I want to ask them what they are giggling about. What could be so funny here? But I have a terrible feeling they are whispering and snickering at me, and there isn’t a thing I can do to find out what it is they’ve found so amusing. I’d like to ask them. Just open my mouth and ask them what exactly they find so funny about my presence. After all, I am the only other person in this lobby.

I wonder if they planned their pregnancies together. How puerile! They have probably done everything together their whole lives. Most likely they spent high school lounging in one another’s bedrooms with their hair hanging down over the side of the bed; daydreaming about the same boys; sharing their deepest secrets, which they never realized are entirely shallow; holding each other’s hair back when one of them got so drunk she had to crouch gargoyle-like over the toilet to vomit; painting each other’s toenails with silly colors; one of them intimately wiping away the other’s tears with her bare fingers after her dog was eaten by a coyote. They will probably grow into old ladies together, their husbands only vaguely aware that they have always come second.

A little girl who cannot be more than four rushes over to the woman with red lips and tugs impatiently on her skirt.

“What is it, darling?”

“I’m bored,” says the little girl in her little-girl voice.

Why bring her here, I wonder. This sterile prison of needles is no place for a child. And all the doors! There are so many doors behind which she might get lost forever. Too many doors for a child, surely.

“You’ll just have to entertain yourself, sweet pea. We’re obliged to wait until the doctor is finished with the other patients.” Her eyeballs roll up in their sockets to glance briefly at me as if to say, Who are you? Are you the one who is holding us up? I quickly look away.

“Here, play with this,” and she hands her an electronic device that looks like a small plastic tablet, which the girl carries away to play on. The women resume paging through their magazines, glancing up every so often, murmuring to one another from the sides of their mouths, looking at me, I know, without really looking, until I can’t stand their little whispered conversation any longer.

I uncross my legs and slap my hands down on my thighs. “Do I know you?”

Their beady eyes latch on to me as their voices die, offended by my abrupt rudeness.

“I’m sure you don’t,” says the blonde.

Somehow the brunt of their direct attention strikes me as worse than the unconfirmed suspicion that they are gossiping about me. If only I could puff myself up and proudly take up an imposing amount of space, but instead I find myself shrinking away into my own body, in danger of shrinking away into nothing.

“I don’t recall seeing you much in town,” adds the woman with red lips. “I suppose that makes you one of those Wakefields?”