My Unsentimental Education

my driver’s ed took place on country roads known for blind spots and wild animals but little traffic. I spoke carefully to strangers. One day, I hurried to pick up my daughter at school. The mothers I met—ones who weren’t clocked in somewhere until five-thirty—never hurried. I said, panting, because I’d run: “Wow. Parenting is labor-intensive, you know?” Two mothers made disapproving eye contact. One said, “I knew when I had my children that it’s a huge commitment.” A third mother said, “I think she’s being funny. Did you have a busy day?”
I chatted with my colleagues at work, an hour away. I spoke on the phone to long-distance friends. I told happy news. This is key. The life you describe is the one you get. Yet I had niggling unease. I mentioned this to my husband. Maybe I was just confused, I said. “Maybe I’m not alone enough to understand what I think.” He looked alarmed. Was I unhappy? Not that, I reassured him. I wasn’t feeling myself yet. What self? Even if I was unhappy, we were married with children now. We didn’t have time for existential quibbles. We got a call that Gary’s parents were in trouble and needed help.
Aunt Gladys had gone to check. My mother-in-law had fallen. My father-in-law couldn’t lift her. Irrationally, she wouldn’t let him call the ambulance. Or rationally, knowing she’d end up in a hospital, then a skilled nursing facility, which is what used to be called a nursing home. For days, they’d camped on the floor, eating whatever food my father-in-law could put together and carry. “But where was Zea?” I asked. Gary said, “Maybe she asked for the week off. I’m not going to judge before I get her side of the story.”
Her side of the story had gaps in it.
Knowing Gary would be the one to decide if Zea would keep her job when my mother-in-law recovered, Zea bought Gary a wrapped, beribboned gift, which turned out to be four crucifixes: a big, iron one for Gary; a big, calico one for me; a small, terra cotta one for my stepson; a small, polka-dot one for my daughter. And Zea had tried to make folksy conversation by saying, about Barack Obama, that she didn’t mind blacks if they weren’t lazy. She’d heard through the grapevine that Gary had married a woman with a daughter. And I still love Gary’s family profoundly as I consider that not one of his relatives, raised in the South during Jim Crow, had felt the need to mention that Marie is black.
You, Reader, might think it’s odd I haven’t mentioned it, as if, as Marie’s mother, I haven’t adequately considered race and racism. In fact, I could write a book about what it’s like to be her mother considering race and racism; I did write that book, my fifth, and this isn’t it. What that subject is now—now that Marie’s growing up and navigating her own shoals—is her business, not ours. At any rate, Gary told Zea that his parents wouldn’t need her now. Aunt Gladys said, “People don’t think Zea is—how do I say this?—good.”
My mother-in-law languished months in the hospital, then in a nearby nursing home, befuddled every night at dusk. There’s a term for this, sundowner’s syndrome. Away from the familiar as darkness encroaches, the patient panics. Gary had been reconsidering my in-laws’ house, its size, its disarray. No doctor will venture to say when he or she thinks it will be time for your elderly parent to go home—until the doctor does say, and then it’s in two days. Quickly, Gary finessed the details of a contract for an assisted living facility in Austin. I made a list of furnishings from my in-laws’ house to be put in the pickup and moved. Aunt Gladys packed clothes. I took over the shopping list from the facility: three sets of bed sheets, ten towels, hampers, a plastic cabinet with drawers.
One Sunday night in winter, Gary and I moved the furniture into a tiny, modern apartment. We whispered as we put together the bed, carried the recliners, set up the TV. It was after eleven when—and I felt bad for the old people asleep in the next room—I tried to quietly hammer mounts on the wall to hang a domed picture of Gary’s great-grandparents and my mother-in-law’s favorite picture of sunflowers. I hammered again, hanging rods for curtains I’d bought, unpackaged, ironed. Gary and I argued in whispers. Only the bed, chairs, and TV mattered, he insisted. Curtains and familiar pictures matter, I said.
Sunrise. Sunset. One each. My mother-in-law fell down within a day.
She was hospitalized again. Then another nursing home. Months.
Gary spent so much time in these settings, he started to talk about when our time would come. He talked about our house being our last with stairs. He dreamed he was trying to land an airplane, he said, but didn’t know how and a crash was imminent. When I pointed out that this was a death dream, he said he didn’t put stock in that abracadabra idea that, as you sleep, dreams explore pressing problems with daytime censors turned off.
His mother settled at last in a skilled nursing wing at the assisted living place. My father-in-law could see her daily, and it was cheery, at least the bird cages and fish tanks. The residents, not so much. Some reached for my daughter and stepson, wanting them. Or, mouths agape, slumped in chairs, eyes gummy and hazed, they wanted to be my daughter and stepson. “Gutta,” one woman said, gibberish, or some odd bit of Czech or German.
Gary’s mother never forgot who anyone was. But in the midst of talk about what we might do for lunch that day, she’d say she was using the time to go speak to Gary’s teacher in the one-room school in Kirbyville because that teacher wasn’t worth salt. Her memory served up long ago days in the same way that Gary’s parents’ house had