Choate

Choate is the boarding school Bee Branch attends before returning to Galer Street. Rather than presenting the school through an extended account of its campus or institutions, the narrative makes it significant through the strain of Bee’s time there and Bernadette Fox’s later rejection of the kind of life she believes it represents.

Bee’s Experience at Choate

By the time Bee is back at Galer Street, she has left Choate. Recounting the upheavals of the preceding months to Mr. Levy, she includes both Choate and a roommate who did not like her among the experiences she is trying to explain. The school is therefore associated with a difficult period away from home, though the available account does not detail the roommate conflict or the daily life of the school.

Bee has written a book while at Choate. When she returns to Galer Street, she gives it to Mr. Levy rather than trying to explain everything in one rush. He later proposes that she complete the book as her spring research project, offers credit for the classes she missed, and enables her to graduate with her class. Choate thus marks not only a disrupted stretch of schooling but also the setting in which Bee began work that becomes part of her return to Galer Street.

Bernadette’s Opposition to Boarding School

In a letter to Bee, Bernadette makes a forceful case against her daughter going away to boarding school. She acknowledges that her objection is partly personal—she cannot bear the thought of life without Bee—but says she also believes the school’s social world would be wrong for her daughter. Bernadette characterizes its students as wealthy and snobbish, contrasting them with Bee’s Seattle friends, whom she describes as kind, casually dressed, unencumbered by cell phones, and untouched by fashion and pop culture.

The letter’s contrast makes Choate stand for more than a particular school: in Bernadette’s view, it belongs to an East Coast world whose young people are on a fast track to nowhere, while Bee belongs to Seattle and to the less polished, more familiar community of her friends. Her argument is protective but also possessive; she openly admits that she cannot bear separation from Bee even as she presents the decision as being chiefly in Bee’s interest.

Narrative Significance

Choate is understood through competing accounts rather than an institutional portrait. Bee’s hurried recollection links it to separation, an unhappy roommate situation, and missed classes; Bernadette’s letter turns it into the object of a broader criticism of privilege, conformity, and distance from home. The book Bee writes there complicates that negative association: even during a difficult period, Bee produces work that can be continued and recognized after she returns.