The Smart One (5 page)

“I’m going to be a doctor,” I said.

Lydia folded her letter in thirds and slid it into an envelope. “Doctor is good,” she said as she licked the seal, “but teacher is good also, no?”

I wondered if being a teacher had more prestige in Hungary than it did here. I knew a lot of kids who went around saying they wanted to be a teacher when they grew up. Kids who were, in my opinion, pretty unimaginative. Of course, they were doing the same thing I was—trying to impress grown-ups. But they got it wrong. Saying you wanted to be a teacher didn’t elicit much more than a pat on the head and a condescending, “Very nice.” But saying you wanted to be a doctor made them look at you differently.

How easily this immature need to impress later gave way to my plans to be an artist. I sighed, trying to suppress my shame over wasting so many years of my life pursuing the wrong dream for the wrong reason. It was so obvious to Kenny’s housekeeper that I was meant to be a teacher. Why on earth did it take me so long to come to the same conclusion?

“Whatever happened to Lydia?” I asked Kenny.

He shrugged. “They told me she went to work for a family in New Jersey. We never heard from her again.”

“That must have hurt.”

“I
still
think about her. It was never the same after she left.”

“I wonder why she didn’t keep in touch.”

“That’s the weird thing,” he said. “When she lived with us, she gave me a handmade card for every birthday, every
holiday. I treasured them, kept them in this special shoebox I never threw out. In fact, I bet it’s still under my bed. But then when she left, nothing. Not a call, a card, a single letter.”

He looked sad, as if the old pain was so close to the surface it didn’t take more than the lightest tap for it to come bobbing into view. Feeling an urge to comfort him, I stepped forward, but the back door opened and Mr. Goodwin emerged, telling the realtor he thought there was a lot to like in this house. Mrs. Goodwin agreed but added that she thought it was “a little small.”

I took a step back and stared into Kenny’s eyes with a stern
don’t-you-dare
look. He put his hands up as if to say,
I’m not even touching it
.

The realtor approached me. “Mr. Goodwin noticed a rip in the screen door and a broken gutter,” she said, looking down at her clipboard. “Also, there’s some sort of industrial drum in the crawl space out back. Looks like it’s been there for years.”

“It has,” Kenny said. “That thing’s been under the house since the extension was built.”

“Do you know what’s in it?” the realtor asked.

Kenny shrugged. “I think some contractor left it there. It’s so heavy no one’s bothered to remove it.”

The realtor leaned toward me as if imparting some special secret. “It really
should
be discarded,” she said.

I nodded. “I’ll see what I can do.”

As the Goodwins and the realtor got ready to leave, Kenny stood and put his arm around me like we were husband and wife. Mrs. Goodwin turned and asked me if I could tell them how to get to the nearest supermarket.

Kenny put his mouth to my ear and whispered, “Tell her to follow the yellow brick road.”

“How does he look?” Clare asked as she turned the giant page of a wallpaper sample book. We were in a home decorating store looking at patterns for her daughter’s bedroom.

I pictured the smile on Kenny’s face when his tan, broad-shouldered self emerged from his car, sun-streaked hair reflecting the light like some corny shampoo commercial. I tried to concentrate on his large nose, still crooked from a baseball he took to the face in a Little League game. I did not want to be seduced by his looks. Or his charm. Or the feel of his warm breath on my ear when he leaned in close and whispered to me.

“Well?” she nudged. “Is he still—”

“Very L.A.,” I interrupted.

“Handsome?”

“I hadn’t noticed.”

“Liar.”

“Stop playing matchmaker,” I said. “One, he’s not my type. Two, he lives in California and three…” I paused to think.

“What’s three?”

“Three is I can’t stand him. Can we change the subject?”

My sister closed the book with a thud and dropped it into
her mounting rejection pile. She opened another wallpaper book and sighed. “They’re all so precious, you know? Maybe we’re looking in the wrong category.”

I stared down at the page in front of me, which had a whimsical pattern of monkeys with slightly grotesque faces. What could this artist have been thinking? It grated on my nerves, already worn thin by Clare’s stupidity. Did she remember
nothing
?

“Besides,” I said, “he fucked Joey.”

“I thought you didn’t want to talk about it.”

I smacked the page in front of me. “Don’t they realize it’s stuff like this that gives kids nightmares?” I slammed the book closed, furious at myself for not being able to get the hell over something that happened so damned long ago. After all, I wasn’t seventeen anymore, so what difference did it make? I’d been through a dozen boyfriends, one husband, four apartments, six cell phones, and at least fifteen pairs of sneakers since then. Why was Kenny Waxman still a pebble in my shoe?

Clare stared at me, her eyes looking as if they were about to spring a leak.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I guess I’m just too agitated for this right now.”

“We can do this another time.” Her voice had that cheery but strained sound she used when trying to hide her distress. I tried to see if she was actually crying, but she put her head down as she rummaged through her purse. Clearly, she didn’t want me to see her face. Guilt tugged at my abdominals.

I opened the book again. “No, it’s fine. Let’s just get through these piles at least.”

Clare and I had so little in common that accompanying her on this errand seemed like one of the few things we could do together. I figured I could apply my sense of aesthetics—such
as it was—toward helping her make a wallpaper decision for Sophie’s bedroom. When I thought about it, though, Clare was the one with an eye for decorating. I was just tagging along.

“Sorry I’m so edgy,” I said. “I guess I’m just stressed waiting to hear about…”

“About what?”

I bypassed the upsetting page with the grotesque monkeys and flipped to the back half of the book, where I found a pattern with wavy yellow stripes against a white background. I brought my face closer to the stripes and realized they were textured in a bricklike pattern.

“A new job I interviewed for.”

“A teaching job?”

“Of course a teaching job. For God’s sake, Clare. Did you think I’d lost interest after spending two years getting my master’s?”

“Don’t get snippy. I’m just asking.”

I turned the page and found the same wavy pattern but in emerald green. I ran my fingers along the page to feel the texture of the softly raised stripes. “Thing is,” I said, “it’s in Las Vegas.”

“What?”

“Don’t get mad.”

“You’re moving to Las Vegas? Why?”

“It’s a great opportunity.”

She slammed her wallpaper book closed. “You want to get away from us. You think it’s your family’s fault that you’re…” She paused. I turned and stared and saw pink rise up in her face.

“That I’m what?” I said. “That I’m a loser?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You were about to.”

“Bev, please. Think about this. You’d be so lonely out there. Everyone you know is here.”

Exactly, I thought. My chance to get a fresh start in a world where everyone sees me a bright and dedicated teacher, instead of as a lifetime of wasted potential.

Admittedly, the whole concept of the Fresh Start was like an addiction for me. A lot of people are terrified by change—or at least uncomfortable with it. But to me it’s exhilarating. The idea of changing jobs or moving is like staring at a clean canvas I can paint any way I want. It’s one of the reasons being a teacher is such a perfect career for me. The Fresh Start is built in, a permanent fixture. Every year it’s a new sea of faces—scared or eager, silly or serious, bright or challenged—each needing something different from me.

And since I was taking this major step, I wanted the cleanest canvas I could find. Staying in New York would mean layering over my past. Moving away was my shot at creating a bright new life for myself. And what better place to do that than the city that tears down its past every few years and starts anew?

“I’ve thought about it tons,” I said to Clare. “And besides, nothing’s definite. I interviewed a couple of weeks ago and I’m waiting to hear.”

“And if it doesn’t come through?”

I flipped more pages in the wallpaper book and came to a section of boys’ room wallpapers, all race cars and skateboards with jaunty stripes. I closed the book and pushed it aside.

“I have other options,” I said.

She bit her lip, and I sensed that she didn’t quite believe me, so I told her about my fallback position. I had been offered a job at the school in Queens where I did my student teaching. It was local—only about a half hour away from where we sat—and
I worried that she would root for me to take it, possibly even hope that the Las Vegas position wouldn’t come through.

Clare’s eyes widened. “Oh?”

“The art teacher is leaving next year,” I said, “and the principal thinks I’d be perfect.” Even as I said it, I realized Clare would think so too, so I quickly explained that it felt like some ludicrous compromise of trying to blend my old interests with my new ones. I wanted this fresh start to be completely separate from my artistic ambitions. Plus, I wanted to be a
teacher
teacher, with a classroom and a blackboard (or the high-tech equivalent) and the opportunity to create my own lessons.

Of course, there were things about the art teacher job that appealed to me too. I loved the way kids tended to open up when they were engaged in something tactile, and I enjoyed coming up with projects that would stimulate their creativity. Plus the Queens school offered the kind of diverse population I had always envisioned myself teaching. But the idea of moving away and starting anew tipped the scales heavily toward the job in Vegas. Surely, the art teacher position would look to my family like yet another halfhearted career choice, and I’d have to bear the burden of their disapproval. My self-esteem just wasn’t up to it.

“The letter from Las Vegas better arrive soon,” I said to Clare, “because the principal in Queens is going to want an answer on the art teacher job.”

I pulled another wallpaper book from the pile and opened it. A few pages in I found a girlish floral pattern that was more jewel-toned than the muted Monet-inspired palette of all the other florals, and I thought it had a lot of life. I showed it to Clare.

“Not half bad,” she said.

I pointed to a light coral in one of the flower petals. “You could pick that up in the carpeting.”

She shook her head and pointed to a darker shade, more orange-red than coral. “
That
would be the carpet color.”

Damn if she wasn’t right.

The door opened and an older woman entered the store—a neighbor who had lived down the block from us for years.

“Look,” I whispered to Clare, “that’s Mrs. Bianco.”

Clare eyed her and grimaced. “
Ick!
She looks like an
oven
mitt.”

I stifled a laugh. Mrs. Bianco wore a bright blue blouse that was quilted in horizontal lines.

“A Coke says she asks about Joey first,” I whispered.

Long ago, Clare and I had come to the realization that there were two kinds of people from our past—those who asked about Joey first and those who asked about our parents. Our younger sister had been enormously famous for about fifteen minutes, when the rock band she was the lead singer for had a Top 40 hit. They were never able to re-create their success, and the band succumbed to infighting and drugs. Clare and I knew it was a typical one-hit wonder story, but to our small Long Island town it was a big deal indeed. And the power of celebrity was so strong that even people who knew us as kids would get this glazed-over look in their eyes when they asked about Joey, as if just brushing that close to fame delivered them someplace transcendent.

“Hello, Mrs. Bianco!” Clare called.

Mrs. Bianco emitted a small gasp and approached. “Helen,” she corrected, the smoker’s rasp of her voice more gravelly than ever. “Please. You make me feel like an old lady.”

“Oh, not with those legs,” Clare said, smiling.

God, but she was charming. Clare wore social graces like a silk evening gown. If I tried the same thing, I’d just trip over the hem.

Mrs. Bianco giggled girlishly and said she wished Mr. Bi
anco thought so. Then it came. “How are you, girls? How’s Joey?” Her eyes glassed over in that familiar way.

Clare banged me with her knee, and then gave Mrs. Bianco—
Helen
—the bare facts we gave everyone, saying that Joey had given up music for a few years but was now thinking about getting back into it. What she left out was that for nearly a decade Joey had done nothing but get stoned and go from living with one loser boyfriend to another. After one of her band members, Tyrone, died from an overdose, she decided it was time to do something that would decrease her chances of killing herself. So she checked into rehab and got off everything. Now she had a part-time job working in a recording studio and, we assumed, ambitions to get back into singing.

Mrs. Bianco had probably heard at least some of the rumors about our little sister’s problems, but she was polite enough to simply say it was great to see us, and to please send her regards to Joey.

“Mom and Dad are fine, by the way,” I whispered to Clare as Mrs. Bianco walked away. “Thanks for asking.”

When we finished looking at wallpaper books, Clare drove me home. I wanted to be sure I was there when the gardener arrived, because I needed to talk to him about moving the Waxmans’ industrial drum to the curb. On the way there, though, it started to drizzle, and Clare wondered aloud if he would even show up.

As we rounded the corner past the Waxmans’ house, I noticed that the front door was open and told Clare to pull over. I didn’t see a car parked out front and couldn’t imagine who was inside.

“I’d better go investigate,” I said, descending to terra firma from Clare’s massive SUV.

My sister followed behind me. I peered through the screen
door and she pressed her face against the rippled glass of the sidelight window.

“See anything?” she asked.

“No, but I think I hear music.” I opened the door. “Hello?” I called.

No one answered.

“Could it be Kenny?” Clare asked.

I shrugged.

“Maybe we should call the police.”

“It’s likely just a realtor,” I said. “Kenny probably gave someone the key and never told me.”

I stepped inside and noticed that the music seemed to be coming from a radio in the kitchen. As I cautiously approached, I wondered if Clare was right about calling the police. What if there was someone dangerous in the kitchen, someone armed?

Though my heartbeat raced as I neared the kitchen with Clare following behind, it pleased me that I was being the brave one. It was a powerful feeling. But it also occurred to me that I could wind up being the dead one.

When I reached the doorway, I stopped. A lone slim figure with bouncing blond curls stood leaning against the counter, her hand deep inside a box of Cheerios.

“Was the porridge too hot?” I asked.