My Unsentimental Education

meant to buy, so that he could continue on with the list, the cart, but we were not to separate in the store. I needed to finish my degree fast because he was staying in Utah only for me, he emphasized; he wanted to move ASAP. Basically, we had our first fights, never-resolved, a solid fighting foundation.
Subsequent fights built on that.
But he had a green thumb. He fried food well. He praised my collection of lace curtains—some old, others $6 a panel at Wal-Mart and you launder them on gentle—and the antiques I’d earned out at Garnett’s store. He said, “I’ve wanted a homespun woman, but they’re usually dumb as cows. I didn’t think a smart one would be interested in me.” I attributed this—he didn’t think a smart one would be interested— to the fact he wasn’t tall. Women are biased toward tall men. He also didn’t feel worthy because he’d been raised by a single mother who’d had to work and sometimes left her kids with ruthless people.
One night, coming back from playing Scrabble at a party, and we’d drunk wine, and Chet was mad I’d played for the most interesting words, not points, and I temporarily misplaced my appeasement mindset and told him he was a control freak. He reached across the seat and hit me. I hit him back. You might think: she showed him, and that was that. No. I learned not to bother him if I could help it because his first instinct—instilled when he was a child, more beaten on that beating—was to swing, swing again. He was strong. The advice my older self has for my younger, or for you, included with the price of this book, is don’t move in with someone if you don’t have savings, first and last month’s rent plus deposit. Don’t sign a lease. I had to make it work until the year’s end.
That bad fight put the kibosh on the athletic sex.
We were both mad but pretended we weren’t as we went to work, school. I never turned to him at night, and he didn’t insist, going to sleep holding me as tight as a child would.
I had straight As, but I hadn’t published. I sent out my stories, each accompanied by a manila-colored, self-addressed envelope with correct postage so the journal could respond. Chet spent weekdays at work, where he negotiated easements for oil and gas. I split time between campus and home. I’d be working, making headway, and check the mail to find, over and over, manila envelopes, form-letter rejections, no encouraging notes, mixed in with the bills. Some of the bills were Chet’s from out of state, way past due.
Before we moved in, I’d studied our expenses. I earned less than he did but was used to being frugal. So I’d proposed we split rent and utilities fifty-fifty. We should have been fine. But he always wanted something, a housetop satellite dish or, if not that because, shrewlike, I’d objected, a new TV. Or he hadn’t paid his half of the rent when he spent $400 on exotic tulip bulbs because, with winter coming, he was planning for spring. He said, “The trouble with you is that you’ve never had money and don’t know how to spend it. You’re what we call penny-wise and pound-foolish.” I’d studied him too, making sure he wasn’t like my first husband, too calm, lazy. Chet’s impatience, his pushy way of insisting, meant he’d be forceful about earning money, I’d felt. But the money problems got worse. Waitress experience, my mother had said, you’ll use all your life.
One night I came in from the restaurant at 11:30 p.m., later than usual, because my friend Shen and her boyfriend had come to the restaurant and I’d waited on them and we’d visited a while before I cleaned my station, wiping away grease and food on cabinets, tables. The end of a shift is hours of carrying other people’s dirty dishes while congealing food spills on your clothes. I opened the back door to the house and saw that Chet had cooked dinner, fried sardines and fried canned oysters, according to the empty, smelly cans on the counter, the stove covered with spatters. And what had required a colander? I wondered. He tended to use one without a sink. He’d dumped something into a colander over the stove, then thought twice because murky liquid trailed across the floor.
I woke him to say that when I’d left for work the kitchen was spotless.
It’s a bad idea to wake a sleeping person with a history of anger management issues to say anything at all. He hit me. I kept yelling. My yelling is querulous and tremolo, not commanding, maybe excruciating in the way silent whistles are to dogs. Chet swung again. I ducked. My head banged into the wall, crumbling the old plaster. Then he started breaking, one at a time, fragile home furnishings, all of which were mine, treasured.
I ran out the door and drove and drove.
After an hour, I passed the house. The lights were out. I parked on a street Chet wouldn’t drive down on his way to work, walked home, lifted the basement door, and crept downstairs to the well-swept basement, its cheery furnace humming, lay on one of the five-foot ledges where emergency supplies should be stored for the righteous duking it out with the left-behinds, a situation that, if I meant to be thematic, made me not left-behind, not righteous, but one of the supplies for someone who was, I thought confused, dozing.
Through the old-fashioned floor registers, I heard the alarm go off, 6:30 a.m. Chet made coffee in the last tidy corner of the kitchen. He had to work at 8:00. I had to teach at 9:30. The new phone Chet had bought trilled. I sat up carefully, so bills and change in my apron wouldn’t shift, jingle. Chet answered the phone, then said: “Top of the morning to you, Shen. No, she’s at school