Educated(85)

Dad was talking loudly, at a volume that would have suited a mountainside but was thunderous in the small restaurant. People at nearby tables had halted their own conversations and were sitting in silence, listening to ours. I regretted having chosen a restaurant so near my apartment.

Dad moved on from World War II to the United Nations, the European Union, and the imminent destruction of the world. He spoke as if the three were synonyms. The curry arrived and I focused my attention on it. Mother had grown tired of the lecture, and asked Dad to talk about something else.

“But the world is about to end!” he said. He was shouting now.

“Of course it is,” Mother said. “But let’s not discuss it over dinner.”

I put down my fork and stared at them. Of all the strange statements from the past half hour, for some reason this was the one that shocked me. The mere fact of them had never shocked me before. Everything they did had always made sense to me, adhering to a logic I understood. Perhaps it was the backdrop: Buck’s Peak was theirs and it camouflaged them, so that when I saw them there, surrounded by the loud, sharp relics of my childhood, the setting seemed to absorb them. At least it absorbed the noise. But here, so near the university, they seemed so unreal as to be almost mythic.

Dad looked at me, waiting for me to give an opinion, but I felt alienated from myself. I didn’t know who to be. On the mountain I slipped thoughtlessly into the voice of their daughter and acolyte. But here, I couldn’t seem to find the voice that, in the shadow of Buck’s Peak, came easily.

We walked to my apartment and I showed them my room. Mother shut the door, revealing a poster of Martin Luther King Jr. that I’d put up four years before, when I’d learned of the civil rights movement.

“Is that Martin Luther King?” Dad said. “Don’t you know he had ties to communism?” He chewed the waxy tissue where his lips had been.

They departed soon after to drive through the night. I watched them go, then took out my journal. It’s astonishing that I used to believe all this without the slightest suspicion, I wrote. The whole world was wrong; only Dad was right.

I thought of something Tyler’s wife, Stefanie, had told me over the phone a few days before. She said it had taken her years to convince Tyler to let her immunize their children, because some part of him still believed vaccines are a conspiracy by the Medical Establishment. Remembering that now, with Dad’s voice still ringing in my ears, I sneered at my brother. He’s a scientist! I wrote. How can he not see beyond their paranoia! I reread what I had written, and as I did so my scorn gave way to a sense of irony. Then again, I wrote. Perhaps I could mock Tyler with more credibility if I had not remembered, as I did just now, that to this day I have never been immunized.



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MY INTERVIEW FOR THE Gates scholarship took place at St. John’s College in Annapolis. The campus was intimidating, with its immaculate lawns and crisp colonial architecture. I sat nervously in the corridor, waiting to be called in for my interview; I felt stiff in the pantsuit and clung awkwardly to Robin’s handbag. But in the end, Professor Steinberg had written such a powerful letter of recommendation that there was little left for me to do.

I received confirmation the next day: I’d won the scholarship.

The phone calls began—from BYU’s student paper and the local news. I did half a dozen interviews. I was on TV. I awoke one morning to find my picture plastered on BYU’s home page. I was the third BYU student ever to win a Gates scholarship, and the university was taking full advantage of the press. I was asked about my high school experience, and which of my grade school teachers had prepared me for my success. I dodged, I parried, I lied when I had to. I didn’t tell a single reporter that I’d never gone to school.

I didn’t know why I couldn’t tell them. I just couldn’t stand the thought of people patting me on the back, telling me how impressive I was. I didn’t want to be Horatio Alger in someone’s tear-filled homage to the American dream. I wanted my life to make sense, and nothing in that narrative made sense to me.



* * *



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A MONTH BEFORE MY graduation, I visited Buck’s Peak. Dad had read the articles about my scholarship, and what he said was, “You didn’t mention home school. I’d think you’d be more grateful that your mother and I took you out of them schools, seeing how it’s worked out. You should be telling people that’s what done it: home school.”

I said nothing. Dad took it as an apology.

He disapproved of my going to Cambridge. “Our ancestors risked their lives to cross the ocean, to escape those socialist countries. And what do you do? You turn around and go back?”

Again, I said nothing.

“I’m looking forward to your graduation,” he said. “The Lord has a few choice rebukes for me to give them professors.”

“You will not,” I said quietly.

“If the Lord moves me, I will stand and speak.”

“You will not,” I repeated.

“I won’t go anywhere that the Lord’s spirit isn’t welcome.”

That was the conversation. I hoped it would blow over, but Dad was so hurt that I hadn’t mentioned homeschooling in my interviews that this new wound festered.

There was a dinner the night before my graduation where I was to receive the “most outstanding undergraduate” award from the history department. I waited for my parents at the entrance, but they never appeared. I called Mother, thinking they were running late. She said they weren’t coming. I went to the dinner and was presented with a plaque. My table had the only empty seats in the hall. The next day there was a luncheon for honors graduates, and I was seated with the college dean and the director of the honors program. Again, there were two empty seats. I said my parents had had car trouble.