Educated (22 page)

Dad paid me the day before I returned to BYU. He didn’t have the money to give what he’d promised, but it was enough to cover the half tuition I owed. I spent my last day in Idaho with Charles. It was a Sunday, but I didn’t go to church. I’d had an earache for two days, and during the night it had changed from a dull twinge to a constant sharp stab. I had a fever. My vision was distorted, sensitive to light. That’s when Charles called. Did I want to come to his house? I said I couldn’t see well enough to drive. He picked me up fifteen minutes later.

I cupped my ear and slouched in the passenger seat, then took off my jacket and put it over my head to block the light. Charles asked what medicine I’d taken.

“Lobelia,” I said. “And skullcap.”

“I don’t think they’re working,” he said.

“They will. They take a few days.”

He raised his eyebrows but said nothing.

Charles’s house was neat and spacious, with large, bright windows and shiny floors. It reminded me of Grandma-over-in-town’s house. I sat on a stool, my head pressed against the cold counter. I heard the
creak
of a cabinet opening and the
pop
of a plastic lid. When I opened my eyes, two red pills were on the counter in front of me.

“This is what people take for pain,” Charles said.

“Not us.”

“Who is this
us
?” Charles said. “You’re leaving tomorrow. You’re not one of them anymore.”

I closed my eyes, hoping he would drop it.

“What do you think will happen if you take the pills?” he said.

I didn’t answer. I didn’t know what would happen. Mother always said that medical drugs are a special kind of poison, one that never leaves your body but rots you slowly from the inside for the rest of your life. She told me if I took a drug now, even if I didn’t have children for a decade, they would be deformed.

“People take drugs for pain,” he said. “It’s
normal
.”

I must have winced at the word “normal,” because he went quiet. He filled a glass of water and set it in front of me, then gently pushed the pills forward until they touched my arm. I picked one up. I’d never seen a pill up close before. It was smaller than I’d expected.

I swallowed it, then the other.

For as long as I could remember, whenever I was in pain, whether from a cut or a toothache, Mother would make a tincture of lobelia and skullcap. It had never lessened the pain, not one degree. Because of this, I had come to respect pain, even revere it, as necessary and untouchable.

Twenty minutes after I swallowed the red pills, the earache was gone. I couldn’t comprehend its absence. I spent the afternoon swinging my head from left to right, trying to jog the pain loose again. I thought if I could shout loudly enough, or move quickly enough, perhaps the earache would return and I would know the medicine had been a sham after all.

Charles watched in silence but he must have found my behavior absurd, especially when I began to pull on my ear, which still ached dully, so I could test the limits of this strange witchcraft.

—

MOTHER WAS SUPPOSED TO drive me to BYU the next morning, but during the night, she was called to deliver a baby. There was a car sitting in the driveway—a Kia Sephia Dad had bought from Tony a few weeks before. The keys were in the ignition. I loaded my stuff into it and drove it to Utah, figuring the car would just about make up for the money Dad owed me. I guess he figured that, too, because he never said a word about it.

I moved into an apartment half a mile from the university. I had new roommates. Robin was tall and athletic, and the first time I saw her she was wearing running shorts that were much too short, but I didn’t gape at her. When I met Jenni she was drinking a Diet Coke. I didn’t stare at that, either, because I’d seen Charles drink dozens of them.

Robin was the oldest, and for some reason she was sympathetic to me. Somehow she understood that my missteps came from ignorance, not intention, and she corrected me gently but frankly. She told me exactly what I would need to do, or not do, to get along with the other girls in the apartment. No keeping rotten food in the cupboards or leaving rancid dishes in the sink.

Robin explained this at an apartment meeting. When she’d finished another roommate, Megan, cleared her throat.

“I’d like to remind everyone to wash their hands after they use the bathroom,” she said. “And not just with water, but with soap.”

Robin rolled her eyes. “I’m sure
everyone
here washes their hands.”

That night, after I left the bathroom, I stopped at the sink in the hall and washed my hands. With soap.

The next day was the first day of class. Charles had designed my course schedule. He’d signed me up for two music classes and a course on religion, all of which he said would be easy for me. Then he’d enrolled me in two more challenging courses—college algebra, which terrified me, and biology, which didn’t but only because I didn’t know what it was.

Algebra threatened to put an end to my scholarship. The professor spent every lecture muttering inaudibly as he paced in front of the chalkboard. I wasn’t the only one who was lost, but I was more lost than anyone else. Charles tried to help, but he was starting his senior year of high school and had his own schoolwork. In October I took the midterm and failed it.

I stopped sleeping. I stayed up late, twisting my hair into knots as I tried to wrest meaning from the textbook, then lying in bed and brooding over my notes. I developed stomach ulcers. Once, Jenni found me curled up on a stranger’s lawn, halfway between campus and our apartment. My stomach was on fire; I was shaking with the pain, but I wouldn’t let her take me to a hospital. She sat with me for half an hour, then walked me home.

The pain in my stomach intensified, burning through the night, making it impossible to sleep. I needed money for rent, so I got a job as a janitor for the engineering building. My shift began every morning at four. Between the ulcers and the janitorial work, I barely slept. Jenni and Robin kept saying I should see a doctor but I didn’t. I told them I was going home for Thanksgiving and that my mother would cure me. They exchanged nervous glances but didn’t say anything.

Charles said my behavior was self-destructive, that I had an almost pathological inability to ask for help. He told me this on the phone, and he said it so quietly it was almost a whisper.

I told him he was crazy.

“Then go talk to your algebra professor,” he said. “You’re failing. Ask for help.”

It had never occurred to me to talk to a professor—I didn’t realize we were
allowed
to talk to them—so I decided to try, if only to prove to Charles I could do it.

I knocked on his office door a few days before Thanksgiving. He looked smaller in his office than he did in the lecture hall, and more shiny: the light above his desk reflected off his head and glasses. He was shuffling through the papers on his desk, and he didn’t look up when I sat down. “If I fail this class,” I said, “I’ll lose my scholarship.” I didn’t explain that without a scholarship, I couldn’t come back.

“I’m sorry,” he said, barely looking at me. “But this is a tough school. It might be better if you come back when you’re older. Or transfer.”

I didn’t know what he meant by “transfer,” so I said nothing. I stood to go, and for some reason this softened him. “Truthfully,” he said, “a lot of people are failing.” He sat back in his chair. “How about this: the final covers all the material from the semester. I’ll announce in class that anyone who gets a perfect score on the final—not a ninety-eight but an actual one hundred—will get an A, no matter how they performed on the midterm. Sound good?”

I said it did. It was a long shot, but I was the queen of long shots. I called Charles. I told him I was coming to Idaho for Thanksgiving and I needed an algebra tutor. He said he would meet me at Buck’s Peak.

When I arrived at the peak, Mother was making the Thanksgiving meal. The large oak table was covered with jars of tincture and vials of essential oil, which I cleared away. Charles was coming for dinner.

Shawn was in a mood. He sat on a bench at the table, watching me gather the bottles and hide them. I’d washed Mother’s china, which had never been used, and I began laying it out, eyeing the distance between each plate and knife.

Shawn resented my making a fuss. “It’s just Charles,” he said. “His standards aren’t that high. He’s with you, after all.”

I fetched glasses. When I put one in front of him, Shawn jabbed a finger into my ribs, digging hard. “Don’t touch me!” I shrieked. Then the room turned upside down. My feet were knocked out from under me and I was swept into the living room, just out of Mother’s sight.

Shawn turned me onto my back and sat on my stomach, pinning my arms at my sides with his knees. The shock of his weight forced the breath from my chest. He pressed his forearm into my windpipe. I sputtered, trying to gulp enough air to shout, but the airway was blocked.

“When you act like a child, you force me to treat you like one.”

Shawn said this loudly, he almost shouted it. He was saying it
to
me, but he was not saying it
for
me. He was saying it for Mother, to define the moment: I was a misbehaving child; he was setting the child right. The pressure on my windpipe eased and I felt a delicious fullness in my lungs. He knew I would not call out.

“Knock it off,” Mother hollered from the kitchen, though I wasn’t sure whether she meant Shawn or me.

“Yelling is rude,” Shawn said, again speaking to the kitchen. “You’ll stay down until you apologize.” I said I was sorry for yelling at him. A moment later I was standing.

I folded napkins from paper towels and put one at each setting. When I placed one at Shawn’s plate, he again jabbed his finger into my ribs. I said nothing.

Charles arrived early—Dad hadn’t even come in from the junkyard yet—and sat at the table across from Shawn, who glared at him, never blinking. I didn’t want to leave them alone together, but Mother needed help with the cooking, so I returned to the stove but devised small errands to bring me back to the table. On one of those trips I heard Shawn telling Charles about his guns, and on another, about all the ways he could kill a man. I laughed loudly at both, hoping Charles would think they were jokes. The third time I returned to the table, Shawn pulled me onto his lap. I laughed at that, too.

The charade couldn’t last, not even until supper. I passed Shawn carrying a large china plate of dinner rolls, and he stabbed my gut so hard it knocked the wind out of me. I dropped the plate. It shattered.

“Why did you do that?” I shouted.

It happened so quickly, I don’t know how he got me to the floor, but again I was on my back and he was on top of me. He demanded that I apologize for breaking the plate. I whispered the apology, quietly, so Charles wouldn’t hear, but this enraged Shawn. He grabbed a fistful of my hair, again near the scalp, for leverage, and yanked me upright, then dragged me toward the bathroom. The movement was so abrupt, Charles had no time to react. The last thing I saw as my head hurled down the hall was Charles leaping to his feet, eyes wide, face pale.

My wrist was folded, my arm twisted behind my back. My head was shoved into the toilet so that my nose hovered above the water. Shawn was yelling something but I didn’t hear what. I was listening for the sound of footsteps in the hall, and when I heard them I became deranged. Charles could not see me like this. He could not know that for all my pretenses—my makeup, my new clothes, my china place settings—
this
is who I was.

I convulsed, arching my body and ripping my wrist away from Shawn. I’d caught him off guard; I was stronger than he’d expected, or maybe just more reckless, and he lost his hold. I sprang for the door. I’d made it through the frame and had taken a step into the hallway when my head shot backward. Shawn had caught me by the hair, and he yanked me toward him with such force that we both tumbled back and into the bathtub.

The next thing I remember, Charles was lifting me and I was laughing—a shrill, demented howl. I thought if I could just laugh loudly enough, the situation might still be saved, that Charles might yet be convinced it was all a joke. Tears streamed from my eyes—my big toe was broken—but I kept cackling. Shawn stood in the doorway looking awkward.

“Are you okay?” Charles kept saying.

“Of course I am! Shawn is so, so, so—
funny
.” My voice strangled on the last word as I put weight on my foot and a wave of pain swept through me. Charles tried to carry me but I pushed him off and walked on the break, grinding my teeth to stop myself from crying out, while I slapped playfully at my brother.

Charles didn’t stay for supper. He fled to his jeep and I didn’t hear from him for several hours, then he called and asked me to meet him at the church. He wouldn’t come to Buck’s Peak. We sat in his jeep in the dark, empty parking lot. He was crying.

“You didn’t see what you thought you saw,” I said.

If someone had asked me, I’d have said Charles was the most important thing in the world to me. But he wasn’t. And I would prove it to him. What
was
important to me wasn’t love or friendship, but my ability to lie convincingly to myself: to believe I was strong. I could never forgive Charles for knowing I wasn’t.

I became erratic, demanding, hostile. I devised a bizarre and ever-evolving rubric by which I measured his love for me, and when he failed to meet it, I became paranoid. I surrendered to rages, venting all my savage anger, every fearful resentment I’d ever felt toward Dad or Shawn, at him, this bewildered bystander who’d only ever helped me. When we argued, I screamed that I never wanted to see him again, and I screamed it so many times that one night, when I called to change my mind, like I always did, he wouldn’t let me.

We met one final time, in a field off the highway. Buck’s Peak loomed over us. He said he loved me but this was over his head. He couldn’t save me. Only I could.

I had no idea what he was talking about.

—

WINTER COVERED CAMPUS IN thick snow. I stayed indoors, memorizing algebraic equations, trying to live as I had before—to imagine my life at the university as disconnected from my life on Buck’s Peak. The wall separating the two had been impregnable. Charles was a hole in it.

The stomach ulcers returned, burning and aching through the night. Once, I awoke to Robin shaking me. She said I’d been shouting in my sleep. I touched my face and it was wet. She wrapped me in her arms so tight I felt cocooned.

The next morning, Robin asked me to go with her to a doctor—for the ulcers but also for an X-ray of my foot, because my big toe had turned black. I said I didn’t need a doctor. The ulcers would heal, and someone had already treated the toe.

Robin’s eyebrow rose. “Who? Who treated it?”

I shrugged. She assumed my mother had, and I let her believe it. The truth was, the morning after Thanksgiving, I had asked Shawn to tell me if it was broken. He’d knelt on the kitchen floor and I’d dropped my foot into his lap. In that posture he seemed to shrink. He examined the toe for a moment, then he looked up at me and I saw something in his blue eyes. I thought he was about to say he was sorry, but just when I expected his lips to part he grasped the tip of my toe and yanked. It felt as if my foot had exploded, so intense was the shock that shot through my leg. I was still trying to swallow spasms of pain when Shawn stood, put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Sorry, Siddle Lister, but it hurts less if you don’t see it coming.”

A week after Robin asked to take me to the doctor, I again awoke to her shaking me. She gathered me up and pressed me to her, as if her body could hold me together, could keep me from flying apart.

“I think you need to see the bishop,” she said the next morning.

“I’m fine,” I said, making a cliché of myself the way not-fine people do. “I just need sleep.”

Soon after, I found a pamphlet for the university counseling service on my desk. I barely looked at it, just knocked it into the trash. I could
not
see a counselor. To see one would be to ask for help, and I believed myself invincible. It was an elegant deception, a mental pirouette. The toe was not broken because it was not breakable. Only an X-ray could prove otherwise. Thus, the X-ray would break my toe.

My algebra final was swept up in this superstition. In my mind, it acquired a kind of mystical power. I studied with the intensity of the insane, believing that if I could best
this
exam, win that impossible perfect score, even with my broken toe and without Charles to help me, it would prove that I was above it all. Untouchable.

The morning of the exam I limped to the testing center and sat in the drafty hall. The test was in front of me. The problems were compliant, pliable; they yielded to my manipulations, forming into solutions, one after the other. I handed in my answer sheet, then stood in the frigid hallway, staring up at the screen that would display my score. When it appeared, I blinked, and blinked again. One hundred. A perfect score.

I was filled with an exquisite numbness. I felt drunk with it and wanted to shout at the world:
Here’s the proof:
nothing
touches me.

—

BUCK’S PEAK LOOKED THE way it always did at Christmas—a snowy spire, adorned with evergreens—and my eyes, increasingly accustomed to brick and concrete, were nearly blinded by the scale and clarity of it.

Richard was in the forklift as I drove up the hill, moving a stack of purlins for the shop Dad was building in Franklin, near town. Richard was twenty-two, and one of the smartest people I knew, but he lacked a high school diploma. As I passed him in the drive, it occurred to me that he’d probably be driving that forklift for the rest of his life.

I’d been home for only a few minutes when Tyler called. “I’m just checking in,” he said. “To see if Richard is studying for the ACT.”

“He’s gonna take it?”

“I don’t know,” Tyler said. “Maybe. Dad and I have been working on him.”

“Dad?”

Tyler laughed. “Yeah, Dad. He wants Richard to go to college.”

I thought Tyler was joking until an hour later when we sat down to dinner. We’d only just started eating when Dad, his mouth full of potatoes, said, “Richard, I’ll give you next week off, paid, if you’ll use it to study them books.”

I waited for an explanation. It was not long in coming. “Richard is a genius,” Dad told me a moment later, winking. “He’s five times smarter than that Einstein was. He can disprove all them socialist theories and godless speculations. He’s gonna get down there and blow up the whole damn system.”

Dad continued with his raptures, oblivious to the effect he was having on his listeners. Shawn slumped on a bench, his back against the wall, his face tilted toward the floor. To look at him was to imagine a man cut from stone, so heavy did he seem, so void of motion. Richard was the miracle son, the gift from God, the Einstein to disprove Einstein. Richard would move the world. Shawn would not. He’d lost too much of his mind when he’d fallen off that pallet. One of my father’s sons would be driving the forklift for the rest of his life, but it wouldn’t be Richard.

Richard looked even more miserable than Shawn. His shoulders hunched and his neck sank into them, as if he were compressing under the weight of Dad’s praise. After Dad went to bed, Richard told me that he’d taken a practice test for the ACT. He’d scored so low, he wouldn’t tell me the number.

“Apparently I’m Einstein,” Richard said, his head in his hands. “What do I do? Dad is saying I’m going to blow this thing out of the water, and I’m not even sure I can pass.”

Every night was the same. Through dinner, Dad would list all the false theories of science that his genius son would disprove; then after dinner, I would tell Richard about college, about classes, books, professors, things I knew would appeal to his innate need to learn. I was worried: Dad’s expectations were so high, and Richard’s fear of disappointing him so intense, it seemed possible that Richard might not take the ACT at all.

—

THE SHOP IN FRANKLIN was ready to roof, so two days after Christmas I forced my toe, still crooked and black, into a steel-toed boot, then spent the morning on a roof driving threading screws into galvanized tin. It was late afternoon when Shawn dropped his screw gun and shimmied down the loader’s extended boom. “Time for a break, Siddle Liss,” he shouted up from the ground. “Let’s go into town.”

I hopped onto the pallet and Shawn dropped the boom to the ground. “You drive,” he said, then he leaned his seat back and closed his eyes. I headed for Stokes.

I remember strange details about the moment we pulled into the parking lot—the smell of oil floating up from our leather gloves, the sandpaper feel of dust on my fingertips. And Shawn, grinning at me from the passenger seat. Through the city of cars I spy one, a red jeep. Charles. I pass through the main lot and turn into the open asphalt on the north side of the store, where employees park. I pull down the visor to evaluate myself, noting the tangle the windy roof has made of my hair, and the grease from the tin that has lodged in my pores, making them fat and brown. My clothes are heavy with dirt.

Shawn sees the red jeep. He watches me lick my thumb and scrub dirt from my face, and he becomes excited. “Let’s go!” he says.