The job would be easy. That’s what everyone said. You’d go to a gray one-story building, sit in a cubicle where everything would be brown or gray or beige. You’d read student essays and give each one a score. A scale, one to six. You’d put in nine hours, which included a half hour for lunch and two fifteen-minute breaks, then you’d be done. Easy.

The first batch of essays was from eighth-grade students answering the question, “What would you do if you were president for the day?” Go shopping, they wrote. Eat candy. Fire all the teachers. Shoot the principal in his fucking head.

In the second batch, students were given a photograph of the Eiffel Tower and asked what they would do if they woke up underneath the tower. One said she’d climb to the top of the Iffle Tower in Rome and discover a magnificent worm’s eye view. Another said he’d wake up under the Awful Tower in Seattle and decide to climb the tower, then fall to the ground. But before he hit the ground, he would wake and realize it was all just a pigment of his imagination.

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One to six, we scored each one, six being the highest, the highest being the cleanest, the clearest. That’s all we had to do. Just read them and score them and do both fast.

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I lived in a town where everyone had more than one degree. Even taxicab drivers had PhDs. An education meant nothing here. Everyone was hustling to cover the rent, and the testing center paid decently. There were even stories of people who’d gotten full-time jobs out of this, not right away, but eventually.

There was a doctoral student in music in my group. A Hungarian painter. Three poets. A young woman who was small and wore giant glasses. I thought she couldn’t be more than nineteen.

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In the second week, I asked one of the poets what he thought of the job. “It’s a job,” he said. Then he told me he’d done this before, that he understood how it worked: you give top scores to the most boring essays, the ones with nothing wrong with them; do not respond, if you can help it, he advised, to anything a student might do creatively.

It was like working in a factory, making shirts where your job was just to sew on right sleeves. Don’t get fancy. Do it like the person sitting next to you and the person sitting next to him. You don’t want your right sleeve to stand out. If your rankings were too high or too low, you’d be singled out, asked to go to the manager’s office for advice on how to better to fit yourself within the larger group. The way to keep the job, to stay in alignment with everyone else, was to give low scores to the creative, high scores to the correct, to keep the two separate, to value order and cleanliness. Flourish, poetry — these were deemed by the higher ups as things to avoid.

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That summer and for years after I was in love with a married man. He drove a yellow truck and knew how to fix a kitchen sink. First we were friends, then nothing, then something else.

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By the third week the Hungarian painter got angry and quit. We never saw him again. By the end of the fourth week the doctoral student was asked to gather his belongings and go to the manager’s office. We never saw him again, either. By the end of the fifth week, the young woman in owl glasses gave me one of the pages from her notebook. “It will be worth something one day,” she said.

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Each day when our hours were up, we left the cramped cubicles in an orderly file then scattered like cats, the sky above us pink and rust, a watercolor at dusk.

When summer ended, the job at the testing center ended too. I got adjunct work at the university teaching at night. The students were older, eager to learn. One wrote about going to Nashville to write songs. Another wrote about traveling to Asia and coming home, spending the next ten years sick. One wrote about working in a restaurant, what it felt like to hold a knife every night. Another wrote about meeting older men in restrooms all over Iowa for sex.

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Years went by like this. Six winters. Six summers.

People came and went. Every year, the town turned over.

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I went for months without seeing the married man, then saw him every week for six months straight, meeting at George’s late at night, where we drank beer and he told me he loved me and he loved his wife.

Once I saw him with his wife. She still looked pregnant. He carried their young daughter on his shoulders. She carried their newborn in a sling.

Once I saw her at Hy-Vee. She had both kids in a shopping cart. She’d lost all the baby weight. She looked pretty, dark hair against the white of the milk aisle, a small bird against a snow-filled sky.

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When I think of Iowa I think of fragments, poets, Charles Wright. All of us, more or less, are unfaithful to something. Cubicles. A tower. Fluorescent lights. I won’t never forget it. I woke up and forgot it and then I remembered it was all a dream.

There were stories in a classroom late at night, the woman who wrote about a prom dress, painting her daughter’s nails a pale lavender, preparations for a burial.

There was color, what stood out against the muted brown hills, cornfields the color of ale, worn cushions of orange velvet.

I think of winters when it seemed like color would never return, the married man, a pigment of my imagination. As all of them were. As all of them are.