My Unsentimental Education

that when I was getting my master’s degree I’d inadvertently heard a professor describe me as “reasonably intelligent, but with unaccountably bad taste in men.”
Gary looked worried.
When my dad came for a visit, Gary’s office was in the midst of a big project. Gary drove out for a hurried dinner: hello, goodbye. My dad respected that Gary, a man, was busy. And I was glad that Gary missed my dad rehashing what was wrong with my mom, whom my dad had divorced twenty-five years earlier, and she was dead, which made the criticism sound more wrong, as my stepmother seemed to think too, knitting, repressing hysteria, a squeal, as my dad poured out half of his can of Pepsi and added booze, and it was hard to keep track of how much he’d had until he was staggering and scrappy.
Describing my past to Gary, I’d simplified because—according to the codes of my childhood—I’d lived like a man. Free love, the so-called sexual revolution, had its inconsistencies. After casual sex was pro forma, women who said No were unhip, frigid. At the same time, they weren’t supposed to pile up a “number,” the new term for copious notches on the bedpost that men are improved by having. I hadn’t meant to be “a sexual adventuress,” as I’ve heard Edna St. Vincent Millay and Martha Gellhorn described, which doesn’t seem fair. Martha Gellhorn once said, pithy, that she’d heard male desire described as so urgent and primal that saying No had seemed as cruel as withholding bread.
The conventional wisdom would be that I’d been naive: wanting it all. Freedom plus routine. Go-for-broke ambition plus a home life. But I hadn’t premeditated any of my wanting. I wasn’t even ambitious. I wasn’t a pioneer either, a first-wave feminist—just a particle in that mass wave of women entering what had been, a generation earlier, a male province. Since first grade, I couldn’t stop reading. And because my relationships had failed, or because I’d had to earn my way—which, in my mother’s era, were one and the same problem—I’d stayed in school, no reason to stop. Age-appropriate and career-minded men, my equals, yet raised by homemakers married to breadwinners, had been as confused.
I didn’t have to ask Gary the same questions because no one was a skeleton in his closet, least of all one of his previous selves. He came from a small town where higher education was rare, but no one was alarmed when a boy precociously interested in books bettered himself through school. Precociously distracted by books, I’d been expected to better myself by becoming an asset to a go-getting man. This time I could be, maybe, because Gary and I had met later in life and didn’t have to decide where to live for whose career.
Our small wedding was in my yard. Sim, who’d lived to a good old age, had died peacefully under the porch swing. So I spent the morning before the wedding chasing deer while wearing an old dress and fancy hair—I’d paid a woman at a salon to pile it on my head and shellac it with spray. In the end, I augmented my ransacked flowerbeds with fake flowers from the Dollar Store, a trick I’d learned from visiting movie sets. It was going to be so hot, so uncomfortable, our vows so brief before people hurried inside to eat and drink in the air-conditioning, that no one would notice a few blooms weren’t real.
Then I moved into the big, remodeled house in the city. A month later, we went to a party, celebrating Gary’s semi-retirement after decades of service, and a few younger, female lawyers assessed me as future sisters-in-law might: was I suitable? Others lawyers regaled me with stories about how instrumental Gary was, how fun, how considerate.
I was wearing a dress and heels, and Marie was turned out in pink. My stepson, Fraiser, stood by, mature, serious. I’d stepped into the part for which I’d been trained, and my advanced degree was a helpful flourish. Everyone seemed startled, yet not exactly unpleasantly, that the books I wrote weren’t typically academic: not quite this or that about gender in the twentieth century, not quite this or that about social class in postindustrial America. When we got home, Gary asked what so-and-so or so-and-so and I had talked about. I couldn’t keep names straight. Gary seemed too casually curious, as if he worried I’d said something confessional, not lawyerly and close-to-the-vest, not the trifling small talk I’d spent my writing career bypassing, going instead straight for the secret, emotional core. I also realized I’d smiled nonstop while clenching my teeth. I was playing a role: last self. This isn’t to say I didn’t mean it. I was acting, and I meant it.
The children must feel the strain too, I thought. Yet, since Marie was little, she’d said I should find a dad. I read her entries in her English class journal: about a great brother, a great father. Her teacher said, “She’s made friends so quickly. It’s not easy in this neighborhood where most kids have known each other since they were babies. Their mothers likely met in Lamaze class.” One day, when Gary said that I’d put too many doilies in the living room, that it looked like my old house, undeniably froufrou, both a home and a quirky domestic museum, I said, “Two is too many, then? I’ve winnowed. I’m down at least fifteen doilies.” Gary had vetoed lace curtains. Fraiser said, “But I think it looks homey now.” He asked for a few of my chairs and lamps for his bedroom. When I passed his open door I felt a jolt, a reminder that the past isn’t gone, just off to the side.
But I was accustomed to small towns, not cities. The talk is different. Traffic is. Entering conversations seemed like edging forward on one of those ramps leading to the six-lane highway I took to work now. In reality, as in this analogy,