My Unsentimental Education

new self, all my selves.
So far I’d met Either and Or.
Either. The night before, I’d gotten back into bed with a moody jack-of-many-trades I’d dated erratically for years—breakups, makeups, seeing him lately after dark as my daughter slept in another room, the baby monitor on my nightstand blinking green, serene, a can’t-last-much-longer arrangement, true. But I couldn’t change where I lived, half-rural, half-highbrow. The night before he’d said he felt objectified. He hadn’t even known what the word meant when I’d met him, but he heard one of my friends say it and asked me to explain. I had, citing the standard complaint about Playboy—not that it’s sexually candid, but that its depictions of women don’t seem real. Maybe objectification is a woman-to-man problem, I thought. Because my first impulse had been to tell him that we would discuss feelings later, but go ahead and objectify me quickly because the baby might wake, and I had to get up early, my Monday morning to-do list long. But I didn’t. I lay there, silent. He got dressed and drove away, his headlights angling into the dark.
“Where does your aunt live?” I asked Miranda.
“San Francisco,” she said.
Or, for example. Before I was a mother, I’d ignored the impracticality, the costly phone bills, and I had a boyfriend I’d met at a professional conference. We visited each other when we could. Mostly we gave good letter. I know the appeal of a sentence bent to please its reader, a glimmer of emotion solidifying to a point. I sent my own letters back.
The fact that he loved me astonished him, he wrote once. Prone to genteel locutions, he said my letters arriving in his mail slot caused his heart to quicken. My heart acted odd too, but I thought it was jitters. He lived in a faraway city. He had a girlfriend already. Instinctively monogamous if a bit hit-and-run, I wasn’t good at being the Other Woman. I’d been raised with stark ideas about purpose: a woman who surrenders all to others, good; a woman who wants (covets), bad. Though I’d been taught to think more subtly since, first impressions last. Yet I hadn’t let go because he was the only man I’d wanted to sleep with who could discuss John Donne, the history of the English language, Aristotle, The Selected Poems of Federico García Lorca. Our brains matched. Our bodies did. Remorse mixed with desire. The letters amassed. My heart thudded.
Once, in an especially well-crafted paragraph, he said he’d dreamed a man in bib overalls stood next to me on the other side of a river, urging him to stop stalling already and cross over. Annoyed, I’d wondered: Why is a farmer my matchmaker in this dream? Because I kept a tidy house and sewed well? Because a hound dog slept on my porch? Because I’d lived in provincial towns and cities all over? My long-distance lover took the dream-advice seriously. In a real city, he moved out of the upscale home he owned with his girlfriend.
I started planning what to do and say.
His letters arrived two and three per day now: a tumble of script an imprecise substitute for a man, I noticed. Then they stopped. I felt scared. Tricked. I broke out in hives as I graded papers and listened to records. Someone to watch over me. Whether or not you have this, whether you feel lonely as the clock creeps toward midnight, is a personal problem, I decided. Work is necessity. Love is for evenings and weekends. He called ten days later. He’d never found a moment during one of our trysts, or during one of his letters either, to tell me he was epileptic. He’d had a grand mal seizure due to the stress of contemplating a new life, and the seizure was real, he said, not the cockamamie dream.
Before either of these men, there’d been more. Scads.
One night a friend from graduate school had called, worried her number was too high.
“Number?” I’d asked.
“Sex number,” she said.
“People count that now?” I said. “Isn’t it also how many people you’ve loved?”
“Loved?” she said.
“Until you change your mind,” I’d added, confused. “Until it doesn’t pan out.”
Sitting next to Miranda, I felt the urge toward truth this time. Because the world churns out aphorisms about school days, golden rule days, school the investment that always pays. But for me—improbably educated yet addicted early to books, convinced that what I’d read and remember would be honey in the larder for tedious years ahead— school had been a time of growing into one life and then another, another, changing social backdrops, lovers, husbands, each time hoping my new life would be the last revision. Men I’d gone to school with had heard women were their equals. I’d heard this too. But it was recent news then. We’d all been raised in homes where women weren’t. I usually dated down anyway, because dating up was work. Work was work, pretending to be who I wasn’t yet, pretending to be self-assured and expert by day. So at night and on weekends, I’d wanted to stop pretending. I chose men as if I’d never left home.
Tamping down a too-personal inflection in my voice, I told Miranda I couldn’t imagine myself without my job—my “vocation,” I said, using my work-day dialect. But, I said, I understood that having pursued it meant I’d bypassed turn-offs to other lives. Scraps of antiquated prose were free-floating around my brain. The angel in the house. Facilitating the family dialectic. I said this out loud: “I wanted to be the angel in the house.”
Miranda frowned. “Angel? Is that a New Age idea?”
“No,” I said. “It’s an old idea.” I explained that Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote for magazines and newspapers, not just the little novel that started the big war, had argued that a wife and mother did civilization’s essential moral work. I’d read Harriet Beecher Stowe in a class where the professor had emphasized that this accommodationist argument had helped set back