My Unsentimental Education

incomplete, partial as in biased.” He said I should go to a summer camp with students from all over the state, students between their junior and senior years, at a small college in Eau Claire, eighty miles south. For two weeks, I’d stay in a dorm and take writing classes. I did the math. I was a misfit at Spooner High. I’d be a misfit times fifty. I said no.
He rolled his eyes and didn’t bring it up again.
Months later, false spring again, and I was walking to my after-school job, stepping through slush, wearing a pastel dress with my winter coat flapping open. A southern breeze stirred branches flecked with buds doomed to freeze before they’d sprout again. Anomie, acedia—sins I’d studied in Lutheran catechism, two hours on Tuesday night. My desire exceeded my portion again. I couldn’t face belabored spring, fickle summer, flashy autumn, immense winter, seasons moving and standing still. I fastened onto a word I’d read but didn’t know how to pronounce. Ennui. Suddenly I started running, twisting my ankles in my sandals with plastic fruits on the straps. I arrived at work early and phoned the school. The teacher was already gone. I tried his house, no answer. His wife ran the register at Rexall Drug, so I went across the street and told her I wanted to go to writers camp, and I jotted this down, and she said don’t bother, she’d tell him.
That July, when I arrived at writers camp, my fears returned.
Then I faked that I felt at ease, and I did.
Some of the writers looked like heads. Some looked like cheerleaders and jocks. The cheerleaderish girls whispered that two girls looked like sluts, but I could tell the slutty-looking girls were just shy, from the same small town, and painted each other’s eyeliner on too thick. I was nice to the eyeliner girls, to the cheerleader girls, and to a girl who looked like Carole King and quoted the Tao Te Ching. I also made friends with a boy named Michael who signed his essays and poems Mikal. My Favorite Subject was every class. My Hobbies and Activities were reading the assignments and staying up late to discuss them. As days flicked by, a boy from Fond du Lac stared across crowded rooms. His name was Chuck. He was my age but five inches taller than Rodney, I noted, disloyal.
I’d read Chuck’s poems in class. They weren’t interesting, but I felt that Chuck—dark and brooding—might be. We hadn’t talked yet because Mikal stopped me after class, standing in front of me, his arm on the wall, challenging my opinions, combative flirting.
An alternate future opened up. Either Chuck or Mikal, I realized.
Mikal talked all the time. Chuck was silent. If the strong, silent lover found in books caused me to believe in a strong, silent lover sitting near me in a classroom, or if the fantasy of the strong, silent lover sitting near women everywhere causes his double to recur in art, is a chicken-or-egg question. Yet women fill silence well. They customize it. “Every night I give my body to my husband like a chalice,” a woman wrote in a letter to Ann Landers I’d read in the newspaper, my interest piqued. As long as Chuck didn’t talk, he was a void into which I poured thoughts so profound he apparently found them inexpressible.
The night before the last day, Chuck and I sat on a bench, hands touching. You shouldn’t have sex before marriage, I knew, but I’d long ago arrived at this variance: it was okay if you did with the man you’d marry because you’d die having had sex with just him. So I’d reasoned until Chuck from Fond du Lac wanted to kiss me. I stopped him as Jane Eyre stopped her wedding. Except I’m candid. Some people appreciate this. Some don’t. And you never know which kind of person you’re talking to until after you’ve divulged. Instead of saying I was practically betrothed, hence unavailable, I said I wasn’t a virgin.
He didn’t speak. I’d planned to marry soon, I added.
I considered telling him I was on The Pill, because I wanted him to understand my life—that I’d been caught in the local pattern and I found the safest way forward, but if I’d lived somewhere else I’d be someone else and still could. Then he’d tell me he’d never met anyone so stalwart, so perfect, and we’d reunite at college in eighteen months. But he looked afraid and hurried off into the gloaming and avoided eye contact the next day.
That night, my parents arrived to take me home. They’d been confused by the whole episode, that I’d wanted to go, that I’d won a prize. They were used to prizes for best jam, best sales record for radial tires in the tristate area, best football playing—not best use of figurative language. We drove under interstate overpasses that seemed like cattle gates, one after another hanging over me as I passed through the chute toward home.
Rodney V. Meadow took me to supper clubs I used to like, to the farmhouse where I’d helped his mother make casseroles. I couldn’t focus. I had trouble kissing him. He lost his temper and called me Miss Poem. One evening he was waiting for me to come downstairs for our date. It was early fall because my family, minus my sister, who’d gotten married, had moved back to town. My mother sat with Rodney on the side porch covered by trellises that made the room seem mysterious and stately. But my parents wanted a modern house, so they’d installed orange indoor-outdoor carpet and bought avocado green slipcovers for the furniture. When I got downstairs, I could tell my mother was in deep conversation with Rodney. She said, “We would have liked for you to marry her. But you gamble when you date someone so young. She’s a girl, still deciding.”
That night, after dinner, he drove back to my house and parked in