Professional Part Time Soccer Mom

Stuart Wilkinson

Professional Part-Time Soccer Mom

The sound of someone knocking stirs me from a deep sleep.

“Stuart? Hello?”

“Coming,” I call. There’s silence. Have they left? Then comes another flourish of knocking. “Hold on, I’m coming.” I reach for the iPod on my bedside table that I’ve been using as an alarm clock. It’s 10:30 in the morning. I must have already silenced it hours ago and drifted back into sleep. Where is the key? I dig through a heap of laundry, tossing socks and sweaters in the air. The sound of restless shuffling comes from outside. “Sorry, just hold on.” I fumble with the lock and swing open the door. The January light is blinding.

The cold that’s been dragging me down all week catches up with me as I stand disoriented on the front stoop. Waiting for me is Bernardo Coronado-Guerra-Peon, the Student Services Coordinator at The Savannah College of Art in Design Lacoste campus.

I wonder if they provided him with the translucent pink clipboard he carries with him or whether he brought it from home.

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Stuart Wilkinson

Bernardo usually wears glasses––but not this morning. They’re small, roundish things that all of the fashionable men in France seem to wear. Though I thought his eyes were brown, I realize in the blinding daylight that they’re blue. Not the translucent watery blues you typically see; his are dark and as opaque as lapis lazuli. Without his glasses on, it’s as if someone’s removed a gun silencer. Bernardo aims his barrel gaze. Me. He’s not amused.

“So, how are you feeling?” he asks. His question is burst like, as if the whole sentence is fired at once. I try explaining through my shroud of sleepiness and congestion that I’m doing better now–– I have medicine. He scans me up and down as I shiver in in the doorway.

It’s impossible to imagine Bernardo as anything less than composed. The previous weekend, the Savannah College of Art and Design went on a field trip to the Angouleme International Comic Festival—the very reason that I have this cold. It rained on and off for three days, but I doubt a drop landed on him. It wouldn’t have dared. Being confronted by him in your pajamas is not something you want. His inquiry makes me nervous. It was only last week that I heard him asking the roommate of another student how they were doing. I want to distrust him; to treat him like a spy sent to check on wellknown illness. Tempering my pre-breakfast paranoia, I decide it’s best to focus on his expensive loafers.

Bernardo is 30, but would like to pass for at least 25. “You could pass for 27 2

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though, easy,” I tell him. He looks 30. His hair, while thinning, is dark and perfectly sleeked. He admits he’s already turning grey; though I doubt you could spot any if you tried. Bernardo was born and raised in Mexico City, but he doesn’t have the faintest trace of an accent left. At few inches short of 6 foot, he stands razor thin, his posture perfect.

He is in good shape. Once, when he was in a rush, Bernardo bolted up one of the steep cobblestone roads in Lacoste in moments. Most people need to catch their breath just walking them. Students called after him, wondering where he was going in such a rush.

He simply turned mid stride, smiled, and waved.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Bernardo knows how to move. He studied architecture in for 5 years, spending year in Australia before returning to Mexico. From 22 onwards he could have easily coasted through life. What he doesn’t like to admit however is that he comes from a wealthy family and has traveled all over the world. He keeps meticulous travel journals. The current one is bright red. It’s overstuffed with mementos: café receipts, museum passes, hotel leaflets. Each page is ornate with cursive notes.

“It was a comfortable life,” said Bernardo about his childhood. “The social aspects of that, growing up and everyone knows who your father is or who your mother is. [Everyone knows] what you do, where you go to school. It wasn’t complicated. It was what we were born into if that makes sense…it would have been very easy for me to ask my father to find me a job. Pretty much that’s what my brother did. I knew that my code 3

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of ethics, my personality, I couldn’t live with that. I wanted to start something for myself.”

His older brother still lives at home––only now looking for his own apartment.

This is something of great amusement to Bernardo, who has been independent since getting his bachelor’s degree in architecture. After graduating, he got a job with a series of construction companies. One of his first projects involved designing high-end residential apartment buildings. “They had the movie room, the kid’s room, and what we call the adult’s play room, the gym, the pool…those were the first interiors I was exposed to.”

At the second firm he worked at, the company “subcontracted everything.” It’s also here when he job title shifted to human resources. “I was starting new policies,” he said. “I had to dig in and try to get everyone social security. I had to make sure there were procedure modules. Plumbers and electricians could actually follow a code of conduct.

Everything that fell into HR––it was my department.”

On field trips, Bernardo is the one calling roll and firing that gaze onto anyone foolish enough to get back onto the bus late. He is the one emailing out weekly itineraries, and driving students to the Apt marketplace on the weekends. During one trip, he couldn’t find any music on the radio he liked. “This is all horrible,” he said, jabbing at the stereo buttons furiously. Where is the Rihanna?” He does all these things while holding his previous position back in Savannah as an Associate Designer for Executive 4

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Administration.

Bernardo is well suited to this kind of hectic work schedule because his job in HR trained him for it. He explains that he was “kind of like their nanny.” When he picked my fellow students and me up from the market later that day, he even laughed at the idea that he was a kind of SCAD soccer Mom as he opened the van door.

He is used to taking care of the needs of others. It was up to him to transition the company to more modern standards of conduct. He had to do things such as make sure that people were getting paid (or not) according to their time cards, and oversaw the payment policy transition from a cash to debit basis. Bernardo ensured the safety of his construction workers while they were in dangerous situations (like working in elevator shafts), and even worked to get employees social security. “I can’t sleep at night knowing that people aren’t covered. Don’t have proper insurance,” he said. Some spy.

This is no easy feat when the people you are in charge of don’t respect you.

“Mexico, or rather Latin America in general,” Bernardo explained “is a very classist society. The socio-economic gaps are quite large. So how you look is who you are and all that…education is a big thing.” Hence the expensive loafers. While he admits that he learned a lot about people at this job, he knew that he wanted to go back to school.

He chose Savannah because desperately wanted to get out of Mexico. “It was getting to the point where for me; it was just affecting my health,” he explained. Bernardo 5

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would leave around nine in the morning and return at 9 o’clock every night. The actual time driving would be at least an hour because of the deadlocked traffic, though the commute should’ve taken only minutes on a clear road.

While he did apply to several schools and was accepted into most of them, SCAD was willing to give him a 50% scholarship. His parents tried to deter him from allowing the financial aspect from being the deciding factor though. Bernardo wanted to make his own way. He won’t be in Lacoste for much longer though, and will be returning to Savannah to pick up where he left off at his old job after the program leaves for Paris in a few days. He misses his apartment and his cat Doris Macarena. There’s still a lot of work to do before he gets to go home though.

“So, I wanted to know if you needed to go see the doctor,” Bernardo asks. I tell him that no, I don’t need to see a doctor. I have all the medications I need and am already starting to feel better. It was only yesterday that he himself drove some of my classmates on an impromptu trip to town to buy them for me. “Well,” he says, “if you change your mind, find me later because I’m taking someone else to the doctor and you could just come with us.” I say thank you and he hurries off.

It’s hard for me to imagine him doing a job as involved as this back in the slow, southern city of Savannah; especially since always seems on the move here. It should come as no surprise that he’s already worked at three of the four school campuses. It must be his travelling bug.

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“I need more going on,” he explained. “I need more cafes, restaurants, museums, you know…a night on the town. Maybe go meet friends at different places. I know in some ways I need more of that.” Though he is passionate about his job, it seems Savannah can only keep him still for so long.

Later that day I bump into Bernardo again. He asks me how I am feeling and I reassured him that I am feeling better than this morning (a lie to placate him). He tells me that he’s made a doctor’s appointment anyways, and that the opportunity to go is still there.

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