My Unsentimental Education

Subaru, I didn’t get the same euphoric surge. Sim liked the denlike space, though. In the passenger seat, taller than me, he’d sigh, let go of his hypervigilant scanning of the periphery for potential threats, and put his paw on my thigh.
Sim sat alert, erect, next to my chair as one day I phoned my dad to ask to borrow $400 because I needed new tires, and I’d cut up all the credit cards. I told my dad I was getting divorced, explaining that Chet was chronically insolvent, not just out of pocket due to my career, and that I was living lean until I paid off bills—a rationale for divorce and borrowed money my dad found irrefutable. “I won’t charge you interest,” he said. But he worried. “What about your children?” The ones I hadn’t had. I didn’t have spare money or brain-room to consider children. I needed $400. I thought about saying that I didn’t need to marry to breed, but I couldn’t be so blunt with my dad. I said, “I guess I could someday maybe adopt.” This filled the blank in his vision for me.
“Yes,” he said, relieved.
Dating and mating, then.
Category 1. No damage, short delays.
Category 2. Longer delays. Obvious escape routes cut off.
Category 3. Small structures destroyed. Evacuation required.
Category 4. Hurricane party. Mesmerized, I drank too much. Battered structures likely.
The problem with this metaphor is that I wasn’t stationary, waiting for landfall. I moved across landscapes too, for example the village near my house where a man followed me to the hardware store, then a gift shop that sold office supplies, then the post office, where he memorized my return address to show up at my door and recite a poem he’d written, its rhyme scheme dependent on words with -tion endings: all my perspiration, due to love’s vibration . Stalker Behavior and Rural Courtship Norms, I thought. Wondering how to respond, I finally told him that, during the twentieth century, poetry had abandoned end rhymes as harsh, artificial. “You’ll see internal rhymes,” I said, “or slant rhymes.” He looked confused. “Heart and dark,” I said, “not dark and bark.”
On campus? Single professors?
My former graduate school classmate from Utah who now hated her lonely job in South Carolina asked me this by phone. An art history professor, grizzled, a bit rotund, had introduced himself, bowing. He’d met me at convocation: new hires lined in a row onstage. No doubt, he was lonely. This was 1992. The Internet wasn’t invented. Or it was, but for use by government scientists to send research results to labs. One day I thought I saw a motorcycle guy—black leather vest, keys clipped to a big chain. But he carried a briefcase. I asked a female colleague who he was. She said, “Angry young man figure.”
She introduced us at a dinner at her house. I’ll call him Felix. Felix arrived with a cooler full of Budweiser and set it in the dining room. She asked him to put it on the porch. Conversation stalled. Felix said, “The university is exclusionary.” I was cutting my chicken. “This university,” I said, “or all universities?” He frowned. “Both.” Our hostess said, “Nonsense. Everyone’s kind to you here.” Everyone had been kind to me, I thought.
A university that lists its second and third most famous graduates as George Strait and Heloise with her Household Hints isn’t elitist. And even our most famous graduate, Lyndon B. Johnson, first taught in a Spanish-speaking country school. But I knew what Felix meant. I said, “People whose parents and siblings went to college before them seem more comfortable—in class, handling the red tape. For them, college seems like a career path, not a long-shot detour.” I spoke for myself, but Felix blushed, angry. As the cooler of Budweiser emptied, he lounged near me with his proud, fierce face and mood swings.
I dated Felix for almost a year, Category 2, obvious escape routes blocked.
I’d stop seeing him, but then I’d see him at work.
Or he’d show up in my driveway, and I’d rush outside to pull Sim off Felix’s car, and conversation resumed. Sim, who weighed ninety pounds, let women onto the property, but he lunged at men, including my landlord, or lienholder now, because he’d sold me the house, using my previous months’ rent paid as down payment. Meanwhile, I bought a book about raising dogs, yet so far hadn’t been able to follow the first rule: to move Sim outside, establishing myself as alpha. Sim came inside, cool in the summer, snug and fortresslike in the winter with a roaring fire and wood on the porch stacked across windows, blocking light.
But I sent Sim back out one night when he came in with a bloody squirrel, dropped it, and snarled as if to attack me when I started to clean up. I kicked him off my bed for good one morning when I noticed him on his back next to me across the chenille bedspread, snoring, jowls quivering, his big head on the embroidered pillowslip.
You might love animals in a spiritual way—They do not sweat and whine about their condition, / They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins—or in a fantasy way—birds tying ribbons, or helping you do chores, or leading you down the right path. But you have to draw the line somewhere, I thought one summer afternoon when I came home and saw wasps as big as hummingbirds flying in and out of an attic vent. I bought spray (”kills from long distances!”) put on pants, boots, a long-sleeved shirt, gloves. The day was hot. One hundred and three, the thermometer said. I put a lace curtain over my head and sprayed and ran.
I was outside one day when a man in a pickup stopped, rolled down his window, and said that cutting weeds keeps snakes away. So I scythed, then bought a lawn mower. I planted flowers too. I’d read in the local paper that deer ate flowers,