. Oh Mike, how could you.”

  “Ha-ha,” he said, filling up the teakettle with water. I actually wanted milk in the hot chocolate. “We’re out of milk,” he said, as if he read my mind. Creepy.

  “Seriously, I heard that you left Harvard to transfer to the University of Kansas to be with a girl,” I said. He looked down and smirked at the teakettle. I’d forgotten how he hung his head and smirked, letting his hair shag down around his eyebrows, when he got embarrassed. Now his hair didn’t cover his eyes. “I don’t know if that’s true or not, though. We don’t have to talk about it, you know. It’s none of my business.”

  “That’s nice of you,” he said, and pulled a comically large mug from the cabinet overhead. “Seriously. Most people so far either act like they didn’t hear about it when clearly they did, or they just ask, ‘How could you do that?’ Like I murdered someone.”

  “Well, I don’t know what you heard about me,” I said.

  “How you took the year off?” he said.

  “Good news travels fast,” I said.

  He sat down on the other side of the bar. I felt like we were in a coffee commercial. “So,” he said. “So what. Picking a school and just going to it is lame, right?” The kettle began to shriek.

  “Hey, can we hang out in your room?” I said suddenly. “It just feels like it would be more normal.”

  “I’m not going to have sex with you, Cecily, if that’s what you’re hoping,” he said, lowering his head and staring at me hard. We had never talked about sex before in our lives. We weren’t that kind of close. It felt like I was talking to Mike’s randier older brother, if he’d had one. At the very least, I wished he would stop calling me by my name.

  “Fine,” I said. “I’m not having sex with you.” Maybe I was remembering it wrong, but when we were closer in high school, it felt like I did most of the joking and teasing while Mike just tolerated it.