Spelldown (13 page)

“May I help you?” he says in a froggy voice.

“No, thanks, I’m just looking,” I say, then slowly circle the booth again, imagining the taste of everything. “How much are the cashews?”

“Forty cents for a quarter pound,” he says, looking at me with the prettiest pair of crossed green eyes I’ve ever seen. I feel sorry for Yves. Maybe I will become an
o-p-t-h-o-m-o-l-o-g-i-s-t
and cure his
s-t-r-a-b-i-s-m-u-s
one day. No, that isn’t right. It’s spelled
o-p-h-t-h-a-l-m-o-l-o-g-i-s-t
.

I pay for the cashews and head toward the lingerie department, where I spot a display of red bras—the lacy push-up kind made of nylon, with smooth, round cups. Mama buys me those stiff cotton bras with sharp, pointy cups that look like weapons. I grab my size and look around for a clerk, but can’t find one. The sign says
WAIT FOR ASSISTANCE,
but I go into the dressing room anyway.

When I look at the girl in the full-length mirror, I see she’s not so skinny anymore. Big, fat, smoochy lips. Dungarees with legs rolled up. Red Clover Tornadoes sweatshirt. No
wonder Mama rolled her eyes. I pull my shirt off and look at myself in the mirror. The pointy white bra is pathetic. I remove it and put on the red one that fastens easily in the front. The girl in the mirror has substantial
c-l-e-a-v-a-g-e!
I unsnap the bra and fling it onto the floor. I dress quickly and make my way to the exit. The cold January night embraces me as I head down Main Street.

The marquee above the Visulite Theater spells out
THE GRADUATE
in big black letters. Holy moly. I love Simon & Garfunkel. Mrs. Harrison plays the sound track all the time. I stare at the poster. A woman is putting on her stockings while a young man stands in the background watching her with
S-E-X
in his eyes. I didn’t get to see it last year when it came out because I had tonsillitis. The next movie starts at eight o’clock. I hurry toward the motel. When I pass Lucky’s Diner, there is only one customer, a handsome man wearing a fancy suit, sitting on a bar stool drinking coffee, staring out the window. He looks sad, like he’s full of rain, so I wave at him. He waves back. I imagine myself a little bit older, walking into the diner, sitting beside him, and acting so mysterious, the poor man falls hopelessly in love with me right on the spot.

When I get back to the hotel room, the door is unlocked, and I rush in to find my parents curled up beside each other on one of the double beds watching Red Skelton on the black-and-white TV. The room smells of cigarettes and White Shoulders, and for a second, Mama and Daddy seem almost happy to be alive. Now that he’s broken that seal on
the bottle, he doesn’t look so tortured anymore.

I give Mama the rest of the cashews and explain how keyed up I feel, and that going to the movies might take my mind off the spelling bee. Mama stalls and looks at Daddy, who hands me five dollars and tells me to be careful. It has never been so easy to get something I want.

A light rain begins to fall as I gallop toward the theater. My basketball shoes slap the sidewalk, breaking up the foggy silence of the night. Being out of Red Clover makes me feel fearless.

In the ticket booth a gypsy-looking woman is rolling quarters in brown paper sleeves. I buy a ticket and walk inside the lobby, where a giant dusty chandelier hangs from the ceiling. I run my fingers across the faded, gold-velvety wallpaper and, for the first time in my life, bypass the refreshment stand. The greasy cashews are scrambling around in my stomach like ladybugs. As I make my way down the aisle, I pass three other loners before taking an aisle seat seven rows from the front. My stomach starts to settle as I watch the Bugs Bunny cartoon.

When the movie finally starts, the music spirals into the theater, making my corpuscles vibrate. It’s as if the characters and I are breathing the same air, hearing the same music. I feel like I’m the film spinning through the projector, exhilarated by the light.

I feel out of place, like Benjamin Braddock—the cute boy who just graduated from college, who doesn’t know what to do with his life, and who isn’t getting any help from any of
the dumb-ass adults. My legs feel sexy in Mrs. Robinson’s stockings. I like the taste of her cigarette in my mouth. All of it feels delicious and a little bit wrong, but not wrong enough to stop. Their sexual affair makes me think the world is made of
maybes
. Maybe sins are nothing more than mistakes. Maybe God views people’s lives like thrilling movies made in Technicolor. Maybe when he watches, he does
not
measure everything we do or think of doing on a scale from Innocent to Guilty. Maybe he doesn’t point a finger at Mrs. Robinson for screwing Benjamin or at Benjamin for being screwed, or at me for wanting victory tomorrow above all else. Maybe I am just like Mrs. Robinson, whom
Jesus loves more than she could ever know
.

But by the end of the movie, I hate Mrs. Robinson for being such a rotten mother, and I’m rooting for Benjamin to crash Elaine’s wedding to save her from getting married to that fancy college boy she does not even love. I don’t give a hoot about Elaine marrying Benjamin. I just want them to get away and make up their own minds about their lives. At the end Elaine and Benjamin are sitting beside each other on the backseat of a bus. There’s this feeling in the air as the bus pulls away—that they’re going Nowhere in Particular. I see the sad truth in Elaine’s and Benjamin’s eyes that their souls are separate
and always will be
. That’s the part that really gets to me.

Listening to the music, I watch all the credits, and am the last person to leave the theater. I feel all grown-up, and sad as a bastard. Lucky’s Diner is closed, but the sign on
the door still says
OPEN.
I wonder where the lonely diner has gone. Is he staying in the same motel as us, or does he live with his crazy mother? Maybe he’s an undertaker haunted by corpses. Maybe he’s an angel with broken wings. When I’m real tired, my mind gets warpy about things, supposing this and that. It’s been a hard day’s night. I feel like sleeping on the sidewalk, but I trudge toward the motel.

1: a meaningful coincidence

2: the coincidental occurrence of events that seem related, but are not explained by conventional mechanisms of causality

The next morning I awake to the smell of coffee and menthol shaving cream. I lie still as a
v-o-y-e-u-r
, soaking up the images of my parents. Mama is dressed in a blue suit, sitting in a yellow vinyl chair, sipping coffee from a paper cup. She’s twirling her string of fake pearls around her finger. Her lips move as she reads from her worn Bible. In the bathroom Daddy is pulling a razor across the face in the mirror. Maybe he’s having a conversation with himself about not drinking today because it’s my special day, not
his
.

Last night’s dream flashes in my mind. I am standing on my head on an empty stage before a huge audience. My skirt is flipped over, exposing my panties. Someone asks me to spell a five-syllable word I’ve never heard before and I’m unable to spell it. Instead, cashews spew like a geyser from my mouth onto the floor. Spectators jump onto their chairs to get away from the puke.

Daddy wipes the streaks of foam from his face. His reflection yells that the bathroom is all mine.

Twenty minutes later I emerge, properly attired in my good-speller’s costume: black skirt, white blouse, and yellow sweater. The black pumps squeak as I walk to the car. When Mama sees how I look, she smiles. Mama’s an
e-n-i-g-m-a
, a ninth-grade dropout who looks real educated but can’t spell a lick. Sometimes I feel ashamed at how words settle into my brain like orphans who’ve found a good home, without even trying.

While Daddy checks out of the motel, I sit in the backseat of the car and assure Mama that, no, I do not want even one Krispy Kreme doughnut. My stomach churns from sheer emptiness, as if I have vomited up my soul. In the background, Mama drones on with her do-your-best-Jesus-will-take-care-of-everything lecture. I say “Yes ma’am” at all the right places, but Mama’s sermonizing makes me wish I’d been born way back before the Lord was born. Finally, Daddy gets back into the car. I smell alcohol. Please let it be Listerine.

When we turn the corner at the Anderson County Library, I make a quick inventory of the parking lot, and spot only one car that is older than our Plymouth station wagon. I look for Mrs. Harrison’s station wagon, but don’t see it. Then I look for Mr. Harrison’s white Cadillac and see it in the first row. The thought of Mr. Harrison sitting in the audience in his fancy business suit makes me feel like puking even more.

I walk behind my parents toward the library. The smell of Mama’s hair spray and Daddy’s cigarette drifts back to me, and I will myself not to retch. When we reach the door to the library, Daddy hands me a purple rabbit’s foot and
says, “Good luck, Chipmunk.” I say thank you and walk into the library, imagining a three-legged purple rabbit limping around in the world just so I can taste victory.

The old library smells of fresh paint, and the floors sparkle like green glass. Most of the spellers’ chairs are already occupied. Good spellers aren’t good-looking, as a rule. Most of the kids look over- or underfed, spoiled or neglected, scared shitless or confident. Extreme cases. Not your average, isn’t-life-great kind of kids. Mrs. Harrison stands near a chair in the front row that has
KARLENE BRIDGES
written in large block letters across it. I walk toward her, feeling as if I’m walking three inches above the floor. She hangs a paper sign around my neck with a big number 8 written on it.

“Karlene, honey, just relax and breathe. Say each word to yourself. See the letters appear in your mind one at a time. Then spell it like you see it.”

“I thought I’d just try my best not to vomit,” I say with my straightest face.

“Good strategy, Ace.” Mrs. Harrison walks away and greets my parents standing at the back of the room. She leads them over to some seats in the second row beside Mr. Harrison.

I shake hands with the boy on my left. His name is Timothy Brinkley, and he smells like the King of Mothballs. He’s wearing a navy blue wool vest with one of those fakey gold coat-of-arms emblems. Poor kid looks like one of those befuddled geniuses who can’t even tie their shoes. He’s probably the best speller in the universe. I squeeze my
rabbit’s foot. Then I close my eyes and see myself waving a giant trophy over my head. The applause almost bursts my eardrums.

Abby Boyce sits to my right. We introduce ourselves. She’s from Charleston and has pale skin and black freckles, and she smells like baby powder. Her fingernails are painted a pale pink. I’d give up my eyelashes to have hands as pretty as hers.

The Assistant Superintendent of Something or Other is a tall, skinny pine tree of a man. He thanks an excruciatingly long list of people, from Governor McNair all the way down to Mr. Whitehall, the janitor, but he neglects to mention the parents who birthed the little spelling freaks, or their coaches. The whole room hums in a whizzy kind of silence. I can’t feel my butt sitting in the chair. It’s like my nerve cells are scattered all over the room.

The first speller, a short, curly-haired girl from Kershaw, spells
xylophone
. The second speller, an athletic-looking boy, misspells
reconnaissance
. The third speller misspells
conflagration
. Spellers 4, 5, and 6 avoid the dreaded bell by spelling
egalitarian, resplendent
, and
bravado
. It’s Abby’s turn. She stands up, her fingers crossed on both hands.

“Will you please spell
repartee?”
the Giver of Words says.

Abby asks for a definition and learns that
repartee
means making witty remarks or jousting with words. She spells it
r-e-p-a-r-t-a-y
, and the bell rings.

As she walks to take her seat in the audience, I whisper
the new Spelling Prayer I came up with last night: “Dear God, Author of All Emotions, give me VICTORY or give me death.” It might be a little sneaky to give the Almighty an ultimatum like that, but I figure he wants me to live a long and prosperous life.

I stand up and the Giver of Words gives me a word. I spell it
d-i-s-a-m-b-i-g-u-a-t-i-o-n
and sit back down. Mrs. Harrison halfway lifts herself out of her chair and salutes me. It will be a long time before I have to spell again, and I’m afraid that watching the sorrow and anxieties of the other spellers will wipe me out, so I let my nerves float around. A phrase from the “The Sound of Silence” plays over and over in my head: the one about people
bowing and praying to the neon God they’d made
.

I look over at my two sets of parents, who are so well dressed. The Harrisons look totally enraptured, but Mama and Daddy look terrified, as if they were watching Daniel in the lions’ den. And for the first time, I realize how nerve-wracking it must be for them to have a daughter like me.

Eons pass as spellers spit out letters correctly or incorrectly. Daddy has made three trips outside. Praise Jesus he didn’t call much attention when he tripped over the threshold. Spelling is a nerve-wracking business for everyone. With my particles being so wavy and scattered all over the place, I can’t concentrate on any spelling words except my own. So far I have managed to spell
ostracization, wanderlust, inimitability
, and
ebullience
. And every time I hear that horrible bell ring, and watch another speller take a
seat in the audience, I say to myself,
Dear God, Author of All Emotions, give me VICTORY or give me death
.

After two hours it’s down to me and the King of Mothballs. We’ve standing side by side. I’m breathing in and out, sending energy to my brain cells, which have all gravitated back into my skull. Timothy’s breath is very ragged. The Giver of Words removes his suit jacket and mops his brow with a handkerchief like he’s been preaching for a couple of days. “Mr. Brinkley, will you please spell ______?” The Giver of Words pronounces a word that sounds like
oshuary
. It has a familiar ring to it.