My Unsentimental Education

to bring in money to cover the house payment. Joe and I went back to Shell Lake and walked the shore of its namesake lake, which I knew as a place to swim and frolic. I’d never seen it in winter, its grim expanse crisscrossed by snowmobile tracks. We ate at a café, though Joe kept food in his room, including perishables between the window and screen. One night, we lay in bed, a streetlight shining around the curled edge of a window shade. Joe said he’d move back to Colorado after Christmas. The factory was hiring. I pictured a conveyer belt. I said, “In political science, we discussed minimum wage, the treadmill life.”
“So on and so forth. I can’t stay here.” Joe gestured at the room.
Then one night at school someone banged on my dorm room door. I opened it. Life had shifted again, but I didn’t know how yet. A girl from the dorm said, “This is an emergency.”
My sister and her husband had been driving to a store in a town named Rice Lake—its lake is bigger than Shell Lake, the town named after its lake is bigger too. My mother had told them not to go, icy overpasses. But, adults now, they made their own decisions.
They were alive, in ambulances en route to an ICU in Minneapolis. My mother arranged for a friend of a friend’s son to drive me to Minneapolis. When I got there, I stumbled through the hospital, asking strangers for directions. My mother’s face said hello. Then a nurse’s face said it would be difficult to see my sister. My mother blurred and disappeared into the waiting area. My dad, I don’t remember, but he must have been there, my brother too. My sister sat propped in bed. She chanted rhymes, her bandages like a turban. She called me baby names, and we were preschoolers again, inseparable, speaking a private language. Except I was the big sister now. I whispered not to say certain things—she was talking about bathroom functions. “Not that,” I scolded.
I stepped outside.
The nurse said, “The brain is like Jell-O. It got shook up. It takes time to settle again.”
I cried hard in the nurse’s station. Then stopped crying.
I went back to school. I was behind in my homework.
I pushed bad thoughts away. Or I wasn’t old enough to wonder if the injury was permanent. My mother and the doctor kept the prognosis sunny. “She’ll be fine in a few months.” My dad might have worried she wouldn’t be, but his duty was work, not family.
Marriage lasts in sickness and in health, especially during sickness because it’s impossible to make a change. My sister and her husband left the hospital and went to my parents’ to convalesce. They had matching wheelchairs, my mother said by phone.
When I got home in December, having handed in my last final, my father was remote, my mother fake-perky. My sister—her concussion rehabilitation underway—was unusually glad to see me. Wires stuck out of her husband’s temples, plastic tabs on the ends so people wouldn’t get scratched. “Doctors will cut those wires off lickety-split,” my mother said. “And,” she added brightly, “please invite your friend Joe for Christmas dinner.” Someone she knew had seen me with Joe, walking the streets of Shell Lake. I told her not to worry: “He’ll be moving back to Colorado.” She said, “Just invite him. No one should be alone on Christmas.”
Around noon, Joe arrived in his banged-up car.
An old car is fine, my dad would tell you. God knew he wasn’t a snob, he’d say, having come from nothing. But the old car shouldn’t have rust, dents, dings, missing chrome. It should be glossy with wax. Joe stomped snow off his shoes as I opened the door.
My dad leapt out of his La-Z-Boy and said, “Where’s your home, son?” My mother rolled her eyes. My dad had shifted into this father-who’s-protecting-defenseless-daughter mode we’d never seen before. I know now, if I didn’t then, that Joe scared him: Joe’s age, Joe’s size, his unfamiliar ways. Joe said, “Indiana, sir.”
Joe wore a sports coat I’d never seen—I found out later it belonged to the son of a woman he’d worked with at the boat factory. He had on a new shirt, wrinkles still visible from where it had been folded in cellophane. If this were my dad’s shirt, new but not ironed, my mom would call it tacky. But I could tell by the look on her face she felt tenderhearted that Joe had tried to dress up for us, sad, too, that he was my boyfriend. He was freshly shaved. His hair looked shiny. I’d warned my mother he’d lost an eye. In a poised way, she was inspecting his face now. Until you got close, he looked like someone who’d been outside a lot, sun creases. He was rough-hewn but handsome when he wasn’t coming off the end of his shift with fiberglass stuck to his clothes.
My mother had bought him a gift. He thanked her and unwrapped it, Avon soap on a rope. He hung it around his neck. “It fits,” he said, standing up and throwing his hands in the air. My sister’s eyes widened. “I like him,” she said. “He’s funny!” She was at the stage of recovery when she blurted. Yet everyone was so happy she was talking at all, even if what she said was uncharacteristic, that we all laughed, cozy group-laughing.
A few days later, Joe left. “Queenie, it’s been sweet.”
I wasn’t exactly sad.
We’d hit an impasse.
I started to plan my life. I wanted out of the dorm: the competing stereos, hairdryers, chatter; girls with winged hairdos, winged sleeves on their blouses, winged shins on their pants.
I stayed home and applied for jobs. I sewed new clothes. I bought women’s shoes at the store where I used to work. The clerk who’d replaced me waited on me, silent. My former boss kept his distance. I’d disgraced myself, it seemed. I practiced my shorthand and