Susan put her feet onto the floor and sat on the edge of the bed. The floor was cold and uninviting. Her hair descended from her head haphazardly, leaving only a two-to-three-inch gap through which to regard her room. It wasn’t much of a room, about twelve by fourteen feet, with two multipaned windows at the end. The windows gave out onto another brick building and a parking lot so that Susan rarely looked out. The paint was reasonably fresh because she had painted the room herself about two years previously. The color was a pleasing pastel yellow which accented perfectly the Marimekko Printex fabric she had used to make the curtains. Their colors were several shades of electric green, separated by dark blue. On the walls hung a variety of colorful posters, framed with stainless steel, advertising past cultural events.
The furniture was medical school issue. There was an old-fashioned single bed, which was too soft, and difficult for entertaining. There was a worn, overstuffed easy chair, which Susan never used save for depositing dirty laundry. Susan liked to read on the bed and study at the desk so that the easy chair really wasn’t “critical,” in her words. The desk was oak and ordinary except for the pattern of initials and scratches carved in the top. In its right corner, Susan had even found a few obscene words associated with the word biochem. A physical diagnosis book was open on the desk. During the last three days she had totally reread it, but the text had failed to buoy her sagging confidence.
“Shit,” she said out loud, with little inflection. The remark was directed at no one and at nothing. It was a basal response as she comprehended that February 23 had indeed arrived. Susan liked to swear and she did it a lot, but mostly to herself. Since such language contrasted sharply with her wholesome image, the effect was truly remarkable. She had found it a useful and entertaining tool.
Having pulled herself from the warmth of her covers with such dispatch, Susan realized that she had an extra fifteen minutes to spare. That was the usual duration of her ritual of repeatedly turning off her radio alarm before actually making it into the bathroom. Her ambivalence toward starting this day made her squander the time by just sitting and staring ahead, wishing that she had gone to law school or graduate school in literature … anything besides medical school.
The coldness of the bare waxed floor worked its way into Susan’s feet. As she sat there, her circulatory system dissipated her body heat into the cold room, making her nipples rise up from the summits of her shapely breasts. Goose pimples appeared from nowhere along the insides of her naked thighs. She wore only a thin worn-out flannel nightgown she had gotten for Christmas when she was in the fifth grade. She still wore it to bed almost every night, at least when she was sleeping alone. Somehow she loved that nightgown. Amid the furious pace of change in her life, it seemed to afford a sanctuary of consistency. Besides, it had always been her father’s favorite.
Susan had enjoyed pleasing her father from a very early age. Her first remembrance of him was his smell: a mixture of the outdoors and deodorant soap covering a distinctive odor she later realized was male. He had always been good to her, and she knew that she was his favorite. That secret she never shared with anyone, especially not with her two younger brothers. It had always been a source of confidence for her as she faced the usual hurdles of childhood and adolescence.
Susan’s father was a strong-willed individual, a dominant but generous and gentle man who ran his family and his insurance business like an enlightened despot. A charming man whose brood acknowledged him as the last word on any subject. It wasn’t that Susan’s mother was a weak-willed individual. It was just that she had met more than her match in the man she married. For much of her life Susan accepted this situation as the invariable norm. Eventually, however, it began to cause her some inner confusion. Susan was very much like her father, and her father encouraged her development in that direction. Then Susan began to realize she could not be like her father and expect one day to have a home of her own like the one in which she was reared. For a time she wanted desperately to be like her mother, and consciously tried. But it was to no avail. Her personality showed more and more her father’s traits, and in high school she was literally forced into a leadership role. Susan was voted president of her graduating class at a time in her life when she thought that she would have preferred to be more in the background.