by Belle Boggs
She led them to the lawn shaded by twisted old oaks. No one, not even the immaculately attired Lilian, dragged along a chair. No one spoke. Along the roadway, crape myrtles dropped the last of their bright pink blossoms, and through their pale, dry branches you could see the protesters sitting in the merciless sun.
“See them?” Lorraine said, not even bothering to lower her voice. She crouched, her long skirt dragging the mulch beneath the crape myrtles. Her students crept next to her and kneeled or crouched as they were best able. If the protesters took notice of them, they did not let on. “Here they are in the blazing heat, holding up their signs not because camera crews are here, not because they think we’ll come out and pay attention to them, but because something compels them to do it. Maybe the news cameras will be back tomorrow, maybe not. Maybe someone will listen to them, take some of their literature, or maybe they will be completely misunderstood. No one is going to give them money, they can be sure of that.” She stood, with effort. “That’s poetry.”
Then she turned around and went back inside, not looking behind to see whether they would follow. Janine was right behind her. The mildly air-conditioned room felt much cooler after the outside heat, and Lorraine was already announcing the order in which they’d be work-shopped as the last of them filed in. First she wanted them to make some revisions on the poems she’d selected to talk about, and she walked around the room, dropping heavily marked papers at each of their places, like an annoyed waiter delivering bread or sodas to impatient diners.
“She learned our names,” Manfred whispered, as a paper fluttered to his hands. He sounded pleased, though his poem was marked through with lines, crosses, and angry-looking arrows.
Janine gasped as her own poem came to rest in front of her. “Last Day,” it was called, and every line was struck through with blue felt tip—except for two, in the center, which now looked both lonely and burdened, like the survivors of a disaster. It was a poem she’d spent weeks on.
“Leave your revisions in my office by the morning, and I’ll get them to you at workshop. We’ll do exercises tomorrow, and we’ll be workshopping the first of you by Wednesday. You have today to work,” she announced. “That will give you a good reason to skip the seminars they have planned.”
She nodded at them and left, in her usually hurried and fumbling way, like she was afraid some of them might chase after her.
“She left me five lines,” said Manfred, after some of the others had left. “That’s an improvement for me, though I won’t say they are my favorite lines.”
“She didn’t cross out any of my lines,” Maggie said. “But she did write ‘start over’ at the bottom. And circled it. Oh well.”
“I have two lines left,” Janine said quietly, still staring at her bludgeoned poem. Lorraine had critiqued her work before, had sent notes and emails exhorting her to be strong or radical, but this felt more personal, to have her writing marked through—obliterated, banished—with the stroke of a pen. She felt sick to her stomach, thinking of the connection she had assumed existed between herself and her teacher. “Two.”
“It’s better than ‘start over,’” Maggie said.
“I think I’d rather start over.”
Janine tried to write in her room, opening the curtains wide to let in light, but Beth’s things were strewn across every surface; even the air, humid from her late-morning shower and permeated with the smell of coconut shampoo, was full of her. She shouldn’t have brought her here, should have insisted that this was her time away, that it was something she needed. Even Rick said as much: You sure you want to take her? But Janine was helpless in the face of criticism from her daughters, the suggestion that she might not want what was best for them. Beth had known that and used it against her.
Where were these mean thoughts coming from? She did not want to think them, not about her own daughter. What was wrong with her?
Janine took her spiral notebook, with the two acceptable lines copied into it, outside, but that was no good either—everywhere she looked she saw a poet. Thinking about other people writing poems did not motivate Janine but instead made her feel nervous and self-conscious and competitive. She wondered how many good poems could be written on a single day, at a single school. Two? Three? Maybe none, she thought, looking at her classmates. She started walking toward the Kangaroo; Beth said this morning that she needed tampons, which was better than Beth not needing tampons, but still. Sometimes Janine thought she’d done too much for her girls; their expectations of her were too high.
The protesters were in their same spots, camped out on lawn chairs with their signs propped against their knees. Close up, Janine could see that some of them had marked the letters on their signs in pencil before going over the lines with permanent marker, and had written their slogans along ruled guidelines, also marked in pencil. POETRY or PROFIT? read one of the signs that Janine could see. She thought about her poem, which when she last looked (just this morning), was still on the Ranch’s web page. It wasn’t making any money—Janine had no idea how many times anyone had looked at it, even—but someone had added links: to the Wikipedia page about Terri Schiavo, to the foundation her parents had established in her name, and, somewhat disturbingly, to the Talking to Tad radio show.
The protesters did not look up at as Janine skirted around their long, silent line, but kept their eyes trained on the school. In the Kangaroo, she bought tampons and seven bottles of water, then carried the heavy bag of water back to the protesters. She walked in front of them, then went down the line, pulling the water bottles from the thin plastic bag and handing them over without speaking. Thank you, they each said. At the end of the row there was a woman wearing a visor decorated with metal buttons and peering through a pair of binoculars.
“Is he in there?” she asked.
“Who?”
“Tad Tucker,” said the woman, letting the binoculars rest on a string around her neck and looking up at Janine. “Today’s the first day of classes, isn’t it?”
“It is,” Janine confirmed. “But I haven’t seen him. I heard that he’s coming on Wednesday.”
“You hear that?” the woman called down the line. “Some inspiration!”
“Wednesday!” said another woman. “No wonder it’s so quiet today.”
“I’m not sure, though,” Janine said, afraid she’d said too much. “Who knows if he’s coming at all. May I sit down?”
The woman inched her chair over enough that Janine had a small patch of grass to sit on and resumed looking through her binoculars. “You’re a student here? What do you think about a politician using your school for political gain?”
“Maybe he just wants to write,” Janine said.
“Then why isn’t he here?” The woman looked again through her binoculars, as if he might be hiding behind the bushes somewhere.
Two years ago, Janine’s school offered yoga to the teachers once a week as part of a stress-reduction initiative. Janine had not learned much more in class than the proper way of sitting in the lotus position, but she had looked forward to each class, especially the silence at the end, when the teacher would ring a small bell and they would sit with their eyes closed as sound reverberated in their chests. She’d been disappointed when her principal cut the funding, but had never attended a yoga class on her own after that.
Now she sat lotus style, her spine as straight as she could make it, her feet tucked against her thighs. Lorraine had said that this was poetry, sitting without expectation. She tried yoga breaths, taking deep bellyfuls of humid air then exhaling slowly, and hoped she didn’t look silly. She thought about the poem she wanted to write, about the security guard’s experience of watching Terri. It had been so awful to think about—guarding someone who was dying, guarding her from the people who wanted to save her—that it had been difficult to express what he might have felt. In the poem, the speaker forced himself to think about other things—going to his son’s T-ball game, grilling steak for dinner, the smell of his wife’s hair.
The pleasures of being alive. But that had left her nowhere to go, using his voice, except guilt. He hadn’t faced Terri’s impending death and what it would mean. Janine hadn’t made him. That was why Lorraine crossed out most of her lines.
Janine longed for her pen and notebook, which she’d left back in her room. She began to get that feeling, a sort of pent-up but not unpleasant sensation, that always signified that a poem was coming. It was similar to the way she sometimes felt before initiating intimacy with Rick—something that seldom happened anymore but used to about once a month, during the fertile part of her cycle. The poem feeling was similar in the way that the desire surprised her, the way it seemed to come from nowhere, from everywhere. Also in its fragility.
“You okay?” asked the woman next to her. She offered Janine some of her water, but Janine shook her head.
“I’m okay,” she said, standing. “Just tired. I have to do some rewriting.”
The woman nodded, unsurprised and unimpressed. “Storm might be here by then, anyway,” she said. “That’d turn all his plans upside down, wouldn’t it? Have you been watching the weather?”
“My daughter studies meteorology,” Janine began, then stopped herself. She knew if started talking about her children, she would lose her momentum, her desire. “I’m sorry. I have to go.”
17
Tad Tucker arrived in a black Suburban, parked directly in front of the office, and left it running. He was accompanied by the same two polo-shirted GWGW assistants, Christopher and Matt, who had first appeared with Regina. She was already on campus when they arrived, waiting on the steps in a bright pink skirt suit and holding a bucket-sized Styrofoam cup of sweet tea.
Marianne kept the storm door propped open so she could watch from her desk. She’d thought—she’d hoped—that the incipient tropical storm, which was in fact headed in their very direction, would have been enough to keep Tad Tucker away from campus and focused on more pressing matters. Wouldn’t miss it! he’d texted them all last night. See you around 1:00. Sophie had sent a text—Lots of cancellations here—you?—and Marianne had considered canceling classes, rescheduling the whole session, but Regina, ever the optimist, encouraged her to wait and see.
“Representative Tucker,” Regina said, handing him the tea as he came up the steps. “So good to have you on campus.”
He took a long sip through the straw before answering her. “Good to be here,” he said, clapping Regina on the shoulder. Gray-blue smoke clouded their ankles. Marianne peered out the door and into the cavernous Suburban—no Ruth, she was relieved to see. No Darryl. “Nice spot, but I was glad to have Chris and Matt for directions. You don’t have much of a sign.”
“Regina? Could you please close the door?” Marianne asked. The office was filling with Tad Tucker’s exhaust.
“Sorry ’bout that,” said Tad Tucker. He tossed his keys to Chris, pointed to a nearby spot where he could park, and opened the door, which Marianne realized, for the first time, was a smaller, nonstandard size. He had to duck to fit inside. “So you must be one of the founders of this fine institution.”
“Guilty as charged,” Marianne said. “You know, with your penchant for alliteration, I’m surprised you’re not a poet.”
“My penchant for what, honey?”
“Oh, Marianne is one of our poets,” Regina said. “You know how they are! Always trying to swell their ranks!”
“I see you’ve got protesters across the street. Not too many, though,” he added, peering through the blinds.
“I imagine there will be more later,” Regina assured him. “It’s early.”
“All right,” he said, taking one last look. “Let’s get this show on the road.”
Marianne led them down the path to the fiction cabana, where ten students barely fit and where the raftered ceiling would barely clear Tad’s six-and-a-half-foot frame. Tad kept stopping so that Matt could take his photograph, and by the time they made it to the classroom he was sweating profusely. Marianne had tried to persuade the two other workshop leaders, whose classrooms were larger and better air-conditioned, to switch for the day with Eric, but Tom refused on behalf of both of them. “We don’t want that guy in our spaces,” he told her. “We might not have had any say in allowing him here, but that doesn’t mean we have to accommodate you.”
“I didn’t have any say in it either,” Marianne argued. She was surprised that Tom blamed her and not Eric, but she was also surprised that he’d returned to campus at all. “It wasn’t my idea. But one day, that’s it, and it’s over.”
“You’re in charge, aren’t you?” Tom asked, and she hadn’t known how to answer.
Class had already started when she opened the door. Someone had thought to remove the table and gather the metal folding chairs in a circle.
“Welcome,” said Eric, nearly knocking over his chair to get to the door. “We’re so glad to have you, Representative Tucker.”
Half the class stood, eagerly extending their hands, as Tucker walked in. The other half stayed awkwardly seated, wearing tight smiles. Davonte, whose newly polished manuscript had been bumped so they could workshop Tad’s story, sat with his arms folded across his chest.
“Davonte Gold,” said Tad, extending his hand, then balling it slowly into a fist. “I loved Hurt Songs, brother. Great album.”
Davonte nodded, but did not fist-bump Tad Tucker.
“Well, it’s very crowded in here, so I’ll see you all at the reading later,” said Regina, backing out of the doorway. “Marianne?”
“Marianne wanted to observe the workshop,” said Eric, widening his eyes at Marianne.
Marianne had expressed no such desire, but she knew the look Eric was giving her, had given it herself to teachers and administrators when faced with a particularly volatile class. For a moment she felt sorry for Eric, dressed in his lame GWGW polo, badly in need of a haircut and a shave. When his book first came out, he’d interviewed for a job at Sarah Lawrence, and she pictured the stately room he might have taught in, the sturdy, genteel furnishings, the well-prepared young students he might have had there. “I did,” she said, taking a seat in the corner and waving good-bye to Regina.
“I just want to start by saying that it’s a privilege to be in this class with you, to spend this Day of Inspiration with you,” said Tad, taking the empty two seats next to Eric. “It was so inspiring to be able to share one of my big passions in life with you.” He looked genuinely pleased and excited to be there. Marianne had not read his story, and Eric had only shaken his head when she asked him about it.
“Actually, you don’t talk during this part,” said Davonte. “That’s one of our rules we learned on the first day, back in March. You just listen and take notes.”
“Great,” Tad said, opening his leather portfolio and taking out a gold pen. “That’s what politicians need to do more of, in my opinion. Listen and—”
“No talking at all,” said Davonte firmly. “Just listening. Am I right, Eric?”
“Well,” Eric said, looking down at his notes. “Why don’t we start by sharing some of the things we admired about Representative Tucker’s—”
“Tad,” said Tad. Davonte gave him a stern look. “Sorry!” he said.
“About Tad’s work,” Eric said.
The room was quiet. Some people looked at the manuscript, searching for the parts that they liked. Others looked at the walls, the ceiling, as if the virtues of Tad’s story might be found there. What had he written about? A gruesome late-term abortion? A science fiction piece about vengeful, sentient zygotes? Marianne leaned forward in her seat.
Finally Louis, the one-world-government novelist, said, “I was surprised, actually, that Tad wrote a story about baseball. I was thinking that this would be, I don’t know, a kind of political piece. But it was about baseball. I like baseball.”
The other students nodded, grateful for the opportunity to approve baseball.
“Writing about baseball has an excellent literary tradition,”
said Eric. “Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, DeLillo—”
Tad’s pen raced across the page as more people offered positive thoughts about baseball.
“Didn’t the story feel sort of … familiar to you, though?” someone asked.
“Yeah,” said Davonte, leaning forward. “The cocky guy that misses and misses and strikes out? I kept thinking, I heard this somewhere before. Don’t talk, man,” he said, pointing at Tad. “You gotta wait.”
“Davonte, Tad is our guest,” Eric chided.
“I thought you said he was a student,” Davonte said. “Same as us.”
“Let’s stick to the work.”
“I will admit, I guess, that I wanted it to be more political,” Louis said, turning the manuscript pages and frowning. “I wanted there to be more at stake. I wanted it to be about something bigger.”
“There is something at stake,” Davonte said. “The pitch. Will he strike out or not?”
“It’s interesting, the way he’s compressed time,” someone else offered.
“It’s ‘Casey at the Bat’!” interjected another student. “That’s why it’s so familiar.”
Tad’s face reddened and his fancy pen slowed as he realized that the students did not mean familiar in a good way. “But—” he said.
“No talking!” said Davonte and Louis at once.
“You’ll have your chance, don’t worry,” Eric said. “Why don’t we think about the ways Tad could expand the story, given what we have here.”
“He could hit the ball instead of striking out,” Davonte said.
“The story could take place over the entire game.”
“He could have something else on his mind? Maybe an internal conflict?”
“What do we really know about this batter, anyway? Could we have some backstory?”
Tad Tucker had stopped writing entirely. The slight flush in his cheeks had become a fiery red that engulfed his head, from his wide neck to his shiny bald spot. Apparently he had not counted on constructive criticism.