My Unsentimental Education

return to studying. We were all studying—the classmate with the toupee, the classmate with the motorcycle chaps, the classmate who slept with the professor, the classmate with the overused seduction line. I wasn’t behind yet, I thought, the house turning dimmer, light buried behind clouds and falling snow. I called the professor with the lakefront office in Cleveland. I wouldn’t be taking the job, I said. He seemed amazed. “Really?” Another life I wouldn’t try on. And I didn’t want him to feel bad he lived in a gloomy city, I thought, though it was perhaps nice in spring. He said, “May I ask where you accepted a job?”
Snow was falling in clumps, and people were driving to work in front of my house, lines and lines of headlights grinding toward downtown jobs. Then I heard a thud, and all at once the room was lit up. A car had slid off the street, crashed onto the porch, its headlights like floodlights; I froze. I looked out the window and saw a terrified woman’s face in a windshield ten feet away. I said to the Cleveland man, “We’re having a blizzard, and someone has crashed into my house.” He probably thought I was lying or crazy.
I hung up, went outside, brought the woman in, called a tow truck, sat her down at my dining room table, and offered her coffee. Being Mormon, she said no, did I have cocoa, and she thought she’d been in my house before. “Maybe,” I said. Who knows who used to live here? Next, she said I was her second-cousin’s niece. “I’m sure of it, positive.” She looked at the room this way and that, then noticed the neighbor’s lighted dining room, not very different from mine, and said, “Oh. Everything is starting to look alike.” Happy families are all alike, I thought, panicked, because I hadn’t read Anna Karenina yet. Maybe mildly unhappy families too. The woman and I waited for the tow truck to arrive, and the woman’s daughter too. “The poor dear,” the daughter whispered, bundling her mother out the door. “She hit the gas exactly when she should have hit the brakes.”

Serfs and Landlords
Chet got to Greensboro before me and found a house with two front porches: one open, an invitation to stop by for sociability and a glass of sweet tea; the other screened with a door that locked, a darkened box passersby strained to see inside. In Utah, he’d run out of work. His car was leased. He gave it back to the company and drove a U-Haul truck, towing my tiny, new Subaru I’d bought when a driver had hit my old car, totaled it, and I’d used the insurance money for a down payment and signed my first promissory note.
I spent the rest of the summer in Utah at my friend Shen’s, bumming rides to and from work, where I waited tables, including on graduation day, fathers and mothers proudly pointing out the honoree. Once, taking an order for a jolly family, I said I’d graduated that day too—I’d skipped the ceremony, its pricey fees for cap and gown—and the mother politely asked what degree I’d earned. I said a PhD, and she looked upset until I told her I had a real job, but it didn’t start for a few months and I needed money. The graduate’s father said, “Can we get another photo, this time with the waitress with a PhD?”
Why Chet wanted to stay married is guesswork.
Why I stayed married is guesswork too. I’ve never been good at saying No, and I don’t mean No to sex, though sometimes that. I’d had trouble telling white-shirted missionaries No I don’t want to join the Mormon Church. I’d had trouble turning down job offers. So I never thought about telling Chet we should split up before we’re trapped together on the other side of the country. Saying No might be everyone’s problem, but women are first girls who, like boys, can’t disagree with parents, and then they’re wives-in-training—that scramble to be a good sport, a salt of the earth. My dad once said, tautological advice when I was an unattached female of the species: “Don’t say no. It’s negative.”
Or I didn’t want to move alone again, long haul and nerve-wracking tight budget.
When at last I flew to Greensboro and Chet drove me from the little airport to the little house, he told me he’d impressed our new landlord, who was also the former mayor. The landlord had said, “Son, when your wife gets here, I want to take you to dinner at my country club.” I said, “Really? He takes his tenants out to dinner?” Chet said, “He saw something of himself in me, I suppose, and I played into that.” Played into it for what? I wondered. “He gave us a rent discount?” Chet said, “I’m making business contacts.” I nodded.
At the rounds of orientations, I met other women professors, all hired in the last few years because women now had PhDs, and the new view was that female students—over half the student body—have different research interests, and these students need mentors. Chatting with recently hired women, I noted that their husbands hadn’t found work.
One husband who used to be a CEO took watercolor classes now, his wife said. She was glad to have him out of the house because he’d gotten prickly, scheduling the laundry, rearranging dishes in cupboards. Another picked up part-time work. If one spouse moved for another’s job, the spouse who’d followed was likely to be unhappy. Yet Chet had never had a career in the way these husbands did, I told myself. He’d have options.
Chet revised his résumé—not exactly untruthfully—by describing his freelance work as owning businesses. His last run of work in Utah had been contract work. In Houston, he’d freelanced during the oil boom, but not steadily, as his mother had intimated when she’d visited us in Utah: “I’m so glad he’s stopped selling pot