Bee Season. Myla Goldberg

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, Eurythmies, 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.

      “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