My Unsentimental Education

item. One year it was a scrapbook, My School Years, Kindergarten on page 1, First Grade on page 2, all the way to Twelfth Grade. You filled in the blanks: My Grades; My Favorite Subject; My Hobbies and Activities. Each section ended with a checklist, “What I Want to Be When I Grow Up.”
The “What I Want to Be When I Grow Up” checklist, with separate categories for Boys and Girls, listed Mother as the first Girls’ option, followed by Nurse, Teacher, Secretary, Stewardess. Boys’ options didn’t list Father at all, just Doctor, Banker, Fireman, Policeman, Farmer, Pilot. This discrepancy bothered my sense of symmetry, an aesthetic sense, not a desire for parity. I hadn’t noticed parity yet, or not as it applied to girls.
I liked the infinity of possible futures at the end of this checklist, a blank labeled Other. One year I wrote “missionary.” Church no doubt contributed to this vision of myself evangelizing while wearing white. School would be a story, I realized, leading me toward The End. An escalator lifting me. I’d enter the fray, irregular, but finish with a smooth life that would be rewarded in people’s thoughts and conversation, the best shot we have at immortality, the praise or gossip that outlasts us. Yet during my real page 1, Kindergarten, I understood that school, if not the scrapbook about it, required hard-core bluffing.
I tried out facial expressions. My teacher, named Mrs. Gagner, taped children’s mouths shut. I haven’t invented this name. I’ve remembered it these years because, at the time, I thought all words would shimmer into meaning if I paid attention. Mrs. Gagner had either always been her name or turned into it. She used Scotch tape first. If it didn’t stick, she upgraded to masking tape. She didn’t tape everyone’s mouths shut, just whisperers’. One day at nap time I lay on my rug with Scotch tape on my mouth, hoping I seemed stoic. A girl on the rug next to me—a girl I barely knew because she was Catholic and her father owned a bar—lifted the hem of her skirt to show me that, since her dress didn’t have pockets, she was carrying her new box of Crayola crayons in her underpants.
When First Grade started, I wasn’t there. We lived in Spooner, Wisconsin, where my dad sold auto parts. Besides brutal stretches of winter, when subzero temperatures turn engine parts brittle, summer was his big season due to tourists’ broken-down cars, so he had to work to make money until after Labor Day, and then we rushed to a hospital in North Dakota where my grandfather, the one married to the wandering grandmother, lay dying.
We children stayed with the taskmaster and the gambler. While my mother and father familiarized themselves with the sick grandfather’s care and made plans for the wandering grandmother’s future, the task-master grandmother lost track of my little brother, who crawled into a suitcase and ate aspirin. My parents came in from the hospital, turned around and went back, my mother holding my brother. His skin was transparent, veins like blue rivers. Doctors pumped his stomach and yelled at my mother, she said.
When we got home, kids in my First Grade class were looking at letters in clumps and, in a thick-tongued way like Helen Keller, saying these letters as words, clump after clump accumulating into sentences about Dick, Jane, Spot. I was called on to read a word: “see.” Instead of sounding it out—no one had taught me to spit, glide, or vibrate consonants and moan vowels, let alone spit and moan sequentially—I recited letters. “S,” I said, “E, and E.” Then we were freed to recess on a playground where louts of boys and tall girls holding hands as they chanted “Paul, Ringo, George, and John” ran circles around me. I recognized a timid boy from my class in a red sweater with kittens on the pockets. We walked hand in hand, which made big kids circle nearer, faces swollen with menace.
The teacher phoned my mother, asking to keep me after school. The teacher explained phonetics. The code broke. I could read “See Dick run,” also the Superior Evening Telegram. And books from the library, or bookmobile, or shelves at home. My mother had bought the complete Dr. Seuss, the Encyclopedia Britannica, a series called Folk Tales from around the World, and every month the mailman brought a volume of remedial adult novels, Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. Obsessed with the lives of made-up people, I pondered stories—why this character did that, new outcomes, possible sequels.
I ignored the teacher, lessons, the dandruff-flecked neck of the boy in front of me. Reading, more exciting than life, calmed me. I was as high-strung as my wandering grandmother.
My wandering grandmother lived with us now, and my mother worried aloud that I’d inherited her tendencies. Waylaid by Reading, I didn’t concentrate on Math, Geography, Science. And behavioral aberrations were considered outages of willpower. I never witnessed one of my grandmother’s spells. She was rushed out of the room and usually spoke a mix of English and German. But she saw dead people and described events that might happen as if they already had. She slept in my brother’s room on a bed called the rollaway and came to breakfast in a nightgown with a hairnet over her curlers, her mouth collapsed (either the sadness or missing dentures), and belched and farted. She was a big, homely baby.
I reached out to her by giving my doll a German name, Gisele, and asking my grandmother to swaddle her, because this grandmother was good at swaddling. When I left for school, I said Gisele would need to eat, and I handed my grandmother a toy bottle of fake milk that drained when you tipped the bottle—like novelty ballpoint pens my dad got from traveling salesmen that, right-side-up, showed an ordinary cartoon woman but, upside-down, showed her ink-clothing draining away, her naked orb-buttocks and cone-breasts.
One day my grandmother ran across town without a coat, and