Conversation

The waiting room is small by the standards of an office with seven doctors' names on the door. There are about thirty steel chairs with fabric seats and backs, in color either black or blue, along with three plain black cube-shaped tables. Current issues of magazines are laid out in haphazard fashion on the tables. Some magazines occupy the chair seats where their readers have hastily left them upon being summoned into their examination rooms. The magazines to which the doctors subscribe may reveal as much about them as about their patients. There are the regulars: Time, Fortune, Business Week, US News and World Report, Sunset, Health, Sports Illustrated, Golf, which one tends to find in most doctors' waiting rooms. There are the ones that appeal to a younger readership: Wired, People, Entertainment Weekly, In Touch ("Who's Britney dating?'). Then there are the magazines aimed at a more affluent clientele: Vanity Fair, Esquire, Southern Accents, Cottage Living, Yachting. Powerboating.

The room is crowded when I first get there. I understand that Mondays are like that. Generally the patients are quietly reading, awaiting their summons. It's cold today, and most of them are warmly clothed.

Two women behind me are engaged in an animated, if one-sided, conversation. The subject is an accident involving a drunken teenager who had crashed into the parked car of a friend of one of the women. No one was hurt, but the car was totaled, and the young man was subsequently arrested. He had no insurance. What is odd about this conversation is that the woman telling it gets no chance to finish any sentence before her (supposedly) attentive listener cuts in with a request for elaboration, an unrelated question, a non sequitur, an inane aside, or some other meaningless interruption. Both women speak in loud tones, as if they were not sitting in a small quiet room, but outdoors on a park bench in the midst of traffic.

At first I do not risk a look in the direction of the conversing women. We are sitting back to back. But through the ruse of looking for another magazine, I get up and glance at them. The one telling about the accident is a large woman in her fifties, with black hair that is wild and frizzled and extends out to either side of her broad face like a woman in the Fusco Brothers comic strip. Her companion is perhaps a couple of decades older, stooped, with stringy blond hair and a beak of a nose. She is the Constant Interrupter.

The two do not appear to be related, except perhaps that the dark-haired one may have brought the older woman for her appointment at this office. By this time the conversation has transmogrified to a discussion about a television soap opera, and the new satellite TV service that the blond woman has just installed at her place, and about how the remote controls that used to work on her TV now no longer work. This is the Constant Interrupter speaking in a complaining tone, and it is the dark-haired woman's turn to interrupt her with 'Did you try doing this or that?' and 'Was it the black remote or the one with the yellow buttons?'

Finally the nurse calls out a name, the blond woman cackles once, rises, is followed by her companion through the door held open for them, and a deathly stillness descends again upon the waiting room.