I stand here waiting. To disappear or sing.
—Francesca Lia Block
Sucissive: spare hours, or time
I sit in the waiting room, though some would call it a gate area, in the Atlanta airport. I’m flying to Rochester, Minnesota, where my mother just died from lung cancer. I will meet my sister there to attend to the cremation. All the seats are taken. Suitcases, strollers, and parcels clog the aisles. I wish I could sit far away from crying babies, screeching toddlers. A gang of young men laugh boisterously, drunkenly.
Restless, I glance at the flight status board. Will the plane leave on time? Will I miss my connection in Minneapolis?
April sun radiates off the massive windows. Planes rush down the runway for takeoff. Others, after landing, glide up to gates.
The area seethes and buzzes. I feel suffocated, cramped.
I hold an unopened book in my lap. I can’t read because it’s noisy; I can’t read because I check the flight status board every thirty seconds. I can’t read because, although my mother wasn’t a good mother, she was, still, my mother. I must comprehend the fullness of the loss.
Daily, thousands of passengers congregate in airport waiting areas: people on vacation, people abandoning or rekindling love, people fleeing to or from emergencies. Whole lives change in these anonymous spaces. Yet everyone seems distracted, oblivious to their surroundings, forgetting the real reason for their trips. How can they absorb the momentous events taking place?
Waiting rooms should provide decorum. To spend time in one is an activity in and of itself. It requires concentration in order to successfully depart, to leave here and to reach what lies beyond.
I realize, belatedly, it’s noisier than usual because the NCAA basketball “Sweet Sixteen” playoffs are being held in Minneapolis. How can this happen at the same time as my mother’s death? But that’s the nature of random encounters with strangers in waiting rooms. We wash ashore in one particular place, one particular time, all heading to the same ultimate destination although for disparate reasons.
By the time the gate agent announces it’s time to board, we’re running more than a half-hour late. Once all the drunk basketball fans and parents with toddlers settle into seats, we’re almost an hour behind schedule. I reach the gate for my connecting flight to Rochester just as the attendant closes the door to the Jetway.
“Please, can you let me on?” I ask. “My mother died.”
She expresses condolences but says she’s not allowed to open the door. The plane is ready to push back from the gate.
I feel stranded. I cry as if I have to make this connection even though my mother is already dead. Upon arrival in Rochester, I will only spend the night in her now-deserted apartment.
But I want to depart this waystation immediately. I need to escape.
My sister and I sit in cushiony wingback chairs in the waiting room of the funeral parlor. On the end table is a cut-glass bowl of candy. My sister has been crunching one after another, while I’ve cradled the same lemon drop on my tongue for close to fifteen minutes. It’s almost dissolved. Still, my mouth feels dry, my eyes drier. Who can mourn in a room that smells of formaldehyde or something like it—maybe mothballs? Maybe the desiccated scent of perfume that women wore in the 1940s.
I fold and unfold my candy wrapper as we wait for the funeral director to greet us.
The wait seems destined: I can neither rush it nor delay it.
The recycled air feels oppressively heavy, the dim lamplight dense as honey. It’s difficult to breathe. The plush carpet absorbs all sound: no footsteps, no voices, no office machinery. No Muzak. No sudden screams from bodies springing to life.
Well thank god for that.
My sister and I decide to buy the least expensive canister for our mother’s remains. My sister hates to spend money though she has a lot of it. I don’t have much money, but I don’t particularly care how much I spend. I just want it over with.
I want to be rid of the thought of my mother lying on a gurney covered with a white sheet no longer waiting for anything.
My parents, brother-in-law, and I sit in a Boston hospital waiting room. Well, my brother-in-law doesn’t sit; he paces back and forth awaiting the arrival of his first child. My older sister labors in a different kind of waiting room, one imbued with magic, miracles, and luck. I can’t imagine, can’t imagine a fully formed human slipping out of another human being. I struggle to sit still then stand to look out the dark window. Tornadoes of swirling, thrashing snow virtually obliterate night. The view is also occluded by my own dim reflection superimposed over the immensity of the storm, the cosmic-ness of imminent creation.
My nephew is wheeled in. He’s asleep in a clear plastic crib, his own waiting area. He’s swaddled in a white coverlet, his arms free. I didn’t know his fingernails would be so heartbreaking in their tiny clichéd cuteness. I press my own finger against the plastic as if I can touch him, but his cellular essence is beyond my reach. I press my finger harder. I whisper Todd. Todd. Todd. Can you hear me? The thin rise and fall of his chest: How has he learned to breathe all on his own so quickly? Does this mean he’ll also know how to survive, to unravel the tangled vagaries of life?
I sit on a green upholstered chair in my doctor’s waiting room in Grand Haven, Michigan, having moved here from Georgia. Identical chairs line the walls with an extra row down the middle; really, this is two waiting rooms in one. I find a seat as far away from everyone as possible, and wish I could move farther still when someone coughs or sneezes, spewing germs. These rooms should be sterile and antiseptic, so going to the doctor doesn’t mean courting disaster.
On the other side of the room an elderly man snores while his wife hovers beside him. As much as I don’t want to die, I’m more afraid of becoming lost to old age. But unless I suddenly stroke out, I am waiting to grow aged, decrepit. Nevertheless, looking on the bright side, if I’m confined to a bed-on-wheels, I can always get up a head of steam and roll myself in front of an oncoming truck—before I lose my marbles, before I’m simply a bag of plasma and protein—still able, however, to argue with The Fates and insist this is all one big mistake.
A locked door leads to the examination rooms. I wonder what my doctor will tell me today during my annual physical: good news? Bad? As long as I’m in the waiting room I can hope for, anticipate, the best, though I always expect the worst.
A nurse opens the door. She calls my name.
I cross the floor to my fate leaving my fellow travelers—sick, prognosis unknown—behind.
My first appointment with the hypnotist, near my house in Michigan, is on Halloween. I sit in his clinic at 6:45 p.m. in the deserted waiting room, waiting for his previous client—trying to exorcise her own demons—to leave. Even the receptionist is gone for the day. Through a glass partition I’m able to see down the hall. All the wood doors for the therapists’ offices are closed. I’m fifteen minutes early.
On one wall hangs a quilt, on another a large oil painting of springtime flowers. Both seem to have been here a long time. A clock hangs on the wall behind me, so I have to turn around to see the time. A sound system plays classic rock ’n’ roll: “You Are My Destiny,” “Travelin’ Man,” “Stop! In the Name of Love.” Touchstones from my teenage years echo.
At 7:10 I worry I have the wrong day, the wrong hour, that my hypnotist won’t walk down that corridor to greet me. The building seems deserted. I hear nothing from behind the glass partition.
The hypnotist also specializes in mind-body therapy, including biofeedback. I don’t fully understand his type of therapy, but, generally speaking, I believe a connection exists between mind and body. I’m here because I fear my own personal connection is damaged. Like right now, my body feels a ribbon of anxiety ripple from the base of my neck to my knees. The rational side of my mind tells me that the hypnotist will open the glass door and fix me. The irrational side tells me I’ll sit here forever, unfixed, listening to classic rock ’n’ roll.
I guess there are worse fates.
I wonder what the hypnotist’s office looks like. I anticipate whether I’ll like him. Will he like me? Will he think he can help me and accept me as a client? What’s the first question he’ll ask? Will I feel scared to talk with him? How can I explain to him my fear of death?
The waiting room vibrates with anticipation.
I could post a Facebook update using my iPhone: “Waiting to see a hypnotist.” But that would interrupt my intense focus of watching for the hypnotist to open the door. The most important job to perform in a waiting room, after all, is waiting.
Later, once I reach his office, I will understand the job that’s required of me is to be hypnotized.
The space between the waiting room and his office is uncharted territory. During those few moments I’m in a state of transit: neither here nor there. What’s supposed to happen in that corridor, that no-man’s land? As months pass, as I continue to see the hypnotist, I will come to understand that we never speak when we’re between these two points: the here and the there.
Waiting in a waiting room can be sacred, but only if you banish to oblivion all that is not of the waiting room.
I sit on a hard plastic chair in the waiting room designated for the Toyota service department. I received a recall notice on my RAV4, something about the rear lower suspension and whether a wheel alignment was performed using a proper torque specification. If not, backlash developing at the threaded portion of the arm, followed by formation of rust, could result in loss of control of the vehicle.
Sudden death, I think, though the recall notice does not suggest this.
The RAV4 will also undergo a tune-up: oil changed, filters replaced, tires checked for pressure. The car should be good to go.
The waiting room smells of rubber, paint, and stale potato chips. The TV blasts an early-morning game show. On one side of me a man talks on his cell phone. On the other, a woman digs in a box of vending-machine candy while reading an old issue of People. Another man does this. Another woman that. We are a strange conglomeration of humanity, Fellini-film extras, with nothing in common except sitting together awaiting our cars, currently in various states of existential disrepair.
I’m faced with the trite but nonetheless frightening thought that life itself is a waiting room: waiting for breakfast, for school to start, for marriage or divorce. Waiting for an airplane to depart, for a concert to begin, for a parent to die, for a phone call with bad news, for an email with good news. Waiting, waiting, waiting at the grocery store checkout line, for a doctor’s appointment that will either cure me or end my waiting once and for all. Waiting for a therapist’s appointment that will only intensify my sense of loss and regret. Waiting for my body to fall apart.
After an hour the Toyota service manager approaches me. I’m sure he’s going to tell me that my car is a contagion of fluidy leaks, undercarriage rust, that the vehicle won’t make it out of the repair shop as far as the street. Instead he smiles and says the repair work is complete. The rear-wheel alignment won’t suddenly and catastrophically unalign itself. I won’t (immediately, anyway) die in a fiery explosion.
I slide onto the leather seat. Carefully, religiously, I click in my seat belt. I check both ways for oncoming traffic. I maneuver into the proper lane. No burning rubber, no squealing out into hazardous traffic. I set the cruise control for the posted speed limit. Well, okay, a couple of miles per hour over. Without the security of a waiting room, you’re next on tragedy’s list.
I sit in the waiting room at Lakeshore Dermatology Laser & Medical Spa. I’m here to have a basal cell spot scraped off my nose. Surreptitiously I study faces, hands, whichever body parts are visible. What tumorous growth lurks behind the bandage on that woman’s neck? What once sprouted on that man’s cheek where a scar now trails beside his nose?
Two doors lead away from this waiting room. The door to the left is the dermatology unit. Enter here and you risk a diagnosis of basal cell, squamous cell, melanoma, and who knows what other kinds of cancer rooting inside a seemingly innocent-looking birthmark?
The door to the right leads to the spa where you’re offered Mega-peels, Biomedic-massages, photo-rejuvenation, laser therapy, microdermabrasions, liposculpture.
I watch as my fellow denizens of purgatory are called to their fate: right or left.
“My Sweet Lord” by George Harrison, who died of cancer, plays softly on the sound system.
In the middle of the waiting room is a display rack of hats to protect skin from harmful UV rays. Most are big, floppy, seemingly designed to protect your whole body. I try one on. It’s unfashionable. Do you have to be frumpy to be healthy? But another one catches my eye: a straw cowgirl-style hat decorated with a string of turquoise-colored beads. I try it on and look at myself in the rack’s little mirror.
I will leave here with just a small gouge in my nose and a hat for the remaining trail ahead, having dodged yet another bullet. But I know there’s one out there, snug in some metaphorical cylinder of some metaphorical gun, waiting patiently. It’s going to have to find me, though. I will wait for a lot of things, but not for that.
No.
I plan to keep moving forward even when I’m sitting still.