My Unsentimental Education

“but they seem full of advice, correct thinking, and that gets old no matter how nice the word choice is.” The correct thinking was feminism, of course. I wasn’t a feminist, not yet, though in time experience would teach me to be. But even by then I’d never like poems that seemed more edifying than beautiful. So far I liked Keats—whose poems about love as the meaning of life until you get clued in that death trumps love—amazed me. And I’d found a book of Richard Brautigan’s poems at the Rexall Drug. They weren’t reliably interesting, but the slangy style was a good example because I hadn’t been anywhere besides Spooner. Did Joe like poetry?
He said, “If you do, Queenie.”
But he didn’t like Leila. She’d had her baby now and gazed at it tenderly as she yanked her dress aside for feedings. Joe had known her years. “She was about to be evicted with children,” he said. “Then she spotted Brock. Some guys will fall in love with their first lay. She’s been looking for a meal ticket since day one.” I argued that raising children was work, that she bartended. Joe pointed out that Leila went downstairs to be in the bar, not work. She didn’t cook or clean. It was true that the dirty dishes in the kitchen were glasses, cups. The trash overflowed with carry-out containers from the Topper Cafe. Joe stayed in the spare bedroom and cleaned the kitchen every day. Or I did.
Leila had to come upstairs every three hours to breastfeed. One night, I held the baby until she slept, then put her in her basket. The girls, who’d moved the TV into their bedroom, dropped off. Then Joe leaned over and kissed me: slow, luxurious. I thought the sex would be luxurious too. But Joe didn’t know—not in the way that Rodney V. Meadow had known—what I liked. I reminded myself that Rodney V. Meadow and I had learned to do for each other over time. How long had it taken? I couldn’t remember. I’d been so sure of Rodney I used to tell him exactly this, that. My time with Rodney had been like marriage, I realized—doctor’s appointments, shared holidays. But I couldn’t go back.
When Joe was done, he lay next to me. In nearby rooms, the children breathed softly. Jukebox thumps rose though the floor. Neon light from a bar across the street blinked against the windows. Joe said, “This is as close as two people get.” Of course he knew that people who weren’t close had sex, but this was the poetry he had. When Leila came upstairs, we were dressed but holding hands. “God,” she said. “I blame myself.”
One day, Joe and I were taking the children to the town playground. I’d packed a lunch—sandwiches, chips, cans of root beer. I put the baby in a backpack carrier. Joe toted the picnic and a brocade bag with diapers and bottles of the formula Leila had begun using because, between months of pregnancy and nursing, she was tired of not drinking.
We left the apartment and headed down Main Street, past bars, past the dime store, past the Palace Movie Theater, and a woman my mother knew drove by. Her steering turned erratic as she craned her neck to see me carrying a baby, walking with a man who looked not only too old but, by her measure, like a drug addict or low-class hobo, not to mention the school-age children prancing. She simplified this tableau when she called my mother, pretending to chat about altar flowers, then saying, “Debbie had a baby?”
My mother recounted this conversation that night. She’d said I hadn’t had a baby, no. I was clerking at the clothing store and babysitting too. “But whose baby is it?” she asked me.
“My classmate’s brother’s,” I said. “His wife already had the other children.”
“You babysit for fun, not pay?” I nodded. “Then why were you alone with the father?”
“That’s their friend,” I said. “He lives with them.”
“In a commune?”
If I said yes, I could imply there was an etiquette she didn’t understand—shared activities, outings. Or I could tell the truth and say Joe was staying there until he found a job. But this would let her know Joe was my boyfriend and she’d ask to meet him. I was raised to be a farmer’s wife, a shopkeeper’s wife, a telephone man’s wife. Joe would seem all wrong, past thirty with no regular job. Shiftless, she’d think—lacking resources to shift for himself and me. I said, “A small commune, yes.”
But before I fielded her questions, Joe and I got to the park. I held Leila’s baby. The girls ran—happy, shrieking—to the seesaw. Then I noticed Joe had his face in his hands. I thought he felt sick. He sat up, took a bandanna out of his pocket and wiped his forehead, then his one eye. Let me emphasize that a missing eye isn’t symbolic. I’d once had a kind teacher who lost an eye to cancer, no connection to Joe, who lost his in an accident. Having loved two people with missing eyes isn’t the key to my character as I proceeded in life, a competition in which the object is the most progress with the least misery.
Joe cleared his throat. He had a daughter named Josie, he said. When he was at work one day, his wife moved back in with her parents. Joe never saw Josie again, except in a restaurant with his wife’s father watching. “He was kind of a nabob locally—glad to get rid of me. I’d have needed money for a better lawyer than his.” Joe went to Kokomo to look for work. Then a friend from Colorado called about a factory with good wages. Joe paid child support on time for three years. Then the factory laid off, rehired, laid off. Last year his cousin had called and said there was a warrant for his arrest in Indiana.
“I can’t go back there,” Joe said,