PRAISE FOR DEBRA MONROE
“Fine and funky, marbled with warmth and romantic confusion, but not a hint of sentimentality.”
—Boston Globe
“Rangy, thoughtful, ambitious, and widely, wildly knowledgeable.”
—Washington Post
“Her characters, like her prose, have hard edges. They also have big hearts, dark humor, and purely unique ways of opening themselves up for our inspection. This book makes you want to take the author out for a drink and tell her your troubles.”
—ANTONYA NELSON
“If this book were a country song, Lucinda Williams would sing it.”
—Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Prose that shimmers like a jazz solo.”
—JONIS AGEE
“Her intelligence tilts the world and offers her every encounter an almost hysterical spin. In a [book] laden with trenchant notes on our new world, Debra Monroe offers us a lively quest— a woman caught between the romantic and the semantic evaluates all the fangled possibilities for human connection.”
—RON CARLSON
“Intelligent . . . deliciously wacky.”
—Publishers Weekly
My Unsentimental Education
John Griswold, series editor
SERIES ADVISORY BOARD
Dan Gunn
Pam Houston
Phillip Lopate
Dinty W. Moore
Lia Purpura
Patricia Smith
Ned Stuckey-French
Also by Debra Monroe
FICTION
The Source of Trouble
A Wild, Cold State
Newfangled
Shambles
NONFICTION
On the Outskirts of Normal
My Unsentimental Education
Debra Monroe
© 2015 by the University of Georgia Press
Athens, Georgia 30602
www.ugapress.org
All rights reserved
Designed by Kaelin Chappell Broaddus
Set in by 11/14 Filosofia Regular
Printed and bound by Thomson-Shore, Inc.
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.
Most University of Georgia Press titles are available from popular e-book vendors.
Printed in the United States of America
19 18 17 16 15 c 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Monroe, Debra.
My unsentimental education / Debra Monroe.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-8203-4874-2 (hardcover : alkaline paper) —ISBN 978-0-8203-4873-5 (ebook)
1. Monroe, Debra. 2. Authors, American—20th century—Biography. 3. Women authors, American—20th century—Biography. 4. Working class women—United States—Biography. 5. Single mothers—United States— Biography. 6. Monroe, Debra—Relations with men. 7. Man-woman relationships—United States. 8. Sex role—United States. 9. Working class families—Wisconsin—Spooner. 10. Spooner (Wis.)—Biography. I. Title.
PS3563.O5273Z46 2015
813’.54—dc23
[B]
2015005541
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too.
—ANNIE DILLARD
CONTENTS
Prologue
History and Practical Math
Regional Trades
On the Down-Low
Drinks Are on the House
Intermission
In the Event of an Apocalypse
Serfs and Landlords
Depredating Deer
A Dress Rehearsal
Epilogue
My Unsentimental Education
Near the turn of the century, the recent turn, fragrant jasmine wafted and crowds of students milled. I sat on a bench near a bronzed statue of a young Lyndon B. Johnson carrying textbooks, his necktie flapping rigid as he strides toward his future. He’s the university’s most famous graduate, also known to have said, perhaps apocryphally: “If it wasn’t for public education I’d still be looking at the ass end of a mule.” If it weren’t for public education, I thought, I’d be a small-town waitress, divorced with grown children by now, haughty with boredom. But I was forty-something, a professor with a baby daughter, and Miranda, a student I was about to teach, sat down next to me and told me that the new day, the new season, springtime, inspired her. Apropos of not much else, she said, “I’m glad to have such a modern role model. And I always admire your shoes too.” I glanced at her sideways.
I didn’t feel like a modern role model.
The faces of previous students—Jennifer, Alyssa, Melissa, Kim, Samantha, Anne, Whitney—reeled past. They’d initiated parallel conversations. In my office, with books and papers stacked askew. Or, if spring had arrived, outside, like this—sap rising, dull roots stirring (lilacs, desire), students passing in pairs. In one version, the conversation implied I’d made an appealing life blueprint and followed through. In another version, I’d sacrificed womanly longing for Great Literature. Neither account is true, Gentle Reader. But I never said so. Pretending life has progressed according to plan is part of anyone’s job. And once, when I was just two years older than a student named Lucy—I still remember her anxious, square-jawed face, how she’d sublimated all her worries into a master’s thesis about Victorian heroines too bluestocking to marry—I’d even pretended at home.
Lucy’s parents didn’t trust her judgment, she’d explained, so they’d asked to meet me. I wasn’t the first woman in what used to be a mostly male profession; I was part of that first mass wave of women entering it. Some of us used to correct our well-meaning elder colleagues who called us my dear and praised our hairdos, not our work. I didn’t, though, having clocked in for years at jobs where correcting your superior got you fired.
Lucy’s parents stopped by my house, which Lucy’s mother reflexively praised—a rental house filled with eccentric used furniture. Lucy’s father shook my hand. “Ah then,” he said, “you’ve answered my question already. You’re wearing a wedding ring.” I nodded. At the time, I was at the tail-end of a grim starter marriage: my second. My husband would have been at work. Or so he’d say. Sometimes he was. Planning how to extricate myself, how to divorce with the least fallout, was currently taking up more mental room than the book I needed to write to keep my brand-new good job. But I didn’t volunteer that to Lucy’s parents. Publish or perish, I thought, pouring iced tea into tall glasses.
You publish and die anyway, hopefully later.
“Married and a lady professor too,” Lucy’s father said, smiling.
I smiled back. This was just one version of myself: temporary.
I’d already been so many.
I moved away and got divorced. And now Miranda, who’d grown up ten years later than Lucy, ten more years of seeing women in white-collar jobs, sat beside me. Her aunt had a career, she said. “And she always has an exciting new boyfriend too,” she added.
This aunt must live in a city, I thought. Or this was the public account of her private life. Or I was projecting. I wanted a man who’d match my old self, my
