My Unsentimental Education

time,” he said once, perplexed. “You’re too relaxed. You move your hips like an expert.” I clarified: “I didn’t say it was my second time. I said you’re only the second person I’ve ever had sex with.” In turn, I didn’t understand him, that his emotions had been activated. I’d been playacting since Kindergarten.
I also dated a boy who’d arrived for the summer and I liked him less than the farm boy. The tourist boy had the exotic whiff of places I’d never been. Yet I failed to tell the farm boy I was dating the tourist boy, and in a town so small people told the farm boy for me. He broke up with me. He said, “If you’re seeing other people, and you’re probably leaving for college, we should call it quits.” I started crying. He shook his head. “Why are you crying?” I was thinking about the hours spent embroidering dish towels and pillow slips, the green fields dotted with wild mustard. Verdant meadows. Years. Misspent? I said, “I liked you.” He said, “I liked you. But that’s not going to fix this.”
I already knew that the two weeks when everyone had shared notebooks and pencils and stayed up late talking about Keats and Emily Dickinson, about compromise and high hope, had been an idyll. Real college had football players, business majors, and—I’d been for a twoday orientation—dorms that, full-up, felt like barracks. I’d started to tip, one wheel spinning on airy prospects, the other grinding through mud. Both worlds would be inhospitable, one an aspiring place where I’d be an amateur all over again, uneasy, missing my set of instructions. Daydreaming would take me over. Teachers would misunderstand. Or I’d stay where I didn’t fit, but I’d feel superior. Now which?

Regional Trades
When I was little, my mother had said to ignore the bars, though my brother and I once pressed our faces against the windows of one called the Chatterbox, which featured strippers. A day-drinker had lurched onto the sidewalk, blinking. A man in a white apron followed, yelling, “Kids, scram.” Strippers took customers upstairs to bedrooms, we knew. Prostitutes also lived at the end of Main Street in the Depot Hotel, until it burned to the ground when one of them fell asleep while making a grilled sandwich on a steam iron. I assumed every Main Street had prostitutes and strippers. People need money, as my parents pointed out; these women had failed to acquire sensible vocational training. Meanwhile, my sister knew bookkeeping, and I, bad at math but good at spelling, knew stenography.
Except for a few years after Prohibition, the legal drinking age in Wisconsin had always been eighteen. Having finished high school now, I needed to choose my bar. Your bar, like your prom dress or favorite song, should match your personality. For instance, my dad would slip out of his store, past the Palace Movie Theater, and into the Corral, where the bartender had my dad’s drink ready, a brandy Manhattan, also standing orders if my mom phoned and asked for my dad—she’d stopped phoning years ago—to say he wasn’t there.
I sampled one drink at Railroad Memories, another at Diamond Lil’s, then the Buckhorn. Finally, I chose the Sportsman’s because I’d been in the apartment above it before I was old enough to go to the bar. During my senior year, I’d left school during lunch hour with a girl whose brother, Brock, had dropped out of college to work at a factory in Colorado, then returned to Wisconsin with his pregnant bride, Leila, who already had two daughters. Brock’s father gave him the Sportsman’s as a means of support and a place to live.
Brock and Leila filled the rooms with big floor pillows covered in batik. Brock lit a joint and passed it around as Leila’s two daughters skipped past. I pondered this, then approved. If my parents drank in front of children, if everyone’s parents did, why should these interesting newlyweds be hypocritical about a peaceful, herbal high? I watched to see what else was different, what chores and responsibilities. Would this marriage be co-constructed by the wife? Brock stared. He’d read my mind, maybe. I waited. He waved his hand and said, “In the future, you understand, this will all be accepted.” He exhaled. “Pot.”
Pot, then. So far, I’d smoked just at night, and I didn’t like being stoned by day, the roar in my head as I went back to school, then work at the clothing store, then dinner with my parents and brother. Sitting in class and pretending to study, ringing up customers buying permanent-press slacks, eating while following family conversation turned complicated. Being stoned while not seeming stoned required strenuous exertion as I overcame obstacles, traversed sundry locales. To what end? Renewed gratitude for normalcy.
One evening, leaving work, I visited Brock and Leila. My sister was also a newlywed—her father-in-law had provided a small, remodeled house because there weren’t suitable places to rent. My sister talked about carpet pile, upholstery swatches. And I’d grown up watching that TV show, Bob Eubanks sending Brylcreemed husbands offstage, then asking wives in minidresses where was the most interesting place they’d made whoopee. The studio audience liked couples who fought, swatting each other with answer cards. Brock and Leila spoke softly to each other—amused, not angry, if children drew on the walls. Leila’s maternity dresses looked like a queen’s, hems swishing the floor.
Downstairs the bar was full of post-hippies who’d started communes on farms they’d bought at rock-bottom prices. In far-off cities, punk and disco were already underway. But I didn’t know. I pinned, snipped, and sewed paisley fabric into peasant blouses and graceful dresses. At a store on the edge of town that sold guns and fishing tackle, I bought a pair of moccasins that laced up to my knees. Adventitious protective coloration. A creature’s color and pattern will blend with the environs. And so I spent Saturday nights talking to people ten years older than me