My Unsentimental Education

tell?”
I felt guilty. But so far I hadn’t worried that Theresa might be interested in me, because if I had I’d have participated in what she’d called homophobia, a new word to me then: the bigoted tendency to assume that gay people were trying to turn everyone gay.
“Yes, I did say that,” she agreed, slumped.
I started to put my arm across her shoulder. Then stopped. I’d once kissed my college roommate, the girl from wealthy Oconomowoc. We’d been in a bar, and boys were hitting on us, and my roommate from Oconomowoc flew into a rage and yelled, “Enough. We’re lesbians. Leave us alone.” The drunk boys yelled: prove it, prove it. Drunk ourselves, my roommate and I kissed, a slow and histrionic kiss. It had the wrong effect. The boys cheered loud, lusty. So we paid for our drinks and went to a different bar.
But when I’d pretend-kissed my roommate from Oconomowoc, it was in the middle of a conversation about how she wanted her old boyfriend back, a not-pretend kiss from a prince of a guy. This was different. I turned to Theresa in the dark. Did I feel recoil? I’ll never know. I felt recoil for considering recoil. I didn’t want to recoil from a lesbian who was my friend. “I like you,” I said. This wasn’t a wide-eyed prick-tease line, like: I care for you but not that way. I meant I was heterosexual. Or, if I believed recent talk that sexuality is fluid, sexual identification cultural, then I was conventional; I’d been raised, cultivated like a crop, to settle on a man. So had Theresa—her parents were well meaning yet baffled, she’d said. But Theresa likely had different genetic markers than me, though the science that would suggest this hadn’t been developed yet. I said, “Let’s call it a night. You sleep on the couch. You better not drive.”
I got her a pillow and blankets. I kissed her goodnight. How long? Did you kiss Mrs. Tilton? Henry Ward Beecher had been asked this during his adultery trial. He was the country’s first celebrity preacher, and people are prurient. A holy kiss as I have sometimes seen it in poetry. I’d read the transcript in an American Studies class. That night, I kissed Theresa too long. I meant that I felt friendly, open-minded, not sexual. This is a lot to convey by kissing. I smoothed over a rough situation, not realizing that removing hope is like removing Band-Aids, best done fast, no frills, sympathy dispensed later.
In the morning, I wore my chenille robe as we hugged goodbye in the doorway. Garnett passed us on her way to church and either thought I was dating a slender young man or that a woman had visited me early, maybe dropping off homework, hugging over homework.
On Monday, I saw Ryman Stacker on campus, and he asked about my plans. I told him that I’d meant to quit after this degree and let my husband explore options, but we’d split up. His band had split up. The best musicians—the ones who didn’t get drunk on stage—were moving to Nashville. “Maybe I’ll get a PhD. There’s no one around to mind.”
Ryman Stacker said, “Ha ha. Decisions and revisions, T. S. Eliot.”
That afternoon, sitting in my kitchen, I contemplated my first solitary Christmas.
The black phone shivered and rang. The possibilities weren’t infinite: Asa, Max.
I answered. “Hello?”
Theresa cleared her throat. “I want to say in my defense that there are more straight women than gay women in the world. That was a hard mistake to avoid.” I sighed. I understand mistakes, I thought. She said, “There’s a time for candor, and a time to keep ideas to yourself. It must have been your dandelion wine, truth elixir.” I wasn’t listening carefully now because a florist’s van was pulling into my driveway, looking for directions to somewhere else. But, no, the driver got out, holding cellophane-wrapped flowers, consulting his clipboard, my mailbox: 229B. Now he was knocking. “My gosh,” I said, hopeful and ingenue-like in spite of myself. “Someone has sent me flowers.”
Theresa said, “You’re kidding.”
Lover Man, I thought. A one-size-fits-all for my variegated selves, someone I knew but hadn’t noticed yet, announcing his arrival. I left Theresa on the phone as I rushed downstairs, signed for the flowers, hurried back, ripped open the card. “Thinking about you at Christmas. Love, Dot.” My not-yet-ex-mother-in-law. Last clue. Mystery over.
A copper-colored kettle with red mums and sprigs of evergreen. On the phone, Theresa said, “From the bald cowboy?” I said, “Not even. They’re from my former husband’s mother.” Theresa started laughing. “I’m sorry I’m laughing,” she said. And I thought about how my old professor Dr. D. Douglas Waters once said in class that the difference between who we are and who we hope to be is a chasm. Yes. We live there, suspended, pulled one way and another. I looked at the mums, the attached fake-gold sleigh bauble. Theresa said, “Agree with me. This is funny.” She seemed too amused. Maybe she had a right. She understood me better than I did yet. Did I owe her? I said, “Funny.”

Let me pause now, intermission, and say that people disappear.
Consider this moment, years in the future, when I had a professional job, but I wasn’t tenured yet, not permanent, and my mother had married her heart-attack-waiting-to-happen boyfriend, who’d died. I told my recently promoted department chair—once the hiring committee chair who’d said she admired we daring young women coming straight through with our PhDs—that I needed a few days off for a family funeral. This isn’t some waitressing job, I reminded myself. At a grown-up job you get bereavement leave. The department chair lifted her pen and said, “Let me express my condolences. Please excuse me for asking, but I need to know who’s died.” I said, “My step-father. I want to go to the funeral for my mother’s sake. This counts as bereavement, I hope?” I left out that my mother and