My Unsentimental Education

been made for the last five years running, and it wasn’t ours but his. Marriage is for sharing, I thought. Yet we weren’t married, not until morning.
We moved to Kansas, and child support payments fell into the pile of monthly bills. Our responsibility beyond that was a knot to be untangled when my husband and I would visit Wisconsin, where he used to play a mix of blues, bluegrass, rock—music that lampooned redneck prejudices, even if rednecks in the audience didn’t know it. “Up against the Wall, Redneck Mother.” Some rube on a barstool always thought this was an anthem.
My husband used to understand it was denunciation. He smoked pot. He smoked it for breakfast. He had gay friends from when he’d majored in music. He used to have a FREE NELSON MANDELA bumper sticker on his guitar case. After we moved to Kansas, he took it off. I asked why, and he said he was making room for new stickers. But he’d left on other stickers that advertised bars. “You’re redecorating your guitar case,” I said. I understood, peer pressure. But we were moving in opposite directions. I was enrolled in a class called Patriotism and Pornography in Seminal American Texts, and he’d started laughing at jokes where the punchline was that certain ethnicities are subhuman. I recognized the need for protective veneers, but underneath them you have beliefs, ever-refining.
“You didn’t think that joke you laughed at was funny, did you?” I asked one night, as we drove home from a gig. I was unsettled, too, because one of the band wives—they were younger than me—had said I looked good for my age. I was twenty-four.
So I maybe seemed like a stranger to him too. He’d met me while I was working for the news channel. He wasn’t used to me agonizing about twenty-page papers, or muttering Wallace Stevens poems while making meatloaf. “So neurotic,” he’d say, patting me. I’d been raised to defer to the husband, but also to work hard, tidy up, pay bills. Had I erred on the side of competence? I’d taken over legal matters, finances, laundry, cooking. What else could I do? Garnett, conversing in the store one day, let drop this nugget: “A woman doesn’t always have to have an orgasm. Sometimes it’s enough to give the man his.” I’d been fascinated that a woman almost old enough to be my grandmother would discuss orgasms. And I absorbed all the marriage survival tips I could.
The Halloween party guests were off the portico roof now. They danced in the living room, the spare bedrooms, the dining room I used for an office, the hall to the bedroom, in the bedroom in a dense U-shape around the brass bed my mother had shipped, her wedding present. By now, I thought, the shocks weathered in my first year of marriage, in the now-tainted week of the wedding, were either water under the bridge (forgivable) or spilled milk (indelible). I glanced at the ceiling with its old wallpaper, parchment-like with silver flowers, and wondered what it must have been like to be a storeowner’s wife a hundred years ago—hopes, fears, a husband with impenetrable motives.
I let myself remember the afternoon, the argument. The mail had come and, with it, another notice my husband had bounced checks. This was before check carbons. He didn’t use the checkbook register. He bought things and didn’t say so. I also told him—though it wasn’t germane—that he hadn’t monitored the oil levels in his car. He’d burned up one secondhand car I’d spent part of a student loan to buy so he could get to gigs. Then I spent more of my student loan to buy another, and it had been down two quarts last week. I’d checked it myself and refilled. He couldn’t live this henpecked, he said. He’d run downstairs and slammed the door. “Fine,” I’d yelled. I threw objects downstairs, and they bounced. Then he was back, bounding upstairs for his guitars. He was six-foot tall, with dimples. He left again, firing up his car, probably down a quart already.
People were starting to leave the party in drunken bunches. Theresa Minster, derby hat in hand, said: “Which one is your husband? I’ve never met him.” I could have said he was at a gig. He wasn’t. He was probably at the pedal steel player’s. He’d slept there before when he’d been too drunk to drive. Impulsively, I said, “He’s not here. We’re fighting.” She looked surprised. I’d mentioned him as a normal husband the day before in the office. I hadn’t told anyone about money problems. When I’d complained about the burned car, I made it sound like a vexing but ordinary used car problem. She said, “Not to intrude, but if there’s anything I can do, let me know.” I nodded. “Thank you.”
Then the apartment was empty except for me and the woodsy poet. I’d restocked coolers all night, collected empties, checked the portico. I wanted a drink, but there wasn’t one left that wasn’t dregs, so I decided to break out the dandelion wine I’d made the spring before, using my husband’s grandmother’s recipe. I’d picked dandelion blossoms (must pick in morning, the recipe stipulated), washed them, added boiling water, sugar, and all-important yeast. I let this stand for three weeks, and strained it into bottles.
I’d set them in the spare bedroom, the one with junk, relics. When light from the window sometimes hit the bottles, they glowed yellow. My husband’s grandmother had served hers to company in thimble-sized glasses. This was the first time I’d served mine. It was strong. Every time I served it in the future—at a Thanksgiving dinner that went on after store-bought wine was drained, or at an after-the-bars-closed party—it knocked everyone into another zone. The woodsy poet and I drank this incandescent wine and talked.
He’d gotten married in high school when his girlfriend, named Stevia, after her father Steve, was pregnant. “It was the right thing to do. But it