Waiting Room Antics

NOVEMBER 24, 2009

Did I post this photo already? I can’t remember. They all look alike.

When I called to schedule my CT scan, the guy on the phone told me I could come right away. “I’m in Brooklyn,” I said, “so it might take me a little while to get there.”

“Tell me when you want to come.”

“One o’clock?”

“No problem. We’ll see you at one.”

Must be a slow day for getting scanned, I thought. Until I arrived, that is, and saw the crowd in the waiting room. I signed in at the front desk, and the receptionist told me to have a seat. Finding one was like trying to find a seat on a third-world bus.

I imagined a calliope’s crooked tune as I circled dozens of elderly women with their home-care escorts, a couple of old men with their slightly healthier wives, a handful of young women in power suits, two equally impatient middle-aged businessmen, and a lone bodybuilder in Lycra shorts.

The instant the music in my head stopped, I grabbed the first vacant seat I could find.

Despite the crowd, things moved quickly. A name was called roughly every five minutes, and soon a few more chairs were empty. A moment later, though, the elevator doors opened and out poured a new batch of patients, and the calliope started playing again.

A dapper middle-aged man in a fancy, custom suit, accompanied by a more plainly dressed woman with a mannish face, was the first to exit. They were an odd couple, but the woman wore a ring and referred to the man as “honey,” so I assume they were married. The man held one arm behind his back and walked like he’d been jammed through his ass with a red-hot poker. He winced and hissed, turning his entire body this way and that, looking for a place to sit. Bad back, I guess.

“Right here,” said his wife, pointing to two available seats near the elevator doors.

“I don’t want to sit near the elevator,” he spat, and scanned the room for something more to his liking. He looked at the seats next to mine, then at me, then at the chairs his wife suggested, then back at me. All of the chairs in the room were the same, equally comfortable — or uncomfortable, as the case may be. “Okay,” he sighed and lowered himself into one of the chairs his wife had suggested.

He told his wife to tie his shoe. She did.

“No,” he snapped, and wiggled his foot, “not like that.”

How many ways are there to tie a shoe, I wondered.

An old woman wearing coke-bottle glasses also got off the elevator. She was escorted by a young woman who seemed to be a home-care worker of some kind. The young woman shuffled the old lady across the room and deposited her in the seat next to me, then waited to sign in at the front desk, where a middle-aged man was arguing with the receptionist.

“I know other people are waiting, but I have a very important meeting in an hour.”

“It won’t be much longer, sir. Please have a seat.”

Nearly every waiting room has one: An exasperated hotshot with a raging sense of entitlement, outraged by a receptionist’s unwillingness to negotiate.

The old lady next to me turned her head from side to side, scanning blurry shapes because she obviously couldn’t see a lick. She reached her hands out to either side, her fingers moving like a stop-motion animated puppet. She found the armrests but then reached further, touching the empty seat to her right, and my leg to her left. When I flinched, she pulled her hand away. Her glasses looked like they weighed more than her frail little head, and I couldn’t help wondering why she bothered wearing them.

On her speckled matchstick arm was a wristwatch — also comically oversized. She held it to her ear and pressed a tiny button. “The time is one-fifteen,” said the watch. She pushed it again. “The time is one-fifteen.”

The old lady’s helper returned and sat down with some paperwork. The old woman reached out and touched the woman’s pant leg, tugged the fabric, then pulled her arm back.

“What time is it?” the old woman asked.

“I don’t know. How much do you weigh?”

“Heh?”

“How much do you weigh?” the woman repeated, louder.

“Oh, eh, a hundred and ten.”

The woman wrote it down.

“I used to be a hundred and twenty,” the woman said. “But not anymore. I’m somewhere between a hundred ten and a hundred fifteen. Maybe a hundred and twelve.”

“How tall are you?”

“Five feet and five inches,” she said.

She obviously hadn’t measured herself in a while.

When the aide was finished filling in the forms, she returned them to the receptionist. Meanwhile, the old woman began exploring her surroundings again.

She reached out and fondled the fabric of my loose-fitting jeans. I was already leaning my body as far away from her as possible. She pulled her arm back, reached to her other side with her other arm, and rubbed the fabric of the adjacent chair.

She listened to her watch again. The time is one twenty-one. And again. The time is one twenty-one.

She glanced in my direction through the two magnifying glasses on her face. Her eyes looked like candy jawbreakers. She faced forward and touched my leg again.

When it happened the first time, I figured she couldn’t tell whether anyone was next to her or not. The second time, I knew she was a little kooky, but getting in and out of a chair with my broken shoulder is awkward and painful, so I couldn’t be bothered. Three strikes, however, and you’re out.

I moved to an empty seat across from the bodybuilder, who was acceptably less disturbing.