2023 Margarita Donnelly Prize for Prose Writing Runner-Up
The Weeping Fig Waits for No One
by L.I. Henley
“[It] turns a back somersault, and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you. It is like a bad dream.”
– Charlotte Perkins Gilman
“I am a patient boy/ I wait, I wait, I wait, I wait/ My time, water down a drain”
– Fugazi
/
In the waiting room of the gynecologist’s office, I sit slumped in a wooden chair against a wall papered with yellow roses and yellow leaves. A giant air conditioner drones loudly next to my head, intermittently knocking and thudding, not pumping out much cold air but really showing a lot of enthusiasm.
In my sagging shorts and flipflops, I look like the perpetually dazed spring-breaker—the contestant who was booted off the island more than a season ago but never got the message. I’m not yet thirty and don’t know that I have a couple of autoimmune diseases, don’t know that one of them is the cause of the horrific pain in my pelvis. I don’t know that my ovaries are firing off blood-filled cysts that burst and ooze corrosive magma, don’t know that my thyroid is broken, that my intestines and nervous system are shot. Right now, I’m just “generally unwell.” This means I’m living in a kind of unclassifiable, alternative elsewhere—a parallel universe with about as much charm as a pedestrian tunnel, or, say, a waiting room.
Beneath the fluorescent tubes, any rosiness in my skin has been rendered lardlike. Even the chipper house-hunters on the TV screen are looking pallid, practically skipping across the jaundiced lawn toward the monkey-vomit green prefab of their dreams.
I keep my sunglasses on.
//
Not all waiting rooms have a television, but all televisions kept in waiting rooms play cable news or one of these house-flipping shows, depending on the time of day.
When my fiancé, Jonathan, comes with me to my appointments, which is often, he turns the volume on the television all the way down. He’ll discreetly ask the people nearby, “Is anybody watching this?” Even the people lugubriously gazing into the screen will shake their heads no.
Jonathan would be here with me today, for the gynecology appointment, but he’s taking a midterm for one of his English courses—Romantic Lit or Victorian Lit or Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama. I can’t remember which. I’m not a bad listener; I’m not disinterested; I was once an English major too. Memory loss is one of my many mysterious symptoms. Difficulty recalling why I came into a room, the last thing that someone told me, the names of all the books I read in graduate school. Jonathan has been kind about it.
“How’s it going with…the one about the guy and his dad…you know…and the dad’s brother fucked the mom?”
“Huh? Whose mom?”
“You know…everybody dies?”
“Hamlet?”
“That one.”
“Oh. It’s great.”
///
The receptionist with her good posture, her rower’s shoulders, and watchful blue eyes thinks I’m not so much hungover as actively drunk, that I stopped for a martini or three in downtown Palm Springs before double-parking in the underground lot. I did double-park, but I’m not drunk. It doesn’t help that my words tend to slur a bit, that my head is full of fog, that my walk is jangly from the creeping ataxia. It doesn’t help that several times now I’ve heard a name that sounded like mine and gone up to ask if she called me.
A sharp, crushing pain overwhelms the right side of my pelvis where my appendix is, and I reflexively press both palms there as though I were shot, trying to keep the viscera in place. When the pain is this sudden, this searing, all I can do is observe: Oh, that’s an interesting sensation. My, something’s hard at work in there! Oh, ack, you got me!
I want Jonathan to be with me. I want to squeeze his hand while I ride out this volley.
If I hadn’t absentmindedly left my phone in the sweltering car, I could text him. Probably he’s done with his midterm now, and I could ask him how it went. In this year of 2011, we only have flip-phones that run off prepaid cards, so our texts always end up reading like the dialogue bubbles of cartoon cavemen: “How you? Test good?”—“Fine. Home now. Test hard. You?”—“Pain. Waiting. Miss you.” But I wish I could at least send him a sign of life.
If I had my phone, I’d know what time it is. I’d know how long I’ve been in the vortex of the waiting room, know how many hours are left on my insurance plan. On the other hand, what would knowing do for me, besides provide a kind of loud, obstinate ticking like the timer on a bomb?
The pain begins to recede. The air conditioner knocks three times, threatens to sputter out, then rallies to life once more.
////
Every waiting room has at least two potted plants. I’m starting to think they’re required by law—Every doctor’s office shall have at least two (2) potted plants, either real or fake, and at least one of them must be a scraggly Ficus of five feet.
Most waiting rooms have a coffee table covered in magazines that no one wants to read but still look as though they’ve been thoroughly thumbed through, traveled with, tucked under arms during rainstorms, used as personal fans on hot days.
Also never seen in use are the toys that look as though they’ve been passed down from children of the Civil War—blocks and cups, wooden beads on wires, dolls with no moveable appendages, and other objects unidentifiable but definitely dangerous.
Designing these rooms of waiting is someone’s job, and this someone made the tiniest bit of effort to make us feel like we’re doing our waiting in a familiar place. A television, but not your television. Magazines and toys that have been used but are never in use. Home, but not home—a room we would enter in a fever dream.
Surrounding one of the Ficus pots is a nest of dead leaves. The plant must be unhappy. And then, as if answering, “Yes, I’m unhappy,” another leaf drops to the floor.
/////
My favorite waiting room was at the urology office. It was the big saltwater fish tank in the center of the room; it was the 3-D models of bladders and urethras and kidneys sitting on the side tables, beckoning patients to touch them; it was the pharmaceutical posters advertising various medications for spastic bladders, incontinence, erectile dysfunction. What I liked was that the room wasn’t trying to make you feel like you were anywhere you’d been before.
Here, in the waiting room of the urologist, you are somewhere new. You can wait, but don’t fall asleep. We don’t want you becoming part of the furniture.
The massive puffer fish in the tank—her body a bloated bladder adorned with short spikes—watched me from her nest in the sand, her little puckered lips making an “O.”
The bladder is a kind of waiting room. The colon, too. The uterus is more of an incubator, but waiting still happens there. Wait. Stay. Empty. Refill. But the mind is the ultimate waiting room. Waiting, waiting. Waiting for the next appointment. Waiting for the next blood draw, the next test, the next result. Waiting to fall asleep. Waiting to be healthy enough to put that degree to use. Waiting to not be a disappointment to others. Waiting to wake up.
Am I awake now? How about now?
I was prescribed a drug for spastic bladders, which I never picked up from the pharmacy. I liked the urologist and the cheery nurse who’d threaded my catheter, liked their waiting room with the rubber kidneys and the puffer fish, but I knew that I didn’t have a spastic bladder.
///// /
On my lap is the notebook where I’ve been keeping track of my symptoms. I’ve got sixty-two pages filled, a kind of diary devoted to bowel movements and rashes, spasms and pains. At the back of the notebook there’s a comprehensive, multi-paragraphed treatise I composed that would only be more complete in presentation form with color photographs. And then there’s the hundred-word summary of a summary—the SparkNotes version I recite to my doctors who are in a hurry, always in a hurry.
“You’re very young,” they say.
What they mean is that I’m too young to be sick. I’m too tan, and I have all my teeth.
What they want is an explanation from me—the patient—as to why I have all these puzzling symptoms. It feels like being in the presence of flustered students demanding that I cut to the chase and tell them the significance of Gatsby’s green light or, more apropos, the goddamn meaning of Plath’s The Bell Jar.
Maybe what I need is an elevator pitch—we learned about them during a lunch-hour workshop in my MFA program. The speaker said that what you need to sell your novel or your script or whatever is a punchy, sexy pitch you could recite in under thirty seconds if you happened to be in a room with someone from Knopf or Norton or HBO. I was the only poet in the workshop, and the idea didn’t seem to apply to me. But maybe an elevator pitch would have helped me gain a specialist’s interest over the last seven months. Maybe I could come up with one now before I see the gynecologist.
Young, attractive, educated, female poet living in Nor Cal redwoods with musician/writer boyfriend (insert same set of physical descriptors) becomes mysteriously ill just days after twenty-seventh birthday. Goes from hiking and hot yoga to basically debilitated (but still attractive). Moves to Palm Desert (aka Heaven’s Waiting Room) to find specialists. After seven months of appointments, she’s buried in medical bills but has no answers—continues to deteriorate, living in constant pain. Parents think she’s a bit of a loser. Dies. Fiancé writes her story.
Maybe an offer from Lifetime for Women. Maybe. But the gyno? Should it be necessary?
///// //
“Laura,” says the receptionist—or at least that’s what I think she says. It’s impossible for me to hear well over the AC. Even though some people have left the office, others have arrived, and I can’t find a different seat.
Perhaps trying to motivate me now, the air conditioner makes a big show of its willingness to try, revving up louder and louder, shuddering so hard it might break loose from the wall and shoot into the sky. I wait to see if anyone stands.
“Laura,” the receptionist yells out, and an older woman wearing a full-body parka that looks like a sleeping bag stands up and crosses the room. Not my name exactly, but close. Maybe they’re going alphabetically. The AC seems to settle down a bit, needing to pace itself. I decide I will pace myself, too. Behind my tinted shades, I peruse the room.
///// ///
I want to sit next to the only other youngish, non-visibly pregnant woman who is sitting near one of the Ficus trees. I want to know what time she has on her watch, want to ask her, “What’re you in for?”
But the social conventions of a waiting room and a movie theatre are the same: to talk to another person would be to admit lunacy. If you say “hello,” you’re strange. If you ask how their day is going, you’re undoubtedly about to try and sell them something you keep concealed inside your jacket. But sitting next to someone when there are plenty of other available seats would be advertising sociopathic tendencies.
The woman and I look similar except she obviously brushes her hair, wears clothes that fit her, and absorbs nutrients from her food when she eats. One funny thing about her, though, and I’m not judging, is that a couple of times she has picked something out of the soil in the Ficus pot. Those little white pellets that come in most soil bags—she’s rolling a few around between her fingers. It seems like a pleasant enough activity. Soothing even. Her eyes look dreamy, like she’s listening to some kind of ASMR podcast. I wish I had some little pellets to roll around, too.
///// ////
Little sharp explosions like Pop Rocks behind my bellybutton.
A dull bread knife sawing down my bikini line.
A leaden, swollen pain somewhere in the center. Like I’ve been beaten with a mélange of primitive tools.
My hands feel all over my stomach, trying to plug up the many holes.
The receptionist utters a name. It sounds like mine. I stand up, slowly, unsteadily, and she sees me, shakes her head no. I hear her call the name again, and this time it’s nothing like mine.
For a moment I forget what it is I’m waiting for.
Then I remember that I’m in a waiting room with the pregnant and menopausal and those in need of birth control. I’m in the “other” category. Not pregnant, not trying to not become pregnant, not menopausal. I’m here for the regular, annual Pap smear and to tell the gynecologist about my irregularness; my non-circular cycles; the intermittent, supercharged pains in my pelvis that the GI said is not from my intestines; the pressure on my bladder filed in the gigantic “spastic bladder” bin.
I breathe in and out. I am awake. I am alive. My insurance runs out soon. Tonight—did I mention? Another leaf falls to its death. The Ficus and I are the same height. We’re both scraggly, pained, unwell. I’m becoming part of the room, part of the set. The AC and I exhale in a sigh that sounds more like a groan.
///// /////
I realize suddenly that I’ve been staring hard at the receptionist, practically burrowing through her clammy skull. The realization comes when she yawns without covering her mouth and I practically fall down her gullet, her healthy pink tonsils looming large in front of me. Her yawn looks like the shape of my name. I stand with great effort, holding my right side. My left knee buckles and I sway a bit, bracing myself on the arm of the chair.
“No,” she says, and goes back to looking down at what is probably a stack of blank papers.
In another life, this woman was a javelin. In my previous life I was still me—soft and slow and bleeding at the end of her speared tip.
///// ///// /
My least favorite waiting rooms are the ones that remind me of the kind of living spaces I’d get stuck in as a child of the eighties—rooms with davenports and tchotchke cases, typically decorated by women who used entire cans of Aqua Net on their bangs. These were the wives of my father’s cop friends, and they were charged with my before-and-after school care. Country music on the radio. The inevitable collection of Precious Moments dolls that no one was supposed to touch. Noxious smells of bleach and old potpourri. The obligatory framed passage from 1 Corinthians 13—“Love is patient, love is kind”—never far from the wooden spanking paddle. At the beginning of my illness, back in Humboldt, I sat in such an office, waiting to talk to a male gynecologist about my bladder, my pelvic pain, the burning sensation in my breasts. One wall was completely plastered in Polaroids of the doctor posing with newborns, sometimes two or three at a time, smiling proudly as though he’d fathered them all.
Surely whoever decorates these kinds of offices doesn’t believe in the limits of embroidery.
Surrounded by so many doilies, I should not have been surprised with the doctor’s response to my complaint of swollen, burning, painful breasts.
“Don’t be glum,” he said, “You’re just well endowed. That’s a good thing.”
Through the speakers in the corner of the exam room, some pop-country star or another was singing about his love for good-looking women and beer as bile crept up my throat. Love is horny, love is Coors Light.
I left with a script for a drug that was supposed to help me feel the need to pee less often, which sounded like a start. Jonathan, who’d gone through paramedic school before becoming an English major, researched the drug and found it was an anti-depressant that also, coincidentally, *might* make a person pee less often. I never filled the script, and I never got over that word—glum.
Working diagnosis: glumness.
Patient presented with symptoms of being glum in a shapely body.
Further work-up of hysteria recommended.
///// ///// //
The receptionist calls another name, and I wait to see if anyone is going to claim it before I try standing up again. Very pregnant and very beautiful, a goddess who looks about my age rises and glides past me, traveling toward her name with certainty. When she crosses in front of me, she leaves behind a cloud of warmth, a bank of heat, the scent of bread rising in the oven. If the indeterminate wait time had any effect on her, she’s not showing it. Her nourished skin deflects the fluorescent lighting without effort.
When she gets to the front desk, the receptionist smiles at her, greets her as if the woman is a regular. And she probably is, being that she is close to giving birth. The receptionist says the woman’s name again and it sounds like “Triscuit,” but it’s probably Kristin or Tristin.
A woman in pink scrubs waits for the pregnant Kristin, clipboard in hand, ushering her past the door with the sign that says in red letters STOP. And for a moment, I’m jealous. Looking at Kristin, you can identify right away what she came in for. I don’t consider that perhaps she’s having complications or will have them…only that her body appears to have one and only one task, that doctors look at her and think, “I got this.”
Whether their specialty lie in molars or urethras, every single medical practitioner I’ve seen since February has asked me when I’m going to have children. Asking me “if” is bad enough, but framing pregnancy as inevitable, as though all of us want to get pregnant and all of us can—not to mention that I’m trapped in a painful, malfunctioning, wire-crossed body that can barely support my own life—is not only tone-deaf but creepy in a dystopian, Handmaid’s kind of way.
“Let’s focus on un-fucking the right now,” the confident person inside me wants to say, “Then we can talk about fucking up the future.” But all I say is no, not now, maybe later.
///// ///// ///
There was a brief time—maybe five or six months—before I turned twenty-seven and before I became ill—when Jonathan and I thought we wanted to be parents. We were living in Humboldt where even after the rain stopped the trees continued to weep. We were maybe a little bored—cabin fever—but also surrounded by things unlimited in their ability to grow: the sword ferns, mosses, and Redwoods. The wild onion shoots rising to our knees. Everything fecund and hairy. The blackberry drupelets swollen, voluptuous bumblebees and powdery moths going in and out of purple Lupine. Dark bowers dotted with glowing mushroom caps. We could envision ourselves growing something, someone, in the hum of all that lushness.
Drinking my coffee and writing my poems or working on poems, I’d hear the voice that said, “Now or never,” and we’d make it on the moldy carpet, make it on our air mattress as it slowly deflated. I was sure in my body then, walking the steep hills in between rain showers or charging through the downpours in my thick galoshes—but we were both students, unmarried, living off loans, dragging discarded furniture off street corners to pad our nest. Our wee-growing neighbors assured us I’d get Medi-Cal if I were pregnant, at least until the child was a certain age, but our reasons for wanting to procreate had more to do with that sense of now-ness, a cresting potential, a go go now now before the heavy door locks. Sometimes I’d be late, and my breasts would feel heavy, my uterus heavy, and we’d think…but then always the heaviness turned into blood and pain. I didn’t know my body was much too busy trying to fend off an invisible army that was taking hold, that it was already overwhelmed.
///// ///// ////
I do not lament childlessness. I only lament my lack of choices, this helpless, fading-away, this leaf-by-leaf disappearing. Perhaps I’ve been too demure, too patient, too forgiving of the process? Maybe I need to conjure rage? Can I muster it? Should I stand up and shout? Make a scene? Flip over the coffee table and send all the tattered magazines flying?
Like a Rugby-playing librarian, the receptionist senses my agitation, looks up at me. If she had a whistle, she’d blow it. My feet are tapping senselessly in their rubber flip-flops, my nails clicking on the metal arms of the chairs. Waiting drives people to such mindless dispatches…their feet and fingers haphazardly tapping a Morse code of garbled intentions. I cross my ankles, try to lock my legs into submission, but soon they are right back at it.
The Ficus next to the woman with the soil pellets is partially blocking a sign. I amble over to read the sign, gently parting the leaves: “PLEASE LEAVE CHILDREN AND OTHER GUESTS AT HOME.” This explains so much. The toys are only here for the mothers who had no other options or who did not read the sign the last time they came. Soon the Ficus will grow large enough to cover the sign completely, and the whole waiting room will fill with children. They will gaze disappointedly at the Tinker Toys, the wooden blocks, the lead soldiers. One boy will hold up the abacus and ask his mother, “How do you plug this in?”
Miraculously, just under the sign is the thermostat, which also tells the time. I’ve been in the office for just over two hours, but it feels much longer. Days, weeks. Two more leaves fall to the carpet. I see a little tag sticking out of the soil. “Ficus benjamina,” I read aloud, “The Weeping Fig.” The woman with the pellets does not look up.
///// ///// ///// //
“Did I miss my turn?” I ask the receptionist after my fourth bathroom visit, a kind of nod to what I can only assume is a shared awareness about how long I’ve been here.
“Actually,” she says. “You did.” I start laughing because I think she’s joking. But she’s not the kind of person who would make a joke.
My face crumbles. The cheilitis at the corners of my mouth threatens to crack and ooze. My nose is sliding down to my chin.
“We’ll call you next,” she says.
I linger a moment, though I’m not sure why.
“Oh,” she says, evenly, casually, as though we play pickleball together on Thursday evenings. “Did you realize your insurance plan ends tonight? I meant to ask you that when I saw your card earlier.”
“Yes,” I say, leaning heavily on the counter, “I’ve been thinking about it all day.”
I tell her about my talks with the major companies—Blue Shield, Aetna, etc.—and how they’ve all offered to sell me an insurance plan but were also sure to let me know that none of my preexisting conditions would be covered. Isn’t that messed up? Isn’t that insane? Her face doesn’t change, not even a twitch. Probably she’s thinking about what she’s going to have for dinner. “Six months,” I repeat, removing my glasses so she can see my eyes. “I’ll probably be dead in six months.” I just want her to feel something—but she’s a stalagmite with glasses.
///// ///// ///// ///
Every person who waits this long for something eventually begins to question what it is they’re waiting for. Sure, I know I’m waiting for a gynecologist I’ve never met to feel my breasts for lumps and swab my cervix to check for cancerous cells. Assumedly I’ll have my sixty seconds to give her my pitch, to rattle off the symptoms—at least the symptoms that fall under her domain. But what is it that I expect she will do for me?
When the receptionist finally calls my name, being sure to call extra loudly and clearly, I’ve just signed my initials on the final blank of the paperwork I’d forgotten to fill out earlier. Probably I signed away some major asset, made a kind of Faustian deal. If it’s my first-born child they’re after, they’re going to be waiting indefinitely to collect, same for a soul. But the joke is on me, of course, because after being weighed on an old, dusty scale, I’m led to yet another waiting room.
The exam room is not the waiting room, but it is a place where you wait. Without your clothes or shoes, without a window, without a Weeping Fig or a copy of Family Circle to keep you company, you wait.
Even a bird in a cage has a mirror.
???
Here in the inner waiting room, it is ten degrees colder. It is silent. Not even a ticking clock or humming air conditioner. If it weren’t for my blue paper skirt and vest, the framed medical posters of ghostly, glandular breasts and grimacing pelvises, I could be in any nondomestic room, any four-walled holding tank, at any time in modern history.
I shimmy down from the examination table, clutching the paper skirt at my hips, pull my notebook of symptoms from my purse, begin taking notes. Here in the inner waiting room, it is ten degrees colder. It is silent….
The silence takes on a high-pitch frequency that’s louder than my heartbeat. I hear footsteps coming closer, then passing me by, the closing of a heavy door. It strikes me that the gynecologist has left for the day or given up the practice entirely. She’s snuck out a hidden exit, burrowed through an escape hatch, thrown herself down a laundry chute. I wonder if she’s army crawling through an air vent above my head at this moment, fleeing her life of vulvas and pubic hair. I wouldn’t blame her. Or there’s no gynecologist, has never been a gynecologist, and I’m waiting for no one, the whole point of waiting is the wait. The Great Wait—a new reality show, and I’m the first participant. In the waiting room, on the television, there I am in real time, sitting on the exam table with my notebook and left breast peeking out of the paper flap. And when I finally decide to walk through the door—the wait having run out the clock of my insurance, the clocks of my patience and hunger—it will be down a long, long hallway that narrows until I’m hunched. Then crawling. Then flat on the floor, inching along, thin as a creeping vine.