My Unsentimental Education

to get even with my dad by calling a radio station to advertise his car for sale, breaking into his house to unplug the freezer so a cow’s worth of steaks had spoiled. He could get a restraining order against you, I’d warned.
My husband turned to look at me. “Besides, I can’t stay married to someone who throws a guitar.” I must have looked stunned. “The day I left,” he said. I’d thrown a Tupperware bowl and the checkbook downstairs. He’d stepped over them when he came back for his guitars. My voice sounded feeble as I said so. “But then you threw my bass guitar.” I pointed out that he’d set the acoustic and the electric bass at the top of the stairs, both in cases designed to get loaded on trailers and driven over bumpy roads to honky-tonks, and he’d taken the acoustic guitar and his best boots downstairs and, when he was halfway back up for the bass guitar, I’d slid its heavy case toward him. You could see this as helping, though I hadn’t felt helpful as I’d shoved it—upright, hinges on the bottom, handle on top. Just unhappy. “I’m too stingy to throw something expensive,” I said.
He yawned. He wanted to go back to sleep, he said.
I stood up. “If we’re getting a divorce, we’ll have to talk about details.”
He patted me. “I’m not going to grow up anytime soon.”
As I drove home, I tried not to think about how he’d set me aside. I worried instead about paying bills without the sporadic money he made. I pulled up in front of Garnett’s store. Inside, she and Opal and Pearl were unpacking items from an estate sale. Garnett looked at me, then handed me a brush from an enameled vanity set. She’d endured the death of a child, also her husband’s dotage, marked by disinhibition, lechery. Once, someone sent her an anonymous letter that said the store needed a coat of paint right away, unless she meant to put the whole community to shame. Garnett had made Magic Marker placards and stuck them in the ground. JUDGE NOT OR YE SHALL BE JUDGED. WHY DO YOU LOOK AT THE MOTE IN YOUR NEIGHBOR’S EYE? When they were weather-beaten, smeared by rain, I’d helped her take them down. I brushed my hair and told her where I’d been.
Pearl said, “My daughter was married to a no-good too.”
Opal, shaking her head, “That’s not husband material.”
Pearl, “Her new boyfriend thinks she’s heaven-sent. A man like that is still coming.”
Garnett, “When you can’t see what’s next, assume it’s better.” She hugged me.
Late that night, I wondered if maybe I deserved this poetic justice, supernatural retribution, because of my reprieve-fling with the woodsy poet—an idea I put to rest when the band wife who’d told me I looked good for my age called from a bar. “I heard it’s over,” she said. “Good riddance. I wouldn’t put up with stepping out. We women wanted to tell you all along, but Eddie said we couldn’t. If Eddie did me like that, I’d glue his dick to his leg with Super Glue.” I thanked her, hung up, and I worried about Christmas.
Economical option, I’d stay in Kansas. I asked which classmates would stay. None. I flew home and went to my father’s newly purchased cottage on a river. His girlfriend, now my stepmother, went to bed early so my dad and I could talk. He showed me his new TV. I admired it. I told him I still had the old one from the summer cottage. He said, “You’re hiding in school. You’re afraid of getting a real job.” I said that I graded three hundred papers per semester. “Not for pay,” he said. Yes, I explained, my fellowship. He said, “Like the dole. And you’re educating yourself out of the marriage market.”
A few days later, I went to see my mother, who’d moved in with a boyfriend. On the phone, she’d told me he owned a mired-in-debt supper club, and she was taking him and his supper club in hand. When I got there, she was in its kitchen, prep-cooking. The boyfriend sat at the bar and gave me quarters for the jukebox. He liked the song I picked out, “Time after Time,” which was sung by the Vienna Boys Choir, he said. I mentioned that it was sung by Cyndi Lauper. Then he called me the last dirty word in the English language.
This word has a respectable history, having appeared as recently as the fourteenth century in its Early Modern English form as a gynecological term—”queynte,” in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue. It was a medical and private word for another three hundred years, but it wasn’t considered lewd until the seventeenth century. I said so the second time he said it, as in: “High-on-your-horse, know-it-all cunt.” Good thing I didn’t visit often, my mother said later. He didn’t eat well. “What?” I asked. “He’s a picky eater, so he doesn’t have food in his stomach when he drinks.” When I went to bed, he was drinking vodka. When I got up he was, but—concession to dawn—he’d added orange juice.
The supper club was next to his house, so well insulated you couldn’t see outside, windows dripping with condensation. My bedroom was in the basement. That night, I woke to noises and shrieks. My mother’s boyfriend was overturning furniture. She came down to wake me. We listened to him stomping, smashing. We spent the night with the door locked, though we worried he’d knock it down. My mother sat on the floor. “You have no idea how hard marriage is.” Maybe I didn’t. Maybe my one-year marriage didn’t count. I said, “But you’re not married. Leave him.” She couldn’t. She’d put her savings into his business. I wondered how long she’d known him when she did. Yet I’d spent a student loan on my shirker husband. She said, “I’ll have to marry him to get it back.”
Did I understand that