My Unsentimental Education

in the café I didn’t think to ask Shelley and Bubbles what the Palmote played on weeknights. Weeknights, I watched TV with my parents, my dad snoring in the recliner. Or he’d stay at the Corral, and my mother would confide gloomily that she’d done her best, cooking, raising children, bookkeeping, having sex. “It pays minimum wage,” Bubbles said. Spring was here, I thought. Ennui again. Longings. I decided to work two jobs, save for a car, move to a city, and wait tables there.
After work, I changed out of my uniform into jeans, a peasant blouse, my puka shell necklace, and I drove my mother’s car to the Palmote. I passed the marquee that said XXX because Shelley was already waving me into a parking spot. Inside, he introduced me to Bubbles’s nephew. “Bubbles wants Vinny to settle down with a local girl,” Shelley said. I’d never seen anyone who looked like Vinny except in West Side Story, which I’d seen on TV. Vinny rolled cigarettes into his sleeve, passé. He had tattoos, also passé. Or not yet reinvented. Only sailors and Hells Angels had tattoos then. Shelley showed me how to use the pizza oven, the popcorn popper, the till. He left to start the movie. Vinny stood so close I smelled his aftershave. He’d moved to Spooner because his parole officer made him live with family, he said. He took a pint of booze out of his pocket, and a condom packet fell on the floor. Years would pass before people would worry about AIDS. I thought the condom was Alka-Seltzer until I picked it up and handed it back to him. What next? Moans, sighs, gasps.
On the screen, a man traveling in a foreign country got separated from his wife. In a tent filled with naked women, he fingered one set of nipples, then another. Porn stars don’t seem real, I thought. Then— odd, creeping—that ancient sensation, arousal. Unsimulated. Maybe my lips were red. My arousal mixed with shame. It turns out I’m a bit of a prude. The so-called sexual revolution might have made me able to maintain a detached facial expression while college-educated people discussed free love, but I felt alarmed, then confused when the man on the screen plied various nipples. “Hmm,” he said, “just like elevator buttons.”
I quit, walking out the door.
When Joe phoned next, he said he was moving to Indiana. He wanted to come for me. I wondered: had he forgotten that I didn’t know good from bad, that we’d worn each other down in close quarters? “Why are you quitting your good job?” I asked. “I’ve got money saved,” he said. “It’s now or never. It’s all I know. Home.”
I stalled. “Go straight to Indiana and get settled first.”
He got mad. “You’ve met someone, is that it?”
The beak-nosed guy once swirled his hand on my back, but I’d walked away, blunt. The woman with the feather earrings had split up with her husband, and he’d turned out to be good-looking now that he’d taken off his straw hat—he had a dry sense of humor and twinkly eyes. If I stuck around, I thought, I’d head that way.
Joe said, “If you see me in person, you’ll change your mind.”
It was May when I drove the 1966 Pontiac Catalina my dad had found for me in a widow’s garage—ten thousand miles on the odometer, no dents or dings—and I parked at the end of a driveway leading to a cabin that belonged to the woman at the boat factory who’d given Joe her son’s sports coat. Ceramic trolls sat in the yard. Flower pots on metal stands whirled in the wind. I saw Joe’s car. Then the door to the cabin opened, and Joe stood on the steps, smiling, waving me in. The woman was at work, I knew. “Come out,” I said. “It’s a beautiful day.” The sky was blue for the first time in months.
We walked toward each other. He opened his arms. I stepped into them, commodious, familiar. But when he kissed me, I felt like an actress, a good actress. I threw myself into the performance: lovers reuniting. If I didn’t kiss him, how could I justify that I’d slept with him for almost a year? If I felt indifferent, I’d be careless, without caring. I’d prided myself on caring.
Before I knew it, we were arguing.
Joe said he’d paid for everything in Colorado. I said, “But I had over $700 before I left Wisconsin and less than $50 when I came home.” He said, “I must have spent three times that much, for our rent, for your food and your drinks.” I said, “You asked me to come. I cooked and cleaned for us. I looked for work. I tried.”
We stared at each other. He turned and walked back to the cottage.
I never saw him again.
A few weeks later, I moved to Eau Claire and rented a bedroom in a house. I took summer-session classes. I didn’t have sensible vocational skills, so I waited tables. As I served coffee, sandwiches, burgers, I considered all the menial ways to earn a wage—Joe at the boat factory, Joe at the steel factory. My dad had eked his way forward, and he got mad whenever he tried to explain how hard it had been. And any idea I got from bar talk that people don’t pay for free love vanished. I came home for a visit and, on Main Street, near the Chatterbox, I ran into the post-hippie who stuttered. He said Leila had left Wisconsin, and her boyfriend from the commune had hooked up with another guy’s wife.
Everyone has aspirations, I realized. Women who choose one mate, then another. Prostitutes and strippers do. Aspirations don’t make you special. One day, I stepped on an elevator in the only tall building on campus, and I understood I’d never again push elevator buttons without thinking of nipples. Underemployed people bored out of their minds wrote that line, I thought, going up.

On