My Unsentimental Education

statistically high among first-and second-generation immigrants, I’d recently read, among first-wave feminists too. It’s a disease, of course, a breakdown of neurological function. But researchers speculate that, for those pre-disposed, the radical stress of dividing the self between one world and its rules and another world and its rules serves as trigger.
One night, pillow-talking, Jed told me about long ago losing his passport while buying wholesale tequila and spending four days in a Mexican jail. I asked how his wife had worried. He said, “She was still trying hard to understand me then. It was ten more years before she gave up.” I asked if he’d tried to understand her back. He sighed. “At the time, no. It had to be hard, my plans changing hers. She’d weigh in, but I didn’t listen.”
Another night we lay curled in opposite directions, Jed’s face upside down, so when he blinked, his gray-green eyes blinked from the bottom up. He looked like the movie character E.T., I told him. Jed’s dad once saw a UFO while planting onions, Jed said, and Jed believed aliens had been here, still were. But he didn’t believe in the moon landing.
“What?” I said. He was the first moon landing denier I’d heard of. It turns out that, according to a Gallup poll, 6 percent of Americans are moon landing deniers; 20 percent, if it’s a Fox News poll. Jed turned defensive. “Why did we never go back there then?” I was pacing while wrapped in a bedsheet, upset, though I wasn’t sure why yet. “Because Congress objected to the cost. Because the point of a race is the finish line. This is bad logic. Little green men mastered interplanetary space travel, but humans who can’t get to a nearby celestial body convinced journalists to televise a hoax? Not to mention a problem with all conspiracy theories—hundreds of people won’t keep a secret.”
He got up and left, angry. He came back a day later. Did we break up because we disagreed about space travel? No. He never brought it up again. No, because we didn’t always talk about concepts and hypotheticals. We talked about cooking, sleep, weather—weather so central to what linguists call phatic talk, talk that’s all mood-calibration, not information. We talked about Sim, who attacked the workers I’d hired, because I’d used money from my book deal to gut the cabin, tearing out murky paneling and old carpet.
When we pulled out the carpet, so many years of dirt had sifted through, despite my three-times-a-week vacuuming, that when I first saw the slab I thought it was a dirt floor. It was a dirty floor. I sent workers away and swept. I got on my knees with a Shop-Vac. I was putting tile in every room, and painting cabinets, walls, outside walls, replacing the leaky roof. The cabin wouldn’t get bigger, but it was going to be airy and light.
While I was turning my cabin into a tidy cottage, I got a phone call asking me to apply to be the director of a creative writing PhD program in a Great Plains state university, a good program with good students. I’d visited it, teaching a class, doing a Q&A. The current director had retired unexpectedly, the man on the phone said. The month was May, nowhere close to the time when departments interview, but the department had to fill the post quickly and well. I was their first choice. They knew my work. I’d do the interview by conference call. I said, “No thank you. I’ve moved so much.”
The man on the phone said. “We’ll pay you more and reduce your teaching load. We’ll pay your moving expenses too. Sleep on it. I’ll call back. You’re deciding too quickly.”
Jed agreed. He beamed, finding this area in my life—besides tequila, day-trip destinations, and whether I wanted a tin or shingle roof—where he was expert. Eating carry-out food in my cabin that wasn’t a cottage yet, he said, “You don’t ever turn down job interviews that fall in your lap. If you get an offer, you tell your employer.” This seemed like trying to make someone jealous, like asking for proof that I mattered. “No,” Jed said. “It’s establishing your genuine market value. Your employer will likely match the offer.” If not? I asked. Jed said, “You stay as you are.” But I’d have to take the job, I said. If I told someone I was thinking of leaving and someone said go ahead and leave, I couldn’t stay, not with dignity. Jed shook his head no. “You’re confusing work with love.”
I cleared painters out of the house and did the conference call interview. The next day, I had an offer. I told the man on the phone I needed a week to decide. I made an appointment with the woman who’d first arranged my salary in Texas. I couldn’t play it Jed’s way, as sorely tempted, because she read my facial expressions well. I stared at the floor and said I hadn’t been looking for a job, that I was remodeling my house and planning to stay, but this job offer came out of the blue. She finished the conversation for me. She said, “Naturally, we’d like to match the offer. How many days do we have to try?”
I was away at a conference in Pennsylvania, sleeping in a lumpy bed next to a phone, when I decided I had to take the new job. I pictured myself in a new state—with a bigger house, better groceries, a newer car. The phone rang. “We can match the offer,” the woman administrator in Texas said. “We can’t make you director of a PhD program, because we don’t have one, but we’ll match every other aspect.” The mirage-vision of my new future stayed in place. I shook my head, willing it to go away. I conjured the limestone campus in Texas with it fiery flowers, my cottage soon to be airy and light. I shivered. Pennsylvania in June is chilly.