Once, when I was in elementary school, I was sent to the counselor's office. Her door was shut when I arrived, a minute or two early, and no one was watching me, so I wandered out into the peaceful wideness of the hallway, to look at the sixth-graders' art on the walls. A tall male teacher passed, looked at me twice: "Where are you supposed to be?"
"Nowhere at the moment," I said truthfully, and was shortly dragged (well, that's how I remember it anyway) back to my classroom where I had to stand there while he told my classroom teacher that I'd talked back. I don't remember if I got to see the counselor, but I won't soon forget the sense of being yanked out of a quiet, empty, long hallway and back to the noisy, bright classroom, along with my face, hot, the center of attention.
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Last summer I saw a tweet that spoke to me:
It spoke to me because I'd literally just been in an airport, all by myself, a handful of days before. My 13yo daughter had been flying back from Colorado unaccompanied, and it fell to me to pick her up. The other children were watched by the oldest, there was no school to do and no place to go, and what did I do but show up a good hour earlier than I needed to? For no other reason than that... I also love airports?
Obviously I had plausible deniability. Had I said to myself, "I must be sure to get there early, for the security lines might be long, and it's vital I arrive at the gate before her flight lands," well, nothing odd about that, right? But truly, I wanted to get there early for the sheer pleasure of strolling through the airport, unrushed, sipping from a paper cup of steaming coffee, and walking from the end of one concourse to the end of another and back, a brisk indoor walk. And I did enjoy it, wandering in and out of the shops and other spaces, sniffing the trial samples of lotions for sale, perusing the covers of paperbacks; finally arriving at my daughter's gate a good forty-five minutes after coming in. Watching all the people rushing here and there, families picnicking on the floor among their suitcases, be-suited travelers looking expectantly up at the arrivals screens with their phones plastered on their ears. Normally if I'm in the airport, I'm among the rushed ones. Not this day: I was entirely separate and apart from all the travelers, at least until my daughter came off the plane and I signed for her, like a parcel.
This was not even the first time. I have also been known to enjoy long layovers and, on a weekend trip meeting a driving friend in Chicago, to positively jump at the chance to be dropped off at the airport several hours before my flight home was to leave.
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Until I saw Ms. Anderson's tweet a few mornings later, I had never been able to articulate exactly what it is I love about airports-not-in-a-hurry. But I felt an instant "click" with the identification of airport-as-liminal-space. That's exactly the quality I love about it, its between-ness. Neither a destination nor a point of origin; not a place to live, but a place to be suspended from normal, everyday life; a place through which you carry a few things you need, to pass you through a time and space of limited access to your belongings and resources. Most of the people around--with the notable exception of the people who labor there--are coming from somewhere and going somewhere else, crisscrossing in the space, mysteries to each other. And it's a place where you can buy food, and coffee, and a drink, and something to read, or something to wear, or toys or puzzles. It's a place where you can sit, sit for a very long time; or walk, walk for a very long time; and no one will bother you.
The reason to be there is to move on, but not yet; and for that reason, everyone who is in an airport (at least, everyone past the security checkpoint)... is presumed to belong.
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Another liminal space is the public area of a hospital. I found myself sitting in just such a space on Wednesday morning, after my diagnostic ultrasound, which came after the diagnostic mammogram, which came after I got the phone call about my screening mammogram three days prior.
After the radiologist herself came in to finish up the ultrasound and pronounced the dense spot benign, pronounced me free to go and to return to the usual annual screening schedule. I was free to go and yet I didn't quite want to leave. The atrium, where the different wings of the hospital come together, is several stories tall and at that moment was full of music: there is a piano on the second floor, by the railing, and someone was playing the piano up there.
I walked out of the wing where they keep the Breast Health Center, briefly considered stopping by the cafeteria for something to eat (hospital cafeterias are liminal spaces), and instead passed the elevators, heading for the curve I could glimpse of a handrail to stairs going up.
I'd taken the elevators as I came in. Each time I stepped out of the elevator and looked about me for a directory, immediately a person walking briskly past stopped and asked: "Can I help you find somewhere?" I was grateful at that moment to be told where to go: from the parking garage elevator to the central elevators (passing the silent and lonely second-floor piano on the way) and from the central elevators to the correct hallway around the corner.
That was then, and I wanted the stairs; but before I got to the stairs I passed a row of inviting upholstered benches and chairs, and I chose one and sat on it and looked about me, listening to the melody rolling down out of the atrium, brought forth by the hands of a passerby. I could see just the top of his head, his soft cap, over the railing above, moving gently along with the notes. A passerby, someone like me, perhaps, except that he knew how to play the piano and so he'd chosen to take his momentary seat up there.
+ + +
It was while I was sitting there between the wall and the stairs that I remembered the liminal space. That's where I was now, in the liminal space between the (extraordinarily common) experience of waiting for that second mammogram after the first (extraordinarily common--something like ten or eleven percent) abnormal one; and going back home and resuming my normal life, the one where I wake up and I don't have any reason to be concerned that my immediate plans are all about to be upended. I had already passed through the difficult bit, the part where it isn't clear yet (even though it's likely) that I can return. I liked the liminal space, I was relieved, there was music, there was a comfortable chair, I needed to go home but no one was expecting me quite yet, and so I sat for a moment and just listened.
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I might have thought of the liminal space when I was ushered into the changing room. The changing room looked like a slightly cushy locker room, such as you might find at the YMCA in the tonier neighborhoods: not metal lockers but easily-cleaned cabinetry, doors with keys and hooks behind; and quilted robes that snap up the front instead of hospital gowns with ties. A separate room with dim lights and comfortable chairs for waiting, and one other woman, staring at the wall and fidgeting with her hands.
I might have thought of it, because locker rooms are another kind of liminal space; a reason I like swimming for exercise isn't despite the extra time it takes in the changing room, the showers before and after, the extra work with hair and clothes, but because of the extra time, the time between; time for stepping out of the day and into the water, out of the water and through the steam and terrycloth and hot blowing air, and so back to the day again.
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But I didn't think of it then, and instead (after the second, more detailed mammogram, after the tech came in and said, "Well, they would like to go ahead and do the ultrasound, too") I thought about the Gulag Archipelago. I'm going to apologize right now for the ridiculous comparison, there's just one little aspect that I remembered. I was sitting in a consultation room, alone with several comfortable chairs and boxes of tissues and books displayed on the shelves, books with little pink ribbon designs on them, with titles about being inspired and courageous and communicative, and I was thinking how very much I did not want to be living in the world where I might seek assistance from the pink-ribbon books. I kind of glared at the closed door I'd just come through, and thought about how I'd just walked through that door and sat down to wait, warm in my quilted robe, and how now I was finding myself in one of the anterooms of the secret world of the sick.
And that made me think of the Gulag Archipelago, which I haven't read. Just some of it. But I was really, really struck by a description from early on in the book, a sort of introductory description; the sort of thing that made me put the book down to think hard about it (and then I guess I didn't pick it up again):
We have been happily borne — or perhaps have unhappily dragged our weary way — down the long and crooked streets of our lives, past all kinds of walls and fences made of rotting wood, rammed earth, brick, concrete, iron railings. We have never given a thought to what lies behind them. We have never tried to penetrate them with our vision or our understanding. But there is where the Gulag country begins, right next to us, two yards away from us. In addition, we have failed to notice an enormous number of closely fitted, well-disguised doors and gates in these fences. All those gates were prepared for us, every last one! And all of a sudden the fateful gate swings quickly open, and four white male hands, unaccustomed to physical labor but nonetheless strong and tenacious, grab us by the leg, arm, collar, cap, ear, and drag us in like a sack, and the gate behind us, the gate to our past life, is slammed shut once and for all.
Reading that, I was struck in the imagination: the G. A. as a disconnected, other world, another dimension almost, where the disappeared lived; and the many, many doors, just through which one could be thrust immediately from the real world to the parallel world of the G. A., doors through which people disappeared into the other world, doors everywhere and anywhere.
It's not the Gulag Archipelago, but I suddenly thought of the door to my consultation room as being a similar door. Doors everywhere, some in hospitals, some in clinics, some the doors to ordinary cars and buildings, I suppose; and on the other side, maybe, a different world; the archipelago of the sick. I sat in the consultation room, knowing I'd soon be ushered out of it and into another room for the ultrasound, and I hoped that the ultrasound room door would be one of the doors leading back out.
+ + +
It was, you know; it was a door back out, out to my regular life. I sat in the atrium and realized: the thing that's peculiarly frightening about Solzhenitsyn's gates--I mean, besides the fact that they were real, and to be disappeared through them meant real, awful horrors--I mean the thing that chilled me and has come back to me over and over about them--is that they are gates without liminal zones.
There's something peculiarly horrible about the other world, the otherworldly, the place where the rules don't follow-- being so close, just on the other side of a door, with no sense of passing through; just there one moment, and somewhere else the next. The theme appears again and again in our deliberately thrilling cinema: I was terrified by Poltergeist on HBO as a child (that cloacal closet door); a more childlike, similar thrill recurs again and again in Harry Potter, on Platform 9-and-three-quarters and in Diagon Alley; just a couple of years ago, Stranger Things hinted at the same terror with the Upside Down.
Even on my way out of skirting the edges of wondering--just a couple of days, days in which I could and did reassure myself that most likely everything would be fine and in fact there are a very large number of cases that get called back and turn out to be nothing significant at all--even on my way out, even with the children waiting at home and with many things left I was very glad to be able to return to doing today--I preferred to sit for a moment in the hospital hallway, with nowhere I needed to be at the moment.
I like to be the one who decides that I am ready to come out of the in-between space, and move on.
I am glad that it was the door back out. I experienced that once with a spot in my lung. I usually enjoy your writing but this post is so well written and describes the feeling I had so well that I had to comment. Plus I learned a new vocabulary word!
Posted by: Tracy | 18 January 2020 at 08:58 PM
I don't like either airports or hospitals so now I will have to sit and think of a liminal space I do like.
Posted by: Kelly | 19 January 2020 at 06:49 AM
I have always thought that I am sort of a weirdo about this, or at least odd, because I feel like *most* people are like Kelly. That being said, I want to stress that I am not particularly fond of the non-public hospital spaces, the treatment rooms and the like—just the parts you pass through on your way.
I have often described myself as enjoying being “alone in a crowd.” Part of what I like about all these spaces is that in them you are allowed to be relatively anonymous, but you can seek out human contact (good mornings, smiles, small talk, requests for small helps like directions or the time of day) if you crave just a little of it. But rarely do you wind up committed to more contact than desired, or that feels safe.
Posted by: bearing | 19 January 2020 at 07:40 AM
Obviously I was born to move to the Upper Midwest. “Polite distance” is my happy place.
Posted by: bearing | 19 January 2020 at 07:42 AM