They expect me to sit in the chair in the corner. Human behavior in this room with nothing but a chair and a mirror is that the person will sit in the chair. It's the expectation of a calculated system.
I wait with the door open. My phone is locked up. I count all the objects in the room, including fixtures and outlets and door handles (both sides), and I include myself sitting in the chair. Forty-eight. This number is pleasing because it is divisible by eight. I do some neck stretches. There's the play I'm writing that I could think about, but when I'm away from it all the characters lead other lives, separate from the play, like they have day jobs and my play is a diversion.
Some song by Rod Stewart is playing through the tinny speaker on the ceiling (object #14), and I'm reminded of how much I don't like his voice, but he had that jazz album that wasn't bad. Didn't my friend Danielle sing one of his songs in a high school choral concert? She was on the homecoming court. Maybe the song was part of the event. There's a connection between her and Rod Stewart in my brain.
The blouse I wore here is a size six petite, too big in the waist, too short in the arms. Another Alice in Wonderland item of clothing I thrifted. It has gussets and placket buttons, and cuffs that fold back to reveal my wrists and two inches of my arm. Dan said I looked skinny in it when I left for this appointment, noting the looseness. None of my clothing feels right on my body. I prefer the outlandishness of costumes, where proportions are malleable.
The carpeting in here is dark shades of greens in a pattern of varied circles that touch each other and remind me of lumps of moss. The hallway has a thinly striped carpeting of lighter shades of green. The patterns do not match. There is no door threshold strip, and some of the weave has come apart, spiraling up like a weed from a sidewalk crack.
I watch the shadow of another woman as she gets dressed in the room across the hall. The shapes and patterns the shadows make are as beautiful as watching leaf patterns on the ground. This thought strikes a low gong in me. All the leaves are falling now, and the leaf shadows will go with them. Bare branch patterns, arterial, will replace them. I wonder about the life of the woman behind the door, the woman in shadow, who nodded to me a grim acknowledgement as she left for her procedure. Why is she here? I hope it's routine.
I kick my feet to the music, tick-tock them, then move them in opposition. I do the same with my shoulders. This has taken some practice for me to do. Getting mocked about it in a theatre class started the practice. How urgent all the younger-than-me students in that class were. I resented their futures, and loved their enthusiasm.
Didn't I have better thoughts when I was in my 40s? Why can't I just be content sitting in this chair in the corner, a half naked human being with an ill-fitting blouse waiting for her? It seems all my friends who are in their 40s now are leading shinier lives than mine but I know this isn't true. My 40s weren't all that great. My mother was in decline. Helen will be in her 40s in ten years, and I will be ...
The math of that thought is a dark corner I avoid by observing the empty chair in the other room across the hall. It is a nicer chair than this one, I decide, because it's lines have an elegant mid-century modern style. It's arms are polished wood. My mother would have commented on that chair.
Now I am uncomfortable enough to stand, unlock the closet, and rifle around my bag to find my phone. The phone, that devil that promises to connect but divides me from the real world. I'll text Dan to see how he's doing.
The lab tech arrives to walk me to my test. She's probably 42 or so, thick dark hair, big brown eyes. Lovely. "Hello Jennifer," she says. This week I talked to a receptionist who told me my full name was the same as her best friend. Jennifer Hill.
My astrological chart reminds me that I am not that special, and my karmic lesson is to learn that others lead lives that are different from my own. Even the other people named Jennifer Hill.
Everything for me right now is 8, 16, 24, 32, 40, 48, 56, present, and accounted for, part of the system.
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