The Gulf

by Belle Boggs

  18

  Later Marianne would realize that she’d done things out of order, that she should have gone first to see Frances, or talked to Mark, or even Eric. Maybe one of these people could have talked her down, warned her against going to the press. Or maybe she should have called Sophie—who hadn’t waited to speak to her after the reading, and who Marianne suspected of calling the reporter in the first place. Instead she’d dialed Ruth’s number, but couldn’t decide if she would yell or apologize, so she hung up before her sister answered. Like she’d answer anyway, Marianne thought while finishing most of a bottle of wine and shakily driving Eric’s car to the coffee shop suggested by the reporter, Martin Rice, who looked much younger than she pictured. Perhaps it was his youth and eagerness—he seemed so interested in everything she had to say, so rigorously observant—that made her talk.

  It had been easy to get away. Everyone at the Ranch was at dinner, gossiping or fretting about the Day of Inspiration. Day of Desperation, she told Martin Rice. He just nodded and wrote in his notebook, his recording device a fulcrum between them. The coffee he offered churned in Marianne’s stomach, but she drank it anyway, like medicine.

  “Let’s go back a little,” Martin suggested. “To the beginning of the school.”

  “It all went wrong when GWGW got involved,” Marianne said. “God’s World God’s Word—you know them?”

  He nodded.

  “They offered us all of this funding, and all of these services, and it sounded okay for a while—well, maybe not okay, but necessary, just to keep the school running, to pay our teachers. I didn’t know the whole story—I didn’t know they were connected to this crazy personhood bill, or the way their support of Tad Tucker and personhood was just a way to get something else they wanted.”

  “Which was?”

  Marianne took a swig of coffee. This was her moment, her chance to deal a real blow to Regina and everyone else at GWGW. “Phasing out Florida’s community college system. They’re spending five million dollars on Tad Tucker’s campaign, just so they can shut down public community colleges. So they can swoop in with their … Christian medical billing schools. Christian prelaw academies. Christian sonography schools.”

  “Christian writing schools?”

  Marianne shook her head so vigorously it hurt. “We had no idea. We are independent—were independent—before they started funding us.”

  “Why did you need their help? Why did you take their money?

  Marianne tried to explain about the cost of everything, about Mark, but everything she said opened up a new question. How did she know Mark? How did it all get started? Why here, why now? What inspired her to start the school?

  “I didn’t start it,” she told him, sitting up a little straighter in her chair. “I served as its first director.”

  He took out his phone and read from the school’s website, which had somehow been changed overnight. There was a bio of Marianne under “About Our Teachers”—she was right at the top. But instead of listing her education and experience and publications, the bio described her as the school’s founder, a Virginia native who dreamed of starting a school for inspirational writing after graduating with her MFA (it did not say from where). At the end, a slew of corporate words: partnership and synergy and opportunity. Martin looked at Marianne and frowned, like he was very confused. Was the school not her idea?

  Well, it was, she said, but not in a serious way. She had the idea that it could work, she said, and would be popular and profitable, but it was actually Frances Ketterling who wanted the school to open. Marianne told him everything she knew about Eric’s aunt, how she had the same dream, but was serious about it. She paid for the school to open. She paid Marianne to be here. It was a job, she told him.

  “If she paid, then why did you need to go to GWGW for money?”

  Marianne sighed—this was the hardest part to explain, the part she herself didn’t understand. “Running a school has so many expenses—all the fees and permits and salaries.” She struggled for a metaphor that would sound convincing. “We were caught a little flat-footed when we realized … how much everything would cost.”

  “Don’t you collect tuition?”

  “Tuition helps,” she allowed. “But, take my graduate school, it wasn’t providing everything I got there on my tuition alone. Though I guess I don’t see why not. The point is, most schools have this big endowment! We were just starting out!”

  Martin Rice asked if she had a business plan. He wanted to see numbers, which Marianne didn’t think to bring—in fact she didn’t even have them, had never had them, though she didn’t tell him that. Instead she told him that Frances was getting older, and what would happen if she fell, and he looked confused again, frowning at his notebook for a long time while she went on about retirement communities and assisted living and skilled nursing. Why didn’t she have those numbers?

  “If you weren’t serious about it, why did you serve as the school’s director?”

  That was the time, Marianne later realized, when she could have lied. Could have embossed, embroidered, embellished, burnished, polished, smoothed. In her growing anger—at Eric, at Mark, at Regina and everyone at GWGW—it didn’t even occur to her. She opened her mouth and told him about not having full-time work, about coming down here, reading applications on the beach. She talked about the terrible vampire stories and ridiculous memoirs, the endlessness of it all, how she’d wanted time to work on her own book.

  “Your book,” Martin Rice repeated. He looked back at her bio. “Poetry? What’s it called?”

  “‘The Ugly Bear List,’” she said, again without thinking. “This was my chance to finish it—and also get some inspiration.” She told him about the book’s concept, the shit list that changes you, the bears in your mind, and how she started the book around the time of the Tea Party’s insurgency, but had stalled out in her anger and helplessness. Her realization that no one and nothing ever gets off the list, that it just gets longer and longer until you realize you’ve spent half your life and brainpower simply keeping track of things you don’t trust, things you fear, things you hate. “I thought, maybe this will help me understand them. But then, they were actually really different than I imagined—all these complicated and smart and interesting people. I realized, the real ugly bear list was made up of people like Regina Somers and Tad Tucker. The manipulators, the profiteers.”

  He nodded and took indecipherable notes. She kept talking, trying to make him understand.

  “Are you a Christian, Marianne?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Are you a Buddhist?”

  She shook her head.

  “Would you describe yourself as spiritual but not religious?”

  “I’m not that either. Whatever that is.”

  He frowned at his notebook. “Do you believe in God, or any other higher power?”

  “No. I do not.”

  “Then why start a faith-based writing school?”

  She said something incoherent about the power of writing to heal, to help, to make things better in your life.

  “Do you believe that?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t think so.”

  “Why then?”

  “Why?” she repeated.

  “Why are you talking to me? You know you’ll probably be fired.”

  That idea—the idea that the school could go on, without her, that it could go on at all after everything she’d said—had not occurred to Marianne. She sat there dumbly, staring at the dregs of coffee sludge and sugar at the bottom of her cup.

  “Okay,” he said, looking through his notes. “Tell me more about this … ugly bear list. Can you explain that again?”

  She got another cup of coffee, dumped in three packets of sugar, loaded it up with milk. Cool coffee, Ruth had called it, when Marianne made it for her as a treat. It was something their mother made for Marianne.

  Marianne felt the last wave of intoxication wash
over her, then recede. She sat back down. She told him that the ugly bear list was her mother’s idea, inherited from her grandmother, a kind of private push-back against the forces of hypocrisy and false piety. She said she’d been depressed since her mother died—she didn’t know why she said that, but as soon as she said it, she knew it was true. How long ago was that? he wanted to know. A long time, she said, counting on her fingers under the table. Seventeen years.

  “Wait,” Martin Rice said. “Wasn’t that what Muhammad Ali called Sonny Liston? ‘You big, ugly bear’—he was taunting him, you know, like he did. Ugly Bear Liston. Ugly bear list. Your mother or grandmother must have gotten it from the papers.” He sounded pleased, like Marianne had returned to him a pleasant memory, though he looked barely out of college.

  “Oh,” said Marianne. “I didn’t—”

  “Your mother—” He paged through his notes. “She was pro-life?”

  Marianne took a deep breath, tried not to think about the knockout she wished she could deliver this kid, who didn’t seem to understand anything she’d told him. She forced herself to imagine that Ruth was listening, said that her mother’s life was complicated, and that she loved her children, and that her personal decisions were beside the point.

  “Okay,” said Martin Rice. “I think I’ve got what I need.”

  “But I haven’t told you about Janine,” Marianne said. “Her poetry, how I think it’s good. I haven’t told you—”

  He turned off his recorder, closed his notebook, checked the time on his phone. “You’ve given me a lot,” he said. “I understand that you didn’t mean for things to go this way.”

  “Wait,” she said as he stood. “How did you find out about us? Who gave you my email?”

  “I can’t tell you that,” he said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

  Marianne watched him leave, the notebook and recorder tucked into a messenger bag, then drove herself to the Largo Shores Club. It was getting late, the sky so inky it was hard to tell what was encroaching storm and what was night. The wind was picking up; she felt it buffeting the sides of her little car. Eric’s little car. The parking lot was nearly empty, but so many spots were marked handicapped that she still had to park far from the entrance.

  The Largo Shores Club was nothing like the home where Marianne’s granny lived. Its lobby had leather furniture, lamps instead of overhead fluorescents, and real paintings on the walls—no ugly motel prints or crucifixes or no-smoking signs.

  Hello? Marianne said at the front desk. Hello? she said to no one. She peeped over the front ledge to see that the surface of the desk was covered in papers and unsorted mail. It looked like it had been abandoned in a hurry, or else used by a number of people who didn’t have to sit there. She heard the sounds of people talking and laughing from a back room and followed them.

  Hello? she said again, opening a heavy wooden door to a large and echoing recreation room, with four Ping-Pong tables manned by a half dozen deeply tanned seniors in coordinated active wear. No one noticed her.

  “I’m looking for Frances Ketterling?” Marianne said. “She lives here?”

  A woman wearing a pink sport visor and matching pink wristbands, who’d just landed a winning shot, knew where she was. “Frances is taking in the orchids!” she said. “Before the storm! I’ll show you.”

  On the long walk to find Frances, the woman talked about the various features of the Largo Shores Club, gushing as if she were selling Marianne a timeshare. Swimming, tennis, competitive bocce, conversational French and Italian: it was for active seniors, she said, and also people with a certain kind of refinement. She looked at Marianne appraisingly as she said this—Marianne wondered a little anxiously if she would pass muster. Something about the phrases “conversational French and Italian” and “taking in the orchids” sounded deeply appealing to her.

  Finally they found a woman carrying an armload of orchids in terracotta pots. The flowers trembled precariously on their stalks, and the whole collection seemed about to topple out of her arms, but she would not let them take any. She was shorter and stouter than the woman with the visor, and wearing an expensive-looking linen tunic. You have to wait until the very last moment to take in orchids, she was saying. They benefited from the prestorm humidity.

  “I’m Marianne Stuart. From Genesis Ranch? I need to talk to you. Could I help you carry the orchids?”

  “No,” she said, this woman whose property Marianne had inhabited, whose school she’d run for more than a year. Marianne could not be trusted to carry her orchids, but she could follow her and open the doors. So she did that, back and forth from the patio into the carpeted hall and an even nicer dining room, where she set them on a long bare table. Finally they were done, and after counting the plants she looked at Marianne and seemed to realize who she was.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m just preoccupied.” She waved her hand in the direction of the now cleared-out patio.

  “Please,” Marianne said, “sit down.”

  She did, and Marianne sat across from her, looking over the still somehow trembling orchids. Marianne told her everything—how the Ranch had spiraled out of her control, into the hands of GWGW and Tad Tucker and Regina Somers. She’d left too many decisions to Mark and Eric. It was no longer the place Frances envisioned, and she was ready to resign. Marianne told her about the new exploitative marketing efforts, and the conversation she’d felt forced to have with Martin Rice, and how there would probably be an exposé in the paper. The enormity of what she’d done suddenly crashed around her in a terrible kind of hangover.

  Frances reached across the table, pushing the tremulous orchids aside. Her palms were warm and smooth. Her eyes were the clear blue of the gulf on a sunny day.

  “My idea was a bookstore,” Frances said. “I was getting older, and tired of running a hotel, and I thought—I know, a bookstore. With an inspirational bent—a place where people of religious and spiritual feeling could come together to buy books, and maybe have readings and events. But the bank turned me down for financing—they said bookstores were dying—and when I called Mark to help me put together a business plan, he remembered an idea Eric told him about, an idea for a school.”

  “So it was Mark’s idea,” Marianne said.

  “No,” she said. “It was Eric’s. Eric talked his brother into starting the school. Eric was in love with you.”

  “We were engaged,” Marianne said. “That was a long time ago.”

  “He was in love when he started the school,” Frances insisted. “I’ve been married six times, and I know what it looks like when a man is in love. He wanted to win you back. This was why he started the school.”

  “Oh no,” Marianne said. It felt good—and also terrible—to be told, to have it confirmed, that Eric still loved her. Good because she loved him too, and terrible because she had just ruined everything.

  “But he didn’t tell me!” she said. “He lied!”

  “He lied to me too,” Frances said. Her voice was resigned and patient, the voice of someone long used to lying men. “At first I was angry. I mean, this is my retirement! But then I thought—maybe it will work? Maybe I’ll dance at your wedding and kiss your babies. Don’t you want that?”

  Marianne started to cry.

  “Here,” Frances said. She picked up one of the smaller orchids, with tiny orange-and-purple flowers, and handed it to Marianne. “You should have this. For your office.”

  “I don’t think I’ll have an office anymore,” Marianne sniffed. “Aren’t you and your friends evacuating soon?”

  “Of course not,” Frances said, straightening in her chair. “I don’t abandon ship, and I don’t accept your resignation.”

  Marianne took the orchid and left. By the time she got back to the Ranch, it had already lost two of its five flowers.

  The wind had died down again, and it was dark enough to make her way back to her room without anyone noticing. Or maybe she could escape, join the lucky ev
acuees slowly inching their way up I-75 in advance of Tropical Storm Helen. She imagined herself in the stolen car, music playing, nothing to do but drive north—away, away.

  19

  By Saturday the storm was officially classified a hurricane, with landfall predicted for Monday night, but Marianne was not among its evacuees. Neither was Janine, whose daughter had lucked into a reporting gig and had taken their car, or Tom, who had nowhere else to go, or Davonte, whose manager/coach was suddenly unreachable. On Saturday afternoon Lorraine rode with a small group of students to Tampa, where they’d booked flights back to where they came from—New York and Amarillo and Chattanooga and other less vulnerable destinations. Most people drove, following the marked evacuation route to join the traffic jams Marianne had fantasized about, but no one offered her a ride.

  At the Ranch, none of the remaining students—not Janine, not Davonte, not even Manfred—was speaking to Marianne after reading Martin Rice’s exposé in the Thursday paper and receiving a long email from Regina expressing disappointment in Marianne’s leadership and doubt about her mental health. Students avoided her, as if her mental instability or her atheism, or some combination of the two, might be catching, and on Friday she’d been fired, over the telephone, by Mark.

  “I’m sorry,” he told her. He did not mention a severance, but suggested that they could possibly still use her as a reader of applications.

  “That’s okay,” she said lightly. She pictured her voice like a pale balloon, escaping, then bumping against the ceiling. “I’ll pack my things and be gone before the storm.”

  “You can stay through the storm.”

  “Ha,” she’d said. “That doesn’t seem advisable. Or likely.”

  “But where will you go?”

  She hadn’t counted on a lack of transportation. Now she busied herself with packing while all around her the usual storm preparations went on without her: securing the lawn furniture, boarding up windows. Janine went shopping for water and nonperishables while Eric and Tom argued about the best way to nail up plywood, and Davonte desperately tried to get in touch with his manager.