the door because I hear that he isn’t alone inside. The first time when I was really little. I’ve always known. Long before Mama knew that I knew. Papa is good at making threats. It is, so to speak, a part of his job.
Waiting.
Now?
No. Not now, either. Every time that nurse comes out to call someone in, everyone sitting in the waiting room thinks it’s their turn. But we have to wait. I hate waiting. I’ve already thought that too many times today. I hate waiting. The wallpaper in the waiting room is green, with thin, white stripes. The ceiling is rather low. There are two small windows facing the street. The closed door into the doctor’s receiving room remains closed. It resists our gaze. When the door out to the stairway opens and a new patient comes in, we all stare angrily at her. We want to have the doctor’s undivided attention for ourselves. We don’t want to share. At least I don’t want to. I’ve always had an eye for doctors.
Once I worked as a nurse. That was long ago, and I kept at it less than a year. But I’ve never had any other job that lasted as long, at least not a real job. Besides, that year was the longest of my life. It was Papa’s idea, I’m not pretending anything else. He came up with the suggestion one day when he got angry because he thought I’d been shopping too much. He always thinks I shop too much. I have several girlfriends who are a lot worse than me, but he doesn’t care about that. You might say that the thing about becoming a nurse wasn’t a suggestion at first, it was more like a threat. Yet another threat. But something caused him to keep it in mind, and later in the evening, when he’d calmed down, he picked up the thread again. It could be useful for me, he maintained, to have a regular job. And in health care besides. I don’t know if he used the phrase “character building,” but I assume that’s how he was thinking. My life had been too easy, and it was time for a little resistance. This was one of the few things Mama and Papa agreed on, that my life had been too easy. Much easier than either of theirs. I had a hard time understanding how that could be my fault, but now I would be punished. Mama was ecstatic. Papa arranged a position for me the very next day, and we drove off to meet the director of the hospital. Perhaps I don’t need to say that I was against the whole thing. I was dating a chaffinch who thought a nurse’s uniform might be pretty, but that was the only amusing thing about the proposal. I believed, in my stupidity, that Papa would think better of it when he realized what all this would entail. I thought it was still mostly a threat, and if I promised to stop shopping I could get out of it. The director of the hospital, a doctor whose name I forgot the moment we left, went over the work duties. As I understood it, it was at least as much about being some sort of maid as it was about taking care of patients, and in the car on the way home I tried to get Papa to change his mind. That this was, as it were, beneath our dignity. But he thought exactly the opposite, and he truly enjoyed the thought of all the scrubbing and cleaning and laundering and dusting and carrying and toiling it involved. Then I started to smell a rat. Then I started to get that this was really going to happen. That I would start working. I protested wildly the whole week. Stopped talking, stopped eating, and screamed what idiots they were, but nothing helped. I think this was the only time Mama and Papa were actually on the same side. Then…
Waiting.
Now, perhaps?
Yes, now it’s finally my turn.
It was still a waiting room. Inside the door, where I believed Dr. Sharm would be found, there was a smaller room, still with the same green wallpaper, but now with a single couch suite.
In here two nurses sit behind a low reception counter, and there are only two of us animals who are waiting. It’s me and the lion, who is still pretending not to see me. It must be lovely to live so