J e r r y s p I n e L l I

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13 . Waiting 
Andrew’s father must have gotten a raise, 
because by the time Zinkoff enters third grade, 
Andrew is gone. Moved. To a place outside of 
town called Heatherwood. To a house with a 
driveway and a front yard with a tree, Zinkoff 
hears. 
In November of third grade Zinkoff goes 
through the worst period in all his eight years. He 
has surgery. He goes into the hospital and they 
put him to sleep and the doctor turns the upside-
down valve in his stomach right-side up. The 
good news is that he stops throwing up. The bad 
news is that he has to miss three weeks of school. 
He drives his mother crazy. “Heaven help 
me” every ten minutes. On the second day after 
returning home from the hospital, he tries to 
sneak off to school. So his mother creates an 
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alarm. She places the alarm in front of the front 
door. If her son ever tries to leave, the alarm goes 
off. The alarm is Polly. 
Polly is seventeen months old by now. She 
speaks very little at this point, but one thing she 
does say is “Bye-bye.” She says it distinctly—in 
fact, she shouts it—and she says it whenever she 
sees someone leaving the house. Each morning 
Mother Zinkoff padlocks the back door. Then 
she wheels the playpen up against the front door 
and places Polly inside. Then she goes about her 
chores, ready to come running whenever she 
hears “Bye-bye!” 
It happens only once. Mrs. Z comes running 
to find her son halfway out the door and Polly 
yelling “Bye-bye!” at the top of her lungs. She 
also finds a chocolate cupcake mashed in Polly’s 
hand. A bribe. 
Once Zinkoff understands that escape is 
impossible, he considers other ways to spend his 
time. This is critical, because time sits on 
Zinkoff’s hands like an elephant. He hates to 
wait. He hates waiting more than anything else. 
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To Zinkoff, waiting means basically this: not 
moving. He hates waiting in lines. He hates wait-
ing for the bathroom to clear out. He hates 
waiting for answers, for toast to pop up, for bath-
tubs to fill, for soup to heat, soup to cool, car 
rides to end. 
Most of all he hates sleep, the curse of the 
human race. Every night he protests it, every 
morning he gets out of it as soon as he can. In 
fact, as far as Zinkoff is concerned, he doesn’t 
really sleep. He merely waits all night until it’s 
time to get up. If pressed, he will admit to going 
to bed, but not to sleep. 
Relatives and other grown-ups have discov-
ered that they can amuse themselves by asking 
him, “So Donald, when did you go to bed last 
night?” 
“Nine o’clock.” 
“And when did you go to sleep?” 
“I didn’t.” 
“You mean you didn’t sleep all night?” 
“Nope.” 
Whenever his uncle Stanley comes over, he 
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proclaims at full voice: “Aha—there he is! The 
Sleepless Wonder!” 
Then there are the sitting things: watching 
movies and reading books and the hours in the 
classroom. Like sleeping, these too are non-
movers—but not entirely. For as long as they 
keep his interest, as long as they make him think, 
Zinkoff is moving. Of course, you wouldn’t know 
it to look at him, since the moving part is out of 
sight, behind his unblinking eyes. His brain. 
This is how Zinkoff at the age of eight imag-
ines the inside of his head: a moving part, like 
an elbow or knee. He imagines that when he’s 
interested, when he’s thinking, his brain is mov-
ing, stretching itself, leaning this way and that, 
flexing. When his brain stops moving—that is, 
when he’s bored—off goes the TV, closed goes 
the book, tuned out goes the teacher. 
Zinkoff’s blessing has been this: Boredom has 
not happened often. 
But it happens a lot during his three weeks of 
convalescing. Every day he looks out the front win-
dow at the kids going off to John W. Satterfield 
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Elementary. Not only is he not allowed to go to 
school, he is forbidden to do anything more active 
than walk across a room. His world shrinks to the 
living-room sofa. He soon becomes fed up with 
TV and books. Fed up with jigsaw puzzles and 
watercolors. Fed up with feeling the stitches of his 
operation. Minute after minute, day after endless 
day he stares out the front window, and the ele-
phant lowers itself onto his hands, and he comes to 
know the Long Wait of the Waiting Man. 
He comes to know how painful a minute can 
be, how unbearable an hour. Though he cannot 
put his understanding into words, he understands 
that time by itself is nothing, is emptiness, and 
that a person is not made for emptiness. One day 
he counts as thirty-two minutes go by on the 
clock, and he says to himself as he looks out the 
window, “Thirty-two years.” He tries to cast his 
brain, like a stone, that far, thirty-two years into 
the future, but all it falls into is an immense gray 
sadness. He knows it is not his own sadness but 
the sadness of the Waiting Man. It is everywhere, 
on the roof shingles and rainspouts and brick 
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walls and alleyways, and the sadness and the 
emptiness are the same thing and they will not end 
until a soldier comes walking down Willow Street. 
Zinkoff turns from the window. He feels an 
urgent need to play with his baby sister. He plays 
with her for an hour or two and makes her laugh, 
and then, because still he cannot go to school, he 
decides that school must come to him. 
He will give himself a test.