At the Ear, Nose, and Throat Clinic

One of those appointments you postpone until anxiety propels you to the phone, then have to wait too long for, to take an inconvenient time . . . Late in the day, an old man and I watch the minute hand on the waiting room wall. I’ve papers to grade, but he wants someone to talk to, and his attendant’s rude, so he turns his whiskery face to me: “Y’ know, I lived my whole life in Waltham, worked 40 years at the watch factory—oh, that city used to be so beautiful, now it’s a mess, those Cubans and Puerto Ricans, they ruined it.” Coiled in his wheelchair, he’s mad for company, probably scared he’s dying, * and so am I. I don’t remember Watch City as beautiful the year I was eleven, when Merle and I rode the Grove Street bus to Moody Street to shoplift haircurlers and Pond’s Vanishing Cream, nickel items at the Waltham Woolworth’s. It was an old factory town, wooden triple-deckers, water rats swimming in the oily river. Merle and I didn’t risk a furtive life of crime in our well-kempt Auburndale where we thought we were well-known, and canoers paddled the same Charles River past our homes. And I still wonder what could have vanished when we rubbed the mystery elixir on our silky cheeks? * His cheeks sucked in, this geezer could be my grandfather forty years ago, so I ignore his racist overture and agree Waltham was beautiful, as the attendant takes his Social Security card, and whistles: “Boy, are you old!” then mutters something else in Spanish. The number must be low. . . . “1936— that was the first year of Social Security!” the old guy brags. The kid forsakes our ancient history, flexes his muscles. He’s probably been listening to insults for an hour in the Elder Van, he’s bored and angry—why should he be nice? Yet hungry for a distracting fact or story, I encourage the grandfather, I want to be treated well myself some day, when I’ll need it even more than I do now. . . . My little bids for attention, my birds, fragile fluttering words, desire to be visible and seen. . . . “FDR was okay, wasn’t he?” I’m playing 90, it’s what I do to make us both less lonely, reminisce as if we’d shared the ’30s, as if I’d been there, come from Sicily or Limerick, a seamstress earning her hard living one town over. I always sat this way with Doc, years after he’d retired, his best treasure (besides my golden mother) a gold pocket watch, a Handsome Waltham watch— * a different time, when the things a person held or owned weren’t many but were permanent, a part of who you were. So his elegant watch confused me toward the idea my little dentist grandfather had some connection to the company, as if he’d labored there, a master craftsman, had been rewarded by a grateful boss. His bit of luxury, the swirling monogram on the back (which opened with a click), IR, for Isaac Rosenberg, timepiece connected by a chain to a safety pin at his frayed striped trouser pocket; another pin secured his Shawmut bankbook, deposits he’d made decades before * that I’d inherit, $214, Shawmut branch nearby the long-gone Waldorf Cafeteria where he idled weekday mornings with his cronies, also reminiscing, I suppose (although then I didn’t think of it), the Good Old Days before the motorcar, before their children moved away. Dexterity and skill gone, too, from his arthritic hands. He relished those mornings! The black-and-white tiled floor, the nearly empty tables, the Perfection Salad, Welsh rarebit, the “bloomberry pie.” The counterman. They serve an elegant porridge there, he told me, gourmet of the ordinary, State-of-Maine-ah grandfather, my Mainiac. The soon-to-be-widowed wives elsewhere, polishing mahogany veneer, or playing bridge, or shopping Coolidge Corner from butcher to baker in prescient black dresses. Old men and women so relieved to be rid of the burden of one another for a whole morning, of the tired bickering sentences of long American marriages, of pain and disappointment. What memories they’d had of courtships long since passed on to grandchildren, and half-false anyway, like studio photographs, mythic stories they could live with; now forgotten, the mistakes they’d been too fearful or devout to rectify. I miss that cafeteria, the whole idea of cafeterias, although Doc never took me, just pointed to it on our Sunday drive, repeating paeans to gray porridge, something no description’s glow could make me want. Waltham had them, too, free-fire zones a kid alone could enter with five cents for huge iced cookies, black-and-whites, * half chocolate, half vanilla, all Crisco and white sugar, chewed in gluttonous companionable half-light, wonderful— But who’d know that now? Who cares? Merle and I did everything subversive we could imagine—which wasn’t much. I’m sure I cruised Sin City in my mind, decayed old town—nowhere—but to me forbidden fruit: the 5 & 10, eyelash curlers, odd metal torture instruments I smuggled home that pinched my lids and made my lashes angle wildly up, delinquent startled in the bathroom mirror; Tangee lipsticks the size of my little finger, unflattering coral; pink girdles I’d eye furtively, wondering that I’d have to wriggle into one someday, or wear the bony corset my grandmother assured me was my fate. Oh, esoteric glamorous puzzle of the vanished vanishing cream . . . * Later, not so much later, the first day of my driver’s license, I drove the family station wagon down Moody Street and banged the traffic policeman’s rubber perch. He jumped down before it bounced the street, and yelled me over in a rage. Or maybe, he was kindly, it’s only my criminal terror I remember, of punishment fine-tuned, my ruined life, my new rights vanishing. Hardly a threat, I know now, the feckless cop. I gripped the steering wheel so hard to stop the huge recalcitrant Ford, doomed to lose my brand-new temporary license— How could I think, my budding power stripped, I’d ever get the chance to live or drive?