Educated: Chapter 4 Summary & Analysis

Tara tells the story of a time her brother Tyler, at seventeen, fell asleep at the wheel and drove the family car off the road. He’d been driving overnight back to Idaho from Arizona, on the way home from a trip to visit Grandma-down-the-hill and Grandpa-down-the-hill at their winter home. The trip had been Mother’s idea—Dad had settled into a deep depression after Christmas and could barely get out of bed. In February, the family piled into their station wagon and drove for twelve hours, through the night, to “plant” Dad in the sun like a sunflower in need of golden rays.

Dad remained listless the first few days in Arizona, but turned back into his old self when he heard Grandma-down-the-hill receive a voicemail from a doctor she’d been seeing. He saw her reliance on doctors as a show of “faithlessness,” and said she was the most “hateful” kind of sinner to accept Mother’s herbs and tinctures and then see a doctor behind her back. Dad told his mother that all doctors tried to kill their patients, and that by seeing one, she was becoming “a knowing participant in the plans of Satan.” These tirades continued for the rest of the trip, and though Grandma laughed them off, they disturbed the young Tara.

One afternoon, Grandma-down-the-hill takes Tara and Richard for a drive through the desert. She makes them wear their seatbelts—something their father has never made them do, as he doesn’t believe in them. Up in the red hills, Grandma helps the children hunt for small black rocks called “Apache tears.” The children collect the stones, which Grandma plans to sell, and all the while she tells them the legend of the Apache tears—the story of a tribe of Apaches’ terrible defeat at the hands of the U.S. Cavalry in these very hills, many years ago. The rocks, legend has it, are the tears the Apache women cried when they saw their husbands’ dead bodies. Even on the drive home, Tara cannot get the Apache women out of her head.

The longer the Westovers stay in Arizona, the more Tara finds herself missing the mountain, and the Princess atop it. Tara longs to return home, but is nevertheless surprised when one night after dinner Dad hurriedly tells everyone to collect their bags and get in the car as Mother’s eyes “darken with worry.”

Tara falls asleep on the drive home, and wakes only in the middle of the accident, as the station wagon hits a utility pole. As the car skids to a stop, everyone takes stock of one another’s injuries. Tyler and Audrey are bloody but conscious, and Tara has a big gash in her arm. Dad says that power lines have fallen on top of the car, and slowly gets out of the car, making sure his body never touches it and the ground at the same time. He goes to the other side to check on Mother, who is unconscious in the passenger seat. Tara remembers her father asking if he should call an ambulance, but is shocked by this memory, as it is decidedly out of character for her father.

A nearby farmer, whose tractor the Westovers’ car has hit, calls the police. They arrive on the scene, and soon Utah Power shuts off the lines draped over the station wagon. Tara remembers only bits and pieces of these moments, but seared into her brain is the memory of Dad lifting Mother—“her eyes hidden under dark circles the size of plums”—from the car.

Tara does not remember how their family got home. The next morning, Mother regains consciousness and begs to be carried to the basement, where there is no sunlight, while Tyler spits blood into the sink. Mother does not come out of the basement for a week, but every day when Tara goes to check on her, she is horrified by the swelling around Mother’s eyes—it is as if she has “two objects strapped to her forehead, large as apples, black as olives.” Despite Mother’s obvious injuries, there is never any talk of taking her to a hospital—Dad insists she is “in God’s hands.”

It takes months for Mother to recover. She is often confused, and calls Tara by her siblings’ names, unable to discern who she is. Even after the swelling goes down, Mother has dark circles around her eyes which the kids call “Raccoon Eyes,” oblivious of the fact that raccoon eyes is a legitimate medical term—and the sign of a serious brain injury. The sensitive Tyler blames himself for the accident, and “every decision that [is] made thereafter,” but Tara never blames him or anyone. A decade later, the accident reminds her of the story of the Apache women, whose fate was decided for them by others—like “grains of sand […] pressing into sediment, then rock.”