Silently, in my head—because this was not the way my father and I ever talked to each other—I would drop the grin and go on to remind him that since he was the one who had done the ruthless ripping and throwing, maybe, just maybe he could back off and give me a break. And then I would feel guilty, would fall down face-first and drown in guilt, for even thinking such a thing.
But anyway, back to what I was saying about adaptation, which was this: it’s hard. Hard to the point of possibly impossible. Take anything. Take, say, raising your hand in class to answer a question. It sounds simple, but for someone who has never in her lifetime raised her hand in a class to answer a question, it’s insanely intimidating, not just a single decision, but a sticky, complex, confidence-smashing web of decision making. When do you raise it? Before everyone else? After? In the middle? Do you stab it into the air, like Joan of Arc with her sword? (You know where that got Joan!) Lift it barely above shoulder level, a president taking the oath of office? Float it upward, with your eyes pointed away, as if your arm were a separate organism, acting without your knowledge or consent? And then there’s the wording of the answer to consider, your tone of voice, your facial expression, the entire wretched eye-contact issue.
I know what you’re thinking. I know what I would have thought: damn the torpedoes, girl, just be yourself! And I did think just exactly that, in general anyway. It was a philosophy I subscribed to one hundred percent, but somehow, in the moment—strangers at every side, the classroom full of eyes and bodies and hairstyles and judgment thick as smoke—I would scatter like a flock of birds when the hawk dives in and forget the whole concept of rising above.
I waited a week to even try it. And it should be noted that my first week of school was not the first week of school. Our family emergency had failed to time itself around the Webley School calendar, which means I came in just after the other new eleventh graders had stopped feeling hopelessly lost but were still lost enough to appreciate the distraction of someone loster, there being no shortage of schadenfreude among the Webley School student body. There weren’t many of us new juniors, eleventh grade not being, as the school counselor had warned us, a “natural transition year,” an assertion I found to be—insert heavy sigh—all too true. It also means that I arrived after the placement tests had been administered. Having been homeschooled since birth or before (my father read Plato’s Republic to me nightly during the last trimester of my mother’s pregnancy), I didn’t have any ordinary school records—apart from attendance records, which were required by the state—and also had no test scores, apart from the PSAT, which, forgive the immodesty, I had aced.
What I had instead were folders full of meticulously detailed and recorded evaluations, handwritten by my father, and several thick portfolios of work in every subject, including a disk with a video of me performing various acts, like playing Beethoven’s Piano Sonata no. 8; reciting, dramatically, Browning’s “My Last Duchess” by heart; and dissecting a fetal pig at our kitchen counter.
What we ended up bringing to the guidance counselor represented only a sampling of my academic history, since lugging all that my parents had compiled would have taken several large hand trucks and an insane amount of hubris. At one point in her frustration at having to consolidate sixteen years of incessant study and achievement into a pile small enough to fit into four tote bags, since she had somehow decided that four tote bags’ worth was the appropriate amount, my mother had suggested that we get my old wagon from the storage shed and bring it with us.
“Muddy,” I’d said, gently. (Yes, I called her “Muddy” but only at home.) “Stop for a second and picture us tugging my old red Radio Flyer down the hallways of my new high school.”
To which she looked surprised and answered, “But it’s in very good shape, almost like new. You always took such care of your toys.”
We were quite a spectacle anyway, each of us with two of L.L.Bean’s extra large (i.e., absurdly oversized) canvas totes, bright white, trimmed in navy blue, and stuffed to the gills, slung over our bony shoulders. The ocean of ogling students parted to let us stagger by, tall, stick-legged, and humpbacked under our burdens.
As it turned out, we shouldn’t have bothered. The counselor, Ms. Janine Shay, took one look at the tower of academic prowess teetering on her desk, casting long shadows across her calendar blotter and threatening to topple what appeared to be a plastic desktop figurine of a groundhog in a red shirt, but which I learned later was a Webley Wombat, and recoiled, visibly.
“Whoa,” she said, “that’s a lot of material.”
“We have more at home,” said Muddy, hopefully.
“Oh, no,” said Ms. Shay, with a short laugh. “This is quite enough. This will do.”
If there was a touch of sarcasm in Ms. Shay’s voice, my dear mother didn’t hear it. Her tense body relaxed with relief. It was all I could do not to hug her.
Ms. Janine Shay picked up the file with my most recent evaluations and lifted her purple reading glasses from the top of her desk to the tip of her nose. She leafed through for maybe a minute, then bent her head and looked at us over the tops of the glasses.
“We could administer tests,” she said, “but that would take time, and we’ve found that homeschoolers are generally very well prepared for Webley, particularly the ones who embrace the sciences.”
She raised her eyebrows. Inquiringly? Accusingly?
“I do,” I said and then felt instantly moronic because I sounded exactly like a bride at the altar—one getting married to Darwin’s The Origin of Species. So I added, “All of us in the family do—embrace them. All of them. The sciences, I mean.”
“Her father is a scientist,” chimed in Muddy.
“All right,” said Ms. Shay. “Why don’t we do this? To save time, why don’t we forgo the testing, start Willow in the regular honors courses, and then allow her teachers to decide whether to move her down to college prep, which seems unlikely, or up to AP?”
Let me make one thing clear about my mother: she is a brilliant woman, an artist. The most amazing things take shape inside her mind, beautiful things that exist nowhere in the world, and then she makes them exist. How many people can you say that about?
But when it came to the mundane, when it came to, say, arguing with a high school guidance counselor, she got a little nervous. Especially when she was on one of her, as she called them, “bad-sleep streaks,” which she was on so often that it was hard to tell where one streak ended and the other began. So my father usually dealt with the mundane. He was brilliant, too, of course, but he could move between living inside his head and living outside of it with an ease that my mother could never manage, probably because the interior of my mother’s head was such a shining place to be.
Who wouldn’t get rattled and even freeze up at the thought of stepping out of that and into an argument with Ms. Janine Shay, she of the purple reading glasses and groundhog/wombat statuette? In any case, Muddy got rattled. Muddy froze. Luckily, I had prepared for exactly this moment. I took a breath.
“‘Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory or defeat.’”
Into the drab silence of the office, the sentence cascaded like a waterfall and sent a shiver over my scalp, like it always did. I didn’t add, “Teddy Roosevelt,” not wanting to assume that Ms. Shay didn’t recognize the quotation, but I did tip up my chin in a way that I hoped conveyed determination. I was betting on Ms. Shay’s being a person with a great big soft spot for determination.
To my relief, she laughed. It was a nice laugh. Then, she whisked off her glasses, and in a quick, single-handed motion, she folded them, like a flamenco dancer snapping shut a fan.
“I must say that I’ve never heard our honors courses called ‘the gray twilight’ before,” she said, smiling.
I smiled back, humbly
. “I meant no disrespect.”
“I’m sure the courses will get over it,” she said, “although I’d probably refrain from calling the students enrolled in them ‘poor spirits,’ at least to their faces.”
I nodded.
“So I take it you would like to jump directly into the AP courses?”
“With your permission,” I said. “And if those teachers decide I don’t belong in them, well, of course, I’ll step down.”
“And into the ‘gray twilight’?” said Ms. Shay, teasingly. “Oh, somehow, I don’t think that will happen.”
My mother stirred. “I like that idea. Aiming high. I’m sure Dr. Cleary would like it, too.”
As soon as she said that, I was mentally transported to my father’s office at home, the President Roosevelt quotation in calligraphy hanging on his wall, next to one by Emerson: “Every wall is a door.” The office empty, the computer screen black. I pictured my father in the hospital bed, sleeping the slack, sick-person sleep that was so sad to watch. My father frail and gray-faced, his heart stammering, stammering against the bones of his chest. If only, I thought, if only I get into the AP classes and succeed in the AP classes, my father will get well. Back then, I was always thinking things like that.
I sprang to my feet and offered the good Ms. Shay my hand.
“Thank you,” I said, squaring my shoulders. “I won’t let you down.”
I was brisk and steady. There were times when I liked to pretend I was a WAC officer addressing General MacArthur, and this was one of those times. I could almost feel the brimmed WAC cap on my head, my hair curling smartly out from under it. I could almost feel my father watching me, nodding his approval.
Ms. Shay gave my hand a hearty shake, then let it go.
“I’m sure you won’t,” she said.
“You bet I won’t!”
It took every bit of self-restraint I had not to click my heels together and salute.
ONE WEEK LATER CAME the hair-raising hand-raising episode.
It was English literature. Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. I had been pleasantly surprised to find that we were studying a book I had already read, since my literary education was, I have to admit, a little spotty. My father was a scientist, a chaired professor of genetic science at an Ivy League university, even though he didn’t really teach anymore. He was also a lifelong history and philosophy buff and a fluent speaker of both French and Italian. The man was shockingly educated. The truth is, though, that he had no use for fiction and even less for poetry, never had, not even as a child. He explained this by saying, “One who truly sees, sees the intricacies and fascinations of facts can hardly be expected to be quite so intrigued by nonfacts, can one?,” which is a pretty convincing argument, I think. But me? I guess I had an inferior grasp of facts. I loved stories.
Early on, my mother taught my English classes, but after I was about eight or nine, she sort of drifted from the picture, gradually pulled back into her world of glass. In what I liked to think of as a giant demonstration of faith in me, my father let me continue on my own, with the single caveat that I read nothing beyond the end of the nineteenth century, since all literature written after that was, by his estimation, trash. I wasn’t so sure about this. It seemed to defy the law of probability that in over one hundred years, no one had written a single item worth reading, not even by accident.
But I knew the deeper reason for the caveat, the one that was behind every decision he made, and that was that he wanted to keep me safe and uncorrupted forever, keep me from turning out like the Others, the Earlier Ones, because he loved me more than anyone in the world. He never said this, not in so many words, but he didn’t have to. I knew. So I honored the caveat, would have even if I’d had the choice not to (I had no way of buying books for myself after all), but sometimes, in the middle of reading John Donne or Shakespeare or the Russians or the Brontës, all that passion, drinking, madness, murder, and generally poor decision making, I would think, If you only knew, you’d make me stop reading completely!, and loyal daughter though I was, no way in the world was I telling him.
But getting back to the hand-raising.
My English teacher, Mr. Insley, was restless, a strider, boldly cutting a path around the perimeters of the rectangular room so that focusing on him usually meant swiveling your neck around until it cricked, something that most of the students didn’t bother to do. Narrow shouldered and slim in his tweed jacket, with fine, pale brown, backswept hair, he looked like John Keats, only taller and less tubercular and not forever leaning his chin on his hand as though his neck were too flimsy to hold up his head on its own. On the contrary, Mr. Insley seemed to bristle with energy. When he posed a particularly important question to the class, he would wave one long, skinny finger in the air and stare at us with what could only be called fervor.
I would not have thought that someone could get so impassioned about Pride and Prejudice. Wuthering Heights, yes, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, sure, but Pride and Prejudice, well, no, not necessarily. I adore Austen. Adore! Who could read P and P without wanting to be Elizabeth Bennet, with her fine eyes and sharp wit? Who wouldn’t want to take an elegant turn around a drawing room or sit with a straight back at a writing desk, composing a letter? But to cant forward, the way Mr. Insley was doing, flushed and burning eyed, to ask the quaking-voiced question “In your opinion, did Elizabeth Bennet marry Darcy for his money?,” seemed a little much, a little out of place. Out of place but—I admit it—stirring. In spite of itself, my pulse quickened.
But no one answered the question. I glanced around the room to see if any of my fellow students (I was still stunned at the fact that I had fellow students) seemed on the verge of answering. No. Nothing. Clock ticking, ticking. Still nothing. To behold Mr. Insley standing in the front of the room, John Brown-like, practically on fire, his chest rising and falling beneath the thin striped cotton of his dress shirt, was like seeing Mark Antony giving his speech over Caesar’s body while all the Romans doodled and stared at the ceiling. Unbearable.
Which I guess is why before I truly understood what was happening, it had happened: my hand was up. On the end of my very long arm, my hand seemed high, high in the air, like a motherless bird in a nest, exposed to wind and weather and my classmates’ unreadable gazes.
For a moment, Mr. Insley looked startled, and then he smiled at me and said, without so much as a glance at his seating chart, “Willow.” He made my name sound like music, like a two-syllable poem. Oh my, his voice. His voice was the most heartening thing that had happened to me in a week.
“Yes,” I said. Yes, I was Willow. Yes, yes.
He kept smiling. I realized my hand was still in the air and brought it down to rest in the palm of my other hand. Mr. Insley’s smile turned from just glad to glad and encouraging, and I realized that, in the presence of this smile, in the presence of his whole presence, my nervousness had vanished. My entire body, including my brain, felt deliciously relaxed. It was like one of those moments in a play where the spotlight falls on two characters in the center of the stage, while everything that isn’t them freezes, goes black, disappears.
“Yes,” I repeated, with assurance. “Elizabeth was a product of her time and in an awkward position, socially. Like most women back then, she didn’t have a lot of choices. She was the daughter of a gentleman, so she couldn’t very well get a job, but because of the entailment, she could expect almost no income of her own. Her only hope of keeping up or improving her manner of living and social position was to marry a man, a gentleman preferably, not a tradesman, with money. Someone like Fitzwilliam Darcy.”
Mr. Insley was nodding, looking more like Keats than ever, and contemplating me for all he was worth, his eyes swimming with thoughts. I sat completely still, feeling like a Grecian urn, a nightingale.
“Excellent answer, Willow,” he said. “Very insightful. Beautifully articulated. Thank you.”
I swear his approval lifted me right off the ground, desk and all. But
then a voice slashed the air like a bullwhip and yanked me back to earth with a crash.
“God, that is just so wrong.”
Even as I was turning around to see who’d said it, I knew. Bec Lansing. Hair a liquid fall of coffee-colored silk. Huge dark eyes. Mouth like a poppy. A riveting girl, a girl who shot sparks and walked in beauty like the night. I hadn’t spent much time with groups of people my own age, but I’d recognized the queen the first second I saw her, and something inside me had instinctively bowed down.
“Bec,” said Mr. Insley, sharply, “are you sharing a differing viewpoint?”
She didn’t acknowledge that he’d spoken. She had eyes—long lashed, coal black—for no one but me, and the hate I saw in them made me gasp.
“To say that she married him for his money? That’s just so sad. So cold. She loved him!”
“No, I know—” I began.
“You don’t know!” snapped Bec. “Which is just really sad.”
Bec looked about as sad as a cobra.
“I-I think she loved him, too. I don’t think she married him only for his money.”
For the record, this was true. Of course, Elizabeth loved Darcy. My heart ached with their love for each other every single time I read the book.
“Sure,” said Bec, with a sneer. “Sure, you do. Way to backpedal.”