Actually, it wasn't like this at all; I was a model of calm.
It was years ago, maybe more. I was waiting. It came to twenty minutes past my appointment time: I was still waiting. Impatiently, nervously, on the edge of “blowing my top,” as if I were a cartoon character. I was a cartoon character. Drooling, it felt like. My knee bouncing up and down. Roz put her hand on my sleeve without looking up from her book. The book: Charles Todd, An Unwilling Accomplice. “It’ll be okay,” the hand said. And I said, “But Dr. Feight* said they were always on time.” “It'll be okay,” she said.
It was years ago, maybe more. I was waiting. It came to twenty minutes past my appointment time: I was still waiting. Impatiently, nervously, on the edge of “blowing my top,” as if I were a cartoon character. I was a cartoon character. Drooling, it felt like. My knee bouncing up and down. Roz put her hand on my sleeve without looking up from her book. The book: Charles Todd, An Unwilling Accomplice. “It’ll be okay,” the hand said. And I said, “But Dr. Feight* said they were always on time.” “It'll be okay,” she said.
The color of the carpet, furnace-ash, and the odor of the music, country influenced by hip-hop: neither was helping. I went to the window: the sky was the color of tin, of a much-used loaf pan. Rain. A view of the parking lot.
“It’s a test, maybe,” I was
thinking. That’s what my notes say, that I was thinking: “It’s a test: Make the
patient wait, to see how committed he is to whatever he has come for.”
 |
| Keep moving. Nothing to see here. |
More from the notes:
“The music is
execrable, whiny
and wroth (beat, beat, beat, beat), plaining because something has been lost, at the same time growling because
something has been taken away. It ain’t fair. Quiet would have been better.
“Quiet would be better,“ I wrote in my notebook. “I could hear my pen scrape across the paper as I write this down. I could pay attention to my thoughts.”
“Quiet would be better,“ I wrote in my notebook. “I could hear my pen scrape across the paper as I write this down. I could pay attention to my thoughts.”
Not that I had any thoughts, I was just “waiting!” “Waiting, dammit.” Fuming. “How
much longer?” “Jesus, how much longer? It ain’t fair.”
“Hi, I’m Jennifer,” she said. “If you’ll
come with me?” A rhetorical question.
I elbowed Roz. She looked up from her book. “I’ll come after,” she said. “They’ll
run the tests . . .” She looked at Jennifer, who nodded. “Then, when the doctor
talks to you about them, I’ll come. They’ll get me.” Still looking at
Jennifer, who nodded again while I'm thinking,
“On my brain! The tests are on my god-d-forsaken brain.”
But I didn't say that. I didn't think it even. It wasn't that way at all. I was, as always, a model of calm.
But I didn't say that. I didn't think it even. It wasn't that way at all. I was, as always, a model of calm.
03.05.20 / 12.10.20
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