The Gulf

by Belle Boggs

  Sometimes, in the years that followed, someone would bring up the Schiavo case in the service of some other cause—disability rights, euthanasia, abortion, even animal rights—and Janine had the strange feeling that she, in her years of praying and wondering, had come to an understanding that others had missed. They—the fighters on both sides—were looking for something that was recognizable, something that looked like them, as if it was some kind of test Terri could pass. Could she feel? Could she hear? Could she respond? Not long after that, the poems started. The first one was about the brain’s experience of electrotherapy, the influence of a monstrous medicine on the slow, godly letting go of neurons, the holy withering of synapses.

  A terrified sadness. That was how one of the police officers described the look on Terri’s face before she died. It was the best description Janine could think of for her own helpless imaginings of the things that might or might not happen to the people she loved best. Chrissy was now a high school junior, and Beth was studying meteorology at the community college. Both girls had hundreds of friends on Facebook (Janine was one of them), but seemed to spend their time exclusively with on-and-off boyfriends whom Janine suspected, in her worst moments, of murderous impulses.

  She found that the poems helped, like a drug that does not eliminate pain but allows a coexistence with it. And like a drug it only worked to the extent that she could look forward to writing another one. If she had been truly honest with Rick, she would have said that she thought she’d developed an addiction to writing the poems, and she was afraid that she might run out.

  Despite her headache, Janine was the first to arrive Monday morning to workshop, in a musty, wood-paneled room with two smallish windows overlooking the gulf. It had been furnished with a long antique table and mismatched chairs. Janine chose the one closest to what she assumed would be the head of the table, then switched for a more comfortable, padded chair. She hadn’t seen Lorraine at breakfast. Concerned about things she might have said—exuberance brought on by too much punch—she had avoided the other students she knew were poets, forking dry eggs and greasy hash browns into her mouth while examining the poems they had to discuss.

  Right at ten, the room began to fill with the other poets, carrying their lucky coffee mugs, their day planners, their laptops and carefully tabbed binders. Janine had only a spiral notebook, two pencils, and the packet they’d passed out at the reception. She smiled at each new student, said hello, and ruffled the edges of the packet with her fingers to soothe her nervousness.

  It was 10:05. It was 10:10.

  “In college,” offered one woman, wearing a helmet of expensive-looking silver hair and a sweater tied around her shoulders, “we would leave after fifteen minutes of waiting. That meant class was canceled. It was a rule.”

  Janine remembered Beth telling her something similar, but did not imagine such a rule applied here.

  “That seems sort of different,” said another woman Janine vaguely remembered meeting last night. She smiled kindly and tried to explain: “College courses last twelve or fifteen weeks, and we have less than two weeks. Plus,” she said, looking around the table. “We are all adults.”

  “It was a way of keeping the professors in check,” insisted the first woman. “So they couldn’t just breeze in whenever they felt like it.”

  “I’m sure that isn’t—” began the second, more reasonable woman.

  “She can leave if she wants to,” said a man with small, puffy eyes, scraggly hair, and a large gold watch fastened around his bony wrist. He spoke with a slow drawl. “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass, sweetheart.”

  “Maybe we should introduce ourselves,” said Janine. Her own poem was one of the pieces selected for the first workshop, and she did not want to waste time on formalities. “I’m Janine. From near Panama City. I’m married and have two daughters. I’m a high school life skills teacher and this is my first poetry workshop.”

  “We’ll just have to do introductions all over again,” complained the woman who, moments ago, had wanted to leave. “Once Lorraine gets here.”

  “I’m Manfred Collins,” said the man with the small eyes and the gold watch. “Though I write under the pen name Wilhemina Drexel. For family reasons.”

  They had gone all the way around the table, as Janine considered the possibility and wisdom of a pen name, and the possible significance of Manfred’s, when Lorraine arrived, carrying a thin sheaf of photocopies. “Oh good,” she said. “You’ve introduced yourselves.” She did not ask them to repeat their names, nor did she bring up any of the poems selected for workshop. Instead, she wordlessly passed around Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “Poetry as Insurgent Art.” Lorraine had each member of the workshop read it aloud, going in a circle around the table. The woman who had wanted to leave—her name was Barbara—struggled over the pronunciation of apocalyptic and Mayakovsky, and Janine worried that she might struggle as well (or worse, be asked to identify some of the poets), but Manfred read the poem with such a flourish that she was confident by the time it was her turn.

  “‘I am signaling you through the flames,’” Janine began, her heart beating fast. She had already heard the poem a dozen times. Though the poem had seemed strange at first—it was so plain, and not particularly poetic, and what did he mean about the North Pole being in a different place?—by now she felt as if she were being signaled, as if she were reading a letter or missive written just for her.

  “‘Civilization self-destructs,’” she read. “‘Nemesis is knocking at the door.’” How true that was—you could see it on every television or computer screen or newscast, the lying face of every lying politician. She paused and looked up to see if the poem was making the same impact on her classmates. Some of them were doodling on the page, like the high schoolers who would intently decorate her handouts as if they were trying to turn a useful thing—instructions for preparing a casserole or sewing on a button—into something else entirely. Manfred nodded at her, encouragingly.

  “‘What are poets for, in such an age? What is the use of poetry?’” she continued, louder. By the time she got to “you can conquer the conquerors with words,” she was practically shouting.

  She had been the last to go. She set the poem down—the paper was wrinkled where she had been clutching it—and looked at her teacher. Lorraine, slumped in her chair, took a minute before straightening up. “Well,” she said, in her smoker’s voice. “I don’t know that any of you are Whitman.”

  Janine waited for Lorraine to ask questions of them, but instead she stared at them, her eyes glassy and rimmed with red—not, Janine could tell, from crying. With her wild gray hair, her loose, purplish clothes, and her unnerving stare, she reminded Janine a little of the bag lady who used to beg for quarters outside the liquor store next to Publix. It was always quarters she wanted, as if she had never considered that someone might give her a dollar. The girls, when they were little, called her the purple lady for her clothes—she even had purple-tinted eyeglasses—and Janine always let them give her a quarter, though she told them never to tell their father.

  There was some silence and some uncomfortable shifting.

  “I am not here to do the work of thinking for you,” Lorraine warned.

  “Lawrence Ferlinghetti,” offered Manfred. “He was a Beat poet?”

  Lorraine didn’t nod or correct him.

  “I believe he was a socialist—”

  “The poem,” she snapped. “Stick to the damn poem.”

  No one said anything for a while. Janine looked back at the poem, and wondered if Manfred was right. But the poem said “you are an American.” It also said “or a non-American,” but that didn’t necessarily mean socialist.

  “I like it,” Janine said before she could stop herself. Everyone looked at her as if she should have more to say, so she continued. “I mean, I’ve never read this poem before. And I didn’t like it at first. But I like it. I agree with it.”

  “You agree with it,” Lorraine rep
eated.

  “The part about conquering the conquerors,” Janine said bravely.

  “Ah,” said Lorraine, putting a finger in her ear. “You were shouting that part.”

  “Well,” said Janine. That was what she said sometimes, to keep herself from apologizing. Well.

  “But you didn’t like it at first,” Lorraine said.

  “No,” Janine said. “I thought it was too simple, and also at the same time confusing. And I didn’t like the word insurgent, in the title,” she said. Across from her, a young woman, whose name she remembered as Laura, nodded. Janine saw that she was holding something white and fuzzy in her lap. A kitten? “I also didn’t know every one of the names.”

  The woman shifted her gaze to the fuzzy white mass, and Janine could see that she was knitting a sweater. Was that allowed? She reminded herself that it was not her job to keep order here—even where it was her job, she was not very good at it.

  “Whitman—” began Manfred, helpfully.

  “Not Whitman,” Janine began. “I know him. And Edna St. Vincent Millay.”

  “Neruda, then,” he said.

  “Everyone here is responsible for correcting their own ignorance on their own time,” Lorraine said. “Back to the idea of insurgency. What didn’t you like about it?”

  “Not the idea, the word,” Janine said. “It made me think of terrorists. And the flames. And the phrase ‘apocalyptic times.’ It sounded … awful.” She was now afraid to ask when the poem was written, but she imagined that it was some time ago, before things were even half as bad. Beth, who had recently begun an internship at the local television station, said that for every terrible thing you heard on the news—a mother backing a carful of children into the water, apartment fires set by jealous boyfriends, robberies committed by idiot thieves—there were several more that they did not even have time to shoot. That had been a revelation.

  Lorraine stared at her with such intensity she thought she had better keep speaking. “But then I realized that he was right. Things are bad. They’re getting worse. That a poem could be a voice against the conquerors, that words could be conquerors … I liked that idea. Even the line about the North Pole, which was confusing at first. I realized it made me think of Santa Claus. Last year I was in line to do my Christmas shopping and I heard a little boy—he must have been six or seven—tell his mother Santa Claus was a load of crap. That’s what he said!”

  “I don’t remember ever believing in Santa myself,” said Manfred.

  That started a long argument that veered rather significantly away from the poem.

  “Apocalyptic times,” concluded Lorraine. She passed out a stack of new poems. Janine flipped through them quickly; not one of them was by a student in the class. “We’ll discuss these others tomorrow. Let us try to stay closer to the poem being discussed. If there is something you don’t know, look it up.” She scowled at the room, stuffed the poems back into her dingy tote bag, and disappeared through the door, ending class twenty minutes early.

  I am signaling you through the flames, Janine thought, walking to lunch behind a group of her classmates. She’d waited, gathering and organizing her papers, until most people left, embarrassed by the way she’d monopolized class discussion. But what a perfect metaphor—that’s what it was, wasn’t it?—for the kind of work she had tried to do with her life, with her writing. Each poem a flag, not of surrender but of contact. Look, pay attention. That’s what she should have said, instead of mentioning the kid at the mall and Santa Claus—what was she thinking? She should have talked about the idea of the signal, the challenge posed by apocalyptic times and the radical idea that poetry could make a difference.

  Though the media machine that thought it knew Janine’s mind imagined an apocalypse of city streets and technology run amok—gray, looming buildings, lurching robots, public transportation decorated with uninviting graffiti—the end times she imagined took place right near Panama City, in its flat expanses of strip malls and stoplights. In its tattoo parlors, check cashing places, signs for Lotto and for off-track betting. In its lurid billboards: for fast food and for megachurches, for motels and for pro-life counseling centers. In gas station crowds of dark-skinned men waiting to be carried off in trucks to work that lasted only a day. In windows rolled up and doors kept closed and locked, even in the daytime. In the listlessness of its teenagers and the accommodating gestures of their parents, who accompanied them—her own students told her—for the application of their first tattoo.

  “Wait, sweetheart,” said Manfred. Janine turned around and saw that he was the last to leave their classroom. He did not seem to be in a hurry but walked with a deliberate and almost stately slowness, as if he expected her to wait as long as it took him to catch up. She had been slightly annoyed by the way he’d prompted her during class discussion, but she did not want to eat alone. Manfred seemed to study the uneven pea gravel path before each footfall. Janine noticed his yellow socks and wondered about his pen name.

  “Thank you,” Manfred said when he finally caught up. “Good discussion.”

  “I wish I hadn’t brought up that kid at the mall,” Janine said. “That wasn’t useful.”

  “You’re paying good money to be here,” said Manfred. “And no one else was saying much of anything, to tell the truth. What do you think of Ms. Kominski?”

  “Oh, I don’t know yet,” said Janine. “I liked the poem she brought us. But she was a little … intense, maybe?”

  Manfred laughed. “You should have seen her in her prime.”

  “You know her?”

  “I took my first workshop with her at a conference in Key West, back in the eighties. On the first day she kicked three people out because she didn’t like their poems. Insipid, she called them. On the second day she kicked a fourth person out for taking up space. This is mellow, post-treatment Lorraine. I’ve taken three other workshops with her.” He paused at the place the pathway forked, between the dormitories and the dining hall, and said, somewhat ruefully, “She doesn’t remember me.”

  Janine wondered what he meant by post-treatment. “Maybe when we talk about your poem,” she suggested. “Perhaps the pen name confused her?”

  “She may not learn any of our names, to be honest,” Manfred said. “But she’s a good teacher if you listen to the right things. She once crossed out every other line in a poem I wrote. I was mad, but when I typed the damn thing up again, it was a better poem. I published it.”

  Janine tried to imagine how she would feel about that happening to one of her poems. At school, they’d recently implemented a policy of no-writing-on-student-work, after the assistant principals went together to some conference in Orlando. Everything—you didn’t finish this, please check your spelling, even grades (B or better for work that was basically complete and reasonably on time, C minus for what was unintelligible or barely begun)—was communicated through sticky notes, which inevitably fell off the page and littered the hallways, making a yellow path of gentle chiding. Disney World shit, the other life skills teacher called the pads of sticky notes delivered to their department, and continued writing—in black Sharpie, which bled through one student’s work and onto the next—on the weekly worksheets she collected.

  Perhaps Lorraine’s tough love approach would be refreshing. Surely the knitting woman’s days were numbered. Manfred pointed himself in the direction of the dormitories. He reminded Janine of an alcoholic turtle.

  “You’re not going to lunch?” Janine asked.

  “Oh no,” he said, taking out a pack of cigarettes. “Chili mac. Do I need to say more?”

  That was something too old-fashioned and caloric even for Janine’s life skills classes, but she had not brought anything from home. She felt a cigarette urge tugging at her, but Manfred didn’t even light his own cigarette, just fiddled with the pack.

  “Maybe I’ll see you later,” said Janine. “Will you be at the beach for sunset?”

  “I didn’t take you for one of those sunset worsh
ippers,” Manfred said. He sounded disappointed.

  “It was beautiful, last night,” said Janine. “I thought I saw the green flash. But I could have been wrong.”

  “The green flash is a myth,” said Manfred. “Though I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it too.”

  Inside the dining hall she spooned out a portion of chili mac—a scoop, rounded, like meat-noodle ice cream—and penitentially filled the rest of her plate with salad. She found two women from her class seated in a far corner. They hadn’t said much in workshop, and perhaps they thought Janine said too much. But it was better, wasn’t it, to stick with those you knew? Janine had always felt loyal to whatever group she was assigned, and she only had to stand for a moment with her tray before they waved her over. She was pleased that she remembered their names and where they were from. Maggie, a woman about Janine’s age, was a nurse from Tennessee, and Lilian, a little older, was from Sarasota. Apparently, she wasn’t staying at the ranch; Janine had seen her steer her broad silver Mercedes into the parking lot this morning.

  They were in the midst of a conversation about husbands. Both women were leaving theirs. Janine had the momentary thought that she should excuse herself—what would she have to contribute, other than sympathy?—but decided it would be equally awkward to get up again.

  “Hopeless,” Maggie was saying about her situation. “We tried counseling at church. Then we went on a special couples retreat where we didn’t speak at all, just communicated nonverbally. But that was hardly any different than what we already had going on at home. Then we tried a special journal we wrote in every night, to say what we appreciated about the other person. Litotes—remember that word, from English class? It means saying something positive in a negative way. She’s not a terrible cook. He hasn’t lost as much hair as I thought he would. That’s what our journal was full of. I actually wrote a bunch of them down, in a poem, and put it in my application here.”