What to wear, what to wear. What to wear to lessons when you’re not allowed to be seen going to them.
What to wear when you have to slip away from your job to audit a course and then hurry back and take your position again.
“It’s not as if you have a lot of choice,” says Nanny. “You’re outgrowing your old rags. And you fobbed off most of your mother’s old garments to greedy-grubbing old Unger Bi’ix. So I think that item you’ve been wearing to sing in, with the pleats paneled in strips from your mother’s elopement garb, it’ll have to do. Perhaps a might saucy for a schoolgirl, but no one is going to see you, remember. You could weave yourself a cloak of straw and coat it with dung, and no one would notice. I mean that affectionately.”
So Elphie strides up to the lodge, dressed only as herself. Maybe that’s for the best. New clothes suggest new opportunities and—she’s not ready.
It will take a few days before her mind steadies itself into a receptive mode. She waits. She’s patient because she wants it so much. Wants what? Something. (Anything.)
In time, while listening to lessons, which means trying to understand what is being said without watching gestures and examining diagrams provided by the teacher, Elphie finds out something new about herself. Two new things, actually.
The first thing she learns is something said by a docent leaning out the window. A scrap-headed fellow with a patch over one eye, carried away by curiosity. He turns his head to take her in. He asks her a few questions, and at her answers he replies, “You’re a quick sketch then, aren’t you. Tomorrow morning, move your stool up to the next window. You’ve already gotten most of what I’m teaching. I’ll let the next-door tutor know to expect your hovering.” So, what do you think about that, Elphie can learn. Up till now, her limited grasp of reading and numbers has been picked up more by osmosis than by effort. Now, just by listening, she finds she can see more openly. She can spell by looking at the letters shaping in her mind and reading them. She can do sums in her head and arrive at something new. It’s like conjuring. She can conjure up an answer—not by guesswork, quite, but by the nimble scaling of the framework of recently acquired information.
She advances along the windows of knowledge by listening, never even by looking in (except a sneaky peek as she comes and goes each morning). The girls in their exotic otherness. Remote, puzzling.
The other thing Elphie finds out, perhaps as important, is that knowledge comes to her without it needing to know what she looks like. Knowledge doesn’t care about that. And in erecting for herself this tentative scaffolding of new skills, she discovers that she’s losing her ability, or her need, to squirm with that awkward sense of not-rightness, not-enoughness. She might struggle to spell a complicated word, to remember the sketchy points of Ozian events that pass for history, to compute in her head without benefit of a slate and a chalk. Hard work, but still, she’s freed of the burden of doing so as the green oddity, the minister’s aberrant daughter.
The answer establishes itself despite her.
So learning becomes a holiday from herself, she who has hardly yet learned the concept of a holiday. It’s better than sleep, for in dreams she sometimes meets herself again, and she can be even more ashamed and angry and desolate while sleeping than she sometimes feels while awake. But in schoolwork she steps out of herself into some other world of meaning.
Put another way: for the first time, she sees that the world exists beyond her, despite her. It will abide indefinitely, even if she steps on a poisonous marsh tarantula and dies the next moment. Reality has apparatus, and consequence. And maybe apparatus and consequence add up to something, too: significance. She isn’t sure. Still, learning brings her out of her head, giddy and unmoored. Tearing through possibility.
Within a few months, when Elphie has reached the fourth window, Nessa begins to agitate that it’s time for her to start her own schooling. Elphie has no interest in sharing her new sense of escape with her sister. However, Elphie’s rounded the corner of the building, so if Nessa gets to come to school, too, at least she’ll be stationed out of sight on the first veranda, set at ninety degrees to the second. (Oh, ninety degrees, to think Elphie hasn’t known about degrees before, and all the time they’ve been quietly holding up tabletops! Holding them up against gravity, that greedy beggar, that killjoy.)
Elphie does her best to squash the notion. She insists that Nessa could never manage education on her own, and of course Nanny can’t spend all day as a helpmeet. While Elphie, Elphie has plunged so far ahead in her learning, she can’t possibly be dragged back to baby school.
Nanny is inclined to agree, at least about not having to sit on a veranda for hours listening to lessons she didn’t grasp when she was Nessa’s age, and isn’t about to start now. Look, our Shell is becoming more unruly by the day! It’s all Nanny can do to keep him in line as it is. Healthy of limb and boasting a normal complexion, Shell is starting to run around with boys his own age on Ovvels, boys too young yet to be sent off to the marshes of vegetable pearl. But he’s getting a reputation as a bad influence. Parents show up to suggest the need to keep him under stricter supervision. Nanny can’t possibly abandon her post now. Unthinkable. Shell needs governance, and Frex is busy with his work. Nanny’s very sorry indeed, but Nessa’s education will have to wait.
“Isn’t it a shame.” Elphie sighs, relieved.
Then Lei volunteers to give Nessa the support she needs—helping her walk up the steps with a supportive arm, supplying her with sips of water. Assist with personal hygiene, even. “You’re not family,” snaps Elphie. “Father, really!”
Frex looks up from the table where he’s working over notes for tomorrow’s schedule of hectoring, worship, and funds-harvesting. He says mildly, “Why not? It might do Nessa some good.”
“Mother would never have allowed it. She’d be shocked.”
“Don’t be flip about your mother.” Frex uses an unexpectedly strict tone. “Melena had more schooling than I did. In lots of ways I relied on her, when I could get her attention. What cleverness you have comes from the Thropp line. If you’re enjoying this experiment in schooling, you have her to thank.”
So Nessa begins at the lodge, too. She doesn’t advance as quickly as Elphie has done. Elphie is secretly pleased at this. But Nessa is no slouch, either.
One day Nessa says to Elphie, “Do you think our mother was a woman of easy virtue?”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“A slut.” The word is angry in Nessa’s mouth, which purses in propriety after having let it slip out.
“I don’t know what that means either, and don’t tell me.”
Meanwhile, Lei stitches herself into the fabric of the family even more tightly. Everyone but Frex notices. But Nanny’s spool of white thread dropping on the floor, he doesn’t notice that, either. Nor the increasing vehemence of little Shell’s misbehaviors.