I Hate Telling Stories

I hate telling stories.  I’d rather just read  one any day. In fact, I don’t even know many stories, so what do you want?   Would you want to hear about Lady Tarzan Spider who lives outside my kitchen window; who reminds me that patience still exists in the Universe? She sits there waiting, in the center of her web, for hours.  She sits there for days sometimes. I think she is waiting for something to nourish her body or soul. At times she disappears for a while.  Just when I think she has chosen a new home, she reappears with a  dead fly or bug or something to nibble on. 

I call her Lady Tarzan, because if anything unwanted gets stuck in her web (for example a pine needle)  she grabs it and swings out away from the web on an unseen strand and drops it to the ground below.  “AH HA HA Yaah,” I imagine hearing.  She is beautiful, but I don’t want to tell you about her.  You wouldn’t care that she has stripes on her legs...all eight of them.  I’m sure it wouldn’t interest you that she is bigger than a quarter, bigger than a fifty-cent piece even.  She lives peacefully outside my kitchen window.

When I was a little girl, I used to have patience like that.  I used to go with my mother to Shriners Hospital in Portland, Oregon for my  checkups.  We would sit, with many other mothers and children, on chairs lined up in rows.  This was a clinic for “crippled children.” I sat patiently for hours.  I looked at big scrapbooks filled with pictures, made by the Shriners’ wives to entertain “the little crippled children.”  

We sat and waited. Finally a nurse, wearing sensible white shoes would come out holding a thick folder of papers and x-rays, which I proudly recognized as my  file.  She’d call my name.  My mother would gather up our coats and purses, bags, books, magazines and whatever else we had brought along to get us through the day of waiting.  We’d follow this nurse whose shoes would squeak on the floor waxed so shiny I could see in it reflections of shadows of gurneys and benches.  The long hallway led to the cubicle where we were told to wait for “The Doctor.”

Only crisp white curtains protected the cubicles from each other,  so if someone was softly crying in the next room, we could hear them.  But we didn’t hear much crying;  no laughing either.  This was not a place for funny stories.  I waited patiently, sitting on the cold table, stripped down to panties.  A small soft blanket,  that smelled warm but felt cold, was draped around my shoulders.

As usual, the doctor came in brusquely with younger doctors crowding in behind him.  (The doctors were always him  in those days.)

“Jump down here, little lady,” he ordered and lifted me down from  the table. The blanket, which covered my eleven-year-old modesty, slipped to the floor.  As he picked it up, brushing aside my shyness, he began telling my often told story to the others, who stared at my nakedness and did not seem to notice the red flush spreading into my cheeks.  He told of the polio contracted at four years old, of the hot-pack treatments,  the casts, braces, operations, hospitalizations, and  more braces.

I was patient as the adults gathered around me and took their time poking, pressing and measuring.  My mother sat quietly, listening and rarely asking any questions.  She imagined The Doctor would tell us if there  was anything we absolutely needed to know.  And today what we needed to know was that more x-rays and a refitting of the brace would be required.

“She’s growing,” he states to my mother; and “aren’t you, little girl?” to me.  Then they all file out, whispering to each other.  No one waves goodbye.  The Doctor just says, “See you in six months.”

Mother gathers up the purses, bags, magazines, my clothes, and her coat.  No use to put my clothes back on.  We move down the hall for more waiting.  Sitting on cold benches in a brightly lit hallway, we wait for my name to be called again.   I sit naked, with only pretty pink panties and a coat to protect my oh-so-delicate integrity.

Mother and I talk quietly.  “Well, that went pretty well, didn’t it?” she asks me hopefully.  I don’t answer, as I pull my library book out of the sack of stuff we brought.  I sit patiently and read.  Another nurse in comfortable white shoes eventually comes out and pronounces my name wrong.  But we recognize it.

I go into a room where there is a huge black and silver table.  I display my almost naked self again in front of another man.  “Take a deep breath now. I’m going to count to five. Hold it...that’s fine.  You can breathe now.  We’ll send these x-rays down to the Lab.”

Just one more stop and then we can leave. We  sit on a  bench near a sign that reads “Physical Therapy-Braces.”  We lean back against the wall and watch the other children go by with mothers who carry clothes over arms and lug bags of toys for entertainment purposes.  I sit turning the pages of another jumbo scrapbook.  This one is packed with pictures of cats cut from magazines, newspapers, and calendars; house cats, wild cats, cartoon cats, kittens.  The pages smell like paste.

Patiently, I wait for them to call my name.  Mother checks with a receptionist to see if they have forgotten us.  No they have just all gone to lunch.  We get our homemade peanut butter and jelly sandwiches out of the bag, eat, and wait.

The bench gets hard.  My coat gets scratchy.  We listen as children whine and cry, wanting to leave.  We want to leave too.  We want to go shopping.  Mother always takes me shopping after we finish at the crippled kids’ clinic.

I hate telling stories.  I wouldn’t even begin to try to tell you  how hard it was the last time I saw my mother. It was a couple of years ago. We were in the waiting room of a clinic.  We waited in front of my psychiatrist’s office.  We sat uncomfortably in comfortable chairs.  I thanked my mother for coming.  I knew it was hard for her.  She is almost crippled by osteoporosis now and often cannot get out of her wheelchair.  But she came.

We sat, waiting for my name to be called.  Neither one of us picked up a magazine from the end table.  We didn’t say anything that I can remember.   Finally it was time.

In the office, my mother sat in my usual chair, my therapist sat in her usual chair and I sat between them on a sofa.  I slowly took out my hurts, one by one, laying them in my mother’s lap.  She refused to look at them and laid them aside in a pile she thought maybe someone else would pick up.  She explained to me how she could not, and would not, let negativity into her life at this late date. 

The hour ended. We all stood up and walked to the door.  My mother thanked my therapist and said,  “Well, that went pretty well, don’t you think?”   I don’t remember getting to my car.  I don’t remember getting home.  But I did.

As the months go by, when the phone rings, I often wonder if this will be the time I will hear my name spoken by the one person who used to love me best.  I’m still waiting.  Lady Tarzan Spider, teach me patience.