My Unsentimental Education

living room. At night, I wanted to turn it off and open bedroom windows, but there’d been a spate of break-ins, sliced window screens, the newspaper warning citizens not to trust nylon screens, and I studied my windows and decided I needed metal bars. I called Wyatt, who asked how Chet liked his work. “There’s nothing more useless than a man without a job,” Wyatt said.
I said, “That’s true for all of us.” Wyatt said, “Honey, he needs a job to raise him up. Women don’t, not the same way.” And I felt bad for Chet, who’d assumed that Wyatt had seen his own ambition mirrored in Chet, but Wyatt had seen need. Noblesse oblige, I thought, the obligation of those with higher rank to help the lowly. Day by day, I’d lost sight of how strange our life had become, Chet’s aimlessness, our precarious finances. On the phone with Wyatt, I acquiesced, acting feminine, frail, saying I wanted to open my bedroom windows. He urged me to lock them and turn up the air conditioner. I couldn’t afford that. I’d been counting on warm weather for savings because the coal furnace had cost a fortune. I said, “Please, I need fresh air.” He said, “I’ll send a man over.”
The man, Hiram, was so old and unsteady as he got out of his truck I worried he couldn’t carry his ladder. Slowly, he put quarter-inch mesh—fencing to keep out snakes and rodents—over my windows, with metal washers under the screw heads to keep the mesh from pulling loose. No one could break in now without using metal snips, Hiram pointed out. I handed him tools. I helped measure. I steadied his ladder. Hiram said, “You want just two windows done?” I said, “I can lock the other windows. I want to open these at night. I can’t afford to run the air conditioner to cool off the wrong side of the house.” Hiram said, “That air conditioner is as old as you are, girl. Used to belong to me.”
I said that, as landlords go, Wyatt wasn’t bad. Hiram frowned. “He’s taken a shine to you then.” Hiram was married to Wyatt’s sister. She had dementia. “He and I are cordial,” Hiram said, “but we don’t see eye to eye. I’ve been a rabble-rousing union man since the thirties. But some strikers got shot. Union’s been a hard sell here ever since.”
I’d had menial jobs. Now I had a job with a future if I was assertive but not too assertive. I saw Sally watching out the window as Hiram and I went to the front porch, the wide-open one. Sally once dreamed she was wearing a waitress uniform as she cooked and cleaned, she’d told me, and she had a revelation: “Serving gives us power. It makes us needed.” This had been the rationale for wives for at least forever. But once you tinker with so-called normative gender stereotypes, the established division of labor and rewards gets confusing. I was paying rent, utilities, the car note, credit cards, my student loans. Chet was making money but spending it, like the stockbroker’s wife who shopped and called it work. Hiram sat down. “Are you management or labor?” he asked me.
A few weeks later, Hiram came back and fixed a door latch and put up a light with a motion sensor. “To make you feel safer coming home. To make you feel safer inside.” I already felt safer in my caged bedroom, dimmer by day—gray mesh—but secure and breezy at night, a fan stirring the lace curtains. Hiram and I sat on the porch, eating Moravian cookies he’d brought me, sipping iced tea, and he talked about his brothers, three who’d worked in the mills, two who’d worked down in the mines, all dead now.
When Chet came home, he called Hiram my seventy-eight-year-old boyfriend. But Hiram was my friend, period. During the Depression, Hiram told me, the WPA had sent bookmobiles to the mills. “That’s how I got to be a reader.” He’d quit school at age fifteen. His brothers had too. He still read books from the library. He asked about my job.
I explained what it meant to be tenure-track. He said, “Probation. What you’re saying is they got you on probation for now, girl. You got to look sharp.” I nodded. It would take hard work and good luck for me to publish in time for tenure. I told Hiram that Chet coming home for the summer—he wouldn’t have new contract work until fall—was bad timing. Chet’s TV, his two TVs, as I explained, echoed through the small house. I’d shut the door to my study, but Chet had trouble letting me write, coming in, for instance, to ask where we kept the SOS pads so he could clean the backyard grill. Under the sink, I’d say, deep in the logic of a paragraph that had nothing to do with SOS pads.
Chet wanted to use his last check to buy a truck for $1,800 to rebuild its engine—to keep busy, he said. I’d admired old trucks. We needed another vehicle. Yet we’d gotten by with one so far, and I thought we should use the money to pay bills. But it was summer. Even though the air conditioner was on high during the day, I worried Sally could hear us argue. So Chet and I headed into the country to buy a sky-blue 1959 short bed Ford. Chet worked on the truck on the driveway a few feet from my study, where I tapped away on my big computer. Sally, seven months pregnant, admired Chet’s handiwork. Ginna, selling Amway, dropped by and said, “I admire a man who can do all that.”
Hiram looked in on the project one day too. He was polite—visiting another man’s wife. Yet he frowned as Chet changed his diction to speak to Hiram. When Hiram arrived, Chet said, “Howdy.” Then: “An old truck is like a pig in a poke, hey.” Hiram nodded, wary.