Free Educated by Tara Westover Page B

spending the afternoon with Grandma-over-in-town. I’d had a bath that morning, even though it wasn’t Sunday, and I’d put on special clothes with no holes or stains so that, scrubbed and polished, I could sit in Grandma’s kitchen and watch her make pumpkin cookies. The autumn sun poured in through gossamer curtains and onto marigold tiles, giving the whole room an amber glow.
    After Grandma slid the first batch into the oven, I went to the bathroom. I passed through the hallway, with its soft white carpet, and felt a stab of anger when I remembered that the last time I’d seen it, I’d been with Tyler. The bathroom felt foreign. I took in the pearly sink, the rosy tint of the carpet, the peach-colored rug. Even the toilet peeked out from under a primrose covering. I took in my own reflection, framed by creamy tiles. I looked nothing like myself, and I wondered for a moment if this was what Tyler wanted, a pretty house with a pretty bathroom and a pretty sister to visit him. Maybe this was what he’d left for. I hated him for that.
    Near the tap there were a dozen pink and white soaps, shaped like swans and roses, resting in an ivory-tinted shell. I picked up a swan, feeling its soft shape give under pressure from my fingers. It was beautiful and I wanted to take it. I pictured it in our basement bathroom, its delicate wings set against the coarse cement. I imagined it lying in a muddy puddle on the sink, surrounded by strips of curling yellowed wallpaper. I returned it to its shell.
    Coming out, I walked into Grandma, who’d been waiting for me in the hall.
    “Did you wash your hands?” she asked, her tone sweet and buttery.
    “No,” I said.
    My reply soured the cream in her voice. “Why not?”
    “They weren’t dirty.”
    “You should always wash your hands after you use the toilet.”
    “It can’t be that important,” I said. “We don’t even have soap in the bathroom at home.”
    “That’s not true,” she said. “I raised your mother better than that.”
    I squared my stance, ready to argue, to tell Grandma again that we didn’t use soap, but when I looked up, the woman I saw was not the woman I expected to see. She didn’t seem frivolous, didn’t seem like the type who’d waste an entire day fretting over her white carpet. In that moment she was transformed. Maybe it was something in the shape of her eyes, the way they squinted at me in disbelief, or maybe it was the hard line of her mouth, which was clamped shut, determined. Or maybe it was nothing at all, just the same old woman looking like herself and saying the things she always said. Maybe her transformation was merely a temporary shift in my perspective—for that moment, perhaps the perspective was his, that of the brother I hated, and loved.
    Grandma led me into the bathroom and watched as I washed my hands, then directed me to dry them on the rose-colored towel. My ears burned, my throat felt hot.
    Dad picked me up soon after on his way home from a job. He pulled up in his truck and honked for me to come out, which I did, my head bent low. Grandma followed. I rushed into the passenger seat, displacing a toolbox and welding gloves, while Grandma told Dad about my not washing. Dad listened, sucking on his cheeks while his right hand fiddled with the gearshift. A laugh was bubbling up inside him.
    Having returned to my father, I felt the power of his person. A familiar lens slid over my eyes and Grandma lost whatever strange power she’d had over me an hour before.
    “Don’t you teach your children to wash after they use the toilet?” Grandma said.
    Dad shifted the truck into gear. As it rolled forward he waved and said, “I teach them not to piss on their hands.”

    The winter after Tyler left, Audrey turned fifteen. She picked up her driver’s license from the county courthouse and, on her way home, got a job flipping burgers. Then she took a second job milking cows at four A.M. every morning. For a year she’d been fighting