I glare at my son, Sammy, who had to tag along with me to my doctor’s appointment and is chewing on a folded-up drinking straw. It’s his new habit, clacking it so loudly that I wondered how hard it would be to adopt him out, before full-blown puberty hits, before I die of exhaustion. At least he’s not smoking, is what his dad says. He’s eleven. My son, not my husband. Sammy’s with me because he’s suspended from school. He’s suspended from school for cussing and fighting. We’re here because I’m sick as a dog. I’m so congested that the noise seems to get trapped in there, echoing through the congestion. About to tell him to throw the straw away, I’m distracted when the moaning starts in the room next to us.
Like, really loud moaning. WHAAAA OOOOOOOOH the man in the room next to us is going, WHAAA OOOO NNNNNNNNGNNNN OOOOOOOH. Loud enough to make us catch each other’s eyes. My son’s eyes are laughing, his mouth hangs open and the straw wad in there rattles for a second then rests, unchewed.
.
Sammy was suspended after telling another sixth-grader to fuck himself during a shoving match that started when the other kid teased him with a life-sized Friendship Mannequin and Sam tackled both the kid and the doll. He actually told the other kid to “fuck yourself with an alternating current,” which is sort of brilliant, and a result of Sam being on an inventors kick, but this sort of thing doesn’t seem to be helping him to make friends who will help him survive middle school.
Then in a break in the moaning we hear the door click shut next door and the nurses start talking in the hallway.
“His ears are just jammed with wax, just full of it.”
At least three voices discuss who is going to flush the loud moaner’s ears.
Fascinated, Sam shushes me. I haven’t made a peep.
One says it’s gross, so gross.
They don’t know we can hear them.
Another says this kind of thing is “honestly not that gross. Cysts are gross . . .”
“Oh, wait ’til you see,” the first one says.
Sammy is thrilled. He’s beaming. I have to laugh. This is the kid who never hesitated to grab a fish to remove a hook. He squirms in discomfort when people kiss on television, but that’s different.
The moaning starts up again.
My entire life, I’ve been encouraged to be quiet, quieter, an invisible helper, make it look effortless, don’t make a scene, and here this man is just moaning, moaning aloud, moaning to fill the entire building with the sound of himself of his own discomfort.
Presumably someone is handing over supplies, and we hear them say, in a cheery, teasing voice: “Here you go, girl, get him to sign the forms and go to town!”
“Gross!” Sam hisses.
Honestly, I haven’t seen him this engaged in anything for months.
When we hear the door click and she goes in to get the man’s signature, his moaning increases in volume and intensity. There’s a blood pressure thing mounted to the wall between us, and the moaning is loud enough to make the cords tremble.
“He’s only moaning because she has to listen,” I say.
Sammy shushes me.
We hear the water running over there. Sam’s eyes widen. It is a loud, forceful whooshing. It sounds like they’re cleaning this person’s head with a garden hose.
“Which ear do you want me to do first?” she asks.
“Are you having as much fun as I am?” he asks her in a flirty voice.
Sam and I jerk our heads to look at each other, both of our faces saying “What!? No!”
She pauses for a really long time.
“It’s been a really crazy morning,” she says, finally.
“Now you lay very still and I will be back in to check on you in fifteen minutes to see if we’re breaking this up for you.”
.
When the doctor comes in for me, she starts to speak and is interrupted by the moans of the man next door.
“Wow, you can really hear everything in here,” she says.
As we talk she diagnoses me with a sinus infection, I am given a prescription, but my ailments take a backseat as all three of us listen to the moaning man.
There is a clatter next door, and the sound of the running water changes, the man yelps “shit!” and then “nurse! nurse!”
“He’s knocked the sprayer loose,” the doctor says.
“He’s really loud,” my son says.
Both of us adults look at Sammy, and then we all laugh. Even though I am pissed at this kid for getting expelled, it’s good to see him smiling. It’s great to see him interacting with another adult in a totally normal way, it’s so great to see him quietly smiling after making a stranger laugh.
“How do I say this without violating any privacy laws,” she says. “Okay, when a patient has a large amount of wax in both ears, they often can’t hear, it affects the hearing.”
We hear a nurse come in to rescue the man. “Oh God, you’re soaked,” she tells him.
While my doctor is filling out a form on her tablet, Sammy asks how long it takes to clear out someone’s ears.
“Oh, quite a while.”
I look down at Sammy’s shoe, his leg is hitched up and crossed so that one ankle rests on the other knee. He’s fretting with the elastic on his sock because he’s excited, and I see that there is writing in pen on his leg. Normally it would be covered by his pantleg; he has written something there that he doesn’t want anyone to see.
We settle up and walk out. Now Sammy sidles up close to me and asks in a low voice if we can stay to see this guy once he’s done.
All I want in this world is to get my drugs and go home to my bed, but I can feel the constant annoyance part of parenting slip away and I remember the joy of giving this kid something he wants.
My happy baby is growing up and he doesn’t want to do sports. He quit karate. He used to love cooking and baking and now he says he hates it. Getting him to do homework and put away his laundry is an ordeal. But here is something he wants to do. He has taken an interest in something: he wants to spy on the unbelievably loud old man with jammed ears.
Now, yes, this is gross. But I am supposed to support his interests. I’ve read so in all the articles. I don’t think it’s illegal to get a look at someone who has put on such a public performance.
I lean over and whisper to my son. I can’t remember the last time he let me get that close. I don’t care that his winter coat smells like a hamster cage. I don’t even mind when I hear his teeth clacking on the straw.
He smiles and nods. We laugh like conspirators.
There is a drive-thru pharmacy I’ve used before that’s next to a McDonalds near here.
We drop off my script, we pick up flavored coffee drinks and cheeseburgers. If I can’t climb into bed, then I’ll have caffeine with whipped cream on top with my weird son. Then I drive us back to the parking lot of the doctor’s office, and we stake it out, eating, drinking our coffees while I wait for my prescription to be filled and my son theorizes about which car belongs to the man we’d overheard moaning in there.
“He’s going to be all wet,” Sammy laughs in anticipation.
He unwraps his second cheeseburger. The coffee is so sweet that it’s making him happy; it’s coffee enough that it will get me through the afternoon.
The radio is off and the heat is on. A figure appears in the doorway of the doctor’s office and we go high alert, then we see it is an old woman and we relax. I’m not going to ask him about the fight at school for the tenth time. I relax enough that I don’t need to rehash all that. We’re cozy here with our junk food, spying like creeps on somebody’s old guy with a health problem. But we’re spying like creeps as a family.
Meredith Counts is a Michigan writer and archives student with an MFA from the Fiction Writing Department at Columbia College Chicago. Her writing and reviews have recently appeared in Foreword, Portage Magazine, Quail Bell, Traverse, the Detroit Metro Times, Chicago Literati, and BUST. She is one of the founding editors of Dead Housekeeping and is co-editing a book by Detroit poet Jim Gustafson, who was her uncle.