Waiting Room

Patricia Foster

David and I watch as two huge cranes move debris from a construction site outside the oncology waiting room window. We’re here for the results of a second CT scan (done earlier today), the first showing an anomalous spot on his left lung three months ago, a weird blotch of white the radiologist diagnosed as probable scar tissue from a recent infection. Today’s scan is for clarification. Around us, the waiting room is quiet, almost empty except for a gray-faced man hunched in his chair near the receptionist’s desk, his hands folded limply in his lap, his eyes closed as if he’s drowsing, and a woman in a scarlet sweater with bold blue eyes, staring fixedly at her magazine. The furniture here is soft and comfortable, the lights muted as if this is a place for rest and napping until the double doors swing open and a nurse calls out “Lawrence F” or “Sarah K” with such curt finality we all startle to attention, destined to follow her into the inner sanctum to be initiated into the secrets of the body.

It’s been two years since David’s initial diagnoses——a rare cancer, eccrine porocarcinoma (cancer of the sweat glands)—a tumor surgically removed from his upper left buttocks, a perforator plus flap to cover the wound, and his body dutifully monitored every six months for metastases. Usually, we sit silently, reading or listening to a podcast, pretending to be somewhere else, but today David is nervous and fidgety. He keeps running his hands through his thick salt-and-pepper hair, shaking his head, then sighing. He looks again out the window, the sky gray and dour, the snow not quite melted, bunched in crusty heaps alongside the curbs. I watch as he picks up a magazine and almost immediately puts it back down, staring at the double doors as if wishing he could hide from the call of his name.

 “Did you ever have a secret place in childhood?” he asks suddenly, his voice so low I can barely hear. He rarely talks about his difficult childhood in Massachusetts, but after our trip to Worcester in early December, a place we wouldn’t have visited if he hadn’t had cancer, if we hadn’t had to stop in midstride, he’s begun to surprise me with memories.

“Did you?” I ask, uncertain if he simply needs distraction.

“Yeah, in the woods, not far from Aunt Adeline’s house in Sturbridge.” Now, he leans closer to me, his hands going still. I know that he lived with Aunt Adeline and Uncle John (foster parents he called “aunt” and “uncle” to make them seem familial rather than institutional) from age three-and-a-half to almost eight years. “I don’t even know why I chose it, but once I saw it, I knew.”

Hiding. I nod. A concept familiar to both of us. I had my own spot near the banks of the Magnolia River in Alabama where I watched the seaweed flutter and sway, the minnows drifting in zigzags through the blue-grey water.

“I had another place inside the house”—David smiles—“where I could get behind the wall in the bathroom linen closet.”

“Behind the wall?” I raise an eyebrow. From the corner of my eye, I notice a woman in a wool turban wander into the room and sit near the window. “How is that possible?”

“There was a raw, unfinished space between the shelves and the tub and once I stepped over the plumbing pipes, I had just enough room to squeeze in and hide. No one knew where I was, right in the center of the house, two doors down from the kitchen. I’d hear Aunt Adeline calling me, ‘Da-vid, Da-vid,’ but I didn’t answer. Later when they asked where I was, I’d say, ‘Aunt Adeline, I was in the house.’”

“Scoundrel.” I shake my head. “Letter of the law.”

To my surprise, David goes quiet, nodding as if caught by the memory.

In my mind, I see him, a skinny, freckled five-year-old crouched in a square no wider than a pizza box, his bony legs still, his mind flickering in the dim light. Maybe he silently prayed for a water gun, a bright-colored plastic one to surprise Buzzy, the neighbor kid with the superior flattop, hoping to ambush him from the woods, then dart away. Maybe he listened to the hum of the pipes or the soft mumble of voices in the house or the tingling awareness of his own breath. He was hidden away. In the heart of the house.

“Elaine D,” the nurse calls out, the double doors thrust open. For a moment, the air tightens. When the small turbaned woman rises, edging towards the door, we watch covertly, then drift back into our fog of talk. Not yet. Not yet.

“I could stay there for thirty minutes,” David says, gazing out the window, the cranes poised in midair, his eyes softer. “My secret.”

“I bet Aunt Adeline was worried,” I say, “unable to find you.” Because I know only bits and pieces of David’s childhood history, I let myself imagine the other side of the story: Aunt Adeline prowling the house, searching for him. I see her, a small, sturdy, pleasant looking woman in her early fifties with dark shoulder-length hair, dressed in one of those ubiquitous cotton-rayon housedresses like my grandmother used to wear. Does she call to him from the kitchen, “David, now where are you, child?” her voice curious and hopeful? After a few minutes of silence with only the clock ticking, does she mutter, “Where does that boy go?” then wander through the house, down the hall and into his small bedroom—the first room he’s ever had to himself, his pajamas scattered on the floor as if the outside world claims him the moment he opens his eyes and he can’t be bothered with order? Does she knock on Betty’s and Helen’s door, the two foster girls who have lived with her and John in this house for so long she’s begun to think of them as daughters? She knows they’re both gone—Betty to high school, Helen to work—but she knocks by instinct, then slowly opens the door to their made-up beds, the cloudy oval mirror and a flannel robe on the hook inside the open closet door. “David,” she calls softly, her eyes sweeping side to side, searching, but only dust motes collide in the air with a faint smell of face powder.

There’s no reason to go upstairs to the apartment where her seventy-five-year-old mother lives because the boy knows not to intrude—her mother likes her privacy—though he’s drawn to the smell of rhubarb and apple pies and sometimes he claims the stairs to play with his trucks or an assortment of rocks he arranges in endless combinations.

The boy is most likely out in the yard, she thinks, or in the woods scrambling about, entertaining himself. He’s good at that, at making up stories and playacting different roles. She can see him talking to himself or charging into what must surely be a fierce battle with a stick, whacking at the bushes and pine needles, his face scowling with determination. Whatever it is, he wants to win. She goes out the back steps and looks out at the yard, past the small garden where the wild rhubarb grows, past the perimeter of the yard where the woods begin. Not dense woods, but scrub oaks, maples and pines and lots of bramble. “Da-vid,” I imagine her calling again, louder this time. She isn’t angry—it’s not in her nature—merely perplexed.

Because David’s lived with her and John for almost two years, she knows the flicker of his pale blue eyes in the morning and his utter concentration when he’s trying to trap a frog in the pond or catch a grasshopper near the back door. At night, he goes to sleep so suddenly, it’s as if a door opens and he falls through, his body dead weight.

“I could hear Aunt Adeline calling,” David says, interrupting my revery, “but she never found my secret place. I guess she didn’t know about hiding.”

“Or maybe she had her own secret place and you never found hers,” I tease.

“Some people don’t need to hide.”

Everybody hides, I want to say. Count on it. Instead, I say, “I’m sure she kept looking. I mean, how scary when you can’t find your kid.”

“I always came out,” David says as if this resolves everything.

I see my husband, both as a little boy and as an adult, enacting a ritual he’ll never completely let go. For years, he’s been secretive, his past hidden, a mystery held close. “I don’t remember,” he’d say if I asked about his childhood in foster care. “I don’t know.’” Here and then there. Why not stay in the hiding place, in the fictive present, recreating yourself, waiting to become the person you imagine yourself to be rather than to move out into a world that baffles and paralyzes, where your fate can be so easily misguided by circumstances and authorities—state supervisors, caseworkers, caretakers, doctors—who manage your life?

To my surprise, eighteen months after his cancer surgery, David felt safe enough and curious enough to write to the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families and ask for his foster care files: sixty-nine pages of notes about his early life documented by Massachusetts social workers, judges, and doctors. The day they arrived, we sat together on our couch in the living room and read the pages, both relieved and horrified by his experience, stunned by the chorus of notes about him, his mother, and his foster mothers. According to the files, he came to Adeline and John after “a failure to adjust” in his previous foster homes where he was “unsettled by his birth mother’s erratic and overly demonstrative visits” and his “former foster mothers’ slackness.” We were both stunned to read he’d been placed in foster care at three-and-a-half months of age, shuttled from one home to another, his childhood a series of unfamiliar places, a new mother always at the center.

Perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised that he was so distressed at being moved to his sixth home, to Adeline’s and John’s, thirty-five miles from Worcester—the caseworker feared he’d become ill, his hands perspiring, his forehead warm, his anxiety high. And yet, two days later, when she returned to check on him, “He immediately tells visitor that he does not want to go in her car and wants to stay where he is.” In two weeks, she finds him playing happily outdoors “with his little cart and his tricycle” and when he sees her “he shakes his head very solemnly and says he doesn’t intend to go anywhere else.”

Now, in the dim light of the waiting room, I notice that my sixty-four-year-old husband looks washed out, like an overexposed photograph—a man without sleep—but I give him back his five-year-old freckled face, his thin-lipped smile.

“Tell me about Aunt Adeline,” I say, though usually I approach the subject of his past from a slant: hinting, nudging, suggesting. Even after we read the foster care files, David provides mostly cryptic descriptions of the people from his childhood as if “brownish hair,” “baked great cakes,” or “a mean bastard” will be enough.

 “More,” I keep saying. “Tell me more.”

“Well, Aunt Adeline always talked to me,” he says now, as if this is the heart of the matter. He shifts his knee closer to mine. “She taught me my alphabet and my numbers when I was five so I could write my name and read the words on the boxes in the kitchen, especially CHEERIOS and CORNFLAKES, and she” –his voice softens—“she listened while I recited and talked about them.” He looks at me, then glances away. “She never yelled at me and always made sure I had breakfast, clean clothes, and baths every week.”

I nod. This seems in many ways familiar and elemental, comments I’ve already heard: a caretaker who doesn’t yell and provides the essentials, but also one who goes a step further, teaching a boy to read and write his name, to complicate himself. And yet this is the first time he’s emphasized how important it was that Aunt Adeline listened, attending to his words, letting him tell stories, allowing a voice. From our earlier conversation, I know that when David was nine or ten years old—he’d moved back to his mother’s care at age eight—he had a photographic memory; that is, he could watch a thirty-minute TV program, then recite all the lines of dialogue to his three-year-old half-brother, acting out each part—doing the expressions and hand motions and accents—to keep his attention. He could listen to a recording of songs and remember all the words, the inflection, the pacing, the style, the shifts in syntax. Listening to words jolted his brain; with reading he was slower, slightly dyslexic before schools had resources or therapies for treating this disorder. By the time he was in sixth grade, the school system in Worcester, Massachusetts, wanted to place him in a school for accelerated students, but when the principal asked permission from his biological mother and stepfather to move him to this new school, his parents refused. “Too much trouble,” they said as if education was an inconvenience, as if they’d never listened to him.

I think of Aunt Adeline as the opposite, a woman who recognized a child’s stories as his way of making sense of the world, a woman who saw learning as necessary, requiring both structure and attention. According to Attachment Theory—a philosophy I studied after reading David’s foster care files—much of the success of a child’s attachment depends on the caregiver. “Most children placed with ‘autonomous’ caregivers formed secure attachments,” one of the articles said, defining an autonomous caregiver as someone who saw relationships as meaningful and important, whose acts were responsive and contingent. “From the beginning,” the caseworker noted, “David has responded remarkably well to the foster mother (Aunt Adeline).” And according to Aunt Adeline, “he is amenable in every way to her supervision, and she believes he is making an excellent adjustment.” The caseworker further wrote, “David has a great deal of affection in this home,” making him feel safe and loved.

Though I know it’s romantic—my desire to impose goodness—I imagine Aunt Adeline in her kitchen, dropping soft dough by the spoonful into a simmering broth while David prattles on about his play with Buzzy in the woods. I see her hanging clothes on the line, putting methylate on his cuts, tugging off David’s cap in church, laughing at a repeated joke. Simple, ordinary acts for a boy who had been moved too many times and needed steadiness and comfort. Ironically, foster care in the early years was referred to as a “waiting room” for the very reason that it was meant to be a temporary solution, with temporary parents. Alas, that seldom happens. David stayed in foster care for over seven years until his mother married and reclaimed him.

 “The only time I remember Aunt Adeline getting upset,” David says, turning towards me, “was when I trimmed her bedroom curtains even with the sill.”

“Uh-oh!” I laugh. “That couldn’t be good.”

“Yeah, my five-year-old aesthetic.”

We both smirk, hiding our smiles. “I think she was surprised as much as anything. You know, just coming into the room and seeing those curtains—” He’s about to tell me more when the double doors swing open and the nurse calls out, “David W.”       

 And just like that, we stop talking, the past receding, the present demanding our attention as we follow the nurse through the double doors, leaving Aunt Adeline’s sheared curtains behind.

For twenty minutes, David and I sit side by side in a small examination room, silent, waiting for Dr. Mo, the oncologist, while the nurse flits in, taking David’s blood pressure, his temperature, his oxygen level, then leaves. There’s no pretense now, the air charged. The test results are about to be revealed, signifying whether cancerous cells are again hiding in his body, perhaps metastasizing to the lungs or the lymph nodes or the liver. We sit quietly, the overhead lights bright and annoying, the examining table formidable, the past eclipsed. No hiding places here. I feel David’s body clench, his knee tight against mine.

“Hello, young people!” Dr. Mo’s voice booms as he strides into the room, his body compact and brisk. No matter that we’re twenty years his senior, his voice is code, signal, a foreshadowing of the results. The room softens. Heat rushes to my face. David’s knee relaxes. “Everything’s looking good,” Dr. Mo says, smiling at us as if we’ve just won a prize while he nods for us to come closer to the computer to look at the scan. And then, “You’re good to go,” he says.

Though we’ve seen him for less than five minutes, we can’t leave the hospital fast enough.

Hours later, I’m still absorbing Dr. Mo’s good news while David sprawls on the couch, taking a nap. I too close my eyes, but instead of the doctor’s voice, I’m pulled back to the finale of David’s story. On the ride home, he picked up his memory of Aunt Adeline, detailing again the shock on her face when she came into the room and saw her gingham curtains shorn, the scissors still in David’s hands.

 “I made them even. That’s what I told her,” David said with a seriousness that surprised me as we drove down Burlington Street in Iowa City. “And despite her irritation, I want to imagine she sorta smiled. . . you know, because I’d noticed her curtains.” He glanced at me. “But she was strict about the scissors. She held out her hand for them and told me to sit beside her on the bed.”

David said that as they sat together, she looked at the curtains—strings dangling in places, a ragged gap at the end—then said, “I know you wanted to do this, dear, but you must remember to always ask permission first. You see, I made these curtains, and they matter to me. I like to open them in the morning, see the sunlight and the sky, then close them at night.” After saying this, my husband paused, staring out at the darkening sky.

“What happened after that?” I asked.

“She put the scissors away and reminded me I’d need to tell Uncle John that night.”

“A spanking?”

David laughed. “Yep! And when there was a punishment, Uncle John simply said, ‘Start running.’ I raced down the hall to the old Singer sewing machine, bent over, and he gave me one swat on the behind.”

He looked up and smiled. “Punishment over and done.”

While David sleeps, I sip a cup of tea, steam rising to my face, softening my breath. After David left Aunt Adeline’s house at age seven and a half, he lost touch with her; his parents’ lives were restless, chaotic, and sometimes violent, a place where he had to learn once again to hide. Living with his birth mother, there were no opportunities to talk to Aunt Adeline, to visit her or even to acknowledge his longing to see her as everyone told him he was so “very, very lucky to be back with his real mother.”

On impulse, I search online for information about Aunt Adeline, something I’ve been too busy with graduate classes and caretaking this year to do. Though I doubt I’ll find much, when a link pops up, I feel a certain pride. Opening it, I discover it is a death notice, a fact that elicits an unexpected ripple of sadness. Adeline E. Partlow died in Southbridge, Massachusetts, on November 26, 1997, at the age of eighty-eight. There is no obituary. There are no photos. There are no descendants, no survivors, no legacies: Aunt Adeline had no biological children. There is no mention of a burial, a grave, or even a memorial. No, there is just a single line: a name, a place, a date of death, an age.

As I print out the page to show David when he wakes, I remember a day years ago when we sat in his study watching Olive Kitteridge. After seeing a difficult scene of Olive’s son leaving Maine for California, David put the show on pause. “Once I left Worcester for San Francisco in my twenties, I forgot all about my mother and stepfather and, well, family.”

“Really? All of them?” I couldn’t imagine such a thing.      

For a moment, David sat very still, and then he turned to me. “Except Aunt Adeline. She was more family to me than anyone.”

Now I look at the obituary. I imagine David reading these sparse words about the woman who cared for him, the woman who taught him about family, about generosity and belonging, and then I see him grabbing a pen and writing the word “Mother.”

Notes

All references to David’s foster care are from The Commonwealth of Massachusetts Executive Office of Health and Human Services, Department of Children and Families, 600 Washington Street, 6th Floor, Boston, MA 02111; file delivery dated February 10, 2014.

Patricia Foster is the author of All the Lost Girls (PEN Award), Just beneath My Skin, Girl from Soldier Creek (SFA Novel Award), Written in the Sky: Lessons of a Southern Daughter (Hall-Waters Prize for Distinguished Southern Writing), and a forthcoming memoir, The New World.  She is the editor of four anthologies, including Minding the Body: Women Writers on Body and Soul.  She has received a Pushcart Prize, a Clarence Cason Award, a Theodore Hoepfner Award, a Dean’s Scholar Award, a Florida Arts Council Award, a Yaddo Fellowship, a Carl Klaus Teaching Award, and was a juror for the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize in Nonfiction (Yale University).  She graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been a professor in the MFA Program in Nonfiction at the University of Iowa for over twenty-five years.  She has also taught writing in France, Australia, Italy, the Czech Republic, and Spain.