The Waiting Room
By John O'Toole

(continued)

A woman responded to his knock on the door. Mid-forties, tall, with flattened auburn hair, eyebrows thin as paper cuts, pushy cheekbones, slit up one side of her tight-fitting skirt. Unsmiling, not unkind though, seemed to know him, waved him in. Huge black beauty mark lurked beneath one cheekbone. Should have rung a bell. He'd been coming here religiously, every Thursday night for a year and a half now. Perhaps she was new here. He doubted it. She seemed such a part of his memory now, he reluctantly decided that she was.

Motioning him to a seat on the boxy, maroon sofa, she stepped away, all business (except for a slight swiveling of hips, the kind that might have crept, as a sort of race memory, into the otherwise innocent walk of a nun), and disappeared through one of those half-doors, left of sofa, the upper half wide open, the lower half a gate that clicked and squealed as the catch gave and the woman hipped it inward. David glanced around. The butterflies had started. He had almost forgotten the sickened nerves that accompanied these weekly visits. Nerves, hell. Panic state more like it.

Odd how the others in the room tried to cope. The others in the cramped and overstuffed, floral-patterned room he had grown to know only in his dreams. The plump young woman in the blowsily upholstered rocker, the old chair crying like a cat as it rocked, the woman removing her beret to pick lint, spinning the little green cap on her finger. The bespectacled boy, skinny as cancer, pompadour dwarfing his vestigial features, his tiny face a gnawed bone of fear. Playing with a yo-yo, though his seated position, all legs in a big fat slob of an armchair, kept foiling the yo-yo in aborted little thunks on the thin floral carpet. The black man on the sofa to David's left, fingers light as raven's feathers drumming on the forties-era console radio that sat by the sofa playing big band music as softly an an old man's heartsick musings.

David's eyes jerking in frightened insect flight, settling on the half-door, the point of his appointment. Bad pun, compulsive rhyme, sure signs of nervous overload, smiley faces popping up like goblins in his mind. For it was through that door - either David going in or someone else coming out — that the whole tone, the fate of that evening would present. Like a symptom. The patient presented with nausea and fever. If only he were waiting at his doctor's, but he wasn't. Going in or coming out? He vaguely recalled — Yes, of course; coming out. A bearish man, huge head bald as a basilica. Double-breasted grey suit, two-tone shoes, their ventilated toes like salt and pepper shakers. Fat cigar in wrestler's hold between bulky, yellowed fingers.