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,