While I'm Falling (4 page)

I
DID NOT ALWAYS
want to be a doctor. I had only known, for a very long time, that I did not want to be a lawyer. Elise is six years older than I am, and so growing up, I didn’t feel competitive with her, exactly; it would be more accurate to say she overwhelmed me from the start. She overwhelmed a lot of people. When she was in high school, she won the state championship for speech and debate two years in a row. She was class president. She was valedictorian. The summer before she left for college, she went to a town hall meeting and argued with the mayor about curbside recycling, and ended up giving such a passionate speech that it made the local television news.

He sometimes seemed unnerved by his inability to intimidate Elise in any way; but for the most part, he seemed very happy to have a sparring partner, and also to have helped create a younger, prettier version of himself. When Elise got into law school, he walked around the house whistling “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby” for days.

So of course I wanted to try for something equally impressive. I didn’t want to do what she was doing, or even anything like it. I wanted to try for something different, something I could be better at—my own thing.

The trouble was, I didn’t know what that thing was. I had good grades. I liked to read. I could do a backbend. As a girl, I had entertained the usual career fantasies: marine biologist, horse trainer, dolphin specialist. But my parents had each, in their own way, discouraged me from a career involving animals. My father’s concerns were pragmatic: “Goofball,” he said. “Honey. A vet is one of the worst jobs you can pick. You’ve got to have all the school that a doctor has, and you make about a fifth of the money. Sweetie. Why do that to yourself?”

My mother agreed that I should consider a different path, but for a very different reason. She pointed out, repeatedly, that I didn’t take care of my own dog. “You
promised
that if we got you a puppy, you would take care of it,” she reminded me. “You whined. You begged. You said you would walk it, you would feed it. And now who takes care of Bowzer? Who walks him when it’s five degrees outside? Who feeds him? Who makes sure he has clean water? Who cleans up after him?”

The answer, of course, was my mother. Bowzer was a cute dog, a bouncy little schnauzer mix, and in his youth, my sister and I had been happy to play with him in the yard on sunny days and to snuggle with him at night. My father used to watch the news with Bowzer on his lap, holding him like a baby and rubbing his belly. But it was my mother who truly took care of Bowzer, even before he got old and stinky. By the time I left for college, he was deaf, and somewhat blind, with a fat pocket sticking out of his back like a handle. When my parents separated, my mother got full custody of Bowzer, pretty much by default.

It wasn’t until my sophomore year, not long after my parents’ separation, that I started thinking about going into medicine. I had aced my freshman biology class. I liked the idea of helping people. I had always admired our family physician, a quiet, thoughtful woman who took an annual break from her middle-class clientele to vaccinate refugee children in Kenya. She rarely erred with her hunches and prescriptions, and even my father spoke to her with deference. I thought I might be good at medical research. I saw myself in a quiet room, doing something important with test tubes that would help save, or at least improve, many lives. I didn’t care about money so much, at least not the way my father did. (“You will,” he told me gravely.) But I cared very much about how excited he got when I told him I was pre-med.

“You’re being very smart,” he said, pointing at me, though we were alone in his car, on our way to pick up two of his suits at the dry cleaner. Apparently, he told me, it was a two-person job, because why in the hell would you expect a dry cleaner to provide adequate parking for customers? Why not just assume a paying customer could bring along his daughter during the only time he got to see her in over a month so he could wait in the car while she ran up to the store to get his suits back? He went on like this for a good three minutes, and I didn’t say anything. Until very recently, my mother had picked up his dry cleaning. I didn’t know where or how she parked.

“Medical school. Good.” He opened the ashtray on his dash and fished out the ticket stubs for the cleaner. “I worry sometimes, having daughters. I read an article just the other day. You know what college majors have the highest percentage of female students?”

I shook my head. He handed me the stubs and held up bent fingers to count.

“Education. Social work. English. And the one about taking care of children, I forget what it’s called. Guess what they all have in common?”

I winced as we came within a foot of a cyclist. “They won’t make money?”

“Bingo.” He nodded at the glove compartment. “There’s a twenty in there. You can pay from that. Make sure you get a receipt.” He turned suddenly, sliding in alongside a fire hydrant. “Guess what major has the lowest percentage of female students?”

I didn’t answer right away. He snapped his fingers.

“Pre-med?”

“Engineering. But you get the drift. And then they wonder why women don’t make as much money as men. Well there you go. These girls do it to themselves. Why? Why choose to be poor? You and Elise are being smart. You’re looking out for yourselves.”

He put the car in park and smiled, his eyes full of affection and pride. I smiled back. It took me a moment to realize he was waiting.

“Honey,” he said gently. “The suits.”

I went to my first pre-med advisory session the fall semester of my sophomore year. It was held in an auditorium—they must have known about two thousand of us would show up. Gretchen and I got there ten minutes early, but the only seats left were in the far balcony. I worried we wouldn’t be able to hear, but when the advisor came onto the stage, his face also appeared, like the Wizard of Oz, on a giant screen that hung from the ceiling. Another screen listed the course requirements and the kinds of grades and MCAT scores medical schools would expect. “Look to your left,” the advisor told us, and two thousand or so of us looked to our lefts. “Look to your right,” he said, and so, good pre-med students that we were, we followed that direction as well. “Don’t get too friendly with either one of your neighbors,” he said. “Because only one of you is going to make it.”

“It doesn’t really matter who you were sitting by,” she assured me. “He just meant it as a statistic.”

Gretchen sometimes didn’t understand when I was joking. But on the whole, she was freakishly smart. If life were fair, if hard work and discipline really could trump pure aptitude, I would have easily been the one to succeed out of almost any group of three in that auditorium. Gretchen, on the other hand, went out a lot. She had three different fake IDs. Sophomore year, we had inorganic lab together at seven in the morning, and Gretchen would show up with mascara tracks down her cheeks, her blond hair tangled and reeking of smoke. But she never seemed particularly pained after she put on her lab coat and goggles. She worked through the most complicated titrations and equations as if she were just stumbling around the dining hall, getting herself coffee and cereal—nothing a girl with a little hangover couldn’t manage. She usually finished early.

I did okay that year. I put in the time. I memorized the formulas, the periodic table, the thermodynamic laws. I stayed in and studied when Gretchen went out. And though it seemed a little unfair that I should have to work so much harder than she did, I was happy I could at least keep up. The future seemed bright and certain. My father started saying, “What’s up, Doc?” when he left messages on my phone.

This year, however, was different. First semester was almost over, and I was already sinking. Organic chemistry was everything I had struggled with and barely understood in inorganic the year before—only now all the diagrams had gone 3-D. For the first time, it didn’t matter how much I studied. As early as September, I went into my TA’s office hours for extra help. But when I tried to explain what I didn’t understand, he used the word “obviously” a lot, squinting at me as if I were playing some joke on him, as if I were a small child pretending to be a chemistry student—no actual twenty-year-old could possibly be so dense.

“You just have to get past organic,” Gretchen said. “It’s a hurdle, that’s all. Don’t let it psych you out.”

“Seriously,” Gretchen said. “None of this crap we’re studying now has anything to do with being a doctor.” She waved off the chicken and took another gulp of coffee. It was nine o’clock on a Wednesday night, but she was on her second cup from the vending machine downstairs. Her favorite bar had Ladies’ Night on Wednesdays—after we finished, she would go out. “You can forget all of this after the MCAT,” she said. “Just go bulimic, you know? Stuff your brain. Take the test. Purge. Repeat.”

I tried to look reassured so she would quit talking. I appreciated her studying with me, since it was charity, really; she was already a chapter ahead of me in the book. But I couldn’t read and listen to her at the same time.
The R/S system also has no fixed relation to the D/L system. For example, the side-chain one of serine contains a hydroxy group, -OH.
I turned to the glossary in the back of the book. This was English. This was my native language. There was no reason I couldn’t understand. I was a little warm. I took off my sweater. I looked back at the book. Gretchen wrote something in her notebook. She turned another page.

“Can we go over this again?” I leaned toward her. “I don’t even really understand what chiral molecules are.”

She nodded and drank more coffee. “Chirals aren’t a big deal,” she said. “The book makes it confusing. They’re just, like, mirror opposites.” She put her coffee down and pressed her hands against each other, extending both pinkies. “You just have to be able to, you know, picture what the molecule looks like and flip it around. Like imagine what it would look like in a mirror.” She smiled and wiggled her fingers. Her fingernails were painted a pale and sparkly pink.

That was it, I thought. That was what I couldn’t do. I couldn’t flip molecules around in my head. The atoms drifted apart on the first rotation, and I lost track of what and where they were. I looked back at my book so she wouldn’t see my face. I didn’t want her to feel sorry for me.

“So what are you doing this weekend?”

“This,” I said. I didn’t look up.

“Oh. Well.” She made an attempt to sound pleasantly surprised. “Since you’ll be in anyway…cover for me Saturday? I’ll trade you any weekday you have.”

“I can’t,” I said.

I could feel her looking at me, waiting. I always covered for her when she asked.

“I’m house-sitting.”

“Oh. Cool. For a professor or something?”

I shook my head. She waited again.

“For Jimmy Liff,” I said.

Gretchen’s surprised expression contained so many circles, her round blue eyes, her O-shaped mouth, the doll-like splotches of pink on her cheeks.

“How do you even know him?”

“He works here. He’s a security monitor.”

“I know that.” She raised her eyebrows. “You two just don’t seem like you would be friends.”

I played dumb, but I knew what she meant. Jimmy Liff was a sixth-year sociology student who took his position in dorm security a little too seriously. His dedication to enforcing rules was a little surprising because of the way he looked: His head was shaved. He wore tight white T-shirts, even in the winter. Both his well-muscled arms were tattooed—a snapping crocodile on the left, a series of Chinese characters on the right. His nose was pierced with a silver, bolt-shaped object that looked both heavy and painful. But Jimmy Liff was no anarchist, no rebel. He wrote people up for music turned ever so slightly too loud. He was ruthless with early morning runners who forgot to bring along their IDs. And around Halloween, during a fire drill, he’d keyed open a room and found a small marijuana plant on someone’s windowsill. As soon as the alarms stopped blaring, he’d called the police. There was some rebellion. Someone fearless had painted “FASCIST PRICK” on the door of Jimmy’s orange MINI Cooper as it sat in the employee section of the dorm parking lot.

“He creeps me out.” Gretchen wrinkled her nose. “Why are you doing it? Why does he need a house-sitter?”

“He’s leaving town for the weekend. I guess he has high-maintenance plants.”

Gretchen lowered her chin, suspicious.

“Orchids,” I said. “He said orchids and ferns.”

“Jimmy Liff raises orchids?”

“That’s what he said.” I looked back down at the book. “I just have to mist them every day and check the humidity. He also needs a ride to the airport.” I lifted my head and smiled. “I’m going to drive him in, and then I get the car for the weekend.” I leaned back in my chair and waved my hands above my head. I was that excited.

“Wow. The one that says ‘FASCIST PRICK’?”

I frowned. I wasn’t going to let her bring me down. She had a car. She didn’t understand. “He got most of that off,” I said. “You can barely see it now. He’s giving me fifty dollars. And I heard his place is really nice. I think he has a Jacuzzi.”

“Yeah, I heard that, too.” She looked over my shoulder to check the door to her room. She looked over her own shoulder, too. “You know why it’s nice, in my opinion?”

I shook my head.

“
Drogas,
” she whispered. Gretchen was taking Spanish, too. “He’s selling
drogas.
”

I frowned again. This was information I did not want.

“You actually know this?”

She looked at me as if I were stupid, not just about chiral molecules, but about the world in general. “How many college students do you know who live in a luxury town house by the country club? And that car?”

“Circumstantial evidence,” I said. It was what my father would have said, what Elise would have said. I could think like them sometimes. I just couldn’t mimic the intimidating way they said things, sounding bored and ready to fight at the same time. I just sounded anxious. “Maybe he has rich parents.”

“Then why does he have a job that pays minimum wage?” She fastened the lid on the chicken. “Please. It’s for contacts. He’s supplying the dorm, I bet. Maybe all of them.”

I paused to consider what she was saying. It was a weakness of mine, this need to slow down and take information in, to always wonder if I was, in fact, in the wrong. Neither Elise nor my father ever seemed to do this. When I got quiet with either of them, they considered me stumped and, if we were arguing, conquered. But Gretchen was waiting patiently, her chin resting in her hand.

“It doesn’t make sense,” I said. “If it’s true, then why did he call the police on the marijuana?”

“Because he’s mean.” She shrugged. “I heard he mostly sells pills.”

I drummed my fingernails on the table. My fingernails were not painted sparkly pink. They were chewed to the quick, awful-looking. “You heard this from a lot of people? People who would know?”

She shook her head. “Just a couple of people.”

“So basically you’re telling me a rumor?”

She put her palms up and nodded.

I nodded, too. Fine then. So it probably wasn’t true. And even if it was, really it didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to be Jimmy Liff ’s friend. I was just going to stay at his nice house, and drive his nice car. Also, I had already told him I would do it. He was counting on me.

Gretchen squinted. “No offense, but I wonder why he asked you. You in particular, I mean.”

I shrugged as if I didn’t know. In truth, the answer to this question was embarrassing. Jimmy Liff had actually looked me in the eye and explained that I was simply the most boring person he knew. “I don’t mean that as a bad thing,” he’d added quickly. “I don’t mean you’re like, boring to talk to. I mean you seem boring in a good way. In a way that would be good for my plants and my car. You don’t even smoke, do you?”

It didn’t hurt my feelings. I understood what he meant. Jimmy and I had landed in the same Shakespeare class the previous spring, and though I had been a little afraid of him at the beginning, we had been paired by the teacher to work on a presentation for
Measure for Measure
together. I went to work right away. I made handouts; I memorized one of Isabella’s soliloquies; I found video recordings of several different productions. Perhaps I went a little overboard, but it was a good thing I did, as all Jimmy did was show up the day of the presentation. But group work was group work, and we’d both gotten A’s. He’d acted chummy with me ever since.

“I don’t care why he asked me.” I reopened the Chicken Satay. A drop of sauce fell on a diagram of a benzene molecule in my book. “I just care that I’m going to get out of here for a weekend. It’s like a prison furlough.”

Gretchen laughed, and then stopped. “You hate it here that much?”

“Yes.” I took a bite of chicken. “I hate it that much.” I couldn’t believe she didn’t hate it. She was an upperclassman, too. In the last week, we’d had three fire drills, all of them pranks, the alarms going off between four and six in the morning. And on just my floor, two weekends in a row, someone had thrown up in the lobby.

“Is Tim going to stay with you?”

I shook my head. This weekend was his grandparents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary. He was driving up to Chicago on Friday, and he wouldn’t get home until Sunday night. I was actually relieved about this. I would need to study all weekend, nonstop, no breaks. The test on Tuesday would be weighed heavily for our semester grade: If I did well on it, I could still do okay in the class, and be on track for medical school. If I didn’t do well on it…there would be no point in even taking the final.

“What a waste,” Gretchen said. “You know. The Jacuzzi.” She leaned back and smiled. “I like Tim. He’s nice.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I think so, too.”

“He graduates next year, right? A master’s? Engineering?”

I nodded.

She bobbed her eyebrows and whistled low. “He’s going to make a lot of money.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“I’m just saying…Why is that a bad thing? Why are you getting mad?”

I looked down at my book and shook my head. I didn’t know why I was mad. I only knew I wasn’t ready for the test.

“Well,” Gretchen said, “since the boyfriend who may or may not be rich someday won’t be around, it might be fun to have a few people over…not a party, just, you know…”

I shook my head. “I have to study. That’s all I’m doing.”

“Okay.” She sighed and turned a page. “I admire your dedication.”

I barely smiled. My dedication, if that was even what it was, didn’t seem like anything she should admire. I was just scared all the time. I had already told everyone—my parents, Elise, Tim—that I was trying for medical school. They would be understanding if I quit, of course; but they would be understanding that I was weak, or not as smart as they were, or that I just couldn’t do it. I didn’t want their understanding. I was the one I couldn’t let down. I didn’t want to have to go through life knowing that I didn’t do something I wanted to do, just because it was difficult. Even relentlessly difficult.

I’d felt this way for a while. My sophomore year, when I was having a hard time in calculus, I found a talking Barbie at Goodwill, and I instantly recognized her as the Barbie who said “Math is hard! Let’s go shopping!” She had come out when I was young, and she had been in the news—people were angry about the implied message, and the toy company finally changed her computer chip to make her say something else. But the Barbie from Goodwill was the original version. I propped her up on my desk. Whenever I was sick of calculus, struggling with derivatives or integrals, I would press the Barbie’s button, and stare into her stupid eyes until I was motivated to get back to work.

Tim said he wanted to help Barbie—he made her wire-rimmed glasses from a paperclip; he drew a pocket protector directly onto one of her big Barbie breasts. Gretchen thought it was funny, too. Elise wanted one for herself. Only my mother, when she saw my Barbie, didn’t laugh at all.

“Honey. Why are you doing this?” She held the mangled Barbie up, and then turned her worried gaze to me. It was always strange when she was in my dorm room. Even if she just stopped in for a few minutes, I felt invaded, taken over. The room was just too small.

“It’s a joke,” I said. “It’s just a joke.”

She frowned. “I didn’t even let you play with these when you were little.” She set the Barbie back on my desk. The doll tipped over, and my mother bent her at the waist so she could properly sit up. She looked back at me. “Veronica. You’re a kind and thoughtful young woman. If calculus is hard, then calculus is hard. It doesn’t mean you’re a doll.”

“It’s a joke,” I said again.

She did not appear convinced. “This doll has nothing to do with you.” She stared down at Barbie with wary eyes. “Honey. She doesn’t even look like us.”