My Unsentimental Education

ten-year-old yelled. Hungover, I dressed to take the call. “Hello,” my mother said in that fast and formal voice she used for long-distance, expensive minutes ticking away. She had my dad pick up on the extension. He said hello in a too-neutral voice. She asked what I’d been up to. I told her about new foods I’d cooked, that I’d had a toothache. She listened, then asked, “When are you coming home?” I said, “I’m waiting for a job at the factory.” She said, “No. Call the airline and get a flight. I’ll call back tonight, and you’ll tell me exactly when to pick you up.” Maybe it was the staying home every day, waiting for a ten-year-old’s return and then Joe’s. Or it was my mother’s stern tone—as if I were ten. I obeyed.
In early April—thaw, freeze, snow, thaw, freeze, snow—I’d wake in my old bedroom, put on a black uniform with white diamond shapes on the bust and hips meant to amplify female contours, then my coat, hat, gloves, and walk past clapboard houses, then down Main Street to the Topper Cafe. In the morning, I served eggs and bacon; for lunch, hot beef, fried liver. Every day, the most vocal of the grizzled men who sat at the counter asked if I’d bend over the cooler another time. Or stick my finger in his coffee to make it sweet. The other men chortled. The first guy would say, “You should move to Las Vegas. No use sitting on that money-maker.” I worried my job with its self-display, the striding across the café in my sex-robot waitress suit, signified changed status. “Are you friends with my dad?” I’d ask, changing the subject.
The first Saturday I went back to the Sportsman’s, Brock rushed around the bar to hug me, to ask how Colorado was. I answered that Colorado was nice—though I’d seen just glimpses. I said Joe and I didn’t talk often because long-distance cost too much. Brock started singing “Indiana Wants Me” robotically, as if he’d forgotten why he’d sung it in the first place. He was out-of-his-gourd drunk, I realized. One of the men with beards, the stuttering one, told me Leila had taken the children and moved in with a commune-dweller, but not at the commune. Where were they? He shrugged. I thought about the children. Would Brock see them again?
I sat next to the woman with feather earrings. Even one semester at a regional college will improve your small talk—I’d read Sylvia Plath. “Better yet,” I added, “John Berryman.” John Berryman’s poetry was gorgeous but bewildering, a line here or there making my heart thrill, a whole poem beyond me; I wasn’t a good enough reader yet. She said, “Another male poet, great.” I said, “But John Berryman is great. He’s better than Marge Piercy.” She stared at me. Commune-dwellers, or housemates in Colorado, have the same pecking orders as people anywhere, I realized. I resented my elders for having more choices, better ways of justifying choices, and they treated me like the amateur I was.
One night, the man with the beaky nose suggested we all go to the Chatterbox. He’d majored in economics. “Consider it research.” Another person suggested the new strip joint on the edge of town. The beaky guy argued for the Chatterbox. “It’s historic.” But everyone else wanted the new strip joint. One of the bib-overalled women smiled at me. “Let’s go. It will be a lark.”
We went to a one-story building that used to house an LP gas supply. We stared at the stripper’s G-string and pasties. She went through the motions—thrust, spin, twirl, dip, spin. I studied her face. She looked like a store clerk, pleasant yet aloof.
One of the bearded men leaned over and told me that lipstick evolved as part of a female’s mating display because red lips simulate the female state of arousal. Another shouted to the stripper: “Are you happy? Is this life fulfilling?” The one with the beaky nose took money out of his wallet. The woman who’d thought this visit to a strip joint would be amusing stared at the floor.
The stripper shook her hips, hands in a V-shape pointing to her privates, and she smiled at the regulars, who leered unapologetically. This was my hometown, schizophrenic. It had fragmented thinking. The post-hippies thought they were better than horny old-timers. Horny old-timers thought that they were no worse, for instance, than a bearded guy talking to a stripper about happiness sitting next to another holding a ten-spot near the stripper’s crotch. Outside, all around us, in houses with lights turned down, furnaces humming—my sister and her husband had just moved back into their house, so recently remodeled it still smelled like paint—were people who’d married because sex felt like love, and the feeling sometimes lasts and sometimes doesn’t.
I talked to Joe on the phone. “You’re my bright spot,” he said.
Weeks passed, and the owners of the Palace Theater came to eat lunch at the café. They’d refurbished the Palmote Drive-In too. Their names were Shelley and Bubbles, and they were ex-carnies. Everyone knew the Palace Theater on Main Street showed G-rated movies at seven p.m. and X-rated movies at nine p.m. Shelley buttered his dinner roll. “PG, which stands for ‘parental guidance,’ has replaced M,” he said, “which used to stand for ‘mature.’ R for ‘restricted’ is always a possibility too. But movies like these have always flopped for me at the Palace,” he added. “My core markets are families with kiddos and the single fellas.”
Bubbles suggested I serve concessions at the drive-in on week-nights. Because I was a good waitress, she said. Flattery, yet another currency. The Palmote showed horror movies on weekends, I knew. During the school year, if the thermometer stayed above zero and snow wasn’t expected, a high schooler might drive through the gate with a keg in the back of his pickup—I’d gone a few times, milling, drinking, the beleaguered babysitters on the screen irrelevant. That day