My Unsentimental Education

who were for the barter system and against capitalist exploitation. Men wore bib overalls. Their girlfriends wore bib overalls too, with silky shirts. There were also the lone men, all with spade-shaped beards.
I met another married couple. The wife had feather earrings and a proud way of tilting her head when she spoke. She asked where I would go to college, what would I study. English, I said, at the small college eighty miles south, in Eau Claire. She told me to read Marge Piercy or, failing that, Sylvia Plath. Week after week, like a teacher checking on assignments, she asked me: had I read these writers yet? The public library didn’t have them, so she loaned me her Marge Piercy books. One night she sat at a table and read aloud “The Implications of One Plus One,” poetic cadences mingling with the plastic slap of Foosball. When she was done, she said, “Jealousy is an emotion I choose not to feel.” Her eyes lingered on me. Her husband’s eyes lingered on me. Did one of them want to sleep with me? I wondered. I decided I had the summer to figure it out and whether or not I believed in free love, which seemed philosophically akin to the barter system.
Sometimes I babysat Leila’s children so Leila could spend time in the bar with Brock. When the girls were asleep, I was supposed to come downstairs for a beer and a bump. A bump was what people called a shot of whiskey or brandy or schnapps or Galliano. Infinite choices for bumps, I thought, surveying tiers of bottles in front of the mirror. Then one night the door swung open and a man stood there, a stranger-come-to-town, hero or villain, to be determined. Brock laughed, then climbed over the bar to hug him.
His name was Joe. Joe had ridden his motorcycle from Colorado. Then Brock started singing “Indiana Wants Me” and burst out laughing. When I asked Brock why, he explained that Joe was wanted in Indiana. I was wondering if it was polite to ask what Joe was wanted for, when Brock laughed again and said: “Don’t worry. He’s no ax murderer.” Something political? I thought. Joe had protested social injustice? Joe had the Sir Galahad hairstyle most men had—our pastor, the young tenor on The Lawrence Welk Show. Maybe Joe’s hair was trendy. Or a sign of allegiance to reformers who’d hoped to fix America, first by revolution, then by organic farming. Or he couldn’t afford a barber.
Another detail I tried to decipher was that he wore sunglasses at night. He took them off and squinted at me. I must have squinted back. Brock explained that Joe had lost an eye in a BB gun mishap when he was a kid. “I see you’re not wearing your eye patch,” Brock added, jovial. Joe threw his hands in the air, his signature joke-delivery gesture, grinned at me, and said, “I save it for special occasions—weddings, funerals, whatnot.”
What I later learned to call social mores were in a state of flux. A line had once separated people who went to strip joints from the rest of us. Now, partly because of the U.S. president who’d resigned for being a crook, and new attitudes about poverty, sex, and money, outlaws seemed like truth-speakers and insiders like colluding frauds. “Every place has strippers and prostitutes,” a man with a spade-shaped beard said. “Strip clubs on Main Street are uh, uh, un . . . not hypocritical.” He’d had a stutter when he was young.
Also, if somebody wanted to have sex with me and I wasn’t inter-ested—this had happened with the tourist boy—he could say I had hang-ups, whereas in the past I could have acted virginal, offended. And if I’d known what social class is—and you don’t until you leave the class you’re in, and Spooner had clique gradations anyway, not class gradations, because there wasn’t wealth, not even post–civil rights economic segregation either, just all-white, rural sameness in which people paid attention to minute status markers like whether someone put paneling in their basement and made it into a den or left it full of cobwebbed junk, or how recently someone repainted their barn—I’d have seen that the just-arrived post-hippies were upper-middle-class and living with townies who’d grown up hardscrabble and preferred communes because now people with money helped do chores.
Joe had grown up hardscrabble. His mother died when he was young. Suicide.
She ate rat poison, Leila told me later.
One day Joe and I were sitting at the end of the bar, and the woman who’d gone to Vassar and wore feather earrings walked past; her husband had on a straw hat like a scarecrow’s. When they were out of earshot, Joe said: “People who have advantages and pretend they don’t are still phony.” Maybe educated people intimidated Joe. Maybe he intimidated them. “Alienation schmalienation,” he said. “Nobody likes work. Of course local yokels like a commune,” he added. “Less work, more food, interesting sex just down the hall.” I protested. “They have ideals. They want a life that’s . . .” I paused. “Egalitarian.”
On the other hand, the bar wasn’t egalitarian.
Once I played “Theme from A Summer Place” on the jukebox. One of the men with beards—this one had a beaky nose—objected, moving his barstool near mine until his thigh pressed against my thigh. He told me that the Percy Faith Orchestra was an ersatz copy of real orchestras playing real art, which never lulls its audience into complacency. Joe liked the J. Geils Band, which wasn’t on the jukebox. Joe probably didn’t like “Theme from A Summer Place” either. Yet he interrupted and said: “Okay, it’s not about peace, love, dove, and incense. But you can listen without losing your grip.”
So I mostly sat with Joe, who didn’t harp about what I didn’t know, because he didn’t know either. I told him that the woman with feather earrings had loaned me books. “Maybe I don’t understand them,” I said,