The Smart One (2 page)

As I stood waiting to catch the express bus back to my apartment in Forest Hills, Queens, I listened to an undergrad next to me speaking Spanish
mas rapido
into her cell phone. Even after all those years of getting As in high school Spanish, all I could pick up was
mi hermana
, my sister. I imagined she was talking
about
her sister, not
to
her sister, but I couldn’t help wondering if I’d be chatting it up with one of
mis hermanas
if my cell phone hadn’t broken the week before. Would I call Clare, my older sister on Long Island, and tell her I had just interviewed for the job of my dreams and thought I had a good shot at getting it? And if I did, would she be happy for me or as judgmental as she was that day I told her that I was going back to school for my master’s in education?

I was sitting at Clare’s designer table in her designer kitchen when I broke the news. Our younger sister, whom we call Joey but whose real name is Joanna, was in the chair next to mine, jiggling her foot and drumming the table, unaware of how obvious it was that she was buzzed on coke and about to jump right out of her skin. Clare was at the counter with her back to us, arranging a display of organic chocolate-chip cookies on a platter.

Clare, I should explain, is a member of the PTA who carpools and has mental algorithms for calculating which type of manicure is appropriate for which occasion in which season, yet didn’t know Afghanistan was a country until it had been in the headlines for a month. I can’t blame her for this. She was always the beautiful one and got heaps of attention for it. The message instilled from the time she was small was that appearance trumped everything, and it formed the core of her character.

In a way, that message formed the essence of my character too, though to opposite effect. I think I must have sensed from the time I was small that I could never compete with Clare in the looks department. So I carved out a niche for myself in the family by taking on the role of the smart one. Then, when Joey came along, she had to find some other way to stand out. With the roles of pretty and smart already taken, Joey became the wild one.

“How long to get the degree?” Clare had asked.

“Probably two years,” I answered.

She pushed the plunger on her French press and poured coffee for us. “You think you’ll stick with it?”

I tried willing her to turn around so she could see me rolling my eyes. “Of course I’ll stick with it,” I said. “This is something I’ve wanted all my life.”

She sighed and put everything on a tray, which she brought to the table. As she set it down carefully, she gave Joey a
what-are-we-going-to-do-with-her
look. But our little sister’s eyes were darting around the room as she bobbed her head to a song only she could hear.

“Didn’t you say the same thing about flower arranging?” Clare asked me.

I gritted my teeth. Why was she so dense? “No, of course not.”

“I seem to remember you being pretty excited about that. Like it was just the thing you were waiting for. Or the photography thing. Remember what you said about that? ‘I think I finally found my medium, Clare,’ that’s what you said.”

I cringed, knowing how unconvincing it would sound if I said this was different. So I just asked Clare what was up with her hair, which looked more tricolor than usual. A low blow. The hair thing was an issue between us. Back in my loft days, I wore my hair Joan Jett black, and Clare called it my “goth period.” But I had been going for that downtown I’m-such-an-artist-I-never-go-out-in-the-sun look of severe dark hair against white skin. Admittedly, the effect was more anemic than artsy, and I’d since let my natural brown hair grow out. Clare was always trying to get me to put in blond highlights, and one day I snapped that I didn’t want to look like a Long Island soccer mom. It was probably unfair of me to get mad rather than admit I had some vanity about my hair. God forbid I let on that I had a bit of pride about my natural chestnut highlights. No, I had to position myself as being above such shallow concerns. That way, I didn’t have to worry about coming up short against my beautiful sister. Part of me resented that Clare, with all her sensitivity, couldn’t see through my facade of studied nonchalance. The other part of me would have been mad if she
had
. A paradox, I know. But we’re sisters so I guess it’s part of the package.

Clare touched the back of her head in response to the tricolor remark. “He put in lowlights. You don’t like it?”

Guilty, I backpedaled. I didn’t want to make her weep again. “I’m an idiot about fashion, you know that. It’s tres chic, I’m sure.”

“You know what
I
think?” Joey said.

Clare and I turned to our younger sister, who was busy wiping her nose with the back of her wrist, as if we wouldn’t
notice all her sniffling as long as she didn’t reach for a tissue.

“Do I have a choice?” I said, sighing.

Joey dug her spoon into Clare’s designer sugar bowl and shoveled two mounds into her coffee cup. “I think,” she said, stirring harder and faster than she needed to, “that wiping kids’ asses all day isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

Clare sighed and touched my arm. “I think you’ll be a good teacher, Bev,” she said.

I smiled, grateful that someone in my family had tossed me a bone.

“I just hope this isn’t another phase,” she added.

I hope Joey cracks your damned cup
, I thought.

My parents hadn’t reacted any better to the news that I was going back to school for a degree in education. Even though my excitement had been as obvious as a
New York Post
headline, they couldn’t muster a pica of enthusiasm. My doctor father had said, “An
elementary
school teacher?” in a voice that implied he couldn’t even conceive of such a thing. Like I was moving to Antarctica to start a branch of blubber-eating Hare Krishnas.

“Maybe she can work her way up,” my mother offered, “and eventually teach high school. That wouldn’t be so bad.”

Back in my apartment, I played my answering machine messages as I riffled through the stack of mail I had brought in. The first call was from my mom. She and my dad were in Florida staying with their friends, the Waxmans, who were our next-door neighbors on Long Island. Like most Jewish New York couples of a certain age, however, the Waxmans followed an instinctive migratory pattern every winter, fleeing the driveway-shoveling responsibilities of the suburban Northeast for the country club lifestyle of Florida’s swanky coastline condos. This year, they were staying straight through the sum
mer, as they had decided that their particular nesting area—a hacienda-styled garden apartment in Boca Raton—was suitable for year-round habitation.

My mother’s voice on my answering machine sounded a little shaky. “Everything’s okay but…,” she said, and sighed. “Just you call me right away, dear. Everything is fine, though.”

I dropped my mail onto the counter in my pint-sized kitchen and dialed the Waxmans’ Florida number immediately, as I knew that the only time Mom bothered saying everything was fine was when it wasn’t.

“It’s Bev,” I said, when I reached her. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing, but…well, your father slipped on some wet tile by the pool here and it seems he broke his ankle.”

“Is he all right? Is he in a cast?”

She said that he was indeed in a cast and would have to stay off his feet for a while, delaying their return home. She handed him the phone before I had a chance to ask any more questions.

“You okay, Dad?” I asked.

“Herman Resnick is down here now,” he said, referring to one of his old doctor pals, an orthopedist. “Had prostate cancer and now he jogs six miles a day.”

“He set your ankle?” I’d been chasing my father’s cryptic dialogue up alleys and around corners my whole life, but it was still dizzying.

“Herman? He hasn’t practiced in years.”

“He referred you to someone?”

“You should see the offices they have down here.”

I took that as a yes and asked to speak to my mother again, who whispered that she thought he was secretly
delighted
to have the chance to relax. But there was one tiny problem, she explained, and it required my attention.

Upon their return to New York, my parents were supposed to take care of some practical details involved in selling the Waxmans’ house next door, like unlocking it for prospective buyers and dealing with realtors, only now they wouldn’t be around to do it. The proposed solution was for me to move into my parents’ house until they returned at the end of the summer.

“The end of the summer?” I asked. “Is Dad laid up for that long?”

“Yes, well,” my mother said and paused, “we might take this time to look for a place of our own down here.”

She said it like she was breaking some difficult news to me, as if her thirty-five-year-old daughter might just fall apart at the thought of living in a different state from her parents. This was probably the perfect opportunity to tell my parents I had just interviewed for a job on the other side of the country, but I would resist the urge. After all, if the job didn’t come through, I’d be even more of a loser in their eyes.

“That’s great,” I offered. “You and Dad will love it there. But I don’t know about staying at your house. It’s kind of a weird time for me.”

Truth was, my lease had expired and I was living month-to-month in my apartment. The landlord had been trying to get me to sign on for another two years, but I kept putting him off as I tried to figure out where I might be in the fall.

“I left the Waxmans’ house key in the cute little green cup in the kitchen,” my mother continued. “You know the one I mean? Shaped like a frog?”

Of course I knew what she meant. I made that cup myself when I was in second grade. It was my first experience with a kiln, and I recalled the thrill of seeing the transformation of my handiwork from a raw creation covered in a dull gray coat to a work of art, glazed in a shiny green finish as brilliant
as emeralds. My art teacher, Miss Butler, made an appropriate fuss over it, and though she probably did the same for everyone, my heart swelled with a special kind of pride. I had created a thing of beauty.

I picked up the stack of mail again and looked through it. Along with a couple of bills, two credit card solicitations from Capital One, pleas for funds from several different charities, and a Pottery Barn catalog, there was a letter from my landlord’s attorney.

My mother sighed. “I don’t know what else to do.”

“What about Clare?” I said. After all, my older sister lived on Long Island just a few miles from my parents.

“Clare?” she asked, as if the suggestion was preposterous. “She’s got the
kids
.”

The kids, of course. Clare couldn’t be expected to do anything that would compromise her time spent parenting. I opened the cabinet where I kept my drinking glasses and reached into the back for a bottle of Advil. I spilled two pills into my hand and swallowed them dry.

“I suppose Joey’s out of the question?” I asked.

“She has enough on her plate, Beverly.”

I took that to mean we shouldn’t do anything to jeopardize the progress she had made in her drug treatment program. She’d been clean for over a year and we were all holding our breath.

I wondered aloud why the Waxmans’ son, Kenny, couldn’t take care of the house, and my mother explained that he was still in Los Angeles. This didn’t surprise me, as it wasn’t hard to keep track of his career through the occasional IMDB search. Though we lost touch after an animosity had developed between us as teens, I was well aware that Kenny had spent the past decade as a comedy writer in Southern California.

“And anyway,” my mother continued, “I figured you had nothing to do now. Aren’t you all done with school?”

Still cradling the phone under my chin, I walked from the kitchen and into the living room, which also served as a breakfast nook, dining area, den, and music room. I sat down at the table and ripped open the envelope containing the lawyer’s letter. Apparently, I either had to produce a signed lease or vacate within ten days. I knew it was mostly bravado—evicting a tenant isn’t all that easy. But did it make sense to put up a fight when my mother’s alternative was presenting itself like some karmic gift? It wouldn’t, after all, be that hard to put my stuff in storage and move into my parents’ house while I sorted out my life’s next move. Still, it felt like a humiliating step backward.

“Well?” my mother nudged. “You do have the summer off, don’t you?”

I sighed and told her I did.

“And in the fall you start teaching full-time?”

“Yes,” I said enthusiastically, wondering if she would ask me what my plans were. It was, I knew, a moment of weakness, but I made the impetuous decision that if she asked, I might just open up after all, letting her in on my excitement over the job in Las Vegas and all it offered. According to Mrs. Perez, the city was growing faster than the education system could keep pace with, so they were offering some extraordinary opportunities. Even without a degree in special education, candidates could get to teach a self-contained classroom of special-needs kids. If I was lucky enough to get one of the job openings—which I’d find out sometime within the next few weeks—I could even get a second master’s degree at night and the district would pick up the tab. Since I’d been on the fence about whether I wanted to teach in a regular classroom or a special-ed setting, the idea of leaving this option open excited me. Surely my mother would be happy for me. Surely.

“I might have this great teaching opportunity,” I prompted.

“So you can do it!” she squeaked.

“What?”

“You can stay in our house?”

I put my forehead down on the cool surface of the table and reminded myself that I should never get my hopes up about my family’s reactions to the things that mean the most to me.

I folded the letter from the attorney and tore it slowly in half.

“What was that noise?” my mother asked.

The wind being sucked from my sails
, I wanted to say. Instead, I asked her if she still kept the green froggy cup on the shelf by the sink.