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 ser-vice 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 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.