Keep Calm and Wait

My little blue car chugs along through the morning traffic. (Traffic! A fact of life quite detrimental to calm!) and I watch her temperature gauge nervously. Sometimes she overheats, and the last thing I need is to be stuck at the side of the road with a steaming car. I need to be calm. I am so tense that I feel ill, and of course I know that’s not going to help. I need to be well and strong or it will all come to nothing. 

Work helps to distract me. I am busy, and the relentless school day doesn't care two pins about my own private restlessness. Bells ring, kids swarm the corridors, the photocopier is stuck again and even break-time is taken up with meetings. A girl in one of my classes is crying over something and her friends look up at me from where they hover over her, imploring me for help. I kneel beside her, coax out the story, offer advice and always-comforting sugar in the form of a lollipop I find in my drawer. She leaves my classroom happier, and I am reminded that even fourteen-year-olds are still kids. 

Sugar helped her but it doesn't do much to help my own agitation. If anything, I feel worse after hiding in my storeroom between lessons to scoff down a chocolate bar. All I do is add guilt to the whole situation. I feel so helpless in this inbetween time, this waiting, this uncertainty. So much depends on what the next few days bring, and I can do absolutely nothing about it! Nothing at all! Am I a control freak? I never thought I was, but this experience has made me think I might be. I want to know what’s going on; I want to know so badly that I find myself googling things when I have told myself not to. It’s something to do, when I can do nothing else. But the results drone back at me, same as they were yesterday, same instructions to wait and wait and wait. I have waited for many things in my life but never anything so consuming as this.  

Keep Calm and Teach, says the trite little orange sign on my door. I take it down and shove it under a pile of tattered and ink-stained exercise books, but then I take it out and put it up again. Someone will ask where it went and I don't want to explain anything. It’s tiring, being on display all the time. Sometimes I long for a job in a cubicle, where I could have a little weep in private and no one but my computer and my desk phone would know. Instead I face whole roomfuls of noisy teenagers every forty minutes, looking to me for direction and motivation. By lunch time I am so worn out that I sit in the empty classroom, unmoving, not even the promise of a cup of tea from the stainless steel teapot in the staff room enough to drag me out of my lethargy. Eventually I get up and go, though, my limbs heavy and my vision blurry. It’s nothing, I think. Just tiredness. Just this maddening, crazy-making waiting. 

After school my blue car and I make our way to the supermarket. She’s always happier in the afternoons when she doesn't have to idle in traffic. I wander around the aisles, thinking I should rather have gone straight home to work on setting exams, but this is easier. I peruse cereal and dishcloths and yoghurt, appreciating not having to talk to anyone, not having to make decisions any more important than whether to buy cornflakes or granola. I get eggs and buttermilk and vanilla and a little tub of rainbow sprinkles. When I get home there’s no way I’ll be sitting down to set exams. I’m going to bake something: mess up the kitchen and then clean it all until it’s sparkling. I’ll sink my hands into a sink of hot soapy water and breathe, absorbing calm and quiet from the suds. 

When I bring out the cake after supper Husband looks at me from under his eyebrows. “What’s this?” he asks. “Are we celebrating?” 

“Nope,” I say, kissing the top of his head and handing him a slice. “Just some baking therapy.”

He shrugs, smiling a little as he forks a piece into his mouth. He has sprinkles in his beard and hope in his eyes. “Not much longer,” he says. “I have a good feeling this time.” 

I am trying not to have any feelings at all. It’s easier that way. Both hope and disappointment loom as the appointed day draws near. I drive to work, I stand in front of my class, I hang out damp clothes and bring them in again. My car, objecting to a bad traffic day, overheats one morning and Husband must come and rescue me. We talk about a new car, maybe. Maybe afterwards, depending. It’s not a good time to be making big decisions right now, not until we know. In the meantime I will take his car to work so he will be the one standing by the side of the road pouring water from a coke bottle into her over-taxed engine. I am grateful – I might not want to admit it but right now he is tougher than I am about those kinds of things. 

I make soup and muffins and baked custard. Husband, finding his lunchbox packed with treats, wonders aloud if this will all end after Saturday. I shrug and say nothing, and he folds me up in a hug. I clean around the oven knobs with a toothbrush and end up having to stay up until midnight setting exams. I am not tired. I make the waiting busy. It’s easier that way. 

It’s a mercy, that time passes. I have often thought about this in rough times, and although I can't call this waiting hard exactly, I am grateful for the moving hands of the kitchen clock, that every day when I wake up the date on my phone has changed and I have not, so far, had to face disappointment. The day arrives. Of course it does. It arrives and the waiting is over. 

I sit on the bed, hugging my knees. It is done; I have left the jolly thing in the bathroom for the recommended two minutes and I can’t bear to look. I make Husband do it.

He goes into the bathroom and leans on the doorframe, holding the narrow piece of plastic in his hand, and my heart constricts with love for him, with gladness that I get to do this with him. I can't read the look on his face at all. I hide my face in my hands and he comes over and sits on the bed next to me. I lift my eyes and look into his, and although I suspect I see relief and happiness there, I can't be sure. 

“Well?” I say. When he answers the wait will be over, for now at least. Perhaps a new kind of waiting will begin today, the kind I have longed for, the kind where hope will grow beneath my skin, the kind that is rewarded with love, and family. 

He holds it out to me, smiling. “I see two lines,” he says. “Time to get you a new car.”