My Husband Kept Scheduling Over My Night Classes—Then I Learned Why My Degree Made Him So Uncomfortable

PART 6

By late October, our new routine had become boring enough to trust.

That mattered.

Grand gestures had never been Mark’s language. He was an engineer who showed affection by replacing furnace filters before anyone knew they were dirty. If he said he would pick up milk, the milk appeared. If I told him a chair leg wobbled, the chair stopped wobbling before I had finished being annoyed.

So when he started cooking on Wednesdays and putting family plans on Thursdays when he could, I believed him.

I also noticed what he still avoided.

He never said, “When you graduate.”

He said, “If you keep going.”

He never asked what classes came next.

He asked whether spring registration had opened yet, as though the answer might fortunately be no forever.

I tried not to turn every preposition into evidence.

In November Riverton held an evening reception for adult students. There was bad coffee, tiny sandwiches, and a panel of four graduates who spoke honestly about finishing degrees while caring for parents, working night shifts, managing divorces, and paying tuition in installments.

I expected to go alone.

On Tuesday Mark said, “What time is that thing tomorrow?”

“Six.”

“Can spouses go?”

I looked at him. “Why?”

“Because I’m a spouse.”

“That is technically correct.”

He smiled. “Do you want me there?”

The question was so much better than assumption that I nearly hugged him for grammar.

“Yes.”

He came straight from work in a blue button-down and sat beside me while a woman named Denise talked about finishing her degree at fifty-seven. She said the hardest part had not been statistics. It had been letting people be disappointed when she stopped being available for every emergency.

I felt Mark shift beside me.

I did not look at him.

Afterward we stood near a display of degree plans while I introduced him to Nina.

“So you’re Pot Roast,” Nina said.

Mark looked at me.

“I have made choices,” I said.

He laughed and shook her hand.

In the car he said, “She’s funny.”

“She thinks you’re a casserole-based oppressor.”

“Excellent.”

We drove a mile in comfortable silence.

Then he said, “I didn’t realize how many people here are our age.”

“Our age?”

“You know what I mean.”

I turned toward him.

He caught himself and laughed.

“I know. I know. Say the sentence.”

“Fine. I pictured college as twenty-year-olds sitting on lawns.”

“Some of them sit on floors now. Lawns are expensive.”

He smiled.

“I guess I thought you were going back to something old.”

The streetlights moved across his face.

“And?” I asked.

“It looked like something new.”

I let that sentence stay exactly where he put it.

Thanksgiving came. I finished a long paper on a Sunday morning while Mark and Hannah argued in the kitchen about whether sweet potatoes needed marshmallows. I turned in my assignment at eleven fifty-eight and came downstairs to discover they had produced a dish with the structural integrity of a mattress.

“You’re both banned,” I told them.

Mark kissed my forehead.

“How’d it go?”

“I no longer know what a sentence is.”

“Good paper, then.”

At dinner, Elaine asked what I was taking next semester.

Before I could answer, Mark said, “She has to meet with the adviser again.”

I looked at him.

He was carving turkey.

“I already did,” I said.

His knife stopped for half a second.

“I’m taking Applied Writing and a seminar on organizations.”

Elaine smiled. “Good for you.”

Scott said, “Look at you, college girl.”

I made a face.

Hannah raised her glass. “College woman.”

“That’s worse.”

Everyone laughed except Mark, though he smiled eventually.

Later, while we stacked dishes, he said, “I thought we were going to talk about spring before you committed.”

“I have not registered yet.”

“You told everybody what you’re taking.”

“Those are the classes I need.”

“That sounds committed.”

“What did you want me to say?”

“That we were figuring it out.”

“We are figuring out scheduling. I’m not figuring out whether I’m continuing.”

He rinsed a plate too long.

“Julie, there are other things we might want to do.”

“Name one.”

He looked at me.

“Not a theoretical Arizona,” I said. “Something actual.”

“We haven’t planned because we don’t know your schedule.”

“The spring schedule is posted.”

“Exactly.”

I dried my hands.

“Mark, you keep talking as though my classes are what happens after life has been scheduled. They are one of the things we schedule around.”

He put the plate in the rack.

“I’m trying.”

“I know.”

“Then why does it feel like I’m failing a test I didn’t know we were taking?”

The words were sharper than the conversation had been.

I stared at him.

A test.

Something in his expression made me think of the photo in Hannah’s apartment—Mark in the graduation gown, me holding our daughter, both of us smiling so hard our faces looked cramped.

“I’m not testing you,” I said.

He nodded but did not look convinced.

For the first time, I wondered whether school was making him defend something older than his Wednesday nights.