My Unsentimental Education

the college town had washed out years ago.
The first emergency at the Halloween party that night, not counting my husband leaving, was the shaky portico. Upstairs, it was like a balcony without railings that you got to through spare bedrooms. The first spare bedroom contained childhood mementos my mother had shipped when she’d emptied the attic, preparing for the court-ordered sale of property co-owned with my dad. The next spare bedroom had a door leading to the roof.
In mild weather, I sometimes studied out there. Once, my husband and I had lain there, staring at stars while taking peyote. He’d rambled on about his recurring dream that he drove a school bus that flew through the sky. I hated peyote. But mutual interests are the foundation of marriage. As my husband talked, I realized that the only recurring dream I had involved my teeth crumbling. This didn’t seem worth describing, so I talked about Death & Dying, which was the unit all teaching assistants were teaching then, using the same textbook, teaching essays, poems, and stories about death, grading fifty freshman papers about death, and I’d never before quite understood that one life is like one sigh entering a whirlwind, that death itself is a blue-gray square, a not-luminous destination.
But I stopped obsessing about Death & Dying because I had classes to attend and teach, papers to write, floors to vacuum, and—tonight— people to herd off the portico roof.
One of the Ryman Stacker look-alikes had noticed my phone ringing, picked it up, and found me. I could barely hear Garnett saying she’d driven by on her way home from Weight Watchers and didn’t mind that I was having a party, but please get people off the portico because it wasn’t sturdy, in fact seemed to be swaying, and people on it were dancing and drinking and some might fall. I rushed to the spare bedroom, stuck my head through the door, and yelled for people to come in right now. The portico roof was covered with tar paper, mended many times with tar. In Kansas, in October, it’s hot outside. In the living room, my imitation Oriental rug, a favorite wedding present, now had tar footprints on it. I bent over it with a rag and nail polish remover, swabbing. But I quit when Ryman Stacker said, “You’ll save yourself some grief if you accept that tar tracks are permanent figures in the carpet, not exactly what Henry James had in mind, ha ha.”
I’d worn limp, floor-length white chiffon—my mother-in-law’s wedding dress—when I opened the rug, rolled up, wrapped in reams of silver paper, a gift from my sister, my brother, my dad, and his girlfriend. My sister found the rug in the Sears catalog, knowing that I’d live in apartments, that a rug covers other people’s stains. I loved the rug and wanted it to stay pristine. I wanted my marriage to stay pristine. But before the wedding my not-yet husband and I had packed up in the northern Wisconsin town where we’d met. We were set to leave for the southern Wisconsin town where his family lived. It was on the way to Kansas. Having the wedding there would help my family use company manners, I felt.
My mother claimed to get ill, or really did, when she was in the same room as my father, who wouldn’t come to my wedding, or anyone’s, or a christening, without his girlfriend. So my nuclear family, having exploded, came to my wedding. So did my gambling grandfather, a widower. I unwrapped the long tubular package, the rug. I’m not the kind of person to forgo makeup at a ritual occasion photographed for posterity, but I’d gotten pink eye in those baffling days before the wedding, and it spread to both eyes before I saw a doctor. I couldn’t wear mascara, and people assumed I’d been crying.
I hadn’t cried, but people thought I had because, before my not-yet husband and I headed south for the wedding, someone had knocked at the door. My not-yet husband answered it, waved me away. When he turned around, he held papers. He’d been served. The child was five years old. The child’s mother had called my not-yet husband months earlier to say she’d had to tell the state or she wouldn’t get food stamps. My not-yet husband hadn’t told me because he’d hoped it wasn’t true. He’d also worried I’d feel upset. When I found out four days before the wedding, I said the child deserved financial support. I felt upset. I said the child deserved to know his father. I felt upset. I said my not-yet husband had known for months; for five years, he must have had an inkling. I felt upset.
My not-yet husband was a fool, irresponsible. But he hadn’t cheated. The child had been conceived back when I was James Still-man’s girlfriend. The mother was someone my not-yet husband had met in bars—groupie was too harsh a word for a woman who’d liked a local band. What a price to pay for a two-night stand, I thought, though she no doubt loved her child. Would I call off the wedding? The U-Haul, packed to its seams, sat in the street. The church in southern Wisconsin awaited. We’d signed a lease in Kansas. I’d stepped onto, not an escalator, but something flat and moving forward.
My husband and I told his family—father, mother, brothers, sisters—about the paternity suit. We sat in their living room with blond paneling, furniture with wagon-wheel and saddle motifs, and talked about this fact, this new relative, illegitimate, though the word sounded awful. A child doesn’t ask to be born. A child is legitimate, I said. My not-yet-mother-in-law asked me if I was feeling okay, her eyes gentle. My not-yet-father-in-law seemed closer to tears than anyone. As everyone watched my face, I said we’d find a way to pay child support. A mistake had been made, but years ago. It was lost on me that a continuous mistake had