women’s state college. She had applied for one of the fifteen full honors scholarships available to in-state students, and though Daddy Will said that to have received anything at all was an honor, she had been awarded only what the letter of congratulation called “A Living Aid Scholarship,” covering the yearly dorm bill of one hundred and eighty dollars. She would be graduating twenty-ninth in a class of one hundred and seventeen, and now she wished that she had worked and slaved for A’s in those courses like Latin and physics, where she had felt it a real victory to get even a B-minus. Not that financial difficulties were going to prevent her going off to school. Over the years her mother had somehow managed to save two thousand dollars for Lucy’s education; this, plus Lucy’s own eleven hundred dollars in savings, plus the Living Aid Scholarship, would see her through four years, provided she continued to work full time at the Dairy Bar in the summers and was careful about spending on extras. What disappointed her was that she had wanted to go off completely independent of them; as of September, 1949, she had hoped to have to rely upon them for nothing more for the rest of herlife. The previous summer she had settled upon Fort Kean State College because it was the least expensive good school she could find, and the one where she had her strongest chance to get financial assistance; she had declined to apply anywhere else, even after her mother had revealed the existence of her secret “college fund.”
Why Lucy detested taking the money was not only because it would continue to bind her to home, but because she knew how it had been paid out to her mother, and she knew why too. Almost into the fifth grade she had thought it made her rather special to be the daughter of Mrs. Nelson, the piano teacher; then, all at once, the kids waiting on the porch in warm weather or sitting on their coats in the hallway in winter, were her own classmates—and that fact caused her to be filled with a kind of dread. No matter how fast she ran home from school, no matter how silently she tried to make it into the house, there would always be some child already at the piano, invariably a boy, who invariably would turn his head away from his lesson in time to catch sight of his classmate, Lucy Nelson, scooting up the stairs to her room.
At school she came to be known not as the kid whose mother gives the piano lessons but the kid whose father hangs around Earl’s Dugout—of that she was sure, though the division she now sensed between herself and her schoolmates was such that it did not permit her to ask what they actually thought, or to learn what it was they really did say behind her back. She pretended, of course, that hers was a normal household, even after she had begun to realize it was not—even after her mother’s pupils went back out into town to spread the story of what Lucy Nelson’s family was really like.
Of course, when she was small, she was nearly able to believe it when she told her friends that it was actually her grandparents who lived with them in their house, and not the other way around. Right off she told new friends that why she couldn’t bring anyone home in the afternoon was because her grandmother, whom she loved dearly, had to take her nap then. And she had new friends often. There was a period whenevery girl her age who moved to town heard from Lucy about her grandmother’s nap. But then a new girl named Mary Beckley (whose family moved on again the following year) began to giggle at the story, and Lucy knew that somebody had already cornered Mary Beckley and told her Lucy’s secrets. This so angered Lucy that tears came popping out of her eyes, and that so frightened Mary that she swore on her life that she’d giggled only because her baby sister took naps too …
Only, Lucy didn’t believe her. And from then on she refused ever to tell a lie again, to anyone about anything; from then on
Why Lucy detested taking the money was not only because it would continue to bind her to home, but because she knew how it had been paid out to her mother, and she knew why too. Almost into the fifth grade she had thought it made her rather special to be the daughter of Mrs. Nelson, the piano teacher; then, all at once, the kids waiting on the porch in warm weather or sitting on their coats in the hallway in winter, were her own classmates—and that fact caused her to be filled with a kind of dread. No matter how fast she ran home from school, no matter how silently she tried to make it into the house, there would always be some child already at the piano, invariably a boy, who invariably would turn his head away from his lesson in time to catch sight of his classmate, Lucy Nelson, scooting up the stairs to her room.
At school she came to be known not as the kid whose mother gives the piano lessons but the kid whose father hangs around Earl’s Dugout—of that she was sure, though the division she now sensed between herself and her schoolmates was such that it did not permit her to ask what they actually thought, or to learn what it was they really did say behind her back. She pretended, of course, that hers was a normal household, even after she had begun to realize it was not—even after her mother’s pupils went back out into town to spread the story of what Lucy Nelson’s family was really like.
Of course, when she was small, she was nearly able to believe it when she told her friends that it was actually her grandparents who lived with them in their house, and not the other way around. Right off she told new friends that why she couldn’t bring anyone home in the afternoon was because her grandmother, whom she loved dearly, had to take her nap then. And she had new friends often. There was a period whenevery girl her age who moved to town heard from Lucy about her grandmother’s nap. But then a new girl named Mary Beckley (whose family moved on again the following year) began to giggle at the story, and Lucy knew that somebody had already cornered Mary Beckley and told her Lucy’s secrets. This so angered Lucy that tears came popping out of her eyes, and that so frightened Mary that she swore on her life that she’d giggled only because her baby sister took naps too …
Only, Lucy didn’t believe her. And from then on she refused ever to tell a lie again, to anyone about anything; from then on
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