My Unsentimental Education

fling was old news. But that life had been shifty, temporary. The light turned green. This life was better. I drove back to it.
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. The doors to the pre-op room opened. Gary’s voice was too calm, I thought. He thinks I’m unhinged, like Zea. He’s naturally laconic, and his profession has weeded out the extraneous. He says “I love you” when you’d expect: after I say it, or while saying goodbye. “I love you,” he said. The anesthesiologist had arrived.
The mask covered my mouth as I stayed calm, pretending I was an adolescent at the lake’s edge, waves lapping. No, earlier, a far-off memory, fainter and fainter, like a Xerox of a Xerox: a memory of memory. I lay on a blanket. Above me, trees flex and billow. Their emerald leaves tremble. I’ve not been a member of the human race for long. An old lady sits nearby. “Gutta,” she says. She’s gone around the bend, as I’ve just overheard, maybe during the car ride here. Other women surge inside to see handiwork, leaving me on my blanket and this great-grandmother in her chair. My sister goes inside too. My brother isn’t born yet, just a twinkling volition in the life before this, a fist-sized fetus in my mother’s belly covered by a new maternity blouse she’d have sewn herself. Stranded with my great-grandmother who calls out, “Don’t leave me,” I understand our situations—if not the two of us—are dead ringers. Left to fend for ourselves, we’re doomed.
“There.” A post-op nurse changed my IV and wheeled me to my room.
I went home. When the phone call about the pathology report came, negative, I was strangely blasé, sedated. I longed irrationally for busy work, for a sewing basket I no longer owned. I didn’t have glossy and colorful skeins, stamped pillowslips, my hoop, my tiny jeweled scissors from Garnett’s store. I thought, I’m going to be a cranky old lady. Marie thinks so. I cuss when I’m multitasking: cooking while grading; vacuuming while stopping to add a line to a paragraph. “All this cussing will spill out when you’re old and in a hospital, and I’m going to have to explain to the nurses that you’re otherwise polite.”
I didn’t feel polite, even with familiar pictures on the bedroom wall, lace curtains Gary had grudgingly said he liked here, in private. I trudged to the living room, admiring a chair I bought in Utah, a table from North Carolina, a cabinet from Gary’s parents’ house. I remembered Gary saying this house would be our last with stairs. “We can still have front steps,” I yelled. “I’m not ready for a goddamn wheelchair ramp yet.” But he wasn’t home. Who was? My friend from Vermont, my long-distance friend Gary had sent for because she has an almost paranormal ability to understand people’s feelings, and she’s a medical reporter. She eased me to the couch, saying, “He’s out filling one of your prescriptions.”
She kept an eye on me while finishing her daily blog for FiercePharma, then doing her exercises, Brute Yoga. I listened to the clicking of her laptop keyboard. Then I watched her curve into C-shapes, S-shapes. “Gary never believed I might really be sick,” I said. She said, “He’s been terrified. He doesn’t know how to help in the ways you want,” she added, her smiling face upside-down between her legs, “and that’s why I’m here.”
Gary came in with my prescription, also two bouquets of flowers, one for the bedroom, he said, the other for the living room, because my friend from Vermont, the empath who’s a medical reporter, had told him I’d want to move around, a change of scenery.
The doctor had said to take two pain pills, one too many I realized during a phone call with my sister who’d called to say she loved me, her instilled kindness. We agreed that the geographical distance is hard. Yet I’ve never been able to convince my family that it wasn’t mere choice to live far from Spooner, that my career had required most moves. But Gary’s family proved to me that shared geography keeps a shared language intact, a language of hearth, home, meals, chores, family lore. The new language of work had connected me to new people, a network, and I’d moved up, around, sideways, and forward.
I felt dizzy—and maybe it was just me, confused, defensive—as the phone conversation drifted to the idea that I hadn’t tried to stay close, and I said I had, visiting, calling. I’d felt like a ventriloquist, projecting this voice here, that voice there. “All of me tried hard,” I said, standing, woozy, and I must have sounded shrill, because Gary was taking the phone away, saying into it that I was sick, his hearty manner turned up high, helpful.
My dad called Gary, asking how I was, then shouting so loud I heard it: “Praise the Lord.” My dad didn’t have this exclamatory tic when I was little. Lutherans sing it, but he got in the habit of saying it at his all-school reunion, he told Gary, due to an old classmate, Gloria, renamed GloryB now. “Sounds like a fun reunion,” Gary said, still watching baseball. When Gary hung up, I said, “Thank you.” He smiled at me. “No problem.”
My friend went back to Vermont. Fraiser came home from his mother’s.
Marie understood I’d had a surgery, and then forgot. Gary had brought her to my hospital room, straight from her summer internship teaching tumbling, and she’d looked at the tubes, the IVs, and got mad. “Why didn’t you say?” But at home I couldn’t sit all the way up for weeks because an interior seam tore and had to be redone; she got used to me reclined. Gary drove me around with the passenger seat flat. Treetops, light poles, buildings flew by. He helped me out of the car, holding my purse. He’d been right, if too far in the future, losing sight of now, when he’d said that this would