by Belle Boggs
Janine thought she had seen it in the packet, but wasn’t sure if she should mention it.
“The director, Marianne? She told me it was her favorite one. Isn’t that the pits? I’m not even a talented poet. I just have a poetic divorce journal.”
“It doesn’t mean that,” Janine insisted. She instinctively liked all insecure women: perennial dieters, remorseful child-spankers, closet smokers and binge drinkers and stress eaters. It gave her a role to play. She had a talent, she thought, for building people up—her own daughters, quite ordinary girls in many respects, anticipated extraordinary futures, Beth as a weather-forecasting television personality, Christine as a humanitarian leader of some sort. “When I write a poem, I don’t even remember having written it. Something just takes over. How can I take credit for something I don’t remember doing? Not that my poems are necessarily something to take credit for, but still. We’re all here, aren’t we, for a reason? You never know if someone else reading that poem will take comfort from it. Perhaps it will help them in their own marriages.”
“That’s nice of you to say,” admitted Maggie. “Maybe they’ll realize things could be worse.”
“Things could definitely be worse,” pronounced Lilian, smiling as if she had found just the right moment to tell them something terrible. She took two bites of chili mac, made a face like someone taking medicine, then chewed for an appropriately long time. Janine braced herself for what this woman might say. Finally she dabbed her napkin at her mouth, which glistened with grease even after she had wiped it. “I discovered that my husband was shopping for a new wife, online. Not a mistress, but a wife.”
“Oh no,” Maggie said. “On a dating site?”
“On a mail-order bride site,” said Lilian, pushing her plate away from her.
“They still have those?” Maggie asked. “Yikes.”
Janine was pretty sure that her colleague in the life skills department had found her husband through that sort of site. He was from Syria—directly, before the wedding, from Syria—and Gladys had never mentioned going on any trips to Syria. He was much shorter than Gladys, who returned from their Pensacola honeymoon wearing a hijab. They seemed quite happy. Janine thought she would not mention their story here.
“They are a booming, multinational business in legal prostitution,” Lilian told them. “I found the sites bookmarked on his laptop, and large funds mysteriously withdrawn from our accounts. Chinalove.com and Russianbride.com. He was still deciding. Apparently he didn’t have much of a preference, Russian or Chinese, so long as she didn’t speak English, was under the age of thirty, and wasn’t me.”
“I’m sure that’s not—” Janine began.
“I’m taking him for everything,” Lilian said. “I hope a double-wide in Bradenton suits her vision of the American dream. I hope she likes franks and beans.”
“Ha,” Maggie said. “That’s a slant rhyme.”
“Maybe I should jot it down,” Lilian said, though she made no effort to do so. “I’m writing a collection of poems about the experience. It’s called ‘Mail-Order Bride,’ though I suppose that term is outdated. But ‘Internet-Order Bride’ doesn’t have the same ring to it.”
“‘Online Bride,’” Maggie suggested.
“That’s good,” Lilian said, though again she did not write it down. “I wake up and write a new poem each day. I switch off. Half are about the Chinese woman,” she said. “And half are about the Russian.”
“Catharsis,” Maggie said. “From the same root as catheter. I read that in a story somewhere.”
“What suits you at one point in life may be unacceptable later,” Lilian advised. “Jerome was quite kinky, early on.”
“How did you wind up … here?” Janine asked tentatively.
“You mean at a Christian writing program?” Lilian said. “I’m Episcopalian. We believe in the suffering of Christ, but also in the cunning of lawyers, and my lawyer advised channeling my rage somewhere more wholesome than Facebook. I can drive here during the day, and keep an eye on our condo at night. So here I am.” She shrugged. “How about you? Marriage woes?”
It took Janine a moment to realize that Lilian was talking to her. She blushed. “No, I mean, my husband did not exactly understand why I needed to come here to study something I was already doing on my own. He thinks poetry is like hooking rugs, or needlecraft, something you just pick up. He built me a room for it, at our house. Like a sewing room.”
Lilian got up from the table, evidently bored with the relatively small gaps of understanding that characterized Janine’s marriage. “I must take a nap.”
“Do you want to borrow my room?” Maggie asked. “I only slept in one bed.”
“Oh, I have a room,” Lilian said. “They told me I could have a discount because I’m staying at my own home, but I wanted the full experience.” She waved her hand to encompass the ranch: its crowded dining hall, with hardly enough room to walk between tables, its unmanicured view of the gulf. “Besides, I’m spending as much money as I can before the divorce is final. Just in case.”
“I wish it could be like hooking a rug,” Maggie said, after Lilian was gone. “Writing poetry, I mean. I’m not sure Lorraine will be the easiest teacher to learn from. Your husband sounds sweet, though.”
“He believes in my work,” Janine said, glad to have the chance to say something nice. “He believes in its message, about the sanctity and value of life.”
“Wait,” Maggie said. “Your poems are the ones about that woman who died? Terri Schiavo?”
Janine nodded.
“Those were very sad. Very sad.”
“Thank you,” Janine said.
“But Lilian told me something you should know. We were reading through the packet, at the beginning of lunch, which is how our divorces came up. Her husband consulted on that case.”
“What?”
“On the Schiavo case. He was one of the doctors who declared her brain-dead. I don’t think she realized it was you. Maybe I shouldn’t have told you.”
Janine was suddenly very dizzy. She gripped the sides of her chair to steady herself.
“I shouldn’t have told you. I’m sorry.”
“No,” Janine said. “You should have. It’s amazing, what God puts in front of us.”
6
By the end of the first full day Marianne had listened to a long parade of complaints from the students, many of whom were new to the workshop process. The complainers made a continuous and ever-changing line, sometimes three and four people deep, outside her door, and Marianne would apologetically but carefully close it in the hope that she could contain the complaints. Putting out fires, Mark called it. Marianne always pictured his businessman clichés in literal terms—her own feet stamping out actual fires, two people standing on the same giant page, a dinner plate overflowing with things to do.
Tom thought one of his students was a neo-Nazi. Eric was ten minutes late for class. Lorraine ended class twenty minutes early. Lorraine did not discuss any of the poems by the students. The chili mac was too spicy, too greasy, too salty. Tom had already mixed up two young blond students’ names, repeatedly. Tom said what the hell did twentysomethings have to write about anyway? The salad bar’s sneeze guard had been sneezed on. Eric had misunderstood a short story’s central biblical allusion. Lorraine had never asked anyone their name.
All day Marianne had looked for Eric. She had left the door to her office open, in between complaints, in case he might happen by. She’d felt immediately sorry after kicking him out of her room—sorry for the look of disappointment on his face, sorry too for the emptiness of her room, the loneliness she’d felt after he was gone. But he did not walk by, not even once, and she had to settle instead for disparaging scraps of him delivered by the students.
“You’re right,” she said, to the woman who complained about Eric’s punctuality. “I’m sure he’ll be on time tomorrow.” “I don’t know how he could have missed that allusion,” she told another student.
“I’m sure he’s reading about it now.”
To the students whose names Tom kept mixing up, she repeated their names with each apology. She read and praised a strange and bloody poem about childbirth. She agreed with several students that punctuality was a way of showing respect (“Punctuation,” Tom said later, “that would show some respect”). She made tea for a woman who began crying in her office for no apparent reason. “Of course,” she said to each of them. “You’re right.”
By five o’clock her neck was sore from nodding. Each complainer left her office placated and soothed, while Marianne felt more and more exhausted, her feet burned from all the fires, her dinner plate smeared with remnants of unappetizing dishes. And how would they fare tomorrow? Marianne had once been in workshop with a young woman who had contradicted Lorraine on the reading of her poem. Lorraine had slid the violently marked up page across the table at the woman, who’d suddenly looked stricken with fear. “Let us agree then,” said Lorraine, “that it’s a subtle fucking masterpiece.” Marianne had not exactly warned her against such performances here.
By supper time, Marianne was hungry for chili mac, something cheesy and starchy, a gummy sauce thickened over Sterno. She had given up vegetarianism weeks ago, after Mark warned her it was anti-Christian. She still had not had a glimpse of Eric, and she looked forward to scolding him playfully for being late (she’d been impressed, if not surprised, that a slight tardiness and mild biblical ignorance were the only complaints levied against him). Maybe they could take a walk later, she thought, and she could let him know that there would be plenty of time to work out their relationship—whatever it was—after the students left. There were only eleven more days of workshops, after all. She had already crossed out today on her calendar, a fat black X.
She got up to draw the blinds and lock the door, but saw, approaching the office, another petitioner—another complainer—clutching a composition book to her side. Marianne snapped the blinds shut and retreated to the back of the office but the woman wasn’t deterred. She rapped on the door’s glass panes and peered through a gap in the blinds. “Hello?” she called. “Hello?”
“Office hours ended half an hour ago,” Marianne said, opening the door but blocking the woman’s entrance. She was, to Marianne, indistinguishable from many of the other students: ordinary, middle-aged, unremarkable in appearance. She had a thick middle hidden by a T-shirt, stick-like legs in capri pants, a girlish, sandy-brown bob. “Dinner is being served. Is it possible for me to see you in the morning?”
“Oh,” said the woman, clutching her notebook more tightly to her side. “I just saw someone leaving, so I thought …”
Sighing, Marianne let the woman enter. She sat down on the sofa and reached in a practiced way for the Kleenex, like someone used to being consoled in other people’s offices. She had an incoherent story about a woman in her workshop whose husband had two mail-order wives, and somehow this connected to her desire to be transferred to another poetry class. There was no other poetry class.
“So your problem is with … polygamy?” Marianne guessed. She stood behind her desk, packing applications for the next round of students into her tote bag.
No, the woman said: it wasn’t that. The content of the writing, she explained between tissues.
“She’s writing about polygamy?”
“My writing,” she insisted, sitting up straighter. “My writing connects to things in her life. Powerful, terrible things. I think God has brought me here for a reason.”
Marianne had heard versions of this search for meaning in randomness all day long: God brought me here for this reason or that reason, to battle with my peers or teach my professor about the finer points of Habakkuk. But this woman had no conflict; she’d just come here to share. Ruth had a similar story about the first time she met Darryl at a youth group gathering, and Marianne had tried her sisterly best only to listen, not judge, as Ruth went on and on about the divinely inspired nature of their meeting. Why couldn’t people see that it was unreasonable—arrogant, even—to picture a god placing them on Earth like chess pieces? Why couldn’t they see that the connections they made were very highly correlated to their personal, individual, deeply insignificant and often foolish choices?
“That’s a lot of folders. Student work?”
“What?” Marianne said. She looked down at her tote, now stuffed to overflowing with paper. “No, just applications. Many, many applications.”
“For next year?”
“For next round,” Marianne said. “Two hundred so far, just in poetry.”
“That’s incredible—so few of us are chosen,” said the woman. She sounded awed and pleased. “You read them all?”
“Yes,” said Marianne. She wanted to cry, looking at the papers and thinking about their probable contents. “I should just close my eyes and reach in, like a card trick.” She demonstrated, reaching in and pulling out a submission bound in a cumbersome plastic claw binding. With a flourish, she held it up as two other packets fell to the floor. “Ta-da!”
The woman picked up the two manuscripts that had fallen to her feet and set them carefully on Marianne’s desk.
“Not that that’s what we do,” Marianne added quickly, gathering the submissions and putting them back in her bag. “We have a very rigorous selection process.”
But it was too late. The woman, whose name she still did not know, neatly deposited her Kleenex in Marianne’s trash bin and thanked her for her time. Marianne knew she should run after her, apologize, but instead she waited until the woman was safely on her way before sneaking out of the office. Hadn’t her own professors guarded their time? Marianne was pretty sure she’d once seen Phil Levine, in his seventies, sprinting away from one of her more careerist peers.
In the dining hall, the buffet line was long but not discontented; writers chatted amiably, passed tongs and plates and napkins. And the food looked unexpectedly promising—blackened grouper with some kind of fresh salsa, salad greens, stuffed peppers. Spooning salsa onto her fish, Marianne overheard the words “tough” and “challenging” and “different” but not “crazy” or “mean” or “I want my money back.” The office complainer was already seated with other students. Maybe she’d forget about Marianne’s slip. Maybe she hadn’t noticed—though Marianne thought that was unlikely.
Eric was sitting at a round table near the window, leafing impatiently through a pile of papers. His plate rested off to the side, untouched, and he didn’t look up as Marianne approached. She took the seat across from him and reached for his plastic cup of Coke.
“Do you ever forget where you are?” she asked, taking a sip through the straw. “Like, you wake up in the morning and have no idea how you got here? Or you space out and forget who you’re talking to?”
Eric frowned, marking one of the papers with a red pen. Marianne knew he wasn’t listening to her—he was unable to pay attention to anything when he was reading. Back when they were dating, she used to make up nonsense sentences to see if she could get his attention. She thought she’d better not do that now. He looked as if he’d been up all night. His hair and clothes were rumpled, his shirtsleeves were rolled up to his elbows. A walk, she thought, would do them both good.
“I wouldn’t be too hard on them,” she suggested. “Maybe start with the positives. Tom made a student cry today.”
“These aren’t manuscripts,” Eric said finally. “It’s a business plan. Projected expenses, projected income.” He lowered his voice. “We’re in the red, Marianne.”
“I don’t see how that’s possible,” she said. “I did the math too, and—”
“The repairs, the permits. Insurance.” He went back to paging through the document. “Frances’s endowment is spent.”
“I thought we had new … funders? Investors? Can’t we send the bills to them?”
Eric shook his head. “That isn’t how it works. We have to show them that we can make a profit, that this idea is scalable, or we’ll lose their interest. M
ark says he has some ideas. I’m gonna talk to him tonight.”
“Why didn’t he send any of this to me? I thought I was the administrator.”
“You work with the students, Marianne,” he said. “That’s plenty. You’ll be brought in for big decisions. Don’t worry.”
The way he said that—don’t worry—made Marianne suddenly feel very small and petty and in the way. Don’t worry! she thought. Hadn’t she given up everything—her apartment, her whole life—to come here? To live in a single room (no matter that it was roughly the same size as the apartment she gave up) and listen to people complain all day?
“I don’t know who decided I was the one who was good with people,” she said, spearing the dry fish angrily with her fork. “I don’t know whose brilliant fucking brainstorm that was.”
Eric eyed her warningly over his papers; they’d agreed on a cussing prohibition for the two-week residency.
“Brilliant freaking brainstorm.”
“You’re great with people,” he said. “Better than Tom, apparently. Didn’t you used to cry at every workshop?”
“Not in workshop,” she insisted. “After. It was cathartic. Sometimes. And crying is good for the skin.”
“Oh, look out,” Eric said. “Davonte wants something. I bet you can help him.”
Two tables over, the former R&B star was signaling for their attention. “I think he wants you,” Marianne said. “You’re his teacher.”
Eric closed his eyes. “I think you’re better with him. Please.”
“Fine,” Marianne said. She took Eric’s Coke with her and walked over to Davonte’s table, where he was sitting alone.
“Hi, Donald!” she said, pleased to remember the name he wanted to be called. “What’s up?”
“This food,” he said, gesturing at his plate: two stuffed peppers, two fish fillets, a tall mound of rice topped with salsa. He had already eaten some of it, and he resumed eating while Marianne stood next to him, as if he was proving something. “It’s too salty,” he said between bites. “And unhealthy.”