The Woman Who Smashed Codes

by Jason Fagone

But Elizebeth didn’t need the hitch in her first name to know she was different. Prone to recurring fits of nausea that began in adolescence and plagued her for years, she had trouble sitting still and keeping her tongue. She clashed with her father, a pragmatic, stubborn man who ordered his children around and believed women should marry young. She questioned her parents’ faith.

All her life, Elizebeth assumed that her restlessness was a defect that adulthood would somehow remove. She had called it “this little, elusive, buried splinter” and hoped for it to be “pricked from my mind.” But she was learning to see the splinter as a permanent piece of her, impossible to remove. “I am never quite so gleeful as when I am doing something labeled as an ‘ought not.’ Why is it? Am I abnormal? Why should something with a risk in it give me an exuberant feeling inside me?

When she spoke about the details of her investigations and findings, no one interrupted her to ask skeptical questions. It was obvious to Elizebeth that people here were used to treating Mrs. Gallup with great deference, that she was an important person at Riverbank, and that dinner conversations like this had probably happened many times before, with Mrs. Gallup holding court and the others nodding and smiling. Elizebeth got the sense that “Mrs. Gallup had dwelt only among those who agreed with her premise and that she had little personal contact with the viewpoint of those who did not believe.”

This reminds me of someone

And there comes a day when Elizebeth just thinks: no. There is nothing wrong with me. What’s wrong is with other people.