Читать книгу Bee Season - Myla Goldberg - Страница 6

AT PRECISELY 11 A.M. EVERY TEACHER in every classroom at McKinley Elementary School tells their students to stand. The enthusiasm of the collective chair scrape that follows rates somewhere between mandatory school assembly and head lice inspection. This is especially the case in Ms. Bergermeyer’s fourth/fifth combination, which everybody knows is where the unimpressive fifth graders are put. Eliza Naumann certainly knows this. Since being designated three years ago as a student from whom great things should not be expected, she has grown inured to the sun-bleached posters of puppies and kittens hanging from ropes, and trying to climb ladders, and wearing hats that are too big for them above captions like “Hang in there,” “If at first you don’t succeed …”and “There’s always time to grow.” These baby animals, which have adorned the walls of every one of her classrooms from third grade onward, have watched over untold years of C students who never get picked for Student of the Week, sixth-place winners who never get a ribbon, and short, pigeon-toed girls who never get chased by boys at recess. As Eliza stands with the rest of her class, she has already prepared herself for the inevitable descent back into her chair. She has no reason to expect that the outcome of this, her first spelling bee, will differ from the outcome of any other school event seemingly designed to confirm, display, or amplify her mediocrity.

Ms. Bergermeyer’s voice as she offers up spelling words matches the sodden texture of the classroom’s cinder block walls. Eliza expects to be able to poke her finger into the walls, is surprised to find she cannot. She can certainly poke her way through and past her teacher’s voice, finds this preferable to being dragged down by its waterlogged cadences, the voice of a middle-aged woman who has resigned herself to student rosters filled with America’s future insurance salesmen, Amway dealers, and dissatisfied housewives.

Eliza only half listens as Bergermeyer works her way down the rows of seats. In smarter classrooms, chair backs are free from petrified Bubble Yum. Smooth desktops are unmarred by pencil tips, compass points, and scissors blades. Eliza suspects that the school’s disfigured desks and chairs are shunted into classrooms like hers at the end of every quarter, seems to remember a smattering of pristine desks disappearing from her classrooms over spring and winter breaks to be replaced by their older, uglier cousins.

Bergermeyer is ten chairs away. Melanie Turpin, who has a brother or sister in every grade in the primary wing, sits down after spelling TOMARROW, which even Eliza knows is spelled with an O. Eliza also knows that LISARD is supposed to have a Z and that PERSONEL needs a second N. And suddenly the bee gets more interesting. Because Eliza is spelling all the words right. So that when Ms. Bergermeyer gives Eliza RASPBERRY, she stands a little straighter, proudly including the P before moving on to the B-E-R-R-Y. By the time Bergermeyer has worked her way through the class to the end of the first round, Eliza is one of the few left standing.

Three years before Eliza’s first brush with competitive spelling, she is a second-grader in Ms. Lodowski’s class, a room that is baby animal poster-free. Eliza’s school universe is still an unvariegated whole. The wheat has yet to be culled from the chaff and given nicer desks. There is only one curriculum, one kind of student, one handwriting worksheet occupying every desk in Eliza’s class. Though some students finish faster than others, Eliza doesn’t notice this, couldn’t tell if asked where she falls within the worksheet completion continuum.

Eliza is having a hard time with cursive capital Q, which does not look Q-like at all. She is also distracted by the fact that people have been getting called out of the classroom all morning and that it doesn’t seem to be for something bad. For one thing, the list is alphabetical. Jared Montgomery has just been called, which means that if Eliza’s name is going to be called, it has got to be soon. The day has become an interminable Duck Duck Goose game in which she has only one chance to be picked. She senses it is very important that this happen, has felt this certainty in her stomach since Lodowski started on K. Eliza assures herself that as soon as she gets called out her stomach will stop churning, she will stop sweating, and cursive capital Q will start looking like a letter instead of like the number 2.

Ms. Lodowski knows that second grade is a very special time. Under her discerning eye, the small lumps of clay that are her students are pressed into the first mold of their young lives. A lapsed classics graduate student, Ms. Lodowski is thrilled that her teaching career has cast her in the role of the Fates. Though she couldn’t have known it at the time, her abbreviated classical pursuits equipped her for her life’s calling as overseer of McKinley Elementary’s Talented and Gifted (TAG) placement program.

Ms. Lodowski’s home, shared with a canary named Minerva, is filled with photo albums in which she has tracked her TAG students through high school honors and into college. In a few more years the first of her former charges will fulfill destinies shaped by her guiding hand.

Ms. Lodowski prides herself upon her powers of discernment. She considers class participation, homework, and test performance as well as general personality and behavior in separating superior students from merely satisfactory ones. The night before the big day she goes down her class roster with a red pencil. As she circles each name her voice whispers, “TAG, you’re it,” with childlike glee.

Steven Sills spells WEIRD with the I before the E. Eliza spells it with the E before the I and is the last left standing. As she surveys the tops of the heads of her seated classmates she thinks, So this is what it’s like to be tall.

She gets to miss fifth period math. Under Dr. Morris’s watchful eye, she files into the school cafeteria with the winners from the other classes and takes her place in a plastic bucket seat. The seats are shaped in such a way as to promote loss of circulation after more than ten minutes. Two holes in each chair press circles into the flesh of each small backside, leaving marks long after the sitter has risen. Each chair has uneven legs, the row stretching across the stage like a hobbled centipede.

Through the windows on the left wall, buses arrive with P.M. kindergartners. In the kitchen, hundreds of lunch trays are being washed. From behind the closed kitchen comes the soothing sound of summer rain. Eliza feels a sudden pang of guilt for having left a lump of powdered mashed potato in the oval indentation of her tray instead of scraping it into the trash, worries that the water won’t be strong enough to overcome her lunchtime inertia.

Dr. Morris is the kind of principal who stands outside his office to say goodbye to students by name as they scramble to their buses. Administering the school spelling bee allows him the great pleasure of observing his best and brightest. The children before him are the ones whose names adorn the honor roll. They are names teachers track long after having taught them in order to say, “This one was my favorite,” or “I always knew this one would go far.” Eliza is the exception to this rule. When Dr. Morris spots her in the group, he is reminded of something he can’t quite place. At his puzzled smile, she blushes and looks away.

The meeting between Dr. Morris and Eliza’s father that Dr. Morris can’t quite remember occurs on Parents’ Night one month after Ms. Lodowski goes from Kathy Myers to John Nervish, skipping Eliza. Saul Naumann only learns of his daughter’s exclusion through one of his congregants who, after Shabbat services, announces loudly enough for the people on the other side of the cookie table to overhear that her son has been identified as Talented and Gifted. Saul realizes that the boy is in Eliza’s class. Eliza hasn’t tendered Saul the congratulatory note Aaron delivered at her age, the one that made Saul feel like a sweepstakes winner.

Saul’s is one of many hands Dr. Morris shakes that Parents’ Night. Dr. Morris’s office contains a desk with a framed picture of his daughter, two squeaky chairs, and a window that looks out onto the school playground. On a small bookshelf, binders of county educational code bookend with instructional paperbacks devoted to several categories of child including “special needs,” “precocious,” “problem,” and “hyperactive.” Dr. Morris keeps mimeographed pages from these books on hand to distribute to the parentally challenged.

“Hello, Mr. Naumann. It’s a pleasure to see you here tonight.” Dr. Morris remembers the son—smart, awkward, too quiet for his own good. While he knows the daughter’s face, he can’t attach words to the picture. He scans her file, hoping for help and finding nothing. “Eliza is a lovely child.”

“Thank you. We think she’s pretty special. Which is why I was a little surprised when I learned that she hadn’t been TAG-tested with the rest of her class.”

Morris manages a polite smile. Every year there is at least one like Mr. Naumann.

“Well, Mr. Naumann, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. Only a portion of the second grade is tested, the fraction of the class Ms. Lodowski feels may benefit from an accelerated curriculum.”

“The smarter ones.”

“There are a lot of different kinds of smarts, Mr. Naumann, a lot of ways for a child to be special.”

Dr. Morris addresses that last part to the picture on his desk. It’s too bad Saul can’t see this picture from where he’s standing. If he could see it, he might conclude that this is a somewhat sensitive topic for Dr. Morris. The only people who generally get to see Rebecca Morris’s picture are the students Dr. Morris catches using the word “retard.” He escorts these students to his office, where they are shown the picture and ordered to repeat the word, this time to his daughter’s face.

“Of course there are a lot of ways to be special,” Saul continues, no way to know that he really shouldn’t. “But my older son was placed in the TAG program, and I just thought that—”

Dr. Morris’s face has grown red. “Instead of focusing on what you think you lack, Mr. Naumann, why don’t you appreciate what you have? Eliza is a caring, loving child.”

“Of course she is. That’s not the issue.”

Dr. Morris pictures Rebecca walking unsteadily to the van that comes for her each morning, the beatific smile that fills her face at the sight of any animal, and her pleasure at a yellow apple cut into bite-size pieces. He wants Mr. Naumann to get the hell out of his office.

“So sorry, Mr. Naumann, but our time is up. I wouldn’t want to keep the other parents waiting.”

“But—”

“Goodbye, Mr. Naumann, a pleasure seeing you again.”

From third grade onward, Eliza’s class is divided into math and reading groups. Eliza’s reading group is called the Racecars. She likes it okay until she learns that the other reading group is called the Rockets. The Rockets read from a paperback that has The Great Books printed on its cover in gallant letters. When she asks Jared Montgomery what’s inside, he tells her that his group is reading excerpts from “the canon” and Eliza feels too stupid to ask if that means something other than a large gun. She can’t help but wonder if someone told her which books were great and which ones were just so-so, if she’d like reading more. While she eventually adjusts to the faded motivational posters featuring long-dead baby animals, and the fifties-era reading books whose soporific effects have intensified with each decade of use, she can’t get it out of her head that, while she is speeding around in circles waiting to be told when to stop, other kids are flying to the moon.

Within half an hour all the fourth graders have been eliminated except for Li Chan, who never washes his hair and outlasts two fifth graders and a sixth grader from a fifth/sixth combination. When Li finally misspells FOLLICLE, the eliminated fourth graders chant “Stink bomb” until Dr. Morris blinks the lights to quiet things down.

Eliza gets CANARY, SECRETARY, and PLACEBO. By the time CEREMONIAL and PROBABILITY come around, it is down to her, Brad Fry, and Sinna Bhagudori.

Everyone knows that Sinna is the smartest girl in school and that Brad is the smartest boy, but probably not as smart as Sinna. If anyone knows Eliza, it is from breaking the school limbo record, which got her name on the music classroom blackboard for a few weeks but which always goes to the short kids anyway.

Sinna has blue contact lenses and big boobs. Everyone knows her eyes are fake because they were brown the year before, but Sinna insists that a lot of people’s eyes change when they go through puberty.

Brad plays soccer at recess and has a lot of moles. There are rumors that he spends his summers at a camp for kids who take math and science classes because they want to, but Brad tells everyone he goes to soccer camp. No one believes him either.

A couple times when it’s Eliza’s turn, Sinna starts toward the podium and Dr. Morris has to remind her to wait. Waiting for Sinna to return to her seat, Eliza pretends she is a TV star during opening credits, her face caught in freeze-frame. She imagines her name appearing below her face in bold white letters.

Sinna spells IMMANENT without the second M. She is already walking back to her seat when Dr. Morris says, “I’m afraid that’s incorrect.” It gets very quiet, like at the beginning of a blackout before anyone has thought to fetch a flashlight. Sinna walks offstage biting her lower lip.

Brad is next, but he is so surprised by Sinna getting out that he has to ask for POSSIBILITY three times before he spells it with one S. Despite his assertions to the contrary, he also believes that Sinna is the smarter one. Which just leaves Eliza, who spells CORRESPONDENCE with her eyes closed to avoid looking at three rows of students staring at her in disbelief.

In Eliza’s fantasy she walks to the podium, which she is suddenly tall enough to see over, and begins speaking to a cafeteria suddenly filled to capacity.

A few of you might know my name, but most of you don’t even recognize me. I know you, though. And what I’m about to say is as important to you as it is to me.

It’s the lead-in to a speech from a particularly powerful after-school special. Eliza’s always thought it made a great beginning. No actual words come after that, but Eliza’s mouth keeps moving and the music swells. By the end, all the students are smiling with little tears in their eyes and Lindsay Halpern makes a place for Eliza at her table between her and Roger Pond.

Eliza stands outside Saul’s closed study door, an envelope hot in her hand. She’s not sure this is a valid interruption. She’s not sick, nothing’s on fire, and the district bee isn’t until the weekend. But if she waits for her father to come out so she can hand it to him, it might be another two hours.

Eliza considers waiting anyway. Perhaps her father will need to use the bathroom, or maybe he’ll get hungry for a snack. She puts her ear against the door but hears nothing. When she looks down she finds that her hands have unconsciously reopened the envelope and removed the letter. A few words are smeared now; the paper’s creases are fuzzed with wear. Eliza realizes for the first time that her last name is misspelled. She feels a sudden urge to tear the letter, burn it to ash, cram it down the disposal. Instead, she folds the letter back into thirds, licks the by now dissolved adhesive on the envelope’s flap, and shoves the letter through the crack beneath her father’s study door.

Saul’s study is smaller than Eliza’s bedroom in that it lacks a closet, making it the smallest room in the house not counting bathrooms. Its perceived dimensions are diminished further by the bookshelves lining its walls and piles of notes in various stages of collapse layering the floor. Notebooks of various thicknesses and binding methods protrude above the thinner strata like steppingstones. The average paper density increases toward Saul’s desk, which emerges from the tumult like a piece of flotsam tossed by the paper tide. Saul’s desk spares no room for distracting doohickey or clever calendar, covered as it is by books and notes, loose and bound. On the wall directly above the desk, framed pictures of Mordecai M. Kaplan and Gershom Scholem provide inspiration. A small desk lamp serves as one of only two light sources, both unnatural. The room’s lack of windows is for the best since the bookshelves leave no room for them.

In this room governed by disorder, the shelves are the exception to the entropic rule. Saul’s library is arranged alphabetically, recent paperbacks brushing spines with age-seasoned leather-bound volumes. English texts adjoin Hebrew and Yiddish. In Saul’s decision to mix languages, he has accorded privilege to a letter’s pronunciation over its ordinal placement. Thus, Hebrew writer Shmuel Yosef Agnon is in among the A’s alongside Aharon Appelfeld even though the Nobelist’s last name begins with an ayin and the novelist’s name begins with an alef. While the library’s overall organization might cause many a self-respecting academic to blush, to Saul the study is a paper-lined nursery in which his scholarly interests may grow and blossom by the light of two 80-watt soft white bulbs.

When Saul closes the study door behind him, he closes the book of the everyday world as well, placing it upon a distant shelf until familial duty or emergency calls him back. So it comes as no surprise that he doesn’t hear the quiet foosh of Eliza’s envelope. Unnoticed, it joins the morass of paper carpeting the floor of his study, invisible to anyone who doesn’t know to look.

Saul Naumann spends the first portion of his life as Sal Newman, son of Henry and Lisa Newman, decorator of Christmas trees and Easter eggs. Henry has every expectation that his only child will follow him into the car repair business. From an early age Saul has been replacing sparkplugs and changing oil. Though he dislikes the combined smells of car exhaust and sweat, the hardness of the garage floor, and the mess of wires and cold metal that compose the machines of his father’s fancy, Saul fosters these associations for the sake of the rare smiles proffered by his father in their company.

Saul is thirteen when his mother takes him into the attic and shows him the box. There is a photo of a bearded man with long sidelocks and a black hat, his hand on the shoulder of a boy. At first Saul cannot believe that the curly-haired boy with the fringes hanging past his shirt is his father, Heimel Naumann, the bearded man his grandfather Yehudah. Saul learns the word “Orthodox.” His mother shows him a pair of brass candlesticks and a wine cup. She describes a world ruled by the Book, a world with little room for change. She relates eloping with Heimel after Yehudah declared her not Jewish enough. Saul sees his birth certificate and learns of his father’s decision to renounce the faith, the shift from Heimel to Henry and Naumann to Newman occurring after Yehudah ignored Saul’s birth. Saul, who had been named for Yehudah’s brother Solomon in one son’s attempt to regain a father’s love, became Sal.

It is Lisa who sneaks her son books, occasionally taking Saul to a nearby synagogue on Henry’s Friday nights out. It is their secret until Henry comes home unexpectedly one evening to find them lighting Shabbat candles. From that point onward, Saul insists on being called by his given name.

By Saul’s sophomore year of high school, he has given up any pretense of interest in cars and his father has given up interest in him. When Lisa dies of cancer, the house becomes a lonely and divided place, the last link between father and son turning to dust in a box underground. The fights begin soon after, never violent but increasingly damaging.

Saul’s escape to a liberal arts college finalizes the rift. When Saul uses his student status to stay out of Vietnam, Henry officially washes his hands of his ungrateful, hippie Jew of a son.

Saul discovers LSD and Jewish mysticism at the same time, a chance concurrence that strengthens the validity of both. During his acid trips, Saul experiences the same sense of time displacement and receptivity described in the texts. On one occasion he attests to having ascended through several levels of being in a manner similar to the ancient mystics, who rode a chariot through six castles on six celestial realms to reach God at the seventh heaven. Saul becomes a campus celebrity and preferred LSD guide. At the end of his undergraduate career and with the war still on, it is only natural that he enter rabbinical school.

Saul enters Baruch Yeshiva on scholarship. His scholarship is revoked during his freshman year when, in the name of mental exploration, he convinces his roommate to place a tab on his tongue and the resultant bad trip leads to said roommate painting his naked body blue and white and running into the dean’s office to declare himself the new Israeli Prime Minister.

Saul returns to his alma mater to live rent-free in the attic of an off-campus house inhabited by undergraduates who know him by reputation alone. The attic is charred from a semi-recent fire, contains no electrical outlets, and is uninsulated. Saul can stand fully erect as long as he keeps to the room’s center. He illuminates the space with chains of Christmas lights running off an extension cord snaked up the narrow attic stairs from a lower-floor bedroom.

Saul spends his time in the library studying Jewish thought and history in a rigorous, self-styled curriculum that surpasses his academic efforts at any time during his official enrollment. He regularly attends religious services and adult education classes at a nearby synagogue. Alone in his attic, Saul practices the traditional songs and fantasizes about someday leading a congregation, if not as a rabbi then as a cantor.

There are drawbacks to this scavenged existence. While Saul has ample access to drugs and female undergrads in his capacity as sexual and psychoactive guide to the student body, the role has begun to wear thin. His acid trips are too déjà vu. He has worn deep grooves in the psychedelic path, falling into the same hallucinatory and revelatory ruts time after time. Increasingly, his affairs with women remind him of his age and the fact that he hadn’t pictured himself at twenty three making love to clumsy teenage coeds on a dirty twin mattress in a burned-out attic. Increasingly, Saul finds himself fantasizing about his own study, a job that gives him time to pursue his interests, and the prospect of children with whom he can share his hard-won life lessons.

On Friday nights, Eliza sits with her brother in the first row of the Beth Amicha synagogue. While Aaron recites the responsive prayers without glancing at his prayer book, Eliza focuses on a spot on the bima between Rabbi Mayer and her father and tries to block out the robotic monotone of the congregation reading as one. It reminds her too much of aquarium fish, the mechanical open and shut of their mouths as they stare blankly through the glass.

While the congregation drones on, Eliza turns her attention to the brown-flecked linoleum floor tiles and thinks of the biblical exodus from Egypt. She transforms each fleck into a Jew in a windswept robe, trekking forty years across the desert to reach the Promised Land. She imagines blisters from uncomfortable sandals. She pictures a tribe of Charlton Hestons looking righteous and bearded and sun-creased. Her reverie is interrupted by Rabbi Mayer’s voice telling the congregation to rise, which she manages to do fast enough to hide the fact that, moments ago, the floor had been the Sinai.

Rabbi Mayer is a tree trunk of a man with a broad forehead and bushy eyebrows that have gone gray even though the rest of his hair remains dark. He looks out at the congregation through disproportionately small eyes, which he has willed down in size to take in as little of the world as necessary. Beth Amicha would not have been his preference, but he was Beth Amicha’s rabbi of choice. With suburban rabbis outnumbering suburban synagogues two to one, Orel Mayer chose a steady salary over spiritual affinity. A Conservative Jew, Mayer disapproves of Beth Amicha’s laxer Reform tendencies. He had initially hoped to spur the congregation to new heights of observance but Saturday evenings, when he lights the braided Havdalah candle and watches the shadows flicker upon the synagogue’s walls, he is often alone. Beth Amicha tends to regard Shabbat as a Friday night obligation. Most congregants have never been to a Havdalah service, have never heard the crisp crszh of the Havdalah flame being quenched by the wine, the true moment of Sabbath’s end. Rabbi Mayer longs to lead a congregation that appreciates this sound. But a good rabbinate is hard to find. He comforts himself with the fact that his is not the life of the itinerant rabbi, reduced to performing the brisses, weddings, and bar mitzvahs of strangers.

Saul’s gangly arms look particularly cartoony when he leads prayers on his guitar, strumming and even thumping as he sings. On the Judaism spectrum Saul’s self-proclaimed Reconstructionism puts him left of center, an affiliation the congregation hoped would counterbalance Rabbi Mayer’s, leaving Beth Amicha’s services somewhere in the middle. By playing the strict traditionalist, Rabbi Mayer makes the congregants feel as if they are being the type of Jew of whom their parents would approve. By playing his guitar and turning prayers into group sing-alongs, Saul allows people to have enough fun to forget they’ve come largely out of guilt. Rabbi Mayer is the dentist, Saul the congregation’s lollipop reward for having kept their appointment.

English prayers outnumber Hebrew ones. The Jewish Congregational Prayerbook attempts to compensate for this by using “thou” and “thee” instead of “you,” and by adding “-est” to verb endings. “Mayest thou liest down and risest up” is supposed to feel more like the four-thousand-year-old language the book has largely replaced. There is, of course, some Hebrew. A gifted minority can parse the words without any idea of their meaning. For those who forgot Hebrew phonetics soon after depositing their bar mitzvah checks, there are English transliterations.

The foreword to the JCP claims that the transliterations are “for the reader’s ease and comfort.” This gentle lie cloaks an embittered editor’s elaborate scheme to avenge the childhood he suffered while actually learning the language. SH replaces T; a K is inserted where a G would be more appropriate. As a result, it is painfully apparent who is reading the Hebrew and who is not. Misbegotten syllables collide midair with their proper cousins, making the service more closely resemble a speech therapy class than a religious gathering.

Aaron will recite the Hebrew just a little faster than everyone else, just to show that he can. He doesn’t need to actually look at the JCP; he can recite the entire service beginning to end with his eyes shut. Since he was eight, people have been saying he should be a rabbi. Aaron is embarrassed by how much he still likes to hear this. Walking through the synagogue doors, he imagines heads turning to look, excited whispers of “There goes the cantor’s son.” Inside Beth Amicha’s walls, he is junior class president, football captain, and star of the school musical. In Aaron’s imaginary congregational yearbook he is Most Popular and Most Likely to Succeed, with the special added superlative of Best Young Jew. In Beth Amicha, he’s pretty sure girls smile at him sometimes. He never doubts his clothes. He is neither too tall nor too pale.

Eliza can’t read Hebrew like her brother. In the time it takes her to negotiate the first five words, picking her way right to left across the page, the prayer is halfway over. Rather than add to the aural melee, she chooses to keep her mouth shut.

For years after his summary dismissal from Dr. Morris’s office, Saul entertains hopes that Eliza will prove her elementary school principal wrong. Grading quarter after grading quarter he erases all memory of report cards past, tearing open each successive manila envelope in a frightful evocation of predator and prey.

Eliza is sitting at the kitchen table so engrossed in a Taxi rerun that a mini-pretzel is frozen in its trajectory from the bag to her mouth. The sealed manila envelope rests on the table just beyond the pretzel bag’s shadow. Jim Ignatowski and Alex Rieger are far more comforting than the sound of Saul exiting his study. Eliza can block out the sounds of her father’s arrival altogether if she concentrates very hard on the openings and closings of Alex Rieger’s bloodless mouth.

Eliza is seven, she is nine, she is six and a half. She is any age at all between second grade and the present.

Jim Ignatowski is bugging his eyes out at Latke Gravas, that funny little foreigner, and Eliza is right there in the taxi depot with them, can practically smell Louis’s cigar as he barks commands from the dispatch desk, wants to bury her face in Latke’s grease-stained overalls. Her father’s hand snaps her out of it.

Eliza wishes her father’s hand were on her shoulder for some other reason, generally covets all forms of his attention. She feigns absorption in the TV so that the hand will stay a little longer. Eliza has learned this trick from Saul himself, though she knows his powers of concentration are real.

Take, for example, the time the ambulance came for Mrs. Feruzza when she broke her hip. The sound of passing sirens shook the walls, but Saul swears he didn’t hear a thing, reading as he was a recent translation of Pico della Mirandola. Eliza isn’t convinced her father would hear an emergency knock on his closed study door. What if she was bleeding, choking, going blind, the house burning down, the escaped convict holding her at knifepoint? She has been kept awake nights wondering if her father would save her in time.

The hand on her shoulder is gone. The manila envelope, now empty, has fallen to the floor. Eliza cannot help but watch her father’s eyes scan the twin grade columns. She feels compelled to watch his face fade from expectation to resignation. Math, C. Science, C. Social Studies, C.Work Habits, B. Behavior, A. Reading, B. Spelling, A. Then, the forced smile, the patting of the head. The click of Saul’s door after his silent retreat to his study always manages to cut through the sound of the television. That night when Eliza glides into sleep, she sees the disappointment on her father’s face behind her closed lids.

Eliza realizes too late that slipping the spelling bee notice under her father’s door may have been a mistake. There is no historical reason for her father to think that an envelope from her is a good thing. When, that first day, he emerges from his office without lauding her bee victory, Eliza assumes he has saved the envelope’s opening for a better mood. She decides to keep quiet to preserve the surprise. She likes picturing Saul’s face the moment he realizes the envelope’s true contents, mentally screens and rescreens this imagined moment to ease her anxiety.

When three days pass without a word Eliza, so accustomed to being disappointing, begins to wonder if the singularity of this, her first achievement, has caused her to overinflate its importance. Spelling, after all, is a skill made redundant by the dictionary. The steady stream of spelling A’s on her report card has never inspired much praise. Perhaps her father is even a little embarrassed? That all his daughter can do is spell? His daughter, who still can’t recite the Hebrew alphabet? Eliza accepts this possibility with the inherent grace of the acutely under-confident, decides not to mention it until he does.

By Friday night, Eliza’s resolve has been seriously shaken. The district bee is less than twenty four hours away. Even if her father is not impressed by her victory, he should have acknowledged by now that there are transportation needs to be met. Saul has never shirked his duty as child chauffeur, is a reliable member of any carpool. But, by now, Eliza cannot imagine bringing it up. Like many things left unsaid, Eliza’s thoughts have metastasized, kernels of doubt exploding into deadly certainties. She has taken Saul’s silence to mean that her accidental achievement is too little too late. Friday night after services, she cannot sleep. She stays in bed until she can’t stand picturing another version of Dr. Morris’s rebuke for her failure to serve as the school’s spelling representative. It’s way past midnight. Eliza decides to visit her mother in the kitchen.

Miriam Naumann is a hummingbird in human form, her wings too fast to be seen without a stop-motion camera. The silver in her hair makes her seem electric, her head a nest of metal wires extending through her body. Eliza can only imagine the supercharged brain that resides inside, generally equates the inside of her mother’s head with the grand finale of a July Fourth fireworks display. The fact that Miriam only needs a nightly three hours of sleep helps to foster this mental image. Saul has calculated, with some envy, that his wife’s Spartan sleep requirements gain her two and a half months more wakefulness than the average person annually.

Eliza has never seen her mother’s law office but is certain that it is kept as obsessively clean as the kitchen. Counters are waxed daily, as is the floor. The dishware in the cabinets is arranged according to precise plan, the stacks spaced exact distances apart and ordered according to a conception of size, color, and function that no one but Miriam fully understands. Miriam refuses to waste anything and insists upon maximum space conservation, such that a spectrum of containers is needed to house everything from the single remaining meatball to the half bowl of uneaten salad. The Tupperware she uses toward this end, stored in cabinets under the oven, is a vision of military precision.

Miriam cleans at night. She is working the Formica in her favorite rubber gloves when Eliza sits at the kitchen table. The room is silent except for the tick of the oven clock and the smrsh, smrsh of the green side of Miriam’s Scotch Brite scrubber sponge pad. Eliza knows she could sit here for an hour without attracting her mother’s notice. In a concentration contest, Miriam would pin Saul to the mat every time.

“Mom?”

Miriam looks up mid-stroke. “Elly? When did you wander in?”

“Just a few seconds ago. I can’t sleep.”

Miriam works the counter like she’s massaging sore muscles. She is at her most placid in the morning’s small hours. Eliza used to fake insomnia for the chance to stay up with her, a ruse Miriam became expert at detecting. For Eliza, the smell of solvent conjures up rival feelings of love and frustration.

“Are Saul and Aaron asleep?”

In Miriam’s conversations with her children, Saul has always been Saul and never “father.” It is a habit of speech to which Eliza, after eleven years, still hasn’t adjusted. Saul’s name in her mother’s mouth makes Eliza feel as if her father is not actually hers, just some man who has come to live with them.

“Yeah. They’re asleep.”

Miriam flips the cleaning pad from green to yellow, downshifting from scrubber to sponge. The counter gleams like an ice rink, post-Zamboni. Eliza had originally intended to tell her mother about the bee, but something about the way Miriam is scrubbing makes Eliza fear that her words will be washed away upon leaving her lips. Eliza has a growing suspicion that she never won the bee at all, her father’s silence proof that she has imagined everything.

Eliza decides to keep quiet. If the bee isn’t real, she would like to hold on to its illusion a little longer.

Miriam turns her attention to the refrigerator. She removes a jar of gherkins, a bottle of Worcestershire, and a tub of margarine, wiping each with a Handiwipe before lining them precisely along the line in the linoleum floor tile pattern. The fridge light bathes Miriam and the foodstuffs in a soft, yellow glow. Though Eliza cannot identify the song’s tide, she finds herself mentally humming the opening bars of the Pachelbel Canon, the image of her mother at the fridge having tapped into a memory of the music from a light bulb commercial.

“Mom?”

Miriam jerks her head like someone caught sleeping in class.

“Silly me, forgot you were here.” Miriam offers Eliza the jar. “Would you like a gherkin?” Miriam is the only one who actually eats the gherkins, drinking the juice from the jar when she’s through.

“No, thanks. I’ve been wondering. Do you clean so much because you like to or because you have to in order to get to sleep?”

The light from the refrigerator turns Miriam’s silver hairs to gold. The Worcestershire has been placed in the exact center of the middle shelf of the refrigerator door. A pint of strawberries has taken its place on the floor between the pickles and the Parkay. Miriam knits her eyebrows together until they resemble a hairy rendering of a bird in flight. Eliza isn’t sure her mother has heard her question. When Eliza looks into Miriam’s eyes, she sees vast intelligence and unspannable distance.

Miriam is born to wealthy parents for whom parenthood equals patriotism. Melvin and Ruth Grossman’s desire for a large, boisterous family à la Kennedy is tempered, with each of Ruth’s miscarriages, into steely determination. Some of Ruth’s near pregnancies are cruel in their duration, allowing for hopes to be raised and names to be chosen before the painful end. This only intensifies the couple’s fervency. After four childless years of marriage Ruth and Mel have become procreative partisans in the clash between will and womb. Ruth’s ultimate pregnancy and delivery of a baby girl is a battle won but a war lost; Miriam’s difficult birth leaves Ruth unable to bear more children. Accordingly, Miriam becomes the repository for the expectations Mel and Ruth harbored for all five of their conceptual offspring. These quintupled aspirations trickle down to Miriam through a series of high-powered nannies and tutors, money no object in insuring that their sole surviving progeny receives the best of everything five times over.

Miriam is an exceptional and obsessive child. She forbids anyone to touch her toys and insists upon her underwear being washed twice before its return to the bureau drawer. Mel and Ruth interpret their daughter’s eccentricity as a sign of genius, insist she be humored to facilitate her intellectual growth.

Miriam learns the extent of her social maladjustment upon her enrollment at a prestigious boarding school at age twelve. There, her natural predilection for study is reinforced by the unremitting mockery of her peers, the library quickly becoming her only place of refuge outside the classroom.

She is a phenomenal student. In college her powers of concentration achieve mythic status when she is evacuated from the stacks by a fireman who discovers her intent upon a book despite the blaring alarm that has cleared everyone else from the building.

Miriam and Saul meet when she is finishing law school and he is working as a research assistant for a Judaism professor. Saul has abandoned drugs to devote himself to a life of mystical scholarship. He now knows that LSD was a false doorway, a simulation of an experience accessible only after years of devoted study. He looks upon his acid insights as shadowy impostors, clay pigeons that will explode at the first touch of true transcendence. Though he knows he may never share the experience of the ancient mystics, Saul has decided to spend the rest of his life trying. Miriam embodies the intellectual discipline Saul senses he will need to reach his goal. Her unconventional mannerisms seem charming indicators of her rich mental life. He is attracted by her permanent slouch, her head always slightly craned forward as if examining a book’s fine print. He likes the solidity of her body, neither fat nor thin, which she carries with a charming lack of self-awareness. As their acquaintance deepens, the hidden workings of Miriam’s mind beckon to Saul like a seven-veiled Salome.

Their early courtship consists of shared dinners in the campus cafeteria followed by neighboring seats at lectures with titles like “God and the Plague: Religious Revivalism in the Middle Ages,” and “Unmaking Your Mind: Discerning Truth From Falsehood in the Midst of Vietnam.” Saul thrills to Miriam’s intellectual voracity, attends the lectures solely to observe her assiduity as she drinks in the words. Weeks later, she can alternately defend or destroy the lecturer’s arguments point by point without having taken any notes.

Until law school, Miriam’s entire academic career is single-sexed, boys an elective she bypasses. Though she has been on a few abortive dates, Saul is the first beau willing to indulge her interests, the first not to suggest popcorn and a formulaic comedy followed by an invitation to his apartment. Saul’s experiences with the greater portion of the female student body at his alma mater have taught him to be a good listener. With Miriam he is patient, luring her with his constancy.

Miriam is grateful for the attention. Aware that her unique temperament might severely limit her relationship options, she had been willing to take on someone far more socially stunted than Saul. Though not religious, Miriam takes self-congratulatory pride in dating a Jew, on occasion even accompanying Saul to synagogue for the opportunity to analyze group religious ritual.

Into their third week of dating, Miriam scrutinizes the library’s dog-eared Joy of Sex and Hite Report from the relative privacy of her cubicle. Sex, like ironing or changing a flat tire, is an essential life skill to be mastered. She is intrigued by a firsthand account of an orgasm as a giant body wave.

And so, after a month of twice-weekly dinner/lecture dates, Miriam and Saul make love. It is the longest Saul has waited to bed a woman he is wooing. While Miriam harbors unspoken reservations (she still prefers to wash her underwear twice and is well versed in the number of microorganisms exchanged during a kiss), she is intrigued by Saul’s vast sexual experience and knows he represents her best chance at a good lay. Miriam is glad they go to his apartment. While somewhat willing to yield up her body, she is less certain about her sheets and towels.

Though Saul wants to undress his new lover himself, Miriam insists upon removing her own clothes, standing with her back to Saul to fold blouse and slacks, placing each neatly on a chair before proceeding. Saul marvels at Miriam’s softness, at the woman inside the scholar. He loves her small breasts and wide hips, takes to calling her his hidden pear, a pet name that makes Miriam blush but which she secretly enjoys.

Miriam is intrigued by the spareness of Saul’s body. She is grateful for the opportunity to examine his angles, his long limbs and fingers, this her first object lesson in male anatomy. Miriam’s shyness at her own nakedness momentarily disappears with the novelty of his. She is more interested in Saul’s scrotum than his penis, fascinated by the way its skin undulates at her slightest touch, how it shrinks with the cold and Saul’s increasing arousal, relaxing into a loose purse after making love, when it has soaked up the warmth of the sheets and their bodies.

The two bond over their mutual lack of family ties: Saul from his disownment, Miriam from the car accident that orphaned her as a college junior. Both want children. Miriam has inherited her parents’ idea of procreative legitimacy, wants to compensate for her only-childdom. She sees in Saul the househusband who will enable her parental ambitions without disabling her autonomy. In Miriam, Saul sees the means to a book-lined study and a lifestyle conducive to mystical advancement. They are both absolutely certain these things equal love.

When Eliza knocks on her brother’s door Saturday morning, he is trying to abstract the reflection of his chest in the mirror. If he can pretend that his chest belongs to a stranger, he may be able to judge it objectively rather than through ugly-colored glasses. His sister’s knock sparks a comprehensive blush, the pale skin from forehead to stomach turning shades of sunburn.

Aaron hesitates before opening the door. To shirt or not to shirt? He and Eliza used to see each other topless all the time. That was before being six years apart meant anything, when their small, pale chests were indistinguishable in the tree-strewn sunlight of the backyard. It was before Aaron had learned that a small, pale chest can be a liability, that six years apart is an expanding universe with a brother at one end and a sister at the other.

But Aaron wants to play Shirts against Skins without chickening out if he’s picked for the wrong team. He wants to feel comfortable in just his bathing trunks. He decides he’d better answer the door the way he is.

Shirtless, Aaron looks even more breakable than usual, as if caught in an act better accomplished from within a cocoon. A thin vein descends the left side of his neck and across the skin of his upper chest like a crack in a windowpane. Eliza tries not to act surprised at the sight of it. Though she hasn’t given Aaron’s chest much thought, she assumed it still looked the same as the last time she saw it, which, now that she thinks about it, was a really long time ago. Since then, her brother’s nipples have grown. There are curly black hairs. The hairs are sparse and thin, as if sapped by their struggle to grow so dark from such pale skin.

Aaron’s chest hairs call to mind other body hairs, hairs that make Eliza decidedly uncomfortable. She shifts her focus to her brother’s face. When she looks up, however, she realizes that Aaron has been watching her watching his chest. She looks down again, this time at his feet, which she notices are also hairy.

“Um, I was wondering if you could drive me somewhere,” Eliza says to the tuft below the first knuckle of her brother’s leftmost toe.

Years and years before hairs and spelling bees, Aaron drives Eliza places all the time. Their two modes of transport are the living-room couch and the fallen-down tree in the backyard, one for when it’s raining and the other for when it’s not. While both agree that the log is better for making their destinations feel more authentic, Eliza has a special fondness for the couch, where she can sit beside and not behind her brother, taking head on the dangers that come their way. And there are always dangers. In addition to being navigator Eliza is official spotter of the alien monsters and sea squids and pumas with which they regularly engage in furious and bloody battle. Eliza likes letting her brother lead the attacks. Aaron knows all the secret moves of the ninja and Jedi and has even taught her a few. Eliza takes for granted her brother’s availability for these and other games, has no cause to question his lack of additional playmates, ones perhaps a little closer to him in age. It is Aaron to whom Eliza turns after a bad dream has scared her awake, the warmth of his bed assurance that she will be protected should her night crawlers return.

Eliza’s first day of kindergarten, Aaron pilots her through the doors of McKinley Elementary with sixth-grade flair. He points out office, cafeteria, and library, describes a secret short-cut to the playground swings, and explains the trick to evading as long as possible the teacher’s end-of-recess whistle. Eliza starts kindergarten assured that her six-years-older brother has vanquished all school-born monsters, squids, or pumas. Aaron, who can take Eliza to Neptune or to the bottom of the ocean. Aaron, who can impale an attacking mastodon with one hand while fending off a Cro-Magnon with the other. Aaron, whose sister’s gilded image of him will last four more months before the real world strips it from him.

Since Aaron earned his license, no one has asked him for a ride anywhere. This is probably for the best, as Aaron is an extremely cautious driver, viewing the car as an extension of himself and, therefore, open to attack at any moment. Another person in the car might send his wariness into overdrive.

“If Dad won’t take you, then he probably won’t let me take you either,” Aaron responds to his sister’s request. Aaron started talking softly so long ago that he has forgotten it was originally a conscious choice. Though Eliza has grown used to it, she can remember running through the backyard armed with thwacking sticks while Aaron screamed, “BEWARE, Space Demon, for it is I, CAPTAIN A, who have come to BLAST you into the 13th GALAXY!”

Aaron feels too weird being in front of Eliza without a shirt, but putting one on now might only draw attention to the fact that he was shirtless before. Besides, he really wants to be able to walk around for hours naked from the waist up, even outdoors, and not think about it.

“You’re not listening,” Eliza complains, tossing a sock in Aaron’s general direction but hitting him in the left nipple, an unintentional bull’s-eye. “The bee is in Norristown this afternoon. I need a ride.”

Aaron opts for a shirt after all. “What bee?” asks the blue pocket tee being pulled over his head.

Eliza is grateful for the clothing choice. T-shirted, Aaron seems less like a flip-book construction—bird head, man body, goat legs—and more like her brother again. “I told you already. The district bee.”

“Don’t you have to win your school bee or something to be in that?” Aaron’s voice is a little louder now that his nipples are hidden.

Eliza rolls her eyes and smiles.

“God, Elly, how did you do that?”

Her face falls.

“I mean, God, Elly, that’s great!”

“I guess.” Eliza’s voice has become as soft as her brother’s.

“No, really.” Aaron puts his hand on Eliza’s shoulder. He’s really, really glad he decided on the shirt. “I’m totally impressed. I bet Dad’s in Dad-heaven. He loves that stuff.”

Eliza gives a small shrug and realizes she’s about to cry. She decides it’s time to talk about the envelope.

Eliza follows Aaron downstairs to their father’s study. Even though the door is open, Eliza feels odd stepping over the threshold. She envies the ease with which Aaron enters, as if Saul’s study were just another room.

The room is dark except for a circle of yellow light over Saul’s desk, which illumines an airborne sea of dust. Saul is engrossed in a leather-bound book with stiff pages that, when turned, creak like old bones.

“Hey, Dad?” Aaron’s voice is swallowed up by the dust born of innumerable book pages and spines. To Eliza, the air itself seems heavy with knowledge. Aaron tries again, this time louder.

Eliza recognizes her mother in the way Saul suddenly turns his head toward the sound.

“Hello, Aaron! I was just reading about the mystics’ migration to Israel. Of course, it wasn’t officially Israel yet, but—”

“Dad, did you get an envelope from Elly this week?”

At first Saul’s eyes are blank, as if not even his daughter’s name holds meaning. “Envelope? Was I supposed to receive an envelope?” Eliza feels her stomach tighten and realizes she is unable to speak. With her eyes she implores Aaron to continue.

“Elly says she won the spelling bee.”

Saul’s face lights up. “Why, that’s wonderful! The class bee. You know, when I was thirteen—”

“No, Dad.” Eliza’s voice is impatient. “Not just the class bee. The school bee.” Eliza watches the dust ride the currents of her breath.

“Well, that’s just.…” Saul looks at Eliza as if she has suddenly borne a delicious fruit from her navel. “This is quite a surprise!”

“But I already told you. You’ve known all week.” Eliza spits the words. “And you haven’t said anything.” She feels the pressure of tears against her eyeballs but forbids herself to cry.

“Eliza. Elly-belly. I didn’t know. How could I have known? When did you tell me?”

Eliza’s face is pink. “The envelope. I put it under your door on Monday.”

The room is silent. For the first time Eliza notices the papers that cover the floor like snowfall. Saul grins.

“Then it must be down here somewhere.”

Saul, Aaron, and Eliza sort through the drifts of paper. It is Aaron who finds the envelope, smudged from Eliza’s hands and taped where she had torn it.

“Is this it?”

For a split second Eliza pictures opening the envelope and finding nothing there, the letter having been absorbed into the dense piles of paper around it. She stifles the urge to snatch the envelope from her brother.

Aaron realizes that his standing mental image of Eliza is three years out of date; in his mind she is still a shy second grader quietly insistent upon matching her socks with her shirt every morning. He wonders when she started parting her hair on the left and if she’s always had the nervous habit of sucking in her cheeks.

The way Saul reaches for the envelope reminds Eliza of first-time Torah bearers, stiff-armed with their fear of mishandling the sacred burden. She likes that he uses a letter opener instead of his fingers. The smile that appears momentarily erases years of report card trauma.

“This,” Saul says in a reverent voice, “is a beautiful thing.”

Eliza is halfway through kindergarten when she sees her brother get beat up. What was thought to be a drill has, with the arrival of the McKinley Fire Department, been elevated to the level of a small, real fire. Though the tray of chicken fingers was extinguished long ago, certain protocols need to be followed, granting the students at McKinley a spontaneous recess while the fire department goes through the mandated motions. Eliza, as an A.M. kindergartner, was not expecting to experience recess until first grade and feels particularly lucky to have been given a sneak preview.

Eliza is waiting her turn at the swings. She is fifth in line, but the BONG BONG BONG of the alarm has been off for a while now, the firemen are returning to their trucks, and she is beginning to doubt that she will get a turn before everyone is sent back to class. She decides to abandon the line to investigate the noises coming from behind the line of evergreen bushes across the grass.

She thinks it may be Holly Ermiline and Gina Gerardi, whom she thought she heard talking about collecting red berries from the bushes in order to paint their fingernails, which Eliza thinks is a pretty stupid idea since she’s heard that the berries are poisonous. Even though she doesn’t really like Holly or Gina, she should at least tell them to wash their hands when they’re done.

As Eliza nears the bushes, she realizes there is too much sound and movement to be Gina and Holly. In fact she gets a sort of sick feeling in her stomach that tells her she probably doesn’t want to get any closer to the bushes at all. But it’s the kind of feeling that also tells her in a soft, persuasive voice to keep going, the same instinct that guides young, naive hands to the pretty red stove burner even though they’ve been told it is very, very hot.

Eliza can make out two figures standing over a third. Eliza’s first thought is dog. She’s seen boys throwing stones at a stray that hangs around the school. The dog, named Sucker by the stone throwers, slams into trees in its frightened attempts to get away but is always there the following morning, waiting for the next cycle of torment to begin. Eliza bristes at the thought of the dog being caught, momentarily forgets her size and age, and ups her pace to the bushes, ready to battle even Marvin Bussy for the sake of Sucker’s protection.

She is steps away from the bush when she sees a flash of skin and realizes that what she thought was a dog is not a dog, despite the whimpering sounds. She is close enough now to recognize the two standing figures as Marvin Bussy and Billy Mamula. They call themselves the B.M. team, which Eliza thinks is really gross but which Aaron tells her just confirms their place in the world as pieces of shit, which is the only time Eliza has ever heard her brother swear. Like most of the school, Eliza fears Marvin and Billy, but being both younger and a girl places her low enough on the elementary school food chain to allow her to call them names behind their backs.

Eliza’s willingness to face a conceptual Marvin Bussy evaporates at the prospect of encountering the actual one even though she knows she’d have to do something really bad to get him to pick on a kinder-gartner. She has never witnessed Marvin’s malice first hand. His cruelty, like sex, is something she has only heard about, something that only happens in places she doesn’t go.

Eliza is staring at the scene a few seconds before she realizes that the thing that is not a dog looks a lot like her brother. Aaron has a shirt like the torn one of the boy on the ground; Aaron has skin that would contrast that disturbingly with the deep brown dirt. Marvin and Billy, backs turned and engrossed in what they are doing, haven’t noticed her but there is a sickening moment of clarity when Eliza realizes that the boy who almost looks like Aaron has been watching her the whole time. His eyes, wide with fear, are the exact shape of Sucker’s when the dog is running in a blind panic, slamming into trees to the sound of jeering children.

For what seems like years, Eliza stands staring. Almost-Aaron’s face remains frozen, not once leaving Eliza’s, his body passively accepting its punishment. It is as if, having been thrown from a window, he has realized that relaxing every muscle will reduce the damage upon his inevitable impact with the ground.

Marvin and Billy can’t afford witnesses to such a suspendable offense. Eliza could call out for Gina and Holly, pretending she is just nearing the bushes to look for them. Marvin and Billy would be forced to stop and the poor boy would be saved. Eliza mentally loops the scenario, looking for flaws and finding none. It would work.

Bestial joy beams off Marvin and Billy like cold light. Eliza is mesmerized by the incongruity of action and reaction, reluctant to relinquish her stolen glimpse of such rare animals. Ultimately, however, her inaction is spurred by the revulsion that sweeps through her at the sight of the boy on the ground. His absolute stillness, his silence, his wide-open eyes. Even a half-blind stray dog would be struggling. Even Sucker wouldn’t lie there, soundlessly accepting his fate. If Eliza intervenes, she will have to touch her almost-brother. He will need help getting up. And there’s no way she’d be able to help this boy who can’t possibly be Aaron. Aaron, who knows all the secret moves of the ninja and Jedi. Aaron, who saves Eliza from bad dreams. Aaron, who would never allow himself to be reduced to this.

Eliza will never mention that Marvin and Billy are grinding berries and evergreen needles into almost-Aaron’s chest, laughing that they are curing his paleness once and for all. Or that pricks of blood from the evergreen needles are indistinguishable from lumps of berry pulp on his almost-skin. Eliza doesn’t know what her almost-brother is thinking as, without a word, she returns to the swings, stubbornly facing away from the bushes until the whistle blows and she returns inside without looking back.

The calm voice of the school nurse (“Your son has had an accident. He says he’s all right, but he needs a change of clothes. Could you please come in?”) evokes Norman Rockwellian images of mud puddles and torn pants. When Saul arrives at the school to find a pale marble statue of a son with a bandaged chest, he demands answers.

“What the hell happened here?” he growls at the nurse, face red, eyes bulging.

“I fell,” Aaron says too soft for anyone to hear.

“He says he fell,” says the nurse, who is constructed like a high school gym teacher and not at all intimidated by Saul’s presence.

“Aaron.” Saul spins around to face his son. “Tell me what really happened. Who did this to you?” Fall definitely doesn’t cover it. Though Saul can tell there’s no serious damage, the scratches and bruises—already purpling—are too specific to have come from a benign source. Aaron’s explanation is as unlikely as his insistence that the tack he sat on last month fell off the class bulletin board halfway across the room from his desk.

“Aaron,” Saul says in a softer tone that he hopes will prove more persuasive, “it’s okay to tell who did this. They need to be taught that this kind of behavior is unacceptable. You deserve to be able to play at recess without worrying about being bullied.”

But Aaron knows better than that. Aaron knows that telling now will haunt him later. If not this year, then the next, or the one after that. Aaron knows that he’s stuck with Marvin and Billy until high school, by which time they will be shunted into either reform school or shop class, removing him from striking range. His best strategy for now is to keep quiet and stay out of their way as much as possible.

“You’re not going to tell me, are you?” Saul sighs. Aaron shakes his head, keeping his eyes on the floor. Underlying his righteous parental outrage, Saul takes peculiar pride in his silent son. A voice, not quite his own, My son’s no tattletale, wells up from the same amorphous source of Saul’s occasional urge to read the sports page, drink a beer with dinner, or change the oil in his car. These fleeting fancies are what remains of Saul’s conflicted feelings for his dead father, a man who definitely would have respected Aaron’s decision not to squeal.

Saul watches his son change into the clothes he brought. “You don’t have to go back to class if you don’t want to,” he offers. “You can come home with me.” Aaron shakes his head just as Dr. Morris enters the room.

“Hello, Mr. Naumann, it’s good of you to come. Aaron, I heard what happened. I’m glad you’re all fixed up. Are you sure you don’t want to talk about it?”

Aaron nods.

“Because I’m pretty sure I know who did this, but I can’t punish them unless you tell me if I’m right.”

Aaron shrugs.

“What if I asked you if it was Marvin and Billy?”

Aaron blushes. He hates that he blushes so easily. “I fell,” he says. He keeps seeing the change in Eliza’s face as she neared the bushes. When Aaron first caught sight of his sister he had thought, ridiculously, that the two of them could band together. That with her by his side he could put a stop to the evil B & M. He was on the verge of calling out her name when she recognized him. Suddenly she became a stranger, with a stranger’s way of looking at him. He realized that the Eliza he had been picturing was as imaginary as the Aaron he had hoped she would help him become.

“I fell,” he says again.

Dr. Morris shakes his head and sends Aaron back to class. He invites Saul briefly into his office, where he assures Saul that an eye will be kept on Aaron, as well as on Marvin and Billy, to prevent further trouble. As Saul is leaving, Dr. Morris offers two stapled pages. “The Vulnerable Child” simpers across the top page in curving, sensitive letters. Saul offers a stiff smile and a reluctant arm, this his parenting booster shot. The ghost of Saul’s father is gone. Pride has been replaced with the desire to protect his smaller, paler, and smarter than average son from the B.M.s of the world. When Aaron comes home from school that day, Saul is ready.

“You’re smarter than them, you know,” he says, catching Aaron by surprise as he walks through the door. “In the long run being smart wins out over just about everything else.” Before Aaron can say anything, he gestures to him. “Follow me.”

Saul leads his son to his study. Aaron hesitates before stepping over the threshold. This has always been a room for quick entrances and exits, a place to ask a question or to deliver a message and then to be gone. It falls into the same territory as his parents’ bedroom, a room in which grown-ups do grown-up things.

“Do you know why I like it in here?” Saul asks, gesturing to his desk and the shelves lining each wall. “It’s because this room is filled with things that make me happy. But today I realized that it would make me even happier if I could share it with you.”

Saul’s presence in the room is so strong that Aaron feels he has stepped inside his father’s body, Saul’s heart suddenly grown large enough for a door.

Saul sits Aaron down, places his hands on his son’s shoulders.

“These people who are making you miserable can tell that you are something special. It drives them crazy because they know they don’t have what you have. So they try to take it away from you, but you and I know they can’t. You and me, Aaron, we’re a team. What we do in here cancels out double whatever they do out there. Deal?”

Aaron pictures his father by his side as he, the Jedi ninja, attacks a legion of Marvin Bussys. Together, they can make the world safe for Aarons everywhere.

“Deal,” Aaron says.

Saul is unable, on such short notice, to accompany his daughter to Norristown Area High School; he is already committed to helping Adam Lubinsky prepare for his date with Jewish manhood next month. Miriam has already left the house, Saturday often as not a workday. Aaron and Eliza are sitting beside each other in the car, this the first time she has ever sat in the front passenger seat. Eliza is unused to the shoulder strap across her chest or a view of the road unobstructed by the back of her father’s head. When she looks to her left, the sight of Aaron behind the actual steering wheel of an actual car strikes her as somehow absurd. The last time they were in a similar position, he was piloting a spaceship headed for Pluto.

Which, as far as Elly is concerned, isn’t so different from where they are going now.

“What’s Norristown High like?” she asks, trying to sound casual. Eliza really hopes Aaron’s answer will fill in the huge empty black space that enters her head whenever she tries to think about the area bee.

“I don’t know,” Aaron says to the car in front of him. “It’s bigger than Abington.”

Aaron doesn’t understand how anyone can look away from the road while driving. When Saul drives, he darts his head between the road and his conversational partner as though he’s watching a turbocharged Ping-Pong match. This didn’t make Aaron nervous until he got his own license and realized how much could happen in the split second a head was turned. Aaron wonders if he should explain to Eliza why she shouldn’t expect him to look at her. A deer could rush into the road, or a car could suddenly stop or change lanes, and then he wouldn’t be able to get her to her spelling bee which, the more he thinks about it, the more he doesn’t understand how she got into in the first place.

You’re not helping, Eliza wants to say. She knows that this is no big deal to Aaron, who does Olympics of the Mind and Science Fair, which have been at Norristown before so she knows he could tell her what it was like if he really wanted to.

Eliza remembers the first Saturday Aaron stopped playing with her. Her selective memory has isolated this event in her mind, removed it from its larger context. She no longer connects it with the fire drill earlier that same week, halfway through kindergarten. All she remembers is walking up to her brother and asking if he wanted to play and Aaron rolling his eyes. “What’s the point?” he says. “You’re too little. It’s stupid. I’ve got better things to do,” at which point he walks right into Saul’s study like it is no big deal. They’ve been told over and over not to bother their father in there unless it is a real emergency, but Aaron walks in and he stays. That first Saturday, Eliza tries to play alone, making herself pilot, monster spotter, and head Jedi ninja all rolled into one but it isn’t the same. “It’s stupid” keeps repeating in her head.

Aaron is thorough in absenting himself from his sister’s life. When not with Saul in the study, he practices guitar in his room or, occasionally, goes to the park. Eliza isn’t invited on these outings. She initially mourns her exclusion, but her growing distance from Aaron allows her to observe more clearly his humble rung on the social acceptance ladder. The few times Eliza spots Aaron in the lunchroom, he is eating alone. When she secretly follows him to the park, she watches his attempts to join pickup basketball or soccer games with a combination of fascination and dread. If he is picked at all, it is reluctantly. Once during a basketball game the ball is slapped out of his arms so soundly that he falls sideways onto the pavement, his arm skidding against the asphalt. No one seems to hear him say foul. Eliza tells herself she is lucky to have learned the truth before her brother’s social standing rubbed off on her. The only really hard part is weathering her nightmares alone.

At a stoplight, Aaron looks over at Eliza. He tries to regard her objectively, the way he examined his chest, to determine if she looks intelligent, but she looks the same as always. He remembers what the smart girls looked like in his fifth-grade class: Denise Li and her purple plastic glasses frames, Jenny Howlitzer with her corny decal T-shirts. Eliza doesn’t look like those girls.

“Are you nervous?” he asks, neck craning toward the windshield, hands clawed onto the steering wheel.

“I don’t know,” she answers. “I wasn’t sure I’d be going until this morning.”

They’ve been stuck behind a truck for a while now, but Aaron won’t switch lanes even though Eliza’s checked a few times and it’s been completely safe. Underneath a cartoon picture of a grinning chicken wearing ear muffs and a scarf are the words “The Smart Frozzen Parts People,” and Eliza can’t help but think it’s a bad omen to be in such close proximity to such a stupid spelling error.

Aaron shakes his head in disbelief. “I can’t believe you thought Dad knew about the bee and was ignoring it. I mean, Elly, he’s been waiting for something like this to happen ever since—”

Eliza knows he is about to say, “since you got skipped for TAG,” before he stops himself. After her father’s fateful visit to Parents’ Night, TAG became a word no one said in front of her, just as the word “puberty” became scarce when, by ninth grade, Aaron’s voice still hadn’t changed. When everything happened all at once for Aaron a year later, the p-word magically reintroduced itself into common parlance as if it had never been banished. TAG, however, has remained taboo. Aaron manages to switch to “since you started school” in time to think that Eliza hasn’t noticed, but Eliza hears “stupid” in her head as clearly as if her brother had spoken the word aloud.

Aaron is eight years old when he sees God. He is on a night flight home from his grandfather’s funeral, a man he never met while living. He has a window seat and has spent the entire flight staring at the tiny lights below which, intellectually, he knows correspond to buildings but which seem more like sequins on an endless black blanket. When the plane flies into a cloud, Aaron’s sense of unlimited span and distance disappears. His window is swathed in white. A pulsing red light emanates from the cloud’s whiteness. Aaron stares, awestruck. With each pulse of light the cloud is transformed into something magical. Aaron wonders if God lives in all clouds, or if his plane just happened to pick the right one. The experience is so intensely personal that it never occurs to Aaron to share it with anyone, thus extending his belief in an all-knowing, all-present God five years longer than if someone had had the opportunity to inform him he’d only witnessed the red blinker of the plane’s wing.

The spelling bee registrar’s face has a worn-out shoe leather softness to it specific to upper middle-aged women. She holds Eliza’s library card in her hands. “Eliza Naumann.” Her eyes scan her list. She crosses through Eliza’s name with a red pen. The soft folds of her neck remind Eliza of turtle skin. “Do you happen to have a picture ID?”

“A picture ID?”

The registrar’s glasses have slipped to the end of her nose, magnifying the age spots on her cheeks. One of them is shaped like Ohio. “You didn’t hear about Bucks County?”

Eliza shakes her head.

“A boy takes fifth place and it turns out he wasn’t even on the list. Turns out he lost his school bee but Mom wanted him to try again at the district. So I’m supposed to ask for a picture, but it’s okay if you don’t have one. What kind of little kid carries a picture ID? Besides, I can tell you belong.”

She winks. The air current created by her arm as she points Eliza in the direction of the auditorium smells of cigars and talcum powder.

The auditorium has cushy seats, a balcony, and a large stage concealed by a heavy purple curtain. Aaron chooses a seat toward the back, figuring it will be easier to make a quick exit without attracting notice. He expects they will be leaving early.

The bee contestants are split according to gender between two backstage dressing rooms. The girls’ has large mirrors along one cinder block wall, each mirror framed by light bulbs. A thick layer of dust has settled along each bulb, few of which are actually lit. One flickers like an amorous lightning bug.

A group of girls crowds around one mirror, mechanically brushing and rebrushing their bangs. One of the smaller girls seems to be praying. A few stand frozen as their mouths form strings of silent, hopeful letters. The only adult in the room is a badged bee chaperone. She sits ineffectually in the corner, splitting the silence at irregular intervals to remind the girls to pee.

Eliza is the only one not wearing a skirt or a dress. She sees word booklets and spelling lists from which girls are quizzing each other. She can’t believe she wasted the week waiting for her father’s nod when she could have been studying. She is suddenly grateful for Saul’s absence, realizes that having him here would have meant watching his face fold into disappointment on a larger scale than ever before.

When it is time for the bee to begin, the children are led onstage and told to take their seats according to their numbers. It’s a much bigger stage than the one in McKinley’s cafeteria, the first real stage Eliza has ever been on. She grasps her number tightly in her hands and gazes at the Times-Herald Spelling Bee banner for reassurance.

Children shuffle to their seats like convalescents who have hopelessly strayed from the hospital grounds and are waiting to be retrieved. A small boy in the back row quietly hyperventilates. Two rows up, a girl tears her cuticles with her teeth. Another energetically sucks her hair.

The curtain opens with a whoosh of heavy fabric, the creak of rusty pulleys, and isolated gasps from startled children. The impression of the audience as a wave about to crash over them is heightened by the sound of applause. One startled fifth grader cries out, “Mo-,” stopping himself before the incriminating final M, his gaffe mercifully concealed by the clapping. The same woman who moments ago had been exhorting Eliza and the others to urinate approaches the microphone. Her voice sounds like a soft-focus greeting card cover.

“Hello. I’m Katherine Rai and I’d like to welcome all of you here today to the Times-Herald District Spelling Bee.” More applause. “The spelling bee is a truly American tradition, one that encourages learning and greater familiarity with our language. Each young person sitting on this stage is a winner. Each is here because he or she has exhibited superior abilities and knowledge. Each is an example of the best and brightest in our area. We are not competing against each other today. This is not a competition. It’s a celebration. Of spelling and of achievement. Parents, remember that no matter what place your child comes in today, he or she is a winner. Spellers, be proud. Be proud of yourselves and be proud that you are here.”

More applause. Eliza isn’t sure if people are applauding because they feel they should or because they actually believe this woman’s lies.

The woman continues, her voice the live embodiment of gently curved Hallmark lettering in a gender-appropriate pastel. “I’d like to introduce our word pronouncer for today’s bee. Mr. Stanley Julien, Norristown Area High’s own principal, has graciously volunteered his time and vocal talents to these youngsters. Stan?”

Mr. Julien walk-jogs onstage like a late night talk show host with his own theme song. More applause. Mr. Julien smiles and waves his way to where a book, a microphone, and a gavel are waiting.

“Thank you, Kathy. Ms. Rai is our school’s resource counselor and she does a great job, a great job. I also understand she was once a spelling bee contestant herself, isn’t that right, Kathy?”

Every year, the same script. Katherine still remembers the mortification of having to pee midway through the sixth round. By round eight, when she could hold it no longer, she misspelled her word just for the chance to get offstage. She smiles too broadly at Stanley in response, her teeth luminous in the stage lights.

In the wake of his airplane wing experience, Aaron becomes an avid sky watcher. Saul sees in his son’s ardency a precocious appetite for astronomy, but Aaron’s favorite nights reveal the fewest stars. More clouds mean more places for God to be. When Aaron lifts his eyes to the sky, he looks for a soft pulsing glow, nothing too dramatic or everyone would notice. He knows not to expect too much. Even Moses only got to see God once in a while.

During the Silent Amidah, the time of the Shabbat service meant for personal prayer, Aaron tenders up his own question, too shy to more than whisper the words inside his head: There were a lot of people on that plane. Were You showing Yourself to me or did I just happen to be looking out the window as You were showing Yourself to someone else?

He decides that maybe God can only be seen from the sky. He begins saving his weekly quarter until he learns that it would take sixteen years of saved allowances to afford even a cheap round-trip fare. If there is to be another sighting, God will have to come to him after all. He widens the scope of his God-watch accordingly. If God can be in a cloud or a burning bush, there’s no reason to think God can’t be in a car or a cookie. The intensity with which Aaron begins looking at the world gives him headaches. Concerned, Saul takes him to get his eyes tested. Aaron is a little disappointed to learn that his vision is fine. He had begun to hope that all he needed to see God was a pair of glasses.

As Ms. Rai lowers herself into the seat beside Mr. Julien, her fuzzy demeanor and calligraphic voice are replaced by a primal predator hunting its next meal. Ms. Rai’s manicured hand becomes a bloodied talon, her gavel rising like a guillotine blade waiting to descend upon the trembling, outstretched neck of the next spelling victim. When the gavel comes crashing down and Ms. Rai growls “Incorrect,” all sweetness and light are gone from her voice. Her victims sometimes limp offstage as if the gavel has smashed the smaller bones of their feet.

But not Eliza. From the first time she steps to the microphone the words are there, radiant as neon. She hears the word and suddenly it is inside her head, translated from sound into physical form. Sometimes the letters need a moment to arrange themselves behind her closed eyes. An E will replace an I, a consonant will double. Eliza is patient. She is not frightened by Ms. Rai’s gavel hand. She knows when a word has reached its perfect form, SCALLION and BUTANE and ORANGUTAN blazing pure and incontrovertible in her mind.

By the time it comes down to Eliza and Number 24, a small boy in a blue shirt the color of deodorized toilet water, time itself is measured in syllables. The sounds of chairs scraping, footfalls echoing on the stage, and the screech of the improperly adjusted microphone are all transformed into letters, the world one vibrant text spelling itself before her. There is no hesitation in Eliza’s voice as she tackles LEGUME and PORTENT. Her pre-bee trepidation is forgotten. She stands confident, no longer caring that she is the only girl in pants. Each turn at the microphone, she spells to a different person in the audience, as if that word is the person’s most secret wish.

Eliza wins the district bee with VACUOUS. Her trophy is crowned with a gold-tinted bee figurine wearing glasses and a tasseled mortar board. The bee clutches a dictionary to its chest and holds aloft a flaming torch. Eliza poses for a photographer from the Norristown Times-Herald alone, with her fellow runners-up, with Aaron, and with Mr. Julien and Ms. Rai. Eliza learns that if she dies or becomes too ill to attend the state competition, she is to inform the Spelling Board as soon as possible so that they can notify Number 24. She learns that Number 24 is named Matthew Harris and that he has a defective pituitary gland, but that he is going to be starting growth hormone therapy in a week. She is too happy to notice that Aaron doesn’t talk much on the way home or that he spends his time at stop lights observing her as if she is a formerly passive dog who has killed its first small animal. Elly spends the car ride silently spelling the words she hears on the radio, her trophy clutched tightly in both hands.

On the day of his bar mitzvah, Aaron attends to each button on his new blue suit with geriatric care. His new shoes, professionally polished, are the first he has ever owned requiring a shoehorn. He slips his feet into them with underwater slowness. He gets his tie perfect on his first attempt and without any help. The day is a Tootsie Pop he must try to lick without giving in to the urge to bite through its chocolate center. He is determined to make it last longer than any other day of his life.

Aaron’s regular visits to his father’s study segued so seamlessly into studying for his bar mitzvah that Aaron isn’t exactly certain how long they have been preparing. It seems that bits and pieces may have been around as early as sixth grade, when Saul first opened his study doors. Aaron remembers playing games in which he learned the trup, the special symbols indicating how the ancient words of the Torah and Haftorah are to be chanted. If Aaron had any doubts about becoming a rabbi, the time spent studying with his father has erased them. His father’s pride in him seeps into his skin, infuses his blood, and whispers his future.

The service is flawless. Aaron acts as cantor and rabbi, leading the congregation through both the prayers and responsive readings, chanting the Hatzi Kaddish like a pro. He is self-assured. He doesn’t slouch. As he recites each prayer from memory, his gaze moves confidently between the faces assembled before him. When he chants his Torah portion, Rabbi Mayer doesn’t have to correct him even once.

Aaron’s earlier habit of looking for God in everyday objects has devolved into a less focused sense of anticipation. Though Aaron no longer whispers questions to God during the Silent Amidah, part of him has never stopped praying for revelation.

Aaron is on the bima, speeding through the final brachot after completing his Haftorah portion when a warm flush starts at his toes and spreads, opening like a feather fan, to the top of his head. Suddenly, every particle of him is shimmering. He can sense each part of his body, down to each hair on his head, but at the same time feels he is one fluid whole. Though his mouth keeps moving, he is no longer focused on the prayers before him. They have become body knowledge, so deeply ingrained that they flow as naturally as air from his lungs. Aaron can sense the approach of something larger, a sea swell building up to a huge wave. Then, in a moment so intense Aaron has no idea he is still standing, it hits.

Every person in the room becomes part of him. He can suddenly see the temple from forty-six different perspectives, through forty-six pairs of eyes. He is linked. He feels the theme and variation of forty-six heartbeats, the stretch and release of forty-six pairs of lungs, the delicate interplay of warm and cool air currents on a congregation of arms, hands, and faces. For one breathtaking moment, Aaron is completely unself-conscious. He feels total acceptance and total love.

The moment passes. Aaron realizes he has finished the brachot and that his father is presenting him with a twelve-string guitar. Already the transformative moment feels distant, a dream he must struggle to recall upon waking. Rabbi Mayer proclaims this to be the most impressive bar mitzvah he has ever attended and presents Aaron with The Jewish Book of Why on behalf of the congregation. Everyone adjourns to the back room where the kosher caterers have set up lunch. Politely ignored is the fact that some of the broiled chicken breasts were not thoroughly defeathered.

A DJ is spinning Duran Duran, Eurythmies, and Flock of Seagulls, songs to which Aaron does not listen but knows are popular. When Aaron dances with Stacey Lieberman, he doesn’t worry that she might only be dancing with him to be polite. When he asks for a second dance, he can tell that she’s really sorry her heel hurts too much to say yes. He decides he will call her next week to ask her to a movie.

Aaron accepts congratulations and a fat slice of cake. He is contemplatively sucking on a sugar flower when he decides that what he experienced on the bima was God. His early years of whispered prayer and the cloud and cookie watching have been rewarded. He knows it was really God because there was no booming voice, no beam of light. His experience was something as momentous and private and unexpected as seeing a red pulsing light inside a cloud. He keeps it to himself.

When Eliza arrives home, Saul’s first thought is how nice it is that the district bee gives away such huge consolation trophies. It takes him a few moments of hearing his daughter’s “I won! I won!” and feeling her arms wrapped around his waist to comprehend that the trophy is no consolation. He scoops his little girl into his arms and tries to hold her above his head but realizes, midway, that he hasn’t tried to do this for at least five or six years. He puts her back down, silently resolving to start exercising.

“Elly, that’s fantastic! I wish I could have been there. I bet it was something else, huh, Aaron?”

Aaron smiles and nods, tries to think of what a good older brother would say. “She beat out a lot of kids, Dad. You would have loved it.”

“I know, I know. And I didn’t even think to give you the camera.” Saul shakes his head. “But now I get another chance. You’re going on to the next level, right?”

Eliza nods. “The area finals are in a month. In Philadelphia.”

Saul claps his hands. “Perfect! We’ll all go. A family trip. A month should give your mother enough time to clear the day. I’m so proud of you, Elly. I knew it was just a matter of time until you showed your stuff. A month. I can barely wait.”

At which point Eliza realizes that she has only four weeks in which to study.

Studying has always been a chore on the level of dish-washing and room-cleaning, approached with the same sense of distraction and reluctance. Eliza fears that studying will leech her of spelling enthusiasm. The days following her spelling win, she resolutely maintains her after-school schedule of television reruns, pretends not to notice her father’s raised eyebrows at the sight of her in her regular chair, nary a spelling list or dictionary in sight. More than her father’s unspoken expectations, it is Eliza’s growing suspicion that she has stumbled upon a skill that convinces her to break out the word lists. She realizes she has never been naturally good enough at anything to want to get better before. She renames studying “practice.” Spelling is her new instrument, the upcoming bee the concert for which she must prepare her part.

Within a few days Eliza has developed a routine. After two TV reruns, she retreats to her room. Though she knows there is little chance of anyone disturbing her, she closes and locks her door. She likes the idea, however unlikely, of Saul or Aaron stuck outside, reduced to slipping a note under her door or to waiting for her to emerge. After dinner, she allows herself one prime-time show and then, with Aaron and Saul playing guitar in the study and her mother either cleaning the kitchen or reading her magazines, she returns to her room. The click of the bedroom door becomes one of her favorite sounds, filling her with a sense of well-being.

When Eliza studies, it is like discovering her own anatomy. The words resonate within her as if rooted deep inside her body. She pictures words lining her stomach, expanding with each stretch of her lungs, nestling in the chambers of her heart. She is thankful to have been spared from fracture, tonsillitis, or appendectomy. Such incidents might have resulted in words being truncated or removed altogether, reducing her internal vocabulary. Elly contemplates growing her hair long; it could give her an extra edge. When she closes her eyes to picture a word she imagines a communion of brain and body, her various organs divulging their lingual secrets.

Eliza starts walking around with the kind of smile usually associated with Mona Lisas and sphinxes. I am the best speller on this bus, she thinks on the way home from school. After a few days of studying, when she’s feeling more daring, she goes as far as I am the best speller at the dinner table, Saul, Miriam, and Aaron innocently eating around her. Eliza knows that something special is going on. On Wednesday, she remembers the words she studied on Monday and Tuesday. On Thursday, she remembers all the old words, plus the new ones from the day before. The letters are magnets, her brain a refrigerator door.

Eliza finally understands why people enjoy entering talent shows or performing in recitals. She stops hating Betsy Hurley for only doing double-Dutch jump rope at recess. If Eliza could, she would spell all the time. She starts secretly spelling the longer words from Ms. Bergermeyer’s droning class lessons and from the nightly TV news broadcasts. When Eliza closes her eyes to spell, the inside of her head becomes an ocean of consonants and vowels, swirling and crashing in huge waves of letters until the word she wants begins to rise to the surface. The word spins and bounces. It pulls up new letters and throws back old ones, a fisherman sorting his catch, until it is perfectly complete.

Eliza can sense herself changing. She has often felt that her outsides were too dull for her insides, that deep within her there was something better than what everyone else could see. Perhaps, like the donkey in her favorite bedtime story, she has been turned into a stone. Perhaps, if she could only find a magic pebble, she could change. Walking home from school, Eliza has often looked for a pebble, red and round, that might transform her from her unremarkable self. When Eliza finds this pebble in her dreams, her name becomes the first the teacher memorizes at the beginning of the school year. She becomes someone who gets called to come over during Red Rover, Red Rover, someone for whom a place in the lunch line is saved to guarantee a piece of chocolate cake. In the dream, Eliza goes to sleep with this magic pebble under her head. The dream is so real that she wakes up reaching beneath her pillow. Her sense of loss doesn’t fade no matter how many times she finds nothing there.

After a week of studying, Eliza begins sleeping with a word list under her head. In the morning it is always there, waiting.

Saul and Miriam have a very small wedding, as neither has relatives they wish to invite and most of Saul’s friends belong to a portion of his life he is trying to put behind him. Miriam invites a few of her law professors, who are surprised but pleased to witness the marriage of their most brilliant, if eccentric, graduate. The couple is wedded under the chuppa, with the traditional breaking of the glass to seal their bond. As Saul stomps on the cup from which he and his wife have just shared wine, he imagines it is his past he is smashing into unrecognizable bits. He emerges from the synagogue reborn.

Their life together begins auspiciously. They find an area with a need for both an estate lawyer and a cantor. Miriam’s contract allows for a down payment on a home. Saul is proud to show Miriam off to his new congregation. The fact that he is married and planning a family quells the loudest concerns of the cantankerous rabbi he seems to have been hired to offset.

The hippie in Saul enjoys their untraditional household roles. Miriam, as chief breadwinner, handles the finances with an efficiency Saul could never match. Saul handles the cooking and shopping. He relishes having dinner waiting when Miriam returns from the office, revels in the question “How was work, dear?” asked in a fluttery falsetto. As the novelty of their responsibilities fades, Saul sometimes forgets that theirs is an unusual arrangement, is surprised by Miriam’s singularity among the battalions of suited and briefcased men grimly disembarking from the commuter train.

Miriam informs Saul she prefers to keep her professional life private to counterbalance the fact that the rest of her life is now shared. She does not take Saul to the firm. There are no holiday parties or business dinners to attend. Saul tells himself it’s not important to see his wife’s office, that he can respect her need for independence. At dinner they watch the TV news and discuss current events during commercial breaks. Sometimes they watch “Jeopardy,” competing with each other by keeping score on scraps of notepaper. Saul excels in the Bible and Mythology categories, Miriam in almost everything else.

The first years are busy ones. In addition to Saul’s scholarly pursuits, which he takes as seriously as a professor angling for tenure, there is the issue of the synagogue, with its need for an adult education curriculum and a bar mitzvah tutorial program. When Saul isn’t at the synagogue, he is in his study. He is grateful for a wife with enough interests to allow his return to work after dinner. He tells himself there is companionship in their discrete activities, togetherness in their occupation of adjoining rooms. Saul decides that if he only needed three hours of sleep a night he too would resent being asked to come to bed any earlier than necessary. He is often deep asleep by the time his wife slips between their sheets. Occasionally she accompanies him to the bedroom, but once they are done she leaves again. On these nights Saul feels as if he is back at the university, carefully wooing a skittish law school student.

Aaron’s appearance on the scene is a supernova, illuminating Saul’s life with a degree of clarity generally reserved for hindsight. Saul keeps waiting for the light to reach Miriam as well. We’ve gone too far from each other, they will tell each other. We’ve got to find our way back. But while Miriam appears to take great pride in Aaron’s birth, she relates to it more as a goal attained than as a personal revelation. Birth of Son seems to occupy a similar part of her psyche as Earning Law Degree, another check-off on a lifelong To Do list. Unprepared for the care and maintenance that attend this particular milestone, Miriam delegates late night feedings and sodden diapers to Saul, who revels in the intimacy these duties afford. It becomes clear to Saul that his supernova has occurred in his personal universe rather than the rapidly expanding one of his marriage. He relishes the sense of possession this gives him. This is his son, his baby boy; Aaron fills the very gap his birth reveals.

It starts feeling natural, even beneficial, for Saul to go to bed alone, allowing him to focus on his goals for the following day. Saul realizes that Miriam’s sexual prowess hasn’t improved markedly since their first time together, when he perceived her as an untried pupil who would grow to mastery under his carnal tutelage. Saul grows less mindful of his wife’s late night arrivals to bed, less often awaits her with eager tongue and upturned palm.

As it slowly becomes clear that theirs is a marriage of mutual utility, Saul’s feelings of love ebb into gratitude. He realizes, sheepishly, that he likes his low-maintenance marriage, privately admits that he might not be suited to a more conventional situation. After Eliza’s conception, their rare lovemaking tapers off even further. Saul rationalizes that the infrequency of their intimacy prevents him from taking sex for granted, a shortcoming he associates with his ignoble college days. By banishing sex from his mind, he can turn his full attention to his scholarly pursuits, exactly as he had hoped Miriam would inspire him to do. Besides, he can always masturbate to his memories. The attic is uncharred and filled with sunlight, the mattress is a queen-size box spring, and the young coeds know just which buttons to push.

Saul has noted with approval the time Eliza now spends in her room. He tells her how happy he is to see her taking initiative. Though he offers to help, Eliza feels protective of her practice sessions, takes a certain pride in studying alone.

This evening, as with every evening, Miriam is ensconced in her brown velour recliner, shoes off, prowling through magazines with diametrically opposed titles like Neo-Proletarian Review and Armed Christian Family. She will stay rooted in her recliner, still except for the movement of her hands, until she finds what she is looking for. When she finds it, she laughs.

Miriam laughs like a happy chicken. It is a joyful, uninhibited cackle entirely out of place with the rest of her, which is why Eliza loves it so much. As Miriam laughs, she flies up from her recliner to her electric typewriter, turned on in anticipation of just such a moment. She types, “Gray’s quixotic implication that the Moral Majority holds exclusive stock to the country’s future imperative powers.…” or, “I find the whole concept of ‘centralized opposition’ oxymoronic even from a neo-communist perspective.…” Miriam signs each of these gleeful invectives with a pen name composed expressly for the occasion, then stuffs them into linen envelopes addressed to editors in Freedom, North Dakota, or San Francisco, California. Though she doesn’t talk about the letters with her family, she makes no secret of their writing or of the photo album she keeps beside the family encyclopedia set. They have all read the letters Miriam has carefully snipped from the editorial pages of these magazines. The first clipping is dated not long after newlyweds Saul and Miriam moved in together. It never occurs to Saul or to Miriam that the magazines have replaced the lectures they used to attend together, the arguments she once presented to Saul now addressed to others. Miriam’s transition to letter writing is so automatic that she doesn’t notice the substitution, her quick mind filling in the gap before she recognizes its presence. Drifting away from her husband is less a conscious choice than a series of unconscious ones.

Eliza feels invigorated by her rejection of Saul’s offer of help. Her power to cause her father’s emergence from his study in the name of spelling is made all the sweeter by her decision not to employ it. Rather than block out her father’s and brother’s guitar music she now incorporates it into her own pursuits, her words gliding on the muted chords rising up through the air vents. Even her mother’s solitary habits have lost the feeling of a party to which Eliza is not invited. Miriam’s typing lends Eliza’s studies rhythm and tempo.

Paging through the dictionary is like looking through a microscope. Every word breaks down into parts with unique properties—prefix, suffix, root. Eliza gleans not only the natural laws that govern the letters but their individual behaviors. R, M, and D are strong, unbending and faithful. The sometimes silent B and G and the slippery K follow strident codes of conduct. Even the redoubtable H, which can make P sound like F and turn ROOM into RHEUM, obeys etymology. Consonants are the camels of language, proudly carrying their lingual loads.

Vowels, however, are a different species, the fish that flash and glisten in the watery depths. Vowels are elastic and inconstant, fickle and unfaithful. E can sound like I or U. -IBLE and -ABLE are impossible to discern. There is no combination the vowels haven’t tried, exhaustive and incestuous in their couplings. E will just as soon pair with A, I, or O, leading the dance or being led. Eliza prefers the vowels’ unpredictability and, of all vowels, favors Y. Y defies categorization, the only letter that can be two things at once. Before the bee, Eliza had been a consonant, slow and unsurprising. With her bee success, she has entered vowelhood. Eliza begins to look at life in alphabetical terms. School is consonantal in its unchanging schedule. God, full of possibility, is a vowel. Death: the ultimate consonant.

Toward the end of the silent Amidah, Aaron and Eliza play a game called Sheep that both claim to have invented. At the Amidah’s beginning, Rabbi Mayer tells the entire congregation to rise. The congregants are supposed to remain standing for as long as they wish to pray, sitting down when they have finished. A lot of people actually do begin by praying, but most stop soon after they start. They become distracted by thoughts of the evening’s prime-time television lineup or by how awful the perfume is of the old lady with dyed hair who always sits in the seat under the air duct so that the smell of her goes everywhere.

Because of this, knowing when to sit down is a problem. People want to appear prayerful, but they also want the service to end in time for “Remington Steele” or “Dallas” or “Falcon Crest.” After a period that is short enough to move things along but long enough to seem respectable, they look for a cue. That is what Sheep is all about.

The best nights to play Sheep are bar mitzvah Fridays. The synagogue is filled with people whose nephew or cousin or boss’s son is becoming a man the next morning. These people occupy the back half of the synagogue even though there are seats available up front. When they stand for the silent Amidah they never know whether to focus on the prayerbook or upon a distant point, looking thoughtful.

The key is to make scraping noises. When Eliza or Aaron chooses the moment they feel represents the perfect prayerful/let’s-get-on-with-it ratio, they rattle their chairs and rub one or two of the chair legs against the floor to make it sound as if more than one person is actually descending. Their efforts carry to the back where it is determined that if the front rows are sitting, the other rows are allowed to sit down as well. Once Eliza timed it so around three fourths of the congregation followed her into their chairs like an elaborate chain of dominoes. Even Aaron had been forced to admit she’d set a new record.

This Friday night not being a bar mitzvah, neither Aaron nor Eliza nets any followers, the regulars making it a point of pride to have a unique time to reseat themselves. Three prayers, a Mourner’s Kaddish, and two responsive readings later come the weekly announcements, which precede the final prayer. It’s the same as usual—Sisterhood meetings, Sunday school classes, and singles retreats—until Saul includes a special announcement.

“Eliza Naumann has won the honor of representing our district tomorrow in the bee finals for our area. We wish her mazel tov and best of luck.”

Then he moves on to something about adult education, as though what he has just said is the most normal thing in the world. Eliza starts smiling so hard her cheek muscles hurt. Aaron makes a point of not looking at her.

After the last prayer, everyone proceeds to the back room for oneg, where a table is waiting with tea, coffee, juice, and cookies. Eliza loves oneg even though the juice is watered down and there are better cookies at home. On the cookie plate are always a few chocolate wafers, but the majority are chalky shortbreads that crumble into little pieces unless the whole thing is ingested at once. On someone’s birthday, there is a store-bought cake sparsely decorated with candy flowers.

The trick is to get one of the wafer cookies or, if it is a birthday, a slice of cake with a flower. This takes practice. Eliza and Aaron can’t just race to the back room after the last prayer and grab what they want. They have to wait until Rabbi Mayer has come to the table and said a prayer over the food. In a way, this is lucky because sitting in the front row would put them at a distinct disadvantage if it were first come, first serve, especially with the Kaplan kids, who always sit in the back.

The key to snagging a good cookie is placement. Eliza puts herself nearest to the side of the cookie plate with the good cookies on it, then casually rests her hand by the edge of the plate. As soon as the prayer is over, her hand is in prime position.

Getting a flower is trickier. An adult always cuts the cake and there is a line. Eliza never knows what slicing method the cake cutter will use, so it is hard to anticipate where in the cake line she should be to net a flower. It is generally smarter to notice which adults get flowers and to casually ask for one. This is especially effective with women, who usually make a show of handing over their flowers in the service of the diet of the moment. With men, it isn’t as sure a bet. They may hand over their flower to prove what great guys they are, but they are just as likely to make a joke about not giving over their flower to spotlight their lingering youthfulness in the face of galloping middle age. Eliza has a standing cake agreement with Mrs. Schoenfeld, who doesn’t have children of her own and likes to think that giving Eliza her occasional flower gives them a special bond.

The pre-bee service happens to fall on a birthday week, so there is cake. When it is Eliza’s turn Mrs. Schwartz, who is the de facto slicer and prides herself on not playing favorites, actually cuts a piece out of sequence in order to give Eliza a flower, saying that it will bring luck.

Aaron tells himself he isn’t jealous. Dad’s announcement is no big deal. Eliza deserves the attention, she doesn’t usually get any, and the state bee is important. Except that Aaron has been to the state science fair a few times and Saul has never told the congregation about it. When Mrs. Schoenfeld offers him her flower he declines. He’s too old to care about such things.

Once Eliza loots the oneg table, she generally drifts outside to play tag until it’s time to go home. Usually this is no problem, but tonight grownups want to talk to her. Mrs. Lieberman corners Eliza by the Siddur table and kisses her on both cheeks. Eliza wonders if her lipstick has left pucker marks.

“… is a wonderful thing that can open doors to wonderful places.”

Eliza misses the first half. She has been watching Aaron, an oneg pro, walk outside with neither cake flower nor good cookie, a sure sign that something is amiss. She feels a strange mixture of anxiety and pride at the thought that she may have something to do with it.

Mr. Schwartz announces he is going to quiz her, one spelling champion to another. Up close, he has a brown front tooth and more wrinkles than Eliza thought. He sips his tea so loudly that she has to repeat NEIGHBOR three times before Mrs. Schwartz comes to her rescue, admonishing Phil for tiring Eliza out before the real thing. The sound of Mr. Schwartz’s until now unknown first name allows Eliza to picture Mr. Schwartz in some place other than the synagogue, wearing something other than a brown-striped tie with a stained tip.

Eliza is steps away from freedom when George finds her. George, who lives in the apartment complex nearby, isn’t Jewish but comes to services every Friday and attends Saul’s adult education classes. Eliza once overheard him talking to her father about religious conversion, and George’s belief that if he is going to do it, he wants to “go all the way,” but that he isn’t sure he is “strong enough.” Eliza has no idea what George was talking about even though Aaron has told her he was once in the bathroom when George was peeing and saw that George was uncircumcised.

George tells Eliza she will be representing not only her district tomorrow but Her People. George holds Eliza’s shoulders as he speaks and spits in his earnestness, the wetter syllables arcing harmlessly over Eliza’s head.

“For centuries, the Jewish nation has been persecuted and exiled. Tomorrow is your chance to manifest the same spirit that has kept the Chosen People alive and faithful through their wanderings in the desert. What you’re doing is courageous.”

Eliza’s eyes are at the level of George’s zipper. She squelches the urge to shout “Uncircumcised,” though still unsure of its meaning. Instead she silently spells the word. She smiles and nods at George as the letters dance and swirl inside her head until they are perfect, the word that is George’s secret spelled out in all its mysterious glory.

The Philadelphia Spectrum serves as concert venue, hockey rink, basketball court and, every so often, books the Ice Capades. Aaron has not attended a Flyers game since learning first hand that blood bounces on ice.

The morning of the area finals is the closest the stadium comes to the best-of-breed tent at a county fair. Friends and relatives scan the spellers, trying to predict the blue ribbon winner. Eyes travel between contestants, gauging preparedness, intelligence, and spelling savvy. Some parents attempt last-minute changes to their entries. One speller stands frozen beneath a hand smoothing a cowlick. Another melts into the floor as his mother rains words like hailstones upon his slumped shoulders. A morbid camaraderie has arisen between spellers, numbered placards drooping from their necks like turkey wattles. Shared smiles and briefly held gazes acknowledge mutual doom.

This is lost on Eliza, who is too excited by her family’s presence to notice. The singularity of their collective appearance outside the house lends a holiday air to their actions. They walk the stadium concourse as if beyond lies Disneyworld or Mesa Verde, this the closest they have come to the family vacation Saul has been promising since Eliza was born.

As far as Eliza can remember, this is the first time she has ever held both parents’ hands at once. She swings her arms back and forth, pen-duluming them the way she’s seen happy children do on Kodak commercials. Miriam wears the smile she usually reserves for discovering one of her letters to the editor in print. Saul whistles a klezmer tune between snapping pictures with film that has been in his camera since the Iranian hostage crisis. Even Aaron is talking a few levels louder than usual. When the time comes for Eliza to journey backstage, she is reluctant to go. She would be content to pass by the statue of Rocky Balboa, circling seating sections A-Z until the sky turned purple if it meant they could keep looking the way TV families look by the end of the show.

The area finals can be distinguished from the district bee in the details. The folding chairs for the contestants are cushioned. There is a bell instead of a gavel. The introductory speeches, while of identical content, are given by local politicians instead of school administrators. Three minutes after the applause for the stageful of winners dies down, the first speller—a thin girl with limp hair and large, sad eyes—is eliminated. Her sigh as she leaves the stage, more than the raising of the curtain, signifies that the bee has truly begun.

Tension runs between the spellers like an invisible steel cable. When one rises to approach the microphone, everyone in the row feels the pull. Many are unconscious of the fact they are spelling along with each contestant. As their mouths form the letters, the effect is that of a choir of mutes accompanying every word.

From the third row, it is impossible for Eliza to see anything but the backs of other spellers’ heads. The tights Miriam picked out for her itch horribly. Eliza uses the relative privacy accorded by her seat to scratch.

Spellers can ask for word pronunciation, definition, etymology, and use in a sentence, but once they start spelling, there is no turning back. A misspoken letter is irreversible, the equivalent of a nervous tic during brain surgery.

The hardest to watch are those who know they have made a mistake. Sometimes they stop mid-word, the air knocked out of them. Even then they are expected to continue until the word is finished. They flinch their way to the word’s end, mere shadows of the child they were before the mistake was made. Finally, the misspelled word is complete, its mistaken A or extra T dangling like a flap of dead skin.

There is a pause, like the split second between touching the thing that’s too hot and feeling the burn. Then, the bell.

Ding.

It is the sound of an approaching bicycle, harmless as a sugar ant, but here it takes on atomic, fifties sci-fi proportions. Just as in the movies, its hapless victim stands immobile while the correct spelling, monstrous with huge, flesh-rending jaws, comes at them from the pronouncer’s mouth.

It is worst when the speller stands there, nodding like a spring-loaded lawn ornament. A couple times, the fatal moment functions like some kind of psychological glue trap: even after the pronouncer completes the word, the speller remains frozen in place. One boy stands with his hand in front of him, thumb pressing an invisible button on what appears to be an invisible remote control, willing the world to rewind.

Eliza begins to wish she were closer to the front. The wait is like the slow tic-tic-tic of a roller coaster climbing to its summit before the stomach-plunging drop. She would gladly trade the ability to scratch at her tights unseen for a shorter ascent, a briefer fall. She is most afraid that some fatal blockage will occur between her brain and mouth, preventing the word from emerging whole. She can hear it happen with other children. She can tell they know the word by the way they intone it, but then some kind of home accident occurs. The word trips over the edge of the tongue and plunges headlong into a tooth. A letter is twisted, I into E,T into P, or there is a pause and the last letter is repeated. Eliza knows it could happen to anyone, that possessing the right spelling is only half the battle.

By the time it is her turn, Eliza is ready for the worst. Instead, she gets ELEMENT. She practically sings the word into the microphone.

Aaron didn’t want to come but knew better than to say anything. There are certain times when it’s easier to go along with what his father says. When the words “as a family” are used is one of those times. Saul gets a look in his eye, like that of a dominant lion, that means either act like one of the pride or prepare to be attacked by the alpha male. Aaron is grateful for these irregular demands on his filial devotion. They reinforce the idea that the four of them are bound by more than a shared roof.

With that in mind, Aaron puts on his most attentive, brotherly face as he tries to discern his sister among the rows of preadolescents squirming in their chairs like insect specimens that weren’t asphyxiated before being pinned. He wants to be able to support his sister’s newfound spelling abilities. It’s silly, he tells himself. It’s immature. But he can’t help but notice the way Saul’s gaze has been fixed upon the stage ever since enough spellers were eliminated for Eliza to become visible. Even when it’s nowhere near her turn, Saul sits at attention, immune from the monotony of each round. The pronouncer’s voice, the heavy pauses as the children buy time at the microphone, the recurring requests—“Please repeat the word, please repeat the definition”—have no effect. Saul’s gaze is fixed on Eliza. He is looking at her the way a parent looks at an infant too new to be taken for granted.

Aaron remembers that look. He is six years old. Baby Eliza is fresh from the hospital. As Saul introduces Aaron to his new sister, he cannot believe anything that small could actually be alive. He grasps one of his sister’s doll hands and examines the tiny fingers. Aaron is not even aware of putting the finger into his mouth, of testing it with his teeth. His sister’s scream interrupts his reverie. Saul snatches the tiny hand away. Aaron is terrified, expects the bitten finger to fall off onto the table in a shower of blood, his fragile sister forever fractured. He can barely believe his eyes when the hand emerges whole, the skin unbroken, only a slight ring of indentations left by his teeth.

“NO,” his father commands, the menace in his voice a physical presence.

Aaron flinches, expecting reprisal. Instead, his father’s voice suddenly softens.

“Be gentle. Your sister needs your love. Look how small she is. She will never be as big or old as you. Will you help me look out for her? She needs us both.”

Aaron nods, his eyes large from the shock of his actions and his unexpected reprieve. Marvin Bussy and Billy Mamula are years away. He is still a boy who believes he has the power to protect.

A lot of time is spent raising and lowering the mike stand between contestants who have hit puberty and those still waiting to grow. Eliza wishes that those who didn’t know their words would just guess instead of stalling until they’re asked to start spelling by the judges. In the time it takes some spellers to get started, Eliza has spelled their word a few times, fought the temptation to just take off her tights, and repeatedly sung through the theme from Star Wars which, for some reason, she is unable to get out of her head.

Without realizing it, she has developed a routine. Three turns before her own, she blocks out the sounds of the bee and closes her eyes. Since she was very small, Eliza has thought of the inside of her head as a movie theater, providing herself with an explanation for the origin of bad dreams. Nightmares are rationalized away with the private assurance that she has accidentally stepped into an R-rated movie and needs only to return herself to the G-rated theater to remedy the situation. Using the mental movie theater construct, Eliza pictures the inside of her head as a huge blank screen upon which each word will be projected.

It doesn’t occur to her to be self-conscious about closing her eyes at the microphone. How else is she to see her word? Not having observed the others’ faces, she is unaware that most spell with their eyes open after a brief period of face-clenched concentration indigenous to constipation and jazz solos. Eliza opens her eyes only after uttering the last letter, the word inside her head as real as her nose and just as unmistakable. She has no fear of the ding. It’s not meant for her.

By Round 7, the words have gotten serious. Eliza has a moment’s hesitation with CREPUSCULE, but when she closes her eyes a second time, the word is there, waiting. After she spells it correctly, she spots her father in the audience when he is the only one standing during the applause. She considers waving but decides that it is too uncool. She tries a droll wink but is unable to manage the eyelid coordination and looks instead as if she has something stuck in her eye.

Though they haven’t spoken, Eliza has developed an affection for the speller next to her, an intense and careful girl whose numbered placard lies at an upward tilt because of her boobs. When the girl is eliminated with SANSEVIERIA, Eliza feels a loss. After the girl is gone Eliza avoids touching her empty chair.

Though Miriam is glad to be sitting here, a parent among parents, she cannot help but feel there is somewhere else she should be. Miriam knows this feeling well. It is rare not to feel the amorphous pull of some nameless, important task requiring her attention. She considers herself at her best when doing three things at once. The book she has brought lessens her sense of urgency, but Saul and Aaron are paying such single-minded attention to the bee that she feels guilty whenever she starts to read.

She is startled by the sight of Eliza onstage. Though certainly cognizant of their biological connection, Miriam has grown to view Eliza as not quite her child. She had always assumed any daughter of hers would excel in school, distinguishing herself early and often from the rabble of her peers. Eliza’s utter failure to do so, along with her apparent disinterest in cerebral pursuits, placed her beyond the ken of Miriam’s experience. Miriam came to consider Eliza a gosling born into a family of ducks, loved and accepted but always and forever a goose. Miriam has never expressed this thought to Saul but can tell he senses it and duly disapproves. She begrudges him his disapprobation, feeling he is equally at fault for so obviously favoring Aaron, leaving her the child to whom she has the least to say.

Eliza’s performance onstage shatters Miriam’s private metaphor. It is not that Eliza is spelling the words correctly. It is that when Eliza stands at the mike, concentrating on the word she has been given, she looks exactly like Miriam when she was a girl, so absorbed in a book that not even a burning building could distract her. There is pain in this recognition. Because Miriam knows that such powers of concentration come from years of being alone, of needing to focus so strongly on one thing because there is nothing else. By keeping her distance, Miriam realizes too late that she has made her daughter more like her than she ever intended.

At the beginning of Round 12, the surviving spellers are consolidated into the front row. Eliza sits with Numbers 8 and 32, two serious-looking Pakistani boys, and Number 17, a red-haired girl with dark circles under her eyes. They are all older and Eliza keeps having to readjust the microphone. Between turns, the red-haired girl whispers a mantra which sounds to Eliza like, “My bear, my bear, my bear.” Number 8 alternates between sitting on his hands and chewing his cuticles. Eliza stares into the audience, trying to find her family, but is blinded by the stage lights, which make identifying individual spectators impossible. In quick succession, 17 is dinged by DAGUERREOTYPE and 8 by CZARINA. It is down to Eliza and Number 32, the shorter of the Pakistanis.

He carries himself like a middle-aged businessman forced into early retirement. He wears blocky glasses with tinted lenses. Before starting his words he runs his fingers through his hair as if he’s collecting letters from his scalp. He and Eliza avoid eye contact. When Eliza accidentally brushes his thigh with her hand as he sits down and she stands up, he jerks his leg back as if he’s been burned.

Time stops sometime after PHARMACOPOEIA. Eliza knows Number 32’s body as well as her own: the inflamed hangnail on his left index finger, the two gray hairs near the back of his head, the way he walks heels first when approaching the mike. He has the annoying habit of grinding his teeth, a quirk that intensifies as the rounds continue. By Round 20, it has become so loud Eliza is sure it can be heard by the spectators in the back rows. The bee has become a war of attrition. If nothing else, Number 32 will turn fifteen before Eliza, at which point he will become too old to qualify.

Despite the incredible tension, despite the fact that Number 32 has obviously been doing this longer than she has, and despite the fact that her stomach is about to tear itself into tiny pieces and explode in a bright cloud of confetti from her mouth, Eliza feels overwhelmingly, intensely alive. She can feel her lungs expanding, the rush of blood traveling from her heart to her fingers. The words hit her at a level of cognition that outpaces conscious thought, resonating somewhere where spelling doesn’t need to happen because it already has, each word exploding upon entering her ear. She loves it. She loves everything about it. And she is fully prepared to spend the next year of her life on this stage, trading words into the microphone with Number 32 until his fifteenth birthday finally arrives, the judges forcibly remove him from the stage and announce Eliza to be the Times-Herald’s Greater Philadephia Metro Area Spelling Champion.

Saul doesn’t know what he is expecting to happen in Philadelphia, but it certainly isn’t the realization that his daughter is a mystical prodigy. And yet, with Eliza standing over the exact spot where Dave “The Hammer” Schulz pummeled Dale Rolfe’s face, that is exactly what happens. He watches, stunned, as Eliza stands at the microphone, eyes closed, body perfectly relaxed, waiting faithfully and patiently for the next word to materialize. Round after round—while the other children nod, shake, or bounce, their hands scratching and picking—his Eliza stands perfectly centered, in complete concentration, employing the techniques of the ancient rabbis.

Saul wants to jump to his feet and dance where he stands. He wants to sing, raising his hands in gratitude and humility. Even Isaac Luria needed a teacher. Even Shabbatai Zvi and Rabbi Nahman of Bratzlav required instruction to reach mystical greatness. Saul learned long ago that he was not meant to be another Abulafia. Instead, he has been hoping to encounter a student of whom history is made.

But that it should be Eliza! His own quiet, unassuming Elly-belly who does little more than go through the motions of the Shabbat service every Friday and who, until the day before the district bee, had never set foot inside his study. He would like to think he has kept his distance in order to protect his daughter from his unfulfilled hopes. He did not want Eliza to sense paternal expectations as unrealistic as they were immutable. Saul—who chose books over cars, Naumann over Newman—knows too well the feeling of becoming something a parent does not intend. At least, Saul had told himself, if I cannot prevent myself from inheriting my father’s faults, I can protect my daughter from their effect.

As Saul watches his daughter go head to head with the serious-looking boy two years her senior, he realizes something with illogical and unexplainable certainty: his daughter is going to surpass his greatest expectations. She is going to win.

When Number 32 stumbles over GLISSANDO, the audience gasps as if the missing second S has left them short of breath. The ding causes the boy’s body to go rigid. For everyone but Saul, who suddenly feels as if he is watching his destiny unfold, it is like witnessing an execution.

Number 32 doesn’t leave the stage. If Eliza misspells her word, the bee will continue. As she approaches the microphone, every muscle in Number 32’s body is tense, his teeth by now surely reduced to blighted stumps.

“Number 26,” the pronouncer intones with the solemnity of the keeper of the Book of Life, “your word is EYRIR.”

“Ay-reer?”

“Ay-reer.”

Doubt hits Saul like a cold wave. His certainty, so strong seconds ago, seems more space than substance. He can already feel disappointment cooling his blood. He wants to run to his daughter standing so completely still onstage with her eyes closed and yell, before it is too late, Quick. Open your eyes. This is what I look like when I believe in you.

EYRIR is a supernova inside Eliza’s head, unexpected but breathtakingly beautiful. The lights transform the audience into a sea of vague shapes, the alien syllables echoing in the auditorium’s corners. It is strangely quiet. The word fills Eliza’s mouth with a sweet, metallic taste.

Suddenly, it is as though she is living underwater. Light wavers on its course to her eyes. The stadium ripples as if painted in ink on a lake’s surface. EYRIR is a dank thing exuding heat and threat, its dark fur tangled from years in the forest. EYRIR is the nameless, shapeless fear that haunts sleepless nights. Eliza wants EYRIR to disappear like a fever vision at the touch of her father’s hand. Instead, she asks for a definition.

“It’s a unit of currency,” the pronouncer explains, eyes unreadable. “Used in Iceland.”

“Ay-reer.” Eliza pauses. A? AI? She closes her eyes. She doesn’t think about Number 32 glowering behind her or about the fact that she will be required to start spelling soon or about her family somewhere in the audience. She waits patiently, faithfully, for the word to reveal itself. Then, as her eyelids glow red from the stage lights, it does. Eliza takes a deep breath to give the word strength.

Y, the slippery snake. Y that can change from vowel to consonant like water to ice.

“E-Y-” She lets out her breath. “R-I-R. Eyrir.” She waits.

Resounding, palpable silence. Nothing moves. Eliza wonders if death is not a sleep you can’t wake up from but life reduced to one inescapable moment.

The pronouncer’s voice cracks the silence, a thickened shell protecting sweet meat.

“That is correct.”

Applause pounds the stage like colored pebbles. An internal mute button that Eliza didn’t even know existed disengages. It is like hearing the ocean after years of watching waves silently crash upon the sand.

And then Eliza sees her father. Saul is not walking but running to the stage. He is oblivious to the rows of chairs, to the clusters of people and journalists, his body reminding Eliza of a bumper car as he bounces off them on his stageward trajectory, eyes locked on her. His face is like a page from Eliza’s illustrated Old Testament: Jew beholding Promised Land. Eliza feels like Moses. She feels like Superman. She holds her trophy aloft, the stage her Mount Sinai, Saul her Jimmy Olsen. When Saul reaches the stage and lifts her into a hug like manna in the desert, Eliza is flying.

The first time Perfectimundo finds Miriam, it is a complete surprise, a game of hopscotch in which the stone falls into the perfect center of square 3. It is a magic moment. The absolute rightness of the stone’s placement in the square opens something deep inside Miriam that had, until this moment, always been shut. Miriam can feel the release. Her body fills with warmth at the sight of the stone, beckoning like a talisman to another world. It is this other world that Miriam wants to inhabit, this other world to which she really belongs. Miriam stops the game, infuriating her play partner, a frilled neighbor whose father is big in pork belly futures. Miriam insists upon staring at the rock, and then upon tossing and retossing other rocks until they land in the exact centers of squares 1, 2, and 4–8, respectively, an activity which has not ended by the time Miriam is called in for dinner, the frilly neighbor having long ago fled in self-righteous boredom back to Mummy.

Later that same year Miriam receives a kaleidoscope as a gift. When she first puts it to her eye, she forgets to breathe. It is a window into the world of the perfectly thrown stone, the land of Perfectimundo. Miriam wishes she could squeeze through the eyehole and into the tube, joining the flawless symmetry. Failing that, she decides she is fully prepared to spend the rest of her life holding the cylinder to her face. When a well-meaning adult rotates the cylinder, Miriam screams so loudly her nanny fears a piece of colored glass has lodged in her charge’s eye. The kaleidoscope is grabbed away just as Miriam realizes that the movement did not destroy perfection, but created it anew. She demands the present back, spends the rest of the day frozen except for the rotation of one hand, the kaleidoscope pointed toward the sun. By the time Miriam goes to bed, the kaleidoscope clutched to her chest, she has decided that where there is a window there has to be a door. That night Miriam vows, with the solemnity of all seven of her precocious years, that even if she must spend her whole life searching for the door to Perfectimundo, she will find it.

Saul comes to breakfast with multiple copies of the Norristoum Times-Herald and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

“Good morning, star,” he says, presenting the papers to his daughter.

The Times-Herald’s front page proclaims HUNTINGDON GIRL SPELLS HER WAY TO V-I-C-T-O-R-Y while the Inquirer places its more sedate “EYRIR” TAKES METRO AREA SPELLER TO NATIONALS in its Neighbor section.

The Times-Herald, with its photo of Miriam, Saul, and Aaron joining Eliza in the winner’s circle, holds Eliza’s interest longer, it being one of the few family pictures ever taken. Eliza’s face is a still life of suspended disbelief, her trophy a baby she didn’t know she was about to have. Saul grasps her shoulders, his face glowing with pride and possession. Miriam stands to their left, her hand caught midway to Eliza’s arm as if unsure whether it is safe to touch. Aaron stands at the frame’s edge, face out of focus, largely concealed by the people around him. Everything is much smaller than it seemed at the time.

It is not the photo Eliza was expecting. Her family doesn’t look anything like the stuff of photography studios. Theirs is no pearl-finish portrait of interlocking hands and matching smiles. Instead, they more closely resemble odd puzzle pieces, mismatched slots and tabs jammed into each other to force a whole. Eliza examines the picture with the detachment of a stranger, seeing for the first time the way her father and mother avoid contact, her brother’s perpetual old woman slouch, and the way she freezes at Saul’s touch as if immobility will preserve the moment. Eliza spots unfamiliar hard lines around the man’s eyes, a strange emptiness to the woman’s face. Even the girl starts to look unfamiliar, her eyes a little too bright, her face a little too eager. Eliza struggles to convince herself that when she looks away from the picture she will be surrounded by familiar figures and not the strangers in the photo. Looking up from the newspaper is like walking into a darkened room from the noonday sun. It takes a moment for Eliza’s eyes to readjust. But there is her father, whistling one of his morning songs as he pages through the paper. There is her mother, head tilted to one side as she scours the pan Saul used to scramble eggs. She knows these people. She turns the Times-Herald