Deck the halls

Jsation I was trying so hard not to eavesdrop on began talking about sex.

The conversation had begun innocently enough. One of them, a grandmother in her early 60s, blurted out that she was due for a bone marrow biopsy soon, and that she was worried sick. Three others who had been through the procedure tried quickly to reassure her. You’ll just feel some numbness near your hipbone, said one. The doctor will give you anesthesia, said another, and really, the worst of it is that you can’t bathe for three days after. Giving birth hurts worse and you’ve endured that, said one, who happened to be my mother.

Soon, they were doing the thing that people past a certain age often do: comparing notes on what ailed them, what they were taking for it, and which dishes they missed most. One, it turned out, had insufficient platelets. One had too much of it. One had been living with her condition for more than six years. Another found out just a few weeks ago.

Because theirs was the only hallway still with people in it, their words easily filled the hall while the dusk darkened the hospital’s windows. They found one another’s comments funny, or at least reassuring, and soon they were laughing together like old friends, although they hadn’t even bothered to exchange names. It made the wait easier. It was too bad they were all senior citizens, the only man in the group said. Otherwise, they could’ve pulled rank and skipped ahead in the clinic’s queue.

Someone asked the lady who was due for a biopsy if she had anyone who could keep her company on the way home. Not that day, she said. Her husband had left her long ago, when they were in their 20s. “How old were you when you married?” another asked. “Fourteen,” she said. “My husband was a couple of years older.” “Kasayo sab ninyo na-migs, oy!” The whole group laughs at this. I give up pretending to read and stare at my mother, whose comment defies translation. And then it occurs to me that this improvised support group knows more about what she’s going through than I do, so I give up trying to read and let their conversation in.

They flit from one topic to the next: the traffic; the ages and civil statuses of their children; the different amounts the cities give their elderly each year; the frailties they’ve grown to know and bear as they aged. From Ms. Lahiri’s lovely book, I learn that “the exchange” is “lo scambio” in Italian. But it is the strangely joyful exchange in that hallway—that gift of time and attention for one’s fellow travelers—that I’ll remember longer.