In the late afternoon, Tessa showed up in Emily’s office, the last patient of the day, and the first time she’d made an appointment with Emily since she came back to the city.
“How’s it going?” Emily asked her, after the door was closed, after Tessa sat in her usual spot on the couch, leaning against the left armrest. Emily tried to get comfortable in her chair, discreetly massaging her back as Tessa spoke.
“Not the best,” Tessa said. “I’ll be honest. Not the best.”
“What do you mean by that?” Emily asked, trying to focus all her attention on her patient, but it was difficult.
Tessa sighed. “Chris is always working—he wants to make a good impression on his new bosses, and I totally get it. But he doesn’t come home until late and I barely get to see him. Zoe hardly ever sees him at all except for on weekends, when he wants to go out for brunch and for drinks with his friends. And I have so much reading to do for class, plus papers, and exams to study for, that I feel like I have to choose between school and them all the time.”
Emily nodded sympathetically while her old thoughts on Chris resurfaced: totally self-absorbed. But she couldn’t change Chris. Tessa couldn’t, either. So they had to figure out what Tessa could do to change her situation, change her response. “Have you thought about taking fewer courses this semester? I know you have a few more weeks to drop without it being recorded on your transcript.”
Tessa wiped her eyes. “I have. But I want to get through this as quickly as I can. I want to be a lawyer, and there’s so much more ahead of me.”
“I hear you,” Emily said, “but what would it mean if you took a little more time?”
“It’s more money I’d have to borrow, for one,” Tessa said. “And I just . . . I want to be like Ruth Bader Ginsburg.” Emily looked down to see if Tessa was wearing her RBG socks. She wasn’t. Her socks were plain white, which somehow made Emily feel sad, though she made sure not to show it. “She went to law school with a baby. And her husband had cancer. And she was still the top of her class. If she could do that, I should be able to do this. She probably didn’t have any trouble introducing solids to her baby, either. Zoe spits everything out.”
“A lot of babies do, at first,” Emily told her, wanting to say something reassuring. Her heart really went out to Tessa. She saw so much of herself in this young mom—or so much of who she might have been. She admired how Tessa went after things—boldly, bravely, not compromising her plans unless she absolutely had to—but that aspect of her personality, so different from Emily’s own, also worried her. If you don’t bend, sometimes you break. Not every woman can be Ruth Bader Ginsburg. And it’s better to figure that out when you’re young, before you disappoint yourself too deeply when the realization does hit. At least then you have other options, at least then you don’t feel stuck in a life that doesn’t quite feel like it’s yours—like Ari seemed to. Like Emily did sometimes, too.