Educated: Chapter 6 Summary & Analysis

The winter after Tyler leaves, Audrey turns fifteen. She gets a job and a driver’s license, and starts spending more and more time away from home and the “restraints” Dad has been trying to put on her. Tara can feel her family “shrinking.” Dad, determined to keep making money and hold what’s left of the family together, makes Luke, Tara, and Richard work every day in the junkyard. Dad teaches the ten-year-old Tara the difference between aluminum and steel, and puts her to work sorting debris. He doesn’t allow her to wear gloves or a hard hat even as she handles rusted, jagged pieces of metal, claiming they’ll just slow her down.

The junkyard which was once Tara’s childhood playground becomes a “mysterious, hostile” place, as she’s forced to dodge the flying debris her father throws around carelessly. Tara thinks of all the injuries she’s seen her brothers incur over the years, but when she expresses her nervousness about getting hurt to Dad, he replies only that “God and his angels,” who are “working right alongside” them, won’t let Tara get hurt.

Mother, meanwhile, is steadily recovering from her head injury, but her memory is erratic and she’s plagued by terrible headaches. She often loses track of ingredients while mixing tinctures, and worries that she’ll never midwife again. When, at Christmas, a friend gives her a bottle of expensive essential oil that helps her headaches, Mother decides to start making her own. Mother relies on the help of “muscle testing” in making her oils—a process by which she holds ingredients around different parts of her body and gauges her body’s muscular response to determine whether she needs to add it or not.

Muscle testing soon becomes an exercise Mother does only with her fingers, by crossing the middle and index fingers and then “flex[ing] slightly to try to uncross them” while asking herself a question. If the fingers stay together, the answer is yes; if they part, the answer is no. Mother begins using muscle testing to determine answers in other kinds of healing, and she starts doing “energy work” on clients in the basement, adjusting their chakras and massaging pressure points. Mother sometimes enlists Tara and Richard’s help in these rituals, but Tara doesn’t feel the energy her mother purports to feel during the healing sessions.

Mother sees muscle testing as a “divine supplication” and relies upon it almost compulsively to complete even the most basic household tasks. Dad is enraptured by Mother’s new skill, believing that she, unlike doctors, can tell what’s wrong with someone just by touching them.

As Tara works in the scrap yard all winter, she finds herself “haunted” by thoughts of what Tyler is doing off at school. She wants to go to school herself, but is too afraid to ask her father for permission. She tries to make time to study in private, but her work in the junkyard and with mother often renders her too tired to focus on math, science, or history. Richard, meanwhile, studies obsessively in his free time, reading volume after volume of the family’s encyclopedia.

Tara begins studying religion, reading the Book of Mormon, the New Testament, the Old Testament, and the writings of early Mormon prophets. Though Tara struggles with the material, her work teaches her a “crucial” skill—“the patience to read things [she] could not yet understand.”

By the spring, Tara has become a slightly more competent scrapper, though she still fears accidents—and working with Dad. One morning, though, after filling a bin with over two thousand pounds of iron, Tara is forced to ask Dad for help in operating the heavy machinery needed to empty the bin. Dad, hoping to expedite the process, urges Tara to climb into the bin so that she can settle the iron once it’s been dumped. Though Tara doesn’t understand the plan, she agrees to it—and as Dad raises the forklift and starts pitching the bin forward, Tara becomes trapped as a piece of metal digs into her leg. Dad rebukes Tara for getting stuck, and urges her to go back up to the house and let Mother treat her bloody gash.

Mother muscle-tests Tara’s wound and declares that she will not get tetanus. She examines Tara’s bruises and determines that Tara has damaged her kidney—but decides to treat it with a “fresh batch of juniper and mullein flower.” As Tara’s wounds heal over the next several weeks, she arrives at a decision: she wants to go to school. She approaches Dad and asks for permission, but in response, he only asks her if she remembers the Biblical story of Jacob and Esau, implying that Tara is “not the daughter he had raised.”