Foreboding
We are all too familiar with this place, this home of our fears. We wish that weren’t so.
Even though chairs are not assigned to any of us we nevertheless choose to sit in the same chair each time we come here. The chairs are all the same, a dull yellow-green heavy plastic material with curved armrests. They are deep and wide and one could easily fall asleep in them. None of us sleep.
The room is large bright and always smells of antiseptic bleach. We would recognize the odor anywhere. A wall-mounted TV is tuned to a daytime soap, sometimes the news. We can’t change the station. Scattered around the huge room are low metal tables covered with old magazines some half-empty coffee cups and sandwich and pastry wrappers.
Most of the women who come here have been regulars for some time, months. We recognize each other but generally remain private except those times when the news is bad. That is when some of us try to console a victim, although we are all victims. We know that we are members of the same ‘club’. There are always dropouts and new members who replace the women who no longer come here. Sometimes we get up and pace back and forth, slowly careful. When we do talk to each other it is in whispers so none of the other women could hear us.
When we talk about about our lives, we are careful, just touch on highlights, no secrets. I, like the others, know the names of the women in our special club, sometimes where we will go when we leave here, sometimes snippets about kids, and husbands, and of course our weekly scheduled clinic visits, and how many treatments have been completed and how many more to go. We rarely talk about progress or changes in our condition. None of us get together on the ‘outside’.
We are experts at noticing changes in our appearance, how we feel, details of how things are going, changes in the color of our skin, and whether we seem thinner, whether we have lost more of our hair or are more tired and resigned than usual. We can’t help ourselves from touching, feeling our body beneath our clothes and wondering whether it, the big it, is getting bigger or smaller. It is hard to keep our fingers from exploring our bodies.
It has been some weeks since the tall slim woman with her young daughter, maybe a nine-year-old, arrived and sat in the fourth chair near the door that leads into one of the labs. Next to her there was a pole with an IV bottle hanging in place. The woman is much younger than most of us. Last week, I put down my magazine and asked the woman sitting next to me whether she had seen her and the little girl during the last few weeks. She hadn’t. I learned that the woman, the mother, had been a 2nd-grade teacher and the girl was her only child and that her husband had disappeared. Horrible. I continue to sit, making small talk, reading, watching the daytime soap waiting for the IV bag to empty, marking the end of this week’s chemo treatment. Maybe the woman with her daughter will be back soon. Would it help to talk to the young woman?
Desperate and alone
Most Saturday mornings, his landlady, Lola, and her 2 adolescent daughters, Roz and Eve, leave the house together. It is a time they set aside each week to be with each other shop, and laugh. They seem a content close-knit family. Lola’s husband and father of the girls died about a year ago. To supplement their income, they rented a room to a boarder, Tim Lowe, a graduate student at the University. The University is within walking distance from their home.
Often, when Tim hears the mother and her two daughters leave, closing the front door behind them and when he hears their car in the driveway start, and the muffler grunts, he leaves his room, wanders downstairs. He tip toes around the house. He starts in the kitchen opening cupboards and then moves to the den and living room opening and closing drawers and closets. However, he spends most of his time in the bedrooms in the house. The path he takes is always the same and inevitably he leaves his favorite place, for last, Roz’s room. He closes his eyes as he sniffs at the scent in the air of Roz’s favorite perfume Giorgio, at least he thinks that is the name of the scent. He has thought about buying her a bottle of that perfume but wonders whether that might be misunderstood but perhaps not if he also bought Eve and their Mom a gift. He stops for a moment and this time doesn’t open up Roz’s draw but instead strokes her bra and hose hanging over the bedroom chair. He never told Roz how pretty she is but if he told her he had to tell Eve the same thing.
The writing and biology projects are due on Monday and once again he finds himself helplessly behind. He hasn’t changed his shirt or socks in several days and knows he can’t put off a visit to the washing machine. His parents don’t know that he is barely above water in most of his classes and maybe that is why his girlfriend broke up with him some months ago or maybe because he knows he seems a bit lost and perhaps she found him too odd, too different. For the moment none of this matter while he is here in Roz’s room. He feels blue, and sad, but then thinks that it just who he is and that one day he will snap out of it and be happy.
Finally, he leaves the bedroom moves back to the kitchen, and stands right behind one of the four wooden chairs framing the white enamel table. His mind picture is vivid and even comes with a soundtrack, of mother, and daughters sitting together at breakfast, sharing stories, giggling, relaxed. They have often invited him to join them at breakfast, to sit in the empty fourth chair.
He always thanks them “Maybe next time” but he knows that won’t be possible.
Old and alone
Mr. Lowen had left his morning newspaper on the table next to the dark gray whicker rocking chair. Each morning, after breakfast, he shuffles towards ‘his’ chair. It stands alone next to an old floor lamp in the corner furthest away from double doors that lead into the Albany Assisted Living’s huge dining room. Tonight, after dinner, just after 6, residents slowly file out, in gaggles, chatting, some pushing walkers or holding canes to steady their gait, all heading for the lounge, the game room, or outside into the garden. Some leave to go back to their rooms. Mr. Lowen rarely stops to talk to the other residents of the Albany home for the Aged. Just like last evening, and every evening, Mr. Lowen heads for the whicker rocker, with a book under his arm. This week it is a book he read when he was young, a book he never got to finish because it bored him. This time he thought that now that he is older he could take another crack at Mann’s Magic Mountain. He figured that maybe a book about a TB sanitarium in the Swiss Alps was not that different from his current home. Just like last night he won’t hear the book slip from his hands and fall to the floor and one of the staff will lean over and whisper “Mr. Lowen you fell asleep reading. Do you want some help getting up to your room?” He is helped out of his chair and he looks at the clock and it is just after 9 pm. “I’m ok and can get to my room just fine” and he slowly walks down the hall to the elevator. It helps to look down at his feet and then ahead him on the faded carpet and he stops occasionally to catch his breath. His chair will be waiting for him tomorrow.
Envy Maybe take out… weak
There are lookers and there are shoppers. The two of us are lookers and have been friends since middle school. We did all sorts of things together including going on double dates with some of the good-looking High School boys at the Walton School. We loved to go shopping but didn’t have deep pockets. I laughed when Sara said, “Sometimes we have no pockets at all”. As lookers, we don’t shop but look around at others who are shopping. We saw a slim tall tailored woman with what looked like a Gucci bag, and matching pumps standing in front in front of some high-end evening gowns. We followed her as she moved on to the furniture gallery of the store. She looked at some furniture that was ready to buy now, not later or tomorrow, or never. The woman stopped in front of a vintage Eames chair. Even I recognized what it was and that the red chair covering meant it was vintage original, classic. She stroked the sweeping broad armrests that flowed across and then down, just barely hiding the arc of the steel legs. I guess Sara and I were staring more at her more than at the chair. She ran her hand over the back of the chair and then without even looking at the price tag, announced to the salesman, “Yes, I’ll take it.”
Stage fright
He was facing an audience that was not there yet. He stood there in front of a large room, dimly lit, filled with, by my last count, over 500 empty chairs that were all lined up, at parade rest. In the aisles between the chairs, stood floor mikes, staggered, every 15 yards, at attention, ready for questions, comments, and criticism. At the front of the hall stood a small podium with three large blank projection screens behind it. In about forty minutes the chairs will be filled, faces staring forward and then I thought, “How should I begin? ”
I could picture the empty seats filled with academics, my judges the ones who could point their thumbs up or down. I could see their faces twisted, grimacing, and the more I talked, and with each slide, I could see them squirming in their seats and then at first one or two of them would get up and quietly leave the conference room. And then more and more of them would leave their seats and then soon most of the seats were empty. I couldn’t stop but continued to stumble through my talk. I thought about this scene and it all seemed so real. I have another few minutes to wait before giving my talk.
Chair power
Sometimes the sitting rules aren’t clear as he hurried into the small conference room. He was a few minutes late when he opened the door. He recognized only two of the participants at the meeting that had already started. There were only 3 empty chairs left around the huge wooden oval table when he arrived and he headed towards one of them. He tip-toed, shoulders, head down, and saw the agenda sheet on the seat of the chair, picked it up and pulled the chair out from the table, then stopped. Two heads bobbed from side to side, a silent but emphatic ‘no’. The woman from marketing, the one he recognized as one of the meeting organizers, signaled to me, a thumbs down. The deputy director sitting next to the empty chair whispered, “That is where the director sits, that is his chair and no one can sit in that chair. He often comes in late and everyone knows that is his chair. I thought you knew that. All of us know that so…” and so I inched backward, almost stumbling, backing into a the armrest of the head of advertising, and finally managed to come around the table to another chair that stood alone with no one sitting nearby.
Bride’s chair
Only three hours left before the wedding would take place at the Hillside Ballroom. Rita, the bride-to-be, had to be there in about an hour. At this moment she is sitting, slumped low in a chair, at an outdoor café not far from the Hillside Ballroom, sipping her 3rd cup of coffee and mindlessly nibbling at a Danish pastry.
She knew she shouldn’t be doing this, marrying the guy everyone thought was a prince among princes. He had it all. Jim Saunders was tall, with dark hair, slim, fit, smart, great job, big salary flawless teeth but Rita had known for some time that when she was with him she felt bored and alone but said she was so excited to marry ‘her Jim’. Her friends often remarked how smart Jim was. He knew so much about so many things. Rita wished he were a bit more spontaneously rather than deliberate in how he acted around her. He was a ‘catch’ and yet so often in these last few months, her decision to marry Jim gnawed at her and left her uneasy, frightened, and paralyzed.
The waiter came by. “Would you like some more coffee?” She didn’t hear him. Her mind was at the Ballroom and so he repeated “Would you like some more coffee?” Rita whispered, “No thanks”. Then she went back to thinking about her wedding, hoping perhaps, somehow she didn’t have to be there. She didn’t have to marry Jim, she can’t and then pictured the two chairs up on the stage of the ballroom with Jim next to her smiling as the 140 guests raised their glasses of wine one more time in honor of the gloriously happy couple. What was she to do? A life alone but with wonderful Jim. Scene after scene drifted through her head, how Jim was a meticulous lover, spending just the right amount of time kissing her all over, hovering over her breasts but not too long, going down on her demonstrating his well-trained mouth. She had learned to moan just right, fake her screams, squeeze the sheets and then they were done and for a lifetime, for how long would that work and their tailored kids just right at every age. Three hours and how can she do this? Could she not arrive, leave for a while, and have her sister Lisa get her what she needs to leave and she would understand because I told her too much, much too much and she said “How can you go through this” and she then saw in bold relief the two chairs,. The crowning chairs, waiting for happy people to sit there standing up for the first dance, sitting back down, getting back up, sliding across the dance floor to the applause of all of their guests, and then Rita started to cry. A couple at the next table asked, “Are you OK? Can we help you?” Rita smiled at the couple as her tears slowed down to a crawl. “Oh, I am fine. I am going to be married in a few hours.” The woman at the nearby table smiled back, “That’s wonderful and I guess those are tears of joy. Rita grimaced as she thought of the rage, Jim shouting, and his friends getting drunk, calling her a queen bitch and the shrieks of the guests and her parents got louder and louder and then she turned off the sounds and sights took a deep breath and headed to the Hillside Ballroom.