My Unsentimental Education

felt when she got her first electric washer.” But we didn’t tell my mother that. “Who is James?” my mother asked again. The coke-roommate said: “Debra’s boyfriend.”
My mother asked to meet him. I didn’t want to give James false hope by introducing him to my mother. I was removing myself slowly, peeling away so he wouldn’t notice. But I couldn’t describe to my mother James’s status as half-boyfriend. I called him.
He answered his door, holding a corsage. He was taking us to dinner, he said. She’d pay, she answered, firm. Then three grubby brothers pulled up, and one handed James money. I hurried my mother back to her car. She said: “Are you kids dealers?” How would a person who didn’t sell drugs or date someone who did respond? Flabbergasted, I decided. Flabbergasted, I said, “No, why?” She said, “That boy gave James money.” I scrambled. What was wholesome yet enterprising? “James runs a lawn-mowing service,” I said. “He sets up accounts and hires people.” She wasn’t done yet; she was a bookkeeper: “Why was the employee paying the boss?” I stopped working on my facial expression. My mother had been privy to my subterfuges since I was little. “Customers pay the guy, and he brings a percentage to James,” I said. She sighed. She weathered bad facts this way: accepting the semblance of a reasonable lie.
I gave notice at the café—Kristine barely spoke as I finished my two weeks—and started at an expensive new restaurant, for better tips. I kept track of James, his schedule. I got cagey about my own. Peter, a boy I knew from Sigma Tau Delta, said to me in a bar, “You don’t like intelligent men.” Men? I thought. I said, “James is intelligent.” Peter said, “You’re too insecure to sleep with me.” I wasn’t. “Prove it,” Peter said. I went to his apartment in one of those business districts with a one-room grocery, butcher, tailor, a strip of stores in the old Polish neighborhood, and Peter’s room an empty storefront with curtains covering the window, his bed pushed so near we heard chattering pedestrians on the sidewalk. We didn’t undress. We talked about Theodore Roethke.
Next, I lived in a blue-collar neighborhood between the tire factory and brewery, in an apartment I shared with a girl doing practice teaching at a nearby school. A man with a PhD doing postdoc research in rivers asked me out. He’d first seen me at James’s. When he came to pick me up, he offered me coke. I declined. He said, “I thought you were a coke whore. I couldn’t find another reason for a girl like you being over there.” My face felt like a mask. I’d seemed like a whore? He’d insulted James too. I said, “This isn’t charming date conversation.” The PhD said, “He has good drugs, but he’s a blowhard. What’s with the guitars?” I said, “He plays well.” He played well with records. He didn’t play with people. He’d never had people, just customers—not counting me, and his mother, who’d called the police to arrest him for breaking curfew after she passed out. “He’s had a hard life,” I said. “He has ten times more courage than you.”
“Whoa,” the PhD said. “I didn’t know you loved him.”
After the expensive restaurant went bankrupt, I took a job at a bar and moved alone to a tiny half-duplex, charming in the summer once I’d redecorated with knickknacks and lace curtains from the thrift store. But winter blew in. The kitchen used to be a porch. The apartment turned cold. I hung a blanket over the kitchen doorway and, in the morning, I found ice-covered dishes in the sink. I wore mittens to make coffee and never covered the kitchen doorway again. I was wrapped in blankets, circling ads for new apartments, when my mother phoned to say that she was buying me a ticket to fly on a prop jet to a hospital in North Dakota because my taskmaster grandmother had terminal cancer.
“You’re never home,” my mother said. “I call and call and call.”
I told her I’d been at class, at work, or studying. Some nights I studied until dawn in the oldest building, Schofield Hall, which stayed open all night. It used to be a laboratory school with secret balconies so normal school professors could observe teaching and learning—ghosts of professors circling as I studied. I didn’t tell my mother that on coldest nights I went to James. We had sex. Then he got up to drink as I slept in a warm bed.
She said, “Just to let you know, I don’t know where your father is.”
She should move on, I said, make a new life. But in a small town filled with bars and strip joints, they’d been not just husband and wife but partners in get-up-and-go. Everything they said, did, wore, drove, established that they weren’t lowlifes. She said, “Divorce is impossible. I’d rather be a widow.” I was shocked. “You wish he was dead?”
She said, “Did I say that? No.”
She needed a plan. I didn’t have one.
When I got to the hospital in North Dakota, my sister was already there, holding her new baby. I sat next to my grandmother’s bed and studied my niece, her tiny face blinking at light, at motion. At the end of life, my grandmother was docile, benevolent. In the middle of life, my mother was staggered by double losses looming. I saw it in her wilted posture.
When I got home a few days later, it was December.
I was graduating in a few weeks. My grades were As, except Cs in required sections of Physical Education I’d procrastinated until the end: a C in Relaxation because I fell asleep instead of relaxing; a C in Beginning Swimming. The teacher had noticed me the first day, floating easefully, and stared at my face: “There’d better not be anyone in here who already knows how or that’s an automatic F.” So I feigned helplessness in deep water.
I’d