My Unsentimental Education

unconsciously quoting the song.
In Brock’s inebriated moments he’d sometimes do the end of the song, when police say: “You’re surrounded. Give yourself up.” I asked Joe if he hated Brock’s singing. Joe said, “He’s just keeping it light—he understands I made miscalculations that snowballed.”
The phrase “deadbeat dad” didn’t exist yet. So I didn’t have an automatic way to say it was wrong Joe’s daughter didn’t know her father. Or that, to get by, Joe’s ex-wife had to live off her father. But if Joe was telling the truth, he’d need money to float like a miracle from the sky, also one of those kindly judges from an old-time movie who’d see that Joe had been railroaded out and needed a way back. Joe hadn’t known his father—not even a name. Here he was, helping with Leila’s baby, not his, who must be as old as the girls now. They ran to the swings; I called for them to be careful. I tried to see Joe’s story in a skeptical light. Was this why he’d objected to Leila? He felt like a meal ticket?
Joe said, “I just want to make it right.”
I pictured his return—getting out of a car at sunrise, a determined look on his face.
“When I do,” he said, “I’ll take you with me.”
So there’d be a stepdaughter I’d learn to love. I pictured myself in an airport somewhere, pushing a stroller. Would this be my baby? It couldn’t be Leila’s. I’d wear a filmy dress, silver earrings; Joe would look better too. I’d buy him new T-shirts. I wondered if I’d like him to wear the eye patch. I would, I thought, if we were far from Spooner.
This was my playground daydream.
I left for college in two weeks.
Once renowned for twenty-two sawmills, Eau Claire had a little university, a tire factory, a brewery that made bad beer, and a toilet paper factory that pumped gray dross into a sludgy peak. Most students came from Milwaukee suburbs, I gathered, and bought their school clothes at department stores. Some had received new cars for high school graduation gifts. I met kids from small towns too, yet I didn’t get to know them because they didn’t talk in class. I got Bs and Cs on my assignments. I had a bad moment in Intro to Philosophy when we discussed collective moral standards, and I raised my hand to ask how it’s possible to know morality from immorality in a purely theoretical context, though I didn’t have the right words to ask my question like that. The professor turned scathing.
I walked off campus, exploring the tiny city. Every few blocks, I found a new business district with a one-room grocery, tailor, florist, shoe repair, and tavern. One corner had four houses with cupolas and stained glass windows, built in the 1920s—each a wedding present from a lumber baron to one of his four daughters, the historical marker said.
Temperatures dropped.
I stopped wearing my dresses with moccasins and wore jeans, flannel shirts, and Red Wing work boots. One day, as rain turned to sleet, I realized that if I continued using the Hunting & Fishing Supply as my shoe store, I’d need felt-lined rubber boots next. Then I headed back to the dorm, where girls played Peter Frampton and hot-rolled their hair.
One night I put a fan in my window facing out, lit a joint, and blew the smoke outside. In the morning, I found a note on my door with shapely Magic Marker letters: “Stop being a DOPE.” Now I truly didn’t fit. A pretty girl one day asked me—a small troupe of her friends listening—why I never spent weekends at the dorm. Instead of giving her a complete answer, I said: “I visit my boyfriend.” She asked where he went to college.
He’s thirty-two,” I said. “He doesn’t think about college.”
In fact, I went north every weekend because my mother and father had arranged trips—my mom’s a guided tour with my taskmaster grandmother, my dad’s a fishing trip to Alaska—but neither had told the other before the nonrefundable down payments got made.
I couldn’t keep straight who’d been rude first and who’d retaliated. My dad’s trip preceded my mother’s, but he wouldn’t have taken his if she hadn’t been greedy and set up hers, but before that he’d ignored their silver wedding anniversary. So I came home to cheer up my mother. Then she left, and I came to clean for my dad and brother. I’d see Joe at night. He had a job at the boat factory in Shell Lake. He’d drive over to see me in a car he’d traded his motorcycle for. We babysat for Brock and Leila, who weren’t getting along either.
I should have tried to make friends at school. But one day, as I looked for rides to Spooner on a bulletin board called the ride board, I found a steady ride to Shell Lake. A guy who stayed on someone’s couch on weekdays, then went to Shell Lake on weekends, picked me up on Friday and took me back on Sunday. Joe had told me about his place. A woman cleaned the bathroom every day. This confused me. Why just the bathroom? What did “place” mean? Was this an idiomatic tic like saying “soda” instead of “pop,” or calling me Queenie, which I’d heard only for dogs, not girlfriends? When I got there, I understood. He lived in a room above a bar and shared a bathroom with people down the hall.
He looked scruffy. After he washed up and changed into a fresh T-shirt and better jeans, I could see why, when he was young, a nabob girl in his high school had loved him. But he didn’t like cleaning up. We argued. I wanted him to put his best foot forward. He said he’d stopped believing a best foot forward mattered.
One weekend, we drove to Spooner to visit Brock and Leila, who were moving into a house. Brock’s dad was redecorating the apartment because it needed