My Unsentimental Education

third marriages, a new branch of psychotherapy has sprung up, devoted to mourning one’s previous mates. Ambiguous Grief. And people will hurry to tell you about a death because they feel swollen with the news, sideswiped, since death will come for them too, and not knowing what to do with this death relief, death sympathy, death freight—”death is weird,” a woman said at the literary festival the night my mother-in-law died—they’ll call.
Joe, half-orphaned, wanted in Indiana, lives in Indiana, retired. He must have paid his child support, or cut a deal, or enough time had passed, I’d thought, when he wrote to me at my university email address—or he’d dictated to his sister, who owned a computer, and her name is Jackie_and_Jim19834—and Joe was friendly, too friendly, via his sister, amanuensis. Like it was yesteryear. I wished him well; I said I was married. He wrote once more to say his sister wouldn’t write for him again after she found out I was married.
My ex-husband #1 has stayed nameless in this book, except for this: I kept his name. I never took Chet’s, saying I’d already earned one graduate degree with the name Monroe. But in fact I like the way it sounds. In Utah and North Carolina, people who didn’t know I hadn’t taken Chet’s name called me Mrs. Crosswater. And it was difficult to explain to even feminists that I’d kept my name, since it wasn’t mine, just a former husband’s, and no I didn’t still want him, just his euphonious name. I’d loved his family too. During a trip to Wisconsin, a trip at Christmastime, when clans gather, one of the brothers of my ex-husband #1 arranged to meet me for dinner in Eau Claire. My former brother-in-law had said, “Mom says hi. Dad says hi. Polly says hi. Jon says hi. Luke says hi. Jenny says hi.” Everyone said hi except my ex-husband #1, who might have, my former brother-in-law explained, except my ex-husband #1’s new wife would have gotten mad.
In terms of the “What I Want to Be When I Grow Up” checklist, my options—Mother, Nurse, Teacher, Secretary, Stewardess, and Other—I could have been Rodney’s casserole-making wife, ex-wife or widow by now. Or forever Queenie. Or a groupie turned aging band wife. Or a girlfriend helping out on movie sets and spending spare time in an adobe dance hall. Or a lady professor waiting for poetic letters. Reader, it’s safe to say that I grew up to be Other, and this was my evolution, not a plan.
One day when both kids had been gone for a week, Fraiser on a vacation with his mother, Marie at camp, I’d told Gary—shouted it, because I was in the tub, floating, inspecting marks on my stomach from incisions, operations that turned out fine—that I’d had a great week, that I loved our kids, our life. Gary stood in the door and said, “I had a great week too.” He added that he hoped we had plenty of time left, that one of us will outlive the other, of course, and then he started in with how we hope for an active life, a swift death, and no painful lingering. I’d said, “Please shut up. It’s important to have a few conversations about end-of-life scenarios. But not over and over.” He’d laughed, agreeing.
Right now, on a winter afternoon, he was watching the Major League Baseball General Managers Meeting coverage in earnest. I picked up “The Family History of the Grosskopfs and the Schades in Fayette County” and read. So-and-so found poisoned in the barn, no one arrested, but people thought it was the wife, who later turned up in a bar in Louisiana. So-and-so known for setting up the region’s first school, from which he embezzled, found floating in a cattle tank. So-and-so raped, or possibly not, because she had a history of lying, but her brothers hunted down the man she’d accused and lit him on fire.
I’d hurtled through someone else’s history. Near miss.
Almost mine.
These people had been dead for years. And yet, I thought, the descendants had descended.
I threw the family history onto the table. “It’s gruesome.”
Gary looked up. “We all have forerunners who were black sheep.”
Yet not so many, not so menacing, I thought. The colorful figure in my family is a grandfather who’d been with a vamp and gambled. My wandering grandmother had schizophrenia. They seem no more unusual than you or me, or someone you or I know who’s had affairs or a mental health diagnosis. Yet the fog of history, the unfamiliarity of the vistas—a fur coat and a roadster, a sod house and a corncrib— make them exotic. My ancestors may have been unevenly educated, badly matched, stuck in the centrifugal whirl of centuries of tradition: women who wait on men. And there were hard stories in Gary’s family too. But no one had murdered or embezzled or perjured or lit someone on fire.
“The Family History of the Grosskopfs and Schades in Fayette County” was scary in reverse, a road I’d started to take, then turned back. I said, “I’m going to throw this in the trash,” realizing that even if I got rid of the paper record I wasn’t getting rid of the history, none of it, none of my irregular past, evidence I’d had a vagrant heart but a sense of direction too, an inclination toward the dark side, but the alchemy of luck had converted it to light. Gary, still watching TV, said, “You mean the recycling.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I dedicate this book to the memory of Kit Ward, who first encouraged me to write it. My best thanks to David Meischen, my hard-core, astute, page-by-page reader. Thank you as well to David McGlynn, Donna Johnson, John Dufresne, Shen Christenson, Scott Blackwood, and John Griswold. Thank you to Kathryn Lang, who taught me so much (”Debra, this is your life!”). Thank you to Summer Wood and Bob Shacochis for help in the dog days of summer. I thank editors of