yesterday, and arrange a time for the dry-cleaners to drop off the curtains.
Meanwhile, Camilla ruffles her carefully coiffed golden mane and pouts towards the mirror behind the front desk. “That horrible woman from PR is coming in a minute, deary me.” Her flawless, porcelain skin is taut with Botoxed perfection. “Honey, how do I look?”
She looks immaculate, as usual, like everything I’ve always wanted to be.
“You look tired,” I lie, but she’s already gone.
I pick up the phone, but I am only half-heartedly going through the motions. My mind is elsewhere. In about three hours, my best friend Sam will be here to take me to my doctor’s appointment. I can’t stop thinking about what the doctor might say.
I have become somewhat of a regular at Dr Horvath’s office. He’s a good doctor, tall with kind eyes and soft hands. It’s Dr George Horvath on the prescription pad, but to me he’s simply Georgie. He always greets me like family because he came here from Hungary on the same boat as my father and featured prominently in Papa’s recoveries and relapses. I suspect that’s why he feels obligated to sugar-coat his prognoses for me the same way Mama would crush aspirin into a spoonful of honey to hide the bitterness. It never works, and it destroys the taste of honey forever.
My father died when I was five years old. Mama protected me from the funeral, and neither she nor my grandmother spoke much about him again. I’ve seen many (though always the same) pictures and heard numerous (though always the same) stories, but I don’t remember much about him at all. I have been told we have the same eyes and the same slim build. I know that he, too, used to sneeze ten times in a row after a big meal and that he, too, loved to draw. But I don’t know how he held his head when he walked. I don’t know how he smelled in the mornings. I don’t know the sound of his laugh. I know there are stories, whispers behind closed doors, and strings of Hungarian gibberish as I leave the room. In a funny way, being at Dr Horvath’s surgery makes me feel close to my father. There’s a lot I don’t know about Papa, but I do know what it’s like sitting in that waiting room.
I finally put down the phone and look at my watch. Ten minutes to go. A group of three middle-aged women hover around the entrance, trying to sneak a look through the glass doors. I know the type: bored, WASP-y housewives with an afternoon to kill.
“Get rid of them, Lily,” Camilla orders. “I don’t have time for this.”
I block the door. They take one look at my shirt and try to push past me.
“Can I help you?” I ask.
“Not sure,” says the fat one, deciding that a smile is probably just too much trouble.
I try to field their questions with as much patience as I can muster. No, we are not open. Yes, we are preparing for a new exhibition. No, they cannot have a sneak peek. Yes, it’s an Aboriginal artist from Arnhem Land. No, he’s not a poor, primitive thing, but a successful, internationally-renowned painter whose works will sell for the price of a small townhouse. Yes, they can take a brochure. No, they can’t speak to the manager. I watch them walk away in a huff, back to their immaculate BMWs, off to pick up their private-school kids, on their way home to tell their husbands about the interesting, cultured afternoon they’d spent at an art gallery.
Sam is waiting for me on the curb. Two freshly lit cigarettes in his hands, one for him and one for me, he is impersonating the women I’ve just encountered in that unashamedly camp style of his.
“Oh darling, this is simply unacceptable. Who do you think you are?” He brushes his soft, blond hair from his eyes and takes a long, exaggerated drag of his cigarette, channelling his inner drama queen.
I’m nervous, but I manage a smile. His irreverent theatrics always calm me down.
“Hurry up, I don’t want to be late,” I tell him, knowing all the same that we will probably spend forty-five minutes in a colourless waiting room.
“What the fuck are you wearing?” he says as we climb into his Jeep convertible.
“Tell me what you really think!”
I know I can count on Sam.
On the way to the surgery, I tell him about my morning at the funeral, about the unfinished sentences and my unexpected encounter with the mysterious old Hungarian woman who made my grandmother awfully mad again.
“Why do you care who she is?” he asks, as we turn off towards Bondi Beach. “Do you have to know everything?”
Sam doesn’t understand. It’s not his fault. He doesn’t know anyone older than his parents, whom he has seen a handful of times since he left home at sixteen, and never wonders what the people in the next car are talking about and whether or not it’s about him. For Sam, history consists of Marilyn Monroe outfits and the list of websites he has visited that day. Sometimes I’m jealous of his clarity and his naturally blond hair, his superhero-like sense of what’s hot and what’s not, and how he gets to make things up as he goes along. But not today.
Today I just want to know.
We park illegally outside Dr Horvath’s office building. The waiting room is packed. In one corner, an old man is coughing and spluttering. His wife is sitting beside him screaming into the phone in Russian, cleaning his collar with a McDonald’s serviette and spit. In another, a young mother decked out in diamonds and Gucci is pacing up and down with a wailing baby. Another five mother-and-child combinations take up all the available plastic seats in between.
“Lily, I’m so sorry,” says Mary, the receptionist, an old acquaintance of my mother’s from high school. She isn’t exactly a friend (Mama maintains Mary’s still jealous over a boyfriend scuffle from when they were fifteen years old) but she has always been nice to me. Today, however, she has disappointing news. “He is completely run off his feet. An early flu outbreak, it seems. Would you believe it?” She stops to look Sam up and down. Her grimace doesn’t hide a thing: who the hell is this handsome yet obviously non-Jewish boy nobody’s told me anything about? “Tell me,” she continues. “Can it wait till tomorrow? Is it urgent?”
Only a matter of life or death.
“It can wait,” I say, arranging something for the following day.
Sam is relieved. He doesn’t want to stay and catch something dull from the middle class.
I turn to leave, but am distracted by a guttural bark from the doctor’s now open doorway.
It’s her.
I freeze.
Not for fifteen or so years and then twice in one day!
I panic.
Should I say hello? Could I say hello?
Dr Horvath ambles out into the waiting room with her at his side. She has an unlit cigarette in one hand, a paper in the other.
Can I pretend not to have seen her? Will she notice me? I’m scared. I’m curious. I’m delighted. I’m frozen.
Sam nudges me. “Come on, Lily, let’s go. You’ll be back tomorrow.”
“It’s her,” I mouth. Why am I so nervous?
“What are you doing?” Now he is irritated. “Her who?”
“Her,” I whisper. The taboo. The unmentionable. Suddenly her name comes to me.
“It’s Eva,” I say.
He’s not interested but I can’t move.
Why does Eva get to see the doctor today and not me?
Dr Horvath smiles hello in my direction and lightly touches Eva’s shoulder. “See you next week,” he says. He says ve-ee-ek like it has three syllables.
Before I have a chance to think, she turns to me. She looks right at me.
“Jaj, Lily daahrlink, ugy nézel ki mint as apád a te korodba.