“Number 304865,” the receptionist calls out from where she sits behind the window-paneled glass. Her voice echoes in the room, which is filled only with women. They all sit patiently waiting their turn, abiding by the unwritten rules of waiting rooms, take a number, take a seat, wait your turn.
“That’s me!” a young woman calls out excitedly, revealing her eagerness to everyone else, which is a highly inconsiderate thing to do. She puts down a People magazine she’s only just started reading an hour ago and gathers her designer bag and coat before walking over to the receptionist. All other eyes in the room are on her, some with a look of longing, some with resentment, some with something resembling fear in their eyes. Those are the ones no one understands.
She hands over her little paper slip, which shows barely a dent to her number, unlike some of the other women in the waiting room, whose papers have turned a faded yellow after sitting in their pockets for too long. She turns around and smiles at them like a pageant queen who just won the world title, in clear hopes they’ll all join in on her exciting moment. They don’t. Her mother clearly never taught her any manners.
The receptionist points toward a door on the left, and the young woman walks toward it. She stands in front of the door, as they all do, and looks at the screen above it. Soon, the screen turns on, and a woman’s voice booms from the tiny monitor.
“Stephanie St. Clair, age 23, from Arizona, you’ve been matched!”
Confetti shoots across the screen as all the women watch in half-bored stares. A green light comes on beside the doorknob, and Stephanie turns the handle.
“Come meet your new partner, Drew Womack!” the voice booms in the room.
Stephanie is smiling from ear to ear as she walks through the door. Before the excitement has even settled, the lights turn off, the door slams shut, and the monitor goes black. The room stays silent as the women look away from the door in resignation. Another one is gone, and they’re all still waiting.
Some of them have been in the waiting room for days, while some have been in the waiting room for years. This young one had only been in an hour or so. She was fresh, her eyes still wide with hope, her blonde hair freshly cut and curled to frame her face that would make you think she was nineteen and had never been fucked. The type of girl who didn’t have to wait long.
“This is bullshit,” Margaret says to no one in particular, and there’s an audible sigh from the room. Margaret has been in the waiting room for five years now. Her ex-husband left her after she gambled away their life savings. She spent some time in therapy, traded the gambling habit for smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, and eventually made her way to the waiting room in the hope of finding a new partner who would better understand her wild ways.
But there’s a system in the waiting room, and everyone knows it. They all sign up from the moment they first have a crush, after their first date and heartbreak, the first whirlwind romance and love that leaves you crying on the floor for weeks. They all make their way to the waiting room because this is where you will find your forever perfect match. Sometimes it just takes longer than others.
There are factors to consider here—there always have been. This is a business, after all. They employ hundreds of people each year to help do extensive research and create informational handbooks, rules, and surveys. This is where forever happens. You can’t make that up overnight, and truth be told, there was a lot of groundwork already in place.
There are some factors that can’t be changed, for example, your height, your age, your eye color, your ethnicity, and your background. But there are others that can be, your interests, your weight, your facial construction, your willingness to have children, your occupation or choice not to have one. The factors are what make up your file, and that is how you end up in the waiting room for seven years or seven minutes.
Every time a new woman walks into the waiting room, Margaret stares them down so that maybe they’ll leave, especially the young ones. They usually scour into a corner and huddle together in protection against her. She can’t fathom how her name hasn’t been called, how some men would want a fresh-out-of-the-womb-like girl who’s barely experienced anything, as opposed to her.
She huffs from her chair in a quiet little rage that the rest of the women know to avoid and will soon pass. After all, the women who have been here for as long as Margaret have known what it’s like. They all have their reasons, and they all have experienced enough of each other to understand what each person is going through.
Angelina has been in the waiting room for five years. Her first three were filled with grief. After her husband passed away, she made her way to the waiting room and sat in a corner, crying every time a number got called. No one could quite tell if it was because she was sad it wasn’t her or relieved she got to stay a while longer.
Leah has just returned to the waiting room a couple of days ago, and no one knows how to interact with her. She’d been in the room for two years, and then last month, her number got called, and she left in a gloriously respectful manner. You could barely see the tears that streamed down her face as she walked through that door. A couple of days ago, she walked back in, her head downcast, dressed in all black, and was wordless as she took her new number. She now sits alone in a corner, never interacting with any of the other women in the room. They’re all too afraid to ask what had happened anyway, that whatever it was might rub off on them and ruin their delicate chances of ever being called.
Kathy and Cleo are the happiest of the bunch. A couple of years later, once they realized they weren’t leaving anytime soon, they started reading some of the discarded books left out on the coffee tables. Now, they have a monthly book club and are constantly recruiting new members. They prefer thrillers about women who kill their husbands. It’s a particular group. Samantha and Georgia are horrified when they overhear their conversations.
Samantha and Georgia sit on the opposite side of the room. They’ve only been waiting for a couple of months and can’t wait to get out. They’re both twenty-two, with dark hair, polite smiles, and soft voices, and will happily please you. They like to cook roast dinners, awe at the sight of children, and spend Sundays at service. They won’t have to wait long. Women like that never do. They’re the women in the pamphlets, the ones they give their mothers when they’re still young enough to know nothing about the waiting room.
“304866,” the receptionist calls out. Georgia squeals in delight. Samantha stands with her, and the two girls hug without needing to say much. They know they’ll see one another soon, on the other side, where they’ll host backyard barbecues as their husbands man the grill. The two of them will look after the children, sipping on white wine spritzers and gossiping about ladies like Kathy and Cleo.
Georgia opens the door and turns to wave at all the women before she goes. Samantha beams at her from her seat, smiling ear to ear. She won’t show it, but there’s a part of her that would like to run up to where Georgia's standing and tackle her to the ground, taking her place. Instead, she sits there and continues to plaster a smile on her face, but she’ll be next. They always are.
As the door closes, another one opens on the other side of the room. They all look up in anticipation, but it’s just the afternoon receptionist rotating shifts. David is in his late sixties, never married, and never even wanted to. In his hands, he carries the next batch of files to be processed—the dirty details of each woman held captive and never to be seen by anyone but the men who choose.
The two receptionists hand off each other's paperwork and one leaves while the other remains. It’s the same cycle that happens every day. After many years of the same routine, no one even notices when a single file falls helplessly to the floor in the middle of the room.
Everyone, except for Leah, from her dark spot in the corner. She quietly gets up and walks towards the paper, bending down to pick it up and turning it over as she does.
“What’s that?” Margaret asks from her seat. She holds a cigarette between two fingers and smiles snidely at Samantha, who looks horrified as she lights it.
Leah doesn’t even look up to acknowledge Margaret as she stares down at the sheet of paper, too engrossed in its contents to move. But on a day like today, there isn’t much for Margaret to do, so she sighed and got up from her seat to walk over to where Leah still stood.
“Where did the paper come from?” Margaret asks again as she attempts to snatch it from Leah’s hands. Only now is Leah broken from her trance and clasps the paper tightly to her chest. She has no intention of letting Margaret see what it holds.
“It’s nothing,” Leah mutters before walking back over to her corner of the room.
"What do you mean it’s nothing? Just show me, Leah.” Margaret presses further, and Leah stands firm in her stance, clutching the paper like it’s her own child.
“Just show her the paper, Leah.” Kathy pipes in from the corner as other eyes have now turned to watch the two women bicker back and forth.
“It’s not her paper, it’s mine.” Leah bites back.
"What do you mean it’s your paper?” Margaret laughs, “just because you found it doesn’t mean it’s yours,” she says mockingly.
“I mean it’s my paper.” Leah says.
It’s now that all eyes in the room turn to stare at Leah because they know exactly what she means. It’s no secret that from the moment each woman enters the waiting room they’re given a number, and a profile is created based on the information they provide. One single paper summarizes who they are, their likes, dislikes, appearance, hobbies, future goals, and past accomplishments, and as a basic rule of the waiting room, none of the women are ever allowed to see their own.
“How is that even possible?” Margaret asks, walking over to sit next to Leah in the corner. A small group of women follow, their interest piqued by the paper and its contents.
“The last receptionist who left dropped it as he went out,” Leah answers.
“Well what does it say?” Margaret asks, even more eager now, but Leah stays silent, shaking her head and turning away from her.
“Oh come on, Leah, I would show you mine.” Margaret winks and laughs lightly at her own joke.
Leah turns back towards Margaret now, and quietly whispers so only she can hear. “It’s not good.”
Margaret’s eyes go wide. “Just give me the damn thing,” she says as she rips it from Leah’s hands.
Margaret looks over the page. “A 3.5 out of 5, overall rating! That’s bullshit. They can’t do that. Who gives a person an overall rating!” Margaret yells, jumping up from her seat. She begins to pace back and forth across the room. The other women backed away, knowing better than to interrupt one of Margaret's freakouts.
The receptionist, who is too engrossed in his episode of Succession, relaxes in the swivel chair behind the window-paned glass. He laughs at something Kendall Roy says, tossing a chocolate M&M into his mouth with ease.
“It’s fine, Margaret. Just sit down,” Leah pleads, looking around the room with fear in her eyes. Though she’s not sure what she should be afraid of, the fear is always there.
“Not only do they give us an overall rating. They give us a rating on physical features and then break it down into sections! This is insane!” Margaret yells.
“What else do they rate us on?” Samantha asks, suddenly coming up beside Margaret.
“Intelligence, social status, personality, and CHILDBEARING ABILITIES!”
Margaret crumples up the paper and throws it on the floor. She begins stomping on top of it trying to rid its existence from the room.
“I wonder what mine says,” Samantha mutters and Margaret rolls her eyes, before turning back to Leah. “We have to do something about this!”
“I’m not sure what we can do Margaret,” Leah resigns, now that the paper is pretty much destroyed.
Margaret turns to look at the receptionist, eyeing the stack of papers sitting behind him and smiles slightly. With the swift movements of someone adept at sneaking a tube of lip gloss from the convenience store as a teenager, Margaret walks over to the receptionist desk and takes the stack of files sitting behind him.
The other women in the room watch in shock. None of them would ever dare to think to look at the files, let alone take them. They are in the waiting room. The receptionist doesn’t ever think to watch the files, because there is a clear divide between him and them. He announces numbers, they wait.
“Margaret, what are you doing?” Kathy whispers, running over to the corner of the room where Margaret has now spread out the file folders, just waiting to be opened and consumed.
“What does it look like? I’m taking back what’s mine,” she smiles gleefully. Like a kid in a candy store, she starts handing out files to the ladies in the room.
“Here’s yours, Samantha and Angelina, Danica too.”
Every woman begins to gather around Margaret as she passes out all the files of the women in the room. They all take their paper and read the comments, the little numbers, the overall ratings, and slowly, the fury starts to build.
“Doesn’t appear to have good childbearing hips,” Kathy says before thrusting her paper in front of Cleo so she can see.
“Mine says, beware, the photo may be a catfish,” Cleo shares. “How is this a catfish?” she asks Kathy, placing a near-identical photo of herself beside her own face.
“Is a little too invested in the Real Housewives. What does that even mean?” Danica says to no one in particular.
“Mine seems pretty accurate,” Samantha says, and all the women turn to glare at her. “What?” She asks the room, her innocent blue eyes looking around for a response that no one will give her.
The women finish reading their own profiles before beginning on each other and before the receptionist can even register what has now started. The women start destroying all the files in the room.
Kathy and Cleo rip up the papers and toss them into the tiniest pieces, like the confetti that shoots across the screen when someone’s been matched. Leah smiles for the first time in days as she and Jessica jump up and down on top of a pile of files of other women who have yet to enter the waiting room. Margaret takes out her lighter and begins to light the tips of the papers, cackling as they evaporate into thin air.
“What are you all doing?” the receptionist yells into the group, running out from behind his desk, now aware of the chaos unfolding before him. But he’s too late. As Margaret takes a fireball of papers and shoots them across the room in his direction, the receptionist runs back behind his desk, unsure of what to do.
As the women run about, throwing papers in the air, running across the chairs, and dancing to no sound but their own laughter and voices, the receptionist hides under his desk. He pulls his chair closer towards him as if the women may actually throw him in the air if they had the chance. He quickly grabs the phone from its cradle and manages to press a couple of numbers. It starts ringing just as one of the women bangs against the glass and flashes her boobs yelling, “Free the nipple!” The receptionist turns away, horrified.
“Hello,” someone says on the other line.
“Hello, hi, we need help!” the receptionist yells into the receiver. “The women in the waiting room, they’ve lost it, they’ve gone wild. They’re dancing on chairs and throwing about their belongings. They’ve completely lost their minds,” he yells as the line goes dark.
