My Education by Susan Choi

Author:Susan Choi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2013-06-01T16:00:00+00:00

That winter, I destroyed what was left of Casper’s struggling career as a scholar. Grief made me coarse, a perverse predator. I snared Casper as sidekick in part with my lurid confessions of passion, but more with the sheer force that madness exerts on the sane. The raving bereaved have an awful charisma, to which such an amiable soul as Casper—long on compassion, short on self-serving ambition—was destined to be vulnerable. Soon Casper and I were consuming a liter of bourbon a day.

Work began around noon, at a vile pizzeria where we’d meet for a hangover pitcher of beer and cheese slices for Casper. I might gnaw on his discarded crusts for the taste of damp starch, but I rarely could eat. My unwashed jeans hung from my hip bones as if I might shed like a snake. That year’s birthday gift from my mother was a turquoise-and-silver bracelet, sent air mail from the Navajo country, which fell off my skeletal hand and was lost the first evening I wore it.

Down the block from the vile pizzeria was a bar called the Red Rooster Inn in which Dutra, one late night the previous summer, had gravely offended a volatile man in a misunderstanding that seemed to have stemmed from a pile of quarters. Their disagreement rising quickly to threats, Martha and I, who’d been with him, had run with him breathlessly out the back door, collapsing once safety was reached in a gale of laughter. But while Dutra had been smirking and facetious in combat, afterward he’d grown as outraged as his enemy had been, and told Martha and me the Red Rooster would never be graced with his presence again. So far as I knew, he had kept to his vow. Now it was the one downtown bar I would drink in, for my vow was to never see Dutra again—never grace him, as he’d said of the Red Rooster Inn, with my presence. I would not even grant him a place in my thoughts. I had rubberized him: the rare times he entered my mind he went hurtling back out to the most inhospitable reaches of space, and sometimes I drank in the Red Rooster Inn all night long without even recalling the reason it held such a privileged position with me.

From the pizzeria Casper and I strode to the Red Rooster with great purpose, for all the world like two regular people who could only spare limited time from our wonderful lives for a quick game of pool. But no regular people lined up at that bar at that hour of the day, and our pretense would fade with the sun. Night would steal over the slotlike irrelevant windows, unnoticed by us. Perhaps we might leave and come back with hot dogs from the Hobo, for I sometimes could eat while blind drunk, and our bartender, that eminent, fatherly, featureless man who was Eddie or Jackie or Joey or John, who was cozy to me as a

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