My Unsentimental Education

hasn’t been the easiest marriage,” he said. “That isn’t the most original line in the world,” I answered, taking off my husband’s hat. “Next you should say she doesn’t understand you.” I was getting drunk fast, monologuing. “But I’d believe you,” I added. “I don’t understand my husband. He doesn’t understand me. It’s a big mystery with clues and clues and no solution.”
The woodsy poet said, “Where is he tonight? Playing?”
“He’s out of town.” This was true, if I meant the almost-ghost-town. I slipped off my ivory-flowered cowboy boots. Then came the second emergency of the night. I was married. The woodsy poet was. I had scruples. Could I break this one rule just once? I could. I straddled the woodsy poet on the chair and started kissing. My husband would be induced to come back, I thought, kissing. But I was on a much-needed vacation from marriage, tough work, and in the meantime I’d do this inadvertent coupling, huddling, a splurge.
My husband was living at the pedal steel player’s. Headed for campus or the laundromat, I’d drive out of my way to see his car. If I called ABC Western Wear, I could ask for the pedal steel player’s phone number—the pedal steel player was engaged to the store owner’s daughter. But calling ABC Western Wear seemed awkward. I could go to the pedal steel player’s house. But who would answer the door? At home, I waited. The weather turned cold. Each room was heated with a gas stove on the floor I lit by pulling a lever, striking a match. I kept doors between rooms open and let costly heat escape so I could hear the phone. I paused the vacuum cleaner to listen. This was before answering machines. Every time I left, I’d return and stare at the phone, its secret life.
Weeknights passed quickly: homework, grading, chores. I didn’t mind Sundays. Dusk was bad, but over in an hour. If I went out on Fridays, I could handle Saturdays—then I’d be hungover, absent-minded, as I bought groceries, cleaned, went downstairs to help Garnett. I’d end propped in the brass bed under the quilt my husband’s grandmother made.
I went places with people from school, who sometimes asked where my husband was. At a gig, I’d say. Then Theresa invited me to a black-and-white ball at the VFW, which was available for private parties. Betty, who shared an office with Ray, was going—Ray had told her they’d have cases of that champagne in black bottles, Freixenet. When we got there, Betty, in a houndstooth-checked dress, stood with Ray, who had on white slacks, a black shirt. Ray’s partner, wearing a black Speedo and a black-and-white feather headpiece, danced with a man in a weight lifter’s suit. I wore a flowing black dress I’d made from inexpensive fabric and lace, my ivory-flowered cowboy boots, and my taskmaster grandmother’s pearls. Theresa, in black jeans and a turtleneck, looked annoyed. “Really,” she said, “no one could be more unalike than gay men and gay women. It’s a political accident we associate at all. It’s the Kansas version of Fire Island here.”
“What’s Fire Island?” I asked.
“Like Woodstock,” she said, “except gay sex, gay music.”
I nodded. Then she starting talking to someone. The softball lesbians had come, wearing rented tuxedos. In the smoky haze, they looked like a waddle of penguins. One of them asked me to dance. “I won’t bite,” she said. I didn’t want to seem prejudiced, so I danced. Then I found Betty, dancing with Ray, and told her to tell Theresa I’d gone home.
I drove my VW bug with the hole in the floor, its dim lights that were brighter than its brights, but not bright. I squinted. I knew this road. The winter before I’d driven it when a blizzard had dumped twenty inches, and the plow came through, but the wind picked up and snow drifted until everything was level, no difference between the ditch and highway, except one side of the highway was rimmed with electrical poles and wires, and I’d used these as guidelines. But that night, I got home, cranked up the bedroom heater. In the morning, I went to brush my hair, but my hairbrush wasn’t in my purse. Maybe it fell out in the car? I went downstairs where my car sat alone. Light snow had sifted down in the night. I found my hairbrush under snow in the driveway, my wallet too.
I’d almost lost my wallet, my two forms of ID.
I got in the car and hurried to the pedal steel player’s house. I knocked, then waited. I knocked again. The pedal steel player, a stoic man, answered, wearing pajamas bottoms. He nodded. I hadn’t brushed my hair yet. “Hello,” he said. He went to a door, banged on it: “Get up. Your wife is here.” How useful to be country after all, I thought. We’d surprised no one with our heartaches by the number. My husband emerged wearing his light blue, misshapen bathrobe, which I was used to seeing him wear at home, while eating Cheerios and waiting for his Alka-Seltzer to fizz. “Hi there,” he said, friendly.
Puzzled, I asked how he got the bathrobe. He’d been back to get clothes while I was in class. “My shirts haven’t been ironed since,” he said. I was confused. “You didn’t take clothes?” I’d have noticed. “A few,” he said. “Your hat?” The one I’d worn on Halloween still hung on its hook. He said, “I have a charge account at ABC Western Wear.”
He explained he wasn’t coming back. “I’m immature.” I said I didn’t mind. Day by day, though, I had minded. He said, “You’re not immature.” Yet I’d assumed that goodwill was enough: marriage’s starter ingredient. I tried to remember who’d asked whom, who’d proposed. But all I could remember was that I’d gotten a good scholarship, and he’d wanted to move to Kansas, and my mother was coming to stay with me every weekend then. She wasn’t herself, trying