My Unsentimental Education

by Debra Monroe

  One of her other sons was an alcoholic. Another was a police officer, suspended. Another was a deadbeat dad. Her stepchildren were dentists, architects, businessmen, or married to these and working in professions from the “What I Want to Be When I Grow Up” checklist for girls: Mother, Nurse, Secretary. My mother-in-law had been stranded without child support herself, so she was sympathetic to the ex-wife of the son who was the deadbeat dad. This former daughter-in-law had since married money. Marrying money had been my mother-in-law’s strategy too. Her husband made money but spent a lot, having pulled himself up by his bootstraps to escape a childhood so dire he craved luxury.

  Because Chet seemed sad, edgy, I invited him to the appointment where I made my retirement and insurance decisions. I chose the cheapest health insurance, since we were young. I put the minimum into retirement because we had debt. Then Chet said I should pick the best life insurance. This seemed inconsistent. We were young, as we’d agreed.

  I said so. Chet looked testy. The human resources aide had already said how unusual it was for the employee’s spouse to come, but nice, she added, that he was taking such an interest. Now she gave us a quizzical look. I signed on, reasoning that, if I were a man and Chet a woman, good life insurance would be the responsible choice. We drove home. Chet looked around, glum, and said he’d never have moved here if not for me.

  I might have used multiple job offers to get a better salary, but I’d been flummoxed to have offers at all; I’d worried about jinxing them. And now my name had been released to a mailing list. Or it was a new era in banking. Credit card offers arrived. I threw them away, but Chet needed credit to start a business, he insisted. I wasn’t afraid of him. Or maybe I was afraid for ten minutes here or there, and then I’d leave until he calmed down.

  Or it’s easy to say so now. But in Utah I could have moved out if I’d taken time off from classes—forgoing my stipend, explaining my predicament to the director of the program, staying in someone’s guest room, and bargaining with my landlord. Yet I didn’t because I had my work that, if I executed it well and on time, might one day be remunerative, and my love life had nothing to do with that. So I’d had work, and Chet had me. In Utah, I wasn’t exactly remunerative for Chet, but I’d been pleasant enough, or at least he’d liked the way I tamed life: curtains, nagging reminders to tidy up and pay bills.

  I didn’t want him to hit me, of course, so he got his way when I didn’t have the patience to argue, leave the house, then start the argument over again. Or the time. I’d come home from teaching—papers to grade, books waiting on my desk—and he’d want to talk. Impatient, I’d lose my temper. I shouldn’t have raised my voice. He shouldn’t have raised his hand. Most of the time he stopped himself, but not always. By today’s standards, using one-size-fits-all diagnostics, he was abusive. But I never thought his anger was my fault. I never felt helpless, or not for long. I had routes out, more than he did. I was outmatched physically. He was outmatched verbally. Years later, he’d be diagnosed with panic disorder so crippling he’d no longer be able to self-alleviate with tantrums.

  But I didn’t know that then. Our arguments escalated. Unseemly.

  I was the youngest professor in the department—the Doogie Howser professor, a student said. The director of graduate studies lived across the street, the dean three doors down.

  Seemly mattered.

  One night Chet and I were shouting about credit cards, windows raised for fall breezes, and the phone rang. It was Sally, a next-door neighbor who was more like me than anyone else on the street because, though Sally and her husband owned their small house, her husband worked two blue-collar jobs. She was pregnant a third time, a nice surprise, she’d said, yet her husband looked weary and dismal when I saw him: coming, going.

  I answered the phone and Sally said: “Are you all right?” I was, I said. She asked again, same phrase, mounting intensity, a little thrill of excitement, a new lease on life, a hobby: me. I mean she sounded happy to be on the phone. I wasn’t. I wanted to shut the windows, get back to grading, and I didn’t want to discuss the credit card argument with Sally.

  Perhaps she saw me as a twin-friend because her husband worked eighteen hours a day and was tetchy when he came home, upset about how she spent money, she told me. She started inviting me over in what she saw as my free time. But I’d be grading. Writing. I wouldn’t get tenure if I didn’t publish another book—though this hadn’t been true for the low-paying job in Washington, I thought wistfully, remembering those fun professors, but of course we’d be busy if we were colleagues, no time for whiskey and haggis.

  One afternoon I came home from watching Sally’s children while she went to the ob-gyn, and Chet was pressing dress slacks for dinner at the country club. He’d grown up doing odd jobs at a country club in Houston, so he helped me look through my closet to choose what to wear. In Spooner, we had just a golf club—people who paid annual greens fees—but anyone could drink at the golf club bar. I’d also had no time to sew and hadn’t yet adjusted myself for North Carolina, adventitious protective coloration, which was bright, neon, I realized in the country club dining room where I felt out of place in my gray dress with matching cardigan. I met the landlord’s wife, in her lime-green shell and skort, and the couple joining us, a stockbroker and his wife, in her orange, lock-knit sheath.

  The men talked about workers at our landlord’s factory. They talked about the senate race, a black former mayor running against the old, white incumbent. Neither the stockbroker nor the landlord admired the old, white incumbent. “But that doesn’t mean I’d vote for a black man,” the stockbroker said, ordering a drink from a black waiter. “Not that I’m against civil rights, but I draw the line when it comes to handouts.” I opened my mouth to object to the illogic, not to mention bad manners, yet I had no idea what to say. Chet kicked me under the table, a signal not to say.

  The stockbroker’s wife turned to Chet and said, “And what do you do, pray tell?”

  Chet started to explain what he used to do, but there were no oil pipelines in North Carolina. She looked bored. “What about you?” I asked, changing the subject. She was an interior designer, she said. Her husband said, “She shops with her friends, who sometimes take her advice.” She slapped him playfully. Chet was still talking about work he used to do, verifying himself as an earner. The stockbroker frowned and asked Chet why he’d moved to North Carolina. Red-faced, Chet said, “I moved for my wife’s career.”

  Our landlord, named Wyatt, said, “That’s right. He’s a stand-up fellow.”

  The stockbroker’s wife looked at me. “Oh my. What’s your job then?”

  I said I was a professor.

  She said she’d met her husband at the university where I taught. She made that old quip about earning her MRS. “So how do you all know Wyatt then?” Having missed cue upon cue, I said, “He’s our landlord.” Everyone at the table went silent. Nearby, diners murmured, clinked. I made a joke: “Every day we collect straw for Wyatt. What he doesn’t need, we use to thatch our roof.” Everyone laughed, relaxing. “Cute,” the stockbroker’s wife said.

  First semester, I went to campus five days a week. I lost a lot of time walking a mile there and home again, stepping around puddles and, once, onto a big rat that ate poison in someone’s garage, then staggered out to the sidewalk to die. I was used to field mice, not rats. I was jumpy, besides. This was the peak of the crack epidemic in the South Atlantic states with a parallel uptick in crime, a woman abducted on campus on a weekday midmorning even. But I’d never before lived in a city, not counting Salt Lake City, which doesn’t count, so I tried not to act like a rube and kept it to myself that I felt scared.

  I walked because I couldn’t afford the campus parking permit, $375. And most professors had schedules that put them on campus just Tuesday/Thursday or Monday/Wednesday/Friday. I made an appointment with my department chair to ask for a better schedule because I needed time to work on my next book. One of the recently hired women had publis
hed only short pieces, which would have been enough for tenure four years earlier when she’d been hired, but times change, so many PhDs, professors to spare. She’d been too servile, she told me, saying yes to niggling requests that had derailed her schedule, and now she was back on the job market, interviews at the big convention after Christmas.

  Chet and I spent Christmas at a hunting camp down a dirt road in Texas—putting the plane tickets on one of my new credit cards, $3,000 credit line each. Misjudging his projected income, my father-in-law had lost the big fancy house with the stairwell just like Tara in Gone with the Wind. I helped cook for Chet’s brothers and spouses, Chet’s stepsiblings and spouses, Chet’s nieces, nephews, great-nephew, and crazy grandma, who’d socked away money and gave my mother-in-law the hunting camp for a place to live.

  The furnace broke. My father-in-law made a fire outside and brought buckets of coals inside for warmth, reliving his bad childhood, my mother-in-law whispered, explaining his foul mood. The pipes froze, no baths. Chet’s brothers talked about living with the crazy grandma, how she used to hit them, then lock them outside. She followed me around with her walker, lenses in her glasses so thick they were gray, milky, and said: “Bet you would have liked to ride in my Cadillac when I went ninety, hey.” Or: “You know what they call a nigger in a Plano? A Plano nigger.” At night she’d go back to her warm cottage, and we slept in our winter coats, eight to ten people a room, most of them snoring.

  I was tired when I got back in January and went to see my department head. But before I could ask about a schedule that would let me work at home at least two days a week, he asked if I’d reviewed my fall evaluations—forms filled out by students about how effective the professor is. I hadn’t yet, I said, worried that I was negligent already, scolded. I’d had good evaluations in the past, but I’d taught only Freshman English. Now I was teaching graduate classes, upper-division classes, and supervising my especially self-doubting teaching assistant, whose parents had asked to meet me to ascertain if a master’s degree was right for their daughter, and the question that had nagged them most was whether she might still get married. “Good,” the father said, relieved.

  The department head smiled and said, “Your evaluations are great.” But when I asked about my schedule, his smile vanished: “No.” A male professor hired at the same time as me had a Tuesday/Thursday schedule, I knew. I didn’t say that. I stared at the tile floor with black heel marks, easy to remove with a bit of oil, then a swipe of Windex. I said, “I teach classes with heavy grading loads, and I agreed to supervise that teaching assistant, which you described as a favor to the department. Now I’m asking you for a favor.” He must have been shocked I hadn’t left the room yet. I was shocked. I’d said No to his No. My heart raced. My department head said, “Hmm, good point. And we don’t want to get a reputation for using up and spitting out our new hires. I’ll arrange something.”

  I walked home, stopping at a little grocer’s to buy dinner. Chet was out of state with the car. After listening to him for three months describe the business he’d start, how he’d one day take it public, sell stock, and I’d meanwhile pay the minimum on our monthly bills and we’d have $75 left for food, I told him to go tell Wyatt he was looking for work. Chet got mad. Did I not understand that Wyatt was in textile manufacturing and Chet was not? I saw Sally through the window, so I pulled the shade. I said, “Wyatt knows people.” Chet said, “You’ll turn my résumé into a hash.” Chet did go see Wyatt, though, and now Chet was staying in Georgia for weeks at a time and negotiating power easements.

  I passed Ginna’s house. She was new to town, having moved here, post-divorce, from a naval base in Virginia. I’d met her one day at the grocer’s as we’d chatted about coupons and produce, and she’d invited me over to show me an article that detailed Greensboro’s crime rate. Ginna had beaten back a would-be rapist with a hairbrush in her den, she told me. She repeated the story again and again as I said, “Thank God you scared him off,” or “Yes, I’ve heard of victims not remembering how the assailant looked.” I doubted her story and felt guilty for doubting it. But her fear rubbed off on me, and I started noticing grisly crimes: a guy who’d microwaved his roommate’s body parts; a house-painter who thought a client was uppity, put her in a septic tank, and shot her.

  It’s natural to want friends, and I scanned the landscape for possibilities. The male professor hired the same time I was lived in a house I passed on my walks to and from school, a house his parents had paid for, he said one rainy afternoon when he’d invited me in for dinner— lentils and cabbage, jug wine—and we discussed his literary analysis by way of Karl Marx, also by way of French and Raven’s bases of social power, which I vaguely remembered from Intro to Communication: reward power, the power to confer positives, and coercive power, the power to create negatives, the power of the otherwise powerless.

  At work, colleagues were friendly but formal. One talked to me about travel and opera. When he realized I’d never traveled, just moved, that I didn’t know opera, he stopped. It would have been easier to befriend graduate students because I’d been one recently, but I taught them, so I kept a distance. I’d run across an undergraduate I’d taught in the fall but wouldn’t again, the one who called me Doogie Howser—his name was Kip, and he’d see me walking in bad weather and offer me rides. I’d decline. One day, the winter sun sinking fast, he pulled over, opened his door, quoted a Dylan Thomas poem we’d read for class: “Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Hey, accept a ride already.”

  Late at night, I sometimes got long-distance calls from friends fading into the past. Chet had bought a new phone that was also a fax machine, and I was supposed to answer it while pretending to be Chet’s secretary (”You have reached Seismic Solutions”). A woman from my PhD program, who’d taken a job in South Carolina, called once a week to tell me my job was better, my life too, she said, because I was in love, not lonely. If I said my life was harder than it seemed, she asked for details, and I said, “Chet has been unhappy here. He had trouble finding work.” But he’d always had trouble finding work. He’d always been unhappy. “Something’s off-kilter,” I said. I felt like his mother or older sister. My friend wasn’t married, but she wanted to be. “Don’t get stuck on a Prince Charming fantasy,” she said. “That’s buying into normative gender stereotypes.”

  One night I got a call from my college roommate from Oconomowoc, and she told me James Stillman was dead. I’d like to report that the sudden weight of this knowledge—he’d been thrown from a car, and the car landed on him—gave me insight about life, how we spend it alone, or how we spend it with others, suppressing our private objections to public truths, some brand-new wisdom about belonging, not belonging, the knitting together, the untangling. I worried instead about sounding appropriate. I listened to the details of James’s death and expressed vague regret. Was I too sad to say so? Or afraid of dying myself? I felt haunted, I decided, and I couldn’t afford not-sleeping, the feeling that, in spite of my locked windows and doors, I wasn’t safe.

  Chet sometimes came home for long weekends, and I told him I was afraid, yet I hadn’t been in the past. Living in cheap housing, I used to hear night-noises and not mind that locks are illusions. In Kansas, the lock on the outside door was meant for a bedroom or bathroom, the door itself hollow, with a hole in its veneer where someone had kicked it. Chet listened to me as he checked the toner in his fax machine, organized the business cards and stationery he’d had printed, put his new TV on top of the not-yet-old TV. He’d bought a TV to use in Georgia because the ones in motel rooms were bad. He’d joined a gym too. He was earning money but putting it all back into his business, he said. When I said that a TV wasn’t a business expense, he said he gave up a thriving career in Utah for me, and I realized he now believed the mostly invented sections of his résumé.

  Spring was muggy, and the only air conditioner was in the living room. At night, I wanted to turn it off and open bedroom windows, but there’d been a spate
of break-ins, sliced window screens, the newspaper warning citizens not to trust nylon screens, and I studied my windows and decided I needed metal bars. I called Wyatt, who asked how Chet liked his work. “There’s nothing more useless than a man without a job,” Wyatt said.

  I said, “That’s true for all of us.” Wyatt said, “Honey, he needs a job to raise him up. Women don’t, not the same way.” And I felt bad for Chet, who’d assumed that Wyatt had seen his own ambition mirrored in Chet, but Wyatt had seen need. Noblesse oblige, I thought, the obligation of those with higher rank to help the lowly. Day by day, I’d lost sight of how strange our life had become, Chet’s aimlessness, our precarious finances. On the phone with Wyatt, I acquiesced, acting feminine, frail, saying I wanted to open my bedroom windows. He urged me to lock them and turn up the air conditioner. I couldn’t afford that. I’d been counting on warm weather for savings because the coal furnace had cost a fortune. I said, “Please, I need fresh air.” He said, “I’ll send a man over.”

  The man, Hiram, was so old and unsteady as he got out of his truck I worried he couldn’t carry his ladder. Slowly, he put quarter-inch mesh—fencing to keep out snakes and rodents—over my windows, with metal washers under the screw heads to keep the mesh from pulling loose. No one could break in now without using metal snips, Hiram pointed out. I handed him tools. I helped measure. I steadied his ladder. Hiram said, “You want just two windows done?” I said, “I can lock the other windows. I want to open these at night. I can’t afford to run the air conditioner to cool off the wrong side of the house.” Hiram said, “That air conditioner is as old as you are, girl. Used to belong to me.”

  I said that, as landlords go, Wyatt wasn’t bad. Hiram frowned. “He’s taken a shine to you then.” Hiram was married to Wyatt’s sister. She had dementia. “He and I are cordial,” Hiram said, “but we don’t see eye to eye. I’ve been a rabble-rousing union man since the thirties. But some strikers got shot. Union’s been a hard sell here ever since.”