The Gulf

by Belle Boggs

  She checked her voicemail, where there was a message from her father.

  “Marianne, it’s Dad. Hello?” Someday she would have to tell him that she knew he was familiar with answering machines and voicemail; there was no reason to pretend otherwise. “I’m just calling to see if you’ve made any plans for, ah, Thanksgiving. You are of course very welcome here. Your sister is having one of her church things, and we could stop by there. Or we could just have dinner here, and see her on Friday. That might be best. Let me know, okay? It’s Dad.”

  Thanksgiving was two weeks away. A plane ticket would be expensive, the drive more than twelve hours without traffic. She thought of calling, explaining this to him, and having to listen to the faint notes of hurt and disappointment in his voice.

  Dad, she wrote instead, in an email. I wish I could come for Thanksgiving, but it looks like travel will be too difficult. I’ll be there for Christmas, and I can stay longer then. Does that sound good? Hope your semester is going well.

  The microwave dinged. In Brooklyn, Marianne hadn’t even owned a microwave, but here at the Ranch she didn’t have many other options. She could drive to Sarasota and pay too much, or go nearby and take her chances. Instead she cooked food in an appliance that looked, as her mother would have said, like a television, rolled it onto a plastic plate, and watched a reality show while she ate. The plot tonight was the same as last night: something about switching families. It always involved the same two kinds: a rigid, God-fearing, paternalistic one in a large, clean house, and a free-spirited, undisciplined Wiccan or feminist one in a smaller house where no one made the beds. The mothers each spent a week trying to cajole the other’s family into her preferred lifestyle, but in the end, after tears and hugs, all agreed that their own way was best.

  In the morning, an email from her father: Dear Marianne, I’m sorry you can’t come but a long visit at Christmas sounds good too.

  The semester goes along, better now than at the beginning. Each of my online classes was overfilled, but then people drop or withdraw, usually by about a third, and that helps. They lose their money after the first week, which as an ethics professor makes me uncomfortable, this wishing for a third (or more) of them to back out. Does it cause me to make the first of their assignments tougher, the readings longer, more daunting? But they tell me I’m not supposed to teach ethics anymore anyway, so I should put it out of my mind. I hope you won’t have to contend with these issues in your school, Marianne.

  Please tell Eric he’s welcome also at Christmas–will he be back by then? I would be interested to hear about teaching in the U.A.E. Are the students better there? More focused? Does the school take a more serious approach? I am guessing not.

  It’s bad all over, but that doesn’t mean that you have to participate. I’ve got five years to retirement, so I’m holding on.

  Probably it’s not better or more serious, she wrote back. But that’s how our school was too–it’s up to you to make something out of it. I imagine it’s the same for your students. You shouldn’t feel guilty.

  I’m getting used to Florida-actually, I think I like it, this extended summerfall, the blazing sunsets. I have a friend who owns a hotel down the road from me. We take walks in the morning sometimes. She’s your age, an artist (not as good as Mom). Maybe if you visit sometime you could meet her.

  Eric will be in Dubai until spring, but I’ll tell him he was invited. He’ll appreciate it.

  Marianne spent Thanksgiving at a seafood restaurant with Sophie, drinking margaritas, trying to shake off the dread feeling of familial truancy, and, later, flirting with Eric over Skype. Santas, crèches, reindeer, and snowmen appeared at the entrances to all the condos and hotels by early December; it was seventy-five degrees outside, still sunny, but lighted icicles hung from dormers and windowsills all along Gulf Drive. In mid-December, a check arrived inside a thick Christmas card printed with an image of the Chrysler Building in silver. You’re doing a great job, Mark had scrawled inside the card. Just a token of our appreciation!

  What did he mean by our appreciation, she wondered? Mark and Eric’s? The patronizing tone bothered her until she realized she’d never gotten a bonus check before, and began thinking of how to spend it. It was more than enough to pay for a flight home, saving her the drive. Or she could pay her student loans—three months of principal plus interest. But after years without a car, she liked driving, the freedom to pack up and leave exactly when you liked, and it felt wrong to spend bonus money, an amount she earned from doing a great job, on something so intangible as debt.

  Instead she splurged on presents for her family. Usually she gave them cheap, last-minute gifts—used books for her father, a T-shirt from a literary festival for her sister—and suffered through thank-yous too effusive to be more than pity. But this year she could prove that she was doing fine, that leaving her life in New York had been a choice, and a good one.

  She made the long drive in a single day. Then she spent a week sleeping in, taking long walks with her father, and avoiding the questions of what-was-the-point-of-her-school-exactly? And how-were-they-paying-for-it? A pot of coffee warmed continuously in the kitchen; Howard shuffled around the house with a mug in his hands and a book under his arm. Marianne wondered what Sophie would think of him. Too old, probably: her last boyfriend had been a thirtysomething chef from Ecuador.

  Ruth was preoccupied and wan-looking, with an amateur haircut, baggy sweaters, and a phone that beeped reminders to her: who was expecting a comfort visit, who needed a phone tree started, a casserole delivered. Only her shoes were something Marianne recognized: Ruth had always favored neon-bright sneakers, and she wore them still, though Marianne could tell these were new. Good, she thought. At least she can buy something she likes.

  On Christmas afternoon they exchanged gifts at home. Marianne presented each gift with a theatrical flourish, and their faces registered surprise at the gleaming, professionally wrapped packages. For her father, a titanium fishing reel and a book about morality and war. For Darryl, a cashmere watch cap and leather gloves. She saved Ruth’s present for last.

  “Dangly,” said Darryl, as Ruth held up the earrings.

  “I thought they looked like water,” said Marianne. “They match your eyes.”

  “I’ll have to find somewhere nice to take you so you can wear them,” said Darryl, though it sounded less like an offer than like an obligation.

  “Thank you,” Ruth said, tucking them back into their tissue-lined box. “Our presents aren’t fancy, but they are handmade.” She nudged two identical-looking packages shyly across the coffee table toward her father and Marianne.

  “A notebook!” said Marianne, turning the lumpy blank pages. “Thank you; I’m always needing these. I didn’t know you were into bookbinding.”

  “One of our congregants,” said Darryl. “She makes the paper and sews the books herself.” He patted Ruth’s knee. “Ruth here is too busy taking care of people for stuff like that.”

  Ruth smiled at her husband as if he’d paid her a compliment. “If you plant it when you’re done, it’ll grow wildflowers,” said Ruth.

  “Probably a good use for whatever I put in there,” said Marianne, running her fingers over the embedded seeds. “Bury it.”

  “Not your writing,” said her father, getting up for more coffee. He was sensitive to any suggestion that one of his daughters might feel slighted by the other, but that didn’t mean he wanted to have it out. “Mine very probably though. It takes the pressure off—thank you, Ruth!”

  Darryl’s and Ruth’s phones beeped simultaneously; a reminder that they had to go to the next place on their list.

  “That’s what this house is to them,” Marianne said, after they left. “Just one stop among many.”

  “That’s what it is to everyone except for me,” Howard said. “She’s got a busy life. Is it the life I would have chosen for her? That your mother would have chosen? No. But it’s the life she’s chosen, so there you go.”

&n
bsp; “Remember how Mom and I always thought she’d be a performer? An actress or a comedian?” Ruth had liked to dance and put on shows every night after dinner. She’d memorize jokes and recite them on the way to school. “Where is she? I don’t recognize my sister at all.”

  Howard poured out the coffee to make another pot. He had the reel propped up on the counter and had been reading the instructions. “How much do any of us recognize each other? Or ourselves?”

  “Thanks, Dad. Very helpful,” said Marianne. Later, she tried writing in her new notebook; she had to press hard on the uneven pages to form the words, which looked like they’d been set down by someone writing with the wrong hand. She’d been thinking of the yellow Tea Party signs, stenciled sloppily in black, which appeared now at regular roadside intervals on the way to her father’s house. The poem, even incomplete, was longer than anything she’d written in months. She took photographs of the pages she’d composed and tried to text them to Eric, but her phone had only one bar of service, and the messages failed.

  In the new year, driving south with a half-written poem in her bag, things looked better to Marianne. It was satisfying to note the way the landscape gradually became green again, as if she were fast-forwarding into spring. The squat palmetto trees and stalky palms looked familiar now, the pro-life billboards and stark messages from God (Where Would You Spend Eternity if You Died Today?) merely an editing problem (wouldn’t “If You Died Today, Where Would You Spend Eternity?” be more gripping?).

  In Georgia she stopped at a rest stop and finished her poem, a memory of seeing a bald eagle flying, a long black snake writhing in its talons, which turned into a reflection about the unnaturally coiled Don’t Tread on Me snake she’d seen on so many flags at home.

  She felt shaky, getting out of the car in the humid January air. Part of her wanted to keep writing in her lumpy notebook, but she had hours more driving ahead. Instead she went inside, fed wrinkled dollars into a snack machine that spat out bags of chips and cookies. Driving again, she ate them ravenously.

  She considered stopping in to see Frances—in four months she still had not met her, mostly out of fear. It had occurred to her that Eric had not seen his aunt in some time. What if Frances was diminished or impaired? How would they feel about following the Christian-commercial whims of someone out of her right mind? The way Sophie described her, she didn’t sound like someone who would want to start an inspirational writing school.

  But perhaps they would get along great—maybe Frances would be just as Eric described, funny and sharp and generous. Maybe she’d have some pointers for dealing with the students. Relationship advice? She’d settle for gardening tips. It would be great to have another Florida associate, someone to run ideas by, to reassure her—Sophie was too appraising, and Marianne thought she was perhaps a little eager for the students to show up. Maybe she imagined them fleeing—for the Manatee Inn! Maybe she just wanted some entertainment, a way to pass the time. Frances, on the other hand, was certainly rooting for its success.

  Just before the turn off 75, Marianne lost her nerve. Her hair was greasy, her clothes rumpled, her fingers orange with Doritos dust. She’d been listening, with morbid curiosity, to a program on the radio: Talking to Tad, a call-in show whose host, Tad Tucker, was a state representative with a penchant for baseball metaphors, alliteration, and defense of the unborn, which for him stretched all the way back to conception. “Our president recently gave a speech in which he said that the lives of people in the poorest countries on God’s Earth are no less valuable than those of Americans. Even all the people in countries at war with us since 9/11, every one of them. Wonderful sentiment. Right? Wonderful words. How wonderful would it be if the president would someday say those wonderful words in reference to the lives of unborn children?”

  Marianne had found herself starting to argue aloud with Tad—it’s a fetus, you asshole …—but Tad’s argument was already pivoting beyond her grasp.

  “How wonderful would it be if our president said those wonderful words in reference to the elderly advancing in their sunset years?” he intoned. “Do you believe the most proabortion president in U.S. history thinks everyone in our land of liberty has—even the most elderly and fragile and vulnerable and small—has an equal right to life? I sure haven’t heard him say so recently, have you? Caller, you’re talking to Tad.”

  “Cluster of cells, you racist asshole, not a child,” Marianne muttered, unprepared to argue that the president could in fact be trusted not to euthanize the citizenry.

  Clearly Ruth’s godliness hadn’t rubbed off on her. She’d barely seen her sister, and hadn’t had a chance to ask her about what she liked to read, what her congregation liked to read. She was certain that she would not appear credible as the director of an inspirational writing program.

  But the Ranch looked better than when she left, and she was heartened, and a little surprised, to find that turning into the drive felt like coming home. Landscapers had worked through the holidays, widening the path to the beach and taming the overgrown mangroves. The interiors of all the rooms had been aired out, the worst of the furniture (broken lamps, humidity-swollen dressers) carted away. The common spaces had been painted a tasteful pale blue, the walls lined with new bookshelves, the catering kitchen scrubbed. The classrooms were next.

  “It’s not bad,” Sophie said, when Marianne invited her for a tour. “I’d say you could get one-fifty a night in peak season, one-sixty with breakfast.”

  “How about if I add in top-quality inspirational writing instructors, flown in from across the country?”

  “Probably need to do something about your sculpture garden,” Sophie said, nudging a naked nymph with her foot.

  Sophie lifted a statue off its pedestal, leaving only the stout wooden post where she’d been anchored. “Better let me take these. I’ll paint some fig leaves on them, file off the nipples.”

  Marianne pictured the statues returning in manatee drag, but that would be better than the current situation. “Well, thank you. But I can pay you. I insist on paying.”

  “It’ll be a challenge for me, artistically,” said Sophie. “Let’s see what I come up with before you make any commitments on the monetary front. Hey, could I hang a snake from a tree, something like that?”

  “A snake?” Her mind went to the poem in her notebook.

  “Like in the Garden of Eden? To go with Genesis?” Sophie laughed. “I could give this naughty gal an apple.”

  “Oh,” Marianne said. She’d forgotten about the name, and the fact that there would soon be a sign out front, announcing it. “Right.”

  “You better bone up on your Bible stories before March rolls around,” said Sophie. “I’ll bring my truck for the rest.”

  In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

  She knew that part, but had to read on for the specifics: the division of night and day, the creation of the firmament, the stars, the division of water and sky and dry land, the thoughtful addition of fish and fowl and cattle for man to dominate and eat. And then, the creation of the garden, where He set man like a doll and named some rivers and put him in charge (sort of). But dominion wasn’t enough for man: God saw that he was lonely, and it wasn’t right to be lonely, especially with all that gardening to do.

  She knew the whole pissy, woman-blaming rest, and so she went back to day one. She read aloud, the words beautiful and strange in her mouth: And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.

  That was the best part of any project, when everything was new and formless and possible. The spark of an idea. The smell of fresh paint, oven cleaner. Carpets with vacuum lines. Microwaves with no food smells or spatters. A blank page.

  She was lonely for Eric, felt it each night on her walks, or at dinner, or lyin
g in bed with the orange safety lights burning through the curtains. She thought of his teasing, Skype-halted voice, the physicality of him—long-limbed, smooth-skinned, just the right amount of muscle.

  It would have been nice to have him there beside her. A helpmeet. Naked and unashamed, both of them.

  Maybe just as the Ranch could be rehabilitated, turned into something new, their relationship could be revived. It would be something else. They wouldn’t bicker. She wouldn’t judge his conventionality and he, in turn, would be less conventional.

  With the energy of new love, she devoted herself to making the Ranch better each day—she got recommendations from Sophie on daily housekeepers, what sort of toiletries to put in the bathrooms, and how to order labels printed with the Ranch’s name. Marianne had no plan to provide lotions or shampoos, or to adhere personalized labels to the bottles, but Sophie said this was a must, otherwise she’d have people asking to borrow hers. “And toothbrushes, get a drawerful,” she said. Sophie had been working on a whole Genesis-themed garden: Adam and Eve in fig leaves, Eve being tempted by the serpent, Cain slaying Abel. It was less sordid than before. Slightly.

  “Great!” Eric said, every time they Skyped and she reported something new. She’d sent a welcome letter to the students; she’d been in touch with the teachers; she’d organized and added to the small library. She’d learned Excel while watching the first Republican primary debates, and had kept her cool when the libertarian doctor said it was okay to let the uninsured die, just kept adding columns and formulas. She’d learned Excel.

  And she’d written: three new poems, which after all was the point of being here, wasn’t it? To write, if not alongside the students then on some parallel track of interest and productivity.