At the Doctor's Office

Saul’s cataracts were so bad that he could no longer put off going to the ophthalmologist.

He double-locked the front door while Sadie stood waiting, insisting, “Would you give me the car keys already?” This was part of their ritual – a pretense that helped Saul maintain his dignity although Sadie always did the driving. It was just another of their many compromises made over 53 years of marriage.

After she backed the 12-year-old Buick out of the garage, Saul reached to pull down the garage door. He felt defeated and beaten on the days the arthritis in his neck did not respond to the two or three Ibuprofens he swallowed before breakfast. One day, he thought, I’ll get one of those automatic garage door openers. Then, Eh...what’s the use? He held onto the car’s doorframe as he eased himself onto the front seat. He had to push Sadie’s pocketbook aside, since she never seemed to remember. Perhaps just another reproach, unspoken this time.

As soon as Sadie turned into traffic, Saul leaned over to push in the cigarette lighter. He reached for the generic pack from his shirt pocket and tapped out an unfiltered cigarette. When the lighter clicked out, he placed the cigarette between his lips. After his first puff, he spat out a bit of tobacco that stuck to his tongue. It was an affectation she hated. He ignored her dirty look and cranked down his side window, but then raised it so it was open less than an inch. She always complained about being cold and he knew that she would inevitably bellyache about a non-existent draft. He turned his head and exhaled smoke out of the side of his mouth.

Sadie pulled into the parking lot when they got to the four-story medical building, and stopped next to the entrance. While she went to park the car, he pulled out his silver Zippo and tapped a cigarette out of the pack. He placed it between his lips, cupped his hand over the cigarette, and flicked open the lighter. It was one continuous motion. Indeed, much of his life had become a series of automatic gestures and movements, from pivoting out of bed every morning, to brushing his teeth and taking his medications at night. For both of them, there was little spontaneity, little that ever changed.

After Sadie found a space, she sat back and took a few breaths to let her body relax. Sadie always knew how long to give him to finish his cigarette. And she always took long enough so that he would start to wonder why it had to take her so goddamn long. She reached into her pocketbook and pulled out a silver flask, dented and tarnished, held it to her mouth – almost caressing it – and took one sip, and then another. She pulled down the sun visor to examine her wrinkled face in the vanity mirror. She ran her fingers through her thinning gray hair. Lately, no matter how carefully she tried to apply her lipstick, it was always somewhat askew. Oh...the hell with it, she thought. Who cares what I look like, anyway? She took one more swig and felt its warmth. Then she got out of the car, locked the door and went to join her husband.

As Saul took a last drag from his cigarette, he started hacking – deep, phlegmy, spasmodic eruptions.

After Saul caught his breath, they walked into the building and took the elevator up to Dr. Andretski’s third-floor office. Already, there was a roomful of people waiting.

The receptionist slid open a glass window and handed them a clipboard.“Write your name on the sign-in sheet,” she said. Then, “Have you ever been here before?”

Before Saul could answer, his wife said, “He was here years ago. I can never get him to go to a doctor until it’s too late. He just won’t listen.”

It used to be their own private joke when his wife ordered for him at a restaurant. To the waiter: “She’ll tell you want I want.” But lately, Sadie interrupted him or didn’t even let him get a word out. This used to get Saul frustrated but he let her get away with it because she had always had the gift for gab. The more she talked to other people, the less she needed to talk to him, and, thus, the more she left him alone. And that was just fine with him.

The receptionist hit several keys on the computer. “Your wife is right. The last time was over five years ago.” She made it a point to hand Sadie a clipboard and a pen and asked her to complete the four-page form.

Saul piped up. “Nothing’s changed. We haven’t moved. My Medicare number and the Part B insurance are still the same. And my date of birth hasn’t changed, either.”

“It’s required, Saul,” the receptionist said. “We need to have the latest information on file.”

It’s Mr. Rosen, goddam it, Saul wanted to shout. I think I’m old enough to have earned that much respect. But, as always, he swallowed his indignation to keep the peace.

They sat down. Sadie took her reading glasses out of the worn faux-leather case in her pocketbook and began filling out the form. She already had all of his vital information memorized so she didn’t have to ask him anything. Saul picked up a dog-eared travel magazine and began to leaf through it.

“Here,” she said, when she was done. “Sign right here.” Sadie pointed to a line on the page. “I already dated it.”

Sadie got up and handed the clipboard to the receptionist. No one had budged; the same people were still in place. “Do you know how long it’ll be?”

“I’m really sorry. The doctor has had several emergencies. It’s a Jewish holiday and he’s covering for two other doctors.” The receptionist pointed to a printed sign taped to the window that read Expect 1-2 hours waiting time. We’re sorry for any inconvenience. Sadie was suddenly infuriated that her husband had chosen the second day of Passover to visit the doctor.

The receptionist handed her a large metal ring with a dangling key. “Outside, to your right.”

Sadie left the waiting room without glancing at her husband, who hadn’t bothered to look up. She would find a pretense to get away from him so that she could drink from her flask and he would pretend to not know what was going on. Sometimes he’d even act surprised – “Oh! Where were you?” – when she came back and plopped down next to him. They both knew their steps in their pas de deux.

When she returned, a young man with a temporary bandage and eye patch, who had been sitting next to her, stood up, picked up another magazine, and then sat down across from them. He didn’t need two eyes to be disgusted – to be repulsed by the odor of alcohol that oozed from her pores, worsened by the overlay of cheap perfume. And sitting beside her, the husband reeked of stale, rancid smoke. He noticed that the husband’s frayed pants and the burn holes. What a pair, he thought. Shoot me if I ever get to be like them. He shook his head and went back to reading with his one good eye.

From time to time, he glanced at the couple. The husband was still leafing through the same magazine. The wife sat stiffly, holding and rubbing her thin, bony wrist with gnarled fingers. Her thick, oversized glasses magnified her dark, impenetrable eyes. The edges of her mouth were pulled down. There was no humor, no let up, no relief in her expression. From time to time, she glanced at her watch, shook her head, and then switched hands. She sat glaring into space until she got up again to ask for the key.

After her second trip to the bathroom, she knocked on the glass to get the receptionist’s attention. “Do you know how much longer it’s going to be?” By then, some of the patients had been ushered inside, and more had arrived, signed the sheet and taken their places on the plastic chairs.

“There’s only one more before you,” the receptionist answered, with an untroubled laugh. “It won’t be long.”

“It’s already been over two hours.” Sadie started to raise her voice but eased off. She was furious at herself, and, by extension, at her husband, because she hadn’t thought to hide an extra bottle of vodka under the driver’s seat.

The young man knew he was next, for everyone else in the waiting room had arrived after him. Although he had been surreptitiously observing Saul and Sadie, he knew nothing about what really went on between them. He had no way of knowing that the couple had once been vibrant and outgoing – that they had often taken the train into the city to attend a Broadway show, or to go to an experimental theater or to one of the off-off Broadway shows that they preferred much more; that they had gone to museums and galleries and to esoteric foreign movies at art theaters; that they had taken the subway and walked the city streets before Times Square was Disneyfied – when crime was on everyone’s mind and many their friends thought they were crazy.

And long before that, that they had two children to whom they were devoted to and whom they doted on. They also had a fox terrier and they joked that they had the ideal nuclear family with 2.2 children. Saul worked long hours at the pharmacy and Sadie stayed home to care for the kids. They had their share of troubles, especially after a downturn in business at Saul’s store, but they did everything they could to make their marriage work and to provide for their children.

But that was then. Now, instead of sitting on mismatched seats at a hole-in-the-wall theater, they spent much of their time in waiting rooms acting out their own personal drama – at the cardiologist for his arrhythmia, at the nephrologist for her kidney problems, at the pulmonologist for his worsening emphysema, at the rheumatologist for their debilitating arthritic conditions, at the gynecologist, where he felt like a schmuck, sitting among women in the waiting room with his wife’s pocketbook on his lap. All the waiting and then the bad news, which came more often than not, sapped what strength they had.

Because most of their friends and acquaintances had died or moved to Florida, which they thought was the same thing, they had no one to commiserate with. It constantly pained them that their surviving child – their “baby” – had turned his back on them when they wouldn’t, couldn’t, accept his homosexuality. When they lost their childless daughter to cancer, Sadie found solace in the bottle. When their son moved away and out of their lives, her drinking got even worse. Privately, both Sadie and Saul wished that they could have done things differently, but they could never find a way to cry out in anguish or just to cry together in remorse. The young man could not have possibly imagined what they had been going through.

He gathered his belongings, stood up and stretched. He was stiff from the hours of sitting. She held the door open for him and said, “Exam room two. The second one on the right.”

As he passed her, he said, “Finally. It’s been almost three hours. Maybe next time, I’ll bring a sleeping bag.” The words came out without the scorn that he actually felt.

The receptionist must have heard similar complaints so many times that his, even disguised as a joke, did not at all faze her. Without a pause, she answered, “I’m really sorry. Dr. Andretski always gives his patients the best care available.” Her carefully rehearsed words, devoid of any real apology, angered him more.

The nursing assistant soon joined Peter in the examination room. She cheerfully asked him, “How’s the eye today?” as she carefully removed his eyepatch.

“Well, it doesn’t hurt so much anymore.” Peter thought he had gotten something in his eye while doing yard work, so he tried to clean it out with dirty fingers and later, a Q-tip and saline solution. Throughout dinner which had passed for an abridged Seder, he could not stop from rubbing his eye. After a while, he could not keep it open. He found out in the emergency room later that evening that he had abraded his cornea. And when he showed up at Dr. Andretski’s office, to whom he had been referred, he was told he was lucky to have been squeezed into to the doctor’s busy schedule.

After the assistant placed eye drops into both eyes to dilate his pupils, he had to wait again before the doctor could examine him. With the exam room door open, he could hear the old man and woman in the hallway just outside complaining to the receptionist. Saul was whining: “You know, time is money,” and “I have plenty of important things to do” – as if he actually had – and then Sadie asked, slurring her words, why the doctor over-booked his appointments, and insisted that it was so inconvenient for everyone. When the receptionist responded with a light-hearted, “I’m really sorry …” Peter started to laugh out loud. Although Peter had to agree with them, his initial disgust did not lessen. He still considered them obnoxious, foul-tempered and below contempt. Again, Peter thought, If I ever get that way, shoot me. And don’t miss.

After a lengthy examination, Dr. Andretski reassured Peter that his eye would heal over in a few days, but it would take six to eight weeks or more for it to fully mend. He gave Peter a sample tube of over-the-counter ointment and wrote two prescriptions for eye drops. On the way out, Peter gave the receptionist a check for the insurance co-pay, and booked a follow-up appointment for early the next week.

When Peter got to his car, the parking lot had emptied. He called Judith, his wife.

“Jesus, Jude. Gimme a break.” And Peter angrily tapped End Call and tossed his cell phone on the console.

He sat strangling the steering wheel, shaking his head, and catching his breath. What a pain in the ass, he thought. She can be so goddam annoying.

He reached over and pulled a gray cloth bag from the glove compartment. He set it in his lap, took out a film cannister and a corncob pipe. He checked the screen inside the bowl, then tapped several crushed marijuana leaves into the pipe until the bowl was full. He looked around and cracked open the car window. He lit the pipe, inhaled deeply, and held the smoke in his lungs. But he waited too long and began coughing. Just like an amateur. After finishing the pipeful, he felt much calmer. He stuck the pipe out of the window, knocked out the ash and put his pipe and cannister back in the bag. He turned on the ignition, cautiously drove out of the parking lot, and then took his sweet time getting home.

When he walked into his house, Judith came from the kitchen to meet him at the door. Peter heard the muffled sounds of Sesame Street from the family room. When the television was on, their two children were in their own world. At least they wouldn’t run in right away and bug him.

“I made pasta. Shells. Your favorite.” Neither felt it necessary to observe Passover.

“Yup,” Judith said with a smile. “I fed them and they already had their baths. We’ll have some time for ourselves.”

They hugged and as she held him, he heard her sniff, an almost inaudible inhalation. Nothing was said, but her embrace suddenly felt cooler, slightly more reluctant, slightly less endearing.

Peter looked at her, started to shake his head, but then nodded. “Give me a fuckin’ break, will ya?”

“Just once,” she hissed. She repeated, “Maybe, just once...” She was suddenly nauseated and sick to her stomach. She felt the pressure in her face that held back tears and she wanted to scream out at him. But she was always too afraid to say anything. She turned and paced back to the kitchen, leaving him standing alone at the front door.

He wanted to curse at her but he gritted his teeth when he remembered how the children were so terrified the last time he lost his temper. He slammed the door behind him as he walked out. He wanted to drive away and never come back, but, instead, he went out to the car to get his pouch. He sat on the front porch behind the overgrown evergreens, unable to be seen from the street, and he lit up another bowl.

The beauty of the cloudless sky after a crisp early spring day went unnoticed while Peter brooded and simmered. He mulled over his dead-end job – teaching junior high math to a bunch of inner-city ingrates, who wouldn’t give a rat’s ass if they didn’t learn a thing. And the administrators were only one step above the kids about giving a damn. What galled him most was the consistency of the inconsistency of curriculum, instruction, discipline, grades, scheduling, teacher ratings and on and on, ad nauseum, ad in-fucking-nitum. Yeah, it’s nice having a spring vacation, he thought. But then I’m going to have to go back to prepare the little bastards for the city-wide tests. After ten years of teaching, he was burnt out to a crisp.

Smoking his pipe on the front porch had been one of their accommodations. If Peter smoked outside, then he would not stink up the house. They assumed that the children, happily ensconced in the family room, wouldn’t realize what he was up to. Judith engaged in her own warped kind of plausible deniability, until the kids would ask, “Mommy? Where’s Daddy?” and she would have to make up excuses for his not being there while the food got cold and the kids would start to squabble. And she would soothe herself by polishing off the last of the Oreos that she hid in the freezer so the kids would not be constantly nagging her for “one more, Mommy, please!”

Judith knew that Peter’s pot-induced hunger would soon force him inside for dinner. She poured Diet Coke into two glasses filled with ice and then sat waiting, infuriated and overcome. She willed herself not to appear angry although her insides were tied up in a knot and she wanted to flee. But where would I go? What would I do? she always wondered. Who would want me like this – so goddam fat? She took several spoonfuls of shells and then hurriedly swallowed down a mouthful when she heard the metallic clank of the screen door.

Peter’s eyes were glassy and dilated, but Judith chose not to look up and, therefore, not to see. Peter noticed the much smaller portion of shells in Judith’s bowl and asked, “What’s the matter? Aren’t you hungry?” Judith cringed from the particularly abrasive edge in his voice.

“No. Not really...” and her voice trailed off. Judith had already eaten a bowl of shells with the kids, several hours before, but that was something that he didn’t have to know. Instead, she hoped that he’d think she was watching what she ate.

Judith’s weight had ballooned after the birth of their first child, eight years before. She was so discouraged when she ended up losing only a few pounds although the baby weighed in at nearly nine pounds. Judith had always battled a weight problem, first with prescribed amphetamines from a diet doctor when she was a teenager, and then with one fad diet after another. Atkins. Scarsdale. Weightwatchers. Jenny Craig. Nutrisystems. She had tried them all. Now, only subconsciously realizing it, she was in midst of a downward spiral. But her binge eating and her burgeoning weight were never mentioned, never a topic of conversation, as long as she kept her mouth shut about his ever-increasing pot-smoking. This was just another compromise that helped them keep their nine-year marriage together.

While Bert and Ernie babysat for the kids, Peter and Judith seethed and ate in silence, ate without even looking up. For one brief moment, he considered telling her about the couple he had been watching in the doctor’s office but he changed his mind. He was too stoned and still pissed off about her earlier accusation – “stoned again” – What a bitch! – a combination that made him much too reluctant about sharing anything with her, particularly himself.

Four towns away, in an almost-identical three bedroom house, Saul and Sadie Rosen had just gotten home and Sadie had handed the keys back to Saul. He trudged into the den, and picked up the remote. He sat down heavily on his burn-scarred lounger and lit another cigarette while Sadie went into the kitchen to warm leftovers in the microwave. As soon as she heard the voices of the talking heads on the five o’clock news, she reached into the dish cabinet and pulled out an unopened bottle of vodka. She unscrewed the cap and filled up a yahrzeit glass with her magical elixir. Only after she took her first evening sip, did a rasping sigh of relief come from deep within.

In one home, an eight-year-old child helped her baby brother count to 10, while in the other, an aged couple counted down their remaining, empty days. In one home, two people sat shoveling Ronzoni Number 22 shells into their mouths, while, in the other, an old man and his wife were separated by plaster walls and their own shrouds of obliviousness. In one home, there was still time, still hope for life, for redemption. But in the other, the clock was relentlessly winding down.

Rev 12 / June 9, 2004 .. Rev 14 / April 22, 2012 .. Rev 18 / April 11, 2014

-- Appeared in Grassroot Reflections Number 31, May 2014

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April 2014…Copyright © 2014, Lloyd B. Abrams

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