An Off Year

I raised the key and hesitated. Something wasn’t right. I turned around. “You know, actually, I think I’m just going to go back home with you,” I told my dad, who was still trying to decipher the campus map.

A dry erase board with a marker clipped to it was stuck to the door. I picked up the marker and wrote to the girl who would have been my roommate: “Molly, sorry, I won’t be here after all. Have a good year. Sincerely, Cecily.” The ink was a happy fuchsia color, fun for a fun girls’ dorm room. Oh well.

I took a deep breath and faced Dad, preparing to be screamed at, ready to be told that there was no way in hell I was going home with him. This was new territory for us: I’d never really done anything like this, so I had no idea how he’d react. I was going to stand my ground, though, and keep calmly repeating my plan: I was not going to college today. I wasn’t sure why this was the plan, but this was the plan, and I was sticking to it. If he didn’t let me back in the car with him, I was prepared to walk back to Chicago. It would take many days, but I was wearing a comfortable pair of Chuck Taylors. I felt a little bit giddy. And also a little like I was going to throw up.

Dad stood for a moment, not looking angry, but pensive, like he was looking for the right word in the crossword puzzle. Across the hall, a mother and her daughter, both redheads, screamed at each other about how to put together the dresser they had bought at Target.

I shrugged and shook my head. “It’s just . . . it’s not . . . I can’t. I just seriously can’t.” I was having a hard time making a complete sentence. My brain had a perfectly articulated argument, but it hadn’t reached my mouth yet. I paused for a second and willed it to flow out, but it obviously hadn’t totally formed. So I shrugged.

Dad fixed his bluish-gray eyes on me, but I couldn’t really look him in the eye because of the glare of the irritating fluorescent hallway lights off his glasses. “Cecily . . . are you sure? You don’t want to sleep on it?”

“You—” Dad started to say something but stopped, and for some reason gazed down at the horrible industrial carpeting under our feet that I didn’t intend to look at for much longer. It was chocolate brown with flecks of yellow in it, probably to hide years of embedded dirt. Dad adjusted his glasses, ran a hand through the short, still mostly dark curls on his head, then put his hand in his pocket and took out the car keys. “All right.” He hesitated for a second. Here it comes, I thought. “If you’re sure, then. Do you want to go home now or get some lunch?” he asked.

We walked back to the car, past crowds of kids and parents rushing through the halls and the parking lot with boxes and trash bags full of clothes, all hugging and crying and yelling at one another. We got back in the car and drove west, putting Gambier, Ohio, behind us, stopping at an Arby’s in Indiana to eat. I had a roast beef sandwich. I offered to drive at one point, but Dad just shook his head. It was pretty awkward, but I’d been through worse. I ignored the silence in the car and drowned out the questions in my head by reading each billboard we saw and imagining what they’d sound like if read in different accents.

We didn’t say anything until we got home many hours later. We drove back into Chicago, got off the expressway, and headed east, turning onto our little street, which stretched along a short Lake Michigan beach. The sun began to set over the backyards—it was barely starting to rise when we left.

“Cecily, what about your stuff?” asked Dad as I closed the car door and headed to the house from the garage. My head hurt from watching the miles of cookie-cutter homes that bordered the highway on the drive back. I was glad to be back in our solid old redbrick house where things felt right again.

When we walked in, my brother, Josh, stood in the kitchen cutting a sandwich in half on top of a paper napkin. Our cleaning lady, Yolanda, had come while we were gone, and the room smelled like Fantastik. Josh was leaving for school in a few days himself, to start his junior year in Madison.

“Hi,” he said, glancing toward us, and then did an actual double take, the kind you usually only see in the movies. “Wait. Aren’t you supposed to not be here?” he asked me. Dad didn’t say anything, just put his keys away in a drawer and went to the refrigerator to get a pop, so I would have to do the talking.

“I didn’t want to go,” I said, as if I had walked out of a movie I didn’t like. Superhero, our black regal-looking-but-often-silly Belgian shepherd, ran up to me, and I got down on my knees for hugs. “Hello, Mister Man!” I cried. Here was a perfectly good reason not to go to college: my dog wouldn’t have it.

I shrugged and retied my ponytail. The heat and humidity and general excitement of the day had styled the shorter curls around my head into a mini ’fro. Josh widened his eyes, looking at Dad and then back at me. It was that I-see-something-serious-is-going-on-but-I’ll-get-the-details-later face. I tried to catch his eye, but he examined the ceiling, his eyebrows almost disappearing under his dark mop of hair. With nothing else to say, I started upstairs to my room, then suddenly realized that I had no idea what I would do when I got there. I was beginning to wonder if this was such a good idea after all. But it felt like it was the only choice. I had to pretend to know what I was doing for a little while—until I actually did.

“Cecily,” Dad said before I reached the landing. I turned around and looked down at him. “Somebody is going to have to unload the car.” He sounded normal, like he was asking me to get groceries out of the trunk after a trip to the Jewel.

In the hall, I ran into my older sister, Germaine. Not literally, although we had spent the summer purposefully bumping shoulders when we walked past each other from our rooms on opposite ends of the hall, an unsubtle reminder that the house wasn’t big enough for the two of us. Germaine had graduated from college just a few months earlier and was living at home, sort of looking for a job, sort of not. Germaine and I had never been great friends. I had hoped that being away at college would mellow her out, but instead she got even more irritable than she was before she left. She seemed to hate being at home with us; she usually sequestered herself in her room or went out with her boyfriend, or sat at the computer listening to bitter pseudofeminist pop through headphones while she e-mailed her friends about how much her life sucked. I didn’t know why she didn’t just leave.

Our household was sort of divided up into Team Mom and Team Dad. Germaine was on Team Mom; she looked like her (dirty blond hair, squinty blue eyes) and, like Mom, didn’t really want to be around us. Josh and I, meanwhile, had Dad’s dark curly hair and gray (sometimes blue or greenish) eyes. I put up with Germaine because I had to; I believed she was the negative energy in the house. Mom was sort of no energy; she hadn’t lived at home since she and Dad divorced when I was eleven.

“What are you doing here?” Germaine asked. She smelled like coconuts and magazine perfume samples, which probably meant she had been tanning earlier. She flipped some long blond hair over her shoulder. She’d gotten her hair done recently, too. Busy day.

“Surprise!” I said, heading into my room. “They decided I was so brilliant they just automatically graduated me.” She snorted and went downstairs to get the whole story. I shut the door and lay down on the hot-pink carpet that I loathed and yet spent an inordinate amount of time on. My mother had cruelly picked it out and had it installed for me one summer while I was away at camp. I’m not sure why she thought I’d like the color of pink Lava lamps, but it was also insanely soft, so I tried to pretend it was actually magenta so I wouldn’t throw up when I was in the room. After pulling out my ponytail holder so that my hair spread out around my head in a tangle on the floor, I stretched out on my back and watched the fading sunlight slant by on the butter-colored walls. My mind raced with terrifying worries about what was going to come next, yet my body felt calm and peaceful, which was extra confusing.

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.

“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!”

“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.”

“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.

“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.

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.

“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 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.”

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.

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.