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How the Nurse Feels

“As the nurse, I have eighty-eight lines, appear in eleven of twenty-four scenes, and, unfortunately, I have no costume changes. From what I know, most of Shakespeare’s women don’t”(page 2, line 12) is a quote from the teenager Tess, the main character in Greg Changnon’s short story How the Nurse Feels from 1998. Everyone can relate to the grief of Romeo and Juliet, but the nurse does not play a significant part in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, which makes it hard for Tess to imagine how the nurse feels and therefore how to play her role. In this short story, however, Changnon uses symbolism to throw light on feelings from characters we might miss out on when we normally read or watch the world famous tragedy.

How the nurse feels is about the high-school student, Tess, who is playing the role of the nurse in the school production of Romeo and Juliet. In the very middle of her struggle finding out how to act her part, there is another drama taking place outside. Bad weather conditions have postponed the play and cancelled school, and suddenly Tiger De Soto, a minor performer in the play, has disappeared.

Tess seems like a typical high school student, living a life with the relatable struggles of a teenager; parents with expectations, boring environment and confusing romantic feelings. She seems attracted to the boy Tiger, whom she barely knows and when she finds out that he has disappeared, she jumps to the conclusion that “He got the hell out of here”(page 3, line 85), meaning that he ran away to live the desirable big city life. Tess herself dreams of going to New York, and is tired of giving “feedback on my father’s sermons”(page 4, line 103) and living in a pink satin bedroom designed by her mother, who also expects her to overtake the fabric shop after college.

In her struggle trying to find out how to play the nurse, she figures out that the nurse must feel a close connection to Juliet as she reminds her of her departed daughter. When Mrs. De Soto comes to talk to the drama class, she stands in the exact same spot as Tess does playing the nurse, and she connects the way Tiger’s mother feels with the way the nurse must feel, and Mrs. De Soto becomes a symbol of the nurse. The way she holds her hands by her belly “as if she is trying to keep all that she is afraid of pushed down to the end of her limbs”(page 6, line 186), is exactly how Tess imagines the nurse to feel when Juliet was a little baby and cried all the time. Because the nurse had already lost her own daughter, she was afraid that something bad was going to happen to Juliet as well. She concludes that the nurse is unhappy, suffering from loss and void.

Not only does Tess connect the nurse and Tiger’s mother’s feelings with each other, but also her own with Tiger’s feelings. After one brief conversation, and what else she has heard about him, she feels that they have a lot in common: “There’s four miles of hard-packed snow between us but I’ve never felt so close”(page 3, line 53). In this case the snow works as a symbol for death, since it is the last conversation she has with him before he falls in the window well. After he disappears, she also feels connected to him because she thinks he has run away to live the life she dreams about. When she in the end finds out that he hadn’t run away, but had fallen in a window well in his garden, she suddenly feels like the nurse. She feels the same loss as the nurse and his mother had felt, not because someone died, but because the person she felt connected to wasn’t who she thought he was.

Another symbol in the short story is Tiger. His name symbolises his personality as the bad boy, who sells marijuana at school, but also he becomes Tess’ symbol of hope. When she thinks he has run away to chase his dreams, she feels hope and is not able to play the nurse. When she finds out that in fact something more mundane had happened to him, her view on him dies, and so does her hope for a better future than overtaking her mother’s fabric shop.

The school play that Tess and Tiger are performing in is a story that we all know: the story about Romeo and Juliet, and how they are in deep love, but can’t have each other. But as Tess observes on page 6, line 18; “We are all thinking about destroyed parents instead of star-crossed lovers”, which is seemingly Changnon’s message in the short story. Every interpretation of Romeo and Juliet focuses on the tragic story of the two main characters. What about the nurse? Nobody feels sorry for her, when she in fact is dealing with severe sorrow. As the title also indicates, this short story wants to illuminate ‘how the nurse feels’, because her story actually is as tragic as Juliet’s, if not worse.