On No Longer Being Mistakable for a Wunderkind

This is going to be a post about age. I am twenty-eight years old, and I've outgrown all hints of the wunderkind. This has been like a rug pulled out from underneath me.

This is going to be a long post. But it is what I need to do to clarify things for myself, this sunny Friday with PhD exams still months ahead of me and no significant publications in my past.

I want to say that in a general way, I like getting older. I have always hung out with (and dated) people older than I, so birthdays hold no terrors -- by the time I get there, it's ground well-trodden. I've decided to build my life less around perfectly kempt skin and more around dinners with family and dinners with friends, my mrowly cat and smelly dog, and mornings of coffee and writing whatever I want to, exam proposal revisions be damned. So this isn't pride in youthful appearance we're talking about. (Though in the interest of perfect disclosure I guess I should admit that I have that kind of oily skin and those doe-eyed round-cheeked features that, people constantly tell me as they card me for buying say gin, still let me impersonate a college kid.)

Some months back, a friend who'd just turned 30 talked about how she liked it more than she expected. "I feel like it gives me some kind of authority. I find myself saying, 'Now that I'm 30, I don't have to do that.' " Thirty is a resting place. This is further an idea I've imbibed from friends over 30 who say things like "I'm glad I'm not in my twenties anymore! Whew! That was crazy!" Referring, it's implied, to confusion, wearying sexual intrigue, too much liquor and too many drugs. So thirty is a nice place to arrive, since it often accompanies a bit of "settling down," less confusion, etc.

Though not QUITE 30, I've felt some of this myself. Gone are the days of having 4 boyfriends, of angry crying myself to sleep by myself. Instead I have a nice warm husband and a very heavy cat who people the bed every night. Further, I no longer feel like I have to perform spastically to demonstrate my authority and separeteness from students. They can tell: I'm older. That, and I have hips now, so there's a division: they're the cute hipless things, and I'm the teacher. Further, I no longer flounder around going, what do I do now, with my life? I'm committed to this program, at least through the exams. On the side I am mentally building up various writing ventures.

Okay, so where's the issue? It's here. For twenty years, I was the youngest in every cohort. Youngest, and yet a whiz. I didn't graduate from college at 15 or anything Doogie Howser like that, but I did skip first grade and ace every class after that, except trig, which transpired during the same months I was embroiled in a terrible gothy love affair and found my misery far more interesting to contemplate than trig. (I earned a B+ in trig, and therefore graduated as salutatorian instead of valedictorian.) From age five, I was always distinguished from my peers, not only by age, but also by the isolation techniques perpetrated on "bright" kids in the name of enrichment. And I am seeing I can't discount the influence of these mutual isolations on the formation of my personality and self-perception.

It started fairly simply. My mom enrolled me, at the proper age, in kindergarten at the private Catholic school. All of us were doing some reading in the Catholic kindergarten. I loved to read already, and so when my dad's job moves us to an even MORE economically-depressed and depressing Midwestern town, my mom was upset to discover that the public school kindergarten there lagged far behind the bright Catholic bubble we just left. For the remainder of kindergarten, while the other kids had recess, I went up to the teacher's desk and read out loud from little books. I didn't mind this arrangement -- I was shy, and the books were interesting. One of them, for example, explained how to do magic tricks; I still remember a few of the methods. And, as I mentioned, I liked to read.

I attended first grade for two days. The kids were learning the alphabet and sounding out words. My mom had gone in and talked to the principal. My kid can read, she can really READ, and is there any advanced class? There was not. But during my second day of first grade, I was summoned to the principal's office. This can't be right, but I remember the walk as being frosty, cold. The school was one of those rat mazes of portable classroom modules. I was a very little kid, and I was walking by myself. Already, my singularity had begun. I don't remember whether I was nervous.

In the principal's office were the principal (a man) and someone else, a woman. On the principal's desk were books I recognized: three or four volumes of a set of children's encyclopedias from my bedroom bookshelf. My mom had brought them in. My mom herself was not present for this interview: they must have banished her thinking she was a kooky, pushy mom who would influence me too much if she was there. (She wasn't, at the time, pushy. She may have become that later, for my brothers, but I am distinctly sure that in my case, she was just working from the simple premise that I already spent hours reading Ramona Quimby, Age 8, loving it, while the other first graders presumably sat around peeing their pants.)

The principal and the woman were nice to me, and they opened one of the encyclopedias to an article about bodies in space. I hadn't ever read these encyclopedias: I'd flipped through them, but found fiction way more interesting. But at their request I began to read, without much problem. I do remember that the article covered the distances between various solar bodies, and I didn't know how to read big numbers, so I said something like "The sun is nine three oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh miles away."

It worked for them, and the next day I went to second grade. This turned out to be mildly annoying. I was in the "dumb" second grade, which meant that the teacher of the "smart" second grade was really snobby. I had to learn cursive, which the "smart" second graders already knew. And I wasn't ready for the math: I remember, because it's the only one I ever got, an "F" on one assignment. But the teacher of my "dumb" class was nice, and she read us Mrs. Piggle Wiggle's Magic, a book I'd already read but loved.

And here again was the shunting of me away from the "normal" students. Five or six of us left some afternoons to go to a different portable classroom for "enriched" lessons. Weirdly, the rest of the kids got to stay together with one teacher, while by myself I was taken to a teeny room in the back, with some weird man. I have no memory of what these lessons involved. I only remember -- this was like 1981, remember -- that the man had a computer, and that he programmed the computer to have Hi Blurt! scroll down it. I was mildly impressed, but only mildly. I thought it was weird that this man was seemingly trying to impress ME, a six-year-old who'd had her last birthday at the McDonald's.

I didn't finish out second grade there: my dad's job moved us back to where we came from. Back to my old school. Sadly, though, I did not get to join my old class. This is probably a defining moment. I have the idea that I was popular in kindergarten: after I left, one of the other brunette girls got a perm and when she came strolling in with her curly brown hair -- her mother later told us -- all the kids said "Blurt's back!" So I looked forward to seeing them... but the decision was made to keep me in second rather than first grade. I remember being consulted about this, but the choice was presented in a way that made clear what the "right" answer was. I had already done most of second grade, and was ahead of where my friends were. It made sense for me to join the second graders. I would be "bored" if I didn't.

On the playground, that first day back, I happily sought out my friends, only to be plucked from them by a teacher. "You are in second grade so you need to play with the second graders," she told me. The motive here was probably to help me adjust by forcing me to get to know my new classmates, and this is eventually what happened. Still, what a message for a little kid: your intellectual interests dictate you forget about your old friends. You are ahead of them now.

The rest of second, third and fourth grades are juicy and vivid in my mind. Sure enough, I got to know the kids in my new class, and I can still tell you most of their names. It was a Catholic school, so we had mass once a week, but this was a break from normal routine. To prepare for mass, we also had once a week a school-wide singing practice, all the kids from first through sixth sitting on the floor in the cafeteria singing Inch by inch, row by row, gonna make this garden grow. Good times, and I don't even mean that sarcastically. I developed an interest in a particular sharp faced girl and we became best friends. We slept over all the time, had slumber parties with the other girls sometimes. In fourth grade, I was intellectual rivals with another girl, a blue eyed, white haired dreamy girl; sometimes she had the highest score on tests, sometimes it was me. We discovered boys. After we'd learned our mulitplication tables, the teacher threw a little celebration for the kids who'd ended up with the most stars earned on tests. My white-haired friend and I had the most, so we got four things from McDonalds (a burger, a coke, a fries, a candy bar). Other students got two. I remember one jokester, who wanted for his two items "a french fries and another french fries." He ate his french fries through a rubber Ronald Reagan mask, pushing the fries through the little breath hole in the middle of Reagan's mouth, until the teacher made him take the mask off.

I was still cordoned off, a bit. I had missed first communion in second grade, so I had to do it in third grade, leaving my third grade class and walking down the hall to join the second graders during the period prescribed for Religion. Until I went through communion, I had to stay sitting in the pews at mass while all my third grade classmates went up to receive their prescribed hosts. And I was one of only a handful of fourth graders invited to join the Great Books club. There I was, seven years old, reading Animal Farm, Anne of Avonlea (which I didn't like, but when I read it later, at like eleven, I adored), and The Witch of Blackbird Pond, discussing them after school with some fifth and sixth graders. I remember this as a fun few years.

The summer after fourth grade, my brain once again became occasion for leaving behind old friends. Though the Catholic elementary school was lively, by middle and high school the course offerings were slim. At the public schools, by contrast, an "Extended Learning Opportunities" program began in fourth grade and bled neatly into the "accelerated" classes in junior high and high school. I don't remember who approached whom about putting me there -- whether the city approached my parents or my parents, the city. But at some point I was driven downtown to a lovely old brick home to meet with a man who was going to give me a kind of test. I understood later, of course, that this was an I.Q. test. At the time I just knew it was a test to see whether or not I should go to the "special program" at public school.

It was a pleasant afternoon. The test took place in a home office, large and lovely, full of books and papers. The man and I sat across from each other at a table large enough that I didn't feel uncomfortably close to him. He gave me a cup of iced Sprite, and made me feel entirely comfortable. I did not feel he was talking down to me, but I also did not feel out of my league.

I was seven years old, once again alone in a room with a balding, eyeglassed man deciding my fate. Mom, is it any wonder I grew up independent and stand-offish, that I became not the kind of daughter who could never need a mother simply? The man asked questions, and I answered them. He asked me to define "orange." ("A color that's a mix of yellow and red, and also a round citrus fruit that's good to eat.") He asked me to figure out, given a pail that holds five gallons and a pail that holds three, how to get two gallons. He asked me another pail question about which I had to say, "I'm sorry, I don't know." And so on.

Afterwards, he talked to my parents while I waited on a set of stairs with a fat wooden banister. And in the fall, I went to my new class at the public school.

My dad told me years later, drunk one night after a bonfire party, that I was a "genius," that that's what they had found out that day. I'm not. At least not anymore. I've taken online I.Q. tests: I'm "above average", just like most grad students. But that's only because a lot of those test questions, if you've read the solution to that kind of problem you just know how to do it. Like the SAT, IQ tests are totally coachable.

Still, imagine this as my new burden in the eyes of the world. And public school didn't have a lot to offer. I had a lackluster best friend in fifth and sixth grades, and had a lot of the same classmates from fifth grade right up to high school graduation. But I'd already imbibed impermanence. I didn't like a lot of the kids in my class; they were from your standard small town Republican minor-mucky-muck backgrounds, the mayor's daughter and that sort of thing. Snobby, but small town. Uninteresting. Petty. Mean.

When we moved from town to the country the summer before sixth grade, I was once again in a situation that made me feel freakish. Instead of going to the nearby elementary school, I had to ride the "special van" to town so I could go to the Enriched class in an elementary school downtown. On the van were me and the kids going to classes at the state mental hospital. Two of them were in wheelchairs, unable to have conversations with people, though one of them had an impressive number of commercials he could recite into the back of his hand, which was presumably working as a microphone. The non-wheelchair kids had Down's syndrome or other severe learning troubles. The two drivers, one of whom was extremely caring and good with the wheelchair kids, were nevertheless total hicks who made us listen to terrible country music. When the male driver came to our house to meet me and figure out how to add me to the route, he asked my mom, right in front of me as if I couldn't understand what he was saying, "So, she's slow, huh?" for which I never forgave him, though it makes a kind of sense. "Intelligence" as mental illness.

In seventh grade I got to ride a normal bus with all the other normal kids, but by this time these country kids I'd never met hated me. Since I had been "too good" to go to their elementary school, they decided I was snob. I spent the 6 years of hour-long bus rides to and from school crouching low in a bus seat, praying no one would say anything to me or would, worse, yell things about me to other kids. "Look, she's putting on makeup. What a snob." At school, I was becoming shyer and shyer, and mostly tried to stay out of people's way, except for in arenas I felt comfortable like the swim team or the band.

You have to understand that part of my shyness came from being younger -- I was continually behind in physical developments like periods, boobs, and hips, and in rites of passage like when I could take driver's ed -- and also from having that "smart" designation: as a label it said "different." We "accelerated" kids had our separate classes, and even within this little cadre I had the additional burden of being young and a quick study, straight-A sort of person. I kept my mouth shut about it, but everybody knew. And the classes were stupid and dull. We had exactly one great teacher in all of junior high and high school, and she was dangerously insane. (Seriously. She needs her own post, and will also appear in my novel.)


(Edit note. Okay, fine, I broke it up. Happy?)