“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 Chris-tian 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.