My Unsentimental Education

the pyramid of descendants. Then the narrative. Fayette County is Gary’s family’s county. I said, “This must have fallen out of one of your files and got stuck in mine. Or it belongs with your parents’ papers.”
Gary glanced at it. “I’ve never heard of these people.”
I said, “I’m not from Fayette County. It can’t be mine.” I checked the pot roast and went back to my study. When I came out, I heard Marie in her room listening to hip-hop, slightly louder than Fraiser listening to alt-rock. I went to the TV room, next to the laundry room. Gary was doing laundry. The dryer hummed companionably, and Gary had on the TV, an ESPN show about baseball managers preparing for spring, old players, new players, prospects. He was still reading “The Family History of the Grosskopfs and the Schades in Fayette County.” He said, “What a vile cross-section of humanity.” Then, “It amazes me that anyone would record this.” Then, “Debra, these are your old in-laws.”
The name Grosskopf suddenly clicked. Chet’s crazy grandma’s last name, his mother’s maiden name. Schade would be the crazy grandma’s maiden name. I don’t have a bad memory, but it’s idiosyncratic. I recalled standing in the dining room in Salt Lake City, talking on Chet’s new phone, high-tech at the time, and his mother saying she’d researched her family, written up the results, and she’d mail us a copy. I’d never read “The Family History of the Grosskopfs and the Schades in Fayette County,” but I’m good with paperwork, as she’d said, so I’d put Chet’s family history in my mother’s sewing table and moved to North Carolina, then Texas. Who knows when I’d stuffed it into my BIRTH, MARRIAGES, DIVORCES file? “The Family History of the Grosskopfs and the Schades in Fayette County” had rubbed against my vital papers, my daughter’s, and now Gary’s.
I went back to my study and used the Internet to search Chet’s mother’s name. She was working for Chet on a plot of land down that driveway I’d passed coming home from Gary’s Aunt Alvina’s funeral. Chet owned a vineyard now, apparently. Reading the vineyard website, the “About Us” section, I recognized Chet’s pet phrases: “deal-flow,” “as per client specifications.” He employed ninety people. Annual profits over a million dollars. I exited the website. Then I felt sure I’d misread. I retyped the name of the vineyard, and a social-media-for-companies website came up. Someone had posted a different description. The vineyard employed three people: Chet, his wife, his mother. The profits were a fraction of a fraction of a million. Then I felt tawdry, cyberstalking, and quit.
I went back to the TV room, where “The Family History of the Grosskopfs and the Schades in Fayette County” lay on the table, and I thought how family trees begin with two people who marry, inaugurating a lineage. When we mate, we end up with who we end up because of location and practical math—one nearby single and one nearby single become a pair—also hormonal surges that are part of love but aren’t love. “I fell in lust all over again,” an old friend from graduate school, living in Ohio, once said by phone. The reasons for this or that marriage, for this and that begetting, for anybody’s family history—which brings tears to the eye, creates genealogy junkies, and compels people to join the Daughters of the American Revolution—is happenstance. Yet we turn out like our ancestors, biologically and biographically programmed, imitators by nature and by nurture.
I’d been connected to two ex-husbands, two family lines that might have stayed connected to mine. I’d pledged myself to a few other men, other potential family lines that might, in time, have attached to me. I sometimes wake in the middle of the night next to Gary, light peeping around the edge of curtains, and I see the outlines of our room, furnishings, bits and pieces, some new, most old, and I’ve been dreaming about one of my ex-husbands or ex-boyfriends, a long-gone, displaced former someone, and in the dream the man is the age he was when I knew him, but I’m who I am now, and I don’t know what to say to him, younger, so green, ready to master life with skills he has available.
As I sat in the TV room that Sunday, pot roast bubbling on the stove in the kitchen, the sun outside the windows starting to sink, I thought about these dreams, exes as mental excess, my end credits rolling. I met Rodney V. Meadow at a fair. In dreams, he leans in, a crooked smile. He died of a heart attack, survived by his mother and sister. My father had called to tell me. The obituary mentioned a dog as survivor too, my dad had said, puzzled. It was the second time someone called to tell me someone I’d known, known, was dead, that a body I’d held had transmuted to another state. James Stillman is dead too, but in dreams he frowns, putting cocaine on a mirror, or restringing an electric guitar.
In one dream, I sit with him in the dining room, and he’s in his twenties, still hoping we’ll get back together. He’s staying with us because he wants to return to college and needs help with the application, his statement of purpose. I’m line-editing while advising him to start with a lofty sense of resolve and end with practical facts. In the dream, Gary summons me to speak privately in another room. Gary says, “He’s had a hard life and needs a hand up. I don’t begrudge that. So help him with this application. But he can’t stay here, not with the kids—it’s too disruptive.” I nod, because our kids, closer to James’s age, matter most. In the dining room I tell James that when we finish this statement of purpose he has to go. Next he’s gone, forever unfinished.
In this era of late marriages to someone who has a past, this era of second and