The Waiting Room - Part 1

The Waiting Room

By Marleah Blades

I was pregnant when I got here, so I have always been Mother.

***

The room smells of old coffee and latex. I reclined across the end table to push – hard plastic chairs bolted down; there was no other way to lean back, and I would not lay on the floor.

The Baby nearly fell through Marco’s hands, but he channeled her into the yellow seat, her body slipping like a melting ice cube around a shallow bowl.

When he handed her to me, I held her to my cheek, dizzy with adrenaline, too fast too slow, my head a cotton beehive.

I whispered to her: “There are seven people in the world. You’re eight.”

Then I apologized until they took her from me and I fainted.

***

Begonia donated her hand towel to wrap The Baby up in. Begonia has lost the hat that gave her her name – a bedraggled blue straw hat with artificial flowers pinned around the brim. We don’t know how things get lost in here.

I thought once The Baby was born I might be called out. We keep saying the metaphor rules the world. Once we’re done waiting, we’ll get called out.

I’ve never seen anyone called out, though.

***

Marco tosses a dime-store rubber ball against the wall and catches it mid-bounce. I sit down next to him. He bounces the ball off the wall to me and I bounce it back.

Again.

Again.

One time we did 316 bounces without missing.

“What are you waiting for, Mother?”

We ask in case the answer has changed. We ask, often. When Marco asks, it’s always like this, thoughtful, with a gentle voice like a therapist’s -- as though if we talk through it we’ll conquer it, a timer will go off, and someone will open the door and tell us all to go home.

What are you waiting for?

The ball hits an empty box, shoots high and fast into the corner, and ricochets off the leg of a chair with a hollow clang. We watch it roll to a stop against psychokitten’s boot. She raises her eyebrows at us, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, shushing gently into The Baby’s ear.

I scoot forward two feet to retrieve the ball. “I’m waiting for you to learn some goddamned aim.”

Again.

***

The Baby coos and gurgles, as I imagine other babies do. She has watery, round eyes.

“Is this normal?” I asked Begonia the first time The Baby pooped. Not knowing what to do, I had wrapped her bottom in toilet paper that was now a soggy mess inside her towel. “Is it supposed to look like that?” Begonia smiled and said nothing. I realized then we don’t know if Begonia has children.

Marco grinned as he leaned in to look. “It’s fine. She is just fine.”

Then he picked up the washcloths that arrived that morning and fashioned one into a diaper, showing me step by step how to fold it.

In the black corner, Cambridge struck a match to burn the day’s refuse. The smoke snaked along the floor to the door, meandering around the hinges before exiting through some miniscule opening -- leaving, as though that were nothing.

This room must smell putrid, I thought. But, you know, you have to leave a room sometimes and come back in to know how foul it is. The Baby must not notice it. How could she? She doesn’t know any better.

“When do the human parts of a person start growing, Marco? When does she turn into someone who is, instead of something that wants?”

Marco’s dark eyes regarded me softly. “She already is, Mother. She is someone.”

The Baby grunted and rooted against me like a pink piglet.

“No she isn’t.”                                                                

He didn’t reply. I wanted to ask, Will she, though? Will she become a real person if we stay here? How can she learn living from us, when none of us is doing it? But I didn’t ask. What kinds of questions are those?

“You don’t have kids, right?” I asked.

“Nieces,” he replied. “From 11 years old I was helping my sister raise her daughters.”

“How old are they now?”

He folded another diaper. “Oh, sixteen. Fourteen. Twenty. There. See how? Now you do it.”

He took The Baby while I unfolded and folded diaper cloths at his instruction. He bounced her gently, making faces the way people do with babies.

“I’m too old to have a baby,” I said. “You’re not supposed to have babies after 35, are you?”

“Bah.” He didn’t look up. “That’s only for the pregnancy risk. You already had her. You had her with no medication and no sterile equipment on a chair in a room that doesn’t exist.” He made another face before handing her back. “She’s just fine.”

***

We wake up in this room. That’s how we arrive. There are no windows, but there is a door. The Officer stays by the door. Every morning he turns on the lights and we find someone or something new. Towels. Toilet paper. There’s a cupboard and a toilet and a sink.

When I got here, the cupboard stayed stocked with food. Then Harry started leaving the cupboard door open at all hours, trying to figure out how it was being replenished.

“He acts like nobody’s ever tried this before,” Cambridge snorted over the splintered bang of Harry’s fist on the back of the cupboard. He laughed as the boy raised himself onto the countertop on one bony knee so he could peer over the top shelf.

“You think you’re the first one to think of this?” Cambridge barked. “You think we’ve been sitting on our hands all this time?”

They quickly became a two-man drama; we sat back against the far wall to watch while Cambridge paced and turned his palms up at us, and for a moment I felt like my six-year-old self sitting cross-legged on the shag carpet watching Randy Savage whip up an arena against The Million Dollar Man.

Harry slid off the counter, squaring himself to examine it. His lips twisted, opened and shut, then fluttered into mumbling as he returned to shifting boxes and cans from side to side on the shelves.

“Hey. Kid.” Cambridge cocked his head, pursed his lips. Raised and dropped one hand in tired sympathy. “We’ve done this. I’ve done it all, man. We tried to follow the plumbing lines. We tried to follow the air. You’re wasting your time.”

Harry stopped, one hand raised at the cupboard door, frozen in mid-reach. Our hearts slowed. The room fell stagnant.

“Well, that’s it, then,” Begonia announced, casually unconcerned, her voice a brick thrown through our silence. She rubbed her hands and pushed herself to standing.

Then with a crash, the cupboard seemed to explode. Cracker boxes, MREs, energy bars, all hurled into the air. Begonia squealed as one of Harry’s projectiles hit her shoulder. We scattered to the corners of the room to dodge his rain of fury, covering our heads, hoping the cans were too heavy to reach us.

Cambridge strode to the cupboard – two steps. He shoved Harry away from the nearly empty cupboard and slammed the door shut.

Harry glared at him, nostrils flaring, and flung it open again.

We watched. Their chests heaved.

Then Cambridge stiffened and whirled away – there’s no room to storm off. All our body language has been adjusted for space. We’ve traded expansive gestures for emotional seizures. Move from the elbow, arms to your sides.

Harry wouldn’t let anyone close the cupboard door. The food stock diminished. Once the cupboard was empty, we had to wait for food like everything else.

Continue to Part 2