Customs: The Godot Game

It figures in no labor statistics, is the object of no time-motion studies, the subject of no sociological thesis. Nonetheless, taken in bulk, it probably consumes more hours out of more days —and is far more essential to survival—than any national pursuit but television. The name of the game: waiting.

Sometimes the result is worth the tedium (the birth of a baby), sometimes not (the refusal of a loan). Either way, there is no alternative method for meeting a plane or departing on one, getting a tooth removed, a passport renewed, or voting. Like any routine, waiting takes its own time, has its own special locales, makes its own etiquette. The furniture, accordingly may be much the same, but the fellow who reclines expansively in a comfortable armchair while awaiting an expense-account lunch guest is apt to assume a straighter posture in an identical chair when protesting outrageous alimony demands. Waiting for the P.T.A. meeting to begin, he sprawls. Waiting for the loan officer to finish a phone call, he assumes the well-known suppliant’s crouch, a kind of sidesaddle, lock-kneed pose designed to convey simultaneously fiscal responsibility and abject need.

A Cue in Common. Nothing defines the waiting room and the nature of its occupants more precisely than the reading matter on display. Movie magazines, out of order in a banker’s office or Government agency, are run-of-the-table at Central Casting, a must at the hairdressers. General practitioners and advertising executives stick to the better-known periodicals; so, as a rule, do psychiatrists (though many patients, fearful of being caught engrossed in the Reader’s Digest and branded a condensed personality, bring along a newspaper instead). Opticians invest in anything, so long as the print is good and dark; while pediatricians can get away with paper towels, stapled together, since anything not bound in cast iron will be in shreds before lunch time.

Basically, there are only so many ways to wait—standing up, sitting down, leaning over, slumping, and lying flat. But customers and patients, applicants and clients, all take a cue from their common mission, find a suitable code. Couples found in adoption-agency reception rooms affect an air of simple good taste (no jewelry other than religious medals), shun cigarettes, hum strains of lullabies every now and then. The same couple, accompanying their college-aged son to the admissions office of a select university, will dress with understated dash (a necklace of wooden, hand-painted beads for her, suede elbow patches and a Dunhill pipe for him), intersperse comments on their reading (“One always comes back to Ovid as if for the first time”) with reminiscences of “the old days at Chicago.”

Wait-It-Yourself. Waiting isn’t paid by the hour, and the minimum-wage law does not apply. And, as the song goes, nobody else can do it for you; you’ve got to wait it by yourself.

But suppose it could be unionized? Union members in good standing could demand undertime.