The Gulf

by Belle Boggs

  “These sound like excellent, very well considered suggestions,” said Eric. “Though of course it will be up to Tad to decide what to do.”

  When it was finally time for Tad Tucker to talk, he looked about to explode.

  “Well, I just want to thank you all for sharing your suggestions. They’re very interesting. Maybe if any of you decide to write a story about baseball you can use them,” he said. “I’m happy with my ending. Sometimes when you go up to bat, it’s the bottom of the ninth, and you’re the best player on the team, you still don’t hit the ball. It happens in ‘Casey at the Bat,’ and it happens here, because it’s one of the tough truths of life.”

  “I think Davonte was just trying to broaden the landscape of narrative choices,” offered Eric. “Since it’s a first draft.”

  “Well, I know when to leave well enough alone. You can’t just spend your life tweaking every word of a story to see if it comes out different. Well, maybe some of you can. I learned to write on a deadline, and I wrote this on a deadline.”

  “That’s a talent,” Eric noted.

  “And it wound up on the front page of the sports section of the Hurricane.”

  “Oh,” said Eric. “You wrote this in college. Well, you’re a busy man, Representative Tucker. It really was great that you took the time to …”

  “Retype it,” said Louis.

  “Well,” said Marianne, after workshop was over and she was left alone with Eric. “Tad Tucker doesn’t like criticism. Go figure.”

  “Nobody likes to be criticized, Marianne,” Eric said, packing papers into his messenger bag. “The class basically accused him of plagiarizing a children’s poem.”

  “It sounded like a terrible story.”

  “It was,” he said, shaking his head. “It was a terrible story. But they’ve written some stinkers themselves.”

  “As bad as that?”

  “No,” he admitted.

  “On the bright side,” she said, “it looks like you’ve taught them something. Louis seems to have made progress, for example. And they didn’t bring Ruth—I mean, I didn’t think she’d show up without telling me, but it’s been so long since I’ve heard from her.” The day would be over soon; nothing horrible had happened. This was what passed for elation for her, these days. Nothing horrible. One foot in front of the other.

  “How did it come to this, Marianne? In a couple of hours, we’re hosting a fetal personhood–themed reading. We’ve invited members of the press. How are we going to keep our pictures—our names—out of the paper?”

  “The reading is personhood-themed? The press is coming? I told Janine—I told her—that it was just a small reading, just like a normal Friday-afternoon reading, with her peers and one external person, Tad Tucker, who is just there to listen. Will there be cameras?”

  Eric hung his head. “There will be cameras.”

  “But Tad isn’t speaking?”

  “He wants to say just a few words—”

  “Shit, Eric. I promised her. She came to me last night, not sure if she should do it or not and I convinced her—against my better judgment—that it would be fine. She was afraid that some of the other students would see her as pandering to a political cause. She doesn’t want her work to be read like that. You promised me, Eric. You promised that it wouldn’t go like this.”

  “I’m sorry,” Eric said. “You’re right. Just a few more days—”

  “The students know, Eric. They know that GWGW has invested in all of those fetus billboards and commercials and postcards. I mean, it’s in the news!

  “Damn you!” she said, making for the door. “I trusted you! I thought, Eric won’t let me down. Eric knows the score. I was so stupid!”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “But you were the one with all the plans—to pay back our loans, to build a library and offer scholarships. How did you think—”

  “Not like this! I never said like this!” Marianne paused in the doorway. “I can’t believe I was falling back in love with you,” she said, before running up the hill.

  The dining hall, arranged for the reading with the salad bar pulled into the kitchen, the round tables pushed against the north wall, was packed. Usually GWGW’s students filled up five rows of chairs, but today there were people standing along the south walls, leaning beneath the gilt-framed pictures. A camera crew was running extension cords into the kitchen, and Regina was talking to the catering staff and pointing at the loud HVAC vents. Marianne spotted Lorraine sitting in the back, marking papers with a red felt-tip pen.

  “Lorraine,” she whispered, crouching behind her. “Do you think there’s time to cancel?”

  Lorraine didn’t look up. “I don’t think so, Marianne. I think the die is cast, as they say. This happening is happening.”

  “I told Janine there wouldn’t be press.”

  “I’m sure she’s seen the cameras,” Lorraine remarked. “Janine will be fine. She’s tough. Tougher than you were.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Up front,” said Lorraine, marking through someone’s poem with a fat X. “We had a cigarette. She’ll be fine.”

  Marianne stood and scanned the front row, where she saw Janine’s familiar mousy brown bob bent over some papers. A pretty young woman rubbed her back. Davonte was doing squats.

  Regina strode down the aisle in a pink flash. “There’s your friend,” said Lorraine. “Better take your seat.”

  “Welcome, everyone, and thank you—so very much—for your support,” Regina began, her voice quiet and halting. “As you know, we have faced enormous criticism of the work that we do here.” She gripped the sides of the podium. “Important work, but frightening, threatening to some people.”

  Marianne looked around her, expecting to see people rolling their eyes, or at least looking away from the phony, almost tearful Regina, but the audience watched her expectantly. She paused for a long moment before going on.

  “That’s why I’m so happy and so grateful to see you all here at the Genesis Inspirational Writing Ranch, a partner campus of God’s World God’s Word,” she said, appearing to blink the tears away. “And I’m so very thrilled that many of you will be joining us in online classes and seminars. But I want to first recognize the students who have been inspired by the school since March! Please stand!”

  The Ranch’s students stood and waved sheepishly, while everyone clapped. Please do not recognize the teachers, Marianne silently commanded. Do not.

  “And the teachers!” Regina said. “Oh, they are so modest, they won’t even stand. But I want to recognize”—here she looked at her list—“Eric Osborne, novelist; Tom Marshall, memoirist and journalist; and Lorraine Kominski, poet.”

  Relieved to be forgotten, Marianne leaned back as Regina introduced Davonte as a reformed, world-renowned star and novelist. He read a short scene in which his protagonist, Damian Silver, convinces a woman not to abort his child, and even choked himself up a little, by the end. He sat down to generous applause.

  Janine received a longer, even more effusive introduction from Regina Somers. “Just think!” she said. “A year ago, Janine Gray had not shown her work to anyone outside her family. Now her work has been read by thousands of people!”

  Janine’s face was flushed as she made her way slowly to the podium, and Marianne could see that her hands trembled as she held the pages of her work. “I wanted to say before I started that I am grateful to Lorraine Kominski, who has taught me so much about poetry, and to my fellow writers, who have made all kinds of sacrifices to be here. I also want to thank Marianne Stuart, who believed in me from the beginning. Marianne, I would not be here—none of us would be here—if it weren’t for you.”

  Students and guests craned their necks to look at Marianne, who slunk down a little in her seat. Janine read Ferlinghetti’s “Poetry as Insurgent Art,” then turned to her own work. Her voice was clear and even and just slow enough, full of feeling for the words. Lorraine smiled and closed her eyes to listen, but Marian
ne could barely hear her, she was so intent on intercepting Tad Tucker, who stood and clapped as Janine finished, starting a standing ovation that cascaded through the hall.

  Marianne jogged down the center aisle. She was faster than Tad, and made it to the microphone first. “Thank you, Representative Tucker, but I can’t let you—”

  He was still clapping manfully as he made his way to the podium and cleared his throat. “I want to talk to you about freedom. Freedom of speech. Freedom of thought. Educational freedom. And before all those, the freedom to be a person,” he began. Patty Connor got up and walked out. Stricken, Janine kept her eyes on Marianne as she edged back to her seat.

  “But before I get into that, I want to acknowledge another person, crucial to this school’s founding.” Marianne thought he would talk about Frances, quickly thought of what she would say, if prompted, about this woman she’d never met. An artist! Who wanted a place for others to find inspiration! Tad threw an arm around her shoulder and yanked her close to him. “That’s this gal right here, Marianne Stuart, and Janine is right—none of us would be here without her. She had the whole idea to begin with, years before it was any kind of possibility. I want to confess that I was skeptical at first—what could some New York City poet know about our culture, our values? But I’ve gotten to know Miss Stuart, and, well, I’m the first to admit when I’m wrong.”

  There was some pointed coughing. Marianne tried to lean toward the microphone—Thank you! What an evening! Let’s all have some punch!—but Tad’s grip on her shoulder held her fast.

  “First off, she’s a Virginia gal. Second, I’ve learned about her family, a good family with roots in the church,” he continued, hugging Marianne closer. He smelled of a noxiously sweet aftershave, and she craned her face away from his jacket. He let her go and stepped back, grabbing the microphone and whisking the cord behind him. “Do you know, Marianne, that we have a surprise for you tonight?”

  Marianne shook her head imperceptibly, then watched as Tad gestured to Regina. “A reunion!” he continued. “A family reunion, of two beautiful and hardworking Christian sisters.”

  And there was Ruth, emerging from the kitchen in a navy skirt suit, her hair pulled back tightly, her pale, makeup-less face implacably serene. She did look beautiful—in a vaguely corporate-Madonna way—but also scared and slightly tottering in her navy heels and tan hose. Marianne reached to take the mic from Tad, but he turned away, toward the audience and Ruth, who stepped shyly onto the dais, aided by Regina.

  “This gal here is Mrs. Ruth Boyette, wife to Darryl Boyette, minister of Healing Waters Baptist Church, and sister to Miss Marianne Stuart—”

  The audience clapped their approval.

  “Ruth,” Marianne whispered as her sister approached for a quick, light hug. “Why didn’t you call me? What are you doing here?”

  “—is a big part of what we’re calling the Tour of Life,” Tad continued. “Which is something I want to invite all of you to join, about the sanctity of life, the power that we have to protect the powerless. That’s why she’s come here, to talk with you about your power, and to congratulate all of you, and also her sister for making this space where you have the freedom to exercise that power. Isn’t that right, Ruth?”

  Ruth nodded, and Tad replaced the microphone in its stand. Ruth leaned in slowly. “I’m here to tell you all a story.” She paused, and Marianne could see that her shyness—the unsteady, slow walk, the determined composure—was something she had practiced. She was not scared. She was, in a way that Marianne would never be, at home here.

  “It’s a sad story, in a lot of ways,” Ruth continued. “My mother—” she looked back at Marianne with a sorrowful expression. “Our mother died when I was in kindergarten. She had breast cancer, and she was a warrior.” Ruth paused again.

  “But her fierceness started long before she got sick. I would not be here before you today, in fact, if our mother had not chosen life—”

  The audience seemed to be holding their breath. This could not go on. Was Marianne going to let Tad Tucker and her baby sister take over, ruin, whatever was left of what she had built? With a fantasy concocted about a time she couldn’t remember?

  She reached around Ruth and pulled the microphone from the stand, roughly, then stepped away and glared warningly at Tad and Ruth.

  “None of us would be here without our mothers,” Marianne snapped, a little more harshly than she meant. “Mothers are wonderful, I think we can all agree, we owe them every gratitude. But our mother was an artist, like all of you, and she isn’t here to speak for herself or her experience or her … choices. This evening is after all about our students and their work, and we want to thank them, especially Donald and Janine. What wonderful, inspiring readings they gave!”

  Some people stood, clapping heartily, while others looked around in confusion. She saw Sophie La Tour at the back of the hall, arms crossed and frowning. Davonte bowed his head as neighbors back-patted him. Janine left in a hurry, poem clutched to her chest, before anyone could reach her.

  A great success, Regina called the Day of Inspiration, after Tad Tucker and his entourage drove away. Scrolling through messages on her tablet, she predicted that, once the story went live, they’d be able to open even more classes. “Of course, we’ll probably need to hire additional instructors, but think of all the free publicity we just got. Did you hear the excellent plug Tad gave the work you are doing here—not to mention independent, online education?” she asked. “Though I have to say it’s a shame that you didn’t let Ruth give her talk. She has become such a powerful speaker on this tour. You should have seen the standing ovation she got at our Institute of Christian Game Design and Videography.”

  Ruth sat in a folding chair, massaging her left foot. She looked more like the self that Marianne knew: petulant, barely out of her teens, a pretend adult. Some of her hair had escaped from its bun, and her cheeks were flushed to her temples. “It’s hot in here,” she said. “Don’t you air-condition this place?”

  “We turn it down between events and dinner, to save energy,” Marianne said. She was loudly dragging tables across the room, getting seating ready for dinner, and starting to sweat herself. “That’s part of what we consider being good Christians, being good stewards of the Earth. But I can turn the air on if it’s important to you.”

  Ruth narrowed her eyes, scuffed her pump defiantly back onto her foot. “You don’t believe any of this. Regina, she doesn’t believe in any of this.”

  “Hmmm,” said Regina, still scrolling through her messages.

  Marianne made the slashing motion across her neck, and Ruth smiled wickedly. “Marianne and my dad—they never come to Healing Waters. They never went to church, never took me to church, after Mom died.” When Regina said nothing, Ruth continued: “She is atheist, Regina. She told me that, when I was a kid. Ask her a question about the Bible! Any question, a little bit hard, I guarantee you—”

  “Do you really have some kind of planted memories of Mom going to church, Ruth?” Marianne asked. “I mean, because that’s what they would be. False memories, except with Granny at Christmas and Easter. Which was before you were born, by the way.”

  “Because she was sick! Because of me, right? You think it was because of me, which is why you won’t ever let me talk about her.”

  “Because you don’t know what you’re talking about, Ruth!” Marianne slammed a chair against the edge of the table nearest Ruth, watched her sister wince.

  Suddenly Marianne was very tired. She had not meant to yell. She took a deep breath and did a count of tables as she exhaled. Seven more to set up. “You should have called me. You should have told me you were coming. Regina, you should have told me—”

  Regina placed her tablet inside her leather tote and hooked the tote over her shoulder. She buttoned her pink blazer and squared her shoulders. “I don’t have a sister, but I always wanted one,” she said, her voice measured and strangely soft. “I’m an only child, actually. I un
derstand that disagreements come up at emotional times like this. But emotions are good, right? For poets, and for feeders of the flock? As for Marianne’s Bible knowledge, I’m not stupid. I’m not unaware of where she comes from … spiritually. But that doesn’t mean you’re not each doing good work. Important work. Though perhaps you need some time apart. The Tour of Life continues, right, Ruth?”

  Ruth nodded and stood, following Regina without looking back. Like looking back would freeze her, turn her into a pillar of salt. Marianne knew that much, mostly from college, or maybe reggae songs, but weren’t those also legitimate ways of garnering knowledge?

  She didn’t watch Regina and Ruth leave, either, though she heard the heavy door shut behind them. She needed the ten more tables in place, napkins restocked, silverware in bins, iced tea cups stacked upside down, Muzak playing softly, the thermostat cranked down to seventy. Ketchup and salt and pepper and sugar and Sweet’n Low centered on every table.

  Where she came from—spiritually! How did Ruth follow that woman? How did she not see that Regina didn’t even care what she believed?

  Just as she was refilling the last ceramic dish with pink sweetener packets, Eric arrived.

  “Sorry I’m late,” he said, reaching for the bag she gripped under her arm. “Let me help.”

  Marianne pushed the table at him, hard, and walked out.

  In her office, she opened a bottle of wine, then sat down at her desk. She had not returned an email in days. She’d left everything to Eric, and he hadn’t delivered on a single promise.

  You’re in charge, aren’t you? Tom had asked.

  None of us would be here if it weren’t for you, Janine had said.

  Marianne opened her email, poured a glass of wine, and waited. Today alone, she’d received a hundred new messages—from students, from applicants, from curious parties. She scanned her unread mail and found one from Martin Rice, of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. The subject line read “Interview for Tomorrow’s Paper?”

  Marianne opened it, found his number, and dialed. “Martin Rice? Yes, this is Marianne Stuart, from Genesis Ranch. I got your message. I’m free to talk.”