My Unsentimental Education

the driveway. I told Rodney I wanted to go to college and we should break up now, as I began Twelfth Grade. He started crying. He put his hands around my neck. I thought his message was that he could choke me if he wanted but he loved me so he wouldn’t. He’d lettered in wrestling—he had a wrestler’s compact body, slow patience too. My mother paced back and forth in the kitchen window. As I spoke, muscles in my neck moved against Rodney’s grip. I said, “I can’t help it. I’m sorry.” His hands tightened. He still didn’t seem violent, just out of options. He let go, then put me in a new hold, my head banging the dashboard as I rolled onto the floor. He landed on me. My mother had begun flicking the porch light on, off. Then she stood in the driveway, rapping on the truck window.
One night, after snow fell, he waited in the truck while I went inside to get the framed high school graduation photo his mother had once kept on the TV but let me take home to put on my nightstand, and the class ring that had thrilled me with its size and unfamiliar date— I’d been in Eighth Grade when he graduated. I opened the door and gave them to him. He threw them into the snow. My mother called me inside. I watched from the kitchen. She stood in the driveway in her bathrobe, shivering, talking to him. He slumped behind the steering wheel. Under the halo of the porch light, my mother dug in snow and found the picture, which she gave him. She looked for his ring but didn’t find it until the next day—guessing where it was by marks in the snow—and we mailed it to him.
He called from work, plugging a receiver into a random outlet. He also called from bars, music clanging and drunken shouts as backdrop. He called from the barn, cattle lowing. He called from the tops of telephone poles. He’d done this once or twice in the past when he’d be working late, thirty feet off the ground, a leather harness wrapped around his hips, boot cleats dug in deep, and say something cheerful, sweet. But he phoned now to say, for instance, he was on County Trunk 71, south of Mueller Road, and go mute, waiting for me to volunteer that the last weeks had been a mistake. After a few minutes of silence, I’d say I had to go. He’d call back. My mother started intercepting calls. I’d hear her, gentle at first, eventually firm: “You need to accept facts and climb down that pole.” We worried. The wind whipped faster up there. The sun had set. The thermometer plunged. He finally came down for good and dated a girl who’d been my sister’s bridesmaid and, as my sister told me, called her my name when he was drunk.
I couldn’t go backward.
I sewed, making clothes from upholstery fabric because fabric at the dime store bored me. I was lonely in high school, having spent my previous spare time carrying deviled eggs to phone company potlucks, or hanging out with Rodney V. Meadow’s mother, once driving eighty miles with her to see a masseuse for her migraines, and we’d sat side by side in portable saunas shaped like washing machines, our heads sticking out. Now I pretended high school was writers camp. But students talked about how they held liquor, not how they shaped paragraphs. I dated a boy who went to community college forty miles away, and he rambled in a way I didn’t understand, either because he was tripping or he’d read Rilke. I made a bong in shop class, and I bought a baggie of pot, which my mother found. She opened the door to the bathroom where I floated in the tub, offended she’d walked in. She shook the baggie’s contents over me like sage over a chicken in broth.
Then my wandering grandmother’s husband had a heart attack in their kitchen, and she ran out the door to tell a neighbor. By the time the neighbor called an ambulance, my grandmother had keeled over, another heart attack. We went to the two-coffin funeral, with the God-fearing and ex-con offspring in the first pew on the left side, and my dad and his two brothers in the first pew on the right. I sat behind my father and uncles, their shoulders heaving, bloated, stuffed with memory. And I understood for the first time that if someone you love dies you have sadness, but if someone you love dies and you have unfinished quarrels—lost chances, love you skipped like a bus that left the station a long time ago—you have sadness, also helplessness and confusion.
The taskmaster grandmother came to celebrate my graduation. My mother bought me a typewriter for a gift. I’d go to college, she said. She also said to remember I was training for a job that would last only until I had children, though later I might work part-time, and it had to be a job that would move as my husband’s job would move.
I’d spent the winter drinking, smoking pot, staying out until dawn. I understood hangover recovery better than most subjects. At my graduation party, there’s a photo of me sitting on my taskmaster grandmother’s lap, though I’m too big for this, and I’m wearing a dress I designed myself, trying to look like a flapper, wearing a brooch Rodney V. Meadow’s mother gave me that belonged to her mother, a hillbilly flapper’s brooch made of paste and tin, something Rodney V. Meadow’s mother would never wear and I was welcome to it, she’d said. So I’m a flapper, except it’s 1976. In the photo, my grandmother—who’d endured a rural flapper, her rival—looks proud. I stare at the cake, queasy.
I’d started dating another farm boy. I’d had sex hundreds of times already. But this was my second lover. “This can’t be your second