distracted by some boy. They were all desperate for boys. The one male nurse in their year had seven piercings on his face, including a big plug in his ear. He was nice, but no one they would be interested in. They used to call him Leo the Male Nurse, right to his face.
Even if Martha found her way into a conversation at these parties, she never really had fun. There were some pleasant moments, but those were short-lived, and all that was left was a group of horny college kids waiting to get drunk enough that they could start making out with each other. It was like one big mono pool. She would wait until all the other girls were occupied, then she’d find one of them and tell her that she was leaving. She tried to find someone who was really immersed in a conversation with a boy, so that there would be no protests, so that no one would try to convince her to stay.
On the street, Martha would breathe with relief. She always walked home, even if it was the middle of winter. She didn’t mind. She liked the way the air rushed into her nose and froze her nostrils. It made her look forward to getting back to her single room and making hot chocolate in the microwave. She liked the feeling of thawing out in her cozy room, finding an old eighties movie to watch while snuggled under her covers, knowing that tomorrow she’d wake up fresh and ready to do her work, while the rest of the girls would be groggy and hungover.
Those were great mornings, when her nursing friends groaned with their heads in their hands. “Why did we do this?” they’d say. Martha would tsk at them, not meanly, just in a good-natured way. She’d smile sympathetically and indulge their requests for Gatorade and water. Martha was happy during those study sessions, pleased that she was learning more than the other girls, because her body wasn’t wrecked from the night before. She always felt like she was a few steps ahead, so she was gracious enough to be nice to these girls, to agree to take a break so they could eat greasy food, shoveling french fries into their mouths as they said, “Why didn’t we leave when you did, Martha? Why did you let us stay?”
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