My Unsentimental Education

Imitation, man. Sincerest form of flattery, quote, unquote. Charles Caleb Colton.” Other young professors came. At a state school with big graduate programs, but located in the middle of Kansas and far from a city, the best chance to mingle with the local elite was drinking.
Professors who attended graduate student parties were young, male, white; professors who didn’t attend graduate student parties were old, male, white. They all had wives who’d typed their dissertations and now taught Freshman English for low pay. Male and female He made them, I thought, noting that there weren’t female professors here, just female students. But professors implied we might one day be more than educated wives.
The professor I’d come to study with, a scholar with a national reputation in rhetoric, knew one female professor at Carnegie Mellon, another at Stanford. But the job market was difficult, he added. And then: “This mixes badly with marriage, you see. Dreams get sacrificed.” Not my dreams, I thought. My husband didn’t have a career. My plan was to stop after this degree and teach at a two-year college. Another of my professors just let old ideas slip. Once, I worried aloud about a paper. He said, “It’s good you’re insecure. Otherwise, with your brains and feminine attributes, you’d scare me.”
I’d scared myself, enrolling in this traditional but newfangled program where, for two years, I’d study literature but also rhetoric, Old English, history of the English language, history and theory of grammar. Then, when I finished two years of classes, I’d spend another year studying for exams on eighty books and writing a thesis for which I’d conduct primary research because the professor whose reputation I’d banked on felt that the study of rhetoric in America was in its infancy and his students should not only summarize current research but exhume the untapped material waiting for us in archives all over and broadcast new conclusions to the world. Most of my classmates were focusing on creative writing or literature instead, not rhetoric, and they seemed more self-assured.
Maybe they were. Or maybe they pretended. I did.
As I’d dug deeper into debt to train for a career my family had never heard of, I saw that I had to go not just to three-hour classes, but to readings, receptions, and happy hours. As I did, I worked hard at acting smart, and then I’d notice my husband working harder.
Next, he joined a band, which solved the problem of whether he should go to my events. When I went to his gigs, though, I talked to people he was hell-bent on impressing, including other band member’s wives, who said I was “unique,” which didn’t sound like praise. I started staying home, doing homework and housework, homework and housework. Not quite synonyms, I thought, as I dusted woodwork while mulling over the Great Vowel Shift, due to migration, also the emergence of a prestige accent. Yet I worried I wasn’t adopting a prestige outlook, so I’d planned this Halloween party.
People were arriving in hordes now. “What are you supposed to be?” a gorilla asked.
A Ryman Stacker look-alike said, “She’s a cowboy’s girlfriend, in real life too.”
When I first met my husband, he’d played in bands people now call alt-country, hippie and hillbilly influences merged. After we moved to Kansas, he played straight-up country. As he’d switched genres, I’d switched personas; I added farmer’s daughter dresses to my repertoire.
As I sewed, I thought how, when I was little and watching Gunsmoke, I’d been mesmerized not by the calico-and-lace heroines but by saloon girls, their clothes, eyes, lips, thrilling bits of cleavage. I’d studied women carefully because I’d grow up to be one, I’d reasoned then. But now I wondered if my childhood longing for a quality these women had and I didn’t meant that I was a latent homosexual, a phrase people were just starting to use. Yet my longing wasn’t for sex but impact: making power fall to its knees.
It seemed wrong to give that up to try for the new power—”women’s lib”—that most people didn’t want women to have anyway. But I couldn’t express my doubts well, and all around me people had refined their women’s rights arguments: precise words, sarcastic zingers. So I kept my feelings about whether I wanted to be sultry-powerful or brainy-powerful to myself and avoided choosing by trying to be both, which is to say dowdy.
One of my classmates, Betty, walked in wearing a boa. She said, “I hate it when people call you a free spirit if they mean they think you’re a whore.” Another classmate, Theresa Minster, came as Charlie Chaplin. She was a lesbian. In Kansas, the word still sounded vaguely kinky, though, when Theresa said it, it sounded dignified. She had a friend, a graduate student from another department, who was also a lesbian, and the two of them knew all sixteen lesbians in the county, who’d formed a softball team. They came in wearing their jerseys. Another classmate, Ray, was gay. Gay men sometimes got treated like lepers then because AIDS was misunderstood. So, for Ray, and Ray’s partner, who said to call him Ray’s Wife, being gay meant being militant. Ray’s Wife grabbed my crotch. “It’s not as if I’m a man demeaning you,” he said, wearing a dog collar and leash.
The apartment was rocking now.
I lived in the country in a not-quite ghost town—above the old general store. Downstairs, in front, a portico that had once sheltered horse-drawn wagons and, later, automobiles, now covered a bench where my landlady Garnett, who sold antiques, not groceries and sundries, sometimes sat with her friends, Opal and Pearl. These names are real. How could I find better? I have nothing but praise for these semiprecious jewels. They treated me like—Garnett’s word—kin. The only other big building besides the store was the empty schoolhouse, where I sometimes did the Jane Fonda workout with young farm wives, including Garnett’s daughters. Everyone knew everyone because we were isolated. The bridge that once led straight to