My Unsentimental Education

It took me a while to understand Lover Man didn’t exist.
I thought about Betty from school, who pined for someone who wouldn’t make their nighttime affair a daytime affair, and she was pined after by the woodsy poet, who’d hardly been with anyone but his high school girlfriend, now his wife. “Maybe it’s that Betty’s out of reach,” the woodsy poet said one day. The man Betty wanted was out of reach. The economy of love, I thought. One person wants someone more than the other one does, and the one who wants most has least power. Because Max hedged his bets with spare lovers, he had power. If he wanted me more, I wouldn’t want him. Not Asa either. Not my husband, who once offered to do the leg work to get our divorce because he felt bad he’d done so little when we were married. But months passed. “You file,” he said.
I found a lawyer, money for the lawyer, started proceedings. I was in the last year of my degree, reading for comprehensive exams, doing research for my hundred-page thesis. But I couldn’t write it. I consulted books about writer’s block. The consensus seemed to be that you distract yourself, write casually, carefree, until you feel excited. I stayed unexcited. I dithered away months, a semester, taking a “Progress” instead of a “Credit” for my thesis grade. And I celebrated Halloween that year by going to bars that teemed with costumed students. I wore a mauve suit, circa 1940, I’d found at a thrift store, also a hat with a veil I got at Garnett’s store; I clipped a fountain pen to a notepad. Dressed as a stenographer—a menstruating stenographer, I thought—I popped Midol and drank.
Then it was a Saturday in December. Theresa Minster came to my apartment to cook chicken parmesan. She’d worked as a butcher, and she’d brought her own knives. She sliced expertly, next to the bone, as she talked about Asa, “the bald guy from the gravel pit,” she said, not quite accurately, and Max, “bad news,” she said, “amusing, yes, because I’ve yakked with him in the bar too, but a sociopath.” We talked about Betty, where she’d go next year, because she’d applied to a PhD program based on where the man she loved had applied. After he broke up with her, she’d torn up a letter from the school.
Theresa and I zipped through a bottle of store-bought wine, then got out the dandelion wine. Theresa said we should put on coats and sit on the roof. “It’s safe for two people, right?” she asked, remembering the Halloween party. It was. I watched sunsets out there. Dawn. Wind making the tall wheat rise, fall, and roll like waves. Tonight the sky was pocked with stars. Theresa and I sat, backs to the wall, and I said that Betty’s letter was likely neither an acceptance nor rejection, just information, because it was early. Graduating at last, I’d applied to PhD programs and was waiting to hear.
If I moved, I thought, I wouldn’t be able to afford an apartment this big. When I worked at the store, Garnett paid me in credit, and my rooms had become a shrine to someone else’s domestic history. I had a Shirley Temple milk pitcher; ceramic statues of dogs, remnants from a 1920s collecting craze; mirrors with hand-painted borders; a plaque made mosaic-style from crushed, colored tinfoil that read GOD BLESS THIS HOME COOKING.
Theresa said, “You can’t keep splitting time between Max and Asa.”
I thought about my soon-to-be-ex-husband, how I’d married his faux-bucolic ideals and soundtrack to match. Or I’d fallen in love with his family. I’d put up preserves, cooked, cleaned, ironed. What did I take from this insight? Don’t marry a facade.
Theresa said, “You’re at a crossroads.”
I’d temporarily lost my goal, yes. Teaching at a two-year college had suddenly seemed wrong. I’d be an old maid schoolmarm, no husband, children, nothing. But I was in too deep. I’d requested documents from archives at universities across the country, sorted them into tidy but guilt-inducing piles around my apartment. Dreams get sacrificed, I’d think, not writing. I made charts, outlines. I refined my title, “Fact and Fiction: The Artificiality of the Distinction between Expository and Creative Writing.” The genres became separate in the twentieth century, I’d argue, because of the history of the American English department. I got down to the wire, eight weeks, still nothing. I worried in front of Asa, whose advice was to stop saying that I couldn’t go on, forward. I asked Max for pot. I wrote my thesis stoned, spattering myself and my desk with Wite-Out.
My acclaimed advisor had beamed. “By God, this is publishable. Essentialist preconceptions revealed as historical fluke. This should be a monograph.” What’s a monograph? I’d wondered. The other professors praised my research, my peculiar organization they charitably described as a rejection of rigid genre definitions. Three weeks before my qualifying exams—covering forty books of literature, forty books of rhetoric—I stopped smoking pot, which overcame inhibitions, I knew, but hurt short-term memory.
Theresa said, “I mean that neither Max nor Asa share your interests.”
Combined, they almost did. Asa suited the part of me raised to be a farm wife. Max was so considerate in bed and inconsiderate everywhere else I’d forget I’d hoped to be a scholar. I didn’t date classmates—dating would seem like homework. The distance between my aspiring daytime self and my nighttime self had widened. I said, “You mean I should date someone like Shawn?” Shawn was one of the students who’d come to last year’s Halloween party dressed like Ryman Stacker, not that Shawn was interested in me, a cowboy’s castoff who dressed like Greta Garbo now. With my marriage done for and wrapping up, I felt older than Shawn. Did that work? I’d never wanted to be the man’s elder.
Theresa threw her hands in the air. “Why? Are you attracted to him?”
I said, “He’s nice.”
Theresa sighed. “I always fall for straight women. You couldn’t