My Unsentimental Education

it, people had said, soothing. It’s an easy procedure, the oral surgeon had assured me. Right, I’d thought. After the botched, gynecological surgery, I’d battled to stay alive because, answering my phone calls, the heedless surgeon had told me he was sure I didn’t have an infection. The oral surgeon had noticed I was scared and promised to be careful.
The oral surgery turned out fine. After it, on a December day, I’d turned fully conscious in Gary’s truck as snowflakes fell—rare in Texas—and I saw him in a plate-glass window in a jewelry store, picking up a sized engagement ring, my Christmas present, it turned out, and he’d thought that, drugged, I’d sleep through his errand. The young gynecologist doing my new surgery to repair my old, bad surgery was careful, like the oral surgeon. She’d ordered scans, tests. Gary was busy at work and the kids still in school.
I was thinking about the conference. I was thinking that basil I’d planted was bushy and tender, and I’d make pesto. My phone rang. It was my new doctor calling to move the date of the surgery to August. “Why?” I’d planned for time to recover before teaching again, commuting, the long days—though, if I consider the trade-off between a short commute as a single mother and a long commute as a mother married to a good co-parent, I’m better off. Still, I missed my house in the woods. Everyone plays roles, but maybe more if you move often, advance through social circles, mate and marry a lot. As I’d tried to be what people expected, my self I knew best, my self without veneers, was solo.
My doctor said, “I need an oncologist. This is when he’s available.”
She’d asked a general surgeon to assist too, three surgeons in all. A long, more intricate surgery, she said. She didn’t know for sure that I had cancer because, due to scarring, she couldn’t get a tissue sample. But I had three out of three symptoms of uterine cancer. Slow-growing, responsive to treatment, she added. She had to take everything and still fix problems from the previous, botched surgery. She said, “I don’t do odds. But if I did, given your history, I’d say your odds of being cancer free are sixty-forty.”
This was better than forty-sixty or fifty-fifty, Gary said, when I told him. Better than a successful biopsy that came back positive. I knew, and still know, that everyone who’s had worse news than a sixty-forty guess in her favor and nine weeks to find out for sure has had a harder life than me. Gary knew I’d be fine, he said. He’d take care of me always. I was youngish, and even bad news, he said, wouldn’t be terrible news. And soon enough we’d face more health issues before, in the end, we’d face more, more, and more.
I didn’t find this comforting.
We decided, together, to wait until after the surgery, days after, when pathology results would be back, and we’d tell the children it had been more than routine only if the results were positive. To this day, Gary insists that he was confident. I followed suit. I read for the conference, book-length manuscripts. I remember the manuscripts, but I don’t remember the conference at all, except for leading workshop with willed intensity that, according to the postconference evaluations, students construed as a manic joy of teaching.
After the conference, I had another test, this one involving dye and a balloon. On the way home, I picked up prescriptions, and I lost my keys in a small pharmacy—no big aisles of detergents, makeup, hair brushes, just medicine and sick people—and I retraced my steps, emptied my purse, retraced my steps. A very old man shuffled over. He said, “Have you checked your car, the ignition? They’re probably there. Then go home and rest.”
When I walked into a room, worry flitted across Gary’s face before he put on a hearty manner—to me, indistinguishable from the coded message that I lacked courage, or that he didn’t like this agitated version of me. Agitated how? The “responsive to treatment” part of the doctor’s call had taken days to register. At first I thought I had to stand weeks of trying not to think about my 60 percent chance not to die, before I understood I had a 60 percent chance not to require chemotherapy, which would be better. And 60 percent, not 50, 40, or worse. Meanwhile, I discovered that I wasn’t concerned about life, mine. I’d been my daughter’s only parent for her first ten years. She was in middle school. I hadn’t lost my mother, available by phone, until I was forty. And I’d had her to see, to spend time with, to touch, until I was in college; I wanted to be that for Marie.
I decided to find a therapist. The therapist said, “Of course, you feel worried, facing mortality.” Not a fresh perspective, I thought, as I drove past the city cemetery. Across from it is a business called Beall Memorial Art. In front, a life-sized statue of a man tees off. I was at a red light, staring at the golfing graveyard marker, when the radio started to play a torch song with an emotive vocal dip. Thanatos trumps eros, I thought, alone in heavy traffic. Why did I find a song about lost love cathartic? The vocal dip, the appoggiatura, did its work. Stored memories released. Or darkness encroached. I wanted to get on a highway and go. I’d stop in a bar, get drunk, have a fling, first the distraction of that, then the hangover and hard work of getting to know a stranger.
Not really. Not anymore. Yet I’d cut loose this way for a month or so after high school. For a few years after James Stillman but before I married. After my first divorce, my second. Before I was a mother. Getting acquainted, then the disentangling and back to responsibility—by then, any problem I’d had before the