My Unsentimental Education

by Debra Monroe

  But I stopped obsessing about Death & Dying because I had classes to attend and teach, papers to write, floors to vacuum, and—tonight— people to herd off the portico roof.

  One of the Ryman Stacker look-alikes had noticed my phone ringing, picked it up, and found me. I could barely hear Garnett saying she’d driven by on her way home from Weight Watchers and didn’t mind that I was having a party, but please get people off the portico because it wasn’t sturdy, in fact seemed to be swaying, and people on it were dancing and drinking and some might fall. I rushed to the spare bedroom, stuck my head through the door, and yelled for people to come in right now. The portico roof was covered with tar paper, mended many times with tar. In Kansas, in October, it’s hot outside. In the living room, my imitation Oriental rug, a favorite wedding present, now had tar footprints on it. I bent over it with a rag and nail polish remover, swabbing. But I quit when Ryman Stacker said, “You’ll save yourself some grief if you accept that tar tracks are permanent figures in the carpet, not exactly what Henry James had in mind, ha ha.”

  I’d worn limp, floor-length white chiffon—my mother-in-law’s wedding dress—when I opened the rug, rolled up, wrapped in reams of silver paper, a gift from my sister, my brother, my dad, and his girlfriend. My sister found the rug in the Sears catalog, knowing that I’d live in apartments, that a rug covers other people’s stains. I loved the rug and wanted it to stay pristine. I wanted my marriage to stay pristine. But before the wedding my not-yet husband and I had packed up in the northern Wisconsin town where we’d met. We were set to leave for the southern Wisconsin town where his family lived. It was on the way to Kansas. Having the wedding there would help my family use company manners, I felt.

  My mother claimed to get ill, or really did, when she was in the same room as my father, who wouldn’t come to my wedding, or anyone’s, or a christening, without his girlfriend. So my nuclear family, having exploded, came to my wedding. So did my gambling grandfather, a widower. I unwrapped the long tubular package, the rug. I’m not the kind of person to forgo makeup at a ritual occasion photographed for posterity, but I’d gotten pink eye in those baffling days before the wedding, and it spread to both eyes before I saw a doctor. I couldn’t wear mascara, and people assumed I’d been crying.

  I hadn’t cried, but people thought I had because, before my not-yet husband and I headed south for the wedding, someone had knocked at the door. My not-yet husband answered it, waved me away. When he turned around, he held papers. He’d been served. The child was five years old. The child’s mother had called my not-yet husband months earlier to say she’d had to tell the state or she wouldn’t get food stamps. My not-yet husband hadn’t told me because he’d hoped it wasn’t true. He’d also worried I’d feel upset. When I found out four days before the wedding, I said the child deserved financial support. I felt upset. I said the child deserved to know his father. I felt upset. I said my not-yet husband had known for months; for five years, he must have had an inkling. I felt upset.

  My not-yet husband was a fool, irresponsible. But he hadn’t cheated. The child had been conceived back when I was James Still-man’s girlfriend. The mother was someone my not-yet husband had met in bars—groupie was too harsh a word for a woman who’d liked a local band. What a price to pay for a two-night stand, I thought, though she no doubt loved her child. Would I call off the wedding? The U-Haul, packed to its seams, sat in the street. The church in southern Wisconsin awaited. We’d signed a lease in Kansas. I’d stepped onto, not an escalator, but something flat and moving forward.

  My husband and I told his family—father, mother, brothers, sisters—about the paternity suit. We sat in their living room with blond paneling, furniture with wagon-wheel and saddle motifs, and talked about this fact, this new relative, illegitimate, though the word sounded awful. A child doesn’t ask to be born. A child is legitimate, I said. My not-yet-mother-in-law asked me if I was feeling okay, her eyes gentle. My not-yet-father-in-law seemed closer to tears than anyone. As everyone watched my face, I said we’d find a way to pay child support. A mistake had been made, but years ago. It was lost on me that a continuous mistake had been made for the last five years running, and it wasn’t ours but his. Marriage is for sharing, I thought. Yet we weren’t married, not until morning.

  We moved to Kansas, and child support payments fell into the pile of monthly bills. Our responsibility beyond that was a knot to be untangled when my husband and I would visit Wisconsin, where he used to play a mix of blues, bluegrass, rock—music that lampooned redneck prejudices, even if rednecks in the audience didn’t know it. “Up against the Wall, Redneck Mother.” Some rube on a barstool always thought this was an anthem.

  My husband used to understand it was denunciation. He smoked pot. He smoked it for breakfast. He had gay friends from when he’d majored in music. He used to have a FREE NELSON MANDELA bumper sticker on his guitar case. After we moved to Kansas, he took it off. I asked why, and he said he was making room for new stickers. But he’d left on other stickers that advertised bars. “You’re redecorating your guitar case,” I said. I understood, peer pressure. But we were moving in opposite directions. I was enrolled in a class called Patriotism and Pornography in Seminal American Texts, and he’d started laughing at jokes where the punchline was that certain ethnicities are subhuman. I recognized the need for protective veneers, but underneath them you have beliefs, ever-refining.

  “You didn’t think that joke you laughed at was funny, did you?” I asked one night, as we drove home from a gig. I was unsettled, too, because one of the band wives—they were younger than me—had said I looked good for my age. I was twenty-four.

  So I maybe seemed like a stranger to him too. He’d met me while I was working for the news channel. He wasn’t used to me agonizing about twenty-page papers, or muttering Wallace Stevens poems while making meatloaf. “So neurotic,” he’d say, patting me. I’d been raised to defer to the husband, but also to work hard, tidy up, pay bills. Had I erred on the side of competence? I’d taken over legal matters, finances, laundry, cooking. What else could I do? Garnett, conversing in the store one day, let drop this nugget: “A woman doesn’t always have to have an orgasm. Sometimes it’s enough to give the man his.” I’d been fascinated that a woman almost old enough to be my grandmother would discuss orgasms. And I absorbed all the marriage survival tips I could.

  The Halloween party guests were off the portico roof now. They danced in the living room, the spare bedrooms, the dining room I used for an office, the hall to the bedroom, in the bedroom in a dense U-shape around the brass bed my mother had shipped, her wedding present. By now, I thought, the shocks weathered in my first year of marriage, in the now-tainted week of the wedding, were either water under the bridge (forgivable) or spilled milk (indelible). I glanced at the ceiling with its old wallpaper, parchment-like with silver flowers, and wondered what it must have been like to be a storeowner’s wife a hundred years ago—hopes, fears, a husband with impenetrable motives.

  I let myself remember the afternoon, the argument. The mail had come and, with it, another notice my husband had bounced checks. This was before check carbons. He didn’t use the checkbook register. He bought things and didn’t say so. I also told him—though it wasn’t germane—that he hadn’t monitored the oil levels in his car. He’d burned up one secondhand car I’d spent part of a student loan to buy so he could get to gigs. Then I spent more of my student loan to buy another, and it had been down two quarts last week. I’d checked it myself and refilled. He couldn’t live this henpecked, he said. He’d run downstairs and slammed the door. “Fine,” I’d yelled. I threw objects downstairs, and they bounced. Then he was back, bounding upstairs for his guitars. He was six-foot tall, with dimples. He left again, firing up his car, probably down a quart already.

  People were starting to leave the party in drunken bunches. Theresa Minster, derby hat in hand, said: “Which one is your husband? I’ve never met him.” I could have said he was at a gig. He wasn�
�t. He was probably at the pedal steel player’s. He’d slept there before when he’d been too drunk to drive. Impulsively, I said, “He’s not here. We’re fighting.” She looked surprised. I’d mentioned him as a normal husband the day before in the office. I hadn’t told anyone about money problems. When I’d complained about the burned car, I made it sound like a vexing but ordinary used car problem. She said, “Not to intrude, but if there’s anything I can do, let me know.” I nodded. “Thank you.”

  Then the apartment was empty except for me and the woodsy poet. I’d restocked coolers all night, collected empties, checked the portico. I wanted a drink, but there wasn’t one left that wasn’t dregs, so I decided to break out the dandelion wine I’d made the spring before, using my husband’s grandmother’s recipe. I’d picked dandelion blossoms (must pick in morning, the recipe stipulated), washed them, added boiling water, sugar, and all-important yeast. I let this stand for three weeks, and strained it into bottles.

  I’d set them in the spare bedroom, the one with junk, relics. When light from the window sometimes hit the bottles, they glowed yellow. My husband’s grandmother had served hers to company in thimble-sized glasses. This was the first time I’d served mine. It was strong. Every time I served it in the future—at a Thanksgiving dinner that went on after store-bought wine was drained, or at an after-the-bars-closed party—it knocked everyone into another zone. The woodsy poet and I drank this incandescent wine and talked.

  He’d gotten married in high school when his girlfriend, named Stevia, after her father Steve, was pregnant. “It was the right thing to do. But it hasn’t been the easiest marriage,” he said. “That isn’t the most original line in the world,” I answered, taking off my husband’s hat. “Next you should say she doesn’t understand you.” I was getting drunk fast, monologuing. “But I’d believe you,” I added. “I don’t understand my husband. He doesn’t understand me. It’s a big mystery with clues and clues and no solution.”

  The woodsy poet said, “Where is he tonight? Playing?”

  “He’s out of town.” This was true, if I meant the almost-ghost-town. I slipped off my ivory-flowered cowboy boots. Then came the second emergency of the night. I was married. The woodsy poet was. I had scruples. Could I break this one rule just once? I could. I straddled the woodsy poet on the chair and started kissing. My husband would be induced to come back, I thought, kissing. But I was on a much-needed vacation from marriage, tough work, and in the meantime I’d do this inadvertent coupling, huddling, a splurge.

  My husband was living at the pedal steel player’s. Headed for campus or the laundromat, I’d drive out of my way to see his car. If I called ABC Western Wear, I could ask for the pedal steel player’s phone number—the pedal steel player was engaged to the store owner’s daughter. But calling ABC Western Wear seemed awkward. I could go to the pedal steel player’s house. But who would answer the door? At home, I waited. The weather turned cold. Each room was heated with a gas stove on the floor I lit by pulling a lever, striking a match. I kept doors between rooms open and let costly heat escape so I could hear the phone. I paused the vacuum cleaner to listen. This was before answering machines. Every time I left, I’d return and stare at the phone, its secret life.

  Weeknights passed quickly: homework, grading, chores. I didn’t mind Sundays. Dusk was bad, but over in an hour. If I went out on Fridays, I could handle Saturdays—then I’d be hungover, absent-minded, as I bought groceries, cleaned, went downstairs to help Garnett. I’d end propped in the brass bed under the quilt my husband’s grandmother made.

  I went places with people from school, who sometimes asked where my husband was. At a gig, I’d say. Then Theresa invited me to a black-and-white ball at the VFW, which was available for private parties. Betty, who shared an office with Ray, was going—Ray had told her they’d have cases of that champagne in black bottles, Freixenet. When we got there, Betty, in a houndstooth-checked dress, stood with Ray, who had on white slacks, a black shirt. Ray’s partner, wearing a black Speedo and a black-and-white feather headpiece, danced with a man in a weight lifter’s suit. I wore a flowing black dress I’d made from inexpensive fabric and lace, my ivory-flowered cowboy boots, and my taskmaster grandmother’s pearls. Theresa, in black jeans and a turtleneck, looked annoyed. “Really,” she said, “no one could be more unalike than gay men and gay women. It’s a political accident we associate at all. It’s the Kansas version of Fire Island here.”

  “What’s Fire Island?” I asked.

  “Like Woodstock,” she said, “except gay sex, gay music.”

  I nodded. Then she starting talking to someone. The softball lesbians had come, wearing rented tuxedos. In the smoky haze, they looked like a waddle of penguins. One of them asked me to dance. “I won’t bite,” she said. I didn’t want to seem prejudiced, so I danced. Then I found Betty, dancing with Ray, and told her to tell Theresa I’d gone home.

  I drove my VW bug with the hole in the floor, its dim lights that were brighter than its brights, but not bright. I squinted. I knew this road. The winter before I’d driven it when a blizzard had dumped twenty inches, and the plow came through, but the wind picked up and snow drifted until everything was level, no difference between the ditch and highway, except one side of the highway was rimmed with electrical poles and wires, and I’d used these as guidelines. But that night, I got home, cranked up the bedroom heater. In the morning, I went to brush my hair, but my hairbrush wasn’t in my purse. Maybe it fell out in the car? I went downstairs where my car sat alone. Light snow had sifted down in the night. I found my hairbrush under snow in the driveway, my wallet too.

  I’d almost lost my wallet, my two forms of ID.

  I got in the car and hurried to the pedal steel player’s house. I knocked, then waited. I knocked again. The pedal steel player, a stoic man, answered, wearing pajamas bottoms. He nodded. I hadn’t brushed my hair yet. “Hello,” he said. He went to a door, banged on it: “Get up. Your wife is here.” How useful to be country after all, I thought. We’d surprised no one with our heartaches by the number. My husband emerged wearing his light blue, misshapen bathrobe, which I was used to seeing him wear at home, while eating Cheerios and waiting for his Alka-Seltzer to fizz. “Hi there,” he said, friendly.

  Puzzled, I asked how he got the bathrobe. He’d been back to get clothes while I was in class. “My shirts haven’t been ironed since,” he said. I was confused. “You didn’t take clothes?” I’d have noticed. “A few,” he said. “Your hat?” The one I’d worn on Halloween still hung on its hook. He said, “I have a charge account at ABC Western Wear.”

  He explained he wasn’t coming back. “I’m immature.” I said I didn’t mind. Day by day, though, I had minded. He said, “You’re not immature.” Yet I’d assumed that goodwill was enough: marriage’s starter ingredient. I tried to remember who’d asked whom, who’d proposed. But all I could remember was that I’d gotten a good scholarship, and he’d wanted to move to Kansas, and my mother was coming to stay with me every weekend then. She wasn’t herself, trying to get even with my dad by calling a radio station to advertise his car for sale, breaking into his house to unplug the freezer so a cow’s worth of steaks had spoiled. He could get a restraining order against you, I’d warned.

  My husband turned to look at me. “Besides, I can’t stay married to someone who throws a guitar.” I must have looked stunned. “The day I left,” he said. I’d thrown a Tupperware bowl and the checkbook downstairs. He’d stepped over them when he came back for his guitars. My voice sounded feeble as I said so. “But then you threw my bass guitar.” I pointed out that he’d set the acoustic and the electric bass at the top of the stairs, both in cases designed to get loaded on trailers and driven over bumpy roads to honky-tonks, and he’d taken the acoustic guitar and his best boots downstairs and, when he was halfway back up for the bass guitar, I’d slid its heavy case toward him. You could see this as helping, though I hadn’t felt helpful as I’d shoved it—upright, hinges on the bottom, handl
e on top. Just unhappy. “I’m too stingy to throw something expensive,” I said.

  He yawned. He wanted to go back to sleep, he said.

  I stood up. “If we’re getting a divorce, we’ll have to talk about details.”

  He patted me. “I’m not going to grow up anytime soon.”

  As I drove home, I tried not to think about how he’d set me aside. I worried instead about paying bills without the sporadic money he made. I pulled up in front of Garnett’s store. Inside, she and Opal and Pearl were unpacking items from an estate sale. Garnett looked at me, then handed me a brush from an enameled vanity set. She’d endured the death of a child, also her husband’s dotage, marked by disinhibition, lechery. Once, someone sent her an anonymous letter that said the store needed a coat of paint right away, unless she meant to put the whole community to shame. Garnett had made Magic Marker placards and stuck them in the ground. JUDGE NOT OR YE SHALL BE JUDGED. WHY DO YOU LOOK AT THE MOTE IN YOUR NEIGHBOR’S EYE? When they were weather-beaten, smeared by rain, I’d helped her take them down. I brushed my hair and told her where I’d been.

  Pearl said, “My daughter was married to a no-good too.”

  Opal, shaking her head, “That’s not husband material.”