My Unsentimental Education

to Dr. Darden Stoat—Uncertainty Reduction Theory put to use. How was he? He hated the North. He hadn’t pictured himself at a small state college. Did he have suggestions for improving my papers? He pointed at me. “You digress. But your digressions ultimately pertain. But this scenic route wearies me because I’m busy when I read.” He described the term paper. “It will make or break you.”
I worried about this paper in my new room that sometimes felt lidless—open to the infinity of ideas, best, worst. Train noises muffled the sound of roommates on the stairs. I’d hear a female giggling, stumbling, more footfalls, male voices. This would be the theater major who sometimes spent the night with two gay men. She slept naked except for pearls, she’d explained, though she was a virgin. Another roommate looked like David Bowie and sat in her room listening to David Bowie while crying—I’d asked why, and she’d cried harder and said she couldn’t tell me. I scrubbed the bathroom, though not the kitchen, preserved museumlike in a state of squalor that predated my arrival.
I saw my room as my apartment: apart. But once in a while I came through the front door and, before going upstairs, gazed at the parlor— its upright piano with carved grapes, the colored glass in panes around windows facing the river, a divan from the Jazz Age. James lived a half-block away now, and I tried to picture him here, sipping tea. I sat down. Dust rose in a puff. The front door opened, and one of my roommates scurried past.
I juggled my job, homework, and James. Our mutual regard had surged, wariness too. Regard + wariness = hope forcing its way through gloom toward light. Call: I love you. Response: I love you too. I’d had this exchange with my mother, less often with my father. Rodney V. Meadow and I said it. Joe and I did. In courtship, the male initiates it. James choked out his part after we’d had sex, increasing the odds that I’d reciprocate because he was virtuoso. Besides homework he read less than he should, he read High Times, Guitar Player, and Playboy, which—say what you will—informed a slew of men who otherwise would never have known that women have orgasms, a subtle way of arriving at them.
James had practiced on acquaintances, none of whom he’d loved, he said. He knew better than I did that delay, a perfectly timed pause, and then another, made fulfillment more intense. I was a host of emotion. I felt self-conscious, grateful, rattled, languid, necessary. What phrase covered this? I said I love you too, though I’d lately told myself in my room, staring at the ceiling, the unpredictable future, to say so carefully this time.
One night I’d dallied too long with James before I went home. My Sacco and Vanzetti term paper was due the next day. I’d Xeroxed microfiche newspaper articles from 1919 to 1927 and circled words used by reporters that suggested presumptions about guilt or innocence— the paper’s gist. I’d tried not to dwell on old photos: Sacco’s and Vanzetti’s doomed faces; hysterical mobs that wanted Sacco and Vanzetti dead. But, reminding myself to avoid digressions that pertained yet wearied, I’d postponed writing. The theater major was out, I ascertained. My other roommate was listening to David Bowie.
I’d have to write the whole paper now or go to school and beg for an extension—uncertain outcome. Writing now was risky too. I sometimes got late-night brain static, worry in the form of freeze-frame images: authority figures with stern faces. As a child, I’d lie awake thinking that ghosts of people who’d died in our house just before we bought it were mad about renovations. Deferentially, I never touched the banister, the only surface not replaced or refinished. My mother would wake to find me standing over her as she slept. Worried, she took me to a doctor who’d prescribed yellow Valiums, children’s Valium. My dad had the big blue ones. My mother dosed me once, then shuddered and tossed the bottle out. That night in my rented room, I pictured Sacco and Vanzetti, looking sad about their trivial afterlife as a Freshman English paper topic. Finally, I put my coat over my winter nightgown, made a plan, and started typing. I read what I wrote, marked it up, retyped, read what I wrote, marked it up, retyped. Again, again.
Perfectionism I’d so far expended on poems. By nine a.m., I didn’t have time for another draft, so I hurried to campus. Dr. Stoat said he’d grade our papers—quickly, he stressed—then confer with each of us in private. I handed mine in, avoiding his skeptical gaze.
A few days later, I went to see James. His GPA had dropped, but a trendy psychology professor with a ponytail would hypnotize him to study harder, a tactic that had worked in the past and would again, James said. James had come to college at age seventeen because his social worker persuaded the judge that self-betterment occurs at college, not in the juvenile justice system. First, James got a job at a campus cafeteria. He didn’t like it, but it qualified him for a job at a sandwich shop, which was where he’d worked when he’d spotted me. Now he sold pot. This paid well and conferred status. Everyone he hoped to impress wanted some and kowtowed. When I arrived that night, one roommate after another greeted me, then departed. James and I sat in the living room.
The weather had rallied—spring’s foreshadowing, its foreplay—and I was wearing a tropical skirt with a leotard and a pair of pricey boots my mother had bought when she’d visited, postulating that I didn’t have a better house with better roommates because I didn’t have better clothes. She also bought me underwire bras that made my torso statuesque, and a coat—not as warm as the Persian lamb coat I’d found at a thrift store.
I settled onto the couch, and a roommate