You'll See

Today, I had a client who was 40 minutes late for her appointment. Whenever this happens, when someone approaches me with the "your client is here" at a time when I have to ask if it's my 3 o'clock or my 2 o'clock, I'm initially really irritated. Forty minutes late into an hour long appointment is going to screw up the rest of the schedule. As I follow her to the front, she explains that her bus didn't pick her up on time, and I see that she is in a motorized chair.

She moves slowly, even though most of the moving she does is powered by a motor. She speaks slowly and measured, and I'm friendly but reserved because I feel very awkward, mostly because I don't know what to expect from this time we will be spending together.

She asks my name again, apologizing as she does so. I tell her not to worry and that I'm horrible with names, and she explains that it's a little embarrassing to have to ask someone's name after they've just told you a minute or two before, almost a punishment for not being a better listener, and that lesson is what will ensure we won't forget again. Her name is Becca.

She is very particular about her hair. The way she styles each area just so, speaking so frankly about her physical limitations and how they affect the way she lives and does, her sense of humor and intelligence underneath the affected speech. She is becoming fascinating to me. She wants to have a manicure as well, and I tell her that I'll see what we can do about fitting her in. My next appointment has not shown up, so now I will be spending a few more minutes with her.

She asks me to reshape her artificial nails. The corners are too sharp, and because her hands are often out of her control and can be spastic (her term), she needs a rounder edge so as not to scratch herself. She tells me she wants me to do her hair again next time, and if it's okay to ask for that. I tell her of course, and how I'd love to have her back, and I mean it. She suggests that she pay and call her ride before we finish and polish her nails so they won't get messed up. This is the first time I've ever had anyone say this, think that far ahead. I've spent the entire appointment with that curiosity lurking in the back of my mind, not wanting to be rude or awkward but wishing so much to find the right way to ask her how she came to be the way she is. She asks what I am interested in instead, and I say something vague about liking music and art and various things.

I will try to paraphrase this as closely as possible. Read it in the evenly slow and dramatic voice of a once-stately 60ish woman.

"I used to paint with watercolors. I would draw, sketch and paint so much when I was younger. I regret that I didn't do more. I had a family, we had four children, and I would always tell myself I could later, 'I can paint from 50 to 100, as much as I please.' I didn't know that things would be like this, though. But that's okay."

I do the thing where you feebly express condolences to someone you barely know, who probably doesn't really care that you're saying it. In the scheme of things, a strange girl she's never met before saying she's sorry to hear that, she's sorry you can't paint anymore probably sounds as ridiculous as it felt to say it.

"Oh no, it's okay. It could always be worse. Now I just paint them in my head."

I'm sitting across from her, polishing the nails on sometimes-trembling hands, only one spastic moment, one little nail fixed.

+++ Slowdive / Holding Our Breath