Educated

by Tara Westover

  Audrey did not wait, not even a day. The next morning she showed my email to Mother. I cannot imagine the details of that conversation, but I know that for Audrey it must have been a tremendous relief, laying my words before our mother, finally able to say, I’m not crazy. It happened to Tara, too.

  For all of that day, Mother pondered it. Then she decided she had to hear the words from me. It was late afternoon in Idaho, nearly midnight in England, when my mother, unsure how to place an international call, found me online. The words on the screen were small, confined to a tiny text box in the corner of the browser, but somehow they seemed to swallow the room. She told me she had read my letter. I braced myself for her rage.

  It is painful to face reality, she wrote. To realize there was something ugly, and I refused to see it.*2

  I had to read those lines a number of times before I understood them. Before I realized that she was not angry, not blaming me, or trying to convince me I had only imagined. She believed me.

  Don’t blame yourself, I told her. Your mind was never the same after the accident.

  Maybe, she said. But sometimes I think we choose our illnesses, because they benefit us in some way.

  I asked Mother why she’d never stopped Shawn from hurting me.

  Shawn always said you picked the fights, and I guess I wanted to believe that, because it was easier. Because you were strong and rational, and anyone could see that Shawn was not.

  That didn’t make sense. If I had seemed rational, why had Mother believed Shawn when he’d told her I was picking fights? That I needed to be subdued, disciplined.

  I’m a mother, she said. Mothers protect. And Shawn was so damaged.

  I wanted to say that she was also my mother but I didn’t. I don’t think Dad will believe any of this, I typed.

  He will, she wrote. But it’s hard for him. It reminds him of the damage his bipolar has caused to our family.

  I had never heard Mother admit that Dad might be mentally ill. Years before, I had told her what I’d learned in my psychology class about bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, but she had shrugged it off. Hearing her say it now felt liberating. The illness gave me something to attack besides my father, so when Mother asked why I hadn’t come to her sooner, why I hadn’t asked for help, I answered honestly.

  Because you were so bullied by Dad, I said. You were not powerful in the house. Dad ran things, and he was not going to help us.

  I am stronger now, she said. I no longer run scared.

  When I read this, I imagined my mother as a young woman, brilliant and energetic, but also anxious and complying. Then the image changed, her body thinning, elongating, her hair flowing, long and silver.

  Emily is being bullied, I wrote.

  She is, Mother said. Like I was.

  She is you, I said.

  She is me. But we know better now. We can rewrite the story.

  I asked about a memory. It was from the weeks before I’d left for BYU, after Shawn had had a particularly bad night. He’d brought Mother to tears, then plopped onto the sofa and turned on the TV. I’d found her sobbing at the kitchen table, and she’d asked me not to go to BYU. “You’re the only one strong enough to handle him,” she’d said. “I can’t, and your father can’t. It has to be you.”

  I typed slowly, reluctantly: Do you remember telling me not to go to school, that I was the only one who could handle Shawn?

  Yes, I remember that.

  There was a pause, then more words appeared—words I hadn’t known I needed to hear, but once I saw them, I realized I’d been searching my whole life for them.

  You were my child. I should have protected you.

  I lived a lifetime in the moment I read those lines, a life that was not the one I had actually lived. I became a different person, who remembered a different childhood. I didn’t understand the magic of those words then, and I don’t understand it now. I know only this: that when my mother told me she had not been the mother to me that she wished she’d been, she became that mother for the first time.

  I love you, I wrote, and closed my laptop.

  * * *

  —

  MOTHER AND I SPOKE only once about that conversation, on the phone, a week later. “It’s being dealt with,” she said. “I told your father what you and your sister said. Shawn will get help.”

  I put the issue from my mind. My mother had taken up the cause. She was strong. She had built that business, with all those people working for her, and it dwarfed my father’s business, and all the other businesses in the whole town; she, that docile woman, had a power in her the rest of us couldn’t contemplate. And Dad. He had changed. He was softer, more prone to laugh. The future could be different from the past. Even the past could be different from the past, because my memories could change: I no longer remembered Mother listening in the kitchen while Shawn pinned me to the floor, pressing my windpipe. I no longer remembered her looking away.

  My life in Cambridge was transformed—or rather, I was transformed into someone who believed she belonged in Cambridge. The shame I’d long felt about my family leaked out of me almost overnight. For the first time in my life I talked openly about where I’d come from. I admitted to my friends that I’d never been to school. I described Buck’s Peak, with its many junkyards, barns, corrals. I even told them about the root cellar full of supplies in the wheat field, and the gasoline buried near the old barn.

  I told them I’d been poor, I told them I’d been ignorant, and in telling them this I felt not the slightest prick of shame. Only then did I understand where the shame had come from: it wasn’t that I hadn’t studied in a marble conservatory, or that my father wasn’t a diplomat. It wasn’t that Dad was half out of his mind, or that Mother followed him. It had come from having a father who shoved me toward the chomping blades of the Shear, instead of pulling me away from them. It had come from those moments on the floor, from knowing that Mother was in the next room, closing her eyes and ears to me, and choosing, for that moment, not to be my mother at all.

  I fashioned a new history for myself. I became a popular dinner guest, with my stories of hunting and horses, of scrapping and fighting mountain fires. Of my brilliant mother, midwife and entrepreneur; of my eccentric father, junkman and zealot. I thought I was finally being honest about the life I’d had before. It wasn’t the truth exactly, but it was true in a larger sense: true to what would be, in the future, now that everything had changed for the better. Now that Mother had found her strength.

  The past was a ghost, insubstantial, unaffecting. Only the future had weight.

  *1 The italics used on this page indicate that the language from the referenced email is paraphrased, not directly quoted. The meaning has been preserved.

  *2 The italicized language in the description of the referenced text exchange is paraphrased, not directly quoted. The meaning has been preserved.

  When I next returned to Buck’s Peak, it was autumn and Grandma-down-the-hill was dying. For nine years she had battled the cancer in her bone marrow; now the contest was ending. I had just learned that I’d won a place at Cambridge to study for a PhD when Mother wrote to me. “Grandma is in the hospital again,” she said. “Come quick. I think this will be the last time.”

  When I landed in Salt Lake, Grandma was drifting in and out of consciousness. Drew met me at the airport. We were more than friends by then, and Drew said he would drive me to Idaho, to the hospital in town.

  I hadn’t been back there since I’d taken Shawn years before, and as I walked down its white, antiseptic hallway, it was difficult not to think of him. We found Grandma’s room. Grandpa was seated at her bedside, holding her speckled hand. Her eyes were open and she looked at me. “It’s my little Tara, come all the way from England,” she said, then her eyes closed. Grandpa squeezed her hand but she was asleep. A nurse told us she would likely sleep for hours.

  Drew said he would drive me to Buck’s Peak. I agreed, and it wasn’t until the mountain came into view that
I wondered whether I’d made a mistake. Drew had heard my stories, but still there was a risk in bringing him here: this was not a story, and I doubted whether anyone would play the part I had written for them.

  The house was in chaos. There were women everywhere, some taking orders over the phone, others mixing oils or straining tinctures. There was a new annex on the south side of the house, where younger women were filling bottles and packaging orders for shipment. I left Drew in the living room and went to the bathroom, which was the only room in the house that still looked the way I remembered it. When I came out I walked straight into a thin old woman with wiry hair and large, square glasses.

  “This bathroom is for senior management only,” she said. “Bottle fillers must use the bathroom in the annex.”

  “I don’t work here,” I said.

  She stared at me. Of course I worked here. Everyone worked here.

  “This bathroom is for senior management,” she repeated, straightening to her full height. “You are not allowed to leave the annex.”

  She walked away before I could reply.

  I still hadn’t seen either of my parents. I weaved my way back through the house and found Drew on the sofa, listening to a woman explain that aspirin can cause infertility. I grasped his hand and pulled him behind me, cutting a path through the strangers.

  “Is this place for real?” he said.

  I found Mother in a windowless room in the basement. I had the impression that she was hiding there. I introduced her to Drew and she smiled warmly. “Where’s Dad?” I said. I suspected that he was sick in bed, as he had been prone to pulmonary illnesses since the explosion had charred his lungs.

  “I’m sure he’s in the fray,” she said, rolling her eyes at the ceiling, which thrummed with the thudding of feet.

  Mother came with us upstairs. The moment she appeared on the landing, she was hailed by several of her employees with questions from clients. Everyone seemed to want her opinion—about their burns, their heart tremors, their underweight infants. She waved them off and pressed forward. The impression she gave as she moved through her own house was of a celebrity in a crowded restaurant, trying not to be recognized.

  My father’s desk was the size of a car. It was parked in the center of the chaos. He was on the phone, which he’d wedged between his cheek and shoulder so it wouldn’t slip through his waxy hands. “Doctors can’t help with them diabetes,” he said, much too loudly. “But the Lord can!”

  I looked sideways at Drew, who was smiling. Dad hung up and turned toward us. He greeted Drew with a large grin. He radiated energy, feeding off the general bedlam of the house. Drew said he was impressed with the business, and Dad seemed to grow six inches. “We’ve been blessed for doing the Lord’s work,” he said.

  The phone rang again. There were at least three employees tasked with answering it, but Dad leapt for the receiver as if he’d been waiting for an important call. I’d never seen him so full of life.

  “The power of God on earth,” he shouted into the mouthpiece. “That’s what these oils are: God’s pharmacy!”

  The noise in the house was disorienting, so I took Drew up the mountain. We strolled through fields of wild wheat and from there into the skirt of pines at the mountain base. The fall colors were soothing and we stayed for hours, gazing down at the quiet valley. It was late afternoon when we finally made our way back to the house and Drew left for Salt Lake City.

  I entered the Chapel through the French doors and was surprised by the silence. The house was empty, every phone disconnected, every workstation abandoned. Mother sat alone in the center of the room.

  “The hospital called,” she said. “Grandma’s gone.”

  * * *

  —

  MY FATHER LOST HIS appetite for the business. He started getting out of bed later and later, and when he did, it seemed it was only to insult or accuse. He shouted at Shawn about the junkyard and lectured Mother about her management of the employees. He snapped at Audrey when she tried to make him lunch, and barked at me for typing too loudly. It was as if he wanted to fight, to punish himself for the old woman’s death. Or perhaps the punishment was for her life, for the conflict that had been between them, which had only ended now she was dead.

  The house slowly filled again. The phones were reconnected, and women materialized to answer them. Dad’s desk remained empty. He spent his days in bed, gazing up at the stucco ceiling. I brought him supper, as I had as a child, and wondered now, as I’d wondered then, whether he knew I was there.

  Mother moved about the house with the vitality of ten people, mixing tinctures and essential oils, directing her employees between making funeral arrangements and cooking for every cousin and aunt who dropped in unannounced to reminisce about Grandma. As often as not I’d find her in an apron, hovering over a roast with a phone in each hand, one a client, the other an uncle or friend calling to offer condolences. Through all this my father remained in bed.

  Dad spoke at the funeral. His speech was a twenty-minute sermon on God’s promises to Abraham. He mentioned my grandmother twice. To strangers it must have seemed he was hardly affected by the loss of his mother, but we knew better, we who could see the devastation.

  When we arrived home from the service, Dad was incensed that lunch wasn’t ready. Mother scrambled to serve the stew she’d left to slow-cook, but after the meal Dad seemed equally frustrated by the dishes, which Mother hurriedly cleaned, and then by his grandchildren, who played noisily while Mother dashed about trying to hush them.

  That evening, when the house was empty and quiet, I listened from the living room as my parents argued in the kitchen.

  “The least you could do,” Mother said, “is fill out these thank-you cards. It was your mother, after all.”

  “That’s wifely work,” Dad said. “I’ve never heard of a man writing cards.”

  He had said the exact wrong thing. For ten years, Mother had been the primary breadwinner, while continuing to cook meals, clean the house, do the laundry, and I had never once heard her express anything like resentment. Until now.

  “Then you should do the husband’s work,” she said, her voice raised.

  Soon they were both shouting. Dad tried to corral her, to subdue her with a show of anger, the way he always had, but this only made her more stubborn. Eventually she tossed the cards on the table and said, “Fill them out or don’t. But if you don’t, no one will.” Then she marched downstairs. Dad followed, and for an hour their shouts rose up through the floor. I’d never heard my parents shout like that—at least, not my mother. I’d never seen her refuse to give way.

  The next morning I found Dad in the kitchen, dumping flour into a glue-like substance I assumed was supposed to be pancake batter. When he saw me, he dropped the flour and sat at the table. “You’re a woman, ain’tcha?” he said. “Well, this here’s a kitchen.” We stared at each other and I contemplated the distance that had sprung up between us—how natural those words sounded to his ears, how grating to mine.

  It wasn’t like Mother to leave Dad to make his own breakfast. I thought she might be ill and went downstairs to check on her. I’d barely made it to the landing when I heard it: deep sobs coming from the bathroom, muffled by the steady drone of a blow-dryer. I stood outside the door and listened for more than a minute, paralyzed. Would she want me to leave, to pretend I hadn’t heard? I waited for her to catch her breath, but her sobs only grew more desperate.

  I knocked. “It’s me,” I said.

  The door opened, a sliver at first, then wider, and there was my mother, her skin glistening from the shower, wrapped in a towel that was too small to cover her. I had never seen my mother this way, and instinctively I closed my eyes. The world went black. I heard a thud, the cracking of plastic, and opened my eyes. Mother had dropped the blow-dryer and it had struck the floor, its roar now doubled as it rebounded off the exposed concrete. I looked at her, and as I did she pulled me to her and held me. The wet from her body seeped into
my clothes, and I felt droplets slide from her hair and onto my shoulder.

  I didn’t stay long on Buck’s Peak, maybe a week. On the day I left the mountain, Audrey asked me not to go. I have no memory of the conversation, but I remember writing the journal entry about it. I wrote it my first night back in Cambridge, while sitting on a stone bridge and staring up at King’s College Chapel. I remember the river, which was calm; I remember the slow drift of autumn leaves resting on the glassy surface. I remember the scratch of my pen moving across the page, recounting in detail, for a full eight pages, precisely what my sister had said. But the memory of her saying it is gone: it is as if I wrote in order to forget.

  Audrey asked me to stay. Shawn was too strong, she said, too persuasive, for her to confront him alone. I told her she wasn’t alone, she had Mother. Audrey said I didn’t understand. No one had believed us after all. If we asked Dad for help, she was sure he’d call us both liars. I told her our parents had changed and we should trust them. Then I boarded a plane and took myself five thousand miles away.

  If I felt guilty to be documenting my sister’s fears from such a safe distance, surrounded by grand libraries and ancient chapels, I gave only one indication of it, in the last line I wrote that night: Cambridge is less beautiful tonight.

  * * *

  —

  DREW HAD COME WITH me to Cambridge, having been admitted to a master’s program in Middle Eastern studies. I told him about my conversation with Audrey. He was the first boyfriend in whom I confided about my family—really confided, the truth and not just amusing anecdotes. Of course all that is in the past, I said. My family is different now. But you should know. So you can watch me. In case I do something crazy.

  The first term passed in a flurry of dinners and late-night parties, punctuated by even later nights in the library. To qualify for a PhD, I had to produce a piece of original academic research. In other words, having spent five years reading history, I was now being asked to write it.