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 mea-sured 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 miter 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, Eurythmics, 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.