My Unsentimental Education

I could go in and wrangle ice cube trays if need be, and I remembered those nights in Utah when my mother and her boyfriend stayed up drinking and clinking, and Kip said I needed to get a divorce.
I told him he was nervy and impertinent.
He said, “True. But someone had to say so. It might as well be me.”
Chet’s manners that night had seemed lacking to me too. Chet had only coercive power, I thought, while I had reward power, so all Chet could do was balk, resist, disturb the peace. He’d lately started talking about staying in Greensboro after I moved, living in a garage that belonged to the guy who painted houses, and doing upcoming easement work. I wondered what else Kip had noticed. But I never did get to ask Kip, younger than me, raised by a mother younger than mine, what he knew and I didn’t, because a bleeding, half-naked man dashed out of the night onto the other side of the porch and was banging on the front door frame. Kip and I froze, silent, in our cube of darkness.
The man glanced around, not seeing us, and walked inside.
I got up and went inside too, blinking in the light. The man had a cut on his chest, and he was wearing cut-offs too short for a man his age. My fear of crime was a figment from another life already. Or I was drunk. I stood in my living room, the half-packed boxes, bare walls. “What are you doing,” I asked, “besides bleeding?” All of this would make sense the next morning when the local paper would report that the grocer’s a few blocks away had been robbed by a man in a blue shirt, that a customer called the police, an altercation ensued, and the suspect got away, throwing his telltale blue shirt into shrubs. But I didn’t know that when he said, “Lady, please. Call me a taxi.” I pointed at the door and said, “Get out. If you do so politely, I might.” I didn’t have to, because he bolted.
Kip was standing next to me. “Did you not see that he had a gun in his back pocket?”
I was still holding my gin and tonic. I looked at Kip. “I didn’t,” I said.
“You’ll be fine divorced,” Kip said. “Really. What’s the delay?”

Depredating Deer
I decided to be undomesticated. Wild. Not coupled up. Not celibate. I never will marry nor be no man’s wife. How do I account for the dozen years I tried to live this way?
Categorically.
But, first, the lay of the land. I arrived in the sky-blue truck, its brakes stopping on a dime now, towing a trailer of my furniture from Garnett’s store, more scratched and threadbare after another move. “Take everything. Whatever you don’t bring you’ll have to buy again,” my mother had said when I was still packing in North Carolina, and she’d called from Arizona, where she lived then, our telephone-only era during which, if her husband wasn’t home, she sounded like herself, thrifty, thoughtful. If he was, she hung up.
I got to my new habitat, a swath of abruptly rugged hills separating coastal farmland from high plains. The university sat atop steep crags, the San Marcos River winding below. The campus was in shambles. Its former glory—buildings like limestone castles; acres of hibiscus; stained glass murals; paths leading to secret courtyards; a round building accessible by way of a footbridge that spanned a pond with red lilies—was masked by scaffolding and cement trucks. At a party, a professor who’d drunk too much told me that, after a scrappy tom fell through a Styrofoam ceiling onto a secretary, the university had hired a specialist to relocate feral cats but not yet the bats in stairwells.
Not-drunk professors rushed to assure me that the university, recently and generously endowed, was on the upswing. Because it had previously been a normal school, it had a long history of female administrators—a boon, I’d realized as I listened to one offer me a salary thousands less than I’d been going broke on in North Carolina. I’d been raised to believe that asking for money was impolite. Perhaps the woman offering the salary had been too. She smiled, helpful. “I see by your facial expression that I’m not even close.” I’d nodded, embarrassed. She offered thousands more. But I was in debt.
So I lived deep in cedars and live oaks in a cabin more cavelike than anywhere I’d lived. It had mud-colored walls and a grubby carpet I covered with area rugs, including the faux-Oriental with traces of tar, wedding present from wedding #1. I’d been warned to wear boots outside—rattlesnakes. Come winter, I’d use the woodstove. For now, a tiny air conditioner kept me cool during the day. At night, I’d wake, hearing footfalls on sere grass outside a window near my bed and think: Who’s out there? Who turned on the floodlight? The moon shone down silvery. Deer cocked their heads at me, collegial.
My other companion was Sim. A man in the parking lot of the village grocery store had held up a sign, FREE DOG. “This’ll be an asset whether you hunt or run cattle,” the man said. “What about as a pet?” I asked. The man pushed his hat back. “Can’t say.”
Sim rode in the back of the blue truck until Chet arrived from North Carolina in the Subaru—to visit family, to see if I’d get back together. I was still paying the car note. The Subaru was registered to me. It got better mileage. But I resented giving up the truck because, as I’d come home from the high-elevation university town to the higher-elevation village, driving across the skyline in a sky-colored truck had made me happy. The University of Disrepair had a casual feel, so I’d be wearing a homemade black dress, or the lime-green miniskirt with a men’s black T-shirt, black tights, black lace-up work boots. As I drove the hills in the squat