My Unsentimental Education

by Debra Monroe

  The grandmother who’d been a teacher, then a mother, then a teacher again—a modern teacher in a brick school in town—had been a taskmaster too long. She might have tried to be impartial at school: uniformly cranky. But as a grandmother, she had grandchild-pets and grandchild-dunces. Some of us got to decline the grassy-tasting milk we called cow milk and she tried passing off as store milk by sneaking it into a carton she’d borrowed from someone. The rest of us choked it down. One cousin invented words while playing Scrabble and got praise. I invented words and got barred from the game.

  Yet you couldn’t tell she liked some grandchildren better than others from her Christmas presents, seventeen versions of the same item. One year it was a scrapbook, My School Years, Kindergarten on page 1, First Grade on page 2, all the way to Twelfth Grade. You filled in the blanks: My Grades; My Favorite Subject; My Hobbies and Activities. Each section ended with a checklist, “What I Want to Be When I Grow Up.”

  The “What I Want to Be When I Grow Up” checklist, with separate categories for Boys and Girls, listed Mother as the first Girls’ option, followed by Nurse, Teacher, Secretary, Stewardess. Boys’ options didn’t list Father at all, just Doctor, Banker, Fireman, Policeman, Farmer, Pilot. This discrepancy bothered my sense of symmetry, an aesthetic sense, not a desire for parity. I hadn’t noticed parity yet, or not as it applied to girls.

  I liked the infinity of possible futures at the end of this checklist, a blank labeled Other. One year I wrote “missionary.” Church no doubt contributed to this vision of myself evangelizing while wearing white. School would be a story, I realized, leading me toward The End. An escalator lifting me. I’d enter the fray, irregular, but finish with a smooth life that would be rewarded in people’s thoughts and conversation, the best shot we have at immortality, the praise or gossip that outlasts us. Yet during my real page 1, Kindergarten, I understood that school, if not the scrapbook about it, required hard-core bluffing.

  I tried out facial expressions. My teacher, named Mrs. Gagner, taped children’s mouths shut. I haven’t invented this name. I’ve remembered it these years because, at the time, I thought all words would shimmer into meaning if I paid attention. Mrs. Gagner had either always been her name or turned into it. She used Scotch tape first. If it didn’t stick, she upgraded to masking tape. She didn’t tape everyone’s mouths shut, just whisperers’. One day at nap time I lay on my rug with Scotch tape on my mouth, hoping I seemed stoic. A girl on the rug next to me—a girl I barely knew because she was Catholic and her father owned a bar—lifted the hem of her skirt to show me that, since her dress didn’t have pockets, she was carrying her new box of Crayola crayons in her underpants.

  When First Grade started, I wasn’t there. We lived in Spooner, Wisconsin, where my dad sold auto parts. Besides brutal stretches of winter, when subzero temperatures turn engine parts brittle, summer was his big season due to tourists’ broken-down cars, so he had to work to make money until after Labor Day, and then we rushed to a hospital in North Dakota where my grandfather, the one married to the wandering grandmother, lay dying.

  We children stayed with the taskmaster and the gambler. While my mother and father familiarized themselves with the sick grandfather’s care and made plans for the wandering grandmother’s future, the task-master grandmother lost track of my little brother, who crawled into a suitcase and ate aspirin. My parents came in from the hospital, turned around and went back, my mother holding my brother. His skin was transparent, veins like blue rivers. Doctors pumped his stomach and yelled at my mother, she said.

  When we got home, kids in my First Grade class were looking at letters in clumps and, in a thick-tongued way like Helen Keller, saying these letters as words, clump after clump accumulating into sentences about Dick, Jane, Spot. I was called on to read a word: “see.” Instead of sounding it out—no one had taught me to spit, glide, or vibrate consonants and moan vowels, let alone spit and moan sequentially—I recited letters. “S,” I said, “E, and E.” Then we were freed to recess on a playground where louts of boys and tall girls holding hands as they chanted “Paul, Ringo, George, and John” ran circles around me. I recognized a timid boy from my class in a red sweater with kittens on the pockets. We walked hand in hand, which made big kids circle nearer, faces swollen with menace.

  The teacher phoned my mother, asking to keep me after school. The teacher explained phonetics. The code broke. I could read “See Dick run,” also the Superior Evening Telegram. And books from the library, or bookmobile, or shelves at home. My mother had bought the complete Dr. Seuss, the Encyclopedia Britannica, a series called Folk Tales from around the World, and every month the mailman brought a volume of remedial adult novels, Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. Obsessed with the lives of made-up people, I pondered stories—why this character did that, new outcomes, possible sequels.

  I ignored the teacher, lessons, the dandruff-flecked neck of the boy in front of me. Reading, more exciting than life, calmed me. I was as high-strung as my wandering grandmother.

  My wandering grandmother lived with us now, and my mother worried aloud that I’d inherited her tendencies. Waylaid by Reading, I didn’t concentrate on Math, Geography, Science. And behavioral aberrations were considered outages of willpower. I never witnessed one of my grandmother’s spells. She was rushed out of the room and usually spoke a mix of English and German. But she saw dead people and described events that might happen as if they already had. She slept in my brother’s room on a bed called the rollaway and came to breakfast in a nightgown with a hairnet over her curlers, her mouth collapsed (either the sadness or missing dentures), and belched and farted. She was a big, homely baby.

  I reached out to her by giving my doll a German name, Gisele, and asking my grandmother to swaddle her, because this grandmother was good at swaddling. When I left for school, I said Gisele would need to eat, and I handed my grandmother a toy bottle of fake milk that drained when you tipped the bottle—like novelty ballpoint pens my dad got from traveling salesmen that, right-side-up, showed an ordinary cartoon woman but, upside-down, showed her ink-clothing draining away, her naked orb-buttocks and cone-breasts.

  One day my grandmother ran across town without a coat, and if the mailman hadn’t called us we might not have found her before she froze. She’d chased him, she said, because she’d written to a man who’d advertised for a German-speaking wife, and she wanted an answer. Of course, we didn’t believe this. And my doll had lain unfed because my grandmother couldn’t pretend, or that’s how she left babies after swaddling them.

  Meanwhile, I was falling behind in every subject except Reading. I’d daydream, thinking about, let’s say, Rapunzel’s mother, who craved rampion, not unlike spinach, the dictionary said, and in the days of thatched roofs people believed that not satisfying a pregnant woman’s craving caused deformed babies, so it was right to steal the rampion. Yet the father traded it for the unborn baby, which canceled out my idea that this stealing was justified, not greedy. These people—characters, mere words on a page—had maybe never existed. But their thorny landscape, their sketchy moral bargain, their fears and expediency, kept me from focusing on multiplication or the Ice Age. Or on dusting and vacuuming.

  At home, it was just five of us again.

  We’d moved my grandmother back to North Dakota, to a hospital where doctors first said she was schizophrenic. We thought she’d split into two, but, no. Her thinking was fragmented. We didn’t belabor the diagnosis because our family doctor didn’t understand it, and the encyclopedia was confusing: daguerreotypes of the man who’d named the disease, lists of symptoms (insomnia! olfactory hallucinations!), descriptions of patients who thought their brains had been invaded by TV. My grandmother started taking first-generation psychotropic drugs and married the widower who’d advertised for a wife—my parents first met him in her hospital room when he arrived with a box of chocolates.

  When we visited her, we ate all day, playing cards and sipping beer, shot glasses of beer for the chi
ldren. At night my sister and I crept down the basement steps, past the iron jaw of the sausage maker, past pipes and a hellish furnace, to a plywood guestroom with a bed and a dresser covered with plastic flowers and dozens of framed photos of the widower’s dead wives, dead but still alive in the photos. Someone had moved the photos and graveyard flowers down here. The first wife was God-fearing. So were her children. The second wife’s children grew up and went to prison.

  At home, my mother had hung a plaque on the wall. CHARACTER IS WHAT YOU REALLY ARE. REPUTATION IS WHAT YOUR NEIGHBORS THINK YOU ARE. You might guess this meant she worked at character and scoffed at reputation. No. The plaque consoled her that even if she didn’t have a reputation, good or bad, just invisibility, she had character. Turning into shopkeepers in a small town with exacting gradations, my mother and father said that we didn’t care how we seemed. But we did. Dinner conversations—this man had ten children but worked hard and bought a new car; that man had a fun personality but no grit—ascertained people’s rank, which was malleable. My parents measured people’s attitude and fortitude, which you control. They’d staked their futures on the belief they could.

  Middle school was called junior high, and the building, 1960s-era, containing grades Fifth through Eighth, sat next to the old-fashioned high school with Doric columns and sequestered offices at the top of curved stairwells. I’d pass through the corridor that connected the schools, carrying a note from a teacher in junior high to someone in a lofty office. School was cold, but this corridor was hot, an engineering mistake. I spent my lunch hour there, next to an auditorium with a stage that had a mechanical folding wall the janitor cranked open for dances involving a king, queen, and court. It was shut most of the time and covered by velvet curtains with weights in the hem. I rolled myself against the collapsible wall, letting the curtains wrap around me. Then I’d unroll and do it again, swathes of velvet like vestments, and once I bumped into someone coming from the other way who turned out to be a boy, and we rolled apart again, afraid.

  What else?

  A red-nosed teacher said I drove him to drink. “It’s not a figure of speech,” he added. I stared at his wild hair and bloodshot eyes. I lacked the ability to fail then prevail. I didn’t always do homework and tried to save face by answering in diction from another era. “We were put on this earth to persevere, you as well as I, sir.” Or, caught reading a novel in History: “There is no frigate like a book to take us lands away.” I didn’t try to make adults unhappy, and yet—I wasn’t the first adolescent to notice this—adults made so many decisions and I made few. One day in spring, false spring because we usually had a last snow in May, a breeze blew through an open window. I climbed out. The teacher yelled. My hair snagged on a bush. Dead grass was turning pale green at its roots.

  I got sent to the principal. My mother, bookkeeping at my dad’s store, showed up, angry. Then she ran out of steam. She seemed to know that my best wasn’t like anyone else’s.

  In the summer, we lived in our cottage that once belonged to people who’d died. We’d acquired their Oriental rugs, their horsehair love-seat, lamps with hand-painted globes, antique vases. The cabin sat on a lake carved by glaciers—shallow plateaus in the center but, here and there, inches from shore, drop-offs so deep no one had fathomed them. My parents, sister, and brother went to town every day, my sister to her summer job, my brother to stock shelves at the store. I stayed behind to cook. That left hours for taking the boat across choppy waves. I’d slow to enter a creek connecting our lake to another, where I’d cut off the motor to hear wind whistling through trees, bird ruckus, the shout of a human reverberating bell-like over water. I studied houses. A piney woods effect here. A paradise effect over there, patios with striped umbrellas out of place next to a barn.

  One afternoon, lying on the boathouse roof, reading Love Story by Erich Segal, I felt hot enough to think it was summer, not summer’s imitation. Truck drivers delivering beer to taverns honked as they passed. So far honking meant “I know you” or “I’m trying not to run you over.” Uneasy, I went inside. I had a pet rabbit. We hadn’t bought him a cage, so he’d grown tame, housebroken, hopping everywhere I went, whimpering if I left him. He crouched on the bed as I looked in the mirror and saw that, if I squinted, my swimsuit made me look like someone else. In a few years I’d be making my selection, I understood, a local man, and I’d better get ready. Then I unsquinted and looked like me again, a girl. We moved back to town in the fall. The rabbit stayed in a neighbor’s cage with other rabbits. In a week, he’d gone wild, back to rabbits, and wouldn’t let me hold him.

  I dove deep into the fracas of high school—including kids who lived in town, also kids who rode the bus and smelled like barn—where my sister was a cheerleader and Rodeo Royalty (doubling as “Miss Spooner and Her Attendants”). She followed rules. On weekends, she drank and made out because these were rules. So was not getting caught. I objected to not-getting-caught. Over the summer I’d read The Autobiography of Malcolm X; My Darling, My Hamburger; A Tree Grows in Brooklyn; One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest; The Catcher in the Rye; Mr. and Mrs. Bo Jo Jones. The national zeitgeist, disestablishmentarianism, had trickled down by way of the paperback book rack at Rexall Drug.

  I’d get grounded. Then sprung. Then grounded. My parents didn’t object to jocks, but I knew them as mean, then friendly after dark, trying to take my clothes off. Stoners were called heads. “He has faraway eyes,” my mother said about a head whose mother had died. “He has a sickly sweet odor like a spice rack,” she said about another. She was paraphrasing the Warning Signs Your Child Might Be on Drugs. I didn’t smoke pot, but I didn’t mind if people did. I made out with heads, practicing my kissing. Like my sister and my parents, I knocked back alcohol. Drinking erased anxiety and social distinctions. My dad drank with people who were fun but didn’t have grit. Heads and jocks drank together in hunting camps with bunkrooms: squeaky bedsprings, whispered moans.

  Then I met a man at the fair.

  He was short with a grown-up’s head and shoulders. If he’d been taller, he’d have been uninterested in a fourteen-year-old waiting to ride the Rock-O-Planes. He worked for the phone company, repairing connections in the office, in people’s houses, on top of tall poles I noticed with a sense of awe for his daring vocation as I rode down highways in my mother’s car. He lived on his parents’ farm because his dad had a bad heart. By now, my sister was pre-engaged, a friendship ring with a diamond chip. This thrilled my taskmaster grandmother, who’d been single and considered a spinster until she was in her twenties. My wandering grandmother was young—the census record is sketchy— when she married. I’ll call my elfin, muscled boyfriend Rodney V. Meadow, a synonym for his real name. V is for verdant. Life teemed with allegory.

  On Saturday, I’d go to dinner with Rodney V. Meadow, who bought buy-one-get-one-free coupons to supper clubs—restaurants deep in the woods. People arrived by snowmobile or in cars with tires wrapped in chains. After dinner, we made out in his truck.

  I wondered: Were sperm airborne? What did “vigorous swimming” mean?

  I fell ill, wondering. My mother, who bought sanitary napkins in bulk, said, “You’re moody because your period is late.” One night in my bedroom, my alarm clock ticked on. I gave up on biology and focused on plot—foreshadowing and upshot. In our living room, with its imitation brass lamps aglow, Pledge-polished furniture gleaming, my mother’s face would crumple. It had crumpled a few weeks earlier when one of my classmates got out of a car at school wearing a maternity dress hemmed as a mini. My dad would pour brandy with one hand, hold his other over his heart, as he did when he told you he was hurt (often) or grateful (rarely). I’d cook for Rodney V. Meadow when he came in from the phone company, I realized. After my baby became a child, I’d serve cupcakes at the elementary school. In a few years, I’d be like my mother, only younger, with modish dresses and silver eye shadow. Outside, dawn crept over snow-covered houses. I crept to the phone in the basement to call Rodney and tell hi
m we were getting married.

  The walking downstairs must have released muscles. I was instantly not-pregnant.

  When I talked to him that weekend, he explained I couldn’t have been pregnant because we hadn’t had sex. He knew because he and his dad sometimes hired a bull and watched it work. He’d had sex himself, in the past. He’d like to again, he added. I couldn’t trust myself not to, I knew, and I didn’t want to squander another series of days and nights worrying how I’d feel moving to a stout house with hodgepodge furniture, or wheeling my baby through SuperValu as I bought meat, eggs, Comet, Gerber products, Windex.

  In 1974, in Massachusetts and Wisconsin, The Pill was newly legal for single women. I’d read this in Time magazine. The decision about minors was pending. I forged a “please excuse Debbie from school” note, walked to a phone booth, and called every doctor in the Greater Spooner Area. Receptionists would tell me the doctor was with a patient, so I’d say: “Would he prescribe the pill to a seventeen-year-old without parental consent?” Most hung up. One said, “You should pray.” Anonymous, I dialed on. Then a receptionist said, “Honey, Dr. X won’t, but if you call Dr. Y in Shell Lake, he will.” I forged another note, and Rodney took the afternoon off work to drive me to Shell Lake.

  Rodney would wait in the truck, we decided, one less person to get noticed by an adult we might know. I’d never been to a doctor without my mother before. The receptionist checked off my name and went back to reading Good Housekeeping. I worried how to act. The only other patients in the waiting room were an elderly man and woman, attending to their old age or dying, which had nothing to do with me and never would, I thought, coldhearted, wrong. I pretended to myself that I was a wife. The Pill was new. Abortion, which we’d discussed in Social Studies because of Roe v. Wade, was new. Buck up, I told myself. Yet what if someone walked in and knew by my face that I’d decided on a bad life: premeditated sex? What if the woman on the phone had set me up and the doctor would tell my parents? Still, I had to postpone getting pregnant, I thought, willing myself calm. For how long? Que sera sera, Doris Day sang.