by Belle Boggs
It was amazing to her how this fearsome object, a pole holding bags of fluid, had become so familiar, how with a single gesture she could conjure it not only for herself but for anyone. She’d done the sketch with a fresh Rapidograph pen on good cotton paper—everything she did was archival quality now—and sent it, along with a few others, to the cartoon department at the New Yorker. To her surprise—she’d sent drawings meant for the magazine’s margins and white spaces for years without a single reply—she received an encouraging note in two weeks, which mentioned not the IV pole but three other drawings: a pair of gardening gloves, a vase, a lady’s slipper. The editor said he liked the way Theresa’s illustrations evoked the carefree quality of summer—it was the summer fiction issue he imagined for her work, a magazine people read on vacation, or thinking of vacation. The iris was especially good—could she do some more summer flowers, maybe in vases?
The lady’s slipper was a spring flower, too fragile to pick. It grew in the deep shade of pine forests near her home, its bulbous translucent-pink flower and fat dark leaves close to the sandy, acidic soil. But she could do tall Hamptons-garden irises too. “Look,” she showed her afternoon class, gliding her pen across one of the lady’s slipper drawings to lengthen its stem. Marianne, who would soon inherit all of the drawings, the fidgety Rapidographs, the letters back and forth with the editor at the New Yorker, watched with a deep archival understanding. How a simple line could not only form a recognizable image, it could also transform that thing into something else.
Transformation and understanding, that’s what Marianne was thinking about writing to Janine Gray on a hot Tuesday morning in July. They’d developed an email correspondence during the break in classes—Marianne had initiated it, afraid that Lorraine wouldn’t keep up with her students, but she found that she looked forward to Janine’s emails, which were sincere and searching, and she tried to put her own sincere and searching thoughts into her replies. Somehow they’d gotten on the topic of character in poetry, and how much you could know the mind of another person. Impossible. That was what Marianne was thinking about writing to Janine, because it was what she had been thinking: about Eric, who had grown increasingly distant, and about her mother, who was always both distant and present. She wanted to say more than that, something about the way our preoccupations grew and changed, how our perceptions became part of the truth. But she was missing her mother, and so that’s what she wrote in her email—how her mother would always be a kind of mystery to her, dying when Marianne was seventeen and just about to ask her things, about sex and love and art. Janine was so lucky to have this time with her daughters, who sounded like lovely and smart young women, and they were lucky to have her too—she would not be a mystery they spent the rest of their lives trying to solve.
She pressed Send, and that was when a new email arrived. She clicked on the link:
Middlesex County, Va. Two local ministers, Darryl and Ruth Boyette, are taking their message of love and life on the road this summer. The couple will leave their flock at Healing Waters Baptist Church to join this summer’s Tour of Life, appearing with prominent religious leaders and pro-life advocates across the Southeast to raise money for crisis pregnancy centers.
“We want to share a message about the sanctity and beauty of life,” said Darryl Boyette, senior minister at Healing Waters. “This is a message of love for teens in trouble. Well, not in trouble. And not just teens. Anyone expecting a baby.”
Ruth Boyette, who has served the church in a counseling and ministerial role for two years, is slated to speak at several major events about her own family background. Boyette’s mother was counseled to end her pregnancy when it was discovered that she had breast cancer. “I wouldn’t be here if my mother hadn’t made that sacrifice, if she had listened to the medical establishment instead of her heart,” she said.
Darryl Boyette has been senior minister at Healing Waters for two years. Ruth Boyette began attending services as a teen, and joined the ministry in 2010 after her marriage to Darryl. Her late mother, Theresa Stuart, was a beloved art teacher at Eastern High.
“This isn’t about politics, it’s about education and helping scared people feel less alone,” Ruth said. “Everyone in my family works in education, in one way or another, so it makes sense that I would be an educator too. This is my way of giving back, helping mothers, helping children.”
Ruth Boyette’s father, Howard Stuart, teaches ethics and philosophy at Rappahannock Community College. Her sister, Marianne Stuart, recently founded the country’s first low-residency Christian writing school, near Sarasota, Florida. The Tour of Life is funded by a grant from God’s World God’s Word, a national faith-based organization involved in education and outreach, and will take the Boyettes to a number of churches and “educational institutions” like her sister’s newly founded school. In the Boyettes’ absence Healing Waters will be helmed by Associate Pastor Charles Walker, though Darryl and Ruth will have weekly videoconference sessions with congregants throughout their three-week trip. They are expected to return to church in August.
Most articles about Ruth and her church—a BBQ fund-raiser, a homecoming reunion, a new twist on vacation Bible school (VBS All Summer Long!)—were in the free local tabloid, print-only and clipped and mailed to Marianne by their dad, usually without comment. But this one, accompanied by a photograph of Ruth, appeared in a larger, regional paper. Though it was in a section called Faith Notes, it was not written in the gossipy, suspense-driven style the local rag favored (Guess who is going on a Tour of Life? Have you ever heard of or been on a Tour of Life?). It was available online and had popped up in Marianne’s Google Alerts, set to notify her when any mentions of Marianne Stuart, Eric Osborne, Genesis Inspirational Writing Ranch, or Davonte Gold appeared. So far there’d been dispiritingly little traffic, but this wasn’t what she had in mind—her sister putting her own maudlin misunderstanding of their family’s history, of Marianne’s mother, in front of everyone, or at least the readers of Faith Notes.
Heart pounding, she called Howard, who answered on the third ring.
“Dad! The article—did you see it?”
“Marianne?”
It had always been exasperating to have to announce herself to her own father. “Yes! It’s Marianne. Check your email—I just forwarded you this awful article about Ruth’s Tour of Life.”
“I know about it. I’m picking up the mail for your sister and Darryl while they’re gone.”
“They’re in the paper,” Marianne said. “The Tidewater Review. Ruth is going to talk about Mom. At antiabortion rallies. At my ‘educational institution’—why is that in quotes? Do they think it’s not a real school? Dad, did she tell you she was coming here? Did you know that she thinks this?”
“I don’t have the full itinerary,” Howard said. “Frankly, it sounded a little rushed to me. Fly-by-night. But what do I know? I seem to remember that you invited her to visit.”
“To visit,” Marianne said. “Not to come here and talk about abortion. Not to talk about Mom. And not when school is in session.”
“Well, maybe you should call her. I can understand that the timing—”
Marianne began to read the article aloud. She paused after reading Ruth’s quote about sacrifice and listening to her heart. “Dad, Mom’s cancer was stage 1. They couldn’t have known it would come back. She listened to the doctors.”
“Your mother was always a good listener. And a careful decision maker.”
“It wasn’t a choice she made,” Marianne said. “Between her own life and a fetus. It wasn’t like that. How did Ruth get this idea?”
Howard sighed, and was silent for a minute, maybe more. Marianne waited for him to say that he would call Ruth, go see her, set her straight about Theresa. It wasn’t Ruth’s fault that she didn’t understand their mother; Theresa was sick by the time Ruth was in kindergarten. She was gone before Ruth entered first grade.
“Your mother did have choices,” Howard said. “
She chose the least aggressive treatment for a variety of reasons. You were young, and chemotherapy is dangerous. She was pregnant. The doctors felt comfortable with her choice. But it was a choice.”
“But if she had known—”
“Marianne, losing your mother was traumatic. To you. To your sister. To me. We all suffered, all in our own ways, none of us worse than any other.”
Marianne, who had been pacing in her hot office, sat down. It was rare to hear Howard talk about her mother. She wanted him to go on. “We all deal with our traumas in different ways. You believe, as you have the right to believe, that your mother did absolutely everything she could to treat her cancer in its first occurrence. If you believed that she didn’t, that would be like thinking that she abandoned you, when you needed her most. Because you did need her. I know that.
“But your sister, she had less time with your mother. Maybe because of that she did suffer the most. Your mother didn’t go to ballet recitals for her, or swim lessons, or parent-teacher conferences. She didn’t host sleepovers or ground her or do any of that—she was gone. So Ruth thinks about what her mother did for her, and thinking about this sacrifice makes her feel cared for. It’s something she needs.”
“And she needs to tell other people? About Mom? Doesn’t it bother you? That she is twisting our personal history for her own political ends? Or for Darryl’s political ends? How is this not a political act anyway—aren’t churches supposed to stay out of politics?”
“My feelings don’t come into it,” he said. “Your sister is free to do as she likes, or do as she feels she must. Just as you are. How are things at school? How is Eric?”
She pictured her father sitting at a desk, writing his answers in neat print in the margins—he was nearing the end of his engagement with her. One could only expend so much ink on a student whose argumentation was all over the place. In her own teaching Marianne had frequently felt defeated by student essays, and sometimes fantasized about drawing an X through the entire document and writing “start over” at the end, as Lorraine had once done to one of her poems. Her own go-to comment had been “?”.
“School is okay,” she said. “Eric is fine. We’re not in session now, so it’s actually kind of great. But we will be in session in August. And if Ruth and Darryl show up—”
“As a matter of fact, I don’t think your sister plans to go that far south,” Howard said. “But you should call her. Ask her about her plans.”
“I will do that,” Marianne said. “Don’t think I won’t.”
After their phone call ended, Marianne resumed furiously pacing her office. Her first real office—the first room with a door and a desk and papers that did not also include the bed where she slept. It was a mess. Fine, she would clean it. She opened the shades and the window and turned the oscillating fan on high. She threw a bunch of papers the fan knocked onto the floor in the recycling bin. She straightened books on her shelves and stuffed some other papers in a drawer. How selfish of her sister, who was probably younger than any of the Ranch’s students, to think she could come here and disrupt their hard-won, expensive time. Time taken away from work and family and home and pets. How devious of Regina—she was sure that she had some hand in this, promoting the Ranch to the Tour of Life, whatever that was. She thought about emailing them both, with a link to the article, and writing only ? in the body of her email.
Soon the office was clean, or at least it seemed clean—Marianne would later have to fish through the recycling bin for bills and letters, and would need to file or recycle the papers stuffed in her desk drawer. The fan oscillated right, then left, stopping briefly at three points in its rotation. Each time the oscillation paused, the fan seemed about to topple over.
Marianne sat down at her newly clean desk and opened the article again on her desktop. She copied it into a new file and printed it. Her mother was progressive, liberal, pro-choice. She’d donated to Planned Parenthood. Choice went both ways—Marianne knew that—and it was possible her mother could support someone else’s right to an abortion without choosing it herself. But she was sure that her mother would not have traded her life for a fetus’s—even the fetus that eventually became Ruth. She was eleven when her mother told her that she was sick, and also, at the same time, that she was pregnant. For a while Marianne thought the sickness and the pregnancy were the same thing, connected somehow in her mind with her own excruciating and recently arrived periods. No, Theresa explained: she was going to have a surgery, a removal of a tumor in her breast, and then she would be better.
It was harder to remember what her mother had said to her than what she thought after hearing it. How disappointing but inevitable—to be left with the preoccupied, ever-present self when what you desired was the missing other. She could remember feeling worried that her mother’s breast would be cut off entirely—as perhaps it should have been—and also about the mechanics of feeding the baby without it. Each time her period rolled around she became convinced again that it was something in her mother’s uterus that had made her sick. The doctor visits—to the oncologist, to the obstetrician—got jumbled in Marianne’s mind. No one in the house said the word cancer, but she knew that was what her mother had, just as she also knew about pregnancy and sex and a woman’s always-changing body. She couldn’t remember any heated arguments between her parents, no hushed or intense talk of fateful choices. And she was sure that Howard would have had an opinion. Take care of the living first: that’s what Howard would have said.
She pulled out her phone, dialed Ruth’s number, and got voicemail. “Ruth,” she said. “It’s Marianne. Call me.”
Outside her office window, the surface of the pool was unnervingly placid; the Spanish moss that hung from the oaks was still and ghostly. The classrooms, when she went in every afternoon to run the air-conditioning, felt wrong: clammy with ocean moisture, echoey and dim. Sometimes she thought about what each of the students must be doing at home. A few of them had made Facebook friends with Marianne (what choice did she have but to accept them?). She’d never spent much time on the site—it always made her feel watched and nervous—but lately she found herself scrolling enviously through their pleasantries:
It’s a beautiful day!
So grateful for another day!
Or Writing! accompanied by a photograph of a desk or a window or a notebook.
She thought especially about Janine, who had not posted a status update since becoming Marianne’s friend and wrote to Marianne exactly once a day, usually in the early morning. She imagined whole routines for her: Janine is teaching summer school now, Janine is grocery shopping, Janine is making dinner with her daughters. Janine is writing a poem. It felt a little like taking a sick day from work or school, or the period just after quitting a job, the way you watched the hours pass and imagined what you’d be doing had you not stayed home to watch the hours pass. Life was lived without you, and you realized that whatever you imagined you’d be doing—whatever luxury or expansiveness the day once held, hours ago—was dissolving, purposeless, invisible.
“How can you stand it in here?” Eric said, when he showed up midmorning. “It must be ninety degrees. That fan doesn’t help.”
“It does help,” she said. “I hate air conditioners. There’s something you should read. It’s in the printer.”
“You should take a trip,” he said. He stood looking around—she could tell he was trying to notice what was different—but did not cross the room to pick up the article. “Go somewhere cooler. Go to Montauk. Remember when we went, had lobsters that time? Or go to Maine. I’ve heard it’s nice in the summer.”
Marianne did remember going to Montauk with Eric—they’d rented a car and driven out there one weekend in the early fall. The water was too cold for swimming, but the light was clear and golden, especially in the late afternoon when they took a walk through the town. After Eric convinced her that lobsters were just big insects, they’d eaten half-pounders with boiled corn and drawn butter. They’d pla
yed minigolf and gone go-kart racing.
“I’ve heard it’s a lot fancier now,” Eric told her. “But hey, business is good.”
Mark had sent them each bonuses at the end of the first session. Marianne put hers in the bank and did not plan to spend it—who knew if he would take it back, that was her feeling. It felt like a mistake, like when the bank credits you for an extra deposit. They always caught their mistake, didn’t they?
“I don’t want to go on vacation by myself,” she said, but as soon as she said it wished she hadn’t. She sounded peevish and self-pitying. “I do remember it. The trip to Montauk. It was one of my favorites.”
He sat down at the conference table and began hole-punching Davonte’s growing manuscript, then feeding the pages into a binder. Marianne had gotten the hole punch at the local freecycle, and he had to lean on its handle to make it work, section by thin section. “We had some good times,” he said, crunching through the pages.
“I thought about it, when you asked me,” she said. “When I said yes. That’s what I was thinking about. Go-kart racing and minigolf and lobsters.”
Eric stopped what he was doing. “And when you said no?”
“It can’t all be go-karts and minigolf. That’s what I thought.”
“No,” Eric agreed. This disappointed her—she wanted him to say, Of course it can! Marriage can be anything you decide. But instead he went grimly back to punching holes. “I guess it can’t.”
Marianne walked to the printer and picked up the article—without the photograph, which didn’t print, it hardly took up a half page. Maybe no one would notice. Eric had been so cheerful, hopeful since the bonuses arrived.
“My dad asked about you,” she said. “I was talking to him about my sister. She may come here. With some sort of GWGW field trip.”
“That’s great—you wanted her to visit. I bet she’ll be really impressed.”
“Don’t you think it’s a little strange—that she is suddenly connected to them, to GWGW?”