The Smart One

“And why do you want to relocate to Nevada, Ms. Bloomrosen?”

Air conditioning,
I wanted to say, but I dabbed the perspiration from my upper lip and bit my tongue. I wasn’t sure this principal from an elementary school in Clark County, Las Vegas—who had already endured hours in a stifling classroom at Columbia University so she could interview recent graduates of Teachers College—was interested in New Yorkers of the smart-ass variety.

Principal Belita Perez folded her hands, waiting for me to answer. I glanced at the sweating can of Diet Coke on the desk in front of her and wondered how she’d react if I told her the truth—that I wanted to relocate so that I could get as far away from my loving albeit judgmental Long Island family as I could, that they were smothering me with unrealistic expectations, that once you’d been labeled “the smart one” as a child, your potential was considered limitless, and the only way you could live up to your early promise was to become a brain surgeon, marry a rocket scientist, and create two perfect children who were bright enough to get their own game show called
Are You Smarter Than a Preschooler?
and that if
you didn’t, that if you fell short of that in any way, you were a disappointment. A failure.

A loser.

Mrs. Perez clicked her pen, waiting to transcribe my response. I considered saying, “I’m eager to work for a district that’s so progressive, yet committed to the highest standards of education.” But that was the textbook response most of her other interviewees probably gave, and I wondered whether a more mature and creative answer would make her remember me, perhaps shed light on the odd anomalies in my resume. I was, after all, almost a decade older than most of her other candidates. No doubt she wondered why I graduated from college with a bachelor’s degree in graphic design and spent ten years flitting from one job to another before going back to school to earn my master’s in education.

Would it be inappropriate to explain about my divorce? Should I tell this woman with the pale-pink manicure and cream-colored suit that it took walking in on my husband performing cunnilingus on a pretty young schizophrenic artist named Savannah to rock the fragile foundation I’d spent so many years building? Would she understand that it required a trauma of that magnitude to make me finally see the truth and understand that I had wanted to be a teacher all along, that it was what I was meant to do?

I had always loved school. I loved raising my hand as high as I could when I knew the answer (which I usually did) and the feeling I got when the teacher pointed at
me
. I loved the whole
schooliness
of it—the smell of pencil shavings and paste, the smoothness of the pages between the covers of fat textbooks, the big round clock on the wall that made the softest
dit-dit-dit
as the minute hand moved.

I didn’t, however, always love my teachers. Some of them were wonderful enough to worship. But there were a few who
struck me as truly sinister, choosing certain boys and girls in the class to hate. It was painful to watch, and utterly confusing. Why, I wondered, couldn’t Mrs. Gaddis simply show Stuart Weingarten how to multiply fractions instead of parading his D-minus paper in front of the whole class? Did she think that humiliating him would help him pass the next test? It seemed obvious to me that this would push him farther away from learning anything.

I thought hard about kids like Stuart Weingarten. They reminded me of those broken dogs I saw on charity canisters at checkout counters, and I fantasized about fixing them. I imagined myself as Stuart Weingarten’s teacher, sitting patiently with him and explaining fractions in a way he could understand. There would be a moment of reckoning when he got it, and his whole sorry life would change. He’d wear better clothes and have cleaner hair, and the other boys would stop calling him Stupid Weingarten.

But back then, being a teacher seemed neither ambitious enough to meet my family’s expectations for me nor rebellious enough for me to be able to consider myself irreverent. Becoming an artist seemed just the ticket. I could be eccentric, exotic, opinionated. To me, the artiste was someone who possessed some inner knowledge everyone else aspired to. It was perfect.

Besides, I reasoned, I could draw, so how hard could it be? Thus, I went to college majoring in fine arts, which I soon learned was a mistake. I did okay in art appreciation, as there was studying and knowledge and time periods involved, but the creative classes were a bust. My charcoal sketches, for example, were passable—accurate and precise. And I even enjoyed the process. But one glance at the creativity in the other students’ drawings let me know I was in over my head.

I was too stubborn to admit I’d made a mistake, so I told
myself that changing my major to commercial art was simply the practical thing to do. I needed to support myself, after all, and had my whole life to become an artist in my spare time.

The result was a professional disaster—a string of entry-level jobs I could never commit to because they didn’t truly satisfy me. I was, among other things, a photographer’s assistant, a junior graphic designer, an assistant studio manager, and even a freelance illustrator. I might have enjoyed that last one if the thought of being a cheat hadn’t put a knot in my stomach. I had cleverly developed a stylistic approach to my illustrations that masked my weaknesses as an artist, and I lived in fear that someone would find out. Eventually, the freelance jobs simply dried up, and I was once again without a career.

Throughout all this, I told my friends that my dream was to move into a loft and get back into oil painting, which I had once actually enjoyed. But part of me knew I’d never follow through with this, so I did the next best thing. I married an artist.

Mrs. Perez looked bored. She took a sip of her Diet Coke and I worried I was losing her. My answers to her previous questions had been intelligent, if a little dry. Perhaps I should make the air-conditioning joke after all, loosen things up a bit.

But what if she was a humorless type like my ex? Jonathan was always so serious. I’ve tried, in the years since we’ve been apart, to picture him smiling, but all I can conjure is that blinky, hurt face he gave whenever I made a joke, as if the idea of humor was something that wounded him.

Even on that day I came home from my job as an assistant layout artist to see strange limbs in the loft above my head, he remained morose.

“Hey,” I had said stupidly.

A blond girl I recognized from the gallery scene downtown
sat up in my bed. They called her Savannah the Schizoid. Jonathan was clearly up there with her, but I couldn’t quite make out where he was or what he was doing.

“Fuck,” the girl said, and reached between her legs.

It took a second for me to realize she was tapping Jonathan on his head to get his attention. He lifted his face and looked down, the area around his mouth slick from her dainty little artist’s box.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” he said.

“And you’re not supposed to be
there
,” I answered.

That wounded face, blinking. I had gone and made a joke, implying that there were things in this world less than serious.

The road from the sting of betrayal to the sweet realization that I had been headed in the wrong direction was a short one. Freed from the burden of Jonathan’s biased scrutiny, it quickly dawned on me that I’d spent my entire adult life lying to myself about what I really wanted to do. So I stepped right over his arrogance as well as my family’s attitude that teaching elementary school was simply aiming too low and, armed with a small cache of guilt-induced largesse from my trust-fund-bridled ex-husband, went back to school to get a master’s degree in education.

And now, at last, I had the chance to not only answer my calling but to do it in an environment where I’d be appreciated instead of judged.

Principal Belita Perez put her soda can down on the desk and fanned her face with my application, waiting for me to tell her why I wanted to relocate to Nevada.

At last, I smiled. “Who needs this frigid New York weather?”