This Modern Writer: Not an English Person by Ester Bloom

To lose one job may be regarded as a misfortune but, as Oscar Wilde might say, to lose two looks like carelessness. I am on my fifth in five years. A monogamist by nature, when I was first hired by the Very Important Talent Agency straight out of college, my fantasy was that I would love and be loved by my corporate family, and that I would rise to the top of my new office like bubbles in a glass of Diet Coke.   Instead, I found myself on Unemployment only a year and half after graduating (with Honors!). Two jobs and three years later, I was on the dole again and starting, again, from scratch.

My address has been almost as unstable as my professional life. Though the bathroom ceiling has caved in and the heat puffs and rankles like an old man with a heart problem, though the oven is temperamental and the living room leaks, I am holding onto this, my fourth apartment, with both hands.

It is hard not to view all of this as failure, especially when I compare myself with my high-achieving classmates from high school and college. The amazing ones have started their own non-profits in third world countries. The average ones are earning graduate degrees, and even they will emerge, shiny with prestige and purpose, to volunteer with un-unionized workers in rural Pennsylvania. All I have to show for myself are my experiences getting kicked around the island of Manhattan for half a decade, and my sense of humor.

I was a good child, the good child, in fact, when measured against my older and younger brothers. At home as well as at school I was praised for being agreeable and intelligent, never punished in a serious way even when I did skirt the rules. Nor did I need to be punished. When I drank, I did not drive. When I got high, I went to art museums or sat around and had lengthy conversations. When I decided on a whim not to complete or hand in a project for my European history class, I received an “A” and the apologies of my teacher, who insisted that she must have misplaced my work. When I graduated from college, it was—did I mention this already?—with Honors. How did I belly flop so spectacularly on the surface of the real world?

An analyst might trace the roots of my problem back to the end of high school, when my flighty, nervous English teacher sat me down with tears in her eyes, and threw a Molotov cocktail through the window of my self-image. “You’re just not an English person,” she said. It felt as though my mother was telling me that I was adopted. Over the years, I had questioned my sexuality, my religion, my attractiveness, and my ability to be loved, but never my identity as an English person. Less than a year before, I wrote and handed in a deconstruction of Great Expectations that argued that it is only when Pip symbolically rapes Mrs. Havisham that she can finally break out of the prison of her eternal wedding night. I was proud of that paper, because by the end I had even sort of convinced myself; and I did well on it, too, possibly for the same reason.

Technically I could have ignored my over-involved, overwrought English teacher. You can’t tell me what I am, I could have shouted. Instead I was reduced to a mess on a bathroom floor like poor, quivering Private Pyle, and without the power to shoot back.

You’re a creative writing person, my English teacher had concluded. My freshman year of college, I took a Fiction workshop. Thin, unsmiling Professor Do-You-Know-Who-I-Am, who dressed like a Victorian gentleman, presided over a long wooden table of students who, like me, had been scribbling away since they were six. Within weeks, she had scared Fiction right out of me. The only stories of which she approved were lightly obscured memoirs, tales of true-life horror from high school and hospital beds. Meanwhile I was sweating through an update of “How the Camel Got His Hump” from Kipling’s Just So Stories, with a self-obsessed college student in the role of the camel.

Professor Do-You-Know-Who-I-Am was unyielding in her disdain. Vampire, I thought. That would explain the deep-set purplish eyes, the scarf obscuring her pale throat. But, as I had done so many times before, I buckled before the stronger personality. I discarded my numerous drafts and asked myself, “Now what?” The path of an English person had been blown away; the path of a creative writing person blocked by a monster. What else did I like? What else was I even capable of?

“Sociology?” I asked my father, who had always given off the comforting impression that he knew everything.

“That doesn’t actually exist,” he replied. “It’s a trick college plays on you.”

“Psychology?”

“Only if you want to listen to rich people whine at you all day.”

I had little patience for whining and even less for the problems of the wealthy. My father had no suggestions to offer: he too had always expected that he would be an English person, until to escape the encroaching shadow of the Vietnam War he ducked into Law School. My mother is also an attorney, though not a particularly happy one: somehow, though she began her career with “Q” Clearance at Los Alamos, New Mexico, she ended up mired in a remote Federal Government backwater.

With no great purpose in mind, I majored in Film & American History, and I enjoyed college until my last year put me through an emotional paper shredder. My dog died in the summer, my grandfather died in the fall, and after that I sat up at night waiting for the third shoe to drop, because everyone knows misfortune has three feet. I was also quite prepared to worry about more abstract things: What would I do with my life? How would I use a Humanities degree to earn money?

Fear of my future, which stretched in all directions with the opaque menace of the ocean, kept me awake for long stretches of time. It would have been wise to make use of those pre-dawn hours to study for my upcoming Honors exams, a series of grueling oral and written tests administered by outside experts. Instead I stared at the dense crowds of words as though at patrons inside a restaurant whose conversations I could not overhear.

The Ivory Tower would soon be no more than a smudge on the horizon, or perhaps, now and then, a tourist destination. In exile from it, I would have to shape a career out of my marketable skills—which was much like trying to build a castle out of mud and twigs.

I applied to Entertainment jobs in New York City, where my then-boyfriend wanted to go to law school, and, more esoterically, to poetry MFA programs. A Very Important Talent Agency (VITA) expressed interest in me and had the potential to put in me in the black rather than in the world of the red wheelbarrow, glazed with rainwater, beside the white chickens. I eliminated all other goals to focus on one: Get a job.

After a phone interview, a preliminary interview, a grammar test, and a typing test, I sat, at last, across a desk from Pat, the head of Human Resources at the New York office of VITA, the Very Important Talent Agency. She wore candy-red glasses that matched her Dansko clogs. Though her accent placed her roots in the heartland, her manner that made it clear that New York City was her native soil. Under her scrutiny, despite my resume, my fancy clothes, and my new Longchamp purse, I felt like an immigrant at Ellis Island being checked for lice.

“We have another step in this process,” said Pat. “You can be taken in front of a panel, and they will decide whether to let you into the program as a Trainee. That is for candidates we think will eventually end up as agents—we start them in the mailroom, and then they work their way up. It’s a tradition, one we are very proud of. But I’ll be frank you with you, Ester. I don’t think you want to be an agent.”

She paused, blankly ominous. One instinct urged me to jump to my feet and begin pledging allegiance, under the assumption that this was a test. Another told me she would be able to see through any act. After all, she was right: I did not want to be an agent. I wanted to be employed.

(What was an agent, exactly, anyway? This was before Entourage.)

I decided to sit quietly and wait for the “but.”

“But,” she said after a long moment, “we do have another option: we can start you as a Floater. You can work here, get to know the place, see if this is the right fit.”

She paused, then straightened up and slammed her hand down on her desk, jostling Yankees memorabilia. “I’ve hired a lot of people who turned out to be stupid,” she said, “and I’m tired of it. So I have to ask you, Ester: are you stupid?”

It was a fascinating question. I was planning to insert myself into the sprawling, foreign, and overheated city of New York, where I knew almost no one. My companion Mr. Ben was a skinny vegetarian who was as prepared to start law school as a bone is prepared to be thrown to wolves. We did not have an apartment, let alone a plan for financing one. We did not have trust funds.

I was relatively certain that I did not want to be an agent, yet here I was, across the desk from someone who in a former life must have run the KGB.

Even if my emotional state was shaky and had confidence had been turned into cheesecloth, one thing remained certain. I was not so stupid that I did not know when to tell someone what she wanted to hear. I was not an English person; I was not a Fiction person. Soon I would not be a student anymore at all. It was time to become something new.

Meeting Pat’s eye like the tough, go-getting city girl I aspired to be, I said, “No. I’m smart.” And I hoped to God that much was still true.



Ester Bloom, the winner of the Lois Morrell Prize for Poetry, has been published in the  Apple Valley Review,  Conte: A Journal of Narrative Poetry, the Morning News, Nerve.com, and Salon.com, among other venues. Her first novel,  Applebaum: Agent of God, was picked up for publication by ICM, and she is currently at work on a book of comic essays entitled  Never Marry a Short Woman. For almost a decade now, she’s been blogging at  http://babblebook.blogspot.com.