My Unsentimental Education

professors abounded, younger than me, usually female. I’d dated via matchmaking websites, ruling out men who smoked, took drugs, didn’t have postgraduate education: specifications that yielded up short-lived fiascos, also a handful of MBAs. I’m not anti-MBA. But conversation, Stage One in Seduction for Grownups, didn’t fly. And selecting dates online—a bit like shopping online, this feature looking good until, close up, it doesn’t—magnified the problem of no one to serve as character reference.
“You’re picky,” my mother had said before she died, suggesting unattached men around town, the man who changed the oil in my car, the man who cleaned the chimney on my woodstove. True, I wanted a man who’d studied the history of humanity; who’d also, at some point, like me, worked menial jobs and therefore wouldn’t think I was a savant on the wild side of a social class rift because I had; who knew that running a tidy, books-balanced household where my child came first was as important, or more, than my career.
One Friday night, after my daughter was asleep, I sat deciding whether to answer a dating website message from an artist recently relocated from Los Angeles, twenty years my senior, formerly famous, he seemed to be saying. Then I got a regular email from a friend of a friend of a friend. Gary and I were being fixed up. Or provided with each other’s contact information so we could fail or succeed in private. He already knew more about me than I did about him because he’d used an Internet search engine to see my English Department website bio and photo. All I could find about him was a quote in a newspaper story in which he explained that an unconstitutional law had finally been overturned.
Gary’s first email demonstrated a concise prose style, also manners. I answered. In a few days, he said he didn’t want to rush me since I was a full-time single mother, while he was a shared-custody single father with more flexibility, but we could meet for lunch at a restaurant halfway between our houses. He’s tall. I confess I like tall men. The conversation was so engrossing I was almost late meeting my daughter’s bus as she came home from her first day of first grade. This was the dilemma. I’d gone to lunch because my semester wouldn’t start for a week, but her school year had begun. Times like this were rare. One of my e-dates once said about a former girlfriend: “I don’t like women with kids because—and maybe that’s what it takes to be a single mother—they’re rigid.”
When I was home, I graded papers, or read for class, or wrote. I cleaned house, letting my daughter run her toy vacuum next to my real vacuum, or I explained what dusting was and that I’d rather she didn’t dust the shelf displaying my grandmother’s vases. I shopped. I cooked. I took care of flowerbeds as my daughter dug in her own tiny plot, planted with carrots and pansies. Saturday mornings, she had dance class. Saturday afternoons, kids’ birthday parties: piñatas, roller skates, cake, chitchat with married mothers. Every Sunday, I drove Marie to the university town, and we spent the day at the playscape and then came home and started our week over again, the alarm set early.
Saturday night, we’d watch the TV connected to the old antenna that came with the house when it was a cabin. The TV got two stations, one of them PBS. Some parts of motherhood are once-in-a-lifetime. The first time your child smiles. The first time she reads. The first time she says something more charming or insightful than you could and— understanding anew that someone other than yourself is real, separate—you love her more. But motherhood is mind-numbing routine too, doing laundry while saying, “Whoa. Do not jump on the sofa because you could fall, not to mention the walls are shaking.” PBS helps because you can hear, if not watch, a documentary while doing chores.
But that doesn’t extenuate what I’m about to confess, self-medication, engrained habit. I was in deep before I knew it. I’d grown too attached to The Lawrence Welk Show, which first aired during my youth, but airs for eternity now on PBS on Saturday nights. I was nostalgic for days when my parents were married, affectionate, and our family watched as my dad said hard work had lifted Lawrence Welk out of a small town and made him successful, and I’d scowl, thinking: do Gail Farrell and Dick Dale, who are singing “One Toke over the Line, Sweet Jesus,” know it’s not a religious song? My wandering grandmother had seemed smitten, a Welk groupie. I watched every week. My Saturday nights matched my parents’ and grandparents’ decades earlier. The music was calming, restful.
When Gary suggested going out on a Saturday night, I hesitated. But I told myself to take a chance, get tired. He offered to pick me up and drive me home—three hours of driving, impractical, half that if I drove to the city instead. I’d liked the way he’d looked on our lunch date, in a white, starched dress shirt with faded jeans, and boots. Yet I didn’t know how he’d dress for dinner at a good restaurant. I’d dated men who’d shown up for dates in shorts and T-shirts, and I’d be overdressed in jeans and a tank top with stylish shoes. This time, I wore a floaty black sheath that, depending on accessories, was glitzy or casual. I drove to the city wearing a pair of beaded flip-flops, sleek sandals on the seat next to me. I’d wear the flip-flops, or say I’d worn them for driving and then change.
He was on the porch when I arrived. I put on the sleek sandals right away and stumbled, crossing the grass. I said, “I’m glad I’m here at long last.” Too enthusiastic. I meant the opposite, glad to have gotten a sitter, to have told Marie over and over she wouldn’t miss