The Gulf

by Belle Boggs

  “Sure,” he said, plating the pasta.

  “You would give that up? And go back to being—what?”

  “Myself?” And there was something about the way he said that, the essential simplicity and honesty on his face—why would he want to be anything else?—along with the pasta, which was surprisingly good in its lemony cream sauce. It was comforting. Unchallenging. It was, at the moment, exactly what she’d wanted without knowing.

  All spring and all the next year they did New York things: went to concerts, readings, museums, out to dinner. They got bronchitis and nursed each other with Gatorade and deli-bought soup. They took long subway rides to Coney Island and the botanical garden in the Bronx; they rented a car and got sunburns and a parking citation at Rockaway Beach. Eric read and marked up (with checks and exclamation points) Marianne’s thesis, mostly poems about people in her hometown; she read his novel, about a family of moonshiners, and did not complain that not a single character resembled her. As graduation loomed, they never talked about leaving, about what they would do next. What was wrong with life as it was? Why did there have to be a next?

  But then it happened, the inevitable next they never again mentioned, though sometimes, even over the telephone, Marianne could feel Eric thinking about it. Why had she said yes, only to say no the very next morning? Why had she led him on? She found herself thinking about it too: Why had he even asked her, when he knew how she felt about marriage? For twelve whole hours following a celebratory dinner (he’d just signed with an agent), the half-carat ring he’d presented her sparkled bluely on her hand, and he’d insisted on calling both of their families. His mother had cried and congratulated them and asked when the wedding would be. Even her father had gotten unexpectedly emotional. “You know,” he said, “your mother and I were engaged in New York.”

  Of course Marianne knew. Wasn’t that what she’d been thinking of when Eric ambushed her in the restaurant?—the sort of place that Marianne’s mother would have loved, with its small rickety tables, mismatched chairs, candles flickering in glass jars. And Eric, he was someone her mother would have loved too: artistic but steady, handsome, a good conversationalist. Her father had said as much when he came up for Marianne’s graduate reading and they’d all gone to dinner: Your mother would have liked him.

  Mom would want this for me, Marianne thought. And she’d nodded yes, teary-eyed, just like someone in the movies.

  All night she lay awake, looking at the ring and thinking about her life with Eric. He wanted to move somewhere cheaper, he’d said on the way back to his apartment. Like Flushing? Marianne said. Or Long Island City?

  No—he actually laughed at her—like North Carolina. Or Virginia. And then, his arm around her on the N train, he’d launched into all the other things he wanted: a yard, kids, good schools. Marianne felt her heart racing—good schools?—but she didn’t say much, just looked at the ring on her finger and thought about her mother, who’d wound up trying to interest untalented high schoolers in modern art while they sketched loving portraits of pickup trucks and deer antlers. By the next morning she had convinced herself that her mother would have wanted something different for her entirely.

  Eric said he knew she didn’t really mean it when she said yes. Then why did you even ask me? Marianne wanted to know. They had a long argument about whether it would be possible for Eric to get his money back. Marianne thought if he just made the situation sad enough, the jeweler might feel sorry for him.

  “That’s exactly what I want right now,” Eric said, holding his head in his hands at her kitchen table. “Thank you!”

  “Tell him I died,” Marianne suggested, and Eric looked at her, just for a moment, as if maybe that were a possibility. “Never mind,” she said quickly. “Tell him you caught me cheating.”

  The ring was not returnable, it turned out, and Marianne wasn’t sure what he ever did with it. Six months later Eric moved back home, and soon he married someone else, a girl he’d known in high school. Who gets engaged after three months of dating? They had been going out for almost two years when Eric asked her. Who leaves New York to go back to Charlotte?

  It was just as well, she told herself, falling into her own rash commitment: a subscription to match.com, where she browsed painters and installation artists, spoken-word performers and trust funders. Eric was too nice and too normal, too much the kind of guy you would take home to meet your parents; he belonged with someone who actually had parents, not just a still-grieving father. “My boyfriend?” she told people, when they asked what happened to Eric. “He came down with male pattern blandness.”

  That didn’t mean she didn’t think of him on those online dates: Eric would hate this movie as much as I do, Eric would never wear a keffiyeh, Eric would hold the door for me, ask me if I was cold, offer to pay for the cab. Eric would understand—not pretend to understand—when I talked about my family. Then she’d go home early, work on a poem, and send it to Eric.

  It was October, a month still warm enough for shorts, when Marianne began to get inquiries from the applicants. (And from her sister, in response to a long handwritten letter: a brief email declining her invitation to visit and expressing mild interest in the Ranch.) She’d set up a temporary office by then, a space in a corner of the large rec room, with a desk for storing application checks, which she bundled and sent to Mark once a week. Determined not to miss another storm warning, she kept her radio tuned to the local NPR station. On her laptop, a small window displayed the Occupy livestream, where things were already falling apart: she never would have lasted there. It contrasted strangely with the conservative talk station she found herself listening to in the Jetta, another kind of stream where men went on about the decline of the country: No more Christmas tinsel in America’s grammar-school hallways. No more cursive in the classroom. But plenty of room on the cafeteria lunch line, they howled, for tacos y fajitas.

  She obsessively refreshed the liberal sites that delivered news about the disturbing fleet of candidates vying for the Republican presidential nomination. Each revelation brought a rush of adrenaline and despair. One wanted to give embryos personhood status, another to make “In God We Trust” larger on money. They all agreed that gay marriage was an abomination. The governor from Texas said that schools oughta be teaching creationism.

  She cringed a little when the applicants, surely the intended recipients of this posturing, got in touch, though they were polite, even deferential. Each week a letter or two, an email, and several phone calls: Sorry to bother her, but when would decisions get made? When would the applicant hear something? The check had not been cashed—was the application complete?

  “We have to let people know,” Marianne told Eric. “We can’t wait until December.”

  “Most programs don’t notify until January or February. At the earliest,” he said.

  “The first session starts in March. We told them it was rolling admissions. Besides, they might move on to something else by then. Woodworking, pottery. Missionary trips. These are not regular applicants.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Decide, then.”

  “No!” Marianne said. She did not want to be responsible for the groups that sat around the long tables Mark had ordered. “That wasn’t what I meant. You have to help me. Or maybe Frances should help. It was her idea.”

  She still hadn’t met Eric’s great-aunt, though she’d twice driven by her ranch-style retirement community. Rest home, Marianne remembered her mother calling the one where her grandmother lived, though inside it seemed more like a depressing hospital, a place where no one expected to get better. This was why she hadn’t stopped and inquired—what would she do if she found a woman as diminished as her granny, who spent entire days gazing out the window at an empty parking lot?

  “She trusts us,” Eric said.

  So Marianne bought a scanner and emailed him the promising applications. It took more than a week to hash out their favorites over Skype. It turned into a series of trades and compro
mises, and by the end Marianne wondered if she might have been better off making the decisions herself.

  Insisting on the R&B singer, she had to concede the pastor’s wife with her many miscarriages, a woman she feared might be too fragile for workshop. They agreed on the strange something expressed by the Schiavo poet but disagreed about the teenage girl whose father had found the Ranch online—Eric thought she was too young. They both had questions about a poet with a pseudonym.

  In early November they accepted a tentative first round: ten fiction writers, twelve memoirists, and twelve poets, mostly from the Southeast but also as far away as Vermont and Oregon. There were twenty women and fourteen men. There was a veteran of the first Gulf War (female) and a ninety-year-old sod farmer (male). Two applicants indicated that they were in recovery from homosexual impulses, and Marianne liked to imagine them falling off the wagon together.

  She made each of the phone calls, delivered to family answering machines and cell phone voicemails, and, occasionally, to a live voice.

  “Hello,” she said late one afternoon, then faltered. It was the last call of the day and she was tired. She began again. “Hello. May I please speak to Janine Gray?”

  There were voices in the background, the sound of kitchen work. “This is Janine.”

  “My name is Marianne Stuart, and I’m calling from the Genesis Ranch. We’d like to admit you to our first class of poets.”

  The background voices got quieter, but the woman did not speak. For a moment Marianne thought they’d been disconnected, then she caught the sound of her breathing, a heavy door closing behind her.

  “I’m sorry, please say that again.”

  Marianne repeated herself and stated the dates for the first session, which would take place over two weeks. She told her when to expect paperwork and talked up Lorraine’s gifts as a workshop leader.

  “I don’t know if I should cry or jump up and down,” the woman said, but did neither, just breathed rapidly into the phone. She did not ask to hear Lorraine’s name repeated.

  “Your poems are … different,” Marianne said. “But we like them. They’re very moving.”

  “Thank you,” said the woman. “My husband thinks they come from God.”

  “Is that where you think they come from?”

  “I don’t know,” said the woman. “Sometimes I think so. They seem to just come out of me.”

  “Well,” said Marianne, picturing her wildest, youngest classes at P.S. 150, the way the children careened about the room, stopping now and then to write a word, a syllable, on the pulpy gray paper she arranged across their desks. She was overcome by a sudden doubt about the Ranch, something that happened every afternoon around this time. What if this woman said such a thing to Lorraine?

  But this conversation was about the delivery of praise, which she recognized from long experience as the food of poets. “The committee was unanimous about your work,” Marianne told her.

  “Thank you,” the woman said again. “That means a lot to me. I didn’t have any expectations about this. I didn’t know what I’d hear back.”

  Marianne made a check mark next to Janine’s name.

  Janine closed the front door softly, then walked back into the kitchen, her breath held tightly in her lungs. Chrissy was sitting at the table doing homework while Beth tended the dinner her mother had walked away from—pork chops and mashed potatoes, a pot of green beans, a salad. Rick sat at his usual spot in the family room, his boots on the coffee table, watching the evening news.

  “They want me,” Janine said, exhaling. She clasped the phone lightly against her chest, like a kitten or a baby. “The writing school. It was unanimous.”

  Chrissy looked up from her algebra textbook and smiled. “That’s great, Mom.”

  “Congratulations,” Beth said, mashing potatoes with a fork. Janine took only the mildest notice that she’d used soy instead of regular milk. “That’s awesome.”

  Rick got up from his chair and came over to kiss her forehead. “I knew they would,” he said. Janine told herself that he was merely expressing confidence in her abilities, but she could not help feeling a little let down by his reaction.

  At dinner, conversation moved on to other topics: an upcoming church mission trip Chrissy wanted to take, a problem Beth was having with one of her professors and her plans for her upcoming twenty-first birthday, which she hoped to spend in Daytona Beach. On her eighteenth birthday she’d come home with a small Chinese character tattooed in black on her shoulder blade. The character meant “freedom,” she’d explained, but it was easy to cover up for job interviews. (What about her wedding? Janine had despaired.)

  As Beth entered her third year of community college, Janine and Rick had wondered to each other when she would want to move out, but they liked having her home, where they could keep up with her increasingly confusing career aspirations and stay vigilant against cohabitation or any further tattooing. Janine thought it was strange the way rebellion and the desire to please could coexist in Beth, but from her friends and her sister she understood that this was the way of this generation. They wanted to sin, then confess their sins to their parents, who acted more like friends than parents. Janine never would have told her own mother some of the things she’d had to hear.

  “And next semester I have to take Communications III,” Beth was saying.

  Rick chewed his pork chop, which had gotten tough in the oven while Janine took her phone call. He was a thorough chewer and a patient listener. Janine had once worried that he might miss being a father to sons—quiet, stalwart builders and fishermen, like all the men in his family—but Rick was perfectly content to be the father of these girls, with their pretty smiles and constant chatter. In fact, he seemed to want little more than what he had: a house, a wife who did not bring work problems home with her, daughters around his table telling him things about the world he had given them. Sometimes he expressed the desire for a bigger fishing boat or some hunting property. Sometimes he mentioned a recipe from the early days of their marriage, something too fatty or caloric for Janine to make in good conscience. But mostly he was content, perhaps more so as each year passed.

  “But the final grade is based on a project, not an exam,” Beth continued, tossing back her hair and pushing aside the healthy mound of potatoes her mother had served her. “Which I hope is not a group project, because I really work better on my own.”

  For a long time Janine had not wanted anything more either. Now she was having a hard time following what her daughter was saying. What did Rick think would become of them when—very soon—their daughters left them? Janine wondered what surprise Chrissy had in store for her eighteenth birthday. Perhaps a piercing, but more likely something more inconvenient and self-sacrificing: a trip to Africa or South America, an allegiance to a sect of the church that took her away from her family to somewhere dusty and unhygienic and dangerous.

  Janine let her mind drift above the table, above the conversation anchored by Rick’s attention and the girls’ self-involvement, which she herself had cultivated over twenty-one years of care. She floated over them, through the family room and into the solarium, above the desk and the folder that contained her poems. During these months of anxious waiting, she’d felt something separate and strange growing inside her—not confidence or certainty, exactly, but promise. She felt full of promise, in a way she hadn’t since she was pregnant.

  The tattoo appeared in one of her poems, a reference to the way your children’s bodies escaped you as they got older. How tenderly she had bandaged it as it blistered and seeped a yellowish fluid a week into Beth’s nineteenth year. How relieved she’d felt when the blistering and seeping was over and the tattoo itself appeared, black edges clean and sharp, almost shiny with health. She had marveled, removing the last bandage, at the way her daughter’s skin had regenerated and healed. “Hallelujah,” Beth had said, twisting around to check herself in the bathroom mirror. It was how their family always greeted good news, thou
gh at the time Janine wondered if it was appropriately applied to good news delivered, in a foreign tongue, via tattoo.

  Now she thought, eating mashed potatoes gummy and gray with soy milk: Hallelujah!

  Forking up salty beans and gristly meat: Hallelujah!

  Watching her younger daughter slouch over her plate, watching the older talk with her hands in that new way she had, spying a glistening green bean seed caught in her husband’s mustache: Hallelujah!

  Praise Him! she thought, and in that moment, three weeks from Thanksgiving, an hour past sunset, in the imperfection of her forty-third year, she loved everything.

  3

  A week after Marianne finished notifying accepted students, Eric called to say he’d been offered a longer teaching contract. He didn’t want to stay in Dubai—he’d much rather be in Florida, with her—but there was a bonus to consider, plus he thought that he would finally make some headway with his novel.

  “I’ll be able to put all my attention into the Ranch when I get home,” he told her.

  “When?” Marianne wanted to know, but he must not have heard her because now he was going on about the way an international experience helped him see America more clearly, which was of some use to his new book. “When, Eric? When are you coming back?”

  “Oh,” he said, as if surprised to be interrupted. “Early March. I’ll fly straight to Tampa.”

  “Classes start in March,” she said. “And I still haven’t met your aunt.”

  “That’s a good sign—a sign she trusts us,” he said. “Have you been getting paychecks?”

  “Yes, but that’s not the point.” She wasn’t sure what the point was—that she wanted, needed supervision? At her school in Brooklyn, every time the classroom teacher would duck out to get coffee or go to the copier or the bathroom, she’d get nervous and sweaty, which was a little like how she felt now, all the time. But, she remembered, the teacher’s return hardly improved things. “And you’re coming in March?”