My Unsentimental Education

feigned confidence everywhere else.
I’d feigned for roommates, Lana and Maribel.
I’d feigned I was popular enough for the girls in the cream-colored house where once, at a party, when I was dancing to the Rolling Stones, I heard a guy, too well-off for me, ask: “Who’s the girl with frizzy hair who digs electronic music?” It seemed like a line from a movie. When I realized he was talking about me I danced like life was a movie. I danced faster, thinking I could measure life out, not in coffee spoons, like J. Alfred Prufrock, that neurasthenic who just needed a job and a few deadlines, but according to the places I’d lived, the parts I’d been forced to play, changing myself as various settings required.
And I’d feigned for Dr. Darden Stoat who, hurrying to get this sticky moment of college teaching behind him, had added, “I hope this predicament won’t keep you from finishing your degree. When a problem presents itself, we have options, but options can shrink.”
He was saying, for instance, that I could have handled writer’s block many ways, but I’d waited too long and had one option, writing my paper in a grueling vigil. He was saying a pregnant college girl could have a baby—back then a college girl who kept her baby married the father, if he could be persuaded. Or she could put the baby up for adoption, dropping out for a semester. Or she’d have an abortion. Maribel, my lovelorn roommate, had an abortion, her parents never the wiser. This was a small school, a small department, and I wasn’t dropping out, nor would I hurry to class with a gold ring, swollen with child. I should have told him I wasn’t pregnant. But I didn’t contradict my elders. For the first time since I’d swallowed tissue paper with a butterfly wing on it the night before, I spoke from deep inside the truths I had available. I said, “This is a nice handkerchief.”
For the next three years, I’d be better dressed—at a visiting scholar event, or smiling as I rushed out of class, happy to have received an A—and I’d see Dr. Darden Stoat in the shadows, his human, intimate smile. I’d change my expression. I’d never been pregnant, of course, but I hadn’t known where I fit. I’d belonged somewhere, then didn’t. I’d been pregnant with hope, that’s all. I couldn’t begin to explain I wasn’t a diamond in the rough with morbid regrets. I’d never been her and was already more.
I graduated and got a job at a cable channel that flashed news on the TV screen. Monday through Friday, the graveyard shift, I took stories off the wire and condensed them. I met a man who seemed wholesome, or his family did. It was time now, I felt: marriage. People my age married. Besides, when I’d get in from work, I’d find my mother in her car in my driveway—who knows how long she’d sat there—saying she had no husband, no children, nothing. I’d take her inside and pour her a drink, though it was morning.
One day my fiancé—he wasn’t perfect, but I was good with raw materials, I felt—didn’t see any reason to stop using the dealer with the best pot, the best prices. I waited in the car as he went into James’s apartment near a school for criminally troubled boys; James worked there, I knew. He was troubled, but not as troubled as the boys, and they responded. Yet he was a drug dealer, I thought, fuming, waiting for my fiancé so we could head off into a life in which I’d get a master’s degree in a warmer state, and my fiancé would learn to be employed. He’d come to college on full scholarship but never finished and clerked at stores and played in bands. He was still inside—getting high by now.
Then I looked up and saw James in stocking feet in the snow, knocking on my window. I rolled it down. For a while, we’d been alike. We’d been squared: strengths multiplying, weaknesses multiplying. He was still who we were when we’d met—outsiders in unfamiliar terrain. “Congratulations on your upcoming nuptials,” he said.
I might have said back: “I wish you a happy life.” But I didn’t know yet that I wouldn’t see him again except dead-but-alive in dreams I’d have for decades. I said, “Thank you.” I cranked my window back up. My fiancé came out. I rolled away scot-free.

Drinks Are on the House
Reader, I married this fiancé. One year later he left me, hauling himself and his guitars away on Halloween, hours before a party I was hosting. We graduate students socialized with fervor—getting too drunk too soon, ignoring social niceties to cement these new friendships, stories of mishaps our creation myth. Standing at the top of stairs that led to my apartment, I watched zombies and ghouls stream past and thought that the idea of this party had probably seemed better to me than to my husband. After all, it wasn’t his master’s degree. Dressed as Dale Evans in my husband’s left-behind cowboy hat, wearing a yellow-sequined square dance skirt with bulls and bullfighters swirling, I put beer in coolers. It would be a buzz kill to announce my separation leading to divorce, I thought. Perhaps not leading to divorce. I wanted him back. He was family, familiar. Manners keep us from revealing feelings too soon. I’d read that in an antique etiquette book.
I greeted people by name who didn’t wear masks. A fellow student, a woodsy poet, came as himself in a flannel shirt unbuttoned to display a ceramic medallion on a rawhide string. Three male students came as one of our professors, Ryman Stacker. They wore guayabera shirts, striped book bag/man purses you could buy at head shops, and pins that said: ANITA BRYANT IS A FRUIT FLY; OUT OF EL SALVADOR NOW. Ryman Stacker came too, dressed as Woody Guthrie. He said to the three students, “Ha ha.