Bring the Rain

by JoAnn Franklin

  Lea would be ticked I was late, so I consoled myself that if this problem simmered for a bit, if I stopped thinking about the situation, the answer would come to me—it always did. As I opened my office door, I thought about canceling the taping. I’d had good intentions over the weekend, but there had never been enough time to prepare for class.

  “Morning,” I said to Lea as I put my briefcase down on the desk and perched Brown Bear on top of the dreaded camera. He looked right at home there.

  Lea frowned. “You’re late, Professor.”

  Wait until she heard the haphazard lecture I’d put together. I set up my notes—or rather the half page I had jotted some notes on—and asked her what it felt like to fall in love.

  “We don’t have time to talk of love this morning.”

  Now that was just rude. “I can reschedule . . . or we can make time.”

  “What do you want to know?” Lea folded her arms across her chest and leaned back against the table behind her, one foot crossed over the other. She didn’t appear at all relaxed despite the pose. She looked surprised that I’d been so adamant.

  I was as well, but I wanted her insights. How I felt about Ash didn’t follow the typical romantic heuristics. I didn’t need his money, thanks to my father, and I’d made my own way, had always made my own way. I couldn’t have his children. He didn’t want children. While I found Ash attractive, most of the women across the campus did as well. He looked like a tall, lean Cary Grant—his facial features a little thinner, more ascetic—but while they appreciated the view, they weren’t lining up to marry him.

  “Have you ever been in love?”

  “What does that have to do with poverty?”

  I sighed and picked up my half page of notes.

  She sighed and said, “Of course I’ve been in love.”

  “How did you know he was the one?”

  “Love shackles your intelligence, makes you high, and because you care, you’re more aggressive in defense of your mate. I’ve seen males in love protect females when someone makes them sad and vice versa. Couple that with the research that links the love bug to feeling invincible, and you’ve got potent stuff,” Lea said, “I wouldn’t fool around with love, Dr. Sommers, not if I were you.”

  Too late. I thought of how I’d left Ash sleeping. He felt safe with me there, and I felt safe with him. How did I explain that to myself?

  “I still don’t understand,” said Lea, “what this has to do with poverty, with this class.”

  Maybe she was thinking I had lost my mind. I looked at Brown Bear perched on the camera and thought that I couldn’t blame her. “I think love, or rather the romantic notion of love, keeps people in poverty.”

  “Now that’s a reach.” Once again, she folded her arms and leaned back. “That makes no sense unless”—she thought for a moment—“I never connected the dots, but the same area of your brain that lights up when you take cocaine, lights up when you fall in love.”

  “Falling in love is the heuristic—”

  “Hold that thought.” Lea got behind the camera and turned it on, waving at me to continue. “Now repeat what you just said and go on. Go on,” she insisted. “Tell me why love keeps people impoverished because I don’t understand how love could when so many say it’s the only thing that makes being poor bearable.”

  The camera’s warning light came on, and I was live. “Welcome everyone,” I said with a smile as I scrambled to reiterate what I’d just said. “Today we’re going to talk about love and Robin Hood and poverty. As the song goes, ‘We’d do anything for love.’ Sounds romantic, doesn’t it? Nothing is further from fact when love keeps you impoverished.

  “Falling in love is the heuristic your brain uses when you decide to marry. Consider this scenario. James and Ted want to marry you. Ted has money, but you’re in love with James. You’re young, idealistic, and impoverished. So is James. Both of you want out, and as that bond strengthens, you become united against the world. Your brain lights up. His lights up. You do stupid things like think you can change him, which is romanticized by society as the acceptable, preferred reform effort rather than incarceration because when James hits you, and when the kids come along, and he hits them, he’s always sorry.

  “You tell yourself, you’re one woman trying her hardest. What’s one woman in the greater scheme of things? You believe the love of a good woman does reform a mean man, and James isn’t mean, he’s angry and stressed because nothing he does puts more food on the table, and he loves his kids, or says he does, as much as he loves you.

  “That’s how you console yourself, but you know, deep inside, Ted might have been a better choice. Wham . . . twenty years go by and you’re saddled with kids, debt, and insurmountable circumstances, but sharing the same bed with James makes you feel safe because at least there’s someone else there in this horrible spot with you. You’re not alone, and at night, you reach out and touch him and that brings comfort, despite the fact that your kids can’t sleep because they’re hungry.

  “Touch is one of the reasons women in poverty suffer their fate rather than change their environments. Loneliness is another because being lonely puts you at the edge of society, and that’s where prey are found, around the edges, not in the middle of the pack. Women are taught in so many ways to value love and family, and even when the relationship is ensconced in poverty, those values keep women chained.

  “And one more thing. As a wife and mother, women have value. That emotional belief anchored through biology allows women to surf waves of shame and despair that keep the impoverished unbalanced.

  “That altruism has advanced civilization, which is not a small thing.” I consulted my notes, turned to face the camera again, and pretended to talk to Brown Bear. “Before I turn to Robin Hood, which we’ve discussed more than once in this class, let me make it clear I believe what we have in place—income taxes, food stamps, earned income tax credit, and Medicaid—are helpful because they address the suffering, and that’s a good thing. But suffering is a symptom, it’s not the cause of poverty. So let’s examine an idea that some individuals think might be a solution.

  “Taking from the rich and giving to the poor, the story of Robin Hood, still lives for a reason. The idea has deep roots in altruism, which always zings our value system. The story is also theologically based.

  “But the question remains: would poverty disappear if we gave the poor money? Maybe, for a moment, but that gesture is not a happy-ever-after solution.” I paused, and Lea’s eyes grew concerned.

  Now her eyes narrowed—because she did not believe me or because she was considering what I’d said? Brown Bear smiled, or it seemed to me that he smiled, because he knew the logic.

  “The gesture relies on the belief that money itself can solve the problem. Better homes, better health care, more food, fancier cars, all of that could bring an improved standard of living to the impoverished, which is what happens through taxes, food stamps, all of the aids I mentioned earlier, but that alone will not solve poverty. Once the money is disbursed, the impoverished and the rich are both at ground zero but with one significant difference.” I went on to reiterate the conversation I’d had with the Raindrops regarding the production of items of value.

  “The key to abolishing poverty is to recognize that a symptom, a lack of money, is not the underlying cause of poverty. For your team project, you might ask yourself, what is? What makes poverty impossible to solve? You’ll find a clue in the discussion earlier about what falling in love does to your brain. You’ll find another clue in thinking about wealth versus value and money as a simple technology that measures value.”

  Lea indicated I’d run out of time, so I concluded, “Beliefs are not facts. They become harmful when the balance between opinion and fact is disrupted. The Sentinel, what you know as System 1, is also at fault here because System 1 uses heuristics better suited to attack by saber-tooth tigers than to cope with poverty.

  “The Mayans, you remember, we’ve ta
lked about them before”—I smiled because I knew that the students watching this video would smile—“they sacrificed virgins in the belief that the sacrifice would make rain and end the drought. When rain didn’t come, they sacrificed more virgins.

  “Taking from the rich and giving to the poor is a belief, like the ones the Mayans had about virgins and drought, and if we implement that belief, which is gaining momentum in this country, we will be as blind to the facts as the Mayans. This particular belief, as altruistic and romantic as it sounds on the surface, won’t work because it doesn’t address the underlying problem.

  “Now for some housekeeping that Lea has brought to my attention. This course is structured to help you think about things differently. That can be uncomfortable because exposure leaves our egos vulnerable to damage. This course is also structured for you to take action—that end-of-course project we’ve asked you to complete with the help of team members. Taking action equates to taking responsibility, which opens you to criticism and, sometimes, regret. We’ve put you at psychological risk, that’s what education does. If you take one thing from this course, take this. Beliefs are not facts. Facts must balance beliefs because if they don’t, we’ll be like the Mayans. And on that cheery note, I’ll see you all again soon.”

  Lea slipped out from behind the camera. While she did a quick check of the video, I breathed a sigh of relief that things had gone as well as they had. These segments were nerve wracking.

  Brown Bear made my anxiety a little better, but not much. I gathered him up along with my briefcase and thought with delight of the hours that stretched ahead of me. I could do anything I wanted to with them. I’d go to the library, I decided, and do research for that chapter Lea and I were writing.

  “I think,” Lea said, “that if I follow through on the chat site with reassurances that the final project will be graded on identification of the societal barriers that contribute to poverty, careful evaluation of pluses and minuses of any and all suggestions they make for solving poverty, and their reasons for choosing the one alternative insight that challenges the status quo based on the evaluation of whether or not that plan will provide a future, we might live to see another taping.”

  “Too much?” I asked.

  “I don’t know if they—or, for that matter, I—see the connection between falling in love and poverty, but you’ve given them food for thought, and that’s what good teaching is all about. You’re not asking them to agree with you. You’re asking them to consider whether love does keep people impoverished, and some of these students are going to agree, and some of them are not.

  “Plus, I’m not sure we have a choice. Nature wants us to procreate, and love helps us do that.” At the look of dismay on my face, she explained. “You told them truth, and you’ve said this before and it bears repeating again: ideas, beliefs, assumptions, and emotion control human behavior. But none of what you knew about the power of love stopped you from tumbling head first into it, did it, Dr. Sommers?”

  Maybe she was right. Loving Ash chained me to a life of emotional loneliness because he couldn’t love me back, and I’d be wanting what I couldn’t have for the rest of my life. I’d be as trapped as those women in poverty, mired in emotion that kept me from living a fulfilling life, always regretting what I couldn’t have. I had all these degrees, fame, fortune, but at heart, like them, like women everywhere, I yearned for love. I would change that weakness about myself, if I could.

  “Are you and Dean Wright dating, Dr. Sommers? You spend a lot of time together.”

  Was it that obvious? “He’s still in love with his wife, Lea. I think he always will be.”

  “You deserve better than that, Dr. Sommers.”

  She was right. I did, but I was learning that that didn’t seem to matter. I didn’t need Ash to take care of me if I was sick. I had enough money to hire caretakers if I needed care, and Robbie would be there for me. I could count on my nephew, and if I made him my sole heir, he would get the farm and the house for his troubles, although I knew that he would care for me even if I had nothing.

  I didn’t need Ash for anything, but I did want him. I had a feeling I always would.

  EIGHT

  ELLEN’S TEXT CAUGHT UP with me as I climbed the next to the last flight of stairs in the building. Exercise cleared my thinking. More than most in this university, I knew the importance of a healthy body for a healthy mind. And with the momentum that was TRI, plus the MOOC, I’d lost myself in the mental challenges and neglected my physical self.

  My labored breathing eased somewhat once the majority of the stairs were behind me, but I still had a long way to go before I could climb four flights from the basement to the third floor without hitching breaths during the final sprint.

  Mexico wonderful. Feeling much better. Bill says worried. Don’t worry about me. I’m fine.

  Her text made me smile and pause, my extended foot retreating from taking the next step up. I leaned against the wall so others could pass me although there was no one around, reading and rereading that text, savoring the honesty of her positive emotion. The relief—that she’d reached out to me, that things might be normal between us, like they used to be before the cancer had caused her to question and then run—made me mellow and happy enough to respond.

  Miss you. Where are you?

  Tepozteco. Mountains in central Mexico. Beautiful here.

  Far away, I thought, trying to imagine what the terrain was like there. Steep hills covered in brush and thorns, and deep ravines that plunged into nothingness. I couldn’t reach her if I tried, although I’d noted she was careful not to share the exact location. My guess was she hadn’t told Bill either. Maybe she’d listen this time, and so I tried yet again to reason with her.

  Come home.

  Soon. I’m healing. I can feel the energies erasing the cancer.

  Oh, that was troubling. Doesn’t work that way, Ellen.

  Dart, if you believe . . . It does.

  Images of dark caves, overgrown trails, sliding, slithering rocks that rolled out from underfoot.

  Mountains dangerous. Stay away.

  Not so. Beautiful. Hiking tomorrow. Part of my spiritual journey, the great one says.

  What great one?

  No answer.

  Don’t do this.

  No answer.

  Come home.

  No answer.

  Come home.

  She was gone. I leaned my head back against the cool tile of the stairwell. Once again, I’d lost her. This was what my life had become, waiting for what happened next. I had always made my own opportunities. I’d started TRI. I’d changed the world, made it a better place for so many people, but I couldn’t control what I feared was already in motion both inside me and inside my cousin’s lungs, heart, and head.

  I slid the phone inside my pocket and climbed the stairs, fighting the pain in my aching leg muscles and my heart. Then I turned around, went down all four flights, and climbed the stairs again, and again.

  “It’s almost impossible to burn pot roast,” Lynn said, drawing my attention back to the task at hand, “but you did it.”

  We had finished dinner, and the four of us were gathered at the dining table for our weekly Raindrop meeting, the one we’d kept postponing because we hadn’t wanted to face how ineffectual we were at solving society’s problems.

  “Have another glass of wine,” I told her, filling her glass with the merlot I’d bought on the way home from work.

  “The potatoes were good,” Susan said. “Those yellow-gold ones are the best though. How come you didn’t use those?”

  “This,” I said, slipping into my chair at the head of the table and picking up my own glass of wine, “is what the Raindrops have disintegrated into—boring discussions of burnt pot roast and mediocre potatoes. We’re supposed to be solving complex messy problems.”

  Mary Beth sighed and picked up her own wine glass. “I don’t feel like solving others’ problems.”

  “I’m wi
th her,” Lynn said. “We couldn’t prevent Ellen from going off to Mexico to consult a faith healer, and she’s not a stranger like these folks.” She gestured toward the closed folders.

  “Poor Bill,” Mary Beth said.

  Susan hadn’t weighed in. She always had an opinion, but she sat there, toying with her wine glass, swirling the red liquid around and around, looking pensive and sad and refusing to meet anyone’s gaze. That troubled me.

  “It’s classic, isn’t it?” I said, as I too stared at my wine glass. “The cancer returned, she’s desperate, and she turned to beliefs.”

  “She’s put facts and knowledge aside for an unproven remedy.” Susan spun her wineglass around and added, “That she believes will cure her, and instead, it’s going to kill her.” Susan spun her wineglass around yet again. Outside a gust of wind rattled the dining room windows.

  “That’s why Dart started The Raindrop Institute,” Mary Beth said, with a smile in my direction. “Dart Sommers, rule number one. Substitute belief for fact, abandon empirical evidence, and you set the stage for collapse.”

  I hadn’t done that with Ash, at least not yet. I was still together enough that I hadn’t substituted beliefs for facts about our relationship. But the fury in my mind had started to erode other relationships because when Lynn said Ellen must be frightened beyond belief, I said, as if I didn’t care my cousin was dying, “As are some of us who see the signs that poverty is edging this country closer to collapse.”

  The room got quiet for a while after that, then Susan straightened as if she’d made a decision. “Maybe we should face some harsh truths about The Raindrop Institute, Dart.” She considered what she was about to add. “It’s not the same without Classy. The three of us have been talking. We don’t think we have enough brain power to keep TRI functioning.”

  Finally. But my cousin Ellen’s act of desperation had pushed them to the realization, not my reasoned logic or facts.

  “It’s not as bleak as that,” I said. Susan looked surprised. “We’ve solved some big issues in Brunswick County, North Carolina, and parts of the Deep South. Our business model has kept us from realizing our potential. TRI needs to make the leap to a peer-driven mode, as TED did.”