My Unsentimental Education

drug. Daylight was bright. Traffic droned.
I locked up my bike and went inside to eat the special: green beans dressed with Roquefort cheese, a pile of cold chicken and hard-boiled eggs. I contemplated Kristine behind the counter. I felt love and fear. She was sublime as she told me the old man who rented an upstairs room had been incontinent. “He needs not a room but family or a private clinic and he has neither, nicht.” She also worried about the cook, who would do well to take a short stay in a sanitarium, Kristine felt. She was mad that a man who’d come last night for all-you-can-eat had wanted more twice. She’d asked him, “More which? More chicken? More dumplings?” Both, he’d answered. She’d given him a saucer with a half-dumpling and a wing. “I said, ‘You might get indigestion. You watch it. You should lose weight for health!’” I laughed, but my laugh sounded loud, so I looked at the counter and pretended to write on a napkin.
Kristine said, “Debra, you are blushing. Just your ears. Red ears. Is it a fever?”
I didn’t want her to see my eyes, windows to the soul, also dead give-away that someone is addled due to illegal drugs. I clocked in. During lunch rush, I didn’t make mistakes. Then I cleaned up, and the man who washed dishes, lurching because one of his legs was shorter than the other, brought me a tub of clean silverware and twisted his ankle. The silverware flew, each piece a missile with a silver stream shooting behind it. I grabbed the dishwasher to keep him from falling and somehow caught pieces of silverware, knowing that any I didn’t catch would need to be rewashed. Kristine clapped her hands, her cue for speed. She couldn’t afford to keep us on the clock past two. I picked up the rest off the floor, washed and dried quickly, slipping spoons, knives, forks into assigned compartments, and these slow-moving pieces had thread-sized, tinsel-like tails.
I left, pedaling across town.
I saw myself in a plate-glass window, perched on my bike. I looked like the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz. I’d unloosed my hair from its hairnet. I had on my uniform and white shoes. My coat flapped behind me. The hardest part about doing drugs was the acting-upon-acting, I decided. Stone-cold straight or sober, I acted: trying to be who Kristine believed I was, who my roommates hoped to live with, who the girl would be that belonged to James. My self that I preferred stayed underneath those facets, each facet angled to please a different person. To thine own self be true. Polonius, you windbag, I thought. People would fire me, fail me. I hurried up the stairs of Hibbard Hall and sat in Dr. Darden Stoat’s office. I said: How are you? I thought: How am I?
I worried that, apart from not passing Freshman English, I might have recurring, small-scale hallucinations forever. Probably not, though. Most people who drop acid don’t turn out like the legend of Art Linkletter’s daughter, I thought. Dr. Darden Stoat’s beard was shiny as sealskin, and he rubbed it, stalling. So I’d fail, I thought. One fail would be like getting that first small dent in my car. Now I could relax in school. I longed for my car next. Why had I been bicycling in winter? Why was I still wearing this waitress suit, my hair an unkempt snarl? I could do with a short stay in a sanitarium, I thought, missing Kristine. All my selves felt jumbled, not separate like forks, knives, spoons.
Dr. Stoat said, “I was dumbfounded when I read this paper.”
Fine, I thought. You try being me and writing it.
“I need to tell you something. Or inform you.”
I’d taken the scenic route again.
“I’ll be using it in future classes as an example of a successful execution of this assignment.”
“My grade?” I asked.
“Highest possible,” he said. “Obviously.”
Nothing obvious about it, I thought. Gold afternoon sun flickered though the slitlike window onto the edge of his wire-rim glasses. I shook my head. “Are you ill?” he asked me. He shoved a wastebasket in front of me. I moved my chair so light wouldn’t hit his glasses, so the tiny star on the corner of the lens would stop pulsing. I started to cry.
I hadn’t cried since my sister was in the hospital, chattering like a baby. That was sad too. I cried from relief. The paper would make or break me; I’d been made. I cried because I’d worked while Kristine watched with a hurt expression because she knew something was wrong and I didn’t confide, and she was too mistaken about my character to assume the worst, that I was doing drugs at work; I didn’t do phone calls at work. I’d hurried to meet Dr. Stoat, who thought I was good, but I almost wasn’t. Then I remembered Vanzetti, who looked more stricken, more woebegone than Sacco, less ready for the end to which his pamphlets and faith in righteous objection to unjust authority had led.
I needed to make a quick exit from Dr. Stoat’s office.
He hadn’t pictured his future at a small state college. He’d likely read a memo from Student Medical Services about suicide prevention—a kind word here or there making a difference. Separate facilities for mental health didn’t exist, so he couldn’t send me there. He said, “Are you failing other classes?” I’d have my best GPA so far. I said so. He produced a crisp, white handkerchief and gave it to me. I demurred: how would I get it back to him? He waved his hand in the air, impatient. “You’re in trouble. Am I right?”
I must have nodded.
He said, “You’re not the first female college student to find herself pregnant.”
I stopped crying. I was deciding how to say I was in a different trouble, drug-related. But not that. His glasses were dull now, unlit. Spiral of silence, I thought. It hove into view. Those