My Unsentimental Education

sat alone in the house, thinking next year, my last in the PhD program, was hard to look forward to now. The only person close to feeling as sad as me about the miscarriage was Chet. So, for a few weeks, he understood me better than anyone else could. How did it matter if I wasn’t blissfully married? Most people aren’t. Exotic tulips pushing through snow cannot console me, I thought, remembering Theodore Roethke’s
“Elegy for Jane.” Or they must have consoled me for a moment, because one day I looked through the window and saw a stranger glance around furtively and pick the best one, aubergine and yellow stripes, and I thought it would be a year, or never, before I saw another like it again, and I felt terrible again.
But I set goals for myself, finishing a draft of my dissertation, a collection of stories that had been rejected twenty or thirty times each by high-level, mid-level, and low-level magazines and journals, and I’d send them off together as a book manuscript, by midsummer, I decided—not that I expected anything but rejection, but working down, down a list of options is helpful because just when you think you’re out you’ll find one more.
Most people who praise Utah praise mountains. I praise the autumn, a lull during which the illusion of rebirth by way of fresh notebooks and sharp pencils lasts three perfect months. Chet and I had argued badly just once more when the prospect of being a father after losing his job had turned Chet angry that I’d left the vacuum on when I ran to take food out of the oven and I should have switched it off and saved the rug under it, Chet had said. I’d felt testy too, rolling my eyes. But sitting together in the ER had made Chet, if not my helpmate, a relative. Family is taxing, yes, I thought. And you can run away like my wandering grandmother or hang on like my taskmaster grandmother. Covenant, I thought, looking outside at the rundown Mormon neighborhood, boxy houses in rows.
I was teaching a class, not taking classes, except Immersion Spanish—starting from scratch for advanced proficiency in a foreign language, since the department wouldn’t accept Old English, in which I already had moderate proficiency, because studying it was out of fashion now. Our department with its recent hires from Yale and Harvard was new-fashioned. I studied for my exams in the spring, comprehensive exams on 280 books, lasting four days, six hours a day, or five, counting the last two-hour oral exam.
When Chet came home for lunch, I’d put aside my work, the schedule I’d made for myself: I’d read a book a day. This meant revisiting and taking notes on books I’d already read, reading and taking notes on books I hadn’t yet read—sometimes a short, congenial book; sometimes a short, difficult book; sometimes a nineteenth-century novel for which I’d roll over remaining hours from the short-book days to read these huge books fast, aggressively, my heart pounding as I searched for passages to unlock deep understanding. I was also waiting tables, and one night I got summoned to the phone, no calls allowed. The head waiter thrust the receiver at me: “Your husband. He says it’s serious.”
Chet said, “How’s it going, hey? You won the Flannery O’Connor Award.”
He was talking about a competition for book manuscripts. Many story writers enter it, hundreds of entrants a year. When I’d mailed my manuscript from the airport post office at 11:30 p.m. on the last possible day, I’d told myself this was an exercise in meeting deadlines. Winning meant one first place only. The winner is published with big fanfare—not to be confused with being for sale on the paperback book rack at Rexall Drug.
This was Chet’s idea of a practical joke, I supposed. He’d driven me to the airport post office. I cared too much. The mail had already come before I’d left for work. But, no, only the submitters of rejected manuscripts get letters. The winner gets a call.
The director of the series had called and asked for me, and Chet hadn’t told him to talk to the answering machine. Chet had jotted down a number so I could call back in the morning. When the director told Chet I’d won, Chet told him I hadn’t published hardly at all, just poems, not my stories, which had been rejected everywhere. The director conceded they were unusual, yes, that one at a time they might seem rough-hewn and unskilled, as opposed to subtly wrought in an imitation-of-blue-collar-life way. But all together, he told me on the phone the next day, they comprised a world, an iconography. They were shrewd, feisty. Nice, I thought, exulting. No one before had said anything so pleasant.
I’d made bad decisions, moving in fast with Chet, for instance. But I’ve had good luck. This prize was luck, not that I didn’t work hard, but most people do. And who judges a contest, and what writing he’ll like, and who will win is arbitrary—a windfall leading to future windfalls. But before I could think of windfalls, a professor said that since I had an award-winning book in press and would be graduating in June, I should hit the job market. “You won’t do well, but it will be good practice for next year.” Most new PhDs need at least a year of trial-run job interviews, he explained, before they get an offer.
So one day a week, I read ads and submitted applications. If I looked interesting, a department would ask for more material. If I looked interesting after that, I’d have made the cut from maybe three hundred applicants to ten and get interviewed in a hotel at a national convention between Christmas and New Year’s; I’d pay for that trip. If I made the cut after that, I’d travel to a two-day interview on campus, paid for by the interested university.
Chet had a credit card left from the