Chapters (35)
Let’s say she decided tomorrow, forgave Eric for being a man, professed her love to him, married him, moved back with him to Charlotte. Perhaps the school where he’d worked would hire him again, and maybe they’d also hire Marianne. Maybe even the house that Eric had owned and somewhat fixed up would be back on the market, and with their two jobs they could qualify for a mortgage and buy it again. Maybe he still had the mixer she’d given him. Maybe she’d bake him a cake, take walks with him through their leafy neighborhood, wave to the neighbors, get a dog from the pound. She tried to picture the child they would have, after suitable time practicing with the scruffy obedient dog; she pictured a hairless baby dressed in yellow. She would have to give up poetry in order to take care of the baby—at least for a while—but it would reappear in her life in other forms: the poetry of a washer and dryer in the house, the ordinary, honest poetry of garage door openers and chrome mixers and public television. The poetry of bedtimes and bath times and Play-Doh smells, of Mother Goose and Goodnight Moon.
But perhaps it was too late already, and her suitability as a partner and mother had already expired, like the planet’s chances of surviving global warming. Nothing else to do but sit and wait for the end, stockpile stores of food and ammunition, figure out how to live off the grid. She’d grow her hair longer and grayer, drink gin and tonics that were all gin and no tonic, spend so much time alone that she lost all sense of appropriate party conversation. She’d stop being invited out other than on the holidays, when she would wear the same tatty clothes she wore now, except it would be many years from now. And unless she somehow (soon!) won the Yale Younger Poets prize or another prestigious and unlikely award, she would not even have Lorraine’s opportunities, to fly around the country, filling in or teaching in disreputable programs like this one, collecting a steady accumulation of Delta miles.
Her best option—her only option—was here. The Genesis Inspirational Writing Ranch, the world’s first and only low-residency Christian writing school, home of Eric, home of Marianne, home of the ugly bear list.