My Unsentimental Education

me, to have fed her, answered her questions as I’d bathed, dressed, put on makeup, questions about mascara, lipstick, perfume. Then the long drive. I was already weary. I blurted, “I’m a little overexcited, you see. I’m usually home on Saturdays, watching PBS. Last night, I dreamed that when I knocked on your door Lawrence Welk answered.”
In the dream, a younger, nattier version of Lawrence Welk had greeted me in a 1950s square-shouldered suit. I’d felt pleased he was familiar but troubled he was old-fashioned, although we were the same age. I also thought: he’s dead, right? I was going to a lot of trouble to date a stranger, I thought, yet I reminded myself to be open-minded, not superficial. Gary smiled. “I suppose I’m flattered. You blew off Lawrence Welk for me.”
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My plan not to introduce Marie to Gary ended fast. I came home from a fourth date in Austin, where I’d spent the night. Marie had spent the night at a friend’s, with a family I knew well, I’d thought. When I went to pick her up, Marie and her friend, age six, and a brother named Brother, age four, were running down the driveway, almost to the highway, with backpacks on, leaving on a trip, they said. I drove them back to the house, where the mother and father slept so hard I pounded on the bedroom door to wake them.
Even without this unsettling morning-after, I’d hit my limit about how often I could be away from home. A month later, as Marie slept, I folded laundry while Gary watched baseball. He said, “I need to tell you something. I wasn’t quite honest when we first met.” I thought: my God, he has an STD, or he’s addicted to crack cocaine, what? He said, “I exaggerated when I said I would never marry again. I would, if I keep feeling the way I feel now.” I smiled and kept folding laundry. The next years passed easily except for the rationed privacy, so little time to talk, Marie always nearby; Gary’s son, Fraiser, often nearby; not to mention the people from Gary’s long roster of character references.
On holidays we went to parties with Gary’s ex-wife and ex-in-laws, where we picked up Fraiser to take him to celebrations on Gary’s side of the family. I’d stopped flying to Wisconsin for Christmas—Spooner so far from an airport, and we’d get snowed into Minneapolis, stuck in overheated hotel rooms, no toys or snacks, watching the Cartoon Network. I’d done my best celebrating at home with Marie and a tree, as Marie, indoctrinated, had pointed out that we lacked a dad and grandma. We didn’t, if we spent Christmas with Gary’s ex-wife, where Gary’s ex-mother-in-law, with her thick Mississippi accent, urged Marie to call her Nana Pat. All the ex-everyones, including Gary’s ex-wife and her partner, his ex-sisters-in-law and their partners, his ex-niece and children, bought Marie gifts. Nana Pat treated me like family too, saying, “My stars, I love Gary. I’d prefer him married to my daughter, but if it has to be someone else, you’re nice.”
Then we went to a small town due east of Austin, La Grange, where Gary’s parents doted on their grandson but seemed as if they’d waited years for a girl to visit them in her colorful dresses, chattering, bringing crayon-colored cards, offering to demonstrate her dance-class routine. I met Aunt Alvina, Aunt Gladys, neighbors. All attested, approved. Gary was a good man. The reputable lineage stories covered eighty years.
Harvest parties in bottomland. A grandfather who, when Gary was little, held Gary by his feet to see cotton entering the gin. Aunt Alvina told me about a time she went to a dance in a borrowed tulle dress. “Ach,” she said, laughing. “I thought I was beautiful. But Texas in midsummer. I started to sweat after one dance. Dye ran in streams down my arms. I wasn’t beautiful then.” And they didn’t like just anyone. Aunt Gladys told me to keep an eye on Zea, who came in to buy groceries and cook for Gary’s parents, who were growing more feeble, confused. I felt bad for Zea. Outsider, I thought, no one to defend her.
Everyone inquired kindly after my family, then looked mystified. They’d heard of Wisconsin. But they’d settled in this area 150 years ago—except for the years when Gary’s parents followed oil field work before returning to the ancestral county.
Gary’s family knew I was a professor, but they’d have been as happy if I’d been a secretary. The University of Disrepair, on the upswing for years, is the most beautiful campus in the state now, an emerging research institute. This is a good time to call it by its real name, its sixth: Texas State University. Why had it had more names than a woman who’d divorced too often? At the turn of the other century, the not-recent turn, it was Southwest Texas Normal School, when Southwest was meant to describe a region in the United States. Normal was traded for Teachers, College for University, and so on. Southwest next to Texas got dropped since southwest Texas is four hundred miles away, not here.
Gary had watched the University of Disrepair convert itself from a local curiosity into something respectable. Like me, I thought. Yet I was guarded, discussing my own past.
I’d summarized it, bare bones. My first husband was a musician, never a good idea. My second husband had a temper. I’d been single twelve years before I met Gary, really? I mentioned Jed, and one dating website fiasco, a man with whom the short-lived romance had run its course, but he’d been fired, and I thought we’d mete out bad news and break up after he found a job and a small surgery I’d scheduled was over. He broke up with me over the phone. “Your surgery?” Gary asked. Botched. I didn’t say that. Or that I’d asked acquaintances for help, awkward. Or that home alone, I’d had complications. I said