My Unsentimental Education

be a rehearsal for the end.
One day, I lay on the couch thinking that life is a race, a skirmish. You try to be like everyone, but not exactly, because you’re supposed to rise above the fray, the fray a cluster of kinship, and strangers too, some of whom become kin, akin, and then the fray unravels.
School began again—for Fraiser, for Marie. I was on medical leave. Fraiser came in and started his homework. Gary was unpacking groceries. Marie arrived full of news about algebra, other students, teachers, history, a dance, boys, and she was standing a few steps up the staircase, and I was lying down, and I thought it was good she didn’t know how confusing it will be to secure her place in the world. None of us knows because being young is oblivion, nirvana, that hard-wired impulse to suppress some if not most of our parents’ warnings and directives. But I wouldn’t change the unsystematic approach by which I got to here, I thought. Here is right. Marie said, “You’re not sad or anything?”
“Not sad,” I said.
She said, “Good. Because I have to tell you. I need new shoes again.” I must have looked exasperated. She said, “I can’t help it. The ones I just got—they’re already all wrong.”

I break with tradition then, using weddings as a means to my end, not The End, ending instead with two funerals and a complicated hysterectomy. But I’m not morbid. I don’t think about my body—guts, bones, protoplasm, a container of fear and desire—as something to monitor for signs of decline, not yet. One Sunday I was thinking how well fed I’d felt after I’d returned from brunch with new friends, all of us married, three of us mothers, all of us writers, and the conversation had flown between recipes, books, work, shopping, and then I hurried home, where I was making a pot roast while preparing to teach the next day. I was still dressed up, including lipstick, red: mimicking the state of receptivity in female mammals known as estrus, from the Latin word for frenzy, gadfly, sting.
Marie was asking about a sleepover. Fraiser wanted to know when we’d eat. I was completing two tasks at once while answering questions, which makes me impatient, and then Gary walked in my study and asked for help finding the car title for the car I’d driven until lately, a car Fraiser would drive now. I said, “Find the one file folder with my handwriting on it.” I’d marked a file BIRTH, MARRIAGES, DIVORCES but kept all my legal documents in it. Gary, on the other hand, has chronologically arranged years of careful record-keeping: policies, statements, taxes. He organizes and reorganizes closets, cupboards, the refrigerator. He’s devised a system in the laundry room for our recyclable trash.
When I’d moved to Austin, I’d separated essential documents from the merely memorable, emptying a stack of drawers that serves as a center column for a table, drop leaf on both sides, that had been my mother’s sewing table. She’d slid out leaves for a surface on which to cut fabric, and she’d stowed thread, patterns, pins—”notions”—in its drawers. When my parents divvied up furniture, I’d taken this table with its shape-changing properties (both leaves up, both down, left or right up or down) for various places I’d live. I’d filled the drawers with papers, receipts, letters, diplomas. When I moved, I’d kept vital records—proof that I existed, that I’d married and divorced, proof that Marie existed—in one folder. When I packed, I slid it in a box. When I unpacked, I put it in Gary’s filing cabinet. The sewing table was in Fraiser’s room now, one leaf up, a desk.
When Gary and I had applied for our license to marry, I’d opened this BIRTH, MARRIAGES, DIVORCES file folder and quickly found my birth certificate and second divorce decree. Afterward, I put them back inside. Our own Rites of Marriage certificate was so beautiful, with scrolling letters and a gold seal—the same design the courthouse had used for a hundred years, the woman had said when Gary and I picked it up—that I’d put it in an antique frame and hung it on the wall. So the last time I’d looked inside the BIRTH, MARRIAGES, DIVORCES file slowly was years earlier, when my second ex-husband, Chet, had called because he was marrying a woman who wasn’t a U.S. citizen, and she couldn’t get immigration status until he proved he was divorced. He didn’t know when or where I’d filed. Did I have a case number? His mother had said: “Find Debra. She was good with paperwork.”
In this same phone call, Chet had said his mother and her imperious, unpleasant husband, my father-in-law #2, had divorced. Chet recounted a story so odd it sounded untrue. Chet’s mother told him she’d found her husband in his office, having sex with a man while she’d been next door, typing. Chet sounded baffled, uncertain, yet he was sure of the next part. The crazy grandma had died and left everyone, including Chet, land. The crazy grandma left her money to Chet’s mother, a considerable sum that should have been used to finish converting the hunting camp to a house, but Chet’s stepfather had craved world travel and spent the money. My mother-in-law #2 was old, twice-divorced, and broke.
A sad story unconnected to me, I thought.
Because now I was married to Gary, who was standing in my study, saying, “I know you can picture this file folder, but I can’t. Please stop working and help me find it.”
I opened the file cabinet, found the file folder, located the car title, and gave it to Gary. Then I noticed a sheaf of legal-sized papers, like a deed or decree, folded, typed, not word-processed. I unfolded it. “The Family History of the Grosskopfs and the Schades in Fayette County.” First, at the top, a diagram. “Great-Grandfather, Patrilineal + Great-Grandmother, Patrilineal, Grosskopf” and “Great-Grandfather, Matrilineal + Great-Grandmother, Matrilineal, Schade.” Then