There is no moment of reprieve when the face disappears, no blessed silence in which to heed the flow of her breath. The face is gone. As far as Eliza has expanded, filling all of space, she begins to contract, her impossibly small body rushing up to meet her at enormous speed. There is immense heat and immense cold. She knows she must, somehow, prepare herself for this corporeal reclamation, but it is impossible to do anything but disintegrate. She can feel parts of her burning and crumbling away. Eliza realizes that a return to her old self is impossible. The thing she has become and the body she left behind will cancel each other out upon impact. For this, she is thankful. There is the sensation of drowning, of suffocation, her lungs filling with a substance that is both thicker and thinner than air. This is the pain of creation, of life emerging from void, of vacuum birthing being.
When Eliza’s alarm wakes her up the next morning, she is afraid to open her eyes. At the sight of the sun streaming through her bedroom window, she breathes a sigh of relief.
It was only a dream,
she thinks until she realizes she is lying on the floor, in damp clothes that smell of urine. Her jaw muscles ache. Her tongue hurts to move and feels three sizes too big for her mouth.
She sees the book lying open beside her. Afraid to touch it, she uses a shoe lying near her right hand to flip it shut. Then she locks herself in the bathroom and rinses her clothes in the tub.
When Saul sees his daughter enter the kitchen, she is pale, with dark circles under her eyes. She doesn’t respond to his question about trouble sleeping.
“I want to apologize for last evening,” he says. “I said a lot of things that I didn’t mean. The past few weeks have been very hard. Your brother and I are going through a difficult time and your mother being sick makes it tougher on everyone. I love you both very, very much and I’m sorry all that had to happen the night before the bee. I hope you can put last night aside and enjoy today. You’ve worked too hard to let anything spoil it.”
When Eliza nods, Saul kisses her on the forehead. “You’re a real trooper,” he says.
Aaron does not join them for breakfast. He goes straight from his room to the front door, managing to back the car down the driveway before Saul, who has run outside after him, can recite his apology.
Eliza watches her father run out the door as if in slow motion. She watches his legs extend, his arms swing back and forth. He returns slightly out of breath, face flushed. For a brief moment Eliza thinks she is still in her room, still trapped in the dream that wasn’t a dream that she can’t remember, because her father’s face is suddenly several faces at once in a way that feels very familiar. She can see the faces of multiple men and women lurking just beneath his skin like afterimages, like long-lost relatives whose pictures she might have been staring at just prior to looking at her father’s face. And though it all happens incredibly quickly, so quickly that Eliza isn’t sure whether or not she is imagining it, she can’t help but notice the way some of her father’s features match up with the other faces and the way some stand completely apart, uniquely his own.
Perhaps Saul catches Elly staring at him funny, because he asks if she is all right. When she answers that she is, she realizes that she’s not just telling him what he wants to hear. She can feel the truth of her answer deep inside herself, at a level where she used to think the words resided but where she now knows there is just her heart and stomach and lungs.
She spends the bus ride to school puzzling the previous night together, alarmed and relieved at the profusion of missing pieces. She remembers taking her father’s book. She remembers beginning to chant. She seems to recall feeling a moment of utter clarity, her life suddenly coming into absolute focus. After that, the blanks begin. She remembers her head pressing against the carpet and feeling that it was being held there. She remembers being afraid. The memory of the pain is more tangible, manifesting itself in the soreness in her muscles and her tongue. She knows that whatever happened last night was her fault. She knows she’d like to be forgiven. Looking into the bus window, Eliza sees Miriam reflected in her own face. “Hello,” she whispers to the window. When she smiles, her mother’s reflection in the window smiles back.
By the time Eliza gets to school, she is no longer the girl who had to wash her clothes out in the bathtub. She has become someone wiser, perhaps that other girl’s older sister. She likes the way this new someone walks past the school showcase without checking for remaining newspaper articles. She appreciates this new girl’s calmness, focusing extra hard on the chalk in Ms. Paul’s hand when a memory of last night, a bad one, tries to claim her attention. She is especially proud of the way the new Eliza barely ever checks the clock to see how much time is left before the bee begins.
Saul arrives at ten forty-five sharp. He is showered and shaved and wearing a tie. Though his face is haggard, he cannot stop grinning. As he enters, he tousles Eliza’s hair, whispers, “This is it, kiddo,” into her ear. The students point and giggle. He is led to a chair on the other side of the room but cannot stop staring. He is a man in love.
Looking at him, Eliza feels incredibly old. Old like she is his grandmother, like they are in a doctor’s office and he is here for his shots. She wants to take him aside and tell him that it will be okay, that it will only hurt for a little while.
At precisely 11 A.M. every teacher in every classroom at McKinley Elementary School tells their students to stand. Eliza stands up no more eagerly or reluctantly than the rest. There are a few giggles, a few pointed stares. Though Eliza doubts that what she is about to do will affect her mother much, she wishes Aaron were here. She’s pretty sure he would like to see it.
Ms. Paul works her way down the rows and it’s words like
MANAGER
and
GHOST
and
MARSHMALLOW
. Saul is beaming; Eliza can feel his excitement from across the room. If this small thing weren’t part of something so much bigger, she would love to give it to him. By the time Ms. Paul gets to Elly, Saul is straining at his seat like a tethered helium balloon waiting for the slightest excuse to soar into the sky.
“Eliza, your word is
ORIGAMI
.”
Saul’s smile is contagious. Ms. Paul is smiling now too, her words curving to fit her upturned mouth.
“Origami,” repeats Eliza, the word inspiring an image that has little to do with paper cranes and boxes. Instead, “origami” conjures its opposite, a shape created by a seemingly endless unfolding, leaving room for nothing else. The image serves to validate a decision Eliza realizes she has already made. She feels suddenly queasy, as if a small earthquake were occurring inside her. Her legs begin to shake. Then she focuses her eyes at the front of the room, on the artificial wood grain of her teacher’s desk. The feeling fades. She is ready.
Eliza had thought that once this moment arrived she wouldn’t want to look at her father, but now she realizes that she must. Saul’s face is frozen in expectation, his body completely still. Eliza is reminded of Aaron, of the look in his eyes in the schoolyard so many years ago. There was a time when either Eliza would have had to turn away from that look or give it whatever it wanted.
Eliza doesn’t close her eyes. She doesn’t empty her mind. She doesn’t wait for the letters to come because she’s already picked the letters she wants. She faces her father as she pronounces them one by one.
“Origami,” Eliza says. “
O-R-I-G-A-M-Y
. Origami.”
Everyone in the room breathes in at once. For a moment it feels as though there isn’t enough air. Saul is covering his mouth as if his hand could somehow block the moment, removing from the room a word which was never his to claim.
Ms. Paul looks stricken. “Are you sure?” she asks, even though that is completely against the rules.
Eliza has a feeling that if she said no, there wouldn’t be a person in the room who wouldn’t let her try again.
Instead, she nods her head. She is sure.
A
massive thank you to Charlotte Anne Arch, who generously gifted me with the seeds of this novel.
Thanks to Wendy Schmalz for believing in me and to my friend and fairy godmother, Alice Peck, for leading me to her. Thanks to Amy Scheibe for your enthusiasm and insight and to Chris Min for your invaluable and indefatigable fine-tuning.
I was guided in my research and writing by Neil Steinberg’s essay, “The Spelling Bee,” as it appeared in
Granta;
by Gershom Scholem’s “Abraham Abulafia and the Doctrine of Prophetic Kabbalism” in his book,
Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism;
and by Aryeh Kaplan’s section on Abulafia in his book,
Meditation and Kabbalah.
Thanks to the many readers and editors of this book: the Fall Cafe fiction workshop; Jeff Herzbach; Anthony Tognazzini; Mark, Ellen, and Saryn Goldberg; and Daupo.
A big, wet, sloppy kiss for Lisa Rosenthal. Thank you for your advice, opinions, support, and unflagging friendship.
Jason — your love, intelligence, and compassion have made me a better writer and a better person. I love you.
MYLA
GOLDBERG
is a first-time novelist whose stories have appeared in
Virgin Fiction, Eclectic Literary Forum,
and
American Writing.
She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband, Jason.