The Waiting Room

They picked me up in the morning. I woke as they politely knocked on my door, then walked in. I looked about me, saw familiar walls, a mirror, my woodstove through the open door. I stood and walked into the kitchen area. I had slept dressed.

My mother and Hope, an artist friend, waited by the open door. "Ready?" Mother asked. We walked out the door, down the three concrete steps, a turn to the left, and out the swinging white gate that told my garden where to end, the street where to begin.

The peacock across the road perked up its head. It was February, and yet the bitter cold that had not relented all winter seemed forgotten. The weather was warm, muggy; the sun was out. It was, quite simply, freak weather. Hope held the seat forward as I climbed into the back seat. Mother started the car, turned it around, and pulled off the small side street and onto Discovery Road, finding a space in the unusually thick traffic. Everyone seemed to be leaving town today.

The road that just yesterday was a smoothly paved artery was today pocked with potholes. It was a dangerous day for driving.

Looking back at the stream of traffic, I saw two motorcycles pass a motor home, claiming the space between us and the motor home behind. A moment later, the first motorcycle exploded with a quiet "pop", the shattered metal and disintegrated bodies of the two riders falling straight to the ground as if glued, as if they had hit a wall and could no longer go forward, only down. The second motorcycle simply fell over and rested in place. Had it been standing still, it would have fallen over with no less commotion. Nobody stopped to help the four riders - they would not get up again.

When we finally reached our destination, the sky had clouded and a storm was beginning to bluster, driving occasional leaves before its wind-bristles down the dark, tree-lined residential street where Mother parked the car.

Mother was born here. The thought blew into my mind as if on the storm, and was forgotten as quickly.

We got out of the car and stood in the street, hesitating as if gathering psychic belongings, finally slamming the car doors shut and locked behind us. We walked slowly down the left side of the street without looking back.

A gust of wind hit my face like a beating wing and forced it to the left. My hand, my eyes, lashed out, catching Hope by her hand, her eyes, and directing her gaze to the lawn of the house we had been passing. Mother walked on.

Hope and I examined the worms, that lay heaped on the lawn, without emotion. We were only recording, storing this event, catching every detail.

The worms were huge. Each was probably twelve feet long, and one or several inches in diameter. They were heaped in a large, squirming ball that made no attempt to escape into the earth, to disentangle itself. They strove for union. Hope and I turned and together walked on. She laid her hand on mine as we walked.

"This is what the storm brings."

I nodded. My gaze was now fixed on the other side of the street where a grain silo rose phallic thirty feet above the tallest house. The roof was steeply peaked, and the ridgepole stood now as the only divider between two unlikely gladiators. On the roof higher than the surrounding trees, on the roof with no possible access, stood two animals. The opossum, small, grey, and fierce, bared its teeth across the ridgepole at the dog, a black mongrel. I felt no emotion as I realized that it was my dog, and that he was sick. The dog swiped tentatively at the possum, as if in play, but the opossum betrayed other intentions. This would be a battle to the death. Between the possum's sharp teeth and the giddy sloped roof and bone crushing fall, the dog stood little chance of surviving. His disease-weakened paws and aimlessly thrashing tail resembled five splayed canes that he alternately leaned on and thrashed out with.

Hope and I went up the walk of a small white Victorian at the end of the street and found Mother there at the door, also turned to face the silo. Our eyes met. The possum would surely win. My dog must win. We opened the door and entered the house.

Hope and I sat at a small Formica table in the kitchen while Mother passed through a doorway into the house proper. After a few minutes, she returned.

"She's not here."

I frowned, looked at Hope, who shrugged.

"Any idea about when she's coming back?"

"Your guess is as good as mine."

I got up, wandered aimlessly to the door, looked out the single pane. The window looked directly out on the silo. The dog had the possum backed up to one edge of the roof. They seemed to be stalemated for the moment. I wandered back over, sat down.

"Nothing to do but wait."

Two hours later, the situation had not changed. The dog and the possum were no closer to a victory. They would stand each other off until one or the other broke their concentration. The suspense was hard to take. We all knew that our fate depended on the outcome of this battle. If the possum won, the woman who owned this house, for whom we waited so patiently, would not return.

The clouds had gotten thicker, and the wind blew in intermittent gusts that rattled the old house's windows between long, still periods during which there was no sound at all except the .occasional click of the wall clock. The silence had lain unbroken for well over an hour before Mother spoke again.

"Storm's coming closer."

Hope and I looked up, but didn't answer.

"Now that you know the way here," she continued, "there's really no reason for you to stay. I can talk to her alone. If she agrees to help, she can bring me back with her." She paused. "If she doesn't, there's no reason for me to return at all. take the car."

I looked at her, still silent, and panic welled up behind my eyes. An intense pressure mounted in my head. The room began to swim. Hope took my hand, and I passed out.

The sound of the car door brought me back with a start. I looked around, dazed. This was not Mother's car. And this was not my house. She tailgate of the small red hatchback slammed shut, and Hope opened my door. I got out. Hope's face betrayed nothing but the necessity for business-as-usual. She pushed the seat back, leaned over, and pulled out a large bolt of red cloth in an East Indian print. She piled it into my surprised arms, and started towards the house. I followed.

I had never been in Hope's house before. The long entry hall opened onto a small waiting area, crammed so with paintings, hangings, and objets d'art that I couldn't imagine anyone doing anything here but admiring. The small red couch (it appeared to be made of the same fabric I held in my hands) faced a low glass-top coffee table crowded with brass ornaments; among them, a meditating Buddha, lap full of ash from burnt incense. Several open books filled the only remaining space. I bent over to look - plumbing texts.

Hope stepped briskly into the room and took the cloth from me, disappearing behind a screen into the next room.

The house was arranged, on the inside, in Japanese fashion. The waiting room was one of several niches along the edges. The rooms were partitioned with Japanese shoji screens that, I discovered, slid easily with finger pressure. In the living room were more paintings - Hope's I suspected - and some Japanese and Tibetan tapestries. The house was immaculately clean.

Hope came into the room and again breezed by me, motioning for me to follow. "Where's Mom?" I petitioned. There was no answer. I followed her out to the car, where she handed me more bolts of cloth - another red, and one deep blue - to be brought inside. Then she locked the car and hurried inside, not looking to see if I was following.

I took this moment to examine the outside of the house. It was newly built, in the style I had heard called "Northwest Contemporary." It sat on a pier above a lagoon, and narrow cedar decking surrounded the house on all sides. In addition, a series of decks stretched across the lagoon to the low, brushy hills just on the other side. The decks now sat isolated from one another. Apparently, they would eventually be connected by bridges, one to the other. The house and decks had a very Oriental feel about them. Something about the pitch of the roof, the way the deck was arranged.

I wandered back into the house. Hope took one of the bolts and led me into a back room, where a sewing machine was set up. The room was cluttered with bolts of cloth in many different colors. Like the art that decorated her walls and surfaces, and like the house itself, the cloth showed Hope's preference for things oriental. Several of the bolts were labeled in various oriental scripts - I recognized Korean, Japanese, and Siamese among them, and one that looked vaguely like Arabic, or maybe Sanskrit.

As I turned to follow her out, a picture on the wall caught my eye. It was this house, photographed from the outside. The sun was shining, and the water sparkled. A large number of children frolicked in the water. A profusion of water toys and flotation devices littered what part of the water was not occupied by squirming bodies. Most of the bodies emanated sheets and streams of glittering water.

Hope was waiting for me in the living room. She wasn't sure, she said, whether the water was on or off. I remembered the open plumbing books on the glass-top table. She asked me to turn it off for her. If the pipes broke during the storm, the water would damage her paintings. Frank had built the water system, she said, and she didn't know anything about it.

Frank was someone I also knew, but I hadn't known that he and Hope knew each other. And as Frank was my psychoanalyst, and I wasn't particularly eager for Hope to know this, I declined to comment. I was surprised to learn that they were acquainted, but this was mild compared to my surprise when, in reaction to my blank stare, she told me that she and Frank lived together. I must have been gaping, because she quickly added "We don't sleep together: it's just a living arrangement. Frank was building his own house on the same piece of land, and the plumbing system he had built was eventually to service both houses.

Hope pointed me towards the lagoon, across which she claimed was the water shut-off valve. It looked none too hospitable, and I doubted that I would find anything but weeds. Nevertheless, when I held picked my way through the brush around the edge of the lagoon, I found a small clearing separated from the lagoon by a small ridge and, looking over the ridge, I saw that this was in fact where the decks led.

Looking at the pipes, I understood why Hope didn't want to deal with them. They were filthy. Frank had been liberal with the grease when he put the thing together, and to look at it I suspected that without the grease the plumbing would leak terribly. The system was placed in such a way that the rain, which here was plentiful, washed mud directly over the pipes. Every place where there was a hiatus in the layer of grease, there was mud, and one pipe looked like it was covered with shit.

The water shut-off was plain enough. It was a large plastic valve, which to be truthful looked more like an electrical switch than anything hydraulic I'd ever seen. It was embedded inside the throat of a piece of Eight-inch iron pipe. The valve was marked "on" on one side and "off" on the other. The valve was in the "on" position.

I searched the ground until I had found a piece of stick, and I pushed the valve to "off", thinking that this would shut off the water supply to the house.

Instead, a stream of water gushed from an unconnected pipe and out into the lagoon. I was so surprised, I almost jumped into the greasiest, muddiest pile of pipes in the bunch, but I kept my presence of mind enough to avoid the mess and also to reach over with the stick and turn the switch back to "on" at which point the water from the unconnected pipe slowed and quickly came to a stop. I gathered that the unconnected pipe was to supply Frank's house, and that the water had been off all along pending its completion. When his plumbing was complete, the valve, which regulated the water for both houses, could be turned on. I threw the stick as far as I could into the bushes and, my task finished, I started back to the house. It felt perfectly natural to cross the small ridge and down the slope to the water's edge, and thence to jump to the, nearest deck, which was somewhat below the bank, and about five feet distant.

I brought to mind the picture, in Hope's sewing room, of the children plashing in the glittering water, and I momentarily considered disrobing and swimming the twelve or so feet to the house. The muggy warmth of this morning had been replaced by a somewhat more usual February atmosphere, and I felt quite susceptible to chill, so I abandoned the idea.

The kitchen of Hope's house was in one of the niches partitioned off of the central room. It was a totally modern kitchen, equipped with every electric appliance a cook could want.

A digital clock on the microwave ceaselessly flashed the time and date. Now it alternated 5:59 and 2:24. . .5:59 and 2:24. As I watched, it changed to 6:00 and 2:24 and I realized that I had been hearing the clock tower strike in the distance. Its last peal was oddly cut off by a shift in the wind, and there was silence for a moment until the wind moaned by again. It seemed to be circling the house.

I started opening cupboards, looking for the vitamin C. Surely Hope had it. Mother always told me to keep it around, and I had become a firm believer in its power to ward off illness. Thinking this, I remembered her, and I resolved to ask Hope what had happened while I was unconscious. Hope came into the kitchen, nose in a sheaf of papers, and she almost didn't notice me. When she did, she looked up with blank surprise, as if she didn't recognize me. I realized I was standing on her chair snooping through her cupboards, and I said apologetically, "Vitamin C?" "On the counter there," she said with a short laugh, and pointed to the small bottle, plainly marked, that was directly under the cupboard I had been rifling. She returned to the papers she held as she absentmindedly reached into the refrigerator and poured herself a glass of milk. I helped myself also, downing several five-hundred milligram C tablets as I drank.

Hope and I both finished our milks, and she hurried off again. I followed close behind, and grabbed her arm as she entered the waiting room, stopping her short. She looked up from her papers, shock spreading across her face. Looking at her, I realized that she didn't know where Mother was any more than I did. "Do you think she's coming back?," I asked weakly.

She sat down, looked away. "I don't know," she said quietly. "There's nothing to do but wait." The wind blew a little harder outside, and I noticed it was beginning to get dark.