My Unsentimental Education

said No to his No. My heart raced. My department head said, “Hmm, good point. And we don’t want to get a reputation for using up and spitting out our new hires. I’ll arrange something.”
I walked home, stopping at a little grocer’s to buy dinner. Chet was out of state with the car. After listening to him for three months describe the business he’d start, how he’d one day take it public, sell stock, and I’d meanwhile pay the minimum on our monthly bills and we’d have $75 left for food, I told him to go tell Wyatt he was looking for work. Chet got mad. Did I not understand that Wyatt was in textile manufacturing and Chet was not? I saw Sally through the window, so I pulled the shade. I said, “Wyatt knows people.” Chet said, “You’ll turn my résumé into a hash.” Chet did go see Wyatt, though, and now Chet was staying in Georgia for weeks at a time and negotiating power easements.
I passed Ginna’s house. She was new to town, having moved here, post-divorce, from a naval base in Virginia. I’d met her one day at the grocer’s as we’d chatted about coupons and produce, and she’d invited me over to show me an article that detailed Greensboro’s crime rate. Ginna had beaten back a would-be rapist with a hairbrush in her den, she told me. She repeated the story again and again as I said, “Thank God you scared him off,” or “Yes, I’ve heard of victims not remembering how the assailant looked.” I doubted her story and felt guilty for doubting it. But her fear rubbed off on me, and I started noticing grisly crimes: a guy who’d microwaved his roommate’s body parts; a house-painter who thought a client was uppity, put her in a septic tank, and shot her.
It’s natural to want friends, and I scanned the landscape for possibilities. The male professor hired the same time I was lived in a house I passed on my walks to and from school, a house his parents had paid for, he said one rainy afternoon when he’d invited me in for dinner— lentils and cabbage, jug wine—and we discussed his literary analysis by way of Karl Marx, also by way of French and Raven’s bases of social power, which I vaguely remembered from Intro to Communication: reward power, the power to confer positives, and coercive power, the power to create negatives, the power of the otherwise powerless.
At work, colleagues were friendly but formal. One talked to me about travel and opera. When he realized I’d never traveled, just moved, that I didn’t know opera, he stopped. It would have been easier to befriend graduate students because I’d been one recently, but I taught them, so I kept a distance. I’d run across an undergraduate I’d taught in the fall but wouldn’t again, the one who called me Doogie Howser—his name was Kip, and he’d see me walking in bad weather and offer me rides. I’d decline. One day, the winter sun sinking fast, he pulled over, opened his door, quoted a Dylan Thomas poem we’d read for class: “Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Hey, accept a ride already.”
Late at night, I sometimes got long-distance calls from friends fading into the past. Chet had bought a new phone that was also a fax machine, and I was supposed to answer it while pretending to be Chet’s secretary (”You have reached Seismic Solutions”). A woman from my PhD program, who’d taken a job in South Carolina, called once a week to tell me my job was better, my life too, she said, because I was in love, not lonely. If I said my life was harder than it seemed, she asked for details, and I said, “Chet has been unhappy here. He had trouble finding work.” But he’d always had trouble finding work. He’d always been unhappy. “Something’s off-kilter,” I said. I felt like his mother or older sister. My friend wasn’t married, but she wanted to be. “Don’t get stuck on a Prince Charming fantasy,” she said. “That’s buying into normative gender stereotypes.”
One night I got a call from my college roommate from Oconomowoc, and she told me James Stillman was dead. I’d like to report that the sudden weight of this knowledge—he’d been thrown from a car, and the car landed on him—gave me insight about life, how we spend it alone, or how we spend it with others, suppressing our private objections to public truths, some brand-new wisdom about belonging, not belonging, the knitting together, the untangling. I worried instead about sounding appropriate. I listened to the details of James’s death and expressed vague regret. Was I too sad to say so? Or afraid of dying myself? I felt haunted, I decided, and I couldn’t afford not-sleeping, the feeling that, in spite of my locked windows and doors, I wasn’t safe.
Chet sometimes came home for long weekends, and I told him I was afraid, yet I hadn’t been in the past. Living in cheap housing, I used to hear night-noises and not mind that locks are illusions. In Kansas, the lock on the outside door was meant for a bedroom or bathroom, the door itself hollow, with a hole in its veneer where someone had kicked it. Chet listened to me as he checked the toner in his fax machine, organized the business cards and stationery he’d had printed, put his new TV on top of the not-yet-old TV. He’d bought a TV to use in Georgia because the ones in motel rooms were bad. He’d joined a gym too. He was earning money but putting it all back into his business, he said. When I said that a TV wasn’t a business expense, he said he gave up a thriving career in Utah for me, and I realized he now believed the mostly invented sections of his résumé.
Spring was muggy, and the only air conditioner was in the