My Unsentimental Education

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My Unsentimental Education Page 7

by Debra Monroe


  I’d have to write the whole paper now or go to school and beg for an extension—uncertain outcome. Writing now was risky too. I sometimes got late-night brain static, worry in the form of freeze-frame images: authority figures with stern faces. As a child, I’d lie awake thinking that ghosts of people who’d died in our house just before we bought it were mad about renovations. Deferentially, I never touched the banister, the only surface not replaced or refinished. My mother would wake to find me standing over her as she slept. Worried, she took me to a doctor who’d prescribed yellow Valiums, children’s Valium. My dad had the big blue ones. My mother dosed me once, then shuddered and tossed the bottle out. That night in my rented room, I pictured Sacco and Vanzetti, looking sad about their trivial afterlife as a Freshman English paper topic. Finally, I put my coat over my winter nightgown, made a plan, and started typing. I read what I wrote, marked it up, retyped, read what I wrote, marked it up, retyped. Again, again.

  Perfectionism I’d so far expended on poems. By nine a.m., I didn’t have time for another draft, so I hurried to campus. Dr. Stoat said he’d grade our papers—quickly, he stressed—then confer with each of us in private. I handed mine in, avoiding his skeptical gaze.

  A few days later, I went to see James. His GPA had dropped, but a trendy psychology professor with a ponytail would hypnotize him to study harder, a tactic that had worked in the past and would again, James said. James had come to college at age seventeen because his social worker persuaded the judge that self-betterment occurs at college, not in the juvenile justice system. First, James got a job at a campus cafeteria. He didn’t like it, but it qualified him for a job at a sandwich shop, which was where he’d worked when he’d spotted me. Now he sold pot. This paid well and conferred status. Everyone he hoped to impress wanted some and kowtowed. When I arrived that night, one roommate after another greeted me, then departed. James and I sat in the living room.

  The weather had rallied—spring’s foreshadowing, its foreplay—and I was wearing a tropical skirt with a leotard and a pair of pricey boots my mother had bought when she’d visited, postulating that I didn’t have a better house with better roommates because I didn’t have better clothes. She also bought me underwire bras that made my torso statuesque, and a coat—not as warm as the Persian lamb coat I’d found at a thrift store.

  I settled onto the couch, and a roommate named Bob Barr came back and asked James for a private confab. When James returned, he said Bob Barr wanted weed to take to a party, and James gave him some, free. “This new batch is good. I’d like to get the word out,” he said, sounding like my dad trying to increase foot traffic at the auto parts store. Then: “Bob just gave you a compliment.” Bob Barr was a short guy who once took first place in a contest for chugging beer. James said, “Bob said that when you first came in wearing your modern coat. . . .” I’d worn it because the temperature was in the forties. My expression must have changed. James proceeded carefully now, as if he’d read a book about how to encourage your girlfriend to make the most of her looks. “Bob said you always look good, but he didn’t know how good until you got rid of the old lady clothes.”

  I thought about how to answer. “Like I dress for Bob Barr,” I said.

  James laughed. “But I like the new coat. And your sexy boots.”

  I didn’t want to look like a beauty queen contestant, or a Bob Barr fantasy either. And I was on a budget—trying to seem as if I preferred carefully mingled cast-offs, the mishmash effect. But I didn’t own a full-view mirror and got just blurred or fleeting glimpses. Now James had dropped a hint. I was feeling demoted when he showed me an ornately inked butterfly on a scrap of paper thin as insect wings. “Pretty,” he said. “It’s blotter.”

  I thought of the blotter my mother had put on her desk to keep pens from scratching the wood. James waited for me to react. I didn’t know yet that love seesaws forever between regard for the other and wariness for the self (self-protection). I thought James and I would one day get to reciprocal poise, and I didn’t want to lose face first. “LSD,” he said. I rolled my eyes: “I know that.” I didn’t. But I didn’t want to seem like Farm-Paula. James grew up in a real city, Milwaukee. He said, “So you’ve tripped then. In Spooner?” This seemed unlikely. I lied again and said, “Colorado.” Mentioning my time in Colorado with an ex-boyfriend older than James gave me back my edge. James looked hurt as he pulled the butterfly into quarters. “Ink amount determines potency,” he added. I didn’t say no, because No is complicated. Besides, I thought, I had an easy day tomorrow, lunch shift at the Crosstown Café, then my appointment with Dr. Darden Stoat.

  But having lied made the tripping harder, because later—when I looked out the window and saw short people trekking down a street daubed in yellow, yellow pools of light, the people carrying fishing poles, and I thought would they really, in March?—I couldn’t ask James if he saw them too. If he didn’t, if we weren’t supposed to share the seeing, he’d know I was a first-timer. I’d have to retract my lie, and retractions are hard, harder still if you’re tripping. I put my thoughts into formation. I gave my thoughts orders. James burst into laughter. “Look. Trolls who fish.” But enough about later. Carpe diem. First, he made us sandwiches and said, “Of course, it takes an hour to get off.”

  I nodded, grim. How long would “off” be?

  James said, “I don’t know how coming down has been for you in the past, but I try to sleep. Coming down is as bad as getting off is good.” An algebra of pleasure and penance, I thought. Pleasure’s first spate passed through. Vines on my ultratropical skirt twisted in a way that seemed right for this room with wet air, aquatic décor, the cumulative effect of a bubbling aquarium with bright fish darting, guitars like Neptune’s forks, and the lush tangle in the window, a houseplant called a dragon tree or corn plant. I held a cup of Red Zinger tea, and the last swallow was a pool surrounded by fronds stirring—a landscape in a cup, miniature and antic, like a snowstorm in a globe, except it was summer here—and James took it to the kitchen sink. We went upstairs and had sex, only amplified. Hours passed. “We’ve peaked,” he said. Sensation crackled like heat-lightning.

  He slept. I redirected bad thoughts, released good ones, but I got angry thinking that James liked me more in new clothes and didn’t know how grueling the LSD had been, was. These thoughts jammed, proliferated, so I put on my clothes and modern coat and went home, the black sky getting thinner, letting in light. At home, I flipped through newspapers one of my roommates had left in a stack by the door. I found a story about the First Annual Tattoo Convention, with a dozen black-and-white photos, the finalists for the Most Beautifully Tattooed Man and Most Beautifully Tattooed Woman Contests.

  I got scissors, cut out these photos, and taped them on the bathroom wall that I’d sometimes surmised needed a poster, pictures, something, and, using bits of newsprint, cut geometric figures to counter the photos. It made an interesting effect, this bathroom with its claw-foot tub, ancient sink, commode with tall tank and chain, ceiling covered by pressed tin, and now the wall with inky-paisley men and women framed by triangle and boomerang shapes. The sky outside was blue now, and I remembered my ordinary life—the Swedish professor who’d like this bathroom, I thought, just as he’d liked the doodling in my notebooks better than paintings I’d completed for class, and he’d asked me to major in art. The sun, all the way up, shone through a grimy window onto the wall, and I saw how crazy I’d been. I ripped it all down, took a bath and hurried to the Crosstown Café.

  My mother had brought my bicycle in the car trunk when she’d visited. I rode it to work over slushy streets, thinking exertion would sweat out the last of the drug. Daylight was bright. Traffic droned.

  I locked up my bike and went inside to eat the special: green beans dressed with Roquefort cheese, a pile of cold chicken and hard-boiled eggs. I contemplated Kristine behind the counter. I felt love and fear. She was sublime as she told me the old man who rented an upstairs room had been incontinent. “He needs not a r
oom but family or a private clinic and he has neither, nicht.” She also worried about the cook, who would do well to take a short stay in a sanitarium, Kristine felt. She was mad that a man who’d come last night for all-you-can-eat had wanted more twice. She’d asked him, “More which? More chicken? More dumplings?” Both, he’d answered. She’d given him a saucer with a half-dumpling and a wing. “I said, ‘You might get indigestion. You watch it. You should lose weight for health!’” I laughed, but my laugh sounded loud, so I looked at the counter and pretended to write on a napkin.

  Kristine said, “Debra, you are blushing. Just your ears. Red ears. Is it a fever?”

  I didn’t want her to see my eyes, windows to the soul, also dead give-away that someone is addled due to illegal drugs. I clocked in. During lunch rush, I didn’t make mistakes. Then I cleaned up, and the man who washed dishes, lurching because one of his legs was shorter than the other, brought me a tub of clean silverware and twisted his ankle. The silverware flew, each piece a missile with a silver stream shooting behind it. I grabbed the dishwasher to keep him from falling and somehow caught pieces of silverware, knowing that any I didn’t catch would need to be rewashed. Kristine clapped her hands, her cue for speed. She couldn’t afford to keep us on the clock past two. I picked up the rest off the floor, washed and dried quickly, slipping spoons, knives, forks into assigned compartments, and these slow-moving pieces had thread-sized, tinsel-like tails.

  I left, pedaling across town.

  I saw myself in a plate-glass window, perched on my bike. I looked like the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz. I’d unloosed my hair from its hairnet. I had on my uniform and white shoes. My coat flapped behind me. The hardest part about doing drugs was the acting-upon-acting, I decided. Stone-cold straight or sober, I acted: trying to be who Kristine believed I was, who my roommates hoped to live with, who the girl would be that belonged to James. My self that I preferred stayed underneath those facets, each facet angled to please a different person. To thine own self be true. Polonius, you windbag, I thought. People would fire me, fail me. I hurried up the stairs of Hibbard Hall and sat in Dr. Darden Stoat’s office. I said: How are you? I thought: How am I?

  I worried that, apart from not passing Freshman English, I might have recurring, small-scale hallucinations forever. Probably not, though. Most people who drop acid don’t turn out like the legend of Art Linkletter’s daughter, I thought. Dr. Darden Stoat’s beard was shiny as sealskin, and he rubbed it, stalling. So I’d fail, I thought. One fail would be like getting that first small dent in my car. Now I could relax in school. I longed for my car next. Why had I been bicycling in winter? Why was I still wearing this waitress suit, my hair an unkempt snarl? I could do with a short stay in a sanitarium, I thought, missing Kristine. All my selves felt jumbled, not separate like forks, knives, spoons.

  Dr. Stoat said, “I was dumbfounded when I read this paper.”

  Fine, I thought. You try being me and writing it.

  “I need to tell you something. Or inform you.”

  I’d taken the scenic route again.

  “I’ll be using it in future classes as an example of a successful execution of this assignment.”

  “My grade?” I asked.

  “Highest possible,” he said. “Obviously.”

  Nothing obvious about it, I thought. Gold afternoon sun flickered though the slitlike window onto the edge of his wire-rim glasses. I shook my head. “Are you ill?” he asked me. He shoved a wastebasket in front of me. I moved my chair so light wouldn’t hit his glasses, so the tiny star on the corner of the lens would stop pulsing. I started to cry.

  I hadn’t cried since my sister was in the hospital, chattering like a baby. That was sad too. I cried from relief. The paper would make or break me; I’d been made. I cried because I’d worked while Kristine watched with a hurt expression because she knew something was wrong and I didn’t confide, and she was too mistaken about my character to assume the worst, that I was doing drugs at work; I didn’t do phone calls at work. I’d hurried to meet Dr. Stoat, who thought I was good, but I almost wasn’t. Then I remembered Vanzetti, who looked more stricken, more woebegone than Sacco, less ready for the end to which his pamphlets and faith in righteous objection to unjust authority had led.

  I needed to make a quick exit from Dr. Stoat’s office.

  He hadn’t pictured his future at a small state college. He’d likely read a memo from Student Medical Services about suicide prevention—a kind word here or there making a difference. Separate facilities for mental health didn’t exist, so he couldn’t send me there. He said, “Are you failing other classes?” I’d have my best GPA so far. I said so. He produced a crisp, white handkerchief and gave it to me. I demurred: how would I get it back to him? He waved his hand in the air, impatient. “You’re in trouble. Am I right?”

  I must have nodded.

  He said, “You’re not the first female college student to find herself pregnant.”

  I stopped crying. I was deciding how to say I was in a different trouble, drug-related. But not that. His glasses were dull now, unlit. Spiral of silence, I thought. It hove into view. Those with an opinion in the minority don’t speak. We were two people in a room. I wasn’t a minority. Yet I was minor. He was major. He waited for me to answer.

  When I got home, I hauled my bike into the parlor and leaned it against the piano. I took a bath. Wearing a robe, my hair in a towel, I used the green phone in the hallway to call James. I wanted to yell at him for giving me LSD. But I’d pretended I’d had it before. I wanted to yell at him for sleeping through the bad part while I’d gone home, cut out newspaper photos, decorated and undecorated the bathroom, then worked. “It was busy,” I said at last. I described the streaks of light behind moving silverware. He said, “They call those trails.” What was High Times for if not to hone your vocabulary? I told him about riding my bike, but not that I’d felt I was pedaling in place like the witch in the tornado. “I got an A on my paper,” I said. He said, “You went to campus today? Man, I slept.”

  The weight we’d thrown around shifted. I didn’t care anymore if he liked my coat or, come summer, my homemade sundresses that looked winsome and breezy with matching flip-flops, two for a dollar at Wool-worth’s. LSD is best taken in glorious weather when you aren’t jostling for power with your boyfriend, I decided. That summer, we made love outside, fireflies flashing. Or the moon shone, and we swam near a waterfall someone made by attaching corrugated tin to posts and stretching it across a creek. I fumbled upward in the downstream until my hands grasped the tin’s edge: all that roiling and churning demystified. I had a solid A going in Shakespeare II, another in Spenser class, both taught by a professor I’d been warned would be hardest. Yet every unfamiliar idea was footnoted, and every progress was a story: rise, fall, rise. “Ah, but you have a knack for getting past the literal to layers of symbols,” Dr. D. Douglas Waters said.

  I met stolid, marriageable boys—in class, at Sigma Tau Delta meetings. But at a small college people know you by reputation. Jimi Hendrix, Are You Experienced? Yes. I’d had that interlude with a thirty-two-year-old factory worker. I dated a drug dealer. I wore odd clothes. But Bob Barr’s bungled compliment had taught me that you can break one rule if you imbed the broken rule in the midst of convention. I’d wear jeans, a black leotard, then add just my coral-colored jacket with silver-embroidered poinsettia flowers—one of two pieces from an old lady sleeveless-dress-with-matching-jacket ensemble. Then, for a poetry event, I’d wear just the sleeveless dress with plain black tights.

  A girl from Oconomowoc—a wealthy Milwaukee suburb, James told me—dated one of James’s roommates, and she asked me to live with her and two of her friends next year.

  But before the lease began, I did LSD one more time, and James promised to stay awake. He didn’t. I shook him gently, and he started yelling, and maybe he couldn’t stop because he remembered none of this later, but he shoved me out his bedroom door, toward the stairs, telling me to go, go. He d
idn’t throw me. Or did. Who can say now? I tumbled down, one bruising step at a time, and walked home in the dark in my pink negligee, circa 1959. When he phoned the next day to say where had I gone and thank God I was okay, I broke up with him. But the next time I worked, Bob Barr dropped off James in the parking lot across from the café. Kristine stared out the window. “Were you expecting him?” she asked. She could tell by my face I wasn’t. She said the dishwasher would walk me to my car. I shook my head no. I drove James home and said not to embarrass me at work. A few days later I came out of class, and he was waiting.

  Dogged pursuit of an aloof woman is celebrated in Renaissance poems. The woman’s refusal will whet the lover’s desire—even if this isn’t what you want. Next, James broke his leg because he went skydiving, perhaps to demonstrate vigor and biological fitness. Why now? I thought. Finals were starting. He was failing Social Work 3305, Human Behavior and Social Environments. I had an exam the next day, but I brought him food. A week later, Bob Barr called me on the green phone and said that James—who’d used Bob Barr’s car to get his license, then bought himself a car, then rolled it while driving fast, possibly drunk— wasn’t injured, except his leg was still broken.

  “He needs you,” Bob Barr said. “He’s bad off.”

  I felt responsible. Intro to Psychology talk about “boundaries” hadn’t begun yet.

  I made a deal with James. I’d be his girlfriend if I didn’t have to see him often. We’d have sex, but not over and over. One orgasm for each of us each time. “I have less spare time than you,” I said. I couldn’t stop him from doing drugs. He sold a few kinds, all of which I’d sampled, then, curiosity sated, I got back to work. But I didn’t want them now.

 

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