My Unsentimental Education

went on interviews at county and state bureaus. “Few people know shorthand these days,” a man who interviewed me said, approving. But a stenographer with experience got hired, not me.
The man called a few days later to say he’d found me a job, due east, near the border of Michigan’s UP. My mother urged me to take the job, describing benefits, transfers. Yet I couldn’t bring myself to move deeper into the pine woods. My dad told me to join the army. “You like going places and . . .” he paused, “meeting unusual people. You’ll get job training besides.” My mother said to get waitress experience. “You’ll use it all your life.”
One night she called me to the phone.
When I picked up, Joe said, jolly, ironic: “Queenie?” I tried to picture him in Colorado, but I’d never been there. “Hello,” I said, puzzled. We hadn’t pledged to be in contact.
He lowered his voice and said I should come. He missed me. He’d gotten a promotion. “I have a room in a house. Not like you think. I share a house with friends and their ten-year-old son. You can drive me to work and use my car to look for a job.” I told him I’d think about it. I hung up and saw the wary look on my mom’s face. But ads for nearby jobs had dried up. I decided to go to Colorado. I wouldn’t be the first or last woman to use a man as a way to leave home, and sometimes you go sideways or down before you go up. All Joe expected was loyalty, maybe cooking. I asked my mother to drive me to the airport in Minneapolis. She said no.
But when I started checking Greyhound schedules, she changed her mind. Only if I’d buy a round-trip plane ticket, she said. I wasn’t coming back, I said. She said leave the return date open—I’d come for a visit. I bought the ticket, using money from savings. These were days when people walked passengers all the way to the gate and waved as the plane lifted off. As we crossed the parking lot, snowflakes drifted down and melted on my mother’s face. When I turned to go, she looked smudged. I got on board.
I remember Colorado Springs as buildings beside a snow-spackled ridge of mountains. I drove Joe to his factory with its big sign: HIGH ALTITUDE. LOW HUMIDITY. BEST METAL WORK IN THE USA. I never saw the inside. Joe came home every night, filthy. I’d packed clothes for job interviews, yet no ads asked for stenographers. My typing was an asset, but I didn’t interview well; I was eighteen. I’d never worked anywhere except the clothing store. I applied at clothing stores, and people taking my application were older, strikingly attired. Joe talked about getting me on at the factory. As days dragged, I learned to make potato soup, macaroni with cheese called rat trap, more potatoes, hamburger, kielbasa. When our housemate’s ten-year-old got in from school, we walked to the grocery store, and I’d have dinner ready when the adults came home.
I spent time with the ten-year-old because conversation was easy— how teachers make you feel, what TV shows we liked. I avoided his parents’ friends who came and went. Joe’s housemates and friends used pot, alcohol, but also mescaline and downers to make weekends special. Joe liked just alcohol and sometimes cheap speed.
One nice weekend Joe and I drove to Cripple Creek to visit his friend who worked in the mines and had married a woman with a baby. In the evenings, the men drank beer while the woman fed the baby, then crocheted. She gave me yarn and a hook so I could crochet too. One night she made tuna casserole. When I said it was good, she said she’d added sour cream for extra flavor, and I nodded, impressed at culinary improvisation. Her husband said that the mine’s better pay meant better grub, this nightly reminder of affluence, and I thought for a minute about the piddling cost of a carton of sour cream. But I let my snobbish thought go because I liked these people. Then Joe and I went home.
Most weekends we went to a bar called the Wagon Wheel. Joe wore Levi’s, a black T-shirt, his leather eye patch. I’d put on my Saturday night best—lace mixed with denim, earrings made of beads and chips of deer antler. One night a man who was tripping or jacked up on white cross spoke to me. I answered politely, and he pulled a knife. Joe knocked him to the floor, then dragged me out of the bar. He said, “Queenie, you need to learn to tell good from bad.” We were on Joe’s turf now. One night we were making love, and Joe said, “Virgins are overrated.” I turned away. “I was not a virgin when we met. If you want facts, you lack finesse too.” He sighed. “We were kidding, right?”
One day I had a toothache and spent almost the last of my money on a dentist who used gas. So far, I’d had only Novocain. The dental assistant put a mask over my nose and said, “Is it enough yet? Is it enough yet?” I winced at the tooth, the dentist prodding, and shook my head no. Then I fell backwards and down. I found my dad and Joe in a hole. Why had I never noticed that they were alike? Their whiskers were coming in as five o’clock shadow, and both of them said I’d never understand. My mother leaned over the top with a woman dressed in white, and light was brighter there. I must have had no better way to sort this out than Sunday school imagery: “There is a hell?” I said. The dental assistant, in white, removed the gas mask. “Oops,” she said, “too much.”
One Sunday morning, the phone rang. Someone rapped on our bedroom door. “Telephone call from Wisconsin,” the