Educated

In our basement I found an oversized knit sweater, stained and hole-ridden,
and an ugly blue dress, which Mother bleached to a faded brown. The dress
was perfect for an orphan, and I was relieved at how easy finding the
costumes had been, until I remembered that in act two Annie wears beautiful
dresses, which Daddy Warbucks buys for her. I didn’t have anything like
that.
I told Mother and her face sank. We drove a hundred miles round-trip,
searching every secondhand shop along the way, but found nothing. Sitting in
the parking lot of the last shop, Mother pursed her lips, then said, “There’s
one more place we can try.”
We drove to my aunt Angie’s and parked in front of the white picket fence
she shared with Grandma. Mother knocked, then stood back from the door
and smoothed her hair. Angie looked surprised to see us—Mother rarely
visited her sister—but she smiled warmly and invited us in. Her front room
reminded me of fancy hotel lobbies from the movies, there was so much silk
and lace. Mother and I sat on a pleated sofa of pale pink while Mother
explained why we’d come. Angie said her daughter had a few dresses that
might do.
Mother waited on the pink sofa while Angie led me upstairs to her
daughter’s room and laid out an armful of dresses, each so fine, with such
intricate lace patterns and delicately tied bows, that at first I was afraid to
touch them. Angie helped me into each one, knotting the sashes, fastening the
buttons, plumping the bows. “You should take this one,” she said, passing me
a navy dress with white braided cords arranged across the bodice. “Grandma
sewed this detailing.” I took the dress, along with another made of red velvet
collared with white lace, and Mother and I drove home.
The play opened a week later. Dad was in the front row. When the
performance ended, he marched right to the box office and bought tickets for
the next night. It was all he talked about that Sunday in church. Not doctors,
or the Illuminati, or Y2K. Just the play over in town, where his youngest
daughter was singing the lead.
Dad didn’t stop me from auditioning for the next play, or the one after that,
even though he worried about me spending so much time away from home.
“There’s no telling what kind of cavorting takes place in that theater,” he
said. “It’s probably a den of adulterers and fornicators.”
When the director of the next play got divorced, it confirmed Dad’s
suspicions. He said he hadn’t kept me out of the public school for all these