The Smart One (5 page)

They didn’t really mean it, Martha knew. Maybe at that moment they regretted their decision, but the thing that Martha always knew was that these girls wanted to go to parties and meet boys just as much as they wanted to be nurses. And that was the difference. Martha was
in school
only
to be a nurse. For these girls, it was just part of the whole package. For Martha, it was everything.

IT WAS ONLY AFTER SHE’D
left college that Martha realized how much she’d loved it there—she loved the structure of it, the study schedule, and the forced socializing. She loved her single room, where she could be alone but keep the door cracked open so she could hear people chattering in the halls, the excited way people greeted one another, their shrieks of laughter. Of course, at the time, if anyone had asked her, she would have said that she couldn’t wait for graduation, that her dorm was noisy and filled with immature girls who made it nearly impossible to get any work done.

But when it was all gone, she mourned it. She would never be back there again. Ever. Her life was a big silent white space. There were no tests to study for, no groups to meet. When she wasn’t working, she could do anything she wanted to, but she found that she didn’t like the openness of her time. It was startling, all that free space, and she ended up watching a lot of TV.

Martha got a job at a large hospital in South Philadelphia. She was hired as a floater, which meant that she rotated among departments, filling in wherever she was needed. One night she’d be in the pediatric ward and the next she’d be in the emergency room. She was always on the night shift, because she was new, and they told her she’d have to earn her way to the more desirable hours.

The hospital was large and understaffed. Martha would arrive at seven p.m. and be thrown into a pit of need. That was what it felt like. There was always so much to do, and so many people who needed things from her. The older nurses weren’t particularly nice or friendly. She’d imagined that they would take her under their wing and show her the ropes. But that’s not how it was. They were frustrated with her, impatient and bossy. And since she moved around all the time, she never really got to know any of them well.

Martha couldn’t adjust to her new schedule. Getting to work in the evening gave her a bad feeling in the pit of her stomach, the kind that she used to get on Sunday nights in high school. She worked until
seven thirty a.m. and then she’d take the train home, rumpled and exhausted, while everyone else was just starting their day. It made her feel anxious, to see them freshly showered and dressed, holding coffee and reading the paper, while she was on her way home to sleep.
I’m living life backward
, she used to think. And the thought of being a backward person made her heart pound loudly, strangely, so that sometimes it even felt like it was beating the wrong way, like it was going backward along with her.

When she got home in the mornings, she couldn’t sleep. She could never quite get used to climbing into bed as the sun was shining. She would lie awake for hours, wondering if she’d done everything she was supposed to. Had she given all of her patients their medications? Had she measured right? Had she filled out the charts? She was sure she was killing her patients, and that kept her awake, always. She was so tired that her whole body ached, but her mind was always moving, always thinking, and no matter how hard she tried, she just couldn’t fall asleep.

With each day, it felt worse. Martha was antsy, but never wanted to leave her apartment when she didn’t have to. She didn’t want to wash her dishes or do her laundry. She ate in her bedroom and let plates pile up on her desk, let glasses full of iced tea sit on her nightstand until they started to mold and little black ants crawled in them. Her laundry lay in piles, and when you first opened the door to her bedroom, it smelled like the home of a dirty person—sour and stale. This wasn’t the way Martha kept things. She’d always been clean, always been disgusted by people who sat around in their own filth. But it didn’t seem to matter anymore, and leaving things to rot where they were was easier than trying to clean it all up.

Her roommate, a girl she knew from nursing school, told her that she couldn’t live like this and that she was moving out when their lease was up. Martha started skipping work, napping during the days and watching TV at night. Her parents came over to see her, and her father stood in the doorway to her bedroom, looking all around, while her mother said, “Oh, Martha,” and began to pick things up, gathering dirty laundry in her arms, as if the mess were the problem.

Martha quit her job and moved home. Her parents packed up the apartment for her, boxing up all of her books and clothes. “It’s just my job,” she told them. “It was too much. I’m burned out. I just need to rest.”

But she was still so tired all the time. She slept almost all day, glad to be in a bed with clean sheets, back at home. Her parents would come upstairs to see her, insist that she get out of bed for meals. Her mom would take her on errands. “You can sit in the car if you want,” she’d say. “But you have to get out of the house.” And so Martha would put on clothes, and sit in the passenger seat of the car while her mother went to the dry cleaners and the bank.

Sometimes her dad would come upstairs and sit next to her bed, to talk or just read. “It will get better,” he’d say to her. And for some reason, this made her cry, tears running down her face to her pillow.

Finally, her parents made her go see someone. “You need someone to talk to,” they told her. “It will make you feel better.” She could hear them whispering about her when she walked out of a room. But she didn’t care. She knew they were worried about her. If she’d had more energy, she would have been worried about herself.

She’d gone to see a therapist and a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist she didn’t much care for. He didn’t seem interested in her, and she’d sat there and answered his questions, and at the end of the session he’d written her prescriptions. Just like that. When she started to take the medicine, she felt loopy and in her own world, and she wanted to tell everyone that this wasn’t going to work.

Dr. Baer was her therapist, and at first Martha thought she wasn’t going to be of any help either. But she kept going, and little by little, Dr. Baer began to grow on her. It was strange, like she didn’t even notice anything was changing, but slowly she seemed to feel the tiniest bit better, then a bit more. The medicine seemed to balance out, or at least she didn’t feel so out of it anymore. Things weren’t perfect, but she slept less and got dressed more often. And one day she realized that her father had been right. Things had gotten better somehow.

A few months after that, she’d felt good enough to apply to J.Crew, and she’d gotten the job and worked hard and done well. It had really
all been going well—until today. Today, Martha couldn’t stand all the people yelling at her about sizes and sales. She couldn’t stand the Candaces of the world thinking they could act however they wanted to, like they were special somehow. Today, for the first time in years, Martha almost wished she was a nurse again.

MARTHA LEFT DR. BAER’S OFFICE,
but stood right outside the door and leaned against the brick wall. She needed a minute. Even though it was August, she was chilled and she pulled a cardigan out of her bag and put it on. The air-conditioning in Dr. Baer’s office was insane. Dr. Baer was always warm (hot flashes, Martha assumed), and now, because Martha had been forced to sit in the freezing room, she probably had a cold.

Early on, when Martha first started seeing Dr. Baer, she used to go home after each session and write down what her therapist had said, so that she could remember everything. Martha wanted to remember all the advice that Dr. Baer gave. She was always so calm, so practical. Martha used to carry that notebook around with her, so she could read Dr. Baer’s words whenever she wanted. It made her feel in control.

Now, after so many years of therapy, she was able to hear Dr. Baer’s voice in her head wherever she went. When she was at the store, about to buy ice cream, she heard her say, “Sometimes we comfort ourselves in physical ways instead of emotional ways.” When Martha turned down an invitation to anything, she heard Dr. Baer say, “It’s scary to put yourself out there. But sometimes you need to be uncomfortable to live in the world.”

But this visit was different. Martha got the feeling that Dr. Baer was less interested in her problems. She seemed to sigh a lot, to tap her pen before she addressed Martha. And at the end she said, “You know, Martha, it feels to me that you’ve had time to recover and now you may just be hiding. Maybe it’s time to push yourself. Find a job that challenges you more. Maybe go back to nursing. Move out, take a trip, do something that will get you going.”

This seemed to be inappropriate shrink talk. All Martha had been saying this session was that she was having some problems with her
family. She was complaining about how it seemed to be her curse that whenever she tried to help people (like her sister) they acted like she was butting in. Dr. Baer had sighed and said something about small problems seeming large under a microscope. What was that supposed to mean?

At first, Martha hadn’t wanted to see a shrink, but her parents hadn’t really given her a choice. For the first few visits, all Martha did was cry. Dr. Baer just sat with her, handing her tissues and waiting. Dr. Baer was a petite woman with short brown hair and thick-framed glasses. She was compact, and looked like she worked out for many hours a day. She handed Martha tissues with purpose, pulling them straight up and out of the box, in one quick motion.

Martha took them, always taking notice of how muscular Dr. Baer’s arms were. She didn’t even know why she was crying, exactly. She just knew that she didn’t want to be there.

As the sessions went on, Martha began to appreciate Dr. Baer’s firm voice. She looked forward to the weekly appointment, picking out her outfit to go to the office downtown, walking down Walnut Street, looking in the windows of the clothing shops. Martha always felt important when she walked down the street to the office, like she had somewhere special to be. Dr. Baer’s office was on the second floor of a building that was squished in between a Rite Aid and a Lacoste store. Sometimes when she entered the door from the street, she felt like she was entering a secret passageway. There were no markings on the door, just a small mailbox card that said
MD BAER
. If you didn’t know what you were looking for, you’d walk right by.

Martha wasn’t embarrassed about seeing a shrink (although Dr. Baer hated that word. “I’m a therapist, Martha,” she would say whenever Martha called her that). She was very honest about her appointments with everyone at J.Crew. “I can’t work Tuesday afternoons,” she would say. “That’s my shrink appointment.”

When Dr. Baer took her vacation in July, Martha felt a hole in her life. The hour appointment was easily the best part of her week. Martha began to think of Dr. Baer more as a friend than as a doctor; a confidante she could talk to. That is, until today.

Outside the office, Martha watched as Duncan walked inside to see Dr. Baer. Duncan had had the appointment right after Martha’s for almost two years now, and they often ran into each other in the waiting room or right outside on the street. They always gave each other knowing nods as they passed. Today, Martha wanted to grab Duncan’s arm and warn him.
Watch out
, she would say.
Dr. Baer is in a mood
. They would look knowingly at each other, Duncan understanding just what Martha meant. But Duncan walked quickly past her before she could say anything.

Martha pulled a dusty Kleenex out of her pocket and blew her nose. Then she decided to walk to the coffee shop a couple of blocks away to get something to drink. She needed to sit and make sense of her last hour.

She hadn’t even gotten a chance to tell Dr. Baer about the dream that she’d had last night, where she’d seen a giant orange ant and grabbed a shoe to kill it. When she smacked it with her shoe, the ant turned to look at her with big eyes. Then the back half of the ant kept moving and Martha had to chase it around and hit it again. She’d been excited to talk about the dream, since she never had dreams that vivid. It must have meant something—she was sure of it. She’d told her mom about it that morning, but her mom had just sort of stared at her in a fuzzy way over her coffee. Dr. Baer would have had to listen as she described the body of the ant, how strange it made her feel. But she hadn’t gotten to talk about it. And now she would never know what the ant was supposed to be.

The coffee shop was more crowded than Martha expected. There were several people banging away on laptops with a sense of purpose, a couple of people reading the paper, and one pair of girls with their heads bent close together, whispering seriously. Martha found a small table in the middle back of the shop, and edged her way through the other customers to get there. A few of them looked up as she passed and she wondered if she looked distressed to them. She tried to catch the eye of one scraggly-looking guy who had his hands resting on his laptop and was staring off into space, but he looked back at the screen as soon as he saw her looking at him.

Martha sighed and flopped her bag onto the table. It made a satisfying thump, and a couple of people jumped. Then she sighed again and sat down, pushing her chair back so that it screeched on the floor. No one looked up. She wanted just one of these people to acknowledge her and give her a sad smile.
I just had a fight with my shrink
, she would say. Although that wasn’t really true. Maybe she’d say,
My shrink just told me I’m worthless
. That would get their attention. But that wasn’t true either. Martha sighed again and leaned back in her chair.

A waitress with hair that hung down her back all the way to her waist came to take Martha’s order. She looked like someone who wanted to be a singer or a songwriter. She probably had a guitar at home. Maybe she even played at small clubs around the city, or at this very coffee shop.