by Belle Boggs
“Oh,” Marianne said. “But it’s fish! It isn’t fried.”
“For lunch … were you here for lunch?”
Marianne suggested the salad bar. But Davonte said he did not like cold food that other people had messed with, and could not be counted on, if she wanted to know the truth of it, to control himself in the face of ranch dressing. But he had a solution—his life coach, who was staying nearby, would bring him supper, and he would eat Lean Cuisine for lunch, if only Marianne could microwave it for him and have it ready on a plate.
“On a plate,” Marianne repeated.
“Yeah,” he said. “I can’t eat from a fucking tray. Excuse me.” He closed his eyes and mouthed something to himself. “I can’t eat from a tray.”
He had been so handsome, ten or fifteen years ago, the star of more than a few shameful sexual fantasies for Marianne. The shame wasn’t from the sex she imagined, but the inadequacy of her own body, soft and dimpled where Davonte’s was hard and chiseled. Now everything about him was slack and soft: his face was round, his biceps undefined. Who knew what his famous abdominals looked like now?
“I’m trying to get everything right with God,” Davonte explained. “The words I say. This book I’m writing. The food I put in His temple.”
“Okay,” said Marianne. Who knows, she thought. Maybe she would see him get back to his old self, fit and muscled. Maybe she would see him that way, in a swimsuit. “So. Lean Cuisine. Heated up. On a plate.”
“Yes,” he said. “Not too hot. It dries out.”
“Any particular time?”
“You think I’m being arrogant,” he said. He stood—he wasn’t much taller than she was—and pulled out a chair for her. Marianne’s mostly unsuccessful dating history had left her helpless against even the smallest expressions of chivalry. Open a door for her, and she’d walk through it. She sat.
“You know who I am,” he said.
Marianne nodded. His eyes were two deep, velvety pools; she couldn’t move. I will never move again, she thought. This was what it was like to be looked at by a famous person.
“Well, after Hurt Songs blew up, I got … a lot of attention. From girls,” he said. “From women. Hell, from grandmas.”
“Yikes,” Marianne said. “That was a good video, though. I liked it, I mean. I don’t think my grandma ever saw it.”
Davonte laughed and shook his head. “That video ruined my career. Do you know I couldn’t leave the house after it came out without somebody throwing herself at me? Couldn’t go to the grocery store, the 7-Eleven, nothing.”
“I bet a lot of guys would like that,” Marianne said. “The attention.”
“They might think they like it,” Davonte said. “But it gets old. It wasn’t for me. I lost who I was. I had some legal troubles. I started ordering in: pizzas, sub sandwiches. Weed. That was all I did, eat and smoke, and in a year I’d gained a hundred pounds, and nobody looked at me like that anymore.
“But it was a bad solution. It messed up my voice and my confidence. I am borderline diabetic, Mary-Anne. This is not what God wanted for me. So I am learning to ask for people’s help. And I am asking you to microwave my Lean Cuisines.”
She nodded; it felt like she was under a powerful, paralyzing spell. She would microwave his Lean Cuisines, she would put them on a special plate at a special time. If he needed it, she would lace up his running shoes for him. She would strain to hold his feet while he did sit-ups.
He turned back to his meal as if it was some unfinished, unpleasant work. She thought of asking him if he wanted her to take it away, but didn’t know how to offer. She got up and walked slowly back to her table.
“Want to take a walk?” she asked Eric, who was still hunched over his papers. “It’s nice out. Breezy.”
Eric looked at his watch and frowned. “I’ve gotta call Mark soon. You go,” he said, and she had the feeling, again, that she was being indulged and discounted, pushed to the side.
“Should I join you?”
“Nah,” he said. “I’ll fill you in later.”
“Okay,” she said. “Fine. Have fun.”
“You have fun,” Eric said.
She leaned in close. “None of this is fun.”
Avoiding entreating expressions from several tables, Marianne walked quickly outside, letting the door slap closed behind her, and jogged down the path to the beach. Her heart was still thudding angrily by the time she reached the fine white sand. Eric had seemed upset too, his shoulders hunched tightly, his voice clipped and angry. Mark would find them more money, just as he had before, or else they would shut the place down and not have to worry about it. After the day she’d had, Marianne would not exactly mind saying good-bye to the lot of them, these sentimental poets, these apocalyptic whiners.
But hadn’t Eric insisted, last night, I want this to work?
And hadn’t he also touched her shoulder, and held his hand there until she moved away? Hadn’t he said “ah” so sadly when she’d kicked him out, and mentioned how long it had been since they were together?
After an old woman confessed a strange whim, he had built an entire school for her, the school Marianne had joked about for years. It was cruel, what Eric had done, like presenting someone who said “I could eat a horse” with a giant horsemeat steak.
She turned around and faced it—she could see the fiction classroom near the beach, the dining hall up the hill, the garden and swimming pool near the dormitories. Marianne turned back to the water, the late-afternoon sun glimmering off a light sea chop, a few pristine sailboats in the distance. As a child she’d realized that, for adults, the real charm of a beach vacation was not the smell of suntan lotion or the sound of the surf or the feeling of warm sand between their toes. It was not the possible glimpse of porpoises or seabirds or the brief dips they took in the water. What mattered most was sitting with your back to everything else.
The last time Marianne spent any real time at the beach was the summer Ruth turned thirteen, when they’d gone as a family. Her father had a girlfriend then, a woman named Noreen who answered phones at the elementary school and had known their mother vaguely. Marianne could never understand what the two of them had in common, but figured that Virginia’s Middle Peninsula offered slim pickings when it came to dating. Noreen was the one who extended the invitation, calling Marianne at home on a Friday evening in May. “Oh,” she’d said, surprised-sounding, when Marianne answered the phone. “I just meant to leave a message.”
“What is that noise?” Noreen asked, after telling her about the house—four bedrooms, oceanfront.
“What noise?” Marianne said, walking away from the window, as far as the phone would stretch. She thought about the space, the wall-to-wall carpeting of silence that would be her family’s beach vacation. The phone cord stretched all the way to her bed—three big steps. “I would love to see Ruth, too. Girl time.”
“Yes,” Noreen—a woman who kept a menagerie of Beanie Babies arranged around her school system name plate—said warmly. “Girl time!”
Marianne flew down from New York, a choppy flight on a commuter plane to Richmond. Heaving her lumpy duffel bag into the used book–lined trunk of her father’s Chrysler, still shaken by the turbulence she should have left thousands of feet above her, she felt old. But somehow over the six-hour drive, riding in the backseat next to Ruth, she turned into a teenager again. She asked how long until they got there, she slept with her head against the window and her mouth falling open, she bought Cheetos and Dr Pepper at rest area vending machines. She listened to her iPod, a time capsule of the year she bought it. Occasionally Ruth passed her an earbud, and she obligingly bobbed her head before passing it back.
They arrived at dusk, the sun setting over the sound. It must have been the last long stretch of time they spent together: six days of late sleeping, lazy swimming, ineffectual tanning, and bad television. Marianne liked the swimming best, the waves no more than gentle hills in the water, lifting them lightly from the sa
ndy bottom, then setting them down again. No surfers to distract Ruth. No surfers to distract Marianne.
Marianne taught Ruth to scuff her toes along the bottom for sand dollars, which they lined up on the beach house’s balcony railing to dry and bleach in the sun. Ruth told Marianne about her favorite bands and painted Marianne’s nails purplish-black. They gorged themselves on pizza and watched scary movies. When Howard and Noreen went out for seafood one night, Marianne drank a bottle of sweet, five-dollar wine and dyed Ruth’s bangs pink.
“I can’t believe you did that, I can’t believe you did it,” Ruth kept saying, after they’d rinsed and dried her hair, but she couldn’t stop looking at herself in the mirror. Her ears weren’t even pierced. “Dad is going to kill you.”
“I’ve been killed by Dad before,” said Marianne. She wondered, sleepily, if she should dye her own hair pink. “I always resurrect myself. I’m like Jesus.”
“You shouldn’t say that.” Ruth could become instantly serious and stuffy, whenever religion came up. She was that age, Marianne figured, that wanted to please and rebel at the same time, an age when pink bangs and black fingernails were little more than innocuous signals to other kids her age. She’d asked Marianne to take her to an all-ages show the next night, but Marianne was sure she’d tell their father all about it the following morning, even recounting the boys she’d flirted with.
“I was just kidding,” Marianne said, pulling the undyed portion of Ruth’s dirty-blond hair into a ponytail with one hand. “I should French-braid the back; you’ll look like a punk cheerleader.”
“I mean it, Mare,” Ruth said. That was her childhood name for her sister—Mare, like a horse. She found Marianne’s eyes in the wide, spotless bathroom mirror. Ruth’s were blue and as wide set and earnest as a cartoon character’s. “It isn’t something to kid about, another person’s religion.”
“Okay,” said Marianne, sectioning out the crown of Ruth’s hair into three pieces. She began to twine them together, pulling neat sections of hair from the side. “But no one else is here, right? Just us?”
Ruth crossed her arms over her chest. “I’ve been to youth group. I’ve been to church.”
“I’ve been to youth group too,” Marianne said. “It was boring.” The braid was starting to veer away from the center, and Marianne had to loosen two sections and start again. In high school chemistry class, she’d sat behind a girl who wore a different, impeccably neat French braid each day—sometimes straight, sometimes diagonal or even zigzagged—and Marianne had studied the back of her head intently for an entire school year. She pulled more hair from the other side and carefully worked to correct things. “But you liked it.”
After a long time, Ruth said, “I guess I thought it would be helpful. I like to think about heaven. You know, to picture Mom there, like a place I could see her again.”
“Oh,” said Marianne. At twenty-seven, and a poet, she didn’t have any words of solace or wisdom, nothing that would not sound false or hollow. “Is it something you’ve talked to Dad about?”
Ruth shook her head. “Do you miss Mom?”
Marianne sighed; the braid looked nothing like the girl’s from chemistry class. “Every day. Then sometimes I think what I’m missing is the idea of her. I miss the things I imagine us doing, things we spent, like, a tiny percent of our life together doing.”
“Like what?”
“Like, if I see a mom and daughter in a museum, I’ll miss her, even though we went to the Virginia Museum or the Smithsonian maybe once a year. Or a mom and daughter in a sushi restaurant. Mom never ate sushi with me. There wasn’t any sushi around when I was growing up.”
“Now there’s a place next to Food Lion. It’s a teriyaki place, but they have sushi too.”
“Yeah.” Marianne took the elastic band holding her own hair in a ponytail and secured the end of Ruth’s braid, doubling the elastic many times. It had turned out okay—lumpy in some places and not exactly straight, but it wasn’t falling apart. “There,” Marianne said. “Punk cheerleader, French-braided by her drunk mom.”
Ruth patted her head. “You might be drunk, Mare, but you’re not my mom.”
“I know,” said Marianne.
“I don’t have a mom.”
“You do,” Marianne said. “You did, I mean. You’ll always have a mom, even if it’s just a mom you remember.”
Ruth slipped her fingers into the braid and undid it, setting Marianne’s elastic band on the edge of the sink. “Thanks. Dad is still going to kill you.”
Except, of course, he didn’t. The next morning at breakfast, Ruth waited for him to say something, her hot pink bangs combed in front of a black velvet headband, but he kept his eyes in a John Grisham paperback while Noreen, unsure of her role, nervously smiled. Marianne, on a walk at the time, came home to find her sister loading the dishwasher, her father on the deck with Noreen.
“You look intact. What did he say?”
Ruth shrugged, clacking bowls into the rack. “Didn’t notice.”
The Ranch kept a stack of lightweight beach chairs near the end of the walkway to the beach. Marianne lifted one from the top of the stack and carried it near the water’s edge and set it down, then dragged it a little north of the Ranch, in front of the mangroves that separated their property from the homes and hotels on either side. Where she was sitting, she could be from anywhere—a guest of one of the nicer hotels or even a homeowner, taking a break at the end of a long day. The tide was going out, and she concentrated on marking where each wave lapped the sand.
Just a week ago, she’d been able to come down here, alone or with Eric, every night. Now there were students scattered everywhere, their dark silhouettes facing the still-shining water.
“Beautiful,” said a voice nearby. Marianne looked to her left and saw that it belonged to the woman who’d most recently cried in her office. She had a spiral notebook in her lap, a pencil sheathed in the metal coil. Had she told Marianne her name? Marianne was bad with names; it seemed that she was always thinking of something else when people announced theirs.
“Thanks,” Marianne said, then realized it sounded like she was taking credit for God’s creation. The sun’s orange light was quickly draining over the gulf’s horizon. “I mean,” she said, “thank you for watching it with me.”
“Last night I was sure I saw the green light,” said the woman. “But now I’m not so sure. My friend Manfred said it was a myth.”
“I haven’t seen it yet, and I come here almost every day,” said Marianne. “But I don’t think it’s a myth. A lot of other people have seen it. I think it’s a scientific thing, actually.” Perhaps it was a good sign—a tolerant and open-minded sign, at least—that this woman counted Manfred Collins as a friend. Marianne had met him, a chain-smoking, bourbon-swilling serial workshopper, years ago. His great-grandfather had made so much money refining sugar, Manfred once told her, that no Collins had ever been useful to the world since.
“Good,” the woman said. “I didn’t want to think it was my imagination. It’s terrible, when people try to talk you out of something harmless, like the green light. Who would want to do that, Marianne?”
“I don’t know,” Marianne said. “I’m sorry, I’m terrible with names.”
“Janine,” the woman said. “I’m sorry I barged in on you at the end of the day, when you were trying to leave. I hate it when my students do that.”
“No, you were fine. I’m sorry, it was a long day. It must seem long to you too—I forget that.”
Janine considered. “Yes and no. It’s been six months since we got in. We’ve been here two days now. That seems pretty short.”
“Good!” Marianne said. “I mean, right? I wouldn’t want this to be the longest workshop of your life.”
“It’s the only workshop of my life. So far.”
“That’s right,” said Marianne, suddenly remembering their phone conversation in the fall, the woman’s shock, her heavy breathing. Then further back, to the
poems themselves: modest but tightly packed, wounded. “I loved your poems, actually. About Terri Schiavo. You said you’d only shared them so far with your husband.”
“Thank you for remembering them,” Janine said. Marianne looked over and saw that she was smiling, but she did not ask, as Marianne would have, which ones she had liked best, did not search Marianne’s face for clues about her sincerity.
“Is that what you’re still working on?”
“I don’t know,” Janine said. “I thought I was done with them, but then I had an experience today that made me think I’m not. I think God brought me here for a reason.”
Marianne made her face as plain as it would go.
“I mean, to have certain experiences. To push me. In workshop today, we read this poem, ‘Poetry as Insurgent Art.’ Do you know it?”
“I am signaling you through the flames,” Marianne said, dramatically.
Janine got up and dragged her chair closer. The sky was a deep lavender now. “Right, that’s it. I had this feeling that Lorraine—Ms. Kominski—chose the poem just for me. I know that’s crazy, but that’s how it felt. My husband would say it was Jesus walking next to me, then picking me up and carrying me before I even knew it. Because I felt so weighed down, just before we read it. I kept getting texts from my girls, and I was missing them and missing Rick and thinking, what am I doing here? Do you know I never got an A in an English class in my life? Always Bs, B pluses. And I look around and see all these other people and think, what am I doing here? They must have a reason, they must have talent, but I do not.”
Marianne had in fact always gotten As, and had even been awarded a prestigious scholarship in her first year of graduate school. But where had it gotten her, all that promise? Not much further than Janine, a self-taught poet from Panama City. “Self-doubt,” she said. “I know it well.”
“But then,” said Janine, putting her hand on the armrest of Marianne’s chair. “Lorraine came in, and she passed out the poem and I read it and it just spoke to me. I’ve read that poem so many times today I could recite it for you,” Janine said, and then she recited it.