My Unsentimental Education

Jed wanted to talk to me on the phone every night. He wanted to have sex when he trusted home health care nurses to take over for a day or so. He said, “I get so much out of a little time with you, I can wait for weeks.” I answered a few of his calls.
My add-on was finished, my cabin converted first to a cozy cottage, then to a commodious house, by the time my daughter arrived: six pounds of dreams-realized. I had sex with Jed Pharr a last few times, my attention fixed on the baby monitor on my dresser.
So ended Jed.
I loved my daughter first, most. Forever.
And if, throughout this book, I’ve emphasized my slow-breaking take on Jed’s strange clan, or my family’s mistaken but enthusiastic impression of him, or a neighbor’s advice about husband #2, or a landlady’s advice about husband #1, all along I was tapping into scant collective wisdom. Had I lived in one spot forever, I’d have had the verbal equivalent of courtship letters of reference, people who’d have known my lover since he was a child. But I’d lived all over, and I’d lived by my wits, making choices by myself. If I turned out to be wrong, having based my decisions on who was locally available, on who suited my past if not my present or future, I alone was responsible, alone.
I saw Jed once more when my mother died. She was still young. Her dying lasted just thirty-six hours. She’d been in Oregon with a new husband—nice, as far as I could tell. I flew to the funeral and back, and then I had to catch up at work while caring for my baby. Jed came for a day to help. Help me how? I was grieving, busy. After he left, I was carrying my daughter in her car seat down a stone path in front of my house, and I passed a flowerbed planted for shade—purple beauty berries, white caladiums—and a rattlesnake cooling on wet soil uncoiled, rattled. I hurried inside and called Jed. “How could I help you from here?” he said. I heard a TV, the volume turned low down. His mother’s dying lasted ten years.
The snake was gone by the time I went back outside. I looked everywhere in my flowerbeds that were lush, but designed, monitored, with bars of soap tucked under a rosebush, mothballs mixed with pentas, cayenne pepper on the leaves of a passion flower vine—ideas I’d read about in the local paper, article after article about the growing deer population with no predators except humans, and none of us hunted, so the deer were starving, but not in my yard, I thought, as a doe slowly chewed impatiens. Deer salad, I thought.
My daughter’s days ordered mine now, her ethereal breaths through the baby monitor that stayed green, serene, until it bleeped red when she woke, hungry, the tempo by which I slept. One night Sim stood outside my window, barking. He’d turned so tame he wanted me to get up and chase a possum off the porch for him so he could go back to sleep. I pushed at the possum with a broom, then wandered onto the sidewalk in my nightgown and looked at the sky and thought I saw a falling star, or a UFO. I looked again. A plane flew sensibly, explicably, across the heavens. Nothing startling and lucky would streak into my life without years of preparation, I’d learned. Not a career. Not a child. It had taken research, meetings, paperwork, to become a mother the nonbiological way.
I heard a crackle in the dark. I’d lived here eight years now, the longest I’d lived anywhere besides Spooner. Apart from wasps, or a rattle-snake in a cool flowerbed on a hot day, and another that bit Sim when he was still macho, wrangling with anything that moved, I’d lived in peace with animals. Except when I didn’t. A male with a small rack on his head was bent over my vincas, which were deer-proof, according to the gardening book. I said this to him: “You’re not even supposed to like those.” All at once, I was surrounded by deer. A big buck. Four or five smaller deer. A doe I recognized because every spring she had a set of twins, the newest standing next to her now. The deer looked at each other, a deer communique, as in: why is the woman in a silver nightgown upset? Next, the doe stared into my eyes so long I thought I understood her. She had a herd. A herd helps. For a moment, I thought her eyes said that. Then she blinked and started chewing.

A Dress Rehearsal
I was taking in new information so fast that I thought in headlines. Well-Adjusted Man Marries Oddball Recluse. Daughter Sees Transition as Tween Movie Plot. Fifteen-Year-Old Hates Eggs. Husband Reasonable on Every Subject Except Baseball. My ten-year-old daughter, Marie, and I had moved to Austin, Texas, to live with my new husband and stepson, a communal life requiring synchronized schedules, preferences, quirks. But I’d lost the knack. Or I’d never had it. I’d lived in the rural hills for eighteen years: single, then a single mother. Before that, I’d lived with husband #1 and husband #2.
My new husband and I had dated for four years. I’ll call him by his real name, Gary, because we’re still married. The dos and don’ts for dating with children, for blending families (puree, stir, knead), are common knowledge, unlike thirty years earlier when divorce was a scandal never discussed with outsiders, and details about what’s wrong with your ex were discussed only with your children, already privy, so my parents reasoned. Or they couldn’t help themselves, stunned by the newfangled moral disaster, divorce.
I’d used a sitter for work; I was averse to using one for leisure. My job was filled with deadlines and responsibilities, also interesting talk, so I’d mostly deferred the desire for adult company. Single