My Unsentimental Education

by Debra Monroe

  On the screen, a man traveling in a foreign country got separated from his wife. In a tent filled with naked women, he fingered one set of nipples, then another. Porn stars don’t seem real, I thought. Then— odd, creeping—that ancient sensation, arousal. Unsimulated. Maybe my lips were red. My arousal mixed with shame. It turns out I’m a bit of a prude. The so-called sexual revolution might have made me able to maintain a detached facial expression while college-educated people discussed free love, but I felt alarmed, then confused when the man on the screen plied various nipples. “Hmm,” he said, “just like elevator buttons.”

  I quit, walking out the door.

  When Joe phoned next, he said he was moving to Indiana. He wanted to come for me. I wondered: had he forgotten that I didn’t know good from bad, that we’d worn each other down in close quarters? “Why are you quitting your good job?” I asked. “I’ve got money saved,” he said. “It’s now or never. It’s all I know. Home.”

  I stalled. “Go straight to Indiana and get settled first.”

  He got mad. “You’ve met someone, is that it?”

  The beak-nosed guy once swirled his hand on my back, but I’d walked away, blunt. The woman with the feather earrings had split up with her husband, and he’d turned out to be good-looking now that he’d taken off his straw hat—he had a dry sense of humor and twinkly eyes. If I stuck around, I thought, I’d head that way.

  Joe said, “If you see me in person, you’ll change your mind.”

  It was May when I drove the 1966 Pontiac Catalina my dad had found for me in a widow’s garage—ten thousand miles on the odometer, no dents or dings—and I parked at the end of a driveway leading to a cabin that belonged to the woman at the boat factory who’d given Joe her son’s sports coat. Ceramic trolls sat in the yard. Flower pots on metal stands whirled in the wind. I saw Joe’s car. Then the door to the cabin opened, and Joe stood on the steps, smiling, waving me in. The woman was at work, I knew. “Come out,” I said. “It’s a beautiful day.” The sky was blue for the first time in months.

  We walked toward each other. He opened his arms. I stepped into them, commodious, familiar. But when he kissed me, I felt like an actress, a good actress. I threw myself into the performance: lovers reuniting. If I didn’t kiss him, how could I justify that I’d slept with him for almost a year? If I felt indifferent, I’d be careless, without caring. I’d prided myself on caring.

  Before I knew it, we were arguing.

  Joe said he’d paid for everything in Colorado. I said, “But I had over $700 before I left Wisconsin and less than $50 when I came home.” He said, “I must have spent three times that much, for our rent, for your food and your drinks.” I said, “You asked me to come. I cooked and cleaned for us. I looked for work. I tried.”

  We stared at each other. He turned and walked back to the cottage.

  I never saw him again.

  A few weeks later, I moved to Eau Claire and rented a bedroom in a house. I took summer-session classes. I didn’t have sensible vocational skills, so I waited tables. As I served coffee, sandwiches, burgers, I considered all the menial ways to earn a wage—Joe at the boat factory, Joe at the steel factory. My dad had eked his way forward, and he got mad whenever he tried to explain how hard it had been. And any idea I got from bar talk that people don’t pay for free love vanished. I came home for a visit and, on Main Street, near the Chatterbox, I ran into the post-hippie who stuttered. He said Leila had left Wisconsin, and her boyfriend from the commune had hooked up with another guy’s wife.

  Everyone has aspirations, I realized. Women who choose one mate, then another. Prostitutes and strippers do. Aspirations don’t make you special. One day, I stepped on an elevator in the only tall building on campus, and I understood I’d never again push elevator buttons without thinking of nipples. Underemployed people bored out of their minds wrote that line, I thought, going up.

  On the Down-Low

  Late one night when no one was home, I worked in the living room while playing a Laura Nyro record. A roommate who’d competed for her hometown beauty pageant by singing “Climb Every Mountain” came in, stared at my typewriter and wadded-up papers, turned down the volume, and said, “She sounds like a panting dog when she sings the chorus.” I hadn’t known this roommate, or any of them, when I moved into my summer sublease bedroom, temporarily bedecked with doilies, knickknacks, and photos of ancestors I’d found in my parents’ attic. I’d found my taskmaster grandmother’s pedal-pump sewing machine too. Creativity and ambition converged as an impulse toward self-presentation that seemed less like style than performance art—still unknown in the upper Midwest.

  Besides jeans and leotards, I bought my clothes at thrift stores: spangled vests, bolero jackets, men’s suit coats. I bought curtains and sewed them into dresses. I was trying to look good, better. Yet, except for a Swedish art professor who taught Watercolor II and praised my outfits, the attention I got was startled.

  My roommates at the summer sublease were two or three years older than me, except Lana, who was my age, but she hadn’t dropped out of college at Christmas. When she asked why I had and came back so soon, I tried out answers. “I wanted to see Colorado, and I got the chance.” Lana frowned. “I needed to save to buy a car, so I can drive to a job and still attend class.” Lana frowned. “I felt guilty getting an education without first understanding the lives of the proletariat.” Lana looked stunned. “My sister was in a car accident, and I felt too sad to study.” Lana’s facial expression recast itself as sympathy.

  So, for a summer, in the company of Lana, I was pitiable, and she was kind. She took me to parties at her boyfriend’s. She introduced me. People said hello, then ignored me as music got loud. Besides beer, there’d be bong hits. I’d end up silent, an especially florid wallflower I thought one night, studying my dress’s fern-and-blossom fabric. Then summer ended, and I needed a new place, a habitat where I’d be surrounded by my own kind.

  In Biology of National Parks, a class with scads of students in it, the professor took roll every day, mangling my last name. At the time, it was Frigen, and people pronounced it Friggin or—afraid of sounding obscene—Frygen. My family said Frigane. In Spooner, everyone heard it before they read it and didn’t mispronounce it. So I’d never thought about it as a liability until now. I corrected the professor each time. One day, drowsy because I’d waited tables the night before, I put my head down, and I heard the professor say, “The first purpose of color change in chameleons is social signaling. Camouflage is secondary.” Then: “Hey, you with the weird last name, don’t sleep.”

  The students laughed. I sat up, casual-seeming. When class was over, I put my book in my backpack. I was wearing my last year’s knee-high moccasins with a dress made from silky, golden curtains—I’d seen a photo of Stevie Nicks and admired the way she’d paired incongruous items, forging together the alien and separating the familiar, as Nietzsche said, though he meant we should disrupt word clichés, not fashion clichés. Still, I felt like I was in grade school. I chewed the inside of my cheek, worrying. In a few subjects, I got As and didn’t know why. In others, I got low Cs and didn’t know why either.

  “Debra Frigen.” Frigane. I looked up. A boy towered over me. “James Stillman here.” He held out his hand, but I couldn’t shake it because I was adjusting straps on my backpack.

  “You moved here last June,” he said. “I saw you.”

  I nodded. I didn’t say that I’d moved here for the second time.

  I didn’t think much about him as I walked to my mustard-colored house by a swampy lake. He was tall, handsome, but his eyes looked like they belonged to a trapped animal.

  I was busy—my typewriter and folder of poems, my classes, my job, my life at the mustard-colored house where I shared a room with a girl named Maribel. In August, the view from its window had reminded me of adolescence: solitary days running a boat along a peaceful shore. But there was nothing solitary about a house with five renters, though it wasn’t fancy l
ike the summer sublease, which I couldn’t have afforded during the school year, so I might just belong with these new roommates, I’d told myself. Besides, in a college town, good leases turned over in an annual wave—not much else had been available. We all contended with chronic unrest over who did or didn’t do dishes, who’d eaten someone’s TV dinner, who’d had sex on the living room floor under a blanket with lights turned off and mood music playing, a cue everyone else in the house took.

  Except Ellen, who was religious. She flipped on the light and witnessed the spectacle, coitus interruptus under a lumpy blanket, then shrieked with her back turned until the boy was gone, and called a house meeting no one would attend. I mostly sided with Maribel, who’d been under the blanket in the living room because she didn’t want to lock me out of our room. Ellen, who’d signed the lease before the rest of us, had the biggest bedroom to herself—not that she’d have sex before marriage because her body was a temple, she said. Two girls named Paula, one from a farm, the other a cello player, weighed in. Farm-Paula rolled her eyes and said, “Lordy, I hope they used a rubber. One minute you’re frisky. Next thing you’ve got a baby with crappy diapers.” Cello-Paula said, “I personally couldn’t have sex in a living room like Maribel, but Ellen needs to get laid.”

  I was waiting tables one night when my boss, Kristine, called me to the phone. “Debra!” she said, accented, authoritarian. She was German. She’d married an American soldier during the Allied Occupation. She had a daughter my age, but they argued because the daughter skipped work, no warning, to go to motocross races with a boy who wore Budweiser T-shirts. Kristine left the receiver uncovered and said: “It is a call from a boy!”

  I must have looked surprised. No one called me. When I answered, James Stillman said he’d gotten my number from the campus directory, called my house, and one roommate said I was at work. He’d asked where. She and another roommate didn’t know, but they found Maribel—brooding and burning incense in our room, I figured—who’d told him the Crosstown Café. James wanted to go out. I was thinking: Friday, Saturday. Tonight, he said. With Kristine listening I didn’t feel I could say I didn’t get off work until late and had class in the morning. I said I’d call him after work.

  When I got home, Maribel, Farm-Paula, and Cello-Paula were waiting in the kitchen. Who was he? How did I know him? When I said he wanted to go out tonight, but it was late and I’d take a rain check, they objected, especially Maribel, who was in love, unrequited. “Not the first time he asks you, no,” she said. “Be picky later.” Farm-Paula: “We have our studies, and we have our real goal, boys.” Cello-Paula: “I tend to agree with Maribel this time. What class is that important?” I balked. My hair smells like kitchen grease, I said. I’d wash it, and it would take an hour to dry. It was fifteen degrees outside. Maribel threw her hands up. “For God’s sake, use a hairdryer. Catch a cold.”

  I called James Stillman. He gave me directions to his house.

  When I got there, he said he’d been insistent on tonight because his roommates had gone to a concert in Minneapolis, and he’d likely never have the house to himself again. He uncorked a bottle, lit a candle, put a jazz record on. He preferred Hendrix-style guitar. “But it makes conversation difficult.” He showed me his own guitars, erect like trophies in front of a lit aquarium. We sat facing this guitar-and-fish-tank tableau. I took off my coat. Maribel had insisted I forsake thrift store creations for jeans and her own best sweater, mauve, fluffy. “You look incredible,” James said. “I thought you might.”

  James rolled a joint and said my boss seemed mean. I said no, she was nice, just strict, no phone calls. He asked about my roommates, the ones who didn’t know where I worked, the one who did. I explained that I hadn’t known them when I moved in. I’d be moving to a new house soon—I’d arranged for Maribel’s friend to take my half-bedroom. During Christmas break I’d move to a house more rundown, but I’d have my own room. I didn’t tell James I didn’t know roommates in my new house either, that I’d never made friends. Though I’d dropped out for just a semester, according to papers I’d filed as I re-enrolled, I was already nontraditional, a student “with above-average financial stressors and potentially isolating life experience.” James asked where my new house was. Around the corner, I said. “From here?” He smiled and set down the joint. He started kissing as if to send a message: he had technique, also ardor, but he’d hold back until I murmured yes.

  Then the music stopped. James said it was cold—on the couch, outside. “Will your car even start?” It would, I said. If it wouldn’t now, it wouldn’t in the morning either, the coldest hour of the day. His face clouded up. “I don’t know anything about cars. I don’t even have a license.” This was unprecedented. Public schools still taught drivers ed. Some people didn’t have cars, but no one didn’t have a license. I asked why not. He said, “My so-called troubled youth. But I’m not getting into that.” He said I should sleep on the couch, and he’d go sleep in his room. Because I’d been drinking, he added, kinder. He pulled blankets off his roommates’ beds, heaped them on me, and went upstairs.

  When dawn came through the window, I went outside and let my car idle as I scraped frost off the windshield. People were driving to work in rows, their faces calm, brains freshly rinsed by sleep. Then the front door to the house banged open, and James shivered on the porch, bare-chested, disheveled. “Call me tonight after you get home from your whatever.” His voice echoed in the hush. A bundled-up girl walking past, book bag over her shoulder, glanced at me, then away. I went to class. But first I went to the mustard-colored house to get my textbook. Maribel said my morning return meant that I belonged to James Stillman now. “From here on,” she told me, “your attention is divided.”

  My Intro to Communication professor said, “After you see these pie charts, the reason for reciprocity in self-disclosure will hove into view.” A few days later: “I never appreciated the importance of Uncertainty Reduction Theory until a conversation with a colleague finally hove it into view.” This professor’s verbal tic and systematic enthusiasm about why we divulge intrigued me. But I got a D on my first paper, in which I wrote that that how we talk, act, and look is communication, and we change according to who we meet, becoming the person the other person wants. The professor said I was describing Accommodation Theory with semiology larded in, but none of this was on the syllabus.

  More puzzling, I was getting a D- in Freshman English, though I was almost a second-semester sophomore. I went to Dr. Darden Stoat’s office hours to ask why. In the spectrum of professor appearances, he was well groomed as opposed to, for instance, a history professor who wore the same pair of pants hooked at the waist with a paper clip for an entire semester. I spoke to Dr. Darden Stoat—Uncertainty Reduction Theory put to use. How was he? He hated the North. He hadn’t pictured himself at a small state college. Did he have suggestions for improving my papers? He pointed at me. “You digress. But your digressions ultimately pertain. But this scenic route wearies me because I’m busy when I read.” He described the term paper. “It will make or break you.”

  I worried about this paper in my new room that sometimes felt lidless—open to the infinity of ideas, best, worst. Train noises muffled the sound of roommates on the stairs. I’d hear a female giggling, stumbling, more footfalls, male voices. This would be the theater major who sometimes spent the night with two gay men. She slept naked except for pearls, she’d explained, though she was a virgin. Another roommate looked like David Bowie and sat in her room listening to David Bowie while crying—I’d asked why, and she’d cried harder and said she couldn’t tell me. I scrubbed the bathroom, though not the kitchen, preserved museumlike in a state of squalor that predated my arrival.

  I saw my room as my apartment: apart. But once in a while I came through the front door and, before going upstairs, gazed at the parlor— its upright piano with carved grapes, the colored glass in panes around windows facing the river, a divan from the Jazz Age. James lived a half-block away
now, and I tried to picture him here, sipping tea. I sat down. Dust rose in a puff. The front door opened, and one of my roommates scurried past.

  I juggled my job, homework, and James. Our mutual regard had surged, wariness too. Regard + wariness = hope forcing its way through gloom toward light. Call: I love you. Response: I love you too. I’d had this exchange with my mother, less often with my father. Rodney V. Meadow and I said it. Joe and I did. In courtship, the male initiates it. James choked out his part after we’d had sex, increasing the odds that I’d reciprocate because he was virtuoso. Besides homework he read less than he should, he read High Times, Guitar Player, and Playboy, which—say what you will—informed a slew of men who otherwise would never have known that women have orgasms, a subtle way of arriving at them.

  James had practiced on acquaintances, none of whom he’d loved, he said. He knew better than I did that delay, a perfectly timed pause, and then another, made fulfillment more intense. I was a host of emotion. I felt self-conscious, grateful, rattled, languid, necessary. What phrase covered this? I said I love you too, though I’d lately told myself in my room, staring at the ceiling, the unpredictable future, to say so carefully this time.

  One night I’d dallied too long with James before I went home. My Sacco and Vanzetti term paper was due the next day. I’d Xeroxed microfiche newspaper articles from 1919 to 1927 and circled words used by reporters that suggested presumptions about guilt or innocence— the paper’s gist. I’d tried not to dwell on old photos: Sacco’s and Vanzetti’s doomed faces; hysterical mobs that wanted Sacco and Vanzetti dead. But, reminding myself to avoid digressions that pertained yet wearied, I’d postponed writing. The theater major was out, I ascertained. My other roommate was listening to David Bowie.