The Gulf

by Belle Boggs

  Davonte did not look like a pervert, but rather like an overgrown child with his cornrows and baggy T-shirt, the shiny gym shorts that hung to the middle of his tattooed calves. She wondered what all of this stretching—the futile attempts to touch his toes, the unlimber side lunges—was in service of. It was hard to picture him jogging, but then, to her surprise, that is exactly what he did. He turned away and started running, arms held in tight L shapes at his side, tennis shoes kicking up sand, and he did not stop for as long as she could keep him in her sight.

  “Like watching a sunset” was how Marianne described it later to Eric. He had returned from examining the cavernous spaces underneath Lorraine’s beds and killing several palmetto bugs. “The way something so big could just disappear.”

  “One was the size of a shoe,” he said. “It was bloody.”

  “I mean, he must weigh three hundred pounds?”

  “He doesn’t weigh three hundred pounds, Marianne.”

  “Well, I’ve never been good at estimating. And he just ran, all the way up the beach.”

  “Lorraine is still a chain smoker,” Eric said.

  He’d come back tanned and spoiled from Dubai, Marianne thought. Everything overwhelmed him, and he needed to be talked down from negative thinking. But then, Marianne had to admit, so did she. It seemed that negativity and pessimism were necessary, essential, but heavy and unhealthy, like a bucket of third-world water, which they passed back and forth between them. This was not how Marianne had imagined their reunion, or even the beginning of their partnership in the school.

  “I am trying to say something positive here. I am trying to talk about potential. It’s been a hard day. I thought we could keep the bad stuff to ourselves for once.”

  “Sorry,” Eric said, holding up his hands in a gesture of surrender. “You think anyone here recognizes him?”

  Marianne frowned at the now-empty beach, trying to conjure Davonte. She’d been somewhat flustered when he checked in, and he’d seemed irritated by how long it had taken her to find his keys. “No, probably not. Do you think it would be a problem if they did?”

  “Maybe. Probably. I doubt we have too many Davonte Gold fans here anyway.”

  “He’s going by Donald,” Marianne said. “So don’t call him Davonte.”

  They still had so much to do—find their nonfiction instructor, set up for the evening’s welcome reception, make tropical punches (with alcohol and without). Marianne kept getting the urge to drive off, maybe to the Keys, where it would be warm enough to swim. It was a feeling she’d gotten at every job she’d ever had, even as a child at school, sent on an errand—I could just escape—and the only way she knew to fight it was to focus on small tasks, like tracking down Tom Marshall’s cell number.

  “His novel.” Eric shook his head as if trying to unsee something. “I don’t know how I let you sneak this one by me.”

  “Positive things,” Marianne reminded him, paging through her nonfiction hiring folder. “Keep the negative ones to yourself.”

  “If people like you are still reading and writing, then we do not have to worry about books becoming obsolete,” the woman at the podium was saying. This was Janine’s teacher, a famous poet who had won prize after prize, back in the seventies. You could google her name and get thousands of hits, and Janine, in the first blush of excitement over her acceptance, had clicked on nearly all of them. She had also ordered her first, most widely praised book and dutifully read it, marking lines and stanzas she did not understand with sticky notes. The slim book, stiffly ruffled with pink and blue notes, peeked out of Janine’s tote bag, which vibrated now and then with texts from her daughters. She was trying very hard to ignore the texts and focus on her teacher. She thought texts should be reserved for important communications—things too immediate to chance losing to the black hole of voicemail—but realized that her daughters felt exactly the opposite.

  Janine, who had long been sensitive to slights, wondered what the woman, her teacher, meant by people like you. She had witchy gray hair that flowed over her shoulders, round glasses pushed on top of her head, and a way of looking out and over the audience instead of at them. In her author photo she’d worn her hair in the same tumbling, frizzy mass, though it was darker then, and she’d stared right at the camera in an unsettling way. Janine craned her neck to see if there was a very tall or standing person that Lorraine Kominski might be addressing, but all she saw were the same attentive, mostly middle-aged students, seated on folding chairs that rested unevenly on the ground, and the sculpture garden behind them. She was talking about the state of poetry today, and Janine felt, despite the woman’s imperious air and fast way of speaking, a kind of kinship forming across the rows of students. The gist of her speech was this: she had seen things change, and she did not feel hopeful about the direction of these changes. That was exactly how Janine felt in her own most trying moments, and she found herself nodding with each pronouncement. After a few more minutes Lorraine Kominski paused abruptly and looked out at the audience as if she were surprised to find them still in their seats, then set her glasses down on the end of her nose and began to read from a stack of poems.

  The woman on Janine’s right was sitting with perfect posture, her hands folded neatly in her lap, her eyes trained on the poet. Her hair was so thick and dark that it looked like a doll’s hair, so smooth that Janine wondered if it might in fact be a wig. Her bag, neater than Janine’s floppy tote but also set on the ground, glowed every few minutes with messages arriving to her iPhone. Janine watched the phone and watched the woman, who did not turn her head or otherwise acknowledge her messages other than a brief squinting and raising of her chin, that extra effort of ignoring the distraction. She might have been Janine’s age or she might have been ten years younger; it was hard to tell in the same way that it was hard to tell the ages of people on television.

  Lorraine was reading a poem about the ocean, one of Janine’s favorites because it was so clear, compared to the others. It always appeared on the poetry websites that would offer you two or three examples from the poet’s work, so perhaps its clarity came from the fact that Janine had read it many times. Lorraine had never had children—Janine knew this from the biographical notes—and this fact was reflected in the poem, which was about feeling powerless and insignificant in the face of nature. She had read this poem many times, Janine could tell, and so its emotional significance was hard to gauge. Janine wondered if she felt the same way now, if it would help her to know that children had their own ways of making you feel powerless and insignificant.

  Soon the reading was over, and everyone was milling about with cups of sparkling punch. Janine was suddenly shy of Lorraine Kominski, who was standing behind the punch table, tipping a cup to her lips.

  “Wasn’t it a wonderful reading?” Janine asked the woman with the perfect posture. Janine was not used to being around so many strangers, and their proximity during the reading suggested a greater intimacy than she would have ordinarily felt with such a pulled-together woman. “I’m studying with her.”

  “Yes, wonderful,” the woman said, though she offered nothing else about the reading. She hitched her purse over her shoulder and smiled broadly at Janine. “Are you a student here?”

  “Oh, yes. I’m here for poetry,” she said. It was still difficult to say I’m a poet and not feel foolish, but I’m here for poetry sounded wrong too—like she was in line for a movie. “And you? Are you a student also?”

  The woman shook her head apologetically. “No, my talents are not in the writing arena. How I wish I could write! You are very lucky. Tell me, how did you find out about the Ranch?” She took an electronic tablet from her bag and tapped lightly at the screen, which cast a pale glow on her poreless skin. “You don’t mind if I take notes, do you?”

  “I found out about the Ranch in a magazine. I just applied,” Janine said slowly. The woman’s swiping and tapping made her self-conscious. Was she a reporter? Some kind of agent? Janine had h
eard from someone at church that agents were the way to get a book published. She thought perhaps she could keep talking. “I’m a teacher. I have two children. Two daughters. Almost grown. And a very supportive husband.”

  Everything that came out of her mouth sounded so boring, so utterly ordinary, but the woman nodded eagerly, tapping the screen as though she could barely keep up with Janine’s brilliance. “How fascinating!” she said. “And what attracted you to the school? Was it the Ranch’s Christian mission, or the convenience of the schedule?”

  Janine had to take all of her spring break, plus four accumulated sick days, to cover the time at the Ranch. Her daughters had complained—wouldn’t she rather spend her time off with them?—and her principal had only grudgingly signed her paperwork. But it was true that a more traditional school—the kind where you had to be in class all semester, and move, maybe to another state, wouldn’t have worked at all.

  “I guess both things?” she tried. “I mean, I never thought I would go back to school at this age—I’m forty-three—and so of course it made a difference that I could come here for a couple of weeks at a time and then go home again, you know, because I have a family, because I have a job. But I am a Christian, and my work has a Christian purpose, so I felt more comfortable applying to a school that embraced those same ideas. I felt like, maybe this school could help me get where I want to go with my writing, like it wouldn’t be a selfish choice? And I wanted to meet other writers, but especially other Christian writers.” Janine looked down at her cup of punch, which was almost empty. “I’m sorry, I’m just going on and on.”

  “No,” the woman cooed, still looking down at the glowing screen. Maybe she really was an agent, Janine thought. Should she tell her about the book she was writing? Should she ask for her card? “This is wonderful. So helpful.”

  “My name is Janine. Janine Gray.”

  “Regina Somers,” the woman said, tucking her tablet under her arm and gripping the ends of Janine’s fingers as if she might lead her to a dance floor. “Such an honor to meet you. I’m sure I’ll see more of you around the school and—hopefully—in the marketplace.”

  Janine took a last sip of punch, and when she looked up again Regina Somers had sidled over to speak to someone else, her tablet in hand again. So she had not asked for the probably-an-agent’s card, had not told her about her sense that something very powerful could be said—needed to be said—about the life of Terri Schiavo. She had at least introduced herself, which was a start.

  It was growing dark. Paper lanterns hung from the eaves of the main building and Christmas lights twinkled around the outdoor reading area. Pea gravel crunched under Janine’s sandals as she walked the perimeter of the sculpture garden, which had probably seen better days. Some of the sculptures were missing from their pedestals, while others leaned lumpily against the boxwoods. Some of them appeared to be fleeing rape, though they also looked like they were enjoying it. Marianne was the first person Janine had spoken to about the Ranch, a pretty girl gone rather thin and harried, she could tell, with taking care of everyone’s needs. She had a young face, long salt-and-pepper hair that she twisted into a bun. Janine wondered if she should grow her own hair long again. She’d cut it when the girls were little.

  Janine’s phone buzzed, and she fished it out of her bag to read the string of text messages, which she’d ignored over the past hour, from Beth and Chrissy. Beth got an A minus on a paper she was sure was an A paper; should she complain? Chrissy wanted to know where the recipe for tamale pie was kept. Beth thought Chrissy was trying to compromise her diet; would Janine please speak to her? And yes she was definitely going to complain about her paper. Chrissy said she missed her, things weren’t the same when she was gone. Chrissy signed her texts Luv u!!! Beth signed her texts with <3 <3 <3. It had taken Janine a while to understand that those were symbols of hearts. For some reason they looked a little vulgar to her.

  She thought about the difficulty of communication between generations, how it all came down to an interpretation of signs and symbols, and then she thought of Bob and Mary Schindler, the wide expanse of understanding they crossed to be closer to Terri, and then she was grateful, so grateful, for her own daughters’ sweet, mildly complaining texts. She texted back: LOVE U GIRLS! XOXO MOM.

  Then she turned back to the party, where in short order she met a farmer, a preacher’s wife, a Gulf War veteran, and a singer. She drank one cup of punch, and then another, and she thought about writing a poem.

  At midnight, some of the students were still awake, loudly talking and laughing in a cluster of folding chairs they’d dragged near the pool. The punch, studded with rum-soaked pineapple, was sweet and easy to drink, and it cheered Marianne to think of the drinkers’ impending hangovers. She was making photocopies of last-minute handouts Lorraine requested—the copier Mark had ordered jammed after every third copy—and Eric was dozing in a chair.

  “Tell your brother that used is not a good choice for copiers,” Marianne said. She’d been talking to Eric in a quiet, firm voice, the way she used to imagine herself talking to the chain-smoking Philippe. Opening the side door, she wrenched out a copy of Galway Kinnell’s “Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock,” pleated into the shape of a fan, and tossed it onto the floor. “You have to ask yourself, why did someone get rid of a perfectly good copier?”

  Eric shifted in his chair but did not open his eyes, and Marianne remembered, from grad school, that he could sleep just about anywhere, on subway benches or in movie theaters, like an old man or a homeless person.

  “The answer is, they wouldn’t,” Marianne said, banging each drawer and door shut a final time. Treating the machine roughly seemed to improve its performance. “This is not a perfectly good copier. I’d be better off copying this by hand, like a monk. I’d be better off photographing the pages and developing the prints in a darkroom.”

  Opening a writing school turned out to be more expensive than Mark and Eric reckoned, she’d learned in these last few weeks. The city had its hand out, demanding various fees, applications that required lawyers, and inspections they never passed on the first go. Converting the kitchen into something a caterer could use hadn’t been cheap, nor had the roof repairs, the painting, the landscaping, or the housekeeping services. Marianne told them not to worry, quoting Frances—it was remarkable and important, this work they were doing—but Eric and Mark felt it was better to protect their aunt from the extra expense. Shield her, was the phrase Mark used. In the end, Mark had used his connections to secure venture capital, which provided for the copier and office equipment and unexpected bills. Before the venture capital arrived, Marianne had taken on the reading of the next batch of applications alone while Eric supplemented the school’s income with odd jobs, offering online critiques of college application essays and handling the Twitter accounts for several Mars brand candies. “It’ll come back to you a thousand percent,” Mark had assured them both, when Marianne complained.

  “Who knows what he even meant by that,” Marianne muttered. “Effort? Karma? I don’t know what your brother got us into, Eric.”

  “Mfff,” said Eric, shutting his eyes more tightly. It embarrassed Marianne to think now of all the ways she’d fantasized about his return: jumping into his arms; running into the shallow waves of the gulf; tumbling, salty-skinned, into bed in Marianne’s shade-drawn room. None of those active, romantic, cinematic sequences had come true, not so far—they’d been too busy, too tense, she told herself. Best to wait until these twelve days were done, then they could start over. Twelve days! It would go by in no time.

  His mouth was slightly open; he may have been drooling. He was certainly snoring, though very softly. Marianne looked away.

  Over the copier’s slow, high-pitched whine came a rumbling sound, and Eric startled. “What’s that?” he said, sitting up and blinking. The rumble settled into the recognizable sound of a motorcycle, and as the motor stalled, then stopped, Marianne could hear the group near the pool go quie
t.

  “Let’s hope it’s Tom.” Marianne had given up trying to locate him hours ago and had prepared to teach his first class herself. This had involved reading chapter one of two memoirs—the first from the Desert Storm veteran, the second from the preacher’s wife. They’d encouraged the students to send new work—not the same material they’d used in their applications, and maybe that accounted for the awkwardness on the page. Both memoirs, oddly, had been written in the third person. They had also been written oddly.

  Tom Marshall stood in the screen doorway, holding his helmet in one hand and running the other through thinning hair. He opened the door, then stepped through, blinking in the fluorescent light.

  “Thank God,” Marianne said. She’d met him at a conference years ago, and he looked mostly the same: rumpled, unshaven, cowboy booted, surprised to be here. Part of his shtick was never dressing appropriately, which Marianne had not connected, at the time, to a penchant for motorcycle riding. “Where were you? Why didn’t you answer your phone?”

  “Got lost,” he said, then made a show of finding his cell phone in his pocket. “You can’t hear these things on a hog. Maybe your little Suzuki, but not a Harley.”

  “Probably shouldn’t answer them either,” Eric said. “On a hog. How’s it going?”

  Ignoring Eric’s outstretched hand, Tom seemed to blink Marianne into his vision. He strode over to her and picked her up as if they were long-lost friends.

  “Mary-Ellen,” he said, kissing her ear wetly through her hair. They’d sat together on a panel—“Life after the MFA: Alternatives in Employment Opportunities”—and had joked about the alternatives. Marianne knew someone who penned greeting cards. Tom, before grad school, had made some money doing medical research (being medical research, Marianne had corrected him). “Little Mary-Ellen the poet. How’s it going?”

  “Marianne,” Eric corrected him.