Dinners in Saul’s absence have been courtesy of Swanson. Tonight Aaron has two turkey pot pies heating up in the oven. The air is sweet with the smell of baking crust. Aaron places a bubbling tin on each plate. The anomaly of foil on white china amplifies the strangeness wrought by Saul and Eliza’s absence: the stiffness of the ritual place settings, the hollow sound of the kitchen chairs scraping against the floor. With two fewer faces to distract him, Aaron sees the lines at the corners of his mother’s mouth and between her eyebrows, echoes of her face deep in concentration. Aaron reasons that, as a face loses its ability to cover its tracks, it must fall back on what it’s most used to. When he attempts to picture himself old, Aaron realizes that the old man currently awaiting him has a face perpetually braced for disaster. He wonders if, at age sixteen, it is not too late to change his wrinkles.
The silence is pregnant with avoided topics. Miriam is giddy with the knowledge of the dish and of a stranger’s home, is reminded of the time she tried marijuana: the giggles, the secret sense of elevation above the plodding world. She knows it’s silly to think Aaron would suspect her of anything. Her comings and goings are too unpredictable for this most recent one to have merited attention. Despite this, she cannot help but inspect Aaron’s face across the table, looking for signs that he has detected the change within her.
Aaron keeps glancing at the kiddush cup on the shelf above the microwave. Its very shape seems accusatory, the stem reaching up to the cup in a huge letter Y. Inside Aaron’s head, Saul’s voice is repeating that very question. Aaron can picture perfectly his father’s disappointment, the head shaking, the downward glance, and now his mother is staring at him from across the table. Perhaps she is equally aware of Shabbat’s absence. Can she tell, just by looking at him, that he isn’t planning on going to services? That instead he plans to reread the pamphlets Chali gave him in the park this afternoon?
Silverware clinks. Water is swallowed. Aaron longs for Saul’s meat loaf or barbecued chicken. They have only talked once so far, a stilted four-phone conversation that lapsed into silence once Eliza described the hotel and Saul the competition. For Aaron it is a preview of what family will become once he leaves home.
Miriam wonders if the dish’s absence has been noticed yet and a plausible reason invented for its disappearance. Robbery certainly wouldn’t be an option its former owners would think to consider. Though Miriam cannot imagine anyone seeing the dishless pile of change and screaming “Thief!” into the night, dread sits inside her like a stone, making it difficult to eat. Its weight in her belly only adds to her excitement, pain enhancing pleasure. She did not know it was possible for such lightness and heaviness to coexist, the one making the other more distinct. When Saul returns with Eliza from Washington, D.C., Miriam realizes she will welcome his weight on the bed, the tiptoeing to prepare for sleep. Saul’s presence has become necessary ballast to keep her from falling up instead of down. At the thought of Saul, the phrase “breaking and entering” comes to mind for the first time.
“I’m going to get some ice cream from the freezer. Do you want some?” The words sound misplaced after the extended silence. Miriam looks at Aaron so strangely that he wonders if he has spoken gibberish. But now she’s smiling with teeth, which is not her usual smile and which kind of gives Aaron the creeps, but at least signifies that what he said made sense.
A question. She only heard the last portion — “want some?” — and is afraid to ask Aaron to repeat himself because she doesn’t want to act unusual. But then she is always asking people to repeat themselves, so asking what he asked would actually be a sign of normalcy.
“Ice cream,” Aaron repeats. Miriam shakes her head. She has barely touched her dinner, tears into her pot pie with affected vigor. On his way to the freezer Aaron turns on the television, which he would have done earlier except that Shabbat is the one night they’re not supposed to watch the news at dinner. The modulated tone of the anchorman muffles Saul’s voice in Aaron’s head and renders the kiddush cup harmless, but it cannot cancel out the previous silence, still waiting beneath the surface.
The remaining spellers occupy two rows of seats. Eliza, situated between Numbers 41 and 62, has a clear view of Rachel whom, having heard her name, she can no longer think of as Number 36. Eliza longs for the distraction of the girl with the brown mole, but she was eliminated by
EDIFICE
yesterday, leaving Eliza no choice but to focus on Rachel’s nervous tics. With each round Rachel adds something to her anxious repertoire, which varies from sitting to standing. Seated, she picks at her placard with her fingers and teeth, tearing its edges as she tugs one way and then another, the string digging into the skin of her neck. As her turn nears, the tugging quickens and is joined by bouncing, making her chair creak. Eliza must stifle the urge to place her hands on Rachel’s shoulders to hold her down.
More than ever, Eliza wants to win. She wants to win with a word so difficult her father will have to admit that he was wrong, that the letters are already guiding her.
When Number 127 is being asked to spell
LOQUAT
, Eliza closes her eyes and feels her mind empty out. L fills her head, a glowing yellow the color of molten metal.
This is what Dad meant.
She’s surprised at how easy it is. Inside Elly’s head, L grows longer, its edges curving inward to form an O. Her body loosens. When the edge of O grows a tail to become Q, Eliza feels the change in her fingertips. Q’s top evaporates and its tail disappears, U settling warm in her belly. Elly feels a tickle as U flips and grows a line through its middle to become an A. When A’s legs slide together as its arm floats up, T fills Eliza, straightening her spine. Eliza opens her eyes. She feels as if she has just woken from a deep sleep. Number 127 is walking offstage to the sound of vigorous applause.
“I did it,” she mouths to her father across the room.
Saul smiles and nods. “I love you too,” he mouths back equally indecipherably.
By Round 7, there are seventeen of them. Number 14, whose perpetually perfect posture adds to the overall impression that he is an android, causes murmurs of admiration when he rips through
DVANDVA
without asking for a derivation or use in a sentence. When Number 22 gets her word wrong, No Chin has to pry her hand from the microphone. Number 33 decides midway through
PERIPATETIC
that he has made a mistake. He turns stubbornly silent, demanding to be dinged out rather than made to complete the word. He stands mute until his time runs out. The judge’s spelling reveals that the boy’s progress had been perfect until he had refused to go on.
Number 35 is called to the mike. Rachel almost trips on her way to the front of the stage, removes the microphone from its stand, and holds it to her mouth like a lounge singer. The Independence Ballroom suddenly seethes with the sound of her nervous breathing.
“Number 35, your word is
GREGARINE
.”
Having been informed that a gregarine is a parasitic protozoan taken from the Latin, Rachel has no choice but to start spelling. She pounds her palm against her forehead after each letter, as if trying to knock the next one loose. Because she is holding the microphone so close to her face, each moment of contact sounds like a heavy blow.
“… I …” Pound. “… N …” Pound. “… E …” Pound. “Gregarine.”
Eliza finds herself bracing for the next blow, but none comes. The judge’s “Correct” sends Rachel leaping back to her seat to resume picking at her placard, which is now noticeably smaller than the others.
When Number 43 is given
PURIM
, Eliza almost laughs out loud. Then she realizes that such an easy word right before her turn is a bad sign, almost certain to mean she’s destined to get something awful. Number 43, the only contestant wearing a yarmulke, makes short work of
PURIM
and returns to his seat with a dazed grin. The judge calls Eliza to the mike.
As she stands, Elly hazily recalls her nightmare: the expectant silence, the feeling she is holding up time, the endless path from her seat to the microphone. She decides that if she can get this next word, whatever it may be, her chances of winning are practically guaranteed. From the moment she rises from her chair, she locks eyes with Saul, whose gaze practically steers her to the microphone.
“Number 59, your word is
DUVETYN
.”
“Dew-veh-teen?” Eliza’s heart lurches into her throat. In her mind’s eye, she sees nothing.
“That is correct. Duvetyn.”
Saul is staring so hard it feels like he’s directly in front of her instead of halfway across the room. She wants to ask him to leave, to just get on the plane and fly back home.
“Um, what does it mean?”
The judge’s voice is irritatingly friendly. “Duvetyn is a soft, short-napped fabric with a twill weave, made of wool, cotton, rayon, or silk.”
Eliza whispers the word, feels the way it shapes her tongue and lips. From these movements she tries to chart the word’s path through time and place. Where has it traveled? When was it born?
“What is the derivation, please?”
The judge’s voice is ever neutral, revealing nothing. “Duvetyn comes to us from the French.”
Eliza wants to see herself through the judge’s eyes. Does he have favorites? Is she one of them? Or are they all interchangeable, one long blur of nervous hands and voices? Her placard suddenly reminds her of the stickers affixed to new underwear:
INSPECTED
BY 59.
She’s got to focus. There isn’t much time. She returns to Duvetyn, pushes everything else aside.
I know it starts with D.
“Dew-veh-teen.”
At first it is a struggle to empty her mind, which keeps conjuring up fresh images: her father’s face, a conveyer belt laden with tagged children, but eventually all is black and blank.
D, D, D, D, D, D,
Eliza thinks until D, proud and foreboding, appears in her mind’s eye. Then, its top disappears. The letters are showing her the way.
“
D-U
…”
Dew – veh – teen.
She speeds through the next few letters, which are obvious.
“…
V-E-T
…” and now she’s got the word in her head, letters rearranging themselves into something that looks right, something French.
“…
I-N-E
. Duvetine.” It feels good.
Time moves so slowly. The silence lasts so long Eliza is sure it means she is correct. Her heart begins to pound faster. Walter Cronkite and the loving cup are practically hers.
Ding.
She thinks she’s hallucinated the sound at first, is sure her ears have made some kind of mistake until the judge starts spelling the word back to her and it’s got that Y in it, the one letter she had dared to call friend. Brown Braid comes up with her arms wide open and Eliza only realizes at that instant how big Brown Braid’s boobs are and how when she gets hugged she’ll be smushed against them and how Brown Braid’s boobs are incontrovertible proof that it’s really, truly over.
Miriam is restless. Her thoughts are on the car, how close it is, how easy it would be to let it guide her to another house and the missing piece held captive there. She can hear pieces of herself calling from their scattered prisons like fifteen-year locusts, a constant high-pitched grating noise impossible to tune out. Once Saul returns it will be harder to pursue her new mission. She knows that part of her will welcome this but, like a schoolgirl presented with the temporary anarchy of deep snowfall, Miriam wants to enjoy the brief obscuration of routine afforded by Saul’s absence.
Miriam’s recent house forays evoke a larger sense of departure from law and order than her department store salvage operations. The magnified sense of infraction has nothing to do with monetary worth. Miriam has stolen silk scarves and flatware, books and appliances. The ceramic dish is barely garage salable, would fetch maybe a quarter on a generous Sunday. But Miriam is invited into the department stores. Their doors stand wide open. Music plays. Buffed and waxed floors welcome her instep. Store objects are meant expressly to be touched, held, and taken away. The only slight variance in their purpose and Miriam’s is that Miriam bypasses a certain conventional exchange, a formality she feels entitled to dispense with.
The dish is different in that it belonged to an environment of objects already claimed by someone else. In taking the dish Miriam was violating not an anonymity but an entity, a discrete collection of memories and intentions with a name and a face. Though Miriam is unfamiliar with the complexities of the state penal code, her private precepts view this as the greater infraction. The ceramic dish tests her devotion to her cause. It is a challenge: How far are you willing to go?
All the way,
she wants to answer, never before having felt the urge to lose herself in something so much larger than herself.
This is passion,
she realizes, finally understanding the smoldering heat of a lifetime of love scenes, real and fictional, that have left her cold. She wants to call Saul, certain that even across a telephone wire he would sense the change.
Is this what you feel?
she would ask, not having to explain, the timbre of her voice explanation enough.
Is this what
we
are supposed to feel?
the question she will never dare to ask, afraid to acknowledge the answer.
The Comfort Room seems empty when Eliza is led in and seated before a plate of cookies and a cup of juice. A curtain separates Eliza from the rest of the room. Behind it, the silence is punctuated by air-sucking sobs.
“This is
your
space,” Brown Braid says in a tone she learned in Psych 202 last semester, gesturing to the curtain, the cookies, and to an inflatable punching bag set up in the corner. “Everything is here for
you.
”
Number 33, his eyes red and puffy, emerges from behind the curtain, his mother holding his arm as if trying to prevent a slow leak.