My Unsentimental Education

Chet had learned this countrified talk from summers he’d spent with his crazy grandma and revived it for Georgia, where he bartered with farmers for power company easements for the lowest price. Down-home talk helped farmers see Chet as one of them, Chet explained, not as a smooth-talking city slicker. “That is smooth talk,” I said. Chet said, “It’s my job to make the best deal. That’s what business is.”
When I tried to understand this marriage, broken but still running, advice from my mother’s era made the most sense: couples argue about sex, children, and money. Chet and I didn’t argue about sex, because neither of us was interested in it with each other. We wanted children. Yet you have to have sex to have them. You have to have money, I’d think as I watched Chet skateboarding with Sally’s children. He was like a kid, not a father.
The arguments that heated up, then, were about money. Most couples will argue about money, I told myself. Lately, because he’d been gone so often, Chet and I argued over the phone. When he was home, he sometimes made feints as if to hit me. I ignored these—like a teenager’s bad moods. But in the daytime, we both tried to keep the noise down. I quietly said how hard it was to pay bills. He quietly said, “We call that robbing Peter to pay Paul.” So I robbed Peter to pay Paul because I believed in, if not happy endings, then ways forward I hadn’t discovered yet. And if I disagreed with Chet that an old truck was an essential purchase, I was grateful he had an outside interest—outside my window.
He sometimes needed someone to hand him a tool. So he’d borrowed Sally’s baby monitor and put the mother’s half in my study and the baby’s half by the truck, and he’d be under its engine and call my name. I’d stop working, go outside, hand him a tool. I made headway on my second book as I heard the musical tinkle of a dropped wrench falling on concrete, followed by Chet cussing, then my name: Debra! At the end of the summer, I had a hundred new pages and a truck to drive when Chet went back to work in Georgia.
One day when school hadn’t started yet but the town was filling with students, I stepped outside just as the undergraduate, Kip, drove by. He rolled down his window and commented that I wasn’t wearing my usual gray, black, or beige clothes. “Of course not. It’s not winter,” I said. I had on a lime-green miniskirt I’d bought on the cheap, a white T-shirt Ginna had decorated with daisy trim on the sleeve edges, and white Keds. I was trying to look local. Kip said, “Wear, wear those clothes so bright.” He went on in this vein, mongrelized Dylan Thomas, as I opened my truck door. It was a handsome truck, stepside, with custom chrome and four on the floor. I liked driving it. I liked that people didn’t expect me—an egghead, a professional woman—to be its driver. Kip asked for a ride.
We circled the neighborhood, and when I approached the last stop my foot on the brake pedal went all the way to the floor, but the truck didn’t stop. I pumped and pumped until the brakes grabbed again. Kip said, “Not the best sort of auto malfunction, you know.” I called Chet. He said, “An air bubble. It’s worked its way through the line now.”
He was right, it seemed. The brakes worked fine until, a few weeks later, I was driving, with Ginna in the passenger seat. She was hooked on a TV show, she said, Unsolved Mysteries. I said, “On PBS? A mystery, not gory?” She shook her head no. “It’s unsolved murders in life.” I was trying not to focus on crime this year. “Wouldn’t it be better to watch something soothing?” I asked. She said, “I’m getting a burglar alarm. My ex is paying for it.” The brakes went out again, and this time pumping them didn’t bring them back quickly. We sped through a stoplight, drivers honking. Ginna started yelling, “Lordamighty.” Then the brakes worked, and I drove Ginna home, her eyes wide. When she got out, she said, “It’s a good thing your husband loves you, or I’d think he was out to get you.” She giggled. “And you’re right I need to stop watching that show.”
I tried to phone Chet to tell him. He’d be home in a few days, because my father and stepmother were coming for a long weekend, arriving Thursday, leaving Monday. I didn’t necessarily expect Chet to be in his motel, but I’d leave him a message. He wasn’t registered; I’d misunderstood. I called his supervisor’s office. The secretary answered. I’d spoken to her before, and she always called me by my husband’s name. “How are things with you, Miz Crosswater?” I wasn’t meant to answer truthfully, to say that bills were accruing, that our house was not so nice or big as the one in Utah yet certainly more peaceful with Chet working. But people had such emphatic Southern manners, even in small talk that’s mere social duty, mere recognition of another human presence, that I sometimes felt tempted. I said I’d forgotten to ask Chet where he was working, and I needed to call him. She said, “Back in a jiffy.” The next voice on the line was Chet’s supervisor.
“Miz Crosswater, this is unpleasant to relay, but Chet’s not in Georgia.” Where was he then? I asked. Or something like that. I shouldn’t have. Because the supervisor said, “It’s unpleasant to relay that I have no idea. He’s not working for me now.” I said, “Did he ever?” Of course, the supervisor said. Chet just wasn’t working now. He was scheduled to work—the supervisor checked his calendar—next Monday. “Thank you,” I said.
Chet had left me, I thought. Another husband gone. As anyone married a second time knows,