My Unsentimental Education

the Down-Low
Late one night when no one was home, I worked in the living room while playing a Laura Nyro record. A roommate who’d competed for her hometown beauty pageant by singing “Climb Every Mountain” came in, stared at my typewriter and wadded-up papers, turned down the volume, and said, “She sounds like a panting dog when she sings the chorus.” I hadn’t known this roommate, or any of them, when I moved into my summer sublease bedroom, temporarily bedecked with doilies, knickknacks, and photos of ancestors I’d found in my parents’ attic. I’d found my taskmaster grandmother’s pedal-pump sewing machine too. Creativity and ambition converged as an impulse toward self-presentation that seemed less like style than performance art—still unknown in the upper Midwest.
Besides jeans and leotards, I bought my clothes at thrift stores: spangled vests, bolero jackets, men’s suit coats. I bought curtains and sewed them into dresses. I was trying to look good, better. Yet, except for a Swedish art professor who taught Watercolor II and praised my outfits, the attention I got was startled.
My roommates at the summer sublease were two or three years older than me, except Lana, who was my age, but she hadn’t dropped out of college at Christmas. When she asked why I had and came back so soon, I tried out answers. “I wanted to see Colorado, and I got the chance.” Lana frowned. “I needed to save to buy a car, so I can drive to a job and still attend class.” Lana frowned. “I felt guilty getting an education without first understanding the lives of the proletariat.” Lana looked stunned. “My sister was in a car accident, and I felt too sad to study.” Lana’s facial expression recast itself as sympathy.
So, for a summer, in the company of Lana, I was pitiable, and she was kind. She took me to parties at her boyfriend’s. She introduced me. People said hello, then ignored me as music got loud. Besides beer, there’d be bong hits. I’d end up silent, an especially florid wallflower I thought one night, studying my dress’s fern-and-blossom fabric. Then summer ended, and I needed a new place, a habitat where I’d be surrounded by my own kind.
In Biology of National Parks, a class with scads of students in it, the professor took roll every day, mangling my last name. At the time, it was Frigen, and people pronounced it Friggin or—afraid of sounding obscene—Frygen. My family said Frigane. In Spooner, everyone heard it before they read it and didn’t mispronounce it. So I’d never thought about it as a liability until now. I corrected the professor each time. One day, drowsy because I’d waited tables the night before, I put my head down, and I heard the professor say, “The first purpose of color change in chameleons is social signaling. Camouflage is secondary.” Then: “Hey, you with the weird last name, don’t sleep.”
The students laughed. I sat up, casual-seeming. When class was over, I put my book in my backpack. I was wearing my last year’s knee-high moccasins with a dress made from silky, golden curtains—I’d seen a photo of Stevie Nicks and admired the way she’d paired incongruous items, forging together the alien and separating the familiar, as Nietzsche said, though he meant we should disrupt word clichés, not fashion clichés. Still, I felt like I was in grade school. I chewed the inside of my cheek, worrying. In a few subjects, I got As and didn’t know why. In others, I got low Cs and didn’t know why either.
“Debra Frigen.” Frigane. I looked up. A boy towered over me. “James Stillman here.” He held out his hand, but I couldn’t shake it because I was adjusting straps on my backpack.
“You moved here last June,” he said. “I saw you.”
I nodded. I didn’t say that I’d moved here for the second time.
I didn’t think much about him as I walked to my mustard-colored house by a swampy lake. He was tall, handsome, but his eyes looked like they belonged to a trapped animal.
I was busy—my typewriter and folder of poems, my classes, my job, my life at the mustard-colored house where I shared a room with a girl named Maribel. In August, the view from its window had reminded me of adolescence: solitary days running a boat along a peaceful shore. But there was nothing solitary about a house with five renters, though it wasn’t fancy like the summer sublease, which I couldn’t have afforded during the school year, so I might just belong with these new roommates, I’d told myself. Besides, in a college town, good leases turned over in an annual wave—not much else had been available. We all contended with chronic unrest over who did or didn’t do dishes, who’d eaten someone’s TV dinner, who’d had sex on the living room floor under a blanket with lights turned off and mood music playing, a cue everyone else in the house took.
Except Ellen, who was religious. She flipped on the light and witnessed the spectacle, coitus interruptus under a lumpy blanket, then shrieked with her back turned until the boy was gone, and called a house meeting no one would attend. I mostly sided with Maribel, who’d been under the blanket in the living room because she didn’t want to lock me out of our room. Ellen, who’d signed the lease before the rest of us, had the biggest bedroom to herself—not that she’d have sex before marriage because her body was a temple, she said. Two girls named Paula, one from a farm, the other a cello player, weighed in. Farm-Paula rolled her eyes and said, “Lordy, I hope they used a rubber. One minute you’re frisky. Next thing you’ve got a baby with crappy diapers.” Cello-Paula said, “I personally couldn’t have sex in a living room like Maribel, but Ellen needs to get laid.”
I was waiting tables one night when my boss, Kristine, called me to the phone. “Debra!” she