My Unsentimental Education

being a middle-aged divorcée in a small, frozen town had made her feel redundant, a reverse spinster, without even a widow’s status, so she’d taken the first man on offer? Yes. Did I worry she wasn’t safe? Yes. Did I know that her situation would cast a shadow over her life and mine for years to come? No. I was young, a sad-circumstances-that-can’t-be-averted novice. I saw her life as a problem I’d solve by phone once I got home, a plan that would turn out to be unworkable, but I didn’t know that yet either. And I had to survive this visit, which was going badly, she intimated, because her kids, evidence of her previous, solvent, reputable life, made him insecure.
Then the fee-fie-fo-fum stopped. He’d passed out. Christmas Day went on as usual: gifts, food, the radio playing carols. My mother’s boyfriend got up at noon, jaunty. Relieved, my mother asked him to drive me to the airport at three a.m. the next morning for my seven a.m. flight. We were barreling down the road, the temperature at minus thirty, when the car heater broke. We went to a gas station, found a piece of cardboard to put in front of the grill to keep air from blowing through the grill as wind-chilled air as opposed to merely unheated air. But because we’d hunted for cardboard at gas stations predawn, I missed my flight. Chagrined, my mother’s boyfriend paid for my changed ticket. I flew to Kansas. I drove three hours in whirling snow to the almost-ghost-town.
Neither maid nor matron, who was I? In Garnett’s store, I found a book of old movie stills. I was Greta Garbo, I decided. I bought a carton of cigarettes, an antique ashtray, an art deco lighter that looked good in my apartment. I forced myself to smoke no less than four cigarettes a day, never skipping even that first bad one with coffee, but I never got past the nausea unless I was drinking. I cut my hair so it fell across one eye. I spent the last of a student loan to buy retro sweaters, fuzzy, feminine, that I wore with trousers.
Country music, inescapable in Kansas, wasn’t my druthers. Every morning I listened to jazz, torch songs, until it was time to get dressed for class. Then I’d stop brooding and put on my makeup. I loved classes I was taking. I loved teaching, students entrusting to me their faith in self-improvement, then coming back to report that they’d started getting higher grades in every class. One day, I told my students what pitfalls to avoid as they took on a new, more demanding paper. I said, “See you next class period.” I felt euphoric. I wondered—as I did every morning when I woke—what I’d been sad about before I’d been unconscious. Then I’d remember, oh that: my husband found me dispensable.
Max found me in a graduate student bar. He wasn’t a student. His money came from cocaine, which he’d offer me, and I’d decline. He owned a huge house surrounded by piles of firewood. Its windows were covered with light-blocking, thermal blinds that tacked down with wing-nuts and metal eyelets. He thought fossil fuels would run out in the next decade. I didn’t see a future with this libertarian with a penchant for dystopian novels and a conviction that Western civilization was on the brink of ruin. Yet, despite his depend-on-no-one view, he’d cook for me, buy me wine. We’d have sex for hours, good for relaxation. He didn’t believe in monogamy, but he hadn’t expected to like me. For me, he said, he’d give monogamy a whirl. Yet I couldn’t be around more than one night a week, school work. Plus, I needed money—I’d taken a job at a bar by the gravel pit.
When I walked in for my first Saturday afternoon shift, customers in sweaty T-shirts and feed caps went silent. The owner, showing me the ropes, said: “Yes, we have a heifer on the premises. At ease, gentlemen.” I felt unsafe. A customer who wasn’t a regular said, “When do you get off work, little lady?” Asa, who wore a cowboy hat and sat at the bar, told him: “Best mind your manners.” Another regular, a pig farmer, grabbed the new guy and made a fist. Asa told the pig farmer to calm down. He told the new guy to find another bar. When spring arrived—redbud blooming against the prairie, temporarily green now—Asa and I went catfishing. Or we’d ride in his jacked-up pickup.
The sun set, red. Or stars glittered. With the windows rolled down, we’d ride over hills, down into valleys, lush pockets of cold air, crickets chirping. Once, we parked by the river. When Asa leaned over for a kiss, his hat slid off. I’d been around Kansas long enough to know that men who never take off their hats are bald. Asa was really bald— this makes any man look low-browed, exposed. Moonlight flickering through the bug-spattered windshield turned his head mottled, unearthly. I said I wanted to have sex. He put his hat back on and said, “I don’t think so. You say you do. But you seem gun shy.”
Max had pointed out that he wasn’t mean. He said he loved me. “You’re my best girl,” he added. But pretending to be someone he wasn’t, someone who didn’t sleep with other women when I was too busy, wasn’t feasible, he said. So I stopped seeing him, though sometimes, home alone at two a.m. and wondering what high standards were for if no one knew I had them, I’d call Max, and he’d answer, at first sleepy, then his voice turned seductive in a too-practiced way, or that’s how he sounded aroused, and he’d drive fast to my apartment. Some high-level pining had been set off in me, an alarm. When Billie Holiday sang about a Lover Man, where was he, at first I thought she meant he was across town with someone else.