Always Late

She was five feet tall, sixty-years-old, and weighed less than a hundred pounds. She wasn’t pretty but her face beamed with happiness. She wore her red hair long, occasionally piling it on top of her head. Her favorite attire was sweatpants with an elastic waistband and a loose T-shirt. Comfort was important to her. So was doing exactly as she pleased.

           She was a new friend of mine, and she always arrived late to get-togethers.         

           Her lateness was hard not to take personally. I explained to her that punctuality was important because I did not like to have my time wasted.

           “You can’t do something while you’re waiting?” she asked.

           “That’s not the problem,” I said, exasperated. “What right have you to keep me waiting? Besides, the world works better when things proceed in an orderly manner.” I wasn’t sure what I meant, but it sounded good.

           “I’m not so sure about the orderly manner being better,” she said.

            I knew that she made others wait too because her friends, when I would meet them, would whisper to me, asking if she was late for me also.

           “Yes!” I’d answer. “Isn’t it exasperating — how she does as she pleases and gets away with it?”

           “It’s like she’s from another world,” one friend said. “She lives by her rules and not others’.”

           If I were spiteful—and I wasn’t in the least—I’d have given her a taste of her own medicine and arrived late to get-togethers myself. But it wasn’t in me to be late. I lived according to my own ideas about “civility.“ I expected people to act a certain way.

           “Don’t you care about anyone but yourself?” I asked her one day. “Doesn’t it bother you that you make everyone wait?”

           “I don’t make anybody wait,” she said. “They can leave if they please.”

           And so, I waited—along with a lot of other people—fascinated by someone who allowed others—and herself—to do as they pleased.

           She even arrived late to her birth. “My mother waited and waited,” she said. “She finally had to be cut.”

           Seated at her family’s kitchen table, her mother said, “I didn’t mind. A mother does everything for her children.” (I got to know her family, since we would occasionally stop by her parents’ house.) Her mother dressed entirely differently than Rhea. Formal to a tee, she shopped daily at Lord and Taylor and was fully accessorized.

           Her mother said that growing up, Rhea’s report cards reported lateness for most classes.

           “I was on time for the classes I liked,” Rhea said.

           “You don’t tell Rhea what to do,” her mother said, smiling. “She tells herself.”

           Although at the end of the school day—when she did not come home from school on time—her mother had worried.

           “What makes you late?” her mother would ask.

           “I don’t know,” Rhea would answer. “I don’t wear a watch, so I don’t notice the time—”

           I argued with Rhea in front of her mother. “How are you ever on time, if you don’t wear a watch?” I asked Rhea

           “If I must know the time, I ask someone,” she said.

           “Well, what if no one wore a watch? Someone’s got to be responsible!”

           Rhea said that her lateness had never been a problem for her. She said she had been late for her Bas Mitzvah (which, I thought to myself, meant that even a rabbi had to go by her time schedule)!

           Her mother said Rhea had been late to her own wedding. The marriage lasted until her husband’s untimely death at the too early age of fifty-five, which had left Rhea with enough money to retire from teaching gym—earlier than most, when she was only fifty.

           Her own children had arrived late (Apparently, lateness was an inherited gene. ). They were both in their thirties. One was a New Age nutritionist, the other an acupuncturist.

           Every year, Rhea was late for her own birthday parties—the ones she held every year, to which she invited all her friends—coming downstairs when she was ready.

           Her guests—I among them—would be waiting. When she finally entered the party room, we were flabbergasted.

           “Where were you?” we all asked at once.

           “I’m here now,” she’d answer. “Let’s get started.”

           She even arrived late to her father’s funeral. She had asked me to drive us there, and she had brought the directions, which she had written down. But the directions were not good, and we arrived just as the mourners were leaving the graveside.

           I felt terrible, although it had not been my fault.

           She, on the other hand, felt fine.

           “How can you not feel bad,” I asked her, “being late to your own father’s funeral?”

           “My father—rest in peace—knows that I loved him. He can see that it couldn’t be helped.”        

           “Maybe he’s annoyed that you were late,” I said, crossly. “How do you know it’s okay with him?”

           “Because everything I did was okay with him,” she said. “Because anything anyone does is okay.” Then she added, “As long as they’re not really hurting anybody.”

           She would simply not be hurried.

           Finally, she was late to her own life’s closing. She had an incurable cancer and lay in her bed at the hospital, where family and friends came every day to say goodbye.

           Death simply would not come. Day after day.

           Her friends could not keep on coming to the hospital. We talked about it. We agreed we would tell her. I was picked to deliver the message.

           Exasperated, I said to her, “Die already!”

           Did I really say that?!

           She looked hurt to the quick.

           “I’m so sorry!” I cried. “Can you forgive me?”

           “Of course!” she said.

           I was there when she took her last breath. She had left a note on the table next to the bed, written the night before:

           “My entire life I was late. This was entirely intentional. I wished to squeeze every drop of living out of life. Every time I was late was practice.”