an unobstructed view

patients

When I open the waiting room door, there's only one empty chair. It's the usual Miami crowd. Burberry and Botox. Dermabrasion and Depends. The sign-in pad confirms my suspicions. Along with me, the dermatologist has booked four other ten o'clock appointments. There's a half wall with a window on top. I press the buzzer once twice three times. Finally, the plastic door slides open. "Can I help you?" she drones. The receptionist has most of her blouse unbuttoned. A push-up bra is working hard. "Do you know how long the wait is?" I am channeling Downton Abbey and high tea. Civilized people. People who have weathered Boy George. Prince Harry. The Blitz. The receptionist is painting her nails, cracking gum, and watching a video on YouTube at the same time. "I think there's an emergency or something." Then the plastic window slides shut. I'm a conflicted hypochondriac. I Google symptoms and exotic diseases, yet I'm terrified of going to the doctor. There's a funny-looking freckle I've been worrying about for weeks. I press the buzzer again. "Someone called yesterday to confirm my appointment. Did all these people confirm their appointments?" She looks up at my chin. There's not a hint of recognition in her expression. It's like I'm brand new. Like she's never seen me before. Like I haven't been going to the same doctor for the last ten years. "Can I help I you?" she drones. I slowly turn to face the other patients. A television with closed captioning is suspended from the ceiling. It's stuck on some medical show. A reporter is having a colonoscopy awake, watching while we're watching a camera being snaked up his ass. In this room, no one's watching. A dozen bodies are squirming in their seats. Tucking in my elbows, I place my butt on the one remaining chair. On my right side is a large man with purple lesions on his face, neck, arms. They march like tire tracks up and down his body, and I'm thinking shingles, small pox, antibiotic resistant staph infections. On my left is the oldest ambulatory person I've ever seen. Reading Fifty Shades of Grey no less. Her back is hunched like a question mark. Her skin's blotched like she's wearing camouflage, only Lord, that's actually her skin. The nice part of me is saying these poor afflicted people. How biblically tragic, how uncomfortable they must be. The other part is screaming like a Munch painting. Are they contagious? What if their elbow accidentally brushes mine? There's not a bottle of Purell big enough to make me feel comfortable in this seat. My rosacea is starting to bloom. Digging in my huge purse—the chiropractor is next week—I find a paperback. If I hunch my shoulders and tighten my legs, there's a good three inches of space between me and my neighbors. I can do this, I say to myself. Read a chapter or two and the time will fly. RRRRING...Sitting five feet across is a twenty-something-year-old. She is dressed in five-inch platform heels, a tight leopard dress and a full face of makeup. RRRRING. She answers her phone, sticks in her ear buds. Her mouth's wide open, and I see her tongue, her lipstick-smeared teeth, the two silver fillings in her rear molars. Bits and pieces of Spanish rocket out. She's either pulled her shoulder or hit her boyfriend. Bought a shirt or bumped her head. Growing up in Miami, I was dipped in Spanish young. But it was public school in Florida. This girl's mangling her consonants, barreling along at Cuban speed, gesturing like a crazed puppeteer. I want to go back to my book, we all want to go back to our books, but leopard lady has made it impossible. A dozen faces are staring at her in disbelief. It's hard to crawl back inside your shell with a human jackhammer banging away. The large purple man next to me screws on a smile and blurts, "Just got back from Africa. You ever been to Africa?" I clear my throat and re-cross my ankles. Leopard lady's looking at me but not at me. I am ectoplasm. We're sitting in a small room—did I tell you how small it was—and it's shrinking by the minute. All of us are held hostage by this intruder and her conversation. The old woman slams her book shut in frustration. The large purple man's raking his fingers up and down his arms. He's chatting to himself only he's on speaker phone. "Did you know there're a lot of mosquitoes in Africa? Mosquitoes the size of a Buick." Finally I make eye contact with leopard lady. "Would you mind talking a little more softly?" I ask. She ignores me, so I rethink my approach. I pantomime the universal signal for taking off your headphones. I pull my ears like they're taffy and shout, Would you mind talking a little more softly! "One second, Yolanda," she says. She takes a bud out of one ear and glares at me. "You have a problem?" "We're all trying to read." I point to the old woman on my right and the guy on my left. Then my hand sweeps the room. "Do you have any idea how rude you are?" she screams. She throws out some Spanish swear words that I'm not familiar with, rolls her eyes, then starts yakking to Yolanda again. Meanwhile a man in a business suit is hiding in the corner. He's fortyish, buried in a laptop. Suddenly he stands, walks over to leopard lady, and taps her on the arm. "She's right, you know. This is a public area." He's at least six feet, and when he stands over her, the air seems displaced. Like God put only so much in one small room, and he's shifting it around. I'd bet money he's a lawyer. She shrinks a little into her chair. "Who can wait like thees?" she tells him. "Thees office is bullsheet. Thees doctor is bullsheet." She packs up her things and slams the door behind her. It's so blissfully quiet, I hear the air-conditioning hum. Some people are leafing through magazines while others check their email. Should I thank him, I wonder? I start evaluating the logistics. I don't want to shout across the room. But it's not easy to maneuver when you're sitting like a tube of squeezed toothpaste. I feel I have to do something. All the words and gestures and steps we take each day add up in the end. Like one big karmic grocery list. I grab the armrests, push off from the cushion, and tentatively start to get up. My timing's off by around five seconds. He's opened his briefcase. Then he punches a few numbers into his iPhone and the ranting begins. "About that deposition, Ed. Fuckem. Just fuckem." Once he starts, he doesn't stop. "We got 'em by the balls, Ed. Fuckem. Fuckem til they beg us to stop." Little gunfire bursts of profanity are laced with legal mumbo gumbo. The guy is relentless. Wham. Wham. Wham. It's an ambush. We hunker in our seats waiting for the siege to end. Two new people walk into the office. A mother and her child. They're blond, fair, sunburnt. Obviously tourists. They buzz and wait, buzz and wait. When the mother finally gets the receptionist's attention, no one understands her. The words seem choppy and thick, probably Eastern European. Frustrated, the mother lifts the little girl's shirt and points to the red dots all over her stomach. I guess the word for measles is universal. While a nurse rushes them in, all of us simultaneously itch. Even the lawyer is momentarily speechless. The wall clock ticks. Someone coughs. Fuckem Ed. Fuckem. Cemented like a barnacle, I sit. I breathe. I stare at receptionist's window willing it to open and patiently patiently patiently wait.

Marlene Olin's stories have been published in over thirty-five online and print journals. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Miami, she attended the University of Michigan. Marlene presently lives in Coconut Grove, Florida with her husband. She has two children and two grandchildren. She recently compiled a collection of her stories and finished her first novel. Her Twitter handle is @writestuffmiami

For more work by Marlene Olin, check out her page at our Online Sundries site.