My Unsentimental Education

by Debra Monroe

  He crawled under my car to look. “Yup, transmission,” he yelled, muffled.

  He slid back out, stood up, looked at my worldly goods piled in the backseat, a pillow, blankets, the old-fashioned lampshade resting against the window. “You heading somewhere?”

  I said, “Salt Lake City.” The future, I thought. Rock candy mountain where bluebirds sing. Or at least my last stop before I’d settle and friends would stop being bit players and match each other, become a circle, a unity, and all my selves would match too.

  He raised his eyebrows. “That’s a ways to go yet. You got family nearby?”

  An aunt I barely knew lived four hundred miles the wrong way. I didn’t say that. I said, “I’m moving. I’m about halfway there.” He looked at the car again, then asked how long I’d been at the truck stop, and I said just long enough to pump gas and pay for it.

  He said, “Then I don’t think you’ve lost much fluid. It would have been up in the gears out on the highway. These bolts have just shook loose. Looks like someone put them on and didn’t tighten them except by hand—like he plain forgot to go back in with the electric wrench. But why anyone would mess with the transmission pan? Makes no sense.”

  My idea, of course.

  The mechanic had said leave well enough alone. Still, he’d messed up the last step.

  “Where you spending the night?” the trucker asked.

  “I thought I’d drive into Laramie,” I said. The sun was gone now, gone.

  He said, “Look, I’ll tighten these bolts for you with my wrenches. Then get yourself to Laramie. In the morning, go to a mechanic and tell him to check your transmission fluid level and use power tools to get these bolts fastened down. I know a fair enough mechanic in Laramie.” The trucker took out a card and wrote on it. “Tell him I sent you and to fix that transmission pan right.” He left and came back with his tool box. When he slid out from under the car, he said, “I tightened them as tight as I could.”

  “Thank you,” I said. What else was there to say?

  He disappeared, never to be seen again.

  This kindness-of-strangers story matters because, years later, when I’d married a second time, my second father-in-law liked to run the dinner table conversation by asking everyone—his sons and daughters and their spouses; his wife’s sons and their spouses; the next generation; even a great-grandchild because one of the granddaughters got pregnant in high school—to each take a turn telling a story on a subject he’d pick. This night he asked us to describe the bravest moment of our lives so far. Someone said when he was in a 7-Eleven during a holdup. Someone else said parachuting. A step-sister-in-law said waiting through her baby’s fever. I said breaking down at a truck stop west of Cheyenne in an old car, with no money, lying underneath the car, and hearing a stranger’s offer and coming out from under to reckon with it. My father-in-law said, “That felt unsafe?”

  I said, “I mean I had to be calm even though I was scared because I’d staked everything on this move.” My second father-in-law cut his beef. “Hmm,” he said, “I was expecting something about risk, a story about physical valor.” I remembered how tense I’d been while driving, gripping the wheel, shoulders sore from teeth-gnashing worry about money, about the car’s ability to get me across the continental divide, about bad job statistics for people with PhDs someone had shown me before I’d left Kansas, the pressure to publish in the next few years or forget about a job. “Physical valor, no,” I said.

  How will we know it’s us without our past? John Steinbeck.

  My second ex-father-in-law—not as nice as the first, not even close—vanished too.

  In the Event of an Apocalypse

  I drove around one mountain range and across another. I kept getting higher, ascension.

  The air got thin. My ears popped.

  Then my car propelled itself down, gravity in charge, road signs on both sides blurring by. “This must be the place,” Brigham Young is known to have said when he and the handcart pioneers arrived in 1846. He’d felt sure because the Wasatch Mountains stand guard to the east, the Oquirrhs to the west, the Traverse Range to the south, the Great Salt Lake a moat across the north and west, geographical barriers keeping outsiders out.

  I moved into a tiny duplex, matching shotgun apartments. The other apartment housed the landlord’s devout cousin and the cousin’s wife. The landlord told me their apartment was identical to mine. “Not a great layout,” he said, “because tenants use common walls at the same time.” My neighbors and I opened matching front doors at the end of the day, cooked dinners in adjacent kitchens, sat in adjacent living rooms, turned out lights in adjacent bedrooms; in the morning, we scrambled for the last of the hot water in adjacent bathrooms.

  These dual apartments might seem symbolic: on the one side, husband and wife; on the other, a misfit typing into the night, quiet typing, clicking. I’d bought a computer when my student loan arrived, chunks of plastic that cost more than I’d so far spent on a car. But no. I didn’t want my neighbors’ life. And I wasn’t sure about my own. My landlord, who’d described himself as “a congenital Mormon, born that way, not my fault,” told me the neighbor-wife was nice but to avoid the husband, who’d try to convert me, or shun me. He shunned me, no preamble. We spoke once when he banged on my door to say that leaving my porch light on until eleven the night before had cost him sleep and he hoped I wouldn’t make late nights a habit. His eyes flicked over my arms, my sleeveless blouse.

  In the grocery store, men sometimes gave me the same once-over, curious but repulsed, because my bare arms, my skirt two inches above the knee, seemed slutty. Mormon women end up with a moderate version of purdah, because clothes cover sacred undergarments with insignia on the nipples, navel, and knees. Both men and women wear these. I noticed telltale ridges beneath clothing. I’d see them—like old-fashioned Victorian underwear—hanging on clotheslines as I walked to school. Salt Lake City was a “monoculture,” a professor said during orientation, exceptions being out-of-staters doing doctoral work, skiers, and missionary-converted Tongans on the west side.

  Male classmates stared in a different way.

  We all lived in one small neighborhood a few miles from campus. The students came from all over, Massachusetts, Ohio, New York, Hawaii, France, California. But only a few of us were studying in the same track, fiction with a secondary focus on history and theory of the novel, “narratology” as a classmate who liked postmodernism and wore a toupee liked to say. But no matter whether you were studying literature, rhetoric, linguistics, creative writing, we were all new to the city and not Mormon. Getting a PhD was enforced proximity. We saw each other in classes by day, at parties at night.

  What did I think about marriage now? In a city where bridal shops outnumbered bars, on a campus where the word “covenant” appeared over and over in undergraduate papers I graded, I wondered if I’d taken my vows too lightly. If so, I’d failed in a way I couldn’t fathom, because I’d trusted the minister who’d said during our ceremony that the key to marriage is believing this: “I can grow. My spouse can grow. Thus, the marriage grows.”

  I’d tried that. And spent hours since noting it wasn’t enough. My husband had been “mellow,” as everyone said. Translation: He didn’t like work. No one does. But most of us accept it’s necessary. Yet if I’d met someone with aspirations, wouldn’t I have had to turn mine into genteel hobbies that fit around the edges of womanly duty? Like all recent divorcées, I’d sworn off marriage. But I wanted it, bosom of family, cozy ideal. Marriages did exist in which women had careers. I read about them in famous people’s biographies; I met a few women who lived this life. But it seemed to require money. It didn’t happen much in the lower middle class. I applied myself to the life of the mind.

  I didn’t let my thoughts wander, daydreams. But I night-dreamed, urges beyond willpower. The only other recurring dream I had at the time was about ledgers: long columns recording money spent, short columns recording money earned. But when I dreamed a
bout sex, or the shimmer of desire for it since I’m a staid midwesterner raised to be respectable, I dreamed about the moments before, the premonition of that clumsy tumble toward astonishment. Inappropriately. I dreamed about the husband of a woman I liked. Twice, I dreamed about a seventeenth-century poet who spoke ardently from his grave.

  The male graduate students were tense too. We’d all embarked on this elongated run toward a career that might not happen. We’d left behind friends and lovers. Parties were courtship displays, if you consider courtship a biological event and not the subject of a sonnet cycle. The men preened, proving strength by consuming vast amounts of toxins.

  The women preened, consumed toxins, awaited. One couple eloped within days of meeting, then fought about whether to divorce or annul. This was the 1980s, free love twenty years old, if not a hundred. I can’t speak for the wives of the English Romantics, but for me the sexual revolution made it hard to say No. One classmate asked me out and returned again and again to his pet topic, that we had to have sex because not to was to go through life as if wearing blindfolds. And after the just-once, he spoke to me like I was annoying.

  Another graduate student made a case for himself, but he had that toupee, which didn’t quite match his remaining hair—this was before balding men shaved their entire heads to reveal, voilà, the phallic head. He said Robert Coover’s work was an assault on cliché-ridden templates society imposes on us. He kissed me. He must have thought I had hyperactivity disorder manifesting as arousal because I tilted a lot, obliging him to tilt. I wanted the toupee to slip so he’d take it off. He wouldn’t try to go to bed with it on, would he? Fake hair was a template imposed by society. Or maybe I tilted to seem hysterical, uptight. It worked. He stopped, never unveiling his head nor his innermost self.

  Next, I met someone who’d finished coursework for a PhD in folklore but hadn’t written his dissertation. “Or I’m taking eleven years to write it,” he said, wry, self-deprecating. He was tall, ten years older than me. He carried snacks in his sports coat pockets. He lived in a house famous for squalor and good parties. We discussed where we grew up, or where I grew up, because he knew where he grew up, Brooklyn, and it didn’t interest him now. He urged me to describe northern Wisconsin customs and jokes. One night he’d cadged tickets to the symphony, where, during intermission, he cadged brownies and asked me to put them in my purse. Afterward, we went to his dissertation director’s house—the dissertation director an old friend now, no longer expecting the dissertation.

  As we sipped wine, my date asked me to tell Wisconsin jokes. He liked the Ole and Lena jokes, not unlike Tarzan and Jane jokes you might have heard at summer camp when you were ten, jokes where the point is to utter the unutterable, or to spell out how procreation occurs: sex instruction with comedy included. I’d heard these jokes from my sister, who’d married into a Norwegian family and seemed to be cataloging them. When I first told them to the man I was dating, he chuckled, as in hmm, intriguing, meantime sifting through his memory for how these jokes correlated to jokes circulating in other subcultures, as though he were doing research while also dating, killing two birds, one stone.

  But when he asked me to tell the jokes at the house of the folklore professor, the professor and his wife looked puzzled. I’d sewn a black sateen dress to wear to the symphony, so I felt dressed up but uncouth as I recited, wondering if the professor and his wife thought I thought these jokes were rollicking party banter and not, as my date had said to me, vehicles for the transmission of beliefs from a culturally isolated corner of the Midwest that deserved analysis before they vanished. All well and good, I thought. But Spooner was still there and its inhabitants still told lewd jokes and perhaps would forever.

  A date gone this awry might turn out fine if, for example, we could have gone back to my apartment and slipped off my shiny dress and made love like James Stillman and I used to do in Wisconsin, like Max and I used to do in Kansas, where you get into tried and true positions that take you to brief ecstasy. Then we’d relax, agree that the joke-telling had turned awkward. If the sense of intimacy lasted, in time I’d even be able to tell my date he needed to dry clean his sports coats. But the sex was polite, muted. Because he was polite, muted? Because his feelings were? I’ll never know. He left afterward because he had to teach at a community college fifty miles away in the morning—by which time I was packing up my laundry to take to the laundromat a block away.

  I stood outside my door, locking up, and the devout neighbor’s wife came outside. Her husband wasn’t with her. She said, “Do you have a new boyfriend?” I must have looked startled. She said, “Don’t be embarrassed. I saw he picked you up wearing a jacket, and you had on that beautiful dress. Later, I heard voices in your bedroom.” I sometimes heard noise in her bedroom, but I turned up music to drown it out. She said, “God doesn’t want us to go through our lives alone, no matter how hard it is to be with someone.”

  A few minutes later, sorting, loading, measuring detergent, setting some washers on hot with full agitation, others on warm with low agitation, I thought how brute needs get mixed up with tradition, so confusing, and I shut the last lid. I’d gotten picky, having had good sex with Rodney V. Meadow, with James Stillman, with Max, who still phoned me, his voice husky as he said he missed me, which might be true, but he wasn’t well traveled and seemed to be angling for an invitation to visit, see the world by way of your ex-girlfriends. Then an extreme sports guy—except no one called them that yet, we called them ski bums, these non-Mormon guys who’d moved to Utah for the mountains and snow and spent warm months hiking and rock climbing—asked me for help with his laundry.

  I was relieved to be useful in an uncomplicated way. I explained sorting for color, choosing settings, and how to save money on dryers by taking out lighter pieces first and folding them as the heavy pieces continued to dry. As we waited through wash, rinse, spin, tumble, we noted we were the same age, except I was getting a PhD. “PhD, oh wow,” he said. He was an undergraduate, philosophy and environmental geoscience. The double major had slowed him down, he said, as had his job teaching skiing at one of the resorts. With regard to the laundry tutorial, he said, “That was helpful. I’m grateful.” He’d been raised in a suburb, in Delaware. I said, “Your mother didn’t teach you before you left home?” He said, “It’s not easy being green.” I thought he meant something about geoscience. He said, “Green like greenhorn. The lesson takes when the pupil is ready.”

  Several months later on a Friday night, the phone rang, a call from a party a few blocks away. The other woman in the fiction track had told the revelers she was sure I owned a blender because I’d gotten conventional wedding gifts whereas she and her new husband had requested matching motorcycle chaps, a new tent, sleeping bags for winter camping, and I heard laughing, shouting. The guy who’d bedded me and every other single female with his line about how not having sex is like going though life as if blindfolded got on the phone and asked me to bring my blender because he was making margaritas.

  Having divorced by age twenty-six was my distinction, in the same way, for instance, that having a toupee or motorcycle chaps was someone else’s. I realized this almost as soon as I got to Utah when I one day walked to school and a car pulled up, its door swung open, and a man with pants unzipped—rhythmic juddering, once witnessed, never to be unremembered—sprayed me and drove off. Flashers flash everywhere, especially in cities. Yet even for a city, Salt Lake had a lot of pesky sex crime. The paper was always reporting Peeping Toms or some man who’d masturbated on women’s doorknobs.

  I had to teach soon, so I hurried to campus, into the restroom, used soap and water. I went to the big office I shared with other students, water splotches on my clothes, and my officemates asked what happened, and I explained. I started crying. Embarrassed, I explained the crying by saying I’d also just that morning realized my ex-husband, who, according to our divorce decree, was supposed to repay me in small installments the cost of the cars I’d bought him, hadn’
t yet sent any money, and I’d never be able to collect it living here because I’d only been able to collect it in Kansas by knowing when his band was playing and going to wake him when he still had cash, and it was sad I’d never spend that part of my student loans on education now. Or I was upset about the flasher, deflected crying. One officemate said, “Holy shit! You’re divorced already.”

  I should have stayed home from the margarita party and worked on a paper, due in a week, but instead I’d been fretting about the folklore boyfriend I’d continued to date. Men and women had paired off since the beginning of time, I thought. Why was it hard now?

  I had only an inkling that trouble-with-love wasn’t just my confusion—though it was, in part—but also the era’s, a slow shift in understanding what wooing and mating would be during a large-scale movement of women into new professions, large-scale movement period, mobility, not just upward but away from familiar communities where you date your neighbor’s cousin or someone you met at your sister’s wedding, friends serving as dating letters of reference. No wonder arranged marriages persist, I thought. But every time I wondered if my choices had been affected by factors beyond my control, I resisted. What did I have if not control? Just secondhand furniture, an old car, and a blender.

  I put the blender in a huge purse, went to the party, and met my second husband.

  I did this to distract myself. Or to keep options open, avenues to the future.

  I didn’t marry him that night, but I drank too much and brought him home.

  He was the department head’s wife’s brother’s roommate. The department head had moved to Salt Lake City because of the job, and his wife—like Ruth, whither thou goest—followed. Then her brother followed her. Then her brother’s college roommate followed.