My Unsentimental Education

I were—to use the shorthand—estranged, though we’d never argued. After years of little to no contact, I didn’t know my mother. She didn’t know me.
My department chair said, “Well, the changing shape of family. You must go.”
Hard on the land wears the strong sea and empty grows every bed.
I’ve never lived near the sea. The social net grows thin, I thought, picturing the social net as one of those frayed curler caps my wandering grandmother used to wear to breakfast.
In stories, people don’t disappear. Every character who mattered just a little makes an appearance, another appearance, another. In the last chapter, everyone who’s weighed in on page 1, page 81, page 181, reappears. Or news of them does. In life, though, people vanish. Remembering what someone said to me on a tar-covered rooftop in Kansas—or in green fields flecked with yellow, or cheap rented rooms, or a house in Colorado, a professor’s office, a café with an odd menu—is historic preservation. I moved on; people I knew didn’t or went somewhere else. Most never met each other. Expecting them to recur and attend a crowded, friendly finale is to expect an old-fashioned story with coincidences and mirage-like continuity, a fable.
The chorus, too, should be regarded as one of the characters.
For centuries, people left farms for cities. Before that, their ancestors left old countries for new countries. People roam. Sometimes they settle down. Once, a sixth cousin addicted to genealogical research (“recovery is not an option!”), contacted my father, my sister, my brother, me. She said my wandering grandmother didn’t speak proper German but Plattdeutsch and lots of Yiddish. My father didn’t believe it, even when I showed him a Yiddish dictionary and he recognized words. This distant cousin on my dad’s side contacted my mother too, since she’d procreated with my dad. My mother resented this recording of birth, death, marriage. Our twig on the family tree was messy.
In small towns, divorce won’t help you move up the social ladder with its miniscule rungs magnified by gossip. My parents hated their divorce. They hated mine. My sister, fully recovered from her accident, had a burst of clarity, realizing she had just one life. She shocked everyone by getting divorced too, going new places, wearing new clothes. “Like Debra,” my father said, appalled. She remarried. My parents sighed, relief.
Before my parents’ divorce was final—the property sold and divided—my father lived with my stepmother in what I thought of as the ancestral home, though we’d lived there for just my childhood. My stepmother walked on carpets my mother had selected (too gaudy, my stepmother felt), pulled shut at night drapes my mother had saved to buy (so old-fashioned, my stepmother said). I didn’t like hearing my mother’s taste criticized, but my stepmother was trying to be herself, get acquainted. The reasons for reciprocity in self-disclosure will hove into view. A few years later, she had the wild idea to fly to Kansas without my father, to visit me. Yes, I said. I’d passed my qualifying exams. I’d dropped off my thesis with a typist who’d bought one of those new computers that word-processed, and I felt momentarily so free. I never did figure out my stepmother’s age. She looked younger than my father but like a bobbysoxer, not a post-hippie. She’d had a rough girl-hood, I gathered, no time for parties. When she got to Kansas, I took her to parties.
I introduced her to classmates as my stepmother. “Wicked stepmother,” she said, giggling. We visited Max, and she asked to see pot. She didn’t want to smoke it, just see it. He got out the tray he kept in his pantry and rolled a joint as she watched. The next day, my stepmother and I wandered through stores, and she surprised me again by buying herself a camisole and panties with Minnie Mouse motifs. I tried on a copper-colored, satin blazer marked down from $165 to $35, quick clearance, then put it back. “You can’t afford $35?” she said, skeptical. I was down to bare bones, waiting to find out my future. No new clothes just now; I said so. She said, “But what would you wear it with anyway?”
I said, “A black top, faded jeans, my high-heeled boots.” A few minutes later she bought it. “Why?” I asked. It didn’t seem like her. Or, with her teased, bouffant hair, she’d look like Tammy Wynette in it. Where in Spooner would she go dressed like that? She said, “Well, it was good enough for you. You think I can’t pull it off then?” I didn’t say anything else because she seemed upset, and I was still thinking it was weird she liked Minnie Mouse underwear. Then, when I’d driven her to the airport and walked her to the gate, she pulled the blazer out and shoved it toward me. “Gosh, you’re hard to surprise,” she said, laughing. But she went home and my dad had drunk too much with the door open, and he passed out over the threshold. She told me this by phone when I asked her to visit again someday. She couldn’t; he might have died of hypothermia, she said. We’ve had moments since, lucky eye contact, unspoken mutual hilarity. But being my dad’s wife wore her down, and that carefree stepmother I could have known vanished too.
I cultivated instead short-term affection: high-risk, high-reward. The lie I told myself was that I’d stay in touch. I’ll come back to visit, I promised Garnett as we walked through the apartment one last time, now a cavernous set of rooms with mock-limestone paneling made of spongy cardboard, but also that starry wallpaper on the ceiling over a hundred years old. My knickknacks, my doilies, my lace curtains, my imitation Oriental rug with traces of tar, had made it seem welcoming. Garnett didn’t see why she was inspecting the apartment before returning my deposit, she said, because I was a good housekeeper. We chatted for a minute about the next renter, a