I was distracted all afternoon, worried about the fallout from last night’s disaster. Would Alice tell anyone, and if so, how would the rumors mutate? How would Emily react?
At breakfast the next morning, I looked around for Emily, and didn’t see her or Darrell. I did see Alice, and after working up my courage, went over to her table.
“I don’t want to talk to you,” she said as she saw me coming.
“I just wondered if you’d seen Emily this morning.”
She said nothing, and I gave up and sat elsewhere. Linda came in a little later and sat with me.
“How did Cynthia and Jennifer’s evening go?” she asked.
“Not that great. Cynthia had an argument with Alice.”
“Oh, I’m sorry... about what?”
“Never mind, it’s none of our business. What do you want to do today? I should do some studying at some point, maybe from breakfast until lunchtime, but we could hang out for the rest of the day.”
“Okay. Do you want to go see Love Story?”
“Sure, let’s check the showtimes. Have you seen a newspaper?”
So after lunch, we went to see the movie, and then hung out in the student union and drank cocoa. I was distracted all afternoon, worried about the fallout from last night’s disaster. Would Alice tell anyone, and if so, how would the rumors mutate? How would Emily react? Probably by never taking jekyllase again, and suppressing her attraction to girls harder than ever... I wasn’t giving Linda my full attention, and she could tell.
“I guess you’ve got a lot on your mind, huh?” she said when I apologized for asking her to repeat something I hadn’t heard. “Have you figured out anything more?”
“Not really. I’m still not sure... of much of anything.”
“Well, let’s start simple. Do you want to take jekyllase again?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to overdose on it and stay Jennifer full-time?”
“No.”
“See, there’s two things you’re sure of. Start there and work outward. Hmm... if it were no longer possible to get any jekyllase, would you want to dress up as a girl sometimes?”
“...I don’t know. Probably not... Maybe?” I thought about it and she didn’t press me, taking a few sips of her cocoa and glancing out the window. “Yeah... I could see that. If I couldn’t completely change into Jennifer, I think I’d miss her enough that I’d... try un-suppressing whatever parts of me she represents in other ways. Dressing up as a girl, putting on makeup...” It didn’t sound as foreign and weird as it had when I’d first considered it, but it still sounded like a poor second best to actually being Jennifer. “Or maybe not that, but doing other things that I used to think were too girly to be worth considering. Reading romance novels or something, I don’t know.”
“You won’t know if you enjoy them unless you try, I guess. I’m not too fond of most of them myself, they’re really clichéd, but there are a few good ones. What about your long-term plans? The first time we talked about it, you weren’t sure what you wanted to do after college. Have you figured out any more about it?”
“Not really... I’ve thought about several things, but nothing really grabs me so far. I need to make up my mind about my major soon, and I realize now I’ve been too busy obsessing over Jennifer to think about it much.”
“Maybe you could consider things you haven’t considered before... Maybe Jennifer is a hint that you might be good at certain professions and fields of study? Nursing, especially pediatric nursing, or elementary school teaching, or something?”
“Huh,” I said, stunned. “That’s a good idea. I should think about those. And let Jennifer think about them and let me know what she thinks.” If I were going to be a grade school teacher, I could do it without transferring to another school, but Newcomen College didn’t have a nursing program.
“Would you describe Jennifer as maternal? Has she run into any kids when you were out and about as her?”
I thought about the matinee showing of The Phantom Tollbooth we’d gone to. Cynthia had been a little annoyed by the kids in the audience, but Jennifer was amused by them, and thought they were cute. I didn’t think she was in a hurry to settle down and have kids (and Cynthia obviously couldn’t give them to her)... even if I were willing to become her full time so she could have a baby. Nor was I, but I did want to have kids someday, and maybe more than the average 2.58, assuming my wife (just possibly Linda?) was okay with having that many.
“A few, yeah. She likes kids, although she hasn’t had a chance to really interact with them one on one yet.”
“And you?”
“Yeah... I could sort of see myself as a grade school teacher. Maybe even a pediatric nurse, although that’s harder to imagine somehow. Thanks a lot, you’ve really been a help. — That reminds me, what do you want to be when you grow up?”
She laughed and told me more about her plans to go to law school after she got her bachelor’s degree, and her vaguer ambitions for a judgeship or D.A. position someday.
At supper, I saw Emily sitting with Darrell. I was going to go over and see if it was all right for me to sit with them, but I saw Linda waving at me, and I decided I’d better sit with her instead. After I bused my tray, I looked around for Emily, and didn’t see her.
Sunday at breakfast, I finally managed to talk to Emily. She wasn’t with Darrell; maybe he was sleeping late, like Randall.
“How are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m not gonna take jekyllase again,” she said without preamble, not meeting my eyes for more than a moment. “I shouldn’t... it’s dangerous. Cynthia is dangerous.”
“Is Alice still mad at you?”
“Yeah. Yesterday morning she made me promise never to take jekyllase again.”
“Or what? She’s not going to turn you in; she’s got enough of a drug habit that she can’t stand the scrutiny it would bring on her.”
“...I don’t know... she was really persuasive.”
That was it, then. Emily took promises seriously.
“And... maybe we shouldn’t be talking like this when Darrell’s not around. I think he’s jealous. Even though I told him we only talk about Jennifer and Cynthia and when it’s okay for them to get together... but you know, he had really good reason to be jealous. And we don’t really have anything to talk about now that I’m not using jekyllase anymore.”
“We could talk about what Cynthia means and whether you need to be her again to figure that out,” I said. “But... if you’re serious about not taking it again, I don’t want to pressure you into it. Bye.”
I went and sat by myself for the rest of breakfast.
I didn’t take jekyllase again for several weeks. I wasn’t sure how much fun it would be to be Jennifer if she was missing Cynthia even more than I was. I did some research on what it would take to major in early childhood education; about one semester extra before graduation, apparently. Nursing would take at least a year longer, and a transfer to another school.
Over the next few weeks, I went to a party at an off-campus house that some friends of Darrell were renting, and on several dates with Linda in addition to that party. We had sex for the first time one weekend when Randall went home to visit family. I hung out with Randall and Darrell, sometimes when Emily was with him, and volunteered a couple of times at the local library to read stories to children. I was nervous at first; I hadn’t had much to do with kids that age since my cousins were little, but I enjoyed it a lot and it made me think more seriously about a career involving children.
Or becoming Jennifer full-time and having babies? I didn’t think about that very seriously, but it did cross my mind.
In early February, when the Apollo 14 astronauts were on the moon, Linda and I were with a small crowd in the lobby of the student union watching Alan Shepard whack a couple of golf balls across the surface of the moon. It wasn’t like the numbers of people who had watched Apollo 11 land a couple of years earlier, but I’m guessing there were more watchers among college students than older adults; there were probably more than a dozen people in the student union lobby in front of the big TV, and more in the common rooms of various dorms around campus. Linda snuggled up next to me on the couch, but as we watched, I got more and more distracted.
When I was a kid watching the Mercury astronauts on TV, I’d wanted to be an astronaut. But that was a transient ambition, as Mark Twain says, and unlike him, I didn’t have a permanent ambition to be a steamboatman, or anything else. I still didn’t have any clear idea what I wanted to do with my life, not even what sex I wanted to spend it as, and I was almost halfway through college.
I made some phone calls over the next few days, and the following Saturday, I drove almost an hour to the nearest town with a hospital to do some volunteer work and talk with a couple of nurses about what their job entailed. I went by the volunteer office first, and after filling out a short form, they had me accompany an older woman while she made the rounds of a ward letting patients pick books and magazines from a library cart. She had something cheerful to say to everyone, and I could see some of them visibly cheer up while we were with them. After that minimal training, she sent me back to the volunteer office and I was sent out again with another cart to make the rounds of another ward, and another after that, before my appointment with a couple of nurses who were going off-duty at three.
Hospitals were among the first places to restrict smoking; even in 1971, this particular hospital didn’t allow smoking in patient rooms or wards by anyone except the patients themselves. It would be decades before they banned smoking entirely, but less than ten years before they restricted it to just a couple of areas. So I’d have to go longer between cigarettes than I was used to, and that reminded me of how wonderful Jennifer’s lungs felt and my last several unsuccessful attempts to quit smoking. I resolved to try again, and didn’t have another cigarette for the rest of that day.
One of the wards I visited was a children’s ward. I had my recent experience of reading to children at the library behind me, and was reasonably confident in my ability to talk with them. Some had their mothers or other visitors sitting with them. Some were up and out of bed, running around the ward playing with each other. Most were more or less bedridden, though, or wheelchair-bound. I chatted with most of the ones who were awake, and their mothers if they were present. I noticed some of the mothers were a little cautious about me at first, and I wondered if I’d have had a warmer reception if I’d shown up as Jennifer.
I paid attention to what the nurses were doing as I happened to run across them in my rounds, but especially in the pediatric ward.
I took the library cart back to the volunteer office a little before my appointment with the nurses. There was a lady in the office doing some paperwork.
“Hey,” I said, “my sister said she’d like to volunteer too, some other time. She’s got a test to study for, so she couldn’t come today. Can I pick up one of those forms so she can fill it out before she comes?”
“Sure,” she said, and gave me a form.
From there I went to the conference room on the ground floor where I’d been told to meet the nurses. One of them, a woman about fifteen years older than me, was already waiting, and the other, a guy a few years older than that, arrived a couple of minutes later.
“So you’re thinking about going into nursing?” the woman, who introduced herself as Mary, asked.
“Yeah. I still don’t really know what I want to do with my life, but I did some volunteering for the library recently — story hour for the kids — and I think I might want to do something with kids. Pediatric nursing or teaching grade school, probably.”
“Or children’s librarian, maybe, but I don’t think there are as many openings for that,” she said. She told me a little about what her job was like, and when the other guy (David) arrived and introduced himself, they kept on with it, and I asked some questions.
It sounded like a difficult but rewarding job. You were on your feet and on the go most of the day, and some of the stuff you had to do was pretty unpleasant — changing babies' diapers was the least of it. The worst part was watching patients die, kids you’d come to care for after taking care of them for days or weeks — or years if they came in to the hospital again and again with worsening symptoms of the same chronic illness. But there was a lot to like about it, too; watching the kids get well, more often than not, and watching how resiliently they bounced back from diseases that would affect the average adult much worse, mentally if not physically. “I used to work with adults, and still do sometimes when they need me to fill in over on one of the other wards,” David said, “and they complain so much more even when they’re not as sick as the kids. Not all of them, of course, you get whiny kids, especially the little ones that don’t understand anything but how much pain they’re in, and stoic or cheerful adults, but on average the adults complain more and are less grateful for your care.”
I still wasn’t sure if I wanted to go into nursing, but if I did, I wanted to be in pediatrics. I thanked them and drove back to Newcomen, meeting up with Linda for supper at the dining hall and telling her about my day.
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