My Unsentimental Education

Anonymous, I dialed on. Then a receptionist said, “Honey, Dr. X won’t, but if you call Dr. Y in Shell Lake, he will.” I forged another note, and Rodney took the afternoon off work to drive me to Shell Lake.
Rodney would wait in the truck, we decided, one less person to get noticed by an adult we might know. I’d never been to a doctor without my mother before. The receptionist checked off my name and went back to reading Good Housekeeping. I worried how to act. The only other patients in the waiting room were an elderly man and woman, attending to their old age or dying, which had nothing to do with me and never would, I thought, coldhearted, wrong. I pretended to myself that I was a wife. The Pill was new. Abortion, which we’d discussed in Social Studies because of Roe v. Wade, was new. Buck up, I told myself. Yet what if someone walked in and knew by my face that I’d decided on a bad life: premeditated sex? What if the woman on the phone had set me up and the doctor would tell my parents? Still, I had to postpone getting pregnant, I thought, willing myself calm. For how long? Que sera sera, Doris Day sang.
The future is never ours to see. The receptionist called my name. I met Dr. Y. He told me to disrobe and left. I wasn’t quite undressed when the nurse came back and complimented my modern, lace-knit bra, like this was gym class, the locker room. “So comfortable,” she said, this woman old enough to be my aunt. Then Dr. Y came back and narrowed his eyes. I was in the stirrups, draped with a fusty hospital gown. I wasn’t embarrassed for this part, or I’d known it was coming and I was ready. I shut my eyes. The doctor probed. He asked my age. I was fifteen. I said I was seventeen. Silence. He seemed not to believe me, but he gave me a year’s supply of pills, which Rodney stored in his tool locker.
Soon, my parents let me spend weekends in the Meadows’ spare bedroom because my mother felt farm chores were salutary. Or she was glad I’d stopped dating heads. She’d made local inquiries. People who knew the Meadows family attested, approved. The whole town weighed in, it seemed. This would be a good match in due time.
One day, I drove the tractor while everyone loaded hay. Rodney’s father clutched his chest and turned purple when, after he’d expressed doubt I was the right person to drive a tractor, I took a corner too sharp. The tractor started tipping, one side of the hay wagon climbing a big wheel spinning in midair. Rodney sprinted across the field, leapt to the top of the tractor, reversed it. The tractor righted itself. The hay wagon rolled back down, its axle and my life saved. That night, Rodney’s mother told me that no one starts out as an expert. We watched The Carol Burnett Show, and she taught me to embroider pillow slips and dish towels. When I saw my wandering grandmother, who embroidered, I showed her my work. She said my knots on the backside were messy. A backside should be as good as a front. I tried harder and piled up pillow slips and dish towels, though, as my mother noted, they’d look ragged after one time through the spin cycle.
In theory, halcyon summer was June and July. But intermittent cold fronts blew in, shrinking our allotment. I loved wandering through swampy patches of wildflowers, or rows of midsummer corn like a dense, miniature forest. My dad bought my brother a motorized mini-bike I’d borrow to ride through pine trees until I found abandoned houses I’d explore for signs of life—a tattered curtain flying like a white surrender flag in a cracked window, a rusty kettle on a stove. Once I saw a bear on a back porch, and I scrambled back to the minibike and sped off, my wheels stuck then swaggering through sand.
One night Rodney and I sat staring at cattails in a shallow lake, the radio tuned to a top-forty station hundreds of miles away. For a moment, John Denver’s song about his ex-wife seemed like poetry—reasonable poetry for a man who hunted and fished, I thought, eyeing Rodney. Night in the forest. Mountains in springtime. Rodney could discuss these. Maybe they filled up his senses. But he couldn’t take the next step and equate bliss in the woods with bliss he felt spending time with me. Could I live the rest of my life never hearing words like these said to me? I couldn’t. But a day later, ironing my father’s shirts, I turned sensible. Poetry was extravagance, I decided. Everyone has longings.
During short, dark days of winter, Rodney must have had his longings because he’d go to a bar after work and come to pick me up late, drunk. It would take me ages to forgive this, though my sister’s boyfriend did it too, and my dad missed every second or third dinner the same way, and my gambling grandfather used to leave my taskmaster grandmother for weeks. Once, my mother stared at me, sitting cross-legged on the console stereo, a coffin-shaped box with a turntable inside, as I stared out the window, waiting for Rodney’s truck. She said: “That’s marriage. It’s never our turn.” She felt bad for me, but it wouldn’t do any good to object, she said. The world was designed for husbands. She forgave my dad his lapses because wives did. He’d had that sorry childhood too. There’s no use bemoaning the past, she said. But she said it to us, not him.
Then a teacher who wore narrow ties, not because they were in style, but because he’d never bought the new, wide ones, explained that impartiality is an ideal existing outside the toils of language. “A selection of facts is partial,” he added, “partial as in