My Unsentimental Education

as he’d dismantled it. He’d found a postcard from Aunt Gladys, mailed from Mexico in 1944. A jewelry box from Woolworth’s holding a dog collar, and inside its lid, lined with fake satin, the name of a long-dead pet, the day it died, written in pen by my mother-in-law.
My mother-in-law started to die. We should call hospice, the doctor said, and a funeral director. The funeral director asked for the dress my mother-in-law would be buried in. She didn’t have dresses. Her new clothes, which I’d bought for Christmas or Mother’s Day, were velour warm-up suits with fancy zippers. I worried about clothes for the children too. My stepson found a pinstripe suit and red satin tie at a thrift store. I took Marie to a mall, where I also shopped for my mother-in-law’s burial dress, without success.
I searched online. Prim, yet springlike, Aunt Gladys stipulated. Given these parameters, JCPenney was too hip. Did Montgomery Ward still exist? Gary stood behind me as I logged on. We scanned pages of women’s clothes, tiny thumbnail photos. We paused, looking at one photo of “Watercolor Floral Dress with Daisy-Trim Jacket” right next to “Intimate Memories,” a strapless minidress with holes for breasts to poke through and a black rectangle covering the model’s nipples, though not her serene, catalog-model face. We searched and found more prim, springlike dresses next to peekaboo corsets and garter belts. “Is this website hacked?” I wondered. Gary said, “Or Montgomery Ward is trying to stay in business by covering every market niche, and they need a new website design.” We ordered the “Watercolor Floral Dress with Daisy-Trim Jacket.”
I’d planned three weddings. No funerals. I called a florist. The florist suggested two big bouquets, a big coffin spray, a corsage. I asked who would wear the corsage, and the florist said, “Any of the bereaved could. Or you put it on the deceased.” I declined the corsage. I thought it would look fussy and wrong on my mother-in-law’s Daisy-Trim Jacket.
Then she wasn’t dying. We sent hospice away.
I was at a nearby literary festival that takes place on a tract of land with a restored opera house and nature trails—not that I saw these, because I was there a few hours when I got a text message from Gary. “She’s gone. Dad and I just happened to be with her. Don’t leave. I’ll take care of the next phase.” Marie was roller-skating. Fraiser was on a date. Gary texted both of them. “Grandma’s gone. Don’t worry. Love.” He told me later that both had texted him back sad-face emoticons, which might seem to lack solemnity, but this was their first death, they did feel sad, and texting is the family lingua franca.
I talked to the festival director about leaving. Yet I should stay and honor my commitments, Gary said by phone. We’d had that trial run, everything set. It wasn’t as if my own mother had died, I thought, or as if I’d known my mother-in-law for years. I felt I didn’t have a right to grief, or to condolences arriving from strangers at the festival, and I’d answer that I was a newlywed, though middle-aged, but my husband was sad, and people looked confused. Was I coldhearted? Gary would be seeing the funeral director in the morning, finalizing plans. The festival was forty miles from the funeral home. I started worrying that Gary didn’t want me there because he thought I’d say something peculiar. I know I’m a little strange because of the decades spent alone even while with others.
That night at the festival, awake in my cottage, freezing though it was spring, I thought about my mother’s funeral in Oregon, where, because I was used to public speaking, I was asked to deliver the eulogy. Delivering my mother’s eulogy was like teaching during the earliest weeks of the semester in that I didn’t know the audience—the family my mother had married into—and couldn’t say everything I knew, just what the audience could handle. At some point, my mother had converted to Catholicism. When I was little, she’d been so wary of Catholicism she wouldn’t let me spend the night with a Catholic friend, worried I’d end up at Mass, spirited away. After her funeral, I went home. I was grieving the death of the mother I’d grown up with, not the one I barely knew who’d married again and died, though the new one had seemed lovely too. I said to my doctor, seeing him for other problems, “I haven’t slept for weeks. My mother died suddenly.”
The doctor had said, “Interesting. Not that I doubt you. It’s just that most people would have a psychotic break.” I’d had insomnia since I was a girl, daydreaming into night about Rapunzel or The Secret Garden, and I said, “If I would, I sure would have by now.”
I stayed awake all night at the festival too, and in the morning I called Gary and said I was coming. I got in my car and drove back roads to meet him at the funeral home, where he’d driven over with the “Watercolor Floral Dress with Daisy-Trim Jacket.” I told the funeral director that the florist had our order. Gary asked me to pick out the coffin. We wandered past brown coffins, white coffins, mauve coffins. He held my hand. I couldn’t tell if he needed comfort, or if he was offering comfort, or if he was holding on in case he’d need to squeeze my hand to stop me from volunteering something he’d rather I didn’t. Imposter syndrome, I thought. Why had I thought I’d ever be a good-fit wife?
By the day of the funeral, my husband’s office was at the busiest point of the season. I was in the middle of finals. But we were ready for, first, the viewing, where my confusion about who wears a corsage led to an altercation. I whispered to strangers, thanking them for coming. “I’m Gary’s wife.” If the person still looked confused, I’d say,