My Unsentimental Education

on until eleven the night before had cost him sleep and he hoped I wouldn’t make late nights a habit. His eyes flicked over my arms, my sleeveless blouse.
In the grocery store, men sometimes gave me the same once-over, curious but repulsed, because my bare arms, my skirt two inches above the knee, seemed slutty. Mormon women end up with a moderate version of purdah, because clothes cover sacred undergarments with insignia on the nipples, navel, and knees. Both men and women wear these. I noticed telltale ridges beneath clothing. I’d see them—like old-fashioned Victorian underwear—hanging on clotheslines as I walked to school. Salt Lake City was a “monoculture,” a professor said during orientation, exceptions being out-of-staters doing doctoral work, skiers, and missionary-converted Tongans on the west side.
Male classmates stared in a different way.
We all lived in one small neighborhood a few miles from campus. The students came from all over, Massachusetts, Ohio, New York, Hawaii, France, California. But only a few of us were studying in the same track, fiction with a secondary focus on history and theory of the novel, “narratology” as a classmate who liked postmodernism and wore a toupee liked to say. But no matter whether you were studying literature, rhetoric, linguistics, creative writing, we were all new to the city and not Mormon. Getting a PhD was enforced proximity. We saw each other in classes by day, at parties at night.
What did I think about marriage now? In a city where bridal shops outnumbered bars, on a campus where the word “covenant” appeared over and over in undergraduate papers I graded, I wondered if I’d taken my vows too lightly. If so, I’d failed in a way I couldn’t fathom, because I’d trusted the minister who’d said during our ceremony that the key to marriage is believing this: “I can grow. My spouse can grow. Thus, the marriage grows.”
I’d tried that. And spent hours since noting it wasn’t enough. My husband had been “mellow,” as everyone said. Translation: He didn’t like work. No one does. But most of us accept it’s necessary. Yet if I’d met someone with aspirations, wouldn’t I have had to turn mine into genteel hobbies that fit around the edges of womanly duty? Like all recent divorcées, I’d sworn off marriage. But I wanted it, bosom of family, cozy ideal. Marriages did exist in which women had careers. I read about them in famous people’s biographies; I met a few women who lived this life. But it seemed to require money. It didn’t happen much in the lower middle class. I applied myself to the life of the mind.
I didn’t let my thoughts wander, daydreams. But I night-dreamed, urges beyond willpower. The only other recurring dream I had at the time was about ledgers: long columns recording money spent, short columns recording money earned. But when I dreamed about sex, or the shimmer of desire for it since I’m a staid midwesterner raised to be respectable, I dreamed about the moments before, the premonition of that clumsy tumble toward astonishment. Inappropriately. I dreamed about the husband of a woman I liked. Twice, I dreamed about a seventeenth-century poet who spoke ardently from his grave.
The male graduate students were tense too. We’d all embarked on this elongated run toward a career that might not happen. We’d left behind friends and lovers. Parties were courtship displays, if you consider courtship a biological event and not the subject of a sonnet cycle. The men preened, proving strength by consuming vast amounts of toxins.
The women preened, consumed toxins, awaited. One couple eloped within days of meeting, then fought about whether to divorce or annul. This was the 1980s, free love twenty years old, if not a hundred. I can’t speak for the wives of the English Romantics, but for me the sexual revolution made it hard to say No. One classmate asked me out and returned again and again to his pet topic, that we had to have sex because not to was to go through life as if wearing blindfolds. And after the just-once, he spoke to me like I was annoying.
Another graduate student made a case for himself, but he had that toupee, which didn’t quite match his remaining hair—this was before balding men shaved their entire heads to reveal, voilà, the phallic head. He said Robert Coover’s work was an assault on cliché-ridden templates society imposes on us. He kissed me. He must have thought I had hyperactivity disorder manifesting as arousal because I tilted a lot, obliging him to tilt. I wanted the toupee to slip so he’d take it off. He wouldn’t try to go to bed with it on, would he? Fake hair was a template imposed by society. Or maybe I tilted to seem hysterical, uptight. It worked. He stopped, never unveiling his head nor his innermost self.
Next, I met someone who’d finished coursework for a PhD in folklore but hadn’t written his dissertation. “Or I’m taking eleven years to write it,” he said, wry, self-deprecating. He was tall, ten years older than me. He carried snacks in his sports coat pockets. He lived in a house famous for squalor and good parties. We discussed where we grew up, or where I grew up, because he knew where he grew up, Brooklyn, and it didn’t interest him now. He urged me to describe northern Wisconsin customs and jokes. One night he’d cadged tickets to the symphony, where, during intermission, he cadged brownies and asked me to put them in my purse. Afterward, we went to his dissertation director’s house—the dissertation director an old friend now, no longer expecting the dissertation.
As we sipped wine, my date asked me to tell Wisconsin jokes. He liked the Ole and Lena jokes, not unlike Tarzan and Jane jokes you might have heard at summer camp when you were ten, jokes where the point is to utter the unutterable, or to spell out how procreation occurs: sex instruction with comedy included. I’d heard