The Gap Year (33 page)

“You probably want to know what happened with my dad,” Twyla goes on. “I left there months ago. He’s an asshole. My mom got that much right.”

“So you’ve …”

“Pretty much been on the street.”

“Oh, Twyla.”

“Then there was this little niblet.” She lowers her nose to baby Aubrey’s head, closes her eyes, and breathes. “So I went to Snowflakes, this Christian adoption agency. I had to tell them that if they didn’t take me, I’d get an abortion. They still wouldn’t let me in, though, until I signed a paper promising that I’d give my baby up to a ‘fit Christian family.’ That was fair. Seven months ago? I shouldn’t have been raising an iguana. In fact, I
tried
to raise an iguana.”

“So what happened?”

“He died.”

“Not the iguana. The adoption.”

“Oh, right, like I was ever going to let
that
happen.” Twyla is her old, brash self as she gives a snort of derision. “No, they thought they had this ultratight security system. All high-tech James Bond and everything. Locked us in at night. But it was a joke. I stayed until I was ready. Until my baby was ready. Had all the extra dairy and folic acid and prenatal care you could dream of. Read every book they had. Just soaked it all up, then left when it was time to come back here.”

Aubrey mewls weakly. Twyla tenses and places the newborn’s mouth over her nipple. The scrawny infant simply lies quietly in Twyla’s arms, her lovely goldfish lips barely resting on her mother’s breast. I help Twyla express a drop of the first milk, so thick that I always think of it as nectar.

“That’s colostrum, right?”

“Yes, it is,” I answer, tucking Aubrey’s head down to encourage her to latch. “Come on, baby girl. The umbilical cord is gone; this is how we eat now.”

“You need this,” Twyla coos to her child. “This will give you all my very best antibodies and immunoglobulins and help you get rid of that nasty meconium.”

I remember what a smart girl Twyla was, able to sing entire songs after hearing them once.

Aubrey shows no interest in nursing. Twyla glances up, a spike of panic bringing back the familiar jitteriness, and asks, “Colostrum is the best thing to prevent jaundice, isn’t it? If she doesn’t nurse, her bilirubin levels are going to get dangerously high and the nurses will make me give her formula.”

“You’ve been doing your homework. Sweetie, don’t worry. Your nipples are just a little inverted is all.”

“I know,” Twyla moans. “I’ve got innie nips. I knew this wasn’t going to work. The nurse told me they’d put her on formula if she didn’t start. I’m going to have to feed her out of a can. Dori didn’t nurse me and look what happened. It’s ruined. It’s all ruined.”

“Twyla, nothing is ruined. This baby is going to nurse. Come on. The bed is a hard place to start. You’re both healthy. Let’s sit up in a chair and feel healthy and strong.”

When Twyla is comfortably roosted on a chair, I settle Aubrey into her arms and notice how worryingly dry her lips are. Infants become dehydrated in such a short amount of time. Aubrey’s whimpers begin to take on a shrill, dire edge as hunger sharpens.

Though nothing ever flusters me at work, this is different. This is Twyla. And a baby named Aubrey. So, though I make a show of sauntering out in a way that I hope projects calm assurance, once outside Twyla’s door, I race to the supply closet and paw madly through the small plastic bins until I find a feeding pack. I grab a pumping machine and push it in front of me back to the room. Aubrey is blubbering by the time I return.

“Look, she’s given up,” Twyla wails. Aubrey is huddled against her; her hands with their matching bracelets of flaking skin are fisted up next to her face.

I hold up a nipple shield. “You are about to become an outie, Mama.” I poke the cone inward, press it against Twyla’s breast, then pop it out. Her nipple, sucked into the shield, comes with it.

“All right, now we’ll just get you hooked up here.” In less than a minute, I’ve pumped out ten ccs of colostrum.

“Now, I don’t do this very often, but for Aubrey’s namesake …” I peel the rubber band off the feeding pack, tear into the plastic wrap, fit a small, curved plastic tip onto a syringe, and use it to suck up some of Twyla’s milk. Then, like feeding a baby bird, I squirt a few drops into Aubrey’s mouth.

The milk dribbles untasted over her lips and I start to worry. I imagine the doctors, nurses, teachers, counselors, every authority that Twyla will encounter from here on out. How they will take one look at her and see nothing but young, unmarried, tattooed, and they will dismiss her. They aren’t going to realize that Twyla knows about folic acid and meconium. That she can sing the entire sound track from
Moulin Rouge
. They’ll automatically assume she’s not up to the challenge. They’ll peg her as a mom who’d use formula. And their beginning—mother and daughter—will be marred.

“No.” I say the word out loud. Twyla, who did not have so many of the things that a dreamy, fairy-winged little girl like her should have had, must have this.

I pluck the cap off Aubrey’s head and beating there is the part left unarmored, the fontanel. “Wake up, little one.” I chafe my knuckles against the rose petal of her ear.

Twyla stops my hand. “What are you doing?”

“She has to wake up and eat.”

I worry her ear some more and Aubrey scrunches her face up.

“You’re hurting her.”

I squirt two more drops of colostrum into Aubrey’s mouth. She retreats farther from the assault of light and noise and liquid. I jiggle her diaper, the tiny body within a rustle of motion. “Sorry, schnooks, it’s time to go to work. Life begins now. It’s hard, I know; it’s hard.”

“Don’t.” Twyla grabs my hand. “Call the nurse. She doesn’t know what to do. Don’t ask her to do something she doesn’t know how to do.”

“She knows,” I coo to Aubrey. “You know what to do, don’t you?”

I tickle Aubrey’s armpit. “Hey, boo-boo. I know you want to go home, back to where it was dark and warm and safe and you didn’t have to work for a living. I wish that was a choice, but it’s not.”

I make Twyla shift to a football hold, take Aubrey’s shirt off, tickle her back, but she only squinches up more tightly against this assault. There will be so many hard things in this child’s life and I haven’t been able to hold the first one off. Out of pure stubbornness, I give Aubrey one last hummingbird sip of milk.

Her lower lip trembles. The fragile hinging of her jaw shifts.

“Twyla, look, she’s swallowing.”

I rush to snug Aubrey tight up against Twyla’s breast and let the next squirt trickle down over her nipple and into the baby’s mouth. Her lips contract into the tiniest of smacks.

“She likes it.” Twyla is tremulous.

As she swallows a few more drops, I whisper to my child’s namesake, “The first of untold numbers of sweet things you will taste in this life.” It is my blessing. Laying out a trail of milk drops, I lure Aubrey to Twyla’s nipple.

“Line her up. Skin to skin,” I coach, snuggling the whisper of a body against her mother’s. “Wait for what looks like a yawn. There. There it is.” Aubrey opens her mouth and I nudge her between the shoulder blades, pushing her open mouth onto Twyla’s nipple.

“Oh, lovely. That is a picture-perfect latch. Your daughter is a genius.”

The baby sucks. Aubrey’s chin bobs rhythmically against Twyla’s breast.

“Is it working?” Twyla asks. “Is anything coming out?”

“Listen.”

The only sound in the universe for the next few seconds is the satisfied
suck-suck-gasp-swallow
of Twyla’s daughter.

“I’m feeding her,” Twyla marvels. “I’m feeding my baby.”

“Yes, you are.”

A strangled yip of a sob escapes Twyla. “I thought she hated me. She doesn’t hate me.” Twyla finally relaxes and strokes her daughter’s face, the top of her head where the beat of life remains visible, and I remember the first time I held Aubrey and touched that emblem of her vulnerability. I made a pact in that instant. The same one that my mother, Rose, with all her heart and as best she knew how, had made when she first held me. The same one that Bobbi Mac made more than six decades ago and that Aubrey will one day make: You will be mine forever and I will never let anything hurt you.

Twyla strokes her child’s hair and declares fiercely, “I am going to be the best fucking mother there ever was.”

I tell the little girl who sang answers to questions about waffles, “You’ll be the best mother you know how to be. Just like your mother was the best mother she knew how to be and wasn’t always. Just like you won’t always be. So forgive her, Twyla, okay? Forgive your mother, forgive everyone, but most of all, forgive yourself. Okay, sweetie?”

Twyla doesn’t answer. She will do everything right; she is certain of it. Everything her mother did, she will do the opposite and it will all be right. We watch in silence as her daughter sips her first meal.

Without lifting her eyes from her daughter’s face, Twyla asks, “How is Aubrey?”

As I consider the answer to that question, the conversation I’d overheard outside the trailer plays and replays in my mind. Tyler’s voice. Aubrey’s. Tyler’s. Aubrey’s. Gradually, the words blur away. In their place, I hear the language of tones and tenors, pitches and accents that Aubrey and I taught each other. Translated into that language I hear a young woman gathering strength to burst from the silver chrysalis that contains her now.

I tell Twyla all about what her old friend is doing.

“Wow,” she says. “I was certain that Aubrey would be all, ‘Go, college’!”

“Certain and humans,” I muse. “Such a hard mix.”

“Oh, look,” Twyla exclaims. Aubrey has started sucking ferociously. “She’s really going for it now!” With food in her minuscule stomach, Aubrey becomes a different baby, a baby who applies herself to the job at hand with exactly the sort of determined energy she will need to be One Shot’s Never Enough’s granddaughter.

When Aubrey’s walnut of a fist finally unclenches, then droops to the side and her head lolls back, I put a full, fed, contented baby in the bassinet beside Twyla’s bed and they both sleep.

Out in the hall, I call Dori and tell her that Twyla is back. I tell her that her daughter is safe and that she is a grandmother.

“They’re sleeping now, so you have time to collect yourself. Be calm when you come.”

Dori is sobbing too hard to answer. I tell her I’ll wait for her outside.

Later, as I watch for Dori in the pickup/dropoff zone, the cold wind blows my hair around my head. I dig in my pocket, find the rubber band I pulled off Twyla’s feeding kit, and use it to slick the tangling hair into a ponytail. For the first time since I cut the ill-advised bangs, they smooth back neatly with all the rest of my hair.

It feels great to have those damn Mamie Eisenhower bangs out of my eyes.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I
am indebted to the Dobie-Paisano Fellowship at the University of Texas, the Johnston Foundation, and the Texas Institute of Letters for giving me the support and sanctuary I needed to finish
The Gap Year
. In particular, I must thank Michael Adams, the Saint Francis of writers, for allowing me to light awhile on his shoulder.

Kristine Kovach inspired me with her humor, empathy, and vast expertise as a lactation consultant. She was extraordinarily generous in allowing me to shadow her on her hospital rounds, audit her classes, and steal juicy chunks of her great material.

Thank you, Gabriel Bird-Jones, for understanding that the only child going off to college in this book isn’t you.

Tiffany Yates, super copy editor, supermodel, it was a happy day for me when you stepped into the Hyde Park Theater.

The book benefited immeasurably from the insights of early readers Kristine Kovach, Robin Chotzinoff (no relation to Dori), Carol Dawson, Caroline Zancan, Mary Helen Specht, Cora Walters, Gabriel Bird-Jones, Kathleen Orillion, Mary Lengel, Sarah Farr, Christy Krames, and
mis hermanitas
, Martha and Kay Bird.

Knopf is the best there is. I am grateful that Patricia Johnson and Christine Gillespie connected with the book; that Caroline Zancan kept it on schedule; that Kathleen Fridella guaranteed that all the infelicities were corrected; that Iris Weinstein created an elegant design; that Barbara de Wilde captured the book’s essence in a lyrical jacket; that Kim Thornton will help readers find it.

There would be no novel, no career, without Ann Close and Kristine Dahl, editor, agent, true friends. Ann, you always find the narrative fulcrum where even a minor shifting of the load brings it all into balance. Kris, thank you for getting me through this summer. No writer has ever been luckier.

And always, always, always to my sweet G-Men, George and Gabriel.

READING GROUP GUIDE

ABOUT THIS READING GROUP GUIDE

The questions, discussion topics, and reading list that follow are intended to enhance your reading group’s discussion of
The Gap Year
, the witty and resonant new novel from acclaimed author Sarah Bird.

ABOUT THE BOOK

“Alternately hilarious and heartbreaking,
The Gap Year
is a pitch-perfect portrayal of a mother and teenage daughter on the precipice of seismic change. Everyone is given full rein in this snappy, deliciously vicious, modern spin on growing up, growing old, and letting go. Bird’s timing is impeccable.” —Cristina García, author of National Book Award finalist
Dreaming in Cuban

“
The Gap Year
, haunting and laugh-out-loud funny, speaks to a mother’s soul … This is a page-turner of a book for every mother who ever worried she wasn’t up to the hard parts—gracefully accepting the you-never-understood-me complaints our children make; rising above the condescension of smug, overachieving mothers; accepting our own self-doubt as we measure ourselves against impossible ideals. Cam’s dilemma will feel like your dilemma from the moment you begin reading.” —Debra Monroe, award-winning author of
On the Outskirts of Normal: Forging a Family Against the Grain

From the widely praised author of
The Yokota Officers Club
, a keenly felt, wonderfully written novel about love that can both bind family members together and make them free, set in that precarious moment before your child leaves home for college.

Cam Lightsey, lactation consultant, is a single mom, a suburban misfit who’s given up her rebel dreams to set her only child on an upward path.

Aubrey Lightsey, a pretty, shy girl who plays clarinet in the school band, is ready to explode from wanting her “real” life to begin.

When Aubrey meets Tyler Moldenhauer, football idol of students and teachers alike, the fuse is lit. Aubrey metastasizes into Cam’s worst teen nightmare: full of secrets and silences, uninterested in college. Worse, on the sly she’s in touch with her father, who left when she was two to join Next—a celebrity-ridden cult—where he’s a headline grabber. As the novel unfolds—with emotional fireworks, humor, and edge-of-your-seat suspense—the dreams of daughter, mother, and father chart an inevitable, but perhaps not fatal, collision …

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

  1. How does Bird use humor to convey character? What about the characters who aren’t particularly funny?

  2. On
this page
, Cam observes a group of mothers with their young children, “They wanted what we all want: reassurance that they had made the right choices.” Does Cam believe she has chosen wisely? Does Aubrey agree with her? How do Aubrey’s own choices reflect upon Cam’s?

  3. Discuss the way Bird uses time—setting Aubrey’s story in one period and Cam’s in another. How do the two timelines play off each other?

  4. Cam believes that Tyler is the reason for the friction between her and Aubrey, but how does the secret that Audrey is keeping about Martin affect her rebellion against Cam?

  5. “My mother hovered and clung more than any helicopter mom that was ever invented after her. But even she couldn’t control any of the most important events in my life.” (
this page
) How does Cam’s distaste for her own mother’s parenting style affect her relationship with Aubrey? Why is Bobbi Mac so important, in contrast?

  6. What do Aubrey’s and Cam’s notions of independence and individuality say about their decisions in life? Who seems more comfortable following her own path?

  7. Discuss the notion of maternal sacrifice. How are Cam’s and Dori’s sacrifices interpreted by their daughters?

  8. Why does Martin allow himself to be sucked into Next? Why doesn’t Cam do the same?

  9. Throughout the novel, Cam and Aubrey make assumptions—about each other, about Tyler, about Martin. Why can’t they communicate more openly? Why have they lost each other’s trust?

10. On
this page
, Martin tells Cam, “For some of us, being right is so much sexier than sex.” What does he mean by this?

11. How does the revelation about Tyler’s upbringing change your perception of him? What do you think Cam’s response would be?

12. Martin tells Cam she is “a true rebel,” who always knew exactly who she was and what she wanted. (
this page
) How does this differ from the way Aubrey sees her? From the way Cam sees herself?

13. Discuss the ending. How does Twyla’s newborn, Aubrey, help Cam to accept her own daughter?

SUGGESTED READING:
Back When We Were Grownups
, by Anne Tyler;
About a Boy
by Nick Hornby;
Imperfect Birds
by Anne Lamott;
Little Children
by Tom Perrotta;
Siddhartha
by Hermann Hesse;
The Scarlet Letter
by Nathaniel Hawthorne.