My Unsentimental Education

houses. A piney woods effect here. A paradise effect over there, patios with striped umbrellas out of place next to a barn.
One afternoon, lying on the boathouse roof, reading Love Story by Erich Segal, I felt hot enough to think it was summer, not summer’s imitation. Truck drivers delivering beer to taverns honked as they passed. So far honking meant “I know you” or “I’m trying not to run you over.” Uneasy, I went inside. I had a pet rabbit. We hadn’t bought him a cage, so he’d grown tame, housebroken, hopping everywhere I went, whimpering if I left him. He crouched on the bed as I looked in the mirror and saw that, if I squinted, my swimsuit made me look like someone else. In a few years I’d be making my selection, I understood, a local man, and I’d better get ready. Then I unsquinted and looked like me again, a girl. We moved back to town in the fall. The rabbit stayed in a neighbor’s cage with other rabbits. In a week, he’d gone wild, back to rabbits, and wouldn’t let me hold him.
I dove deep into the fracas of high school—including kids who lived in town, also kids who rode the bus and smelled like barn—where my sister was a cheerleader and Rodeo Royalty (doubling as “Miss Spooner and Her Attendants”). She followed rules. On weekends, she drank and made out because these were rules. So was not getting caught. I objected to not-getting-caught. Over the summer I’d read The Autobiography of Malcolm X; My Darling, My Hamburger; A Tree Grows in Brooklyn; One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest; The Catcher in the Rye; Mr. and Mrs. Bo Jo Jones. The national zeitgeist, disestablishmentarianism, had trickled down by way of the paperback book rack at Rexall Drug.
I’d get grounded. Then sprung. Then grounded. My parents didn’t object to jocks, but I knew them as mean, then friendly after dark, trying to take my clothes off. Stoners were called heads. “He has faraway eyes,” my mother said about a head whose mother had died. “He has a sickly sweet odor like a spice rack,” she said about another. She was paraphrasing the Warning Signs Your Child Might Be on Drugs. I didn’t smoke pot, but I didn’t mind if people did. I made out with heads, practicing my kissing. Like my sister and my parents, I knocked back alcohol. Drinking erased anxiety and social distinctions. My dad drank with people who were fun but didn’t have grit. Heads and jocks drank together in hunting camps with bunkrooms: squeaky bedsprings, whispered moans.
Then I met a man at the fair.
He was short with a grown-up’s head and shoulders. If he’d been taller, he’d have been uninterested in a fourteen-year-old waiting to ride the Rock-O-Planes. He worked for the phone company, repairing connections in the office, in people’s houses, on top of tall poles I noticed with a sense of awe for his daring vocation as I rode down highways in my mother’s car. He lived on his parents’ farm because his dad had a bad heart. By now, my sister was pre-engaged, a friendship ring with a diamond chip. This thrilled my taskmaster grandmother, who’d been single and considered a spinster until she was in her twenties. My wandering grandmother was young—the census record is sketchy— when she married. I’ll call my elfin, muscled boyfriend Rodney V. Meadow, a synonym for his real name. V is for verdant. Life teemed with allegory.
On Saturday, I’d go to dinner with Rodney V. Meadow, who bought buy-one-get-one-free coupons to supper clubs—restaurants deep in the woods. People arrived by snowmobile or in cars with tires wrapped in chains. After dinner, we made out in his truck.
I wondered: Were sperm airborne? What did “vigorous swimming” mean?
I fell ill, wondering. My mother, who bought sanitary napkins in bulk, said, “You’re moody because your period is late.” One night in my bedroom, my alarm clock ticked on. I gave up on biology and focused on plot—foreshadowing and upshot. In our living room, with its imitation brass lamps aglow, Pledge-polished furniture gleaming, my mother’s face would crumple. It had crumpled a few weeks earlier when one of my classmates got out of a car at school wearing a maternity dress hemmed as a mini. My dad would pour brandy with one hand, hold his other over his heart, as he did when he told you he was hurt (often) or grateful (rarely). I’d cook for Rodney V. Meadow when he came in from the phone company, I realized. After my baby became a child, I’d serve cupcakes at the elementary school. In a few years, I’d be like my mother, only younger, with modish dresses and silver eye shadow. Outside, dawn crept over snow-covered houses. I crept to the phone in the basement to call Rodney and tell him we were getting married.
The walking downstairs must have released muscles. I was instantly not-pregnant.
When I talked to him that weekend, he explained I couldn’t have been pregnant because we hadn’t had sex. He knew because he and his dad sometimes hired a bull and watched it work. He’d had sex himself, in the past. He’d like to again, he added. I couldn’t trust myself not to, I knew, and I didn’t want to squander another series of days and nights worrying how I’d feel moving to a stout house with hodgepodge furniture, or wheeling my baby through SuperValu as I bought meat, eggs, Comet, Gerber products, Windex.
In 1974, in Massachusetts and Wisconsin, The Pill was newly legal for single women. I’d read this in Time magazine. The decision about minors was pending. I forged a “please excuse Debbie from school” note, walked to a phone booth, and called every doctor in the Greater Spooner Area. Receptionists would tell me the doctor was with a patient, so I’d say: “Would he prescribe the pill to a seventeen-year-old without parental consent?” Most hung up. One said, “You should pray.”