The Girl in a Lab Coat
by Jeffrey Greene
Teresa Williams — not her real name — arrived in Gainesville in the late summer of 1989, a beginning freshman like thousands of others at the University of Florida. The small Georgia town where she grew up and her course of study matter less than what happened to her or, rather, what was inside of her, what led her to do what she did. I’m told her father was a physician, and it was implicitly understood that she, too, would study medicine.
We can assume that she successfully navigated the painful initiation process of student registration and getting established in a new town: the sweaty, endless lines at every counter, where she obtained parking privileges, a bank account, textbooks, campus ID. She was probably excited, happy, and a little frightened by the torrent of new faces, the ocean of young energy in which she was now swimming with all her strength.
Then classes began, with their suddenly massive load of reading assignments and papers, and with the partial information available to me, I can only speculate when the normal feeling of being swamped by the work that most students feel before learning how to budget their time and acquire the necessary discipline turned, in Ms. Williams’s case, into panic.
Almost from the beginning, she struggled with the math and science requirements of pre-med, and having been the salutatorian in her small high school, it was a heavy blow to find herself unequal to the college curriculum. But instead of quickly admitting her inaptitude for medicine and changing her major, as some would have, Teresa bore on, falling farther and farther behind, her grades abysmal in spite of the extra hours she was spending with tutors.
She came to dread the phone calls from her parents, especially her father and, finding herself either unable to disappoint him or fearing his scorn, she began telling him what he wanted to hear. This previously unsuspected talent for lying served her well in the months that followed.
Her proud parents could have no idea that while she was giving them glowing reports of her progress in school and her blossoming social life, she had already stopped attending classes and had become a virtual recluse in her dorm room, having little or no contact with her roommate, who was spending most her time off-campus with a boyfriend.
To fill her now-empty days, Teresa begun taking long, meandering walks around the campus and, by chance, one afternoon she entered the University Health Center, a huge complex of red-brick buildings that houses over seven thousand employees and patients. The wide, bustling hallways and crowded waiting rooms, the noise and jostle around her, instead of augmenting her isolation, seemed to offer a kind of shelter from the turmoil of her thoughts.
What caught her eye immediately was the number of people wearing white lab coats, and it soon became apparent to her that regardless of who wore one, whether it was a doctor, a technician, or a nurse practitioner, the coat seemed like a badge of identity, bestowing a sense of unquestioned belongingness to this closed society in which she had found herself. In her street clothes, she could have passed for either an outpatient, a visitor to an inpatient, or a job applicant, but she must have known or sensed even then that all of these non-medical identities were at best conditional and temporary.
Did she have any idea what she was about to do, or was this first foray to the hospital more of an instinctive groping after some solution to her dilemma? For an hour or two, she explored this new world and then, driven by hunger or boredom, she went back to her dormitory room. She returned the next day, and the day after that.
The antiseptic smell in the air, the always-lighted hallways, the beak-nosed profile of dying faces and the hunted-rabbit expressions of their visitors, instead of repelling her, instead of driving her back to the sunlit afternoons of her own healthy youth, seemed to exert a strange attraction.
So drawn was she to this world that allowed her to disappear into it on a daily basis, that she kept coming back and staying for longer periods each visit. One afternoon, during her aimless wanderings on this or that floor, she saw a lab coat lying across a chair, or perhaps crumpled on top of a briefly abandoned laundry bin. She looked around, and finding herself alone, snatched it up and hurriedly slipped it on. By chance, it fit her.
Did she read into this coincidence a sense of rightness or destiny, or was she too preoccupied by her rapidly beating heart and fear of discovery to ponder the larger meaning of this petty theft? It was probably an impulse, but whatever the reason, the simple act of donning someone else’s lab coat seems to have been a crucial moment for her.
Now, as she walked the anonymous hallways, recoiling from every stare that seemed suspicious, she couldn’t help noticing the difference this ordinary garment made in the way she was perceived. To those in the intricate caste system of hospitals who also wear white coats but are not doctors — the lab, x-ray, and EKG techs, respiratory therapists, dental hygienists — she had become a “colleague,” to be accepted and ignored in the same glance.
Those employees on the lower rungs of the hierarchy: housekeeping, nurse’s aides, food servers and dishwashers, while not subservient or even particularly interested, noticed her in a way that her “peers” did not. The passing glances of doctors alarmed her at first, until she realized that their expressions were not so remote and impersonal as they had seemed when she was a mere civilian. Now they were seeing her. She was part of their world now, one more cog in the machinery.
But of all the changes the coat had made in her position, none was more dramatic or more insidious than the different way the patients looked at her. Depending on their circumstances or degree of sophistication, she saw hope, awe, respect, even mistrust in their eyes, but the important thing was that none of them seemed to view her with the pity or contempt that until very recently she had seen — or imagined she had seen — on the faces of her fellow students.
* * *
The reasons for her academic collapse are unclear and may have had little to do with her intelligence, but that she was devastated by it is unquestionable. This ignominious failure on the proving ground of a state university and the extended period in which she had kept the truth from her parents must have been a crushing weight on her mind.
There are several cases on file of murder on college campuses, when the shattered hopes of some overly serious graduate student have been avenged by the violent death of the professor held responsible for his failure. This is a kind of suicide, whether or not the murderer finally turns the gun on himself. Although Teresa’s need to escape what she perceived as the merciless judgment of her instructors, peers, and most of all, her family, may have been no less urgent, she chose a more benign and secret form of obliteration: she became a ghost.
In order to become a ghost while still breathing, certain rights of the living must be forfeited: a name, a network of friends and loved ones, and virtually all connections to those habitual, daily activities that keep most of us anchored in the majority consensus we call reality. For all I know, Teresa may have been moving toward ghost-hood long before she put on the coat, but it wasn’t until she began her masquerade that she truly crossed over. She had made no friends with whom she could confide and her loved ones were far away; so, after one last visit to her dorm room to collect some money and a change or two of clothing, she literally moved into the hospital.
Whether she hid her spare clothes or never changed the clothes she had on, I have no information, but the time it took for someone to realize she didn’t belong there argues that she found ways to keep herself clean and well-groomed, at least in the beginning.
By day she wandered through the floors and clinics, keeping to those areas where she was least likely to be challenged, ate dinner in the cafeteria and out of vending machines the rest of the time and, at night, slept on waiting room chairs, changing her location each night and occasionally taking off the lab coat and using it as a pillow when it seemed a more suitable disguise to pose as the distraught relative of a patient.
Somehow, this went on for three months. That so much time had to pass before her presence in the hospital was noted is bizarre in itself and tends to support the theory that, however much she may have respected — or resented — the doctors for dwelling at the top of the hospital food chain, not to mention succeeding where she had failed, it was never her intention to impersonate one. An imposture of that magnitude would have been quickly exposed. No, the lab coat wasn’t worn to elevate her status in the eyes of others; quite the opposite. I think she wore it as a cloak of invisibility, to lose herself among strangers.
There can be no lasting pain without personal history and a memory to contain it, and unless Teresa was mentally ill — and there is no obvious evidence that she was — one suspects that her efforts to efface herself, to occlude her own past, were unsuccessful. It seems doubtful that her sleep was very sound during those lost three months. No matter how well she had learned to play the part of some generic technician, and to say the right things when challenged, there must have remained a constant awareness of how tenuous a fiction was this character that her need for escape had brought into being. It would have gnawed at her constantly, the sense that at bottom it was all an absurdly drawn-out dance of procrastination, mere avoidance of the inevitable necessity of admitting her failure to her family.
On the other hand, maybe she disappeared completely into her role of Girl in a Lab Coat, in effect became someone else, with no past and no existence outside the hospital. In either case I have to believe that, whatever else Teresa gleaned from her strange sabbatical, she must have learned — painfully and for all time — that escape is impossible, at least for the living.
* * *
In March of the following year, a security guard on the night shift at the health center found a young woman sleeping across some chairs in the waiting room of the outpatient clinic. He noticed that she was unkempt and wearing a soiled lab coat. When asked what business she had in the hospital, she stated that she worked on the night shift in the Hematology lab and was taking a nap on her lunch hour, but when she was unable to produce an identification badge, he became suspicious. At first she gave her name as Christina Bowman, claimed to have left her ID at home, and asked to be allowed to return to work before her boss noted her absence. When the guard offered to call her supervisor, she admitted that her real name was Teresa Williams. Listless, apathetic, and nearly inaudible at times, she told him her story.
I don’t know what happened to her after she took off the lab coat and returned home. But I wonder if, in this case, our almost complete ignorance of her personal life is not an advantage. Doesn’t this single act tell us more about her than a volume of biographical data, because it came from a place behind and beneath her socialized self or her family circumstances? The desire to escape the prison house of self is one of the primal human impulses, and it is only in this failed attempt to break out of her own intolerable confinement that Teresa Williams becomes, for us, extraordinary.
Copyright © 2023 by Jeffrey Greene
