My Unsentimental Education

yet sent any money, and I’d never be able to collect it living here because I’d only been able to collect it in Kansas by knowing when his band was playing and going to wake him when he still had cash, and it was sad I’d never spend that part of my student loans on education now. Or I was upset about the flasher, deflected crying. One officemate said, “Holy shit! You’re divorced already.”
I should have stayed home from the margarita party and worked on a paper, due in a week, but instead I’d been fretting about the folklore boyfriend I’d continued to date. Men and women had paired off since the beginning of time, I thought. Why was it hard now?
I had only an inkling that trouble-with-love wasn’t just my confusion—though it was, in part—but also the era’s, a slow shift in understanding what wooing and mating would be during a large-scale movement of women into new professions, large-scale movement period, mobility, not just upward but away from familiar communities where you date your neighbor’s cousin or someone you met at your sister’s wedding, friends serving as dating letters of reference. No wonder arranged marriages persist, I thought. But every time I wondered if my choices had been affected by factors beyond my control, I resisted. What did I have if not control? Just secondhand furniture, an old car, and a blender.
I put the blender in a huge purse, went to the party, and met my second husband.
I did this to distract myself. Or to keep options open, avenues to the future.
I didn’t marry him that night, but I drank too much and brought him home.
He was the department head’s wife’s brother’s roommate. The department head had moved to Salt Lake City because of the job, and his wife—like Ruth, whither thou goest—followed. Then her brother followed her. Then her brother’s college roommate followed.
So I woke up with a short guy who suggested we address the emergency of our hangovers by eating breakfast at a diner, where he said how exhausting he found the parties he went to with his roommate and roommate’s sister and brother-in-law, all the people who wanted to tell you what they’d read with a view to pointing out that it was more than you’d read. I countered this by telling him how, in front of classmates, I once said merlott, as opposed to merlot with a silent T, over-thinking my pronunciation by first considering that claret, also French but drunk by the English, rhymes with carrot. A pert classmate who dated one of our professors—this wasn’t frowned on yet—had corrected me.
My future husband phoned the next day and the next and next.
I canceled plans with my folklore boyfriend, saying I didn’t feel good. One effect of free love on women is serial monogamy entered into too rapidly because women are supposed to play the field just long enough to pick a mate. I couldn’t sleep with two men; I’d be a whore or vamp. The folklore boyfriend stopped by my apartment. We sat at my kitchen table. I wanted to ask point-blank if I should pick him or a guy he didn’t know except as a good outfielder on the intramural team composed of men loosely affiliated with the English Department. I said, “I’d like more certainty you have feelings for me.”
Spring sunlight poured through the windows. He had a nice mustache, kind eyes. He needed a slight makeover and a housekeeper. “I’m deeply fond of you,” he said. Then he flexed his hands. “Is there something else I should be saying?” At the time I thought I could commit to wanting to love him, that if both of us committed to wanting to, in time we’d love each other. That’s possible. But you have to pick a person with the same wanting-it-to-work level who also negotiates differences well, and the two of you have to be hot for each other because that’s part of wanting it to work. “I,” he said, “love.” He paused. “You.” He smiled. I flinched. We agreed to meet soon to discuss love.
When he left, I stood in the doorway. He waved. The devout neighbor’s wife came out and said, “You broke up with him, right?” I frowned. My kitchen table wasn’t near the common wall, not that I’d broken up with him. I thought about telling her she was nosy, but that would mean acting haughty while passing her on the sidewalk each day; I’m not naturally haughty, so I’d have to work at it. She said, “You should. I’m rooting for you to find the right man.” I was wondering how this fit, theologically. I was not-converted, damned, but if I found the right man I’d be less damned? She said, “You met someone with more passion. I heard your headboard banging the wall last week and I thought that can’t be that old guy.” In fact, my future husband was just a few years younger than the folklore boyfriend and his lovemaking style was more athletic, but not better.
I got similar advice from the motorcycle chaps classmate, who’d known her husband a month before they decided to marry. “He was The One,” she said. “I knew it right away. You’ve been dating what’s-his-name forever.” Another classmate had moved in with an engineering PhD student after six weeks. “We knew immediately,” she said, “that what we want to talk about isn’t the same, but differences enlarge our world.” She left out that the two of them had gotten into huge fights about who had uglier used furniture.
I had a coffee date with my husband #2—though he wasn’t my second husband yet, and let’s say his name is Chet—and he objected to the fact that we’d had sex once and not again. My indecision had ripple effects. He’d been dating—casually, he said—his roommate’s sister’s friend, who’d told Chet to choose, and he wouldn’t until I did. I started to panic, not about losing Chet, but about how I