My Unsentimental Education

be the baby’s godmother, and I felt I couldn’t. I loved her baby. Or not him: all babies. I’d been groomed to be a mother, but this was a physical urge, to hold a baby, any baby, smell it, stare in its face. And I liked Sally’s older children, their knock-knock jokes that didn’t make sense, their anthropological take on adult customs, their frank conversation, no hidden agendas. But it wasn’t my time for children. I had to launch Chet first, find him his place in the world. “Where will I be as he grows up?” I’d said. Sally said, “But you’re one of my best friends. My kids love you.”
I said I couldn’t because I had to be at work on the day of the baby’s christening. “A Sunday?” she’d said. We had an event on campus, I said, improvising. I had to go early to set up—a probable impossibility, a fiction that, according to Aristotle, is more believable than an improbable possibility. But I never wrote down the date, and I was reading on the private porch when Sally’s minivan pulled up and her husband got out, her children did, and she did, carrying the baby in his white bunting. She peered through the dark screen, came to the porch door, handed me a church program. “Here,” she said, hurt.
So it was Ginna who met the self I’d kept hidden. One day she asked how I was, and I told the truth. Pensive, she chewed her lip. She said, “I have the solution.” She always did. Amway laundry booster. A burglar alarm. She’d recently heard weddings were a good place to meet eligible bachelors, so now she was finagling invitations to weddings. She said, “Move—you have bad geographical luck here. Some regions are bad for some people.”
That wouldn’t help with Chet, I said. She said, “Leave him.” I said, “I need him to leave me.” But I couldn’t figure out where he’d go. Onto the streets, spending nights at a homeless shelter? I couldn’t just throw him out. I’d talked to him about where he wanted to be. Texas, he’d said. But his stepfather had a rule about no grown children moving home, too many grown children, first of all, and a safety net makes people weak, he felt. This anti-incentive had worked for the stepfather’s children. They’d also been raised by a different mother and had different genes—nurture and nature accounting for the fact that they got something steady lined up so as not to flounder, and Chet and his brothers never did. Ginna said, “Move. It’ll shake him loose, either all the way loose, or he’ll get out of his rut.” The nomadic cure, I thought, moving as a release from unsolved problems.
I looked at the national job list. There’d been no ads for jobs in Texas when I’d finished my PhD. But this year I found two. I applied for both, and one in Mississippi too, because it looked interesting, another new life that beckoned. I flew to the national convention on the red-eye, did all three interviews in one day, and straight home on another redeye. I had calls for campus interviews, but I only went to two in Texas, because, as Chet said, we wouldn’t like Mississippi. I accepted a job in Texas in March. I hurried to campus to resign. My department chair was shocked. “But not mad?” I said, irrationally, panting from the brisk walk. I’d felt duplicitous, two-timing my job. He said, “No, saddened. I think I speak for many of us when I say I thought you’d succeed here.”
So my stint in North Carolina ended.
Before I left, Hiram arrived to take me out to lunch, and I got in his truck and rode to K & W Cafeteria, where we slid trays on rails and ordered food. I worried about Hiram’s tray as he walked to the table, his half-dozen different plates clinking, his wobbly glass of tea, which slid to one side, and the tray fell to the floor. Hiram bent down and tried to pick up the crockery shards, to swab spills, but a cafeteria employee got a mop and told him to load up another tray. I asked to carry it for him. Grim-faced, he said no and brought it carefully to the table. Because he was embarrassed, the conversation was stilted, partial. He died that summer. Wyatt phoned me in Texas. Hiram died in the middle of the day in a rocking chair on his porch. Wyatt said: “A peaceful end. I know he was your friend.” He had been. That afternoon after we’d eaten at K & W Cafeteria, he brought me home and said, “Best of luck to you, girl. I will miss you.”
Kip, the undergraduate, invited me to a going-away meal too. His roommate would be there, and my husband was invited. I couldn’t possibly, I said. Kip said, “What? Who cares? You’re moving. They can’t fire you.” So I went. Kip made hamburgers and his favorite childhood dishes. Frozen spinach baked with Hidden Valley Blue Cheese Dressing Dry Mix. Summer squash sprinkled with Butter Buds. Freezer pie made with a graham cracker crust filled with a Cool Whip and limeade concentrate. After dinner, Kip’s roommate pulled out a bag of pot. He and Chet smoked. I did too. I hadn’t since I’d written my master’s thesis. Pot had either gotten stronger in the intervening years, I realized, or I’d lost my tolerance. The next forty-five minutes felt like hours, or like I’d taken LSD—Kip’s face, his roommate’s, Chet’s, cartoonishly young. Then I felt fine, but dazed.
Kip’s roommate went to a bar, and Chet went too. “You don’t mind,” Chet said, already out the door. Kip walked me home, carrying a bottle of gin, another bottle of tonic. We sat on the dark and private side of the porch, the screened-in porch. On the public side of the porch, the door to the living room was wide open so Kip and