My Unsentimental Education

by Debra Monroe

  The future is never ours to see. The receptionist called my name. I met Dr. Y. He told me to disrobe and left. I wasn’t quite undressed when the nurse came back and complimented my modern, lace-knit bra, like this was gym class, the locker room. “So comfortable,” she said, this woman old enough to be my aunt. Then Dr. Y came back and narrowed his eyes. I was in the stirrups, draped with a fusty hospital gown. I wasn’t embarrassed for this part, or I’d known it was coming and I was ready. I shut my eyes. The doctor probed. He asked my age. I was fifteen. I said I was seventeen. Silence. He seemed not to believe me, but he gave me a year’s supply of pills, which Rodney stored in his tool locker.

  Soon, my parents let me spend weekends in the Meadows’ spare bedroom because my mother felt farm chores were salutary. Or she was glad I’d stopped dating heads. She’d made local inquiries. People who knew the Meadows family attested, approved. The whole town weighed in, it seemed. This would be a good match in due time.

  One day, I drove the tractor while everyone loaded hay. Rodney’s father clutched his chest and turned purple when, after he’d expressed doubt I was the right person to drive a tractor, I took a corner too sharp. The tractor started tipping, one side of the hay wagon climbing a big wheel spinning in midair. Rodney sprinted across the field, leapt to the top of the tractor, reversed it. The tractor righted itself. The hay wagon rolled back down, its axle and my life saved. That night, Rodney’s mother told me that no one starts out as an expert. We watched The Carol Burnett Show, and she taught me to embroider pillow slips and dish towels. When I saw my wandering grandmother, who embroidered, I showed her my work. She said my knots on the backside were messy. A backside should be as good as a front. I tried harder and piled up pillow slips and dish towels, though, as my mother noted, they’d look ragged after one time through the spin cycle.

  In theory, halcyon summer was June and July. But intermittent cold fronts blew in, shrinking our allotment. I loved wandering through swampy patches of wildflowers, or rows of midsummer corn like a dense, miniature forest. My dad bought my brother a motorized mini-bike I’d borrow to ride through pine trees until I found abandoned houses I’d explore for signs of life—a tattered curtain flying like a white surrender flag in a cracked window, a rusty kettle on a stove. Once I saw a bear on a back porch, and I scrambled back to the minibike and sped off, my wheels stuck then swaggering through sand.

  One night Rodney and I sat staring at cattails in a shallow lake, the radio tuned to a top-forty station hundreds of miles away. For a moment, John Denver’s song about his ex-wife seemed like poetry—reasonable poetry for a man who hunted and fished, I thought, eyeing Rodney. Night in the forest. Mountains in springtime. Rodney could discuss these. Maybe they filled up his senses. But he couldn’t take the next step and equate bliss in the woods with bliss he felt spending time with me. Could I live the rest of my life never hearing words like these said to me? I couldn’t. But a day later, ironing my father’s shirts, I turned sensible. Poetry was extravagance, I decided. Everyone has longings.

  During short, dark days of winter, Rodney must have had his longings because he’d go to a bar after work and come to pick me up late, drunk. It would take me ages to forgive this, though my sister’s boyfriend did it too, and my dad missed every second or third dinner the same way, and my gambling grandfather used to leave my taskmaster grandmother for weeks. Once, my mother stared at me, sitting cross-legged on the console stereo, a coffin-shaped box with a turntable inside, as I stared out the window, waiting for Rodney’s truck. She said: “That’s marriage. It’s never our turn.” She felt bad for me, but it wouldn’t do any good to object, she said. The world was designed for husbands. She forgave my dad his lapses because wives did. He’d had that sorry childhood too. There’s no use bemoaning the past, she said. But she said it to us, not him.

  Then a teacher who wore narrow ties, not because they were in style, but because he’d never bought the new, wide ones, explained that impartiality is an ideal existing outside the toils of language. “A selection of facts is partial,” he added, “partial as in incomplete, partial as in biased.” He said I should go to a summer camp with students from all over the state, students between their junior and senior years, at a small college in Eau Claire, eighty miles south. For two weeks, I’d stay in a dorm and take writing classes. I did the math. I was a misfit at Spooner High. I’d be a misfit times fifty. I said no.

  He rolled his eyes and didn’t bring it up again.

  Months later, false spring again, and I was walking to my after-school job, stepping through slush, wearing a pastel dress with my winter coat flapping open. A southern breeze stirred branches flecked with buds doomed to freeze before they’d sprout again. Anomie, acedia—sins I’d studied in Lutheran catechism, two hours on Tuesday night. My desire exceeded my portion again. I couldn’t face belabored spring, fickle summer, flashy autumn, immense winter, seasons moving and standing still. I fastened onto a word I’d read but didn’t know how to pronounce. Ennui. Suddenly I started running, twisting my ankles in my sandals with plastic fruits on the straps. I arrived at work early and phoned the school. The teacher was already gone. I tried his house, no answer. His wife ran the register at Rexall Drug, so I went across the street and told her I wanted to go to writers camp, and I jotted this down, and she said don’t bother, she’d tell him.

  That July, when I arrived at writers camp, my fears returned.

  Then I faked that I felt at ease, and I did.

  Some of the writers looked like heads. Some looked like cheerleaders and jocks. The cheerleaderish girls whispered that two girls looked like sluts, but I could tell the slutty-looking girls were just shy, from the same small town, and painted each other’s eyeliner on too thick. I was nice to the eyeliner girls, to the cheerleader girls, and to a girl who looked like Carole King and quoted the Tao Te Ching. I also made friends with a boy named Michael who signed his essays and poems Mikal. My Favorite Subject was every class. My Hobbies and Activities were reading the assignments and staying up late to discuss them. As days flicked by, a boy from Fond du Lac stared across crowded rooms. His name was Chuck. He was my age but five inches taller than Rodney, I noted, disloyal.

  I’d read Chuck’s poems in class. They weren’t interesting, but I felt that Chuck—dark and brooding—might be. We hadn’t talked yet because Mikal stopped me after class, standing in front of me, his arm on the wall, challenging my opinions, combative flirting.

  An alternate future opened up. Either Chuck or Mikal, I realized.

  Mikal talked all the time. Chuck was silent. If the strong, silent lover found in books caused me to believe in a strong, silent lover sitting near me in a classroom, or if the fantasy of the strong, silent lover sitting near women everywhere causes his double to recur in art, is a chicken-or-egg question. Yet women fill silence well. They customize it. “Every night I give my body to my husband like a chalice,” a woman wrote in a letter to Ann Landers I’d read in the newspaper, my interest piqued. As long as Chuck didn’t talk, he was a void into which I poured thoughts so profound he apparently found them inexpressible.

  The night before the last day, Chuck and I sat on a bench, hands touching. You shouldn’t have sex before marriage, I knew, but I’d long ago arrived at this variance: it was okay if you did with the man you’d marry because you’d die having had sex with just him. So I’d reasoned until Chuck from Fond du Lac wanted to kiss me. I stopped him as Jane Eyre stopped her wedding. Except I’m candid. Some people appreciate this. Some don’t. And you never know which kind of person you’re talking to until after you’ve divulged. Instead of saying I was practically betrothed, hence unavailable, I said I wasn’t a virgin.

  He didn’t speak. I’d planned to marry soon, I added.

  I considered telling him I was on The Pill, because I wanted him to understand my life—that I’d been caught in the local pattern and I found the safest way forward, but if I’d lived somewhere else I’d be someone else and still could. Then he’d
tell me he’d never met anyone so stalwart, so perfect, and we’d reunite at college in eighteen months. But he looked afraid and hurried off into the gloaming and avoided eye contact the next day.

  That night, my parents arrived to take me home. They’d been confused by the whole episode, that I’d wanted to go, that I’d won a prize. They were used to prizes for best jam, best sales record for radial tires in the tristate area, best football playing—not best use of figurative language. We drove under interstate overpasses that seemed like cattle gates, one after another hanging over me as I passed through the chute toward home.

  Rodney V. Meadow took me to supper clubs I used to like, to the farmhouse where I’d helped his mother make casseroles. I couldn’t focus. I had trouble kissing him. He lost his temper and called me Miss Poem. One evening he was waiting for me to come downstairs for our date. It was early fall because my family, minus my sister, who’d gotten married, had moved back to town. My mother sat with Rodney on the side porch covered by trellises that made the room seem mysterious and stately. But my parents wanted a modern house, so they’d installed orange indoor-outdoor carpet and bought avocado green slipcovers for the furniture. When I got downstairs, I could tell my mother was in deep conversation with Rodney. She said, “We would have liked for you to marry her. But you gamble when you date someone so young. She’s a girl, still deciding.”

  That night, after dinner, he drove back to my house and parked in the driveway. I told Rodney I wanted to go to college and we should break up now, as I began Twelfth Grade. He started crying. He put his hands around my neck. I thought his message was that he could choke me if he wanted but he loved me so he wouldn’t. He’d lettered in wrestling—he had a wrestler’s compact body, slow patience too. My mother paced back and forth in the kitchen window. As I spoke, muscles in my neck moved against Rodney’s grip. I said, “I can’t help it. I’m sorry.” His hands tightened. He still didn’t seem violent, just out of options. He let go, then put me in a new hold, my head banging the dashboard as I rolled onto the floor. He landed on me. My mother had begun flicking the porch light on, off. Then she stood in the driveway, rapping on the truck window.

  One night, after snow fell, he waited in the truck while I went inside to get the framed high school graduation photo his mother had once kept on the TV but let me take home to put on my nightstand, and the class ring that had thrilled me with its size and unfamiliar date— I’d been in Eighth Grade when he graduated. I opened the door and gave them to him. He threw them into the snow. My mother called me inside. I watched from the kitchen. She stood in the driveway in her bathrobe, shivering, talking to him. He slumped behind the steering wheel. Under the halo of the porch light, my mother dug in snow and found the picture, which she gave him. She looked for his ring but didn’t find it until the next day—guessing where it was by marks in the snow—and we mailed it to him.

  He called from work, plugging a receiver into a random outlet. He also called from bars, music clanging and drunken shouts as backdrop. He called from the barn, cattle lowing. He called from the tops of telephone poles. He’d done this once or twice in the past when he’d be working late, thirty feet off the ground, a leather harness wrapped around his hips, boot cleats dug in deep, and say something cheerful, sweet. But he phoned now to say, for instance, he was on County Trunk 71, south of Mueller Road, and go mute, waiting for me to volunteer that the last weeks had been a mistake. After a few minutes of silence, I’d say I had to go. He’d call back. My mother started intercepting calls. I’d hear her, gentle at first, eventually firm: “You need to accept facts and climb down that pole.” We worried. The wind whipped faster up there. The sun had set. The thermometer plunged. He finally came down for good and dated a girl who’d been my sister’s bridesmaid and, as my sister told me, called her my name when he was drunk.

  I couldn’t go backward.

  I sewed, making clothes from upholstery fabric because fabric at the dime store bored me. I was lonely in high school, having spent my previous spare time carrying deviled eggs to phone company potlucks, or hanging out with Rodney V. Meadow’s mother, once driving eighty miles with her to see a masseuse for her migraines, and we’d sat side by side in portable saunas shaped like washing machines, our heads sticking out. Now I pretended high school was writers camp. But students talked about how they held liquor, not how they shaped paragraphs. I dated a boy who went to community college forty miles away, and he rambled in a way I didn’t understand, either because he was tripping or he’d read Rilke. I made a bong in shop class, and I bought a baggie of pot, which my mother found. She opened the door to the bathroom where I floated in the tub, offended she’d walked in. She shook the baggie’s contents over me like sage over a chicken in broth.

  Then my wandering grandmother’s husband had a heart attack in their kitchen, and she ran out the door to tell a neighbor. By the time the neighbor called an ambulance, my grandmother had keeled over, another heart attack. We went to the two-coffin funeral, with the God-fearing and ex-con offspring in the first pew on the left side, and my dad and his two brothers in the first pew on the right. I sat behind my father and uncles, their shoulders heaving, bloated, stuffed with memory. And I understood for the first time that if someone you love dies you have sadness, but if someone you love dies and you have unfinished quarrels—lost chances, love you skipped like a bus that left the station a long time ago—you have sadness, also helplessness and confusion.

  The taskmaster grandmother came to celebrate my graduation. My mother bought me a typewriter for a gift. I’d go to college, she said. She also said to remember I was training for a job that would last only until I had children, though later I might work part-time, and it had to be a job that would move as my husband’s job would move.

  I’d spent the winter drinking, smoking pot, staying out until dawn. I understood hangover recovery better than most subjects. At my graduation party, there’s a photo of me sitting on my taskmaster grandmother’s lap, though I’m too big for this, and I’m wearing a dress I designed myself, trying to look like a flapper, wearing a brooch Rodney V. Meadow’s mother gave me that belonged to her mother, a hillbilly flapper’s brooch made of paste and tin, something Rodney V. Meadow’s mother would never wear and I was welcome to it, she’d said. So I’m a flapper, except it’s 1976. In the photo, my grandmother—who’d endured a rural flapper, her rival—looks proud. I stare at the cake, queasy.

  I’d started dating another farm boy. I’d had sex hundreds of times already. But this was my second lover. “This can’t be your second time,” he said once, perplexed. “You’re too relaxed. You move your hips like an expert.” I clarified: “I didn’t say it was my second time. I said you’re only the second person I’ve ever had sex with.” In turn, I didn’t understand him, that his emotions had been activated. I’d been playacting since Kindergarten.

  I also dated a boy who’d arrived for the summer and I liked him less than the farm boy. The tourist boy had the exotic whiff of places I’d never been. Yet I failed to tell the farm boy I was dating the tourist boy, and in a town so small people told the farm boy for me. He broke up with me. He said, “If you’re seeing other people, and you’re probably leaving for college, we should call it quits.” I started crying. He shook his head. “Why are you crying?” I was thinking about the hours spent embroidering dish towels and pillow slips, the green fields dotted with wild mustard. Verdant meadows. Years. Misspent? I said, “I liked you.” He said, “I liked you. But that’s not going to fix this.”

  I already knew that the two weeks when everyone had shared notebooks and pencils and stayed up late talking about Keats and Emily Dickinson, about compromise and high hope, had been an idyll. Real college had football players, business majors, and—I’d been for a twoday orientation—dorms that, full-up, felt like barracks. I’d started to tip, one wheel spinning on airy prospects, the other grinding through mud. Both worlds would be inhospitable, one an aspiring place where I’d be an amateur all over again,
uneasy, missing my set of instructions. Daydreaming would take me over. Teachers would misunderstand. Or I’d stay where I didn’t fit, but I’d feel superior. Now which?

  Regional Trades

  When I was little, my mother had said to ignore the bars, though my brother and I once pressed our faces against the windows of one called the Chatterbox, which featured strippers. A day-drinker had lurched onto the sidewalk, blinking. A man in a white apron followed, yelling, “Kids, scram.” Strippers took customers upstairs to bedrooms, we knew. Prostitutes also lived at the end of Main Street in the Depot Hotel, until it burned to the ground when one of them fell asleep while making a grilled sandwich on a steam iron. I assumed every Main Street had prostitutes and strippers. People need money, as my parents pointed out; these women had failed to acquire sensible vocational training. Meanwhile, my sister knew bookkeeping, and I, bad at math but good at spelling, knew stenography.

  Except for a few years after Prohibition, the legal drinking age in Wisconsin had always been eighteen. Having finished high school now, I needed to choose my bar. Your bar, like your prom dress or favorite song, should match your personality. For instance, my dad would slip out of his store, past the Palace Movie Theater, and into the Corral, where the bartender had my dad’s drink ready, a brandy Manhattan, also standing orders if my mom phoned and asked for my dad—she’d stopped phoning years ago—to say he wasn’t there.