My Unsentimental Education

by Debra Monroe

  A copper-colored kettle with red mums and sprigs of evergreen. On the phone, Theresa said, “From the bald cowboy?” I said, “Not even. They’re from my former husband’s mother.” Theresa started laughing. “I’m sorry I’m laughing,” she said. And I thought about how my old professor Dr. D. Douglas Waters once said in class that the difference between who we are and who we hope to be is a chasm. Yes. We live there, suspended, pulled one way and another. I looked at the mums, the attached fake-gold sleigh bauble. Theresa said, “Agree with me. This is funny.” She seemed too amused. Maybe she had a right. She understood me better than I did yet. Did I owe her? I said, “Funny.”

  Let me pause now, intermission, and say that people disappear.

  Consider this moment, years in the future, when I had a professional job, but I wasn’t tenured yet, not permanent, and my mother had married her heart-attack-waiting-to-happen boyfriend, who’d died. I told my recently promoted department chair—once the hiring committee chair who’d said she admired we daring young women coming straight through with our PhDs—that I needed a few days off for a family funeral. This isn’t some waitressing job, I reminded myself. At a grown-up job you get bereavement leave. The department chair lifted her pen and said, “Let me express my condolences. Please excuse me for asking, but I need to know who’s died.” I said, “My step-father. I want to go to the funeral for my mother’s sake. This counts as bereavement, I hope?” I left out that my mother and I were—to use the shorthand—estranged, though we’d never argued. After years of little to no contact, I didn’t know my mother. She didn’t know me.

  My department chair said, “Well, the changing shape of family. You must go.”

  Hard on the land wears the strong sea and empty grows every bed.

  I’ve never lived near the sea. The social net grows thin, I thought, picturing the social net as one of those frayed curler caps my wandering grandmother used to wear to breakfast.

  In stories, people don’t disappear. Every character who mattered just a little makes an appearance, another appearance, another. In the last chapter, everyone who’s weighed in on page 1, page 81, page 181, reappears. Or news of them does. In life, though, people vanish. Remembering what someone said to me on a tar-covered rooftop in Kansas—or in green fields flecked with yellow, or cheap rented rooms, or a house in Colorado, a professor’s office, a café with an odd menu—is historic preservation. I moved on; people I knew didn’t or went somewhere else. Most never met each other. Expecting them to recur and attend a crowded, friendly finale is to expect an old-fashioned story with coincidences and mirage-like continuity, a fable.

  The chorus, too, should be regarded as one of the characters.

  For centuries, people left farms for cities. Before that, their ancestors left old countries for new countries. People roam. Sometimes they settle down. Once, a sixth cousin addicted to genealogical research (“recovery is not an option!”), contacted my father, my sister, my brother, me. She said my wandering grandmother didn’t speak proper German but Plattdeutsch and lots of Yiddish. My father didn’t believe it, even when I showed him a Yiddish dictionary and he recognized words. This distant cousin on my dad’s side contacted my mother too, since she’d procreated with my dad. My mother resented this recording of birth, death, marriage. Our twig on the family tree was messy.

  In small towns, divorce won’t help you move up the social ladder with its miniscule rungs magnified by gossip. My parents hated their divorce. They hated mine. My sister, fully recovered from her accident, had a burst of clarity, realizing she had just one life. She shocked everyone by getting divorced too, going new places, wearing new clothes. “Like Debra,” my father said, appalled. She remarried. My parents sighed, relief.

  Before my parents’ divorce was final—the property sold and divided—my father lived with my stepmother in what I thought of as the ancestral home, though we’d lived there for just my childhood. My stepmother walked on carpets my mother had selected (too gaudy, my stepmother felt), pulled shut at night drapes my mother had saved to buy (so old-fashioned, my stepmother said). I didn’t like hearing my mother’s taste criticized, but my stepmother was trying to be herself, get acquainted. The reasons for reciprocity in self-disclosure will hove into view. A few years later, she had the wild idea to fly to Kansas without my father, to visit me. Yes, I said. I’d passed my qualifying exams. I’d dropped off my thesis with a typist who’d bought one of those new computers that word-processed, and I felt momentarily so free. I never did figure out my stepmother’s age. She looked younger than my father but like a bobbysoxer, not a post-hippie. She’d had a rough girl-hood, I gathered, no time for parties. When she got to Kansas, I took her to parties.

  I introduced her to classmates as my stepmother. “Wicked stepmother,” she said, giggling. We visited Max, and she asked to see pot. She didn’t want to smoke it, just see it. He got out the tray he kept in his pantry and rolled a joint as she watched. The next day, my stepmother and I wandered through stores, and she surprised me again by buying herself a camisole and panties with Minnie Mouse motifs. I tried on a copper-colored, satin blazer marked down from $165 to $35, quick clearance, then put it back. “You can’t afford $35?” she said, skeptical. I was down to bare bones, waiting to find out my future. No new clothes just now; I said so. She said, “But what would you wear it with anyway?”

  I said, “A black top, faded jeans, my high-heeled boots.” A few minutes later she bought it. “Why?” I asked. It didn’t seem like her. Or, with her teased, bouffant hair, she’d look like Tammy Wynette in it. Where in Spooner would she go dressed like that? She said, “Well, it was good enough for you. You think I can’t pull it off then?” I didn’t say anything else because she seemed upset, and I was still thinking it was weird she liked Minnie Mouse underwear. Then, when I’d driven her to the airport and walked her to the gate, she pulled the blazer out and shoved it toward me. “Gosh, you’re hard to surprise,” she said, laughing. But she went home and my dad had drunk too much with the door open, and he passed out over the threshold. She told me this by phone when I asked her to visit again someday. She couldn’t; he might have died of hypothermia, she said. We’ve had moments since, lucky eye contact, unspoken mutual hilarity. But being my dad’s wife wore her down, and that carefree stepmother I could have known vanished too.

  I cultivated instead short-term affection: high-risk, high-reward. The lie I told myself was that I’d stay in touch. I’ll come back to visit, I promised Garnett as we walked through the apartment one last time, now a cavernous set of rooms with mock-limestone paneling made of spongy cardboard, but also that starry wallpaper on the ceiling over a hundred years old. My knickknacks, my doilies, my lace curtains, my imitation Oriental rug with traces of tar, had made it seem welcoming. Garnett didn’t see why she was inspecting the apartment before returning my deposit, she said, because I was a good housekeeper. We chatted for a minute about the next renter, a daughter of the man who owned the bar by the gravel pit, how she wouldn’t be able to make the place homey. I pictured bean bag chairs, plastic end tables, beer posters. Garnett said, “I don’t mind an occasional party, but if it’s all the time and a rough crew I’ll give her notice.” I smiled.

  I was Garnett’s favorite. Had I ever been anyone else’s? We hugged goodbye, and she broke down, tears streaking her face dusty with lavender-scented powder. She took off her glasses, which caught in her hair, her topknot, which tumbled down, dark, undulant.

  I wrote to her, and she wrote back. The last time was after my thesis advisor sent me a newspaper clipping—he took pride in students he’d launched, and he knew I’d lived in the almost-ghost-town. It said that Garnett’s youngest son had been smothered while driving a back-hoe in the gravel pit when gravel mounds toppled. I wrote to Garnett. She answered: “Thank you and know that I love you, but don’t worry about me. And maybe it’s good Tim can’t feel the shame his father has heaped down upon us.” Her husband, a randy old man whom even Garnett avoided, had run
off with a barfly. I hadn’t lived long enough to know what to say back. My news was trivial, plans coming together, not apart. I never heard from Garnett again, though, as I write this, having run her name through an Internet search engine, she’s alive, a survivor in her eighty-six-year-old brother’s recent obituary.

  I found an 1880s photo of the store too, a general store. According to the website, the upstairs rooms where I lived once served as a courthouse for a county seat long since gone. The land is different, no trees; people in front look like characters in a Mark Twain story.

  But the building is the same. I count my windows: one for my kitchen where I answered the phone; one for my dining room where I wrote and studied; one for my living room where I listened to records; one that would become the door to the portico roof, not yet built; one for the spare bedroom where I stored relics my mother shipped when she emptied my childhood home. The apartment was a cheap place to live until I could afford better, yet decades later I wake in my king-size bed, and I find I’ve dreamed I’m moving back in, and there’s a surprise-door leading to space I didn’t know existed. The surprise-door is in the spare room, where I’d stashed cargo I cast off when I moved: embroidered dish towels turned ragged; the My School Years scrapbook my taskmaster grandmother sent; bottles of dandelion wine I made using husband #1’s grandmother’s recipe.

  That apartment is the second-to-last place I saw my mother for nearly twenty years. I understand now that when I saw her in Kansas our era of telephone-only contact was beginning, but I’d assumed we were just in a short spell when visiting each other was inconvenient.

  On the phone with my mother, then, I said I was driving across western Kansas, eastern Colorado, north to Wyoming, west into Utah. I wouldn’t throw away my bed, my books, my desk, my sewing machine, the parquet-inlay table with matching chairs, and a few more pieces I’d earned at Garnett’s store. I was renting a U-Haul truck, towing my small car. My mother must have worried into a froth in front of her boyfriend, not yet her husband. Or, sober, he wanted to be kindly acquainted. My mother called the next day and said to rent a trailer, not a truck, and the two of them would drive from Wisconsin to Kansas, tow the trailer to Utah, unhitch it, then drive down to Arizona, snowbird haven, to check it out for future business schemes, then drive back to Wisconsin. “We love road trips,” she said, a girl in love. I was relieved, grateful. I’d been scared to drive a big rig while towing a car, the last stretch into Salt Lake City so steep, I’d heard, that brakes give out.

  I left pots and pans unpacked, and I’d been told to buy specific groceries. My mother’s boyfriend ate only a few foods, canned corn, ground round, and on Fridays—he was Catholic—tuna in white sauce over toast. I’d also been told to have everything else packed because there’d be no time to linger, so the apartment looked as unappealing as it did the next day when Garnett and I would walk through it. Instead of getting kindly acquainted with my mother’s boyfriend, I got bad conversation. The apartment was ugly, he said. How much had I declared on last year’s income tax return? Wasn’t I an adult yet?

  He put mirrored sunglasses on and started hauling boxes. So when I said the apartment looked nice with furniture and curtains, that some people praised my ability to make do on a budget, that I was a student, an apprentice, that most of my income was a teaching fellowship, an award, only my mother heard, and even she said we needed to stop wagging our chins and load. I couldn’t object anyway because they were moving my furniture he didn’t like either. I couldn’t see his face as they pulled away. My mom waved—parting, sweet sorrow—as if this was just another Kodak moment in the family annals.

  I headed out the next day.

  A week before, I’d taken my car to a mechanic and asked him to change the oil, the coolant, the transmission fluid too. The mechanic said transmission fluid was good for the life of the car. “But,” I said— and I concede that there’s a fine line between being preemptive and meddlesome—”won’t new fluid help me shift gears with less friction?” I was about to cross mountains. The mechanic said he, personally, wouldn’t bother. But I prevailed and headed west, fluids refreshed, looking like an Okie with a few fragile home furnishings in the back (a lamp with a glass finial and a shade made of flocked celluloid, a picture painted on the back of domed glass), also bedding I’d used to sleep on the floor the night before and would again my first night in Utah, and an ironing board, suitcases, an atlas.

  It was a thousand-mile trip. I had time to think about interstate highways not taken.

  My thesis advisor had suggested a PhD in rhetoric, a semipractical suggestion since there’s always a need for people to teach composition and people to teach people to teach it. Another professor suggested I get a PhD in American studies with an emphasis on women writers, turn expert in a burgeoning field. I could get a degree in creative writing too, not practical since thousands already had these master of fine arts degrees and argued about what they were for: to create artists? to create teachers? To teach, you first had to publish a book. To teach rhetoric or literature, you had to publish too—papers, book chapters— which was a matter of knuckling down, doing research, whereas the how-to of becoming a published novelist or poet seemed to me pie-in-the-sky and vague.

  I hoped, in the end, for a stable life.

  But there are different levels.

  I’d heard since third-grade social studies class that no one is permanently above the plebeian rest of us, that anyone who works hard can become great or rich. But few people do, and so, impatient with barriers that prevent this rise to greatness, we painstakingly mark lines that separate those who have from those who have a little less. But I didn’t think about that as I drove. Beyond feeling hurt, then defensive, distant, because my father had told me that if I got another degree he was done with me for good—what did that mean? I wondered—I didn’t understand that getting another degree would change me enough to eliminate the last conversational threads connecting me to my family, shred that net forever. I’d never been connected anyway, except to my mother, whose conversational threads now floated, connected to no one, her talk about canned corn and bankruptcy. Besides, I was poor, and jobs I’d be aiming for weren’t guaranteed. I was who I was so far, or seemed to be, a black sheep afraid of real work.

  I’d applied to PhD programs in rhetoric and literature at good state universities. Schools at the pinnacle of the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education’s hierarchy of impressiveness weren’t on my radar. I’d studied with just one professor who’d gone to one, an eighteenth-century scholar who spent part of every lecture describing his salad days at his Ivy League school and the big letdown it had been to end up teaching us. I wanted to emulate instead my professors who’d come through on the GI bill, inching forward to the examined life. “Education is not the filling of a bucket but the lighting of a fire,” William Butler Yeats. I’d grown up with different words. I once wrote a paper on William Butler Yeats, and over and over I used Wite-Out for this typo: William Butler Yeast.

  I could have gone south, studying women writers. I could have gone north, studying rhetoric. I could have gone northwest or southeast. I’d applied to the Iowa Writers Workshop and the University of Iowa, writing in my letters of application that I wanted to earn an MFA in creative writing—gambler’s degree, source of joy and sorrow—and a PhD in literature at the same time. I got accepted at both programs but thought hard about writing a thesis and dissertation simultaneously. In the end, I headed to the University of Utah to get one of the brand-new PhDs that let students write creative dissertations. For four years, I’d write fiction but do scholarship on the history of the novel.

  Motoring onward, I’d sometimes check the map and glance at states where I didn’t go and consider the person I wouldn’t become—with a different geographical past, a different deeply mined obsession, a different set of brain-goods on the shelf for times of boredom. The world also churns out aphorisms about how useless education is. But it makes you good company for yourself as you
live out fast-flying days and nights until you die, just another human with plights and scrapes in a long line of human plights and scrapes.

  I stopped at a truck stop in Wyoming with shower stalls, a big diner, hundreds of semitrucks with sleeping cabs where the drivers catch forty winks. When I got to Utah, someone told me that this truck stop is also famous for prostitutes. I pumped gas, went inside to pay. I glimpsed the diner window, full of lone wolves, and walked back to my car.

  The sun had begun to set, the sky dimming, vapor mercury lights buzzing and snapping. Before I got in my car to drive off, I lifted the hood to check the oil. I also looked under the car. Even in shadows I could see strands of thick fluid dripping. I slid underneath—I was wearing one of the ankle-length, sleeveless dresses I’d sewn for this trip, thin cotton marked down to $1.99 a yard, because my car didn’t have air-conditioning, and nothing is cooler than a cotton dress—and felt around for the source of the leak: a seam between a pan bottom that connected to a pan top, and bolts holding these together were loose enough that I could twist them with my hand. I was losing transmission fluid. In a matter of miles, I’d have an immobile car in need of repairs that cost more than the car. A voice boomed from above, immanent: “Need help?”

  Friend or foe, I wondered from under the car, knowing that all this person could see was my car with its hood propped and my feet in white sandals, Payless ShoeSource, $6.99.

  I crawled out, stood up, looked at him—a trucker with a T-shirt, steel-toed boots, a toothpick in his mouth, tattoos before tattoos were hip. Or something like that. It was getting dark, and this was a long time ago. He could go either way, I knew. He was the gentlemanly trucker sometimes celebrated in country song who rides the highway doing right by women and children, or tough enough to do me wrong and never look back. My options were shrinking. In an apologetic voice, I said my car was leaking transmission fluid.