My Unsentimental Education

already.” He was trying hard to sound upbeat, normal. At parties he sometimes paced with his hands in his pockets, whistling. “Would you like to leave a message?” He wouldn’t write it down, he said, because we had one of the new answering machines, and Shen should feel free to call back and talk to that.
That night, when he asked where I’d gone, I said I’d used my tips for a motel. I was too cheap to spend a night’s worth of earnings to sleep in dirty clothes in a motel, but he didn’t know me well enough to know that. He washed the dishes. I cleaned the stove, mopped. We swept up the broken knickknacks. He glued the frame of an antique picture he’d thrown, and he spackled crushed plaster. Three months until the lease was up, I told myself.
But I didn’t have the money yet—no first and last month’s rent plus deposit.
Then my mom and her boyfriend, husband now, visited on their way to another scouting expedition in Arizona. I’d saved time to spend with them, but they arrived a week late.
They stayed up every night until dawn.
Chet and I lay awake side-by-side, listening to my stepfather wrenching the ice cube trays, walking around in clickety-clack cowboy boots, saying, “Hon, do you think I should go out in this goddamn town and find more ice?” He’d gotten thrown out of the state-owned liquor store that afternoon for threatening a clerk. This was after I’d come home from class to the two of them waiting to see the sights, and I should have been grading or writing, but I was too tired, and I tried to be nice for my mother’s sake, thinking they’d leave soon, and my step-father stared and said: “I’d like a job that lasts three hours a day.”
Lying in bed on the fourth night, I pictured my stepfather’s boot heels like hooves on the wood floor, my hooved stepfather upright, ambulatory, mixing drinks, and Chet said: “You’ll have to tell them to leave.” Chet would be at work by the time they woke, he added, so I should tell them. Next to each other in the dark, scared and sleepless, Chet and I quietly had sex for the first time in months. Who knows why? Perhaps not having a mother or father to confide in, a home to go back to if life turned to shambles, made me lonely. I wanted someone. I wanted a replacement family, my goal, my target. Chet was nearby.
The next day, I told my mother and stepfather that Chet and I were having trouble getting our work done. My mother said, “But you’re good at school. You’ll be fine.” I said, “We can’t sleep with you partying all night.” They packed and left. My mother waved, tearful. I never saw my stepfather again except in his casket. I talked to my mother on the phone but didn’t see her until he’d died, years and years later. I’d broken a big rule. I’d disregarded generational rank, failed to respect my elders, by sending them away.
I was pregnant.
“You’re shitting me,” Chet said, beatific. “After just the one time?”
I can’t logically explain my joy, my newfound purpose. I’d watch the Mormon neighbors (mother, father, sister, brother) through our matching gold-lit windows. Not having this baby was unthinkable. Being unmarried while pregnant was unthinkable. I was raised to think so. But Salt Lake City exerted its own pressure. I could imagine being an unmarried mother better than I could imagine crisscrossing the city, pregnant, no ring, forced into small talk with cashiers, bank tellers, my students. It would be easier to say I was divorced with children, sad facial expression, than to say I’d never married at all. Even a dud husband was better than no husband, I reasoned, someone to doze on the sofa when I left to study or work. I didn’t want to give up on my PhD, or I might for a few discouraged hours now and again, but I owed so much in student loans I couldn’t repay them without a good job. I needed to finish the degree, earn a living, support this child.
You don’t plan a miscarriage, of course. You plan a wedding.
Days before ours, I was at the restaurant. I’d picked up shifts because we needed money. The midwife had said that many women bleed during the first trimester. Still, she sent me for an ultrasound, bad news. Now I was having mild contractions, nothing to keep me from work or school yet, and I couldn’t afford to quit or get fired because Chet was already fired again. But I wasn’t sleeping, stunned, carrying a baby that was not the quick but the dead. The other waiters protected me from the chef’s wrath by keeping an eye on chores I’d space out. Then, cutting baguette, I sliced off a slab of my finger, still dangling.
I wrapped my hand inside linen napkins and bar towels, turning red fast now, and a customer drove me to the ER, explaining to the triage person that he wasn’t my husband. A nurse made a tourniquet, stanched the bleeding, and called Chet. We sat in the ER for hours because a man in the next stall was having a heart attack, and doctors tried to revive him. When they couldn’t, and he lay dead on the other side of the curtain, a doctor sewed my finger back together, did a pelvic exam, and gave me pills to hasten contractions.
It takes a specific kind of courage to call off a wedding, and I didn’t have it. My finger was still wrapped up. I felt like a broken, half-built something moving along an assembly line. Fellow students arrived to witness our vows in front of our fireplace, to eat cake in our dining room. They disregarded basic writing advice—avoiding clichés and mixed metaphors—and said that star-crossed lovers reach a tipping point and the tide turns.
After this deep-in-winter wedding, Chet started working again. I