Educated

The rest of my class arrived. When they saw the outfits, they rushed into
the studio to see what Caroline had for them. Caroline was standing next to a
cardboard box full of large gray sweatshirts. She began handing them out.
“Here are your costumes!” she said. The girls held up their sweatshirts,
eyebrows raised in disbelief. They had expected chiffon or ribbon, not Fruit
of the Loom. Caroline had tried to make the sweatshirts more appealing by
sewing large Santas, bordered with glitter, on the fronts, but this only made
the dingy cotton seem dingier.
Mother hadn’t told Dad about the recital, and neither had I. I didn’t ask
him to come. There was an instinct at work in me, a learned intuition. The
day of the recital, Mother told Dad I had a “thing” that night. Dad asked a lot
of questions, which surprised Mother, and after a few minutes she admitted it
was a dance recital. Dad grimaced when Mother told him I’d been taking
lessons from Caroline Moyle, and I thought he was going to start talking
about California socialism again, but he didn’t. Instead he got his coat and the
three of us walked to the car.
The recital was held at the church. Everyone was there, with flashing
cameras and bulky camcorders. I changed into my costume in the same room
where I attended Sunday school. The other girls chatted cheerfully; I pulled
on my sweatshirt, trying to stretch the material a few more inches. I was still
tugging it downward when we lined up on the stage.
Music played from a stereo on the piano and we began to dance, our feet
tapping in sequence. Next we were supposed to leap, reach upward and spin.
My feet remained planted. Instead of flinging my arms above my head, I
lifted them only to my shoulders. When the other girls crouched to slap the
stage, I tilted; when we were to cartwheel, I swayed, refusing to allow gravity
to do its work, to draw the sweatshirt any higher up my legs.
The music ended. The girls glared at me as we left the stage—I had ruined
the performance—but I could barely see them. Only one person in that room
felt real to me, and that was Dad. I searched the audience and recognized him
easily. He was standing in the back, the lights from the stage flickering off
his square glasses. His expression was stiff, impassive, but I could see anger
in it.
The drive home was only a mile; it felt like a hundred. I sat in the backseat
and listened to my father shout. How could Mother have let me sin so
openly? Was this why she’d kept the recital from him? Mother listened for a
moment, chewing her lip, then threw her hands in the air and said that she’d