My Unsentimental Education

women’s rights. I secretly admired it. I knew its logic by heart. It was a flattering way to describe the only options I’d once had. But times change. I’d changed, improvising. I’d made my piecemeal life, ragged stiches between phases.
Miranda said, “But anyone can be a wife and mother.”
I turned to Miranda suddenly. “Look, it was all a Plan B, C, and D.” I described my job interview here, two days of campus meetings with committees, the dean, the provost, the president, a last appointment with the hiring committee chair, who’d described the job’s details, a chair who was a woman, rare enough then. She’d said, “I confess I’m envious of you young women coming straight through with your PhDs. I waited for my husband to finish his degree, next for my children to go to school. Then I got my degree and put together a career as best as I could.” Disarmed by this unvarnished moment during three days of official posing and hand shaking, by the distinct flicker of regret—she was in the midst of a divorce, I’d heard—I blurted, “Are you kidding me? I had dozens of failed relationships. At a certain point, I realized it would inconvenience no one if I got a PhD.”
The hiring committee chair had glanced away, embarrassed.
Miranda was smiling. “So your career happened instead?”
“Yes,” I said, “by accident.”

History and Practical Math
On my mother’s side, my grandmother was a teacher, the undisputed sovereign of a one-room school. Then she married a man she met at the fair. At their fiftieth wedding anniversary party—when I was twenty and thought I knew everything, or more than my over-the-hill relatives celebrating days of yore, not progress—I saw a photo of my grandfather, wearing spats, pants too wide to be respectable, standing next to a roadster, and nearby a woman who isn’t my grandmother wears one of those fur coats with dead animal heads dangling, and she sits on a road sign shaped like an arrow, her rump covering its letters. My uncle, who’d assembled the slide show, had included this photo. I glanced at him. Defiant, he was staking a claim for men’s right to roam. Or he was still mad at his father.
I studied the photo, the vamp draped over the arrow. “Who is she?” I asked. One aunt giggled. My mother said, “Shush.” My grandfather threw back his head and laughed. My grandmother—her hair lavish, intricate, shellacked as a crown—looked aloof, this long-ago affront irrelevant because of fifty years of prodigious regeneration, children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. My grandfather used to leave every fall to sell the harvest, I knew. He was supposed to return with cash and shoes for the children. But, having gambled, he’d return with no money, just someone’s silverware or, once, a Shetland pony he’d packed into the Chevy’s backseat. My mother had told me that my grandmother, gardening, canning, cooking, sewing for six children, would sigh and go inside.
After the slide show, everyone left for spare bedrooms in scattered farmhouses belonging to relatives. My mother and her siblings were tipsy, so I drove. One aunt asked my mother why my dad hadn’t come. My mother didn’t answer. My aunt said, “Why didn’t he?” My mother let go: “Because he couldn’t make the effort. Are you happy?”
My mother and father had argued.
She hadn’t told her siblings because everyone bowed down before the finality of marriage, and she thought my dad would too, in time. Marriage suffers insult, then self-repairs.
My aunt said, “You should have set aside squabbles for one day.” We were at a stop sign, and my mother flung open the door and ran in heels and a DuPont faux-silk dress into moonlit fields. I stopped the car and ran after her. Sobbing, she fell into my arms.
I’d assumed that only young people have sex and therefore only young people feel tragically rejected. Yet here was my mother, tragically rejected. My heart hardened. I didn’t want to be her. I didn’t want to be my grandmother, who’d married a man who wasn’t her equal in terms of ambition because ambition had added up to zilch without a man.
Both of my grandmothers lived in North Dakota. The other was famous for her cooking—homemade sausage, kuchen, calf’s liver in sour cream—but also for having schizophrenia, though no one called it that yet. She gave birth to her first son in a sod house, and later to my father and another son in a wood house. She ran away when she got the chance, rebelling.
Or crazy. Strangers brought her home. Someone used to lock someone else in the corncrib—an airy, aromatic prison, I used to think, with its weathered, silvery slats and golden litter of corn. Either the sons got locked up when my grandmother didn’t feel well, or my grandfather locked her up until the cows got milked, the hay baled. She might hit a son with a skillet, or she’d stop cooking, and the sons would have to walk to town in a blizzard to charge food at the general store. My mother, sister, brother, and I doubted a few of these facts. Some of them must be true. But my dad exaggerated, we knew. All those years without good mother love had made him need extra attention now.
The grandmother who’d been a teacher, then a mother, then a teacher again—a modern teacher in a brick school in town—had been a taskmaster too long. She might have tried to be impartial at school: uniformly cranky. But as a grandmother, she had grandchild-pets and grandchild-dunces. Some of us got to decline the grassy-tasting milk we called cow milk and she tried passing off as store milk by sneaking it into a carton she’d borrowed from someone. The rest of us choked it down. One cousin invented words while playing Scrabble and got praise. I invented words and got barred from the game.
Yet you couldn’t tell she liked some grandchildren better than others from her Christmas presents, seventeen versions of the same