My Unsentimental Education

must seem to the woman Chet had been dating, or actually to her friend, the department head’s wife. I imagined the department head and his wife discussing me at dinner as they passed around meat and potatoes.
I’d just handed out flyers in my Freshman English class about the university’s counseling center. I made an appointment. A counselor, having seen all varieties of moral blind spots, would have insight, I felt. When I got to the counselor’s office—with a big window, the Wasatch Range a jagged cordon across the sky—I saw my counselor was a middle-aged man; I assumed he was Mormon because of his double-knit slacks, the side-part hair. Mormons don’t look alike. But rules about tattoos and beards encourage conformity. I looked for the ridges of his sacred garment through his slacks, check. But I believed in higher education. He had a PhD. He’d be trained to counsel non-Mormons too.
I summarized my situation, my sense that neither of these guys was The One, but I felt pressure because of the department head’s wife’s friend. I was confused, maybe lonely. Life was coupled-up here, I said, not just Utah with its emphasis on brides and progeny, though it was, but the graduate students moved in and out of each other’s apartments every time school let out between quarters. None of us had spare time to linger over dating—we settled the romance question fast and got back to work. The dating pool for non-Mormons was finite, I added, like a small town high school where people recirculate. The counselor scrawled on a notepad. He said, “I’m referring you to a psychiatrist who specializes in this disorder.” I thought of my wandering grandmother. Was I schizophrenic? I did have fragmented thinking: half-scholarly, half-lusty. The counselor said, “He counsels sex addicts.” I’d never heard the term. Most people hadn’t yet.
He said, “You’ll undergo a program to get over this impulse to escape ordinary stress through meaningless sexual contact. You might need in-patient treatment.” I rushed out of the building. I had to cross campus for a seminar on the Victorian novel, where we’d discuss the collective obsession with legitimacy and lineage as a desire for social order that gets mimicked by plot—the end of the story that delivers its message authoritarian and elevated, and scenes leading up to it like minors, dependents, which is to say that the family with its dictatorial clan-head shows up in vestigial shadow-forms everywhere.
My mind was racing as I ran, birds chirping, bees buzzing, trees blooming, branches quivering with pollen, and I bumped into someone and dropped my copy of Middlemarch. “Hey, I’ve haunted the laundromat. I should have gotten your phone number.” It was the extreme sports guy. He was handsome, I realized, blinking. But I didn’t ski, hike, camp. I said so out loud, apparently. Because he laughed and said, “I’m not looking for that. We could see a movie. When we know each other better, we could take turns cooking each other dinner.” Months earlier I might have given him my phone number. Now I had two boyfriends, and—I looked at my watch—in less than ten minutes I’d be sitting in class with that guy I’d had sex with just after I’d moved here, having fallen for a pickup line, also the toupee guy I’d kissed. Maybe I did handle life’s ordinary stress with meaningless sexual contact. I said, “I’m in a big mess in terms of my schedule.”
His smile faded. “I understand. The PhD, all-consuming.”
Love does happen fast. I fell for a house.
After I broke up with the folklore boyfriend, Chet started coming over all the time with clothes for his office job the next day, and I thought I was being cautious, centrist, by thinking about living with him, not marrying him, because pairing off seemed to be a virus everyone had caught. When the quarter ended, I attended housewarming parties for new couples and two weddings. I wanted to live with someone. Or I wanted out of the duplex, its thin wall, its rooms so small and few that, furnished, it felt mazelike. I called ads for two-bedroom houses, and during one call I recognized my landlord’s voice. He said, “For you, a discount. Your rent is on time, and you improve the property by living in it.”
The house I loved had oak floors, a white fireplace, a living room, dining room, big porch, a bedroom for love and sleeping, another for writing and homework. The street in front was a thoroughfare, and our bedroom looked onto a boarded-up house, but a nice family lived on the other side. Our kitchen window faced theirs; our dining room window faced theirs. On dim days, I’d watch them cook, eat. I felt light-years away from campus and its intrigues. And because I’m enthralled by unused space—ways to fill it, doors leading to the unknown—I loved the basement you got to through an outside entry.
It had a fruit cellar, which Chet equipped with grow lights for seedlings for flowers for the front yard, vegetables for the backyard, and hydroponic pot plants. The rest of the basement was surrounded by five-foot-deep shelves that I assumed were structural ballast. No, the landlord said, they were built to store food, water, fuel. Preparedness for cataclysm—an earthquake, a government takeover, or End Time— was doctrine. Was a government takeover seen as likely? I asked, curious. “That part’s probably a holdover from the polygamous days,” he said. Souls need food? I asked. All religions are mystery religions, of course. God knows. We don’t. The landlord said, “I guess the idea is that the righteous might not get taken right away and would have to duke it out with the left-behinds.”
So what got the fighting started?
Chet and I painted the inside of the house, and he got upset because my brushstroke was inefficient. I tried to make light by calling him Paint Marshal. He got upset in the store when I backtracked to pick up a jar of mustard we’d