My Unsentimental Education

“The daughter-in-law.” The funeral director handed me a corsage. I said I hadn’t ordered it. He said, “But it came with your order. You may as well use it.” I didn’t put it on my mother-in-law. I decided to give it to Aunt Gladys. It didn’t seem right to say: “The florist messed up, and I have a corsage lying around.” I said, “Here’s a corsage for you.”
A white lie, half-true. No malice.
But Gary, who should have been a judge, pointed out later that even white lies cause trouble. Aunt Gladys’s eyes filled with tears, and she thanked me. This was the death of her only sister. A few minutes later, a woman rushed in, hurried to the coffin, looked around. I said, “Thank you for coming. I’m Gary’s wife.” Marie was next to me. Gary was across the room. The woman said she was Zea. Then she said: “What have you done with it? Where is my corsage?” Confused, I stared at Zea’s empty lapel. Zea said, “I ordered it for her in the coffin.” Then I understood. I said, “It seems I made a mistake.”
I wondered if I could ask Aunt Gladys to give hers back. Or should I try to order a replacement corsage? I was also thinking about Aunt Gladys, who’d been single her whole life, now living in her hometown, and Zea, divorced in a furtive way—how they’d turned out different. Aunt Gladys belonged to us, to others. Zea belonged to no one. I could have become Zea, I thought, not unsympathetic. Zea hit me. She missed my face. She hit my arm. I wasn’t hurt. I was embarrassed. Zea left, hissing that I wasn’t family, not really.
Before the service started, we waited in the choir loft. Then—a funeral is like a wedding—the relatives would be seated last. Men don’t dress up for church here, I noted. Gary’s male cousins, farmers, welders, well diggers, wore jeans and western shirts. One wore bib overalls. He didn’t have front teeth, but he smiled wide and kind at me, at Marie hugging me, at Fraiser standing to the side, anxious. The pews were full. My funeral won’t be so full, I thought. I’d lived too many places and lost track of too many people. My mother’s funeral had been crowded, but the squadrons of attendees had belonged to the groom’s side. My mother had been so recently married that it was impossible not to make that distinction. Moving and three marriages had scattered her friends.
People trailed into my mother-in-law’s funeral, including Aunt Alvina, whose quilting circle had made the food: kolaches, not unlike my grandmother’s kuchen; trays of homemade sausage; pimento-cheese sandwiches, crusts removed. Gary’s ex-in-laws came too, the ex-everyones and their partners showing support, some dressed like Gary’s male cousins, because Gary’s ex-sisters-in-law are gay. Nana Pat often remarks on this: “Can you believe it, Debra, that I raised not one but two gay daughters? But they’re so nice.”
Then the funeral director waited as we said that necessary goodbye before the coffin lid closes—necessary so you understand that death is death, not relocation. After the service, we drove to the cemetery. A historic drought was underway. Wind like a furnace blast blew across withered cornfields, and the striped canopy over the gravesite tilted, wobbled. I thought about my grandmothers’ funerals, one in autumn, one in winter, colder, but the same incessant gusting. The faces all around me, austere and creased, saying prayers with German accents, seemed familiar. Done. We went to our cars.
Two weeks later, Aunt Alvina died. She was my father-in-law’s sister. She had scads of children, so we didn’t arrange her funeral, which was in a town near La Grange. Her funeral was bigger than my mother-in-law’s. A table displayed agricultural extension plaques honoring her and trophies from the county fair. She’d been an exemplary cook, a seamstress, a driver of tractors. My father-in-law sat crumpled, stricken. Afterward, Gary drove him to the assisted living, and I left with Marie and Fraiser. Fraiser liked English classes best, and he asked me about the origins of modernism, and I was doing my best to answer—mass migration, the anonymity of a postagrarian life creating new freedom in terms of one’s inherited identity, but also new loneliness—when I saw a familiar driveway, a long and winding approach.
I’m not saying that the name of the town where we went to Aunt Alvina’s funeral hadn’t rung a bell. When we used to visit Gary’s parents, we’d go to nearby towns for dinner, and I’d been here before, in this east Texas town where long ago I’d spent a grim Christmas at a hunting camp not yet converted to a house, with my second husband, Chet, my father-in-law and mother-in-law #2, the broken furnace, crazy grandma, snoring in-laws. Everyone has a past, I’d think, as Gary drove us into town, and we parked next to a restaurant. But I hadn’t seen this driveway in over twenty years. Curious, I wanted to turn down it, memory lane. But no telling who I’d meet, I thought. Myself, outmoded. I kept on driving.
My semester ended. I’d go to a professional conference in early July. Then I’d have a small surgery to repair damage from my previous surgery. The previous surgery had been exploratory, for problems that, in Spooner, people call “plumbing problems,” but in my educated life people describe as gynecological. I’d like to avoid saying which problems because I was raised not to talk about gynecology, or gall bladders, or livers. “Organ recital,” my mother once said about a conversation with a neighbor she’d found indecorous.
My previous surgery had been incomplete because, surprised at the extent of the problem, the doctor ran out of time. Then I got a postop infection. Was I nervous about my upcoming surgery? No. Between my previous, botched surgery and my upcoming surgery, I’d worked through my post-traumatic-botched-surgery panic by wigging out over a small dental procedure. I didn’t want it, I’d said, stubborn. I needed