My Unsentimental Education

by Debra Monroe

  He looked scruffy. After he washed up and changed into a fresh T-shirt and better jeans, I could see why, when he was young, a nabob girl in his high school had loved him. But he didn’t like cleaning up. We argued. I wanted him to put his best foot forward. He said he’d stopped believing a best foot forward mattered.

  One weekend, we drove to Spooner to visit Brock and Leila, who were moving into a house. Brock’s dad was redecorating the apartment because it needed to bring in money to cover the house payment. Joe and I went back to Shell Lake and walked the shore of its namesake lake, which I knew as a place to swim and frolic. I’d never seen it in winter, its grim expanse crisscrossed by snowmobile tracks. We ate at a café, though Joe kept food in his room, including perishables between the window and screen. One night, we lay in bed, a streetlight shining around the curled edge of a window shade. Joe said he’d move back to Colorado after Christmas. The factory was hiring. I pictured a conveyer belt. I said, “In political science, we discussed minimum wage, the treadmill life.”

  “So on and so forth. I can’t stay here.” Joe gestured at the room.

  Then one night at school someone banged on my dorm room door. I opened it. Life had shifted again, but I didn’t know how yet. A girl from the dorm said, “This is an emergency.”

  My sister and her husband had been driving to a store in a town named Rice Lake—its lake is bigger than Shell Lake, the town named after its lake is bigger too. My mother had told them not to go, icy overpasses. But, adults now, they made their own decisions.

  They were alive, in ambulances en route to an ICU in Minneapolis. My mother arranged for a friend of a friend’s son to drive me to Minneapolis. When I got there, I stumbled through the hospital, asking strangers for directions. My mother’s face said hello. Then a nurse’s face said it would be difficult to see my sister. My mother blurred and disappeared into the waiting area. My dad, I don’t remember, but he must have been there, my brother too. My sister sat propped in bed. She chanted rhymes, her bandages like a turban. She called me baby names, and we were preschoolers again, inseparable, speaking a private language. Except I was the big sister now. I whispered not to say certain things—she was talking about bathroom functions. “Not that,” I scolded.

  I stepped outside.

  The nurse said, “The brain is like Jell-O. It got shook up. It takes time to settle again.”

  I cried hard in the nurse’s station. Then stopped crying.

  I went back to school. I was behind in my homework.

  I pushed bad thoughts away. Or I wasn’t old enough to wonder if the injury was permanent. My mother and the doctor kept the prognosis sunny. “She’ll be fine in a few months.” My dad might have worried she wouldn’t be, but his duty was work, not family.

  Marriage lasts in sickness and in health, especially during sickness because it’s impossible to make a change. My sister and her husband left the hospital and went to my parents’ to convalesce. They had matching wheelchairs, my mother said by phone.

  When I got home in December, having handed in my last final, my father was remote, my mother fake-perky. My sister—her concussion rehabilitation underway—was unusually glad to see me. Wires stuck out of her husband’s temples, plastic tabs on the ends so people wouldn’t get scratched. “Doctors will cut those wires off lickety-split,” my mother said. “And,” she added brightly, “please invite your friend Joe for Christmas dinner.” Someone she knew had seen me with Joe, walking the streets of Shell Lake. I told her not to worry: “He’ll be moving back to Colorado.” She said, “Just invite him. No one should be alone on Christmas.”

  Around noon, Joe arrived in his banged-up car.

  An old car is fine, my dad would tell you. God knew he wasn’t a snob, he’d say, having come from nothing. But the old car shouldn’t have rust, dents, dings, missing chrome. It should be glossy with wax. Joe stomped snow off his shoes as I opened the door.

  My dad leapt out of his La-Z-Boy and said, “Where’s your home, son?” My mother rolled her eyes. My dad had shifted into this father-who’s-protecting-defenseless-daughter mode we’d never seen before. I know now, if I didn’t then, that Joe scared him: Joe’s age, Joe’s size, his unfamiliar ways. Joe said, “Indiana, sir.”

  Joe wore a sports coat I’d never seen—I found out later it belonged to the son of a woman he’d worked with at the boat factory. He had on a new shirt, wrinkles still visible from where it had been folded in cellophane. If this were my dad’s shirt, new but not ironed, my mom would call it tacky. But I could tell by the look on her face she felt tenderhearted that Joe had tried to dress up for us, sad, too, that he was my boyfriend. He was freshly shaved. His hair looked shiny. I’d warned my mother he’d lost an eye. In a poised way, she was inspecting his face now. Until you got close, he looked like someone who’d been outside a lot, sun creases. He was rough-hewn but handsome when he wasn’t coming off the end of his shift with fiberglass stuck to his clothes.

  My mother had bought him a gift. He thanked her and unwrapped it, Avon soap on a rope. He hung it around his neck. “It fits,” he said, standing up and throwing his hands in the air. My sister’s eyes widened. “I like him,” she said. “He’s funny!” She was at the stage of recovery when she blurted. Yet everyone was so happy she was talking at all, even if what she said was uncharacteristic, that we all laughed, cozy group-laughing.

  A few days later, Joe left. “Queenie, it’s been sweet.”

  I wasn’t exactly sad.

  We’d hit an impasse.

  I started to plan my life. I wanted out of the dorm: the competing stereos, hairdryers, chatter; girls with winged hairdos, winged sleeves on their blouses, winged shins on their pants.

  I stayed home and applied for jobs. I sewed new clothes. I bought women’s shoes at the store where I used to work. The clerk who’d replaced me waited on me, silent. My former boss kept his distance. I’d disgraced myself, it seemed. I practiced my shorthand and went on interviews at county and state bureaus. “Few people know shorthand these days,” a man who interviewed me said, approving. But a stenographer with experience got hired, not me.

  The man called a few days later to say he’d found me a job, due east, near the border of Michigan’s UP. My mother urged me to take the job, describing benefits, transfers. Yet I couldn’t bring myself to move deeper into the pine woods. My dad told me to join the army. “You like going places and . . .” he paused, “meeting unusual people. You’ll get job training besides.” My mother said to get waitress experience. “You’ll use it all your life.”

  One night she called me to the phone.

  When I picked up, Joe said, jolly, ironic: “Queenie?” I tried to picture him in Colorado, but I’d never been there. “Hello,” I said, puzzled. We hadn’t pledged to be in contact.

  He lowered his voice and said I should come. He missed me. He’d gotten a promotion. “I have a room in a house. Not like you think. I share a house with friends and their ten-year-old son. You can drive me to work and use my car to look for a job.” I told him I’d think about it. I hung up and saw the wary look on my mom’s face. But ads for nearby jobs had dried up. I decided to go to Colorado. I wouldn’t be the first or last woman to use a man as a way to leave home, and sometimes you go sideways or down before you go up. All Joe expected was loyalty, maybe cooking. I asked my mother to drive me to the airport in Minneapolis. She said no.

  But when I started checking Greyhound schedules, she changed her mind. Only if I’d buy a round-trip plane ticket, she said. I wasn’t coming back, I said. She said leave the return date open—I’d come for a visit. I bought the ticket, using money from savings. These were days when people walked passengers all the way to the gate and waved as the plane lifted off. As we crossed the parking lot, snowflakes drifted down and melted on my mother’s face. When I turned to go, she looked smudged. I got on board.

  I remember Colorado Springs as buildings beside a snow-spackled ridge of mountains. I drove Joe to his factory with its big sign
: HIGH ALTITUDE. LOW HUMIDITY. BEST METAL WORK IN THE USA. I never saw the inside. Joe came home every night, filthy. I’d packed clothes for job interviews, yet no ads asked for stenographers. My typing was an asset, but I didn’t interview well; I was eighteen. I’d never worked anywhere except the clothing store. I applied at clothing stores, and people taking my application were older, strikingly attired. Joe talked about getting me on at the factory. As days dragged, I learned to make potato soup, macaroni with cheese called rat trap, more potatoes, hamburger, kielbasa. When our housemate’s ten-year-old got in from school, we walked to the grocery store, and I’d have dinner ready when the adults came home.

  I spent time with the ten-year-old because conversation was easy— how teachers make you feel, what TV shows we liked. I avoided his parents’ friends who came and went. Joe’s housemates and friends used pot, alcohol, but also mescaline and downers to make weekends special. Joe liked just alcohol and sometimes cheap speed.

  One nice weekend Joe and I drove to Cripple Creek to visit his friend who worked in the mines and had married a woman with a baby. In the evenings, the men drank beer while the woman fed the baby, then crocheted. She gave me yarn and a hook so I could crochet too. One night she made tuna casserole. When I said it was good, she said she’d added sour cream for extra flavor, and I nodded, impressed at culinary improvisation. Her husband said that the mine’s better pay meant better grub, this nightly reminder of affluence, and I thought for a minute about the piddling cost of a carton of sour cream. But I let my snobbish thought go because I liked these people. Then Joe and I went home.

  Most weekends we went to a bar called the Wagon Wheel. Joe wore Levi’s, a black T-shirt, his leather eye patch. I’d put on my Saturday night best—lace mixed with denim, earrings made of beads and chips of deer antler. One night a man who was tripping or jacked up on white cross spoke to me. I answered politely, and he pulled a knife. Joe knocked him to the floor, then dragged me out of the bar. He said, “Queenie, you need to learn to tell good from bad.” We were on Joe’s turf now. One night we were making love, and Joe said, “Virgins are overrated.” I turned away. “I was not a virgin when we met. If you want facts, you lack finesse too.” He sighed. “We were kidding, right?”

  One day I had a toothache and spent almost the last of my money on a dentist who used gas. So far, I’d had only Novocain. The dental assistant put a mask over my nose and said, “Is it enough yet? Is it enough yet?” I winced at the tooth, the dentist prodding, and shook my head no. Then I fell backwards and down. I found my dad and Joe in a hole. Why had I never noticed that they were alike? Their whiskers were coming in as five o’clock shadow, and both of them said I’d never understand. My mother leaned over the top with a woman dressed in white, and light was brighter there. I must have had no better way to sort this out than Sunday school imagery: “There is a hell?” I said. The dental assistant, in white, removed the gas mask. “Oops,” she said, “too much.”

  One Sunday morning, the phone rang. Someone rapped on our bedroom door. “Telephone call from Wisconsin,” the ten-year-old yelled. Hungover, I dressed to take the call. “Hello,” my mother said in that fast and formal voice she used for long-distance, expensive minutes ticking away. She had my dad pick up on the extension. He said hello in a too-neutral voice. She asked what I’d been up to. I told her about new foods I’d cooked, that I’d had a toothache. She listened, then asked, “When are you coming home?” I said, “I’m waiting for a job at the factory.” She said, “No. Call the airline and get a flight. I’ll call back tonight, and you’ll tell me exactly when to pick you up.” Maybe it was the staying home every day, waiting for a ten-year-old’s return and then Joe’s. Or it was my mother’s stern tone—as if I were ten. I obeyed.

  In early April—thaw, freeze, snow, thaw, freeze, snow—I’d wake in my old bedroom, put on a black uniform with white diamond shapes on the bust and hips meant to amplify female contours, then my coat, hat, gloves, and walk past clapboard houses, then down Main Street to the Topper Cafe. In the morning, I served eggs and bacon; for lunch, hot beef, fried liver. Every day, the most vocal of the grizzled men who sat at the counter asked if I’d bend over the cooler another time. Or stick my finger in his coffee to make it sweet. The other men chortled. The first guy would say, “You should move to Las Vegas. No use sitting on that money-maker.” I worried my job with its self-display, the striding across the café in my sex-robot waitress suit, signified changed status. “Are you friends with my dad?” I’d ask, changing the subject.

  The first Saturday I went back to the Sportsman’s, Brock rushed around the bar to hug me, to ask how Colorado was. I answered that Colorado was nice—though I’d seen just glimpses. I said Joe and I didn’t talk often because long-distance cost too much. Brock started singing “Indiana Wants Me” robotically, as if he’d forgotten why he’d sung it in the first place. He was out-of-his-gourd drunk, I realized. One of the men with beards, the stuttering one, told me Leila had taken the children and moved in with a commune-dweller, but not at the commune. Where were they? He shrugged. I thought about the children. Would Brock see them again?

  I sat next to the woman with feather earrings. Even one semester at a regional college will improve your small talk—I’d read Sylvia Plath. “Better yet,” I added, “John Berryman.” John Berryman’s poetry was gorgeous but bewildering, a line here or there making my heart thrill, a whole poem beyond me; I wasn’t a good enough reader yet. She said, “Another male poet, great.” I said, “But John Berryman is great. He’s better than Marge Piercy.” She stared at me. Commune-dwellers, or housemates in Colorado, have the same pecking orders as people anywhere, I realized. I resented my elders for having more choices, better ways of justifying choices, and they treated me like the amateur I was.

  One night, the man with the beaky nose suggested we all go to the Chatterbox. He’d majored in economics. “Consider it research.” Another person suggested the new strip joint on the edge of town. The beaky guy argued for the Chatterbox. “It’s historic.” But everyone else wanted the new strip joint. One of the bib-overalled women smiled at me. “Let’s go. It will be a lark.”

  We went to a one-story building that used to house an LP gas supply. We stared at the stripper’s G-string and pasties. She went through the motions—thrust, spin, twirl, dip, spin. I studied her face. She looked like a store clerk, pleasant yet aloof.

  One of the bearded men leaned over and told me that lipstick evolved as part of a female’s mating display because red lips simulate the female state of arousal. Another shouted to the stripper: “Are you happy? Is this life fulfilling?” The one with the beaky nose took money out of his wallet. The woman who’d thought this visit to a strip joint would be amusing stared at the floor.

  The stripper shook her hips, hands in a V-shape pointing to her privates, and she smiled at the regulars, who leered unapologetically. This was my hometown, schizophrenic. It had fragmented thinking. The post-hippies thought they were better than horny old-timers. Horny old-timers thought that they were no worse, for instance, than a bearded guy talking to a stripper about happiness sitting next to another holding a ten-spot near the stripper’s crotch. Outside, all around us, in houses with lights turned down, furnaces humming—my sister and her husband had just moved back into their house, so recently remodeled it still smelled like paint—were people who’d married because sex felt like love, and the feeling sometimes lasts and sometimes doesn’t.

  I talked to Joe on the phone. “You’re my bright spot,” he said.

  Weeks passed, and the owners of the Palace Theater came to eat lunch at the café. They’d refurbished the Palmote Drive-In too. Their names were Shelley and Bubbles, and they were ex-carnies. Everyone knew the Palace Theater on Main Street showed G-rated movies at seven p.m. and X-rated movies at nine p.m. Shelley buttered his dinner roll. “PG, which stands for ‘parental guidance,’ has replaced M,” he said, “which used to stand for ‘mature.’ R for ‘restricted’ is always a possi
bility too. But movies like these have always flopped for me at the Palace,” he added. “My core markets are families with kiddos and the single fellas.”

  Bubbles suggested I serve concessions at the drive-in on week-nights. Because I was a good waitress, she said. Flattery, yet another currency. The Palmote showed horror movies on weekends, I knew. During the school year, if the thermometer stayed above zero and snow wasn’t expected, a high schooler might drive through the gate with a keg in the back of his pickup—I’d gone a few times, milling, drinking, the beleaguered babysitters on the screen irrelevant. That day in the café I didn’t think to ask Shelley and Bubbles what the Palmote played on weeknights. Weeknights, I watched TV with my parents, my dad snoring in the recliner. Or he’d stay at the Corral, and my mother would confide gloomily that she’d done her best, cooking, raising children, bookkeeping, having sex. “It pays minimum wage,” Bubbles said. Spring was here, I thought. Ennui again. Longings. I decided to work two jobs, save for a car, move to a city, and wait tables there.

  After work, I changed out of my uniform into jeans, a peasant blouse, my puka shell necklace, and I drove my mother’s car to the Palmote. I passed the marquee that said XXX because Shelley was already waving me into a parking spot. Inside, he introduced me to Bubbles’s nephew. “Bubbles wants Vinny to settle down with a local girl,” Shelley said. I’d never seen anyone who looked like Vinny except in West Side Story, which I’d seen on TV. Vinny rolled cigarettes into his sleeve, passé. He had tattoos, also passé. Or not yet reinvented. Only sailors and Hells Angels had tattoos then. Shelley showed me how to use the pizza oven, the popcorn popper, the till. He left to start the movie. Vinny stood so close I smelled his aftershave. He’d moved to Spooner because his parole officer made him live with family, he said. He took a pint of booze out of his pocket, and a condom packet fell on the floor. Years would pass before people would worry about AIDS. I thought the condom was Alka-Seltzer until I picked it up and handed it back to him. What next? Moans, sighs, gasps.