The Gulf Read online

  For example, this woman in the line in front of her, with her grocery cart full of bottled water, Wonder Bread, and peanut butter. She could be one of those apocalyptic types.

  “That’s a lot of peanut butter,” Marianne said. Something compelled her to be friendly all the time here.

  The woman turned to her and smiled, an act that never seemed to happen in the small, crowded C-Town in Brooklyn. She had crazy Florida hair—poet hair—coarse and long and unconfined, and her batik tunic, decorated with fish, came down just to the tops of her tan, wrinkled knees. “It’s a big storm that’s coming,” she said, looking with concern at the measly contents of Marianne’s cart. “You’re not going to ride it out?”

  “Oh,” said Marianne. “I guess I am.” She hadn’t turned on the TV in more than a week. The sky was blue and cloudless, and the gulf was calm this morning.

  “Thursday,” the woman said, loading her provisions onto the conveyor belt. “Just a tropical storm. This place’ll be packed tomorrow, better get what you need now. Faye’s the name.”

  “Oh,” Marianne said. “Nice to meet you, Faye.”

  “The storm, honey. The storm is Faye.”

  Marianne thanked the woman, then turned her cart around to shop for something more substantial and nonperishable. Living most of her adult life in Brooklyn had not prepared her for this kind of shopping; she never bought more than what she could carry.

  She wound up selecting the exact same provisions as Faye, and was pleasantly surprised by the low total in the checkout line. It took Marianne a while to find her car—she had not learned to mark the spot where she’d parked—and, wandering the lot with her cart, she surveyed the atmosphere. The ratty palm fronds lining the edge of the parking lot were completely still. Marianne hauled the flats of water into the trunk, nestled the bread on top.

  Some say it’s God’s judgment, a deep radio voice intoned as she turned the key. Then laughter. Nah, said another voice. You sound like one of those climate crazies. It’s just fall in Florida, same as always. Marianne turned up the radio, wondering if she’d hear news about the storm, but the hosts moved on to other concerns.

  Back home, she made herself a fat peanut-butter-and-white-bread sandwich and ate it on the beach next to a stack of manuscripts. A slim stack, compared to the noes, but rich with promise: not of publication and esteem, perhaps, but of a kind of legitimacy, steady work, and—yes—tuition. Nine thousand dollars a year for two years.

  Marianne had been using hardship deferments (surprisingly easy to obtain) to avoid her own debts and had managed to pay very little principal on loans that had somehow continued to grow. She’d lately imagined that she would never pay them off. She’d just defer and defer, one hardship after another; wasn’t that how life went?

  But now she saw another possibility. Doing rough math on the back of an application, Marianne figured that two and a half students paying full fare was all it took to make forty-five thousand dollars. It was simple addition: take this long-winded missionary memoirist, add this evangelical poet, throw in half a writer of an ill-conceived Christian bodice ripper starring a hot Jewish carpenter stud, and she’d be back to where she started. They planned to admit thirty students in the first class; in a single year, not counting application fees, that was more than a quarter-million dollars. For once in her life Marianne could imagine coming out ahead.

  Just follow any major religion on the planet Earth, a white-bearded man toting a red flag explained on the Occupy livestream. Greed is not a virtue.

  But this was not greed; it was perfectly fair. Eighteen thousand dollars was a bargain compared to her tuition, and didn’t they have the same chances that she had? Better, maybe—the most popular books in America, after all, were Mormon vampire romances and pious, Pollyanna-ish collections of poetry by cancer-stricken children.

  The sky had taken on a slight greenish haze, and far out, Marianne could see whitecaps on the choppy water. The creamy peanut butter and soft bread was the perfect food to eat while reading, Marianne thought. Easy, cheap, elemental. She smelled the salt of the sea, inhaled it deeply. She would sit here and watch the storm come in.

  Across the gulf, Janine Gray unlocked the file cabinet where she stored ten years of lessons—on nutrition, setting up a bank account, planning a budget—and checked the folder where she’d collected her photocopied submission materials. She reviewed the order of poems, the personal statement, even her own address, neatly hand-lettered on the information page, which she’d also photocopied. Janine did not often apply for things—not credit cards (she did not believe in them), not mortgage applications (her husband had filled out the paperwork), and certainly not creative writing programs. How long would she have to wait before she heard something back? She had no idea. It was an extraordinarily personal and uncharacteristic thing she’d done, writing the statement and sending in the poems. If they—whoever they were—did not like her poems, would they write to her anyway? Would they respond to the something Janine had tried to say with the poems?

  She wished for a cup of coffee and a cigarette, an early-afternoon-break routine she’d established when the girls were little, before she’d started teaching. But she didn’t smoke anymore, and hardly any of the other teachers at the high school did either. The ones who couldn’t quit had to walk all the way to the teachers’ parking lot to sit in their cars, and while Janine occasionally felt like joining them—say someone set a fire in the kitchen, or she suspected a student may have called her a bad name in his native language—she resisted. How would it look for the life skills teacher to demonstrate such a nasty addiction?

  Life skills. When Janine was in high school, they’d called it home economics. The curriculum had hardly changed—some sewing, some cooking (really the preparation of prepackaged convenience foods), and a little math—but home ec, the principal said, had a girly and old-fashioned ring to it, and the students were no longer the same perky future housewives who had been Janine’s classmates. No, Janine’s students were bored, gum-snapping girls, delinquent boys who needed one more class to graduate, tenth-graders who could not read or pronounce the word ingredients. These were students bound for work in fast food restaurants and big box stores, some of them bound for deportation. And every year, more of them: twenty-eight in a classroom meant to hold twenty-two, thirty sometimes. Janine knew the word whore in several languages and kept a stack of detention slips signed and filled out on her desk. “Gross disrespect” she’d written under “reason” on every one.

  One day last fall, the principal came to speak to her about the frequency of her detention referrals—didn’t she think it would be better to work on her relationships with the students? He was a reasonable, maddeningly patient man who had taught for exactly one year.

  “You mean,” Janine said, “I should let them—”

  “Not let them,” the principal said. “Work with them.”

  That was when Janine started writing the poems. At first, she’d simply flipped the detention slips over and started writing. Someone used the smooth green jersey intended for frog-shaped pillows to make a pot leaf? She wrote a poem. Someone used the hot dogs, meant to be baked into pigs in blankets, for lewd gestures? Poem. Someone cussed, talked over her lessons, texted, or passed notes? Poem.

  The students had thought she was writing detention slips, and they would wait for her to hand them over so they could suck their teeth and roll their eyes at her. But she’d merely stuffed the slips into her top desk drawer and continued with the lesson: this is how to remove a seam, this is how to season a pan, this is how to extinguish a grease fire.

  “What you doin’ with them slips, Ms. Gray?” asked a boy who had spent most of Life Skills I in detention. He had passed—that seemed to be the point of life skills, everyone passed—and was back for more, as two of the classes made one math credit. He eyed her desk nervously. “You savin’ ’em up or something?”

  Janine had shrugged. “Just writing something to myself,” she said
.

  He held out his hand. “If I’m gonna have detention, I’ll take it now,” he said.

  “But I haven’t given you detention,” Janine said. “I was only writing.”

  “Not ’cause of me?”

  “I didn’t say that,” Janine said.

  They went back and forth for a while. None of the students was able to confirm that Janine was not hoarding a trove of detentions, to be formed, in the distant future, into a megadetention—and there was significant argument about that strategy’s feasibility—but they were also not able to dispel the worry. One day’s detention, served on the spot: that was one thing, that was survivable. But facing a desk drawer crammed with them? That was another thing entirely.

  And for Janine, the poems helped. At first they were about the students themselves, and their strange, unknowable, ridiculous choices: Why would someone choose to ruin perfectly good food? Why not spend a class period sewing a cute stuffed animal or a pair of boxer shorts instead of clowning around and breaking expensive sewing machines? Why would someone take another student’s homework and ruin it?

  But then she grew bored with those questions, and her mind drifted to larger concerns. She’d always been an avid letter writer, mostly to her local newspaper. She did not for the life of her understand why a student prayer group could not pray before assemblies and football games. She questioned teaching sex ed to middle schoolers. She thought that parents should take more responsibility for their own children, instead of expecting the schools to feed them breakfast, lunch, and snack and teach them things that were once learned in church or at home. Soon she was no longer writing letters at all but drafting everything she had to say about the world in lines and stanzas.

  Janine returned the folder to its place and locked the file cabinet. Her classroom had one measly window, and she could see that the storm her daughter warned her about was churning the sky with dark-gray clouds. Her students had spent the morning debating the possibility of school cancellation. Just a little bitty storm, one of them said dismissively.

  When she got home, there would be more to do: taking down awnings and bird feeders, folding up the lawn chairs left out after her daughters’ afternoon tanning sessions. It would be nearly six o’clock before she finished, no time to write or even sit down for a moment. She unlocked and opened her cabinet again and rummaged beneath the folders for the familiar, crinkly package: a stale pack of menthols she was saving for such a day as this. She closed her fingers around the package, then let go. She had a stack of papers to grade, and surely Rick was not taking a break at his job. He didn’t believe in breaks and would work straight through a twelve-hour, hot-sun day, just to set an example for his crew. Everything in Rick’s world was done according to a predictable schedule and for a purpose; he didn’t believe in anything as wasteful as a smoke break. Janine imagined what the cigarette would taste like, outside, with the wind whipping and the air taking on a sudden sharpness.

  In the early years of their marriage, Janine had stayed home, and even then she had written—stories for the girls, letters to her sister, then to the editors of various North Florida newspapers. She had never written poetry, not until this year, and she couldn’t explain it well to anyone except Rick, who had been her truest confidant ever since they’d started dating, way back in high school. “I don’t know how it happened,” she told him. “It’s like I’m suddenly talking in a new language.”

  She’d shyly handed the poems over one morning in bed, and Rick had handled them reverently, then excused himself for his morning BM. After spending an entire hour with them, in the bathroom, he confessed that he did not understand the new language she was speaking, but he believed whatever it was must be coming from God. Rick believed firmly in the intervening hand of God; he was like one of those biblical men who built boats and temples on command, the kind of man, strong and certain, that the world didn’t make anymore. Janine sometimes felt an acute pain for her daughters, knowing they’d never find a man like their father.

  “Why do you need to go someplace else to write?” Rick had asked her early this morning when she showed him the application to the Ranch, which she did not tell him she’d mailed two weeks ago.

  At the beginning of the summer, he’d built Janine a solarium, an octagonal room with glass walls and smooth white oak floors. He’d set her desk in the center of the room, facing out at the various staked finch feeders in their yard, and when Beth, their older daughter, had wanted to use the space for her elliptical trainer, Rick had told her no, her mother needed that room to write.

  It was hard to explain that the room itself, along with the application, seemed to be interfering with her writing, with the hand of God that had once guided her poems. It was embarrassing to think about one of her neighbors seeing her in the act of writing—though imagining some professor at the school reading the twelve short poems she’d enclosed with her application was not any easier.

  “I want to be around other poets,” Janine had tried to explain.

  “Oh,” he’d said, and she could tell that he was a little hurt.

  “Also, I want a teacher. Someone to help me make the poems better,” she’d said, though it was hard to imagine how one went about changing a poem.

  “Okay,” Rick had said, kissing her forehead. He took his lunch from the counter—three ham and cheese sandwiches and an apple in a paper sack—and left for work, same as always. Janine followed him to the door and watched him haul his heavy frame into the cab of his truck, adjust the mirror, and wave good-bye.

  “Will you be home early, if the storm comes?” she’d called after him.

  He’d ducked his head out of the window and looked up at the tranquil sky. “It won’t storm today,” he’d told her. He did not seem to be thinking anymore about the school. That was the thing about Rick: he never held on to emotions for long.

  Perhaps if the room had not been glass, she thought now. Because he had nothing to hide, Rick believed in absolute transparency. None of the bedroom doors in their house locked, and Rick and Janine had shared the same email account for more than ten years. How could she explain that poems needed privacy? That it would have been better for her if he’d simply cleared out a closet?

  Janine checked her application folder one last time, then closed and relocked the drawer. It was likely she wouldn’t get in anyway. What did she know about poetry? And who cared anymore about her subject, poor Terri Schiavo, who’d starved to death years ago?

  Marianne turned over the manuscript in her lap—yet another end-times piece—and thought of Ruth, who’d once confessed to reading the first of the Left Behind books. “Did you like it?” Marianne had asked, trying not to let her alarm show.

  “It was okay,” Ruth said, in that way she once had about most everything. She could take it or leave it, her tone seemed to imply, but Marianne thought what she was really saying was that she wasn’t sure what she was supposed to like. Marianne had been that way herself, as a teenager, and for many years she’d seen the process of becoming an adult as about replacing that uncertainty with strong, unyielding opinions. About music. About politics. About books. About art. In that way she was not so different from her sister.

  Marianne did not believe in God and had suspected that He did not exist as soon as she noticed how much other people insisted on His existence. In high school Ruth had become one of those people, attending a Baptist church three times a week and eventually dating and becoming engaged to the youth minister there. Their father, a community college philosophy professor who liked conflict on paper but not in real life, insisted that it was a phase, provoked by postponed grief. He’d rebuffed Marianne’s offers to come home, to get involved, and she hadn’t pushed it. “You know how she is,” he’d said.

  “That’s the problem with people like you, you don’t believe in anything,” Ruth later claimed, full of certainty, when Marianne tried to talk her out of teenage marriage while their father despaired in his study. “Not God. Not God’s l
ove. Not even love.”

  Ruth was wrong to say that Marianne didn’t believe in anything. She believed in things you could see or prove. She believed in science, believed in abortions, believed in the miracle of stem cells. She believed in population control and drug legalization, gun control and public transportation. She believed in generous arts grants and taxes for the rich. She thought everyone should be an organ donor and should have no say in the matter. She thought cats and dogs should be spayed and neutered, and that no one should have children before the age of thirty. She believed in climate change and the electric car, in NPR and PBS, in free speech and online privacy and free lunch and Medicaid. She believed in gay marriage and no marriage. She had no business starting a school for people equally passionate about their own opposing opinions, people who clearly believed in God. Her father said as much, when she told him she was moving to Florida to start an inspirational writing ranch for evangelical Christians.

  “That doesn’t sound like you,” was actually what he said.

  But at least she was doing something: participating in this world, instead of letting it run over her or leave her behind. Bending it to her needs instead of the opposite.

  The storm was taking its time. It seemed that she’d been watching the sky’s gradual darkening, the gathering clouds, for hours now. Above the smoothness of sand worn down by surf, there was a thick stratum of black, papery-skinned mussels, each one broken open and picked clean by a seabird.

  Oh, I’m as happy as a clam, Marianne remembered telling Ruth once, when her sister asked over the phone how she was doing. It was maybe a year after their mother died, and every call from home was still a shock. It was her mother she wanted—to tell about her classes, her friends, the problems of dorm life. Any other voice, even her baby sister’s, left her with a hollow feeling in her stomach.