My Unsentimental Education

blew my cloth napkins off the table like tiny kites. My sundress billowed. Sim sprawled on concrete. Our guests ate with gusto, laughing. Jed said, “You have no idea how much thought goes into this. Note red tomatoes on a yellow plate. Presentation increases appetite.” True, I loved to cook, combining my mother’s home ec lore with all I’d learned as a waitress, listening to chefs. Conversation flew, never once touching down on the poverty on every side.
When Jed went back to work one Monday morning, I went into town to say goodbye to his mother. She told me how, when she was a new bride married to a sharecropper, he came home drunk, and she locked him out. When he was halfway through a window, she slammed it on his back. “Did he get mad?” I asked. “Oh no,” she said. “He knew better than to drink.” Clear-cut conflict resolution, I thought. She had the right to anger, nothing else. I said, “Was he hurt?” I never found out because she answered her phone with the enlarged dial pad that blinked when the phone rang, and when she hung up she was upset. “You have to leave, dear. Vick’s wife is coming with a relative you don’t know.” She even said “shoo” as she opened her door and shoved me through.
I didn’t blame her, I thought, driving. She got flustered. “I’m a flibbertigibbet,” she’d said once. She’d had Vick when she was sixteen, and now she lived on Vick’s largesse, his wife’s too. And who was the relative I didn’t know? Jed’s semi-estranged daughter? I sighed. Sim, in the passenger seat, sighed. He laid his head on my shoulder. Next, I saw flashing lights. I was being pulled over—the border patrol, looking for drug mules.
An officer with mirrored sunglasses asked for my license. He glanced at my overnight bag, a box of kitchenware, a laundry basket with bed linens I took to and from the bedroom in Vick’s little house. Whore’s bedroom, I thought. “One last question,” the officer said. Sim hadn’t moved his head next to my ear, but his growl amplified. The officer asked with a trace of a smile: “Are you both U.S. citizens?” Then he said, “Get back to civilization. If you run into trouble down here, your dog friend won’t be much use.”
Jed’s mother started to die, and he moved in to oversee the home health care he didn’t trust. When it was clear her dying would last more than a few weeks, he stayed, paid by Vick. I was focused on a new book coming out, the advance from it that would purchase a car, and an addition to my house if I kept it simple. “Extend the cottage motif throughout!” a colleague’s wife said when I held a party in honor of another colleague’s engagement.
I’d given up the wild life. I was moving on, forward. I wanted to be a mother. This can’t be explained entirely rationally. I’d been raised to be a mother, yes. I’d never not hoped to be a mother. My wanting turned urgent now: biological, animal fact. I’d once been a child with my doll, Gisele, I thought. Then I’d gone on The Pill to delay my motherhood, not eliminate it. I’d married husband #1 with his lovechild a precursor to the child I’d one day have myself, I’d assumed. I’d married husband #2 because I’d wanted to be a mother, not his mother, though. Motherhood was one facet of traditional female identity I couldn’t let go. I could forgo being a wife, I knew, but not being a mother. I thought hard about my decision because adoption requires months and months of interviews in which I’d describe why I hoped to be a mother and what kind I believed I’d be.
As I spoke to social workers, I realized I’d be a mother not so different from my own—until she got distracted by the end of one marriage, that is, and subsumed into the perpetual crisis of another. Given my history, marriage seemed like an obstacle to good child-rearing, I thought, not an aid. Single and focused, I’d cook, clean, sew, nurture, set rules, and enforce them gently. I’d respect the ways my not-yet-arrived child would be different than me. I’d be just like my mother and her mother before her, but changed, a new rendition of an old recipe, an improvisation. I’d retain only the best bits of the past, modified.
I’d researched adoption using the Yellow Pages and the telephone because, while the Internet had been invented, the local dial-up server—run by two guys in a pole barn, eating potato chips whenever I stopped by to tell them it was down again—took forever to load pages. But the Internet was showing up in student stories in my graduate fiction class. I embarrassed myself once, commenting in class that it was unconvincing for lovers to meet, as two characters in a student story did, online. A student—not the blushing student who’d written the story—said, “Um. Debra. No. Not anymore. Wider selection.”
Then my mother’s husband died, heart attack, and she resurfaced, sleeping on the floor of my study for weeks at a time as I pored over blueprints I’d paid Jed to draw. She was like a mother-in-law, I thought—wanting to bake cookies or tell me how to do my laundry, and I called her Mom though I didn’t know her, not anymore. One Sunday afternoon, she watched football with Jed Pharr, both of them joyfully shouting at the TV. She said later, “He’s wonderful. Who could ask for anything more? And he loves his mother.”
Blood loyalty. Even in-laws—apart from Vick’s wife because of the ferocious way she watched over Vick’s money—didn’t merit it. I didn’t. I didn’t care now. I’d once loved Jed, but he wouldn’t fit into my new life as a mother. My own mother would, if she’d stop praising my stepfather, her revisionist history, and turn back into the mother I’d once known. Still,