The Waiting Room

I'm bored. I'm early and I'm bored. I'm waiting in this dingy little room to see the shrink, no correct that - "licensed social worker" - my parents are too cheap to get a real shrink - to explain to him "what's going on with me."

What's going on with me is that I am flunking out of high school. Mr. and Mrs. Cannon's pride and joy, always-in-advanced-classes daughter, has taken the plunge and is doing really badly in that preppy enclave they say will "prepare me for my future life."

There's one couch in here, two chairs, and a coffee table with all the obligatory magazines. Anything you can sit on is a mustard-yellow vinyl that makes farting sounds when you move. I'm sitting on one of the chairs, trying not to move. There are no windows. An overhead fan whirls desultorily overhead. By the door to the shrink's office is a desk, behind which a wrinkled, white-haired receptionist sits. She peers up periodically from her computer screen to give me snake eyes. She looks like a grandmotherly type. The kind who'd tell you, "You don't have to go and be like that," her old lady lips all drooping and tremulous, while she gave you an Indian burn to drive the point home.

The only other person in the room is this girl who looks like she's some model/actress wannabe. I'm guessing she's about twenty-three. She's wearing the kind of clothes you see on the mannequins at Macy's. This summer's colors are orange and turquoise, so she wears both - an orange blouse rolled up to her elbows and turquoise Capri pants. Sequined orange sandals adorn her feet. Her toenails are painted a vibrant red. She's forgotten that her fingernails should match, or maybe she just doesn't bother anymore - they're chewed to the quick. Her white hair is cut short into soft feathery spikes sticking out at odd angles from her head.

She's pretending to read The New Yorker, but every once and awhile she sneaks a look at me. I can picture what she's thinking - that I'm some overanxious, eager-to-please chunky girl here to get some diet tips and be straightened out. I contemplate a tantric place in the middle of my stomach like the yoga tapes always talk about and visualize the model's white spiky hair falling out like a gentle snow upon a green meadow.

"Hey," Spiky says suddenly. "Do you have the time?"

I tssk at the interruption to my meditation and look pointedly at the clock above Snake Eyes' desk.

"Oh," Spiky says, having some sense to act embarrassed.

She starts fumbling in her purse. I can tell she's looking for a cigarette. "There's no smoking in here," the old me would have told her. The new me waits for Snake Eyes to do it.

In about a minute Spiky finds it, a cellophane-wrapped package of Virginia Slims that she grasps in her hand like a candle at Lourdes.

With preternatural timing, Snake Eyes looks up from her computer screen. Her eyes goggle in alarm. "Miss Fiore!" she hisses, emphasizing the word "Miss." "There is no smoking in here!"

Having clearly outed Spiky as a single, delusional loser, Snake Eyes returns to her labors at her computer, which I suspect displays a game of solitaire. You can hear the flick, flick, flick of cards being electronically dealt.

Spiky turns red and shoves the package of cigarettes back into her purse. She catches me staring and for some reason takes this as an invitation to start talking to me.

"I don't have time for this," Spiky says. "My boyfriend, Louis, wanted me come here. This'll make Louis happy in the short run, but it won't last." She snorts, "It won't even give me any prestige. Anyone who's anyone sees a therapist. Except that I can't afford a real therapist. Not the kind who could do me any good and give me what I need."

"You know that don't you?" Spiky says, looking at me intently. "He can't prescribe anything for you." She taps her long slender fingers on her turquoise-clad legs. "Anyway, what I have is chemical. So what I need are some pills."

Spiky breathes in and out. On that last inhale I start counting, but eventually she exhales. I've read that manic phases can sometimes precede a violent act, so I watch her carefully.

Then Spiky lets loose. "God, this office is like a freaking death trap. You'd think they could manage to put a freaking window in here. I'm GROWING FREAKING OLD IN HERE!"

As if even she recognizes that was over the top, Spiky makes a show of searching in her purse for tissues. "Don't mind me," she sniffs pathetically.

I close my mouth, which is admittedly hanging open after this speech. "Exactly, what kind of prescription are you imagining I need?" I ask.

Spiky's eyes widen, her brain rewinding the conversation.

She clears her throat and laughs. "Well, sorree," she says. "Look, I didn't mean to presume. It's a nervous habit. Louis tells me all the time - I say inappropriate things. I can't please that man." She laughs again.

I start to say, "Louis sounds like a......" but Snake Eyes, ever alert, harrumphs and cuts me off.

But Spiky gets it. "No, he's not really. He just wants me fulfill my potential. See, I'm a model and he's a director and I'm trying to get into acting but he can't really help me. I have to do it on my own, he says. And I wholeheartedly agree."

"Wholeheartedly," she repeats, shooting me a sideways glance.

She looks at her watch and asks Snake Eyes when the therapist is going to be in, but she calls him "Joe," which is his first name. Snake Eyes bristles at this familiarity and tells us that "Mr. Moran" is running a bit late. Spiky laughs - it's more of a bark, and that tees off Snake Eyes some more. This time there's no infraction she can charge us with so she has to go back to her game of solitaire, but I can tell that she is fuming.

I'm a little in Spiky's corner now.

"So what kind of modeling do you do?" I ask.

"Well," Spiky hesitates, "I'm a catalog model. Ok, so it's not the most glamorous kind of model, though Louis says I shouldn't tell people that. I should just say I'm a runway model and not diminish myself." She rummages through her purse. Then she sneaks me a look. "So like, what is your problem? Teen addiction? Boyfriend trouble?"

I shrug.

"I used to be a good girl," I say, "and I'm not anymore. My parents want to fix me."

"Oh yeah?" she says. "Just like that?"

She acts like I'm putting her on.

But it really was like that. One day I was a good girl, a straight A student, maybe a little short of those extra curricular activities that make it easier to get into those really good schools, the next day I am sitting in the cafeteria at school with all the other good girls, my so-called friends, and I am thinking that I really can't stand them and if I walk outside and into the path of an oncoming bus, they'd all be excited but not one of them would be really sorry.

Or maybe it starts before then, at a dinner party where I am once again the daughter in third person. She who is going to Yale. She who gets all A's. She who could lose a few pounds but we are so proud of her. There She is, reflected in dad's poindexter glasses, being chewed on by mom in dainty little bites like the evening's roast beef. She who is invisible.

And then the cosmic order of the universe is tilted by She who is me.

At first it's like a game. I still study. I know all the right answers on tests; I just don't put them down. I draw Christmas tree patterns as I fill in the bubbles of the answer sheets with my number two pencil.

Then I don't study.

Then I don't know the answers and I start wondering if I ever was really smart in the first place. Maybe they are just finding out the truth. Tests don't lie after all.

Then I stop eating lunches with the good girls. Or is it that they can never find my table in the cafeteria anymore?

But I'm like all, "So what. Who needs you?"

I manage to lose some weight because it's just more interesting to look scary and unapproachable at lunch than to eat with a bunch of morons.

One day I even get into a fight, pushing this big girl who was always in my face when I was a goody-goody girl. I push her so hard that she slams into the water fountain and hurts her back.

Hey, back injuries are easy to fake.

So here I am.

But I don't say any of this to Spiky.

Instead I sneer, "Yeah, just like that."

I can tell she's a bit taken aback by my tone.

"Well, don't take it personally," she says. "I didn't mean anything by it. I just mean that changing your personality isn't easy. I should know."

She picks at some invisible hanging threads on her sweater.

"I was a lot less polished before I met Louis and decided to get my act together. I mean even before I was a model, I was kind of clumsy, chunky. I used to play soccer. I was a goalie." Spiky laughs, snorting. "Can you imagine?"

"But modeling helped me," she nods, like someone born again. "I listened to what people told me instead of being just another pretty face. I learned from people. And then I met Louis. Life has been a lot different since."

Spiky smiles widely, but her eyes are kind of watery.

Moran finally shows up. His curly hair is all damp and pressed against his head from the rain and he shakes his umbrella and his coat like a big dog shaking out his fur. He is such a nerd. I am a little bit fond of him. He is the man I might have fallen in love with if I had stayed the old me.

He greets Snake Eyes who positively beams at him. He waves a brief hi at me and Spiky, but avoids too much eye contact, saving it for inside the office.

After about five minutes Snake Eyes calls out "Miss Fiore" once again emphasizing the "Miss" part.

Miss single loser.

Spiky grimaces and looks at me anxiously, then flounces into the office like someone going into a casting call.

I imagine what she tells Moran - Joe, she'll call him, staring earnestly into his eyes.

Maybe it's tragic.

Maybe it's ordinary.

Maybe she tells him that it's killing her that all her dreams are common.

To want to be beautiful.

To be loved by someone other than that loser, Louis.

But at least by Louis.

Maybe she tells him about the dream. The one where she's standing in dark water, unable to see her feet, then her legs, then her thighs. The water creeps up and she digs her toes into the sand and from the waist down, she imagines herself to be a sea creature.

Maybe some of the things she tells him are even true.

But what good does it do her?

I picture a moment from my own past. I'm about five, twirling round and round in a sunlit room like a ballerina. I leap into the air and coming down I crash into a table and knock over a lamp. And I feel it so deeply, this terrible reckoning of a body being severed from its imaginings.

But you get over it. You have to don't you?

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