My Unsentimental Education

with an opinion in the minority don’t speak. We were two people in a room. I wasn’t a minority. Yet I was minor. He was major. He waited for me to answer.
When I got home, I hauled my bike into the parlor and leaned it against the piano. I took a bath. Wearing a robe, my hair in a towel, I used the green phone in the hallway to call James. I wanted to yell at him for giving me LSD. But I’d pretended I’d had it before. I wanted to yell at him for sleeping through the bad part while I’d gone home, cut out newspaper photos, decorated and undecorated the bathroom, then worked. “It was busy,” I said at last. I described the streaks of light behind moving silverware. He said, “They call those trails.” What was High Times for if not to hone your vocabulary? I told him about riding my bike, but not that I’d felt I was pedaling in place like the witch in the tornado. “I got an A on my paper,” I said. He said, “You went to campus today? Man, I slept.”
The weight we’d thrown around shifted. I didn’t care anymore if he liked my coat or, come summer, my homemade sundresses that looked winsome and breezy with matching flip-flops, two for a dollar at Wool-worth’s. LSD is best taken in glorious weather when you aren’t jostling for power with your boyfriend, I decided. That summer, we made love outside, fireflies flashing. Or the moon shone, and we swam near a waterfall someone made by attaching corrugated tin to posts and stretching it across a creek. I fumbled upward in the downstream until my hands grasped the tin’s edge: all that roiling and churning demystified. I had a solid A going in Shakespeare II, another in Spenser class, both taught by a professor I’d been warned would be hardest. Yet every unfamiliar idea was footnoted, and every progress was a story: rise, fall, rise. “Ah, but you have a knack for getting past the literal to layers of symbols,” Dr. D. Douglas Waters said.
I met stolid, marriageable boys—in class, at Sigma Tau Delta meetings. But at a small college people know you by reputation. Jimi Hendrix, Are You Experienced? Yes. I’d had that interlude with a thirty-two-year-old factory worker. I dated a drug dealer. I wore odd clothes. But Bob Barr’s bungled compliment had taught me that you can break one rule if you imbed the broken rule in the midst of convention. I’d wear jeans, a black leotard, then add just my coral-colored jacket with silver-embroidered poinsettia flowers—one of two pieces from an old lady sleeveless-dress-with-matching-jacket ensemble. Then, for a poetry event, I’d wear just the sleeveless dress with plain black tights.
A girl from Oconomowoc—a wealthy Milwaukee suburb, James told me—dated one of James’s roommates, and she asked me to live with her and two of her friends next year.
But before the lease began, I did LSD one more time, and James promised to stay awake. He didn’t. I shook him gently, and he started yelling, and maybe he couldn’t stop because he remembered none of this later, but he shoved me out his bedroom door, toward the stairs, telling me to go, go. He didn’t throw me. Or did. Who can say now? I tumbled down, one bruising step at a time, and walked home in the dark in my pink negligee, circa 1959. When he phoned the next day to say where had I gone and thank God I was okay, I broke up with him. But the next time I worked, Bob Barr dropped off James in the parking lot across from the café. Kristine stared out the window. “Were you expecting him?” she asked. She could tell by my face I wasn’t. She said the dishwasher would walk me to my car. I shook my head no. I drove James home and said not to embarrass me at work. A few days later I came out of class, and he was waiting.
Dogged pursuit of an aloof woman is celebrated in Renaissance poems. The woman’s refusal will whet the lover’s desire—even if this isn’t what you want. Next, James broke his leg because he went skydiving, perhaps to demonstrate vigor and biological fitness. Why now? I thought. Finals were starting. He was failing Social Work 3305, Human Behavior and Social Environments. I had an exam the next day, but I brought him food. A week later, Bob Barr called me on the green phone and said that James—who’d used Bob Barr’s car to get his license, then bought himself a car, then rolled it while driving fast, possibly drunk— wasn’t injured, except his leg was still broken.
“He needs you,” Bob Barr said. “He’s bad off.”
I felt responsible. Intro to Psychology talk about “boundaries” hadn’t begun yet.
I made a deal with James. I’d be his girlfriend if I didn’t have to see him often. We’d have sex, but not over and over. One orgasm for each of us each time. “I have less spare time than you,” I said. I couldn’t stop him from doing drugs. He sold a few kinds, all of which I’d sampled, then, curiosity sated, I got back to work. But I didn’t want them now.
I moved with the girl from wealthy Oconomowoc and her two friends into a cream-colored house. My mother visited. Someone mentioned James. My mother said: “Who?” He had trouble sticking to my schedule, so he’d drop by, wearing aftershave, and leave pot in a box my roommates kept on the table. He conversed about blues guitar with one roommate, social work with another. The girl who’d invited me to live there loved cocaine. We’d start to wash dishes, scrub the bathroom. She’d say: “Call James and get some coke over here, so we can get this place spiffy.” She’d do lines with him, then fire up the vacuum, shouting: “Now this is housekeeping. This must be how my grandma