My Unsentimental Education

a shade made of flocked celluloid, a picture painted on the back of domed glass), also bedding I’d used to sleep on the floor the night before and would again my first night in Utah, and an ironing board, suitcases, an atlas.
It was a thousand-mile trip. I had time to think about interstate highways not taken.
My thesis advisor had suggested a PhD in rhetoric, a semipractical suggestion since there’s always a need for people to teach composition and people to teach people to teach it. Another professor suggested I get a PhD in American studies with an emphasis on women writers, turn expert in a burgeoning field. I could get a degree in creative writing too, not practical since thousands already had these master of fine arts degrees and argued about what they were for: to create artists? to create teachers? To teach, you first had to publish a book. To teach rhetoric or literature, you had to publish too—papers, book chapters— which was a matter of knuckling down, doing research, whereas the how-to of becoming a published novelist or poet seemed to me pie-in-the-sky and vague.
I hoped, in the end, for a stable life.
But there are different levels.
I’d heard since third-grade social studies class that no one is permanently above the plebeian rest of us, that anyone who works hard can become great or rich. But few people do, and so, impatient with barriers that prevent this rise to greatness, we painstakingly mark lines that separate those who have from those who have a little less. But I didn’t think about that as I drove. Beyond feeling hurt, then defensive, distant, because my father had told me that if I got another degree he was done with me for good—what did that mean? I wondered—I didn’t understand that getting another degree would change me enough to eliminate the last conversational threads connecting me to my family, shred that net forever. I’d never been connected anyway, except to my mother, whose conversational threads now floated, connected to no one, her talk about canned corn and bankruptcy. Besides, I was poor, and jobs I’d be aiming for weren’t guaranteed. I was who I was so far, or seemed to be, a black sheep afraid of real work.
I’d applied to PhD programs in rhetoric and literature at good state universities. Schools at the pinnacle of the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education’s hierarchy of impressiveness weren’t on my radar. I’d studied with just one professor who’d gone to one, an eighteenth-century scholar who spent part of every lecture describing his salad days at his Ivy League school and the big letdown it had been to end up teaching us. I wanted to emulate instead my professors who’d come through on the GI bill, inching forward to the examined life. “Education is not the filling of a bucket but the lighting of a fire,” William Butler Yeats. I’d grown up with different words. I once wrote a paper on William Butler Yeats, and over and over I used Wite-Out for this typo: William Butler Yeast.
I could have gone south, studying women writers. I could have gone north, studying rhetoric. I could have gone northwest or southeast. I’d applied to the Iowa Writers Workshop and the University of Iowa, writing in my letters of application that I wanted to earn an MFA in creative writing—gambler’s degree, source of joy and sorrow—and a PhD in literature at the same time. I got accepted at both programs but thought hard about writing a thesis and dissertation simultaneously. In the end, I headed to the University of Utah to get one of the brand-new PhDs that let students write creative dissertations. For four years, I’d write fiction but do scholarship on the history of the novel.
Motoring onward, I’d sometimes check the map and glance at states where I didn’t go and consider the person I wouldn’t become—with a different geographical past, a different deeply mined obsession, a different set of brain-goods on the shelf for times of boredom. The world also churns out aphorisms about how useless education is. But it makes you good company for yourself as you live out fast-flying days and nights until you die, just another human with plights and scrapes in a long line of human plights and scrapes.
I stopped at a truck stop in Wyoming with shower stalls, a big diner, hundreds of semitrucks with sleeping cabs where the drivers catch forty winks. When I got to Utah, someone told me that this truck stop is also famous for prostitutes. I pumped gas, went inside to pay. I glimpsed the diner window, full of lone wolves, and walked back to my car.
The sun had begun to set, the sky dimming, vapor mercury lights buzzing and snapping. Before I got in my car to drive off, I lifted the hood to check the oil. I also looked under the car. Even in shadows I could see strands of thick fluid dripping. I slid underneath—I was wearing one of the ankle-length, sleeveless dresses I’d sewn for this trip, thin cotton marked down to $1.99 a yard, because my car didn’t have air-conditioning, and nothing is cooler than a cotton dress—and felt around for the source of the leak: a seam between a pan bottom that connected to a pan top, and bolts holding these together were loose enough that I could twist them with my hand. I was losing transmission fluid. In a matter of miles, I’d have an immobile car in need of repairs that cost more than the car. A voice boomed from above, immanent: “Need help?”
Friend or foe, I wondered from under the car, knowing that all this person could see was my car with its hood propped and my feet in white sandals, Payless ShoeSource, $6.99.
I crawled out, stood up, looked at him—a trucker with a T-shirt, steel-toed boots, a toothpick in his mouth, tattoos before tattoos were hip. Or something like that. It was getting dark, and this was