At dinner I listened to the cheerful chatter of my friends while longing for the isolation of my room. Professor Steinberg was seated at the high table. Each time I glanced at him, I felt that old instinct at work in me, tensing my muscles, preparing me to take flight.
I left the hall the moment dessert was served. It was a relief to escape all that refinement and beauty—to be allowed to be unlovely and not a point of contrast. Dr. Kerry saw me leave and followed.
It was dark. The lawn was black, the sky blacker. Pillars of chalky light reached up from the ground and illuminated the chapel, which glowed, moonlike, against the night sky.
“You’ve made an impression on Professor Steinberg,” Dr. Kerry said, falling into step beside me. “I only hope he has made some impression on you.”
I didn’t understand.
“Come this way,” he said, turning toward the chapel. “I have something to say to you.”
I walked behind him, noticing the silence of my own footfalls, aware that my Keds didn’t click elegantly on stone the way the heels worn by other girls did.
Dr. Kerry said he’d been watching me. “You act like someone who is impersonating someone else. And it’s as if you think your life depends on it.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.
“It has never occurred to you,” he said, “that you might have as much right to be here as anyone.” He waited for an explanation.
“I would enjoy serving the dinner,” I said, “more than eating it.”
Dr. Kerry smiled. “You should trust Professor Steinberg. If he says you’re a scholar—‘pure gold,’ I heard him say—then you are.”
“This is a magical place,” I said. “Everything shines here.”
“You must stop yourself from thinking like that,” Dr. Kerry said, his voice raised. “You are not fool’s gold, shining only under a particular light. Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were. It was always in you. Not in Cambridge. In you. You are gold. And returning to BYU, or even to that mountain you came from, will not change who you are. It may change how others see you, it may even change how you see yourself—even gold appears dull in some lighting—but that is the illusion. And it always was.”
I wanted to believe him, to take his words and remake myself, but I’d never had that kind of faith. No matter how deeply I interred the memories, how tightly I shut my eyes against them, when I thought of my self, the images that came to mind were of that girl, in the bathroom, in the parking lot.
I couldn’t tell Dr. Kerry about that girl. I couldn’t tell him that the reason I couldn’t return to Cambridge was that being here threw into great relief every violent and degrading moment of my life. At BYU I could almost forget, allow what had been to blend into what was. But the contrast here was too great, the world before my eyes too fantastical. The memories were more real—more believable—than the stone spires.
To myself I pretended there were other reasons I couldn’t belong at Cambridge, reasons having to do with class and status: that it was because I was poor, had grown up poor. Because I could stand in the wind on the chapel roof and not tilt. That was the person who didn’t belong in Cambridge: the roofer, not the whore. I can go to school, I had written in my journal that very afternoon. And I can buy new clothes. But I am still Tara Westover. I have done jobs no Cambridge student would do. Dress us any way you like, we are not the same. Clothes could not fix what was wrong with me. Something had rotted on the inside, and the stench was too powerful, the core too rancid, to be covered up by mere dressings.
Whether Dr. Kerry suspected any part of this, I’m not sure. But he understood that I had fixated on clothes as the symbol of why I didn’t, and couldn’t, belong. It was the last thing he said to me before he walked away, leaving me rooted, astonished, beside that grand chapel.
“The most powerful determinant of who you are is inside you,” he said. “Professor Steinberg says this is Pygmalion. Think of the story, Tara.” He paused, his eyes fierce, his voice piercing. “She was just a cockney in a nice dress. Until she believed in herself. Then it didn’t matter what dress she wore.”
The program ended and I returned to BYU. Campus looked the way it always had, and it would have been easy to forget Cambridge and settle back into the life I’d had there. But Professor Steinberg was determined that I not forget. He sent me an application for something called the Gates Cambridge Scholarship, which, he explained, was a little like the Rhodes Scholarship, but for Cambridge instead of Oxford. It would provide full funding for me to study at Cambridge, including tuition, room and board. As far as I was concerned it was comically out of reach for someone like me, but he insisted that it was not, so I applied.