The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate

Too late. “Yes, Mother,” I said, in my best cheerful-obedient-good-girl voice.

“Bring me your sewing first.”

“What?”

“Don’t say what like that, my girl. Bring me your sewing before there’s any talk about going to the river. And where’s your bonnet? You’ll freckle.”

How could I freckle? It was practically dark out. I tromped back up the stairs, feeling as if I were carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders.

“And stop stamping about like that,” Mother called. “You’re not carrying the weight of the world, you know.”

Her comment startled me into proper behavior. It was scary how she could read my mind. I crept the rest of my way up to my room and closed the door. I pulled my sampler from my sewing bag and looked at it. It had started out life as a perfect square but had evolved into a skewed rhomboid, with all the letters leaning sharply to the right. How were you supposed to make the stitches the same size? How were you supposed to keep the tension even? And, most of all, who cared about this stuff?

Well, I could answer the last one. My mother cared, and the rest of the world apparently did too, for no good reason that I could figure out. And I, who did not care, was going to be forced into caring. It was ridiculous. I threw the embroidery hoop across the room.

Two hours later, I took my work downstairs. The assignment was to embroider “Welcome to Our Home” in flowery script. I had made it as far as “Welco,” but it was all wobbly, so I had picked it out and reworked the entire W to show Mother.

“Is this all you have done?” she said.

“It’s a big letter! It’s a capital!”

“All right, all right. Lower your voice. You have done better, which shows me, Calpurnia, that you can do this if you would only apply yourself.”

Oh, how my brothers and I hated that word apply.

“Can I go?”

“Yes, you may go. Don’t be late for dinner.”

As Mother lit the parlor lamps, I shoved my handiwork away and dashed out the front door. There wasn’t much light left. Too late to collect diurnal samples. Great. I could see the newspaper: Girl Scientist Thwarted for All Time by Stupid Sewing Projects. Loss to Society Immeasurable. Entire Scientific Community in Mourning.

I seethed my way to the river and got there at darkfall. And then Viola’s bell clanged in the distance.

I clomped through the kitchen on the way to washing up and said to Viola, “How come I have to learn how to sew and cook? Why? Can you tell me that? Can you?”

I’ll admit it was a bad time to ask her—she was beating the last lumps out of the gravy—but she paused long enough to look at me with puzzlement, as if I were speaking ancient Greek. “What kind of question is that?” she said, and went back to whisking the gravy in the fragrant, smoking pan.

My Lord, what a dismal response. Was the answer such an ingrained, obvious part of the way we lived that no one stopped to ponder the question itself? If no one around me even understood the question, then it couldn’t be answered. And if it couldn’t be answered, I was doomed to the distaff life of only womanly things. I was depressed right into the ground.

After dinner I went to my room, put on my nightie, and read. I was munching my way, so to speak, through Granddaddy’s volumes of Dickens with great satisfaction and had made it all the way to Oliver Twist. Please, sir, could I have some more? The poor wretch’s circumstances were grim enough to make me reconsider my own situation.

I went downstairs for a glass of water. Mother and Father were sitting in the parlor with the door open.

“What will we do with her?” said Mother, and I froze on the landing. There was only one her they ever talked about, and it was me. “The boys will make their way in the world, but what about her? Your father feeds her a steady diet of Dickens and Darwin. Access to too many books like those can build disaffection in one’s life. Especially a young life. Most especially a young girl’s life.”

I wanted to yell, We’re doing important work! There’s the Plant! But then I’d really catch it for eavesdropping.

“I don’t see the harm in it,” said Father.

“She runs wild all day with a butterfly net. She doesn’t know how to sew or keep house,” said Mother.

“Well, plenty of girls her age don’t know yet,” said Father. “Don’t they?”

“She can’t cook a dry bean. And her biscuits are like . . . like . . . I don’t know what.”

Rocks, I thought. Isn’t that the word you’re looking for?

“I’m sure she’ll pick these things up,” said Father.

“Alfred, she keeps frogs in her room.”

“She does?”

I wanted to call out, That’s a lousy lie—they’re only tadpoles.