Tears by Permission
“She'd known how to do tears for a long time: you didn't have to squeeze them out, you only had to allow them.” The pause before she dials is “her best instrument — better than tears, better than her voice”: it gives the dean time to understand whom she is about to call. “Yes, sunshine?” — and her face changes, “not all at once — she was no cheap actress”: the lips, half a tone in the voice, the eyes. “She’d known how to do tears for a long time: you didn’t have to squeeze them out, you only had to allow them.” Her father’s three questions always come in the same order; the fourth is “Put him on.” The tears stop instantly, “the way water stops when you turn off the tap,” and the dean sees it “exactly as clearly as she wanted him to.”
This is not pretending in the everyday sense: the emotion is real; it is simply switched on by decision and switched off by result. This is how children grow up whose feelings were currency in the family economy from the start — they worked when they could be converted into a father’s attention. Note that Priscilla does not hide the mechanism; she demonstrates it to the dean: let him see that what sits before him is not a crying girl but a person who knows how to cry. And a detail from a later chapter: “There was only one person she had to cry for, and even then — over the phone.” From everyone else, the world hands her what she needs without tears.
