My Unsentimental Education

by Debra Monroe

  She kept an eye on me while finishing her daily blog for FiercePharma, then doing her exercises, Brute Yoga. I listened to the clicking of her laptop keyboard. Then I watched her curve into C-shapes, S-shapes. “Gary never believed I might really be sick,” I said. She said, “He’s been terrified. He doesn’t know how to help in the ways you want,” she added, her smiling face upside-down between her legs, “and that’s why I’m here.”

  Gary came in with my prescription, also two bouquets of flowers, one for the bedroom, he said, the other for the living room, because my friend from Vermont, the empath who’s a medical reporter, had told him I’d want to move around, a change of scenery.

  The doctor had said to take two pain pills, one too many I realized during a phone call with my sister who’d called to say she loved me, her instilled kindness. We agreed that the geographical distance is hard. Yet I’ve never been able to convince my family that it wasn’t mere choice to live far from Spooner, that my career had required most moves. But Gary’s family proved to me that shared geography keeps a shared language intact, a language of hearth, home, meals, chores, family lore. The new language of work had connected me to new people, a network, and I’d moved up, around, sideways, and forward.

  I felt dizzy—and maybe it was just me, confused, defensive—as the phone conversation drifted to the idea that I hadn’t tried to stay close, and I said I had, visiting, calling. I’d felt like a ventriloquist, projecting this voice here, that voice there. “All of me tried hard,” I said, standing, woozy, and I must have sounded shrill, because Gary was taking the phone away, saying into it that I was sick, his hearty manner turned up high, helpful.

  My dad called Gary, asking how I was, then shouting so loud I heard it: “Praise the Lord.” My dad didn’t have this exclamatory tic when I was little. Lutherans sing it, but he got in the habit of saying it at his all-school reunion, he told Gary, due to an old classmate, Gloria, renamed GloryB now. “Sounds like a fun reunion,” Gary said, still watching baseball. When Gary hung up, I said, “Thank you.” He smiled at me. “No problem.”

  My friend went back to Vermont. Fraiser came home from his mother’s.

  Marie understood I’d had a surgery, and then forgot. Gary had brought her to my hospital room, straight from her summer internship teaching tumbling, and she’d looked at the tubes, the IVs, and got mad. “Why didn’t you say?” But at home I couldn’t sit all the way up for weeks because an interior seam tore and had to be redone; she got used to me reclined. Gary drove me around with the passenger seat flat. Treetops, light poles, buildings flew by. He helped me out of the car, holding my purse. He’d been right, if too far in the future, losing sight of now, when he’d said that this would be a rehearsal for the end.

  One day, I lay on the couch thinking that life is a race, a skirmish. You try to be like everyone, but not exactly, because you’re supposed to rise above the fray, the fray a cluster of kinship, and strangers too, some of whom become kin, akin, and then the fray unravels.

  School began again—for Fraiser, for Marie. I was on medical leave. Fraiser came in and started his homework. Gary was unpacking groceries. Marie arrived full of news about algebra, other students, teachers, history, a dance, boys, and she was standing a few steps up the staircase, and I was lying down, and I thought it was good she didn’t know how confusing it will be to secure her place in the world. None of us knows because being young is oblivion, nirvana, that hard-wired impulse to suppress some if not most of our parents’ warnings and directives. But I wouldn’t change the unsystematic approach by which I got to here, I thought. Here is right. Marie said, “You’re not sad or anything?”

  “Not sad,” I said.

  She said, “Good. Because I have to tell you. I need new shoes again.” I must have looked exasperated. She said, “I can’t help it. The ones I just got—they’re already all wrong.”

  I break with tradition then, using weddings as a means to my end, not The End, ending instead with two funerals and a complicated hysterectomy. But I’m not morbid. I don’t think about my body—guts, bones, protoplasm, a container of fear and desire—as something to monitor for signs of decline, not yet. One Sunday I was thinking how well fed I’d felt after I’d returned from brunch with new friends, all of us married, three of us mothers, all of us writers, and the conversation had flown between recipes, books, work, shopping, and then I hurried home, where I was making a pot roast while preparing to teach the next day. I was still dressed up, including lipstick, red: mimicking the state of receptivity in female mammals known as estrus, from the Latin word for frenzy, gadfly, sting.

  Marie was asking about a sleepover. Fraiser wanted to know when we’d eat. I was completing two tasks at once while answering questions, which makes me impatient, and then Gary walked in my study and asked for help finding the car title for the car I’d driven until lately, a car Fraiser would drive now. I said, “Find the one file folder with my handwriting on it.” I’d marked a file BIRTH, MARRIAGES, DIVORCES but kept all my legal documents in it. Gary, on the other hand, has chronologically arranged years of careful record-keeping: policies, statements, taxes. He organizes and reorganizes closets, cupboards, the refrigerator. He’s devised a system in the laundry room for our recyclable trash.

  When I’d moved to Austin, I’d separated essential documents from the merely memorable, emptying a stack of drawers that serves as a center column for a table, drop leaf on both sides, that had been my mother’s sewing table. She’d slid out leaves for a surface on which to cut fabric, and she’d stowed thread, patterns, pins—”notions”—in its drawers. When my parents divvied up furniture, I’d taken this table with its shape-changing properties (both leaves up, both down, left or right up or down) for various places I’d live. I’d filled the drawers with papers, receipts, letters, diplomas. When I moved, I’d kept vital records—proof that I existed, that I’d married and divorced, proof that Marie existed—in one folder. When I packed, I slid it in a box. When I unpacked, I put it in Gary’s filing cabinet. The sewing table was in Fraiser’s room now, one leaf up, a desk.

  When Gary and I had applied for our license to marry, I’d opened this BIRTH, MARRIAGES, DIVORCES file folder and quickly found my birth certificate and second divorce decree. Afterward, I put them back inside. Our own Rites of Marriage certificate was so beautiful, with scrolling letters and a gold seal—the same design the courthouse had used for a hundred years, the woman had said when Gary and I picked it up—that I’d put it in an antique frame and hung it on the wall. So the last time I’d looked inside the BIRTH, MARRIAGES, DIVORCES file slowly was years earlier, when my second ex-husband, Chet, had called because he was marrying a woman who wasn’t a U.S. citizen, and she couldn’t get immigration status until he proved he was divorced. He didn’t know when or where I’d filed. Did I have a case number? His mother had said: “Find Debra. She was good with paperwork.”

  In this same phone call, Chet had said his mother and her imperious, unpleasant husband, my father-in-law #2, had divorced. Chet recounted a story so odd it sounded untrue. Chet’s mother told him she’d found her husband in his office, having sex with a man while she’d been next door, typing. Chet sounded baffled, uncertain, yet he was sure of the next part. The crazy grandma had died and left everyone, including Chet, land. The crazy grandma left her money to Chet’s mother, a considerable sum that should have been used to finish converting the hunting camp to a house, but Chet’s stepfather had craved world travel and spent the money. My mother-in-law #2 was old, twice-divorced, and broke.

  A sad story unconnected to me, I thought.

  Because now I was married to Gary, who was standing in my study, saying, “I know you can picture this file folder, but I can’t. Please stop working and help me find it.”

  I opened the file cabinet, found the file folder, located the car title, and gave it to Gary. Then I noticed a sheaf of legal-sized papers, like a deed or decree, folded, typed, not word-processed. I unfolded it. “The Family Hist
ory of the Grosskopfs and the Schades in Fayette County.” First, at the top, a diagram. “Great-Grandfather, Patrilineal + Great-Grandmother, Patrilineal, Grosskopf” and “Great-Grandfather, Matrilineal + Great-Grandmother, Matrilineal, Schade.” Then the pyramid of descendants. Then the narrative. Fayette County is Gary’s family’s county. I said, “This must have fallen out of one of your files and got stuck in mine. Or it belongs with your parents’ papers.”

  Gary glanced at it. “I’ve never heard of these people.”

  I said, “I’m not from Fayette County. It can’t be mine.” I checked the pot roast and went back to my study. When I came out, I heard Marie in her room listening to hip-hop, slightly louder than Fraiser listening to alt-rock. I went to the TV room, next to the laundry room. Gary was doing laundry. The dryer hummed companionably, and Gary had on the TV, an ESPN show about baseball managers preparing for spring, old players, new players, prospects. He was still reading “The Family History of the Grosskopfs and the Schades in Fayette County.” He said, “What a vile cross-section of humanity.” Then, “It amazes me that anyone would record this.” Then, “Debra, these are your old in-laws.”

  The name Grosskopf suddenly clicked. Chet’s crazy grandma’s last name, his mother’s maiden name. Schade would be the crazy grandma’s maiden name. I don’t have a bad memory, but it’s idiosyncratic. I recalled standing in the dining room in Salt Lake City, talking on Chet’s new phone, high-tech at the time, and his mother saying she’d researched her family, written up the results, and she’d mail us a copy. I’d never read “The Family History of the Grosskopfs and the Schades in Fayette County,” but I’m good with paperwork, as she’d said, so I’d put Chet’s family history in my mother’s sewing table and moved to North Carolina, then Texas. Who knows when I’d stuffed it into my BIRTH, MARRIAGES, DIVORCES file? “The Family History of the Grosskopfs and the Schades in Fayette County” had rubbed against my vital papers, my daughter’s, and now Gary’s.

  I went back to my study and used the Internet to search Chet’s mother’s name. She was working for Chet on a plot of land down that driveway I’d passed coming home from Gary’s Aunt Alvina’s funeral. Chet owned a vineyard now, apparently. Reading the vineyard website, the “About Us” section, I recognized Chet’s pet phrases: “deal-flow,” “as per client specifications.” He employed ninety people. Annual profits over a million dollars. I exited the website. Then I felt sure I’d misread. I retyped the name of the vineyard, and a social-media-for-companies website came up. Someone had posted a different description. The vineyard employed three people: Chet, his wife, his mother. The profits were a fraction of a fraction of a million. Then I felt tawdry, cyberstalking, and quit.

  I went back to the TV room, where “The Family History of the Grosskopfs and the Schades in Fayette County” lay on the table, and I thought how family trees begin with two people who marry, inaugurating a lineage. When we mate, we end up with who we end up because of location and practical math—one nearby single and one nearby single become a pair—also hormonal surges that are part of love but aren’t love. “I fell in lust all over again,” an old friend from graduate school, living in Ohio, once said by phone. The reasons for this or that marriage, for this and that begetting, for anybody’s family history—which brings tears to the eye, creates genealogy junkies, and compels people to join the Daughters of the American Revolution—is happenstance. Yet we turn out like our ancestors, biologically and biographically programmed, imitators by nature and by nurture.

  I’d been connected to two ex-husbands, two family lines that might have stayed connected to mine. I’d pledged myself to a few other men, other potential family lines that might, in time, have attached to me. I sometimes wake in the middle of the night next to Gary, light peeping around the edge of curtains, and I see the outlines of our room, furnishings, bits and pieces, some new, most old, and I’ve been dreaming about one of my ex-husbands or ex-boyfriends, a long-gone, displaced former someone, and in the dream the man is the age he was when I knew him, but I’m who I am now, and I don’t know what to say to him, younger, so green, ready to master life with skills he has available.

  As I sat in the TV room that Sunday, pot roast bubbling on the stove in the kitchen, the sun outside the windows starting to sink, I thought about these dreams, exes as mental excess, my end credits rolling. I met Rodney V. Meadow at a fair. In dreams, he leans in, a crooked smile. He died of a heart attack, survived by his mother and sister. My father had called to tell me. The obituary mentioned a dog as survivor too, my dad had said, puzzled. It was the second time someone called to tell me someone I’d known, known, was dead, that a body I’d held had transmuted to another state. James Stillman is dead too, but in dreams he frowns, putting cocaine on a mirror, or restringing an electric guitar.

  In one dream, I sit with him in the dining room, and he’s in his twenties, still hoping we’ll get back together. He’s staying with us because he wants to return to college and needs help with the application, his statement of purpose. I’m line-editing while advising him to start with a lofty sense of resolve and end with practical facts. In the dream, Gary summons me to speak privately in another room. Gary says, “He’s had a hard life and needs a hand up. I don’t begrudge that. So help him with this application. But he can’t stay here, not with the kids—it’s too disruptive.” I nod, because our kids, closer to James’s age, matter most. In the dining room I tell James that when we finish this statement of purpose he has to go. Next he’s gone, forever unfinished.

  In this era of late marriages to someone who has a past, this era of second and third marriages, a new branch of psychotherapy has sprung up, devoted to mourning one’s previous mates. Ambiguous Grief. And people will hurry to tell you about a death because they feel swollen with the news, sideswiped, since death will come for them too, and not knowing what to do with this death relief, death sympathy, death freight—”death is weird,” a woman said at the literary festival the night my mother-in-law died—they’ll call.

  Joe, half-orphaned, wanted in Indiana, lives in Indiana, retired. He must have paid his child support, or cut a deal, or enough time had passed, I’d thought, when he wrote to me at my university email address—or he’d dictated to his sister, who owned a computer, and her name is Jackie_and_Jim19834—and Joe was friendly, too friendly, via his sister, amanuensis. Like it was yesteryear. I wished him well; I said I was married. He wrote once more to say his sister wouldn’t write for him again after she found out I was married.

  My ex-husband #1 has stayed nameless in this book, except for this: I kept his name. I never took Chet’s, saying I’d already earned one graduate degree with the name Monroe. But in fact I like the way it sounds. In Utah and North Carolina, people who didn’t know I hadn’t taken Chet’s name called me Mrs. Crosswater. And it was difficult to explain to even feminists that I’d kept my name, since it wasn’t mine, just a former husband’s, and no I didn’t still want him, just his euphonious name. I’d loved his family too. During a trip to Wisconsin, a trip at Christmastime, when clans gather, one of the brothers of my ex-husband #1 arranged to meet me for dinner in Eau Claire. My former brother-in-law had said, “Mom says hi. Dad says hi. Polly says hi. Jon says hi. Luke says hi. Jenny says hi.” Everyone said hi except my ex-husband #1, who might have, my former brother-in-law explained, except my ex-husband #1’s new wife would have gotten mad.

  In terms of the “What I Want to Be When I Grow Up” checklist, my options—Mother, Nurse, Teacher, Secretary, Stewardess, and Other—I could have been Rodney’s casserole-making wife, ex-wife or widow by now. Or forever Queenie. Or a groupie turned aging band wife. Or a girlfriend helping out on movie sets and spending spare time in an adobe dance hall. Or a lady professor waiting for poetic letters. Reader, it’s safe to say that I grew up to be Other, and this was my evolution, not a plan.

  One day when both kids had been gone for a week, Fraiser on a vacation with his mother, Marie at camp, I’d told Gary—shouted it, becaus
e I was in the tub, floating, inspecting marks on my stomach from incisions, operations that turned out fine—that I’d had a great week, that I loved our kids, our life. Gary stood in the door and said, “I had a great week too.” He added that he hoped we had plenty of time left, that one of us will outlive the other, of course, and then he started in with how we hope for an active life, a swift death, and no painful lingering. I’d said, “Please shut up. It’s important to have a few conversations about end-of-life scenarios. But not over and over.” He’d laughed, agreeing.

  Right now, on a winter afternoon, he was watching the Major League Baseball General Managers Meeting coverage in earnest. I picked up “The Family History of the Grosskopfs and the Schades in Fayette County” and read. So-and-so found poisoned in the barn, no one arrested, but people thought it was the wife, who later turned up in a bar in Louisiana. So-and-so known for setting up the region’s first school, from which he embezzled, found floating in a cattle tank. So-and-so raped, or possibly not, because she had a history of lying, but her brothers hunted down the man she’d accused and lit him on fire.

  I’d hurtled through someone else’s history. Near miss.

  Almost mine.

  These people had been dead for years. And yet, I thought, the descendants had descended.

  I threw the family history onto the table. “It’s gruesome.”

  Gary looked up. “We all have forerunners who were black sheep.”

  Yet not so many, not so menacing, I thought. The colorful figure in my family is a grandfather who’d been with a vamp and gambled. My wandering grandmother had schizophrenia. They seem no more unusual than you or me, or someone you or I know who’s had affairs or a mental health diagnosis. Yet the fog of history, the unfamiliarity of the vistas—a fur coat and a roadster, a sod house and a corncrib— make them exotic. My ancestors may have been unevenly educated, badly matched, stuck in the centrifugal whirl of centuries of tradition: women who wait on men. And there were hard stories in Gary’s family too. But no one had murdered or embezzled or perjured or lit someone on fire.