The Barge Photographs

Hospital waiting rooms are a strange kind of place when you think about them. You get a bunch of people who don't know each other, all parked in the same ugly chairs under the same buzzing lights, all waiting on news about somebody they love, and nobody says a word for hours. I'd done my share of waiting over twelve years on the barge, mostly for coworkers getting patched up after accidents, so I knew the rhythm of it. The clock on the wall that's always two minutes slow. The vending machine that hums louder than the TV. The way everybody checks their phone at the same time, like the news might come by signal instead of by a nurse walking through the door.

It was a Friday night in March, I was forty-four years old, and my crewmate Ruthie was upstairs getting her gallbladder taken out. Routine surgery, they said, but her sister lived clear across the country and somebody had to be the name on the form. That was me. I'd grabbed a cardboard box of old photographs on my way out, the one that had been riding around in the back of my locker since I claimed it five years back.

The box was my aunt Doreen's. She passed five years back, and I claimed the photos right after, and they've sat in my locker ever since. Four hundred-some pictures of a woman I barely knew, mostly from the fifties and sixties, all of her glamorous in a life nobody in my family ever talked about. I'd been through them a dozen times on slow nights since I claimed them. That night I just wanted something to do besides watch the elevator doors open and close.

The only other person in the waiting room was a woman about my age, maybe a little younger, sitting across from me with her own cardboard box on her knees. I noticed that first, the box, because who brings a box to a hospital at eleven at night. She had brown hair pulled back in a loose knot and she wore one of those quilted coats with the collar turned up, and she was going through the box slow, one photo at a time, holding each one up under the fluorescent light like she was checking it for flaws.

I went back to Doreen's photos. There was one I always stopped on, a woman on the deck of some lake steamer in a satin dress the color of champagne, one hand on the rail, laughing at whoever held the camera. Written on the back in pencil it said Marjorie, June 1958. Not Doreen. One of her friends or sisters or somebody. I'd always liked that one best. The dress had a cowl neck and it moved in the photo, you could tell, even in a still picture you could tell it moved.

"That's a beautiful dress," the woman across from me said.

I looked up. She was nodding at the photo in my hand, and she'd angled her own little stack so I could see the top one, a woman in a bathing suit standing on a diving board somewhere.

"Thanks," I said. "It's not her, though. It's a friend of my aunt's, I think. Aunt's the one who kept all this stuff."

"How old is it?"

"June of fifty-eight, if the back of it's honest."

She leaned forward a little to see. She had reading glasses pushed up on her head and she pulled them down now, and I remember thinking she had careful hands, the kind of hands you'd want doing lab work, which is exactly what she turned out to do. Her name was Phoebe. Her aunt was upstairs on the fourth floor, some kind of heart trouble, and Phoebe had come straight from the water quality station where she worked, still in her work coat, because her aunt had nobody else in town.

"They admitted her around nine," she told me. "They keep saying stable but they won't let me up yet."

"Same with mine. Gallbladder. They said come back in the morning."

So we did what waiting room people do. We compared vending machine grievances, we talked about the parking situation, and somewhere around midnight she came over and sat in the chair next to mine, and we went through Doreen's box together. She was good at it. She'd hold a photo up to the light and pick out some detail, the shape of a collar or the way a skirt was hemmed, and she'd guess the decade and she was right more than she was wrong. Four years in Riverton, she said, moved from the coast after a relationship ended, worked at the water station ever since. Thirty-seven years old. I told her about the barge, the twelve years, the Marigold where I stay when I'm not working, which was that week.

Then she got to the photo of the woman in the satin dress and she stopped, the way I always stopped on it.

"This one again," she said. "I keep coming back to this one."

"Marjorie. June of fifty-eight."

"Look at the neck of it. That's a cowl, and the satin's got weight to it, real weight. You don't see satin like that anymore." She turned it over, read the pencil, handed it back. "You said your aunt kept all this. Is the dress in here too?"

I laughed before I could stop myself. "Actually, yeah. It is. Rolled up in tissue paper at the bottom of the box like a snake in a basket. I've never had the nerve to take it all the way out."

"Never?"

"Never wore anything like it in my life," I said. "I'm a man who wears jeans and rubber boots twelve hours a day. That dress belongs to somebody else's life."

Phoebe didn't say anything right away. She looked at me a little longer than a person usually looks, and then she looked at the photo, and then back at me, and I felt my face go warm, which at my age still catches me off guard.

The night wore on the way hospital nights do, slow and thick. Around two in the morning a nurse came through and told us both our patients were stable and sleeping and that there'd be nothing to know until morning, so we might as well get comfortable. She said it kindly but it still landed like a sentence. Four more hours, minimum.

"Four hours," Phoebe said after the nurse was gone. She rubbed her eyes with the heel of her hand. "I can't sit in these chairs four more hours. My back is already done."

"I've got a place three blocks from here," I heard myself say. "The Marigold. She's a barge, but the cabin's warm and there's real coffee and the chairs don't have that hospital smell in them. We could wait there. I'd walk you back whenever you