My Unsentimental Education

these jokes from my sister, who’d married into a Norwegian family and seemed to be cataloging them. When I first told them to the man I was dating, he chuckled, as in hmm, intriguing, meantime sifting through his memory for how these jokes correlated to jokes circulating in other subcultures, as though he were doing research while also dating, killing two birds, one stone.
But when he asked me to tell the jokes at the house of the folklore professor, the professor and his wife looked puzzled. I’d sewn a black sateen dress to wear to the symphony, so I felt dressed up but uncouth as I recited, wondering if the professor and his wife thought I thought these jokes were rollicking party banter and not, as my date had said to me, vehicles for the transmission of beliefs from a culturally isolated corner of the Midwest that deserved analysis before they vanished. All well and good, I thought. But Spooner was still there and its inhabitants still told lewd jokes and perhaps would forever.
A date gone this awry might turn out fine if, for example, we could have gone back to my apartment and slipped off my shiny dress and made love like James Stillman and I used to do in Wisconsin, like Max and I used to do in Kansas, where you get into tried and true positions that take you to brief ecstasy. Then we’d relax, agree that the joke-telling had turned awkward. If the sense of intimacy lasted, in time I’d even be able to tell my date he needed to dry clean his sports coats. But the sex was polite, muted. Because he was polite, muted? Because his feelings were? I’ll never know. He left afterward because he had to teach at a community college fifty miles away in the morning—by which time I was packing up my laundry to take to the laundromat a block away.
I stood outside my door, locking up, and the devout neighbor’s wife came outside. Her husband wasn’t with her. She said, “Do you have a new boyfriend?” I must have looked startled. She said, “Don’t be embarrassed. I saw he picked you up wearing a jacket, and you had on that beautiful dress. Later, I heard voices in your bedroom.” I sometimes heard noise in her bedroom, but I turned up music to drown it out. She said, “God doesn’t want us to go through our lives alone, no matter how hard it is to be with someone.”
A few minutes later, sorting, loading, measuring detergent, setting some washers on hot with full agitation, others on warm with low agitation, I thought how brute needs get mixed up with tradition, so confusing, and I shut the last lid. I’d gotten picky, having had good sex with Rodney V. Meadow, with James Stillman, with Max, who still phoned me, his voice husky as he said he missed me, which might be true, but he wasn’t well traveled and seemed to be angling for an invitation to visit, see the world by way of your ex-girlfriends. Then an extreme sports guy—except no one called them that yet, we called them ski bums, these non-Mormon guys who’d moved to Utah for the mountains and snow and spent warm months hiking and rock climbing—asked me for help with his laundry.
I was relieved to be useful in an uncomplicated way. I explained sorting for color, choosing settings, and how to save money on dryers by taking out lighter pieces first and folding them as the heavy pieces continued to dry. As we waited through wash, rinse, spin, tumble, we noted we were the same age, except I was getting a PhD. “PhD, oh wow,” he said. He was an undergraduate, philosophy and environmental geoscience. The double major had slowed him down, he said, as had his job teaching skiing at one of the resorts. With regard to the laundry tutorial, he said, “That was helpful. I’m grateful.” He’d been raised in a suburb, in Delaware. I said, “Your mother didn’t teach you before you left home?” He said, “It’s not easy being green.” I thought he meant something about geoscience. He said, “Green like greenhorn. The lesson takes when the pupil is ready.”
Several months later on a Friday night, the phone rang, a call from a party a few blocks away. The other woman in the fiction track had told the revelers she was sure I owned a blender because I’d gotten conventional wedding gifts whereas she and her new husband had requested matching motorcycle chaps, a new tent, sleeping bags for winter camping, and I heard laughing, shouting. The guy who’d bedded me and every other single female with his line about how not having sex is like going though life as if blindfolded got on the phone and asked me to bring my blender because he was making margaritas.
Having divorced by age twenty-six was my distinction, in the same way, for instance, that having a toupee or motorcycle chaps was someone else’s. I realized this almost as soon as I got to Utah when I one day walked to school and a car pulled up, its door swung open, and a man with pants unzipped—rhythmic juddering, once witnessed, never to be unremembered—sprayed me and drove off. Flashers flash everywhere, especially in cities. Yet even for a city, Salt Lake had a lot of pesky sex crime. The paper was always reporting Peeping Toms or some man who’d masturbated on women’s doorknobs.
I had to teach soon, so I hurried to campus, into the restroom, used soap and water. I went to the big office I shared with other students, water splotches on my clothes, and my officemates asked what happened, and I explained. I started crying. Embarrassed, I explained the crying by saying I’d also just that morning realized my ex-husband, who, according to our divorce decree, was supposed to repay me in small installments the cost of the cars I’d bought him, hadn’t