AT PRECISELY 11 A.M. EVERY TEACHER in every classroom at McKinley Elementary School tells their students to stand. The enthusiasm of the collective chair scrape that follows rates somewhere between mandatory school assembly and head lice inspection. This is especially the case in Ms. Bergermeyer’s fourth/fifth combination, which everybody knows is where the unimpressive fifth graders are put. Eliza Naumann certainly knows this. Since being designated three years ago as a student from whom great things should not be expected, she has grown inured to the sun-bleached posters of puppies and kittens hanging from ropes, and trying to climb ladders, and wearing hats that are too big for them above captions like “Hang in there,” “If at first you don’t succeed …”and “There’s always time to grow.” These baby animals, which have adorned the walls of every one of her classrooms from third grade onward, have watched over untold years of C students who never get picked for Student of the Week, sixth-place winners who never get a ribbon, and short, pigeon-toed girls who never get chased by boys at recess. As Eliza stands with the rest of her class, she has already prepared herself for the inevitable descent back into her chair. She has no reason to expect that the outcome of this, her first spelling bee, will differ from the outcome of any other school event seemingly designed to confirm, display, or amplify her mediocrity.

Ms. Bergermeyer’s voice as she offers up spelling words matches the sodden texture of the classroom’s cinder block walls. Eliza expects to be able to poke her finger into the walls, is surprised to find she cannot. She can certainly poke her way through and past her teacher’s voice, finds this preferable to being dragged down by its waterlogged cadences, the voice of a middle-aged woman who has resigned herself to student rosters filled with America’s future insurance salesmen, Amway dealers, and dissatisfied housewives.

Eliza only half listens as Bergermeyer works her way down the rows of seats. In smarter classrooms, chair backs are free from petrified Bubble Yum. Smooth desktops are unmarred by pencil tips, compass points, and scissors blades. Eliza suspects that the school’s disfigured desks and chairs are shunted into classrooms like hers at the end of every quarter, seems to remember a smattering of pristine desks disappearing from her classrooms over spring and winter breaks to be replaced by their older, uglier cousins.

Bergermeyer is ten chairs away. Melanie Turpin, who has a brother or sister in every grade in the primary wing, sits down after spelling TOMARROW, which even Eliza knows is spelled with an O. Eliza also knows that LISARD is supposed to have a Z and that PERSONEL needs a second N. And suddenly the bee gets more interesting. Because Eliza is spelling all the words right. So that when Ms. Bergermeyer gives Eliza RASPBERRY, she stands a little straighter, proudly including the P before moving on to the B-E-R-R-Y. By the time Bergermeyer has worked her way through the class to the end of the first round, Eliza is one of the few left standing.

Three years before Eliza’s first brush with competitive spelling, she is a second-grader in Ms. Lodowski’s class, a room that is baby animal poster-free. Eliza’s school universe is still an unvariegated whole. The wheat has yet to be culled from the chaff and given nicer desks. There is only one curriculum, one kind of student, one handwriting worksheet occupying every desk in Eliza’s class. Though some students finish faster than others, Eliza doesn’t notice this, couldn’t tell if asked where she falls within the worksheet completion continuum.

Eliza is having a hard time with cursive capital Q, which does not look Q-like at all. She is also distracted by the fact that people have been getting called out of the classroom all morning and that it doesn’t seem to be for something bad. For one thing, the list is alphabetical. Jared Montgomery has just been called, which means that if Eliza’s name is going to be called, it has got to be soon. The day has become an interminable Duck Duck Goose game in which she has only one chance to be picked. She senses it is very important that this happen, has felt this certainty in her stomach since Lodowski started on K. Eliza assures herself that as soon as she gets called out her stomach will stop churning, she will stop sweating, and cursive capital Q will start looking like a letter instead of like the number 2.

Ms. Lodowski knows that second grade is a very special time. Under her discerning eye, the small lumps of clay that are her students are pressed into the first mold of their young lives. A lapsed classics graduate student, Ms. Lodowski is thrilled that her teaching career has cast her in the role of the Fates. Though she couldn’t have known it at the time, her abbreviated classical pursuits equipped her for her life’s calling as overseer of McKinley Elementary’s Talented and Gifted (TAG) placement program.

Ms. Lodowski’s home, shared with a canary named Minerva, is filled with photo albums in which she has tracked her TAG students through high school honors and into college. In a few more years the first of her former charges will fulfill destinies shaped by her guiding hand.

Ms. Lodowski prides herself upon her powers of discernment. She considers class participation, homework, and test performance as well as general personality and behavior in separating superior students from merely satisfactory ones. The night before the big day she goes down her class roster with a red pencil. As she circles each name her voice whispers, “TAG, you’re it,” with childlike glee.

Steven Sills spells WEIRD with the I before the E. Eliza spells it with the E before the I and is the last left standing. As she surveys the tops of the heads of her seated classmates she thinks, So this is what it’s like to be tall.

She gets to miss fifth period math. Under Dr. Morris’s watchful eye, she files into the school cafeteria with the winners from the other classes and takes her place in a plastic bucket seat. The seats are shaped in such a way as to promote loss of circulation after more than ten minutes. Two holes in each chair press circles into the flesh of each small backside, leaving marks long after the sitter has risen. Each chair has uneven legs, the row stretching across the stage like a hobbled centipede.

Through the windows on the left wall, buses arrive with P.M. kindergartners. In the kitchen, hundreds of lunch trays are being washed. From behind the closed kitchen comes the soothing sound of summer rain. Eliza feels a sudden pang of guilt for having left a lump of powdered mashed potato in the oval indentation of her tray instead of scraping it into the trash, worries that the water won’t be strong enough to overcome her lunchtime inertia.

Dr. Morris is the kind of principal who stands outside his office to say goodbye to students by name as they scramble to their buses. Administering the school spelling bee allows him the great pleasure of observing his best and brightest. The children before him are the ones whose names adorn the honor roll. They are names teachers track long after having taught them in order to say, “This one was my favorite,” or “I always knew this one would go far.” Eliza is the exception to this rule. When Dr. Morris spots her in the group, he is reminded of something he can’t quite place. At his puzzled smile, she blushes and looks away.

The meeting between Dr. Morris and Eliza’s father that Dr. Morris can’t quite remember occurs on Parents’ Night one month after Ms. Lodowski goes from Kathy Myers to John Nervish, skipping Eliza. Saul Naumann only learns of his daughter’s exclusion through one of his congregants who, after Shabbat services, announces loudly enough for the people on the other side of the cookie table to overhear that her son has been identified as Talented and Gifted. Saul realizes that the boy is in Eliza’s class. Eliza hasn’t tendered Saul the congratulatory note Aaron delivered at her age, the one that made Saul feel like a sweepstakes winner.

Saul’s is one of many hands Dr. Morris shakes that Parents’ Night. Dr. Morris’s office contains a desk with a framed picture of his daughter, two squeaky chairs, and a window that looks out onto the school playground. On a small bookshelf, binders of county educational code bookend with instructional paperbacks devoted to several categories of child including “special needs,” “precocious,” “problem,” and “hyperactive.” Dr. Morris keeps mimeographed pages from these books on hand to distribute to the parentally challenged.

“Hello, Mr. Naumann. It’s a pleasure to see you here tonight.” Dr. Morris remembers the son—smart, awkward, too quiet for his own good. While he knows the daughter’s face, he can’t attach words to the picture. He scans her file, hoping for help and finding nothing. “Eliza is a lovely child.”

“Thank you. We think she’s pretty special. Which is why I was a little surprised when I learned that she hadn’t been TAG-tested with the rest of her class.”

Morris manages a polite smile. Every year there is at least one like Mr. Naumann.

“Well, Mr. Naumann, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. Only a portion of the second grade is tested, the fraction of the class Ms. Lodowski feels may benefit from an accelerated curriculum.”

“The smarter ones.”

“There are a lot of different kinds of smarts, Mr. Naumann, a lot of ways for a child to be special.”

Dr. Morris addresses that last part to the picture on his desk. It’s too bad Saul can’t see this picture from where he’s standing. If he could see it, he might conclude that this is a somewhat sensitive topic for Dr. Morris. The only people who generally get to see Rebecca Morris’s picture are the students Dr. Morris catches using the word “retard.” He escorts these students to his office, where they are shown the picture and ordered to repeat the word, this time to his daughter’s face.

“Of course there are a lot of ways to be special,” Saul continues, no way to know that he really shouldn’t. “But my older son was placed in the TAG program, and I just thought that—”

Dr. Morris’s face has grown red. “Instead of focusing on what you think you lack, Mr. Naumann, why don’t you appreciate what you have? Eliza is a caring, loving child.”

“Of course she is. That’s not the issue.”

Dr. Morris pictures Rebecca walking unsteadily to the van that comes for her each morning, the beatific smile that fills her face at the sight of any animal, and her pleasure at a yellow apple cut into bite-size pieces. He wants Mr. Naumann to get the hell out of his office.

“So sorry, Mr. Naumann, but our time is up. I wouldn’t want to keep the other parents waiting.”

“But—”

“Goodbye, Mr. Naumann, a pleasure seeing you again.”

From third grade onward, Eliza’s class is divided into math and reading groups. Eliza’s reading group is called the Racecars. She likes it okay until she learns that the other reading group is called the Rockets. The Rockets read from a paperback that has The Great Books printed on its cover in gallant letters. When she asks Jared Montgomery what’s inside, he tells her that his group is reading excerpts from “the canon” and Eliza feels too stupid to ask if that means something other than a large gun. She can’t help but wonder if someone told her which books were great and which ones were just so-so, if she’d like reading more. While she eventually adjusts to the faded motivational posters featuring long-dead baby animals, and the fifties-era reading books whose soporific effects have intensified with each decade of use, she can’t get it out of her head that, while she is speeding around in circles waiting to be told when to stop, other kids are flying to the moon.

Within half an hour all the fourth graders have been eliminated except for Li Chan, who never washes his hair and outlasts two fifth graders and a sixth grader from a fifth/sixth combination. When Li finally misspells FOLLICLE, the eliminated fourth graders chant “Stink bomb” until Dr. Morris blinks the lights to quiet things down.

Eliza gets CANARY, SECRETARY, and PLACEBO. By the time CEREMONIAL and PROBABILITY come around, it is down to her, Brad Fry, and Sinna Bhagudori.

Everyone knows that Sinna is the smartest girl in school and that Brad is the smartest boy, but probably not as smart as Sinna. If anyone knows Eliza, it is from breaking the school limbo record, which got her name on the music classroom blackboard for a few weeks but which always goes to the short kids anyway.

Sinna has blue contact lenses and big boobs. Everyone knows her eyes are fake because they were brown the year before, but Sinna insists that a lot of people’s eyes change when they go through puberty.

Brad plays soccer at recess and has a lot of moles. There are rumors that he spends his summers at a camp for kids who take math and science classes because they want to, but Brad tells everyone he goes to soccer camp. No one believes him either.

A couple times when it’s Eliza’s turn, Sinna starts toward the podium and Dr. Morris has to remind her to wait. Waiting for Sinna to return to her seat, Eliza pretends she is a TV star during opening credits, her face caught in freeze-frame. She imagines her name appearing below her face in bold white letters.

Sinna spells IMMANENT without the second M. She is already walking back to her seat when Dr. Morris says, “I’m afraid that’s incorrect.” It gets very quiet, like at the beginning of a blackout before anyone has thought to fetch a flashlight. Sinna walks offstage biting her lower lip.

Brad is next, but he is so surprised by Sinna getting out that he has to ask for POSSIBILITY three times before he spells it with one S. Despite his assertions to the contrary, he also believes that Sinna is the smarter one. Which just leaves Eliza, who spells CORRESPONDENCE with her eyes closed to avoid looking at three rows of students staring at her in disbelief.

In Eliza’s fantasy she walks to the podium, which she is suddenly tall enough to see over, and begins speaking to a cafeteria suddenly filled to capacity.

A few of you might know my name, but most of you don’t even recognize me. I know you, though. And what I’m about to say is as important to you as it is to me.

It’s the lead-in to a speech from a particularly powerful after-school special. Eliza’s always thought it made a great beginning. No actual words come after that, but Eliza’s mouth keeps moving and the music swells. By the end, all the students are smiling with little tears in their eyes and Lindsay Halpern makes a place for Eliza at her table between her and Roger Pond.

Eliza stands outside Saul’s closed study door, an envelope hot in her hand. She’s not sure this is a valid interruption. She’s not sick, nothing’s on fire, and the district bee isn’t until the weekend. But if she waits for her father to come out so she can hand it to him, it might be another two hours.

Eliza considers waiting anyway. Perhaps her father will need to use the bathroom, or maybe he’ll get hungry for a snack. She puts her ear against the door but hears nothing. When she looks down she finds that her hands have unconsciously reopened the envelope and removed the letter. A few words are smeared now; the paper’s creases are fuzzed with wear. Eliza realizes for the first time that her last name is misspelled. She feels a sudden urge to tear the letter, burn it to ash, cram it down the disposal. Instead, she folds the letter back into thirds, licks the by now dissolved adhesive on the envelope’s flap, and shoves the letter through the crack beneath her father’s study door.

Saul’s study is smaller than Eliza’s bedroom in that it lacks a closet, making it the smallest room in the house not counting bathrooms. Its perceived dimensions are diminished further by the bookshelves lining its walls and piles of notes in various stages of collapse layering the floor. Notebooks of various thicknesses and binding methods protrude above the thinner strata like steppingstones. The average paper density increases toward Saul’s desk, which emerges from the tumult like a piece of flotsam tossed by the paper tide. Saul’s desk spares no room for distracting doohickey or clever calendar, covered as it is by books and notes, loose and bound. On the wall directly above the desk, framed pictures of Mordecai M. Kaplan and Gershom Scholem provide inspiration. A small desk lamp serves as one of only two light sources, both unnatural. The room’s lack of windows is for the best since the bookshelves leave no room for them.

In this room governed by disorder, the shelves are the exception to the entropic rule. Saul’s library is arranged alphabetically, recent paperbacks brushing spines with age-seasoned leather-bound volumes. English texts adjoin Hebrew and Yiddish. In Saul’s decision to mix languages, he has accorded privilege to a letter’s pronunciation over its ordinal placement. Thus, Hebrew writer Shmuel Yosef Agnon is in among the A’s alongside Aharon Appelfeld even though the Nobelist’s last name begins with an ayin and the novelist’s name begins with an alef. While the library’s overall organization might cause many a self-respecting academic to blush, to Saul the study is a paper-lined nursery in which his scholarly interests may grow and blossom by the light of two 80-watt soft white bulbs.

When Saul closes the study door behind him, he closes the book of the everyday world as well, placing it upon a distant shelf until familial duty or emergency calls him back. So it comes as no surprise that he doesn’t hear the quiet foosh of Eliza’s envelope. Unnoticed, it joins the morass of paper carpeting the floor of his study, invisible to anyone who doesn’t know to look.

Saul Naumann spends the first portion of his life as Sal Newman, son of Henry and Lisa Newman, decorator of Christmas trees and Easter eggs. Henry has every expectation that his only child will follow him into the car repair business. From an early age Saul has been replacing sparkplugs and changing oil. Though he dislikes the combined smells of car exhaust and sweat, the hardness of the garage floor, and the mess of wires and cold metal that compose the machines of his father’s fancy, Saul fosters these associations for the sake of the rare smiles proffered by his father in their company.

Saul is thirteen when his mother takes him into the attic and shows him the box. There is a photo of a bearded man with long sidelocks and a black hat, his hand on the shoulder of a boy. At first Saul cannot believe that the curly-haired boy with the fringes hanging past his shirt is his father, Heimel Naumann, the bearded man his grandfather Yehudah. Saul learns the word “Orthodox.” His mother shows him a pair of brass candlesticks and a wine cup. She describes a world ruled by the Book, a world with little room for change. She relates eloping with Heimel after Yehudah declared her not Jewish enough. Saul sees his birth certificate and learns of his father’s decision to renounce the faith, the shift from Heimel to Henry and Naumann to Newman occurring after Yehudah ignored Saul’s birth. Saul, who had been named for Yehudah’s brother Solomon in one son’s attempt to regain a father’s love, became Sal.

It is Lisa who sneaks her son books, occasionally taking Saul to a nearby synagogue on Henry’s Friday nights out. It is their secret until Henry comes home unexpectedly one evening to find them lighting Shabbat candles. From that point onward, Saul insists on being called by his given name.

By Saul’s sophomore year of high school, he has given up any pretense of interest in cars and his father has given up interest in him. When Lisa dies of cancer, the house becomes a lonely and divided place, the last link between father and son turning to dust in a box underground. The fights begin soon after, never violent but increasingly damaging.

Saul’s escape to a liberal arts college finalizes the rift. When Saul uses his student status to stay out of Vietnam, Henry officially washes his hands of his ungrateful, hippie Jew of a son.

Saul discovers LSD and Jewish mysticism at the same time, a chance concurrence that strengthens the validity of both. During his acid trips, Saul experiences the same sense of time displacement and receptivity described in the texts. On one occasion he attests to having ascended through several levels of being in a manner similar to the ancient mystics, who rode a chariot through six castles on six celestial realms to reach God at the seventh heaven. Saul becomes a campus celebrity and preferred LSD guide. At the end of his undergraduate career and with the war still on, it is only natural that he enter rabbinical school.

Saul enters Baruch Yeshiva on scholarship. His scholarship is revoked during his freshman year when, in the name of mental exploration, he convinces his roommate to place a tab on his tongue and the resultant bad trip leads to said roommate painting his naked body blue and white and running into the dean’s office to declare himself the new Israeli Prime Minister.

Saul returns to his alma mater to live rent-free in the attic of an off-campus house inhabited by undergraduates who know him by reputation alone. The attic is charred from a semi-recent fire, contains no electrical outlets, and is uninsulated. Saul can stand fully erect as long as he keeps to the room’s center. He illuminates the space with chains of Christmas lights running off an extension cord snaked up the narrow attic stairs from a lower-floor bedroom.

Saul spends his time in the library studying Jewish thought and history in a rigorous, self-styled curriculum that surpasses his academic efforts at any time during his official enrollment. He regularly attends religious services and adult education classes at a nearby synagogue. Alone in his attic, Saul practices the traditional songs and fantasizes about someday leading a congregation, if not as a rabbi then as a cantor.

There are drawbacks to this scavenged existence. While Saul has ample access to drugs and female undergrads in his capacity as sexual and psychoactive guide to the student body, the role has begun to wear thin. His acid trips are too déjà vu. He has worn deep grooves in the psychedelic path, falling into the same hallucinatory and revelatory ruts time after time. Increasingly, his affairs with women remind him of his age and the fact that he hadn’t pictured himself at twenty three making love to clumsy teenage coeds on a dirty twin mattress in a burned-out attic. Increasingly, Saul finds himself fantasizing about his own study, a job that gives him time to pursue his interests, and the prospect of children with whom he can share his hard-won life lessons.

On Friday nights, Eliza sits with her brother in the first row of the Beth Amicha synagogue. While Aaron recites the responsive prayers without glancing at his prayer book, Eliza focuses on a spot on the bima between Rabbi Mayer and her father and tries to block out the robotic monotone of the congregation reading as one. It reminds her too much of aquarium fish, the mechanical open and shut of their mouths as they stare blankly through the glass.

While the congregation drones on, Eliza turns her attention to the brown-flecked linoleum floor tiles and thinks of the biblical exodus from Egypt. She transforms each fleck into a Jew in a windswept robe, trekking forty years across the desert to reach the Promised Land. She imagines blisters from uncomfortable sandals. She pictures a tribe of Charlton Hestons looking righteous and bearded and sun-creased. Her reverie is interrupted by Rabbi Mayer’s voice telling the congregation to rise, which she manages to do fast enough to hide the fact that, moments ago, the floor had been the Sinai.

Rabbi Mayer is a tree trunk of a man with a broad forehead and bushy eyebrows that have gone gray even though the rest of his hair remains dark. He looks out at the congregation through disproportionately small eyes, which he has willed down in size to take in as little of the world as necessary. Beth Amicha would not have been his preference, but he was Beth Amicha’s rabbi of choice. With suburban rabbis outnumbering suburban synagogues two to one, Orel Mayer chose a steady salary over spiritual affinity. A Conservative Jew, Mayer disapproves of Beth Amicha’s laxer Reform tendencies. He had initially hoped to spur the congregation to new heights of observance but Saturday evenings, when he lights the braided Havdalah candle and watches the shadows flicker upon the synagogue’s walls, he is often alone. Beth Amicha tends to regard Shabbat as a Friday night obligation. Most congregants have never been to a Havdalah service, have never heard the crisp crszh of the Havdalah flame being quenched by the wine, the true moment of Sabbath’s end. Rabbi Mayer longs to lead a congregation that appreciates this sound. But a good rabbinate is hard to find. He comforts himself with the fact that his is not the life of the itinerant rabbi, reduced to performing the brisses, weddings, and bar mitzvahs of strangers.

Saul’s gangly arms look particularly cartoony when he leads prayers on his guitar, strumming and even thumping as he sings. On the Judaism spectrum Saul’s self-proclaimed Reconstructionism puts him left of center, an affiliation the congregation hoped would counterbalance Rabbi Mayer’s, leaving Beth Amicha’s services somewhere in the middle. By playing the strict traditionalist, Rabbi Mayer makes the congregants feel as if they are being the type of Jew of whom their parents would approve. By playing his guitar and turning prayers into group sing-alongs, Saul allows people to have enough fun to forget they’ve come largely out of guilt. Rabbi Mayer is the dentist, Saul the congregation’s lollipop reward for having kept their appointment.

English prayers outnumber Hebrew ones. The Jewish Congregational Prayerbook attempts to compensate for this by using “thou” and “thee” instead of “you,” and by adding “-est” to verb endings. “Mayest thou liest down and risest up” is supposed to feel more like the four-thousand-year-old language the book has largely replaced. There is, of course, some Hebrew. A gifted minority can parse the words without any idea of their meaning. For those who forgot Hebrew phonetics soon after depositing their bar mitzvah checks, there are English transliterations.

The foreword to the JCP claims that the transliterations are “for the reader’s ease and comfort.” This gentle lie cloaks an embittered editor’s elaborate scheme to avenge the childhood he suffered while actually learning the language. SH replaces T; a K is inserted where a G would be more appropriate. As a result, it is painfully apparent who is reading the Hebrew and who is not. Misbegotten syllables collide midair with their proper cousins, making the service more closely resemble a speech therapy class than a religious gathering.

Aaron will recite the Hebrew just a little faster than everyone else, just to show that he can. He doesn’t need to actually look at the JCP; he can recite the entire service beginning to end with his eyes shut. Since he was eight, people have been saying he should be a rabbi. Aaron is embarrassed by how much he still likes to hear this. Walking through the synagogue doors, he imagines heads turning to look, excited whispers of “There goes the cantor’s son.” Inside Beth Amicha’s walls, he is junior class president, football captain, and star of the school musical. In Aaron’s imaginary congregational yearbook he is Most Popular and Most Likely to Succeed, with the special added superlative of Best Young Jew. In Beth Amicha, he’s pretty sure girls smile at him sometimes. He never doubts his clothes. He is neither too tall nor too pale.

Eliza can’t read Hebrew like her brother. In the time it takes her to negotiate the first five words, picking her way right to left across the page, the prayer is halfway over. Rather than add to the aural melee, she chooses to keep her mouth shut.

For years after his summary dismissal from Dr. Morris’s office, Saul entertains hopes that Eliza will prove her elementary school principal wrong. Grading quarter after grading quarter he erases all memory of report cards past, tearing open each successive manila envelope in a frightful evocation of predator and prey.

Eliza is sitting at the kitchen table so engrossed in a Taxi rerun that a mini-pretzel is frozen in its trajectory from the bag to her mouth. The sealed manila envelope rests on the table just beyond the pretzel bag’s shadow. Jim Ignatowski and Alex Rieger are far more comforting than the sound of Saul exiting his study. Eliza can block out the sounds of her father’s arrival altogether if she concentrates very hard on the openings and closings of Alex Rieger’s bloodless mouth.

Eliza is seven, she is nine, she is six and a half. She is any age at all between second grade and the present.

Jim Ignatowski is bugging his eyes out at Latke Gravas, that funny little foreigner, and Eliza is right there in the taxi depot with them, can practically smell Louis’s cigar as he barks commands from the dispatch desk, wants to bury her face in Latke’s grease-stained overalls. Her father’s hand snaps her out of it.

12 След.

Bee Season

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MYLA GOLDBERG Bee Season A NOVEL

Dedication

Epigraph

Contents

Bee Season

MYLA GOLDBERG
Bee Season
A NOVEL