Authors: Lynn Austin
“You can’t operate, you’re only the nurse.”
“I don’t want to be a nurse anymore. I want to be a doctor. I want to operate too.”
“You can’t be a doctor. You’re a girl. Girls are nurses, like Mommy. Boys are doctors, like Daddy.”
I whacked Bobby on the head with his doctor’s kit. The blow quickly wiped the smirk of superiority off Bobby’s face. When he ran crying to Mom, I collected all the patients and opened my own hospital in my bedroom. I promoted myself to chief surgeon. I didn’t want to be like Mom with her pearls and lipstick and high heels. I could never be as sweet and soft-spoken as she was.
Once at a backyard cookout with my parents’ friends, Mom was circulating through the crowd in pink pedal pushers and a peasant blouse, serving hors d’oeuvres while Daddy grilled everyone’s T-bone steaks to perfection on perfectly heated charcoal briquettes. Bobby and his friends had climbed up in his
“boys only” tree house to devise pranks against the girls. And I was supposed to be twirling my Hula-Hoop with those girls, but I had grown bored with swivelling my hips. I decided to hang around the adults, instead.
“What line of work are you in?” Daddy’s golf partner asked our next-door neighbor.
“I’m an attorney . . . And you?”
“Obstetrician.” Ritual handshakes and nods of respect followed this exchange of identities.
Daddy introduced a late arrival to the group by saying, “This is my friend John Moore. He’s my stockbroker.”
I wandered over to where the women lounged beneath a flowered patio umbrella. “This is our neighbor, Gloria Clark,” I heard Mom say. “Her husband is an attorney.”
“What does your husband do?” Gloria asked the other woman.
“He’s an architect. His firm designed the new Crawford building down-town.” Judging by the admiring
oohs
and
ahhs
, the woman might have selected every brick and support beam in the building herself, instead of merely ironing the architect’s shirts and cooking his hard-boiled eggs.
I was a tomboy, confronting snakes and spiders and starting fires as fearlessly as my brother, Bobby. Mom despaired of ever making a young lady out of me. “Don’t sit like that, Suzanne, it isn’t ladylike. Please use a hanky, Suzanne, not your sleeve. . . . Young ladies walk, Suzanne, they don’t gallop.”
My brother could sit, sneeze, or gallop any way he wanted to. When he crawled around under the pews after church one Sunday morning, Daddy said, “He’s all boy.” I tried it the following Sunday—ripping my crinoline and scuffing my patent-leather shoes in the process—and was declared a disgrace. Bobby never had to wear hats to church that looked like straw saucers with glued-on flowers, or suffer in hot white gloves that made his hands sweat. Daddy served on the board of elders—Mom served chicken a la king at potluck suppers. Daddy passed the collection plate and shook hands with people after church—Mom stood a few demure steps behind him, smiling and looking pretty.
The older I got, the more I rebelled against my Sunday schoolteachers for reinforcing this stereotype of submissive women. “Why did God give me talents and brains and curiosity if I wasn’t supposed to use any of them?” I asked the pastor once during catechism class. “Why can’t women pass the blasted collection plate too?” My behavior outraged Daddy. I quickly learned
that if I wanted his approval and affection, I had to be quiet and ladylike. Impossible.
My brother didn’t have to do anything to earn Daddy’s approval except brag about how he was going to be a doctor someday. At first I was determined to go into medicine too, just to prove that I was as smart as Bobby. But my straight
As
in biology and advanced algebra didn’t impress Daddy the way I had hoped they would.
He called Bobby and me into his den, one at a time, on report card day to discuss our grades. Bobby had already emerged from the dark-panelled room smiling. But Daddy was very quiet as he read over mine. I hopped from one foot to the other in front of his desk, reading all his diplomas and awards hanging on the walls and waiting for the words of praise that were sure to come.
“So do you think my grades are good enough to get me into a pre-med program?” I blurted when he finally looked up.
“Pre-med?” he repeated. He made the word sound shocking. “Is that what your guidance counselor at school recommended?”
“Of course not. My guidance counselor is a jerk!”
“Suzanne . . .”
“Well, he is. He told me I was ‘college material,’but he advised me to choose a profession that would work well with a family, such as teaching or nursing.” I did a nasty impression of the counselors prissy voice.
“He has a point.”
“No! The last thing in the world I want is a June Cleaver life like Mom’s. She’s nothing more than your glorified maidservant!”
Daddy held up a warning finger. “You be careful how you talk about your mother. Don’t you dare be disrespectful.”
“I respect her as a person, I just don’t want her life.”
“What do you want, then?”
“I’m just as smart as Bobby. I could go to medical school too.”
Daddy frowned and leaned back in his leather chair, toying with the stethoscope on his desk. “There is always a handful of intelligent girls who try medical school,” he said, “but it’s a very difficult field for women to break into. They’re not readily accepted. And in the end, it seems like a waste of time and money because they’ll eventually give up medicine to get married and have children anyway.”
There were those dreaded words again—
married
and
children
. “How come every time my future is discussed, those two words always surface? Why
is my future so narrowly defined when the whole world is open to Bobby?”
Daddy shook his head. “I never know what to say to you, Suzanne. I don’t understand you at all.”
Say you are proud of me, I thought. Say I’m just as smart’ just as important to you as Bobby. But I said nothing to my father
.
Throughout high school, I wavered between trying to prove I was as good as my brother by going into medicine, and doing what I loved the most, which was editing the school newspaper and expressing my opinions in scathing editorials. I loved books, loved manipulating words and ideas, loved telling stories much more than I liked dissecting worms and bisecting angles. I decided I would be a career woman on my own terms; I would win a Pulitzer prize in journalism, then advance to editor in chief of
The New Yorker
magazine, and eventually retire as CEO of a publishing empire. I would
not
be a housewife.
Bobby enrolled in the pre-med program at the Ivy League college where Daddy had done his undergraduate work. Tired of living in my brother’s shadow, I chose a college that was renowned for its literature department. The pastor of the church I attended near campus was the first minister I’d ever met who didn’t seem to consider women an inferior species under man’s dominion.
“God has a unique plan for your life, Suzanne,” he told me. “He expects you to use the gifts He has given you, not wrap them up in society’s expectations.” I was on good speaking terms with the pastor’s God.
Being away from home suited me. By my junior year I had joined the best sorority, found a steady boyfriend, and earned the kind of outstanding grades that put me on the dean’s list. I steered clear of the campus radicals and avoided all the turmoil of the ‘60s, like pot parties and love-ins and campus take-overs. I preferred to attend classes rather than protest the Vietnam War. My life hummed along nicely. Daddy approved.
Then, the first semester of my junior year, I took Introduction to Art.
The art building seemed like a foreign country to me, a messy, disorganized, third-world country with bizarre people in exotic costumes. The halls smelled like turpentine and plaster dust and wet clay. I hadn’t wanted to take art, but my schedule gave me few choices, so I dragged myself to class three times a week, not daring to miss a lecture and ruin my grade point average. As if studying art history wasn’t challenging enough, the professor made us
learn the fundamentals of drawing too. Once a week, he would set up a bowl of fruit or a vase of flowers and we’d have to practice sketching it so we could learn about perspective and proportion and shading.
One day he brought in a live model to pose for us—a guy I’d seen around campus, hanging out with the “peaceniks.” The hippie sat sprawled on a wooden chair wearing only his bell-bottoms and sandals, and I saw right away why the teacher had chosen him to pose. His shoulders and torso were as beautifully muscled as the Italian statues we’d studied.
I pulled out my sketch pad and began to draw, my eyes traveling from the paper to the model and down again. While I sketched, I analyzed him as if he were a biology specimen—strong biceps, solid pectorals, tight abdominals. The next time I glanced up, the hippie was staring back at me. His simmering gaze totally unnerved me. I didn’t want to admit it, but I found him extraordinarily attractive. I usually preferred the clean-cut fraternity-type like my steady boyfriend, Bradley Wallace. This guy wore his dark hair tied in a po-nytail, and the bottom half of his face was obscured by a thick brown beard and mustache. A peace necklace on a leather thong hung around his neck, dangling against his bare chest. Every time I glanced up to sketch him he was looking straight at me, staring intently with a dangerous Jimmy Dean look in his eyes. I decided to concentrate on his foot.
When the professor came around to comment on my efforts he said, “You’ll have to work a little faster, Miss Bradford, if you hope to sketch more than his big toe before the semester ends.” I was so relieved when the bell rang that I slammed my sketch book shut and raced out.
As I hurried across the campus toward my dormitory, the guy I’d just been sketching suddenly appeared beside me. He had shrugged into his shirt but hadn’t bothered to button it. “What’s your hurry,
Irish
?” he said.
“Are you talking to me?”
He spread his arms to encompass the empty sidewalk and pivoted in a slow, hip-swaying turn. “Do you see anyone else? A leprechaun, perhaps?”
“Why were you staring at me like that in art class?”
He gave a lazy, lopsided smile. “It seemed only fair. You were staring at me.”
“I was drawing you! But you were very rude, in case you don’t know.”
“Wow! You’ve got an Irish temper too! Far out!”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I turned to leave, but he stepped smoothly in front of me.
“Have coffee with me.” He smiled broadly this time, and I thought my
heart would go into cardiac arrest. He slowly fastened the buttons on his shirt while his magnetic blue eyes held mine. I’d never had such a heart-stopping reaction before. I was both fascinated and terrified.
“No, thank you,” I managed to say.
“Why not?”
“Well, in the first place, I don’t even know you.”
“Jeff Pulaski. Art major. Born and raised in Pittsburgh.” He extended his hand.
I shook it briefly, then said, “And in the second place, I’m pinned.”
He laughed uproariously.
“I’m glad you find that amusing, Mr. Pulaski.”
“I do! Ever see those butterflies in the museums, all stretched out on a piece of velvet with pins holding down their wings? Here’s this beautiful creature, meant to fly, but it’s just lying there, trapped, held down by pins. That’s what I think of whenever some chick says, ‘I’m pinned.’” He fingered my boyfriend’s fraternity pin, fastened just above my breast, and laughed again. “He’s got you all stretched out under glass like his prize specimen, and no one else can touch you.”
“How dare you!” I said, slapping his hand away. “I’m nobody’s possession!”
“Then prove it by having a cup of coffee with me.” There was that smile again.
I didn’t have to prove anything to him, but something compelled me to accept his challenge. Part of it was stubbornness, part was curiosity, but mostly it was the sheer excitement of being with such a dangerous person. How much longer could my heart continue its wild stampede before they had to rush me to the emergency room?
The campus coffee shop pulsed with life, the crowded room ringing with the noisy bustle of students trying to be heard above The Rolling Stones. I couldn’t tell if the dull, throbbing sound was my heart or the bass rhythm. I laid claim to a table and two chairs while Jeff ordered our coffee at the counter. I watched him saunter smoothly through the crowd without spilling a drop.
“Here you go, Irish.” He set down the cups and lolled in the chair opposite mine, his legs outstretched.
“Why do you keep calling me that?”
“An artist is trained to. pay attention to details. I could tell right away by your dark hair and fair skin and that freckled nose of yours that your ancestors are Irish.” He traced his finger down the bridge of my nose.
“You couldn’t be more wrong,” I said, pushing his hand away. “I’m one hundred percent German on my mother’s side, and Daddy is pure WASP—Bradford and Biddle.”
“Sounds like a law firm,” he said with a grin. “‘Bradford & Biddle, Attorneys at Law.’”
“Not even close,” I said, laughing. “Daddy is a pediatrician, and he’s definitely not Irish. His ancestors date back to before the Revolutionary War. I could join the DAR if I were so inclined—which I’m not.”
He shook his head. “Someone must have switched babies at birth. You’re pure Irish.”
“Well, don’t tell that to Daddy, or he’ll throw me into the river like a litter of kittens. He thinks the Irish aren’t quite human. Trust me, there’s no Irish blood in these veins. What nationality are you?”
Jeff sat up straight. “Pure Polack and proud of it. We’re one generation off the sausage boat. You ought to see me do the polka.” He lifted his coffee cup in a mocking toast as if it were a beer stein, then swallowed a gulp. “My dad was a steelworker until he injured his back-now he’s a laid-off steelworker collecting disability pay.” He took another swallow and set the cup down. “Hey, got a pen I could borrow?”
I dug around in my purse and produced a pen. He proceeded to sketch a picture of me on his paper place mat. I sipped my coffee and watched him draw, fascinated. He was very good. In a few simple strokes he had my likeness.