My Unsentimental Education

if the mailman hadn’t called us we might not have found her before she froze. She’d chased him, she said, because she’d written to a man who’d advertised for a German-speaking wife, and she wanted an answer. Of course, we didn’t believe this. And my doll had lain unfed because my grandmother couldn’t pretend, or that’s how she left babies after swaddling them.
Meanwhile, I was falling behind in every subject except Reading. I’d daydream, thinking about, let’s say, Rapunzel’s mother, who craved rampion, not unlike spinach, the dictionary said, and in the days of thatched roofs people believed that not satisfying a pregnant woman’s craving caused deformed babies, so it was right to steal the rampion. Yet the father traded it for the unborn baby, which canceled out my idea that this stealing was justified, not greedy. These people—characters, mere words on a page—had maybe never existed. But their thorny landscape, their sketchy moral bargain, their fears and expediency, kept me from focusing on multiplication or the Ice Age. Or on dusting and vacuuming.
At home, it was just five of us again.
We’d moved my grandmother back to North Dakota, to a hospital where doctors first said she was schizophrenic. We thought she’d split into two, but, no. Her thinking was fragmented. We didn’t belabor the diagnosis because our family doctor didn’t understand it, and the encyclopedia was confusing: daguerreotypes of the man who’d named the disease, lists of symptoms (insomnia! olfactory hallucinations!), descriptions of patients who thought their brains had been invaded by TV. My grandmother started taking first-generation psychotropic drugs and married the widower who’d advertised for a wife—my parents first met him in her hospital room when he arrived with a box of chocolates.
When we visited her, we ate all day, playing cards and sipping beer, shot glasses of beer for the children. At night my sister and I crept down the basement steps, past the iron jaw of the sausage maker, past pipes and a hellish furnace, to a plywood guestroom with a bed and a dresser covered with plastic flowers and dozens of framed photos of the widower’s dead wives, dead but still alive in the photos. Someone had moved the photos and graveyard flowers down here. The first wife was God-fearing. So were her children. The second wife’s children grew up and went to prison.
At home, my mother had hung a plaque on the wall. CHARACTER IS WHAT YOU REALLY ARE. REPUTATION IS WHAT YOUR NEIGHBORS THINK YOU ARE. You might guess this meant she worked at character and scoffed at reputation. No. The plaque consoled her that even if she didn’t have a reputation, good or bad, just invisibility, she had character. Turning into shopkeepers in a small town with exacting gradations, my mother and father said that we didn’t care how we seemed. But we did. Dinner conversations—this man had ten children but worked hard and bought a new car; that man had a fun personality but no grit—ascertained people’s rank, which was malleable. My parents measured people’s attitude and fortitude, which you control. They’d staked their futures on the belief they could.
Middle school was called junior high, and the building, 1960s-era, containing grades Fifth through Eighth, sat next to the old-fashioned high school with Doric columns and sequestered offices at the top of curved stairwells. I’d pass through the corridor that connected the schools, carrying a note from a teacher in junior high to someone in a lofty office. School was cold, but this corridor was hot, an engineering mistake. I spent my lunch hour there, next to an auditorium with a stage that had a mechanical folding wall the janitor cranked open for dances involving a king, queen, and court. It was shut most of the time and covered by velvet curtains with weights in the hem. I rolled myself against the collapsible wall, letting the curtains wrap around me. Then I’d unroll and do it again, swathes of velvet like vestments, and once I bumped into someone coming from the other way who turned out to be a boy, and we rolled apart again, afraid.
What else?
A red-nosed teacher said I drove him to drink. “It’s not a figure of speech,” he added. I stared at his wild hair and bloodshot eyes. I lacked the ability to fail then prevail. I didn’t always do homework and tried to save face by answering in diction from another era. “We were put on this earth to persevere, you as well as I, sir.” Or, caught reading a novel in History: “There is no frigate like a book to take us lands away.” I didn’t try to make adults unhappy, and yet—I wasn’t the first adolescent to notice this—adults made so many decisions and I made few. One day in spring, false spring because we usually had a last snow in May, a breeze blew through an open window. I climbed out. The teacher yelled. My hair snagged on a bush. Dead grass was turning pale green at its roots.
I got sent to the principal. My mother, bookkeeping at my dad’s store, showed up, angry. Then she ran out of steam. She seemed to know that my best wasn’t like anyone else’s.
In the summer, we lived in our cottage that once belonged to people who’d died. We’d acquired their Oriental rugs, their horsehair love-seat, lamps with hand-painted globes, antique vases. The cabin sat on a lake carved by glaciers—shallow plateaus in the center but, here and there, inches from shore, drop-offs so deep no one had fathomed them. My parents, sister, and brother went to town every day, my sister to her summer job, my brother to stock shelves at the store. I stayed behind to cook. That left hours for taking the boat across choppy waves. I’d slow to enter a creek connecting our lake to another, where I’d cut off the motor to hear wind whistling through trees, bird ruckus, the shout of a human reverberating bell-like over water. I studied