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 service 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 inheriting 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.”