for granted, a shortcoming he associates with his ignoble college days. By banishing sex from his mind, he can turn his full attention to his scholarly pursuits, exactly as he had hoped Miriam would inspire him to do. Besides, he can always masturbate to his memories. The attic is uncharred and filled with sunlight, the mattress is a queen-size box spring, and the young coeds know just which buttons to push.
Saul has noted with approval the time Eliza now spends in her room. He tells her how happy he is to see her taking initiative. Though he offers to help, Eliza feels protective of her practice sessions, takes a certain pride in studying alone.
This evening, as with every evening, Miriam is ensconced in her brown velour recliner, shoes off, prowling through magazines with diametrically opposed titles like Neo-Proletarian Review and Armed Christian Family. She will stay rooted in her recliner, still except for the movement of her hands, until she finds what she is looking for. When she finds it, she laughs.
Miriam laughs like a happy chicken. It is a joyful, uninhibited cackle entirely out of place with the rest of her, which is why Eliza loves it so much. As Miriam laughs, she flies up from her recliner to her electric typewriter, turned on in anticipation of just such a moment. She types, “Gray’s quixotic implication that the Moral Majority holds exclusive stock to the country’s future imperative powers.…” or, “I find the whole concept of ‘centralized opposition’ oxymoronic even from a neo-communist perspective.…” Miriam signs each of these gleeful invectives with a pen name composed expressly for the occasion, then stuffs them into linen envelopes addressed to editors in Freedom, North Dakota, or San Francisco, California. Though she doesn’t talk about the letters with her family, she makes no secret of their writing or of the photo album she keeps beside the family encyclopedia set. They have all read the letters Miriam has carefully snipped from the editorial pages of these magazines. The first clipping is dated not long after newlyweds Saul and Miriam moved in together. It never occurs to Saul or to Miriam that the magazines have replaced the lectures they used to attend together, the arguments she once presented to Saul now addressed to others. Miriam’s transition to letter writing is so automatic that she doesn’t notice the substitution, her quick mind filling in the gap before she recognizes its presence. Drifting away from her husband is less a conscious choice than a series of unconscious ones.
Eliza feels invigorated by her rejection of Saul’s offer of help. Her power to cause her father’s emergence from his study in the name of spelling is made all the sweeter by her decision not to employ it. Rather than block out her father’s and brother’s guitar music she now incorporates it into her own pursuits, her words gliding on the muted chords rising up through the air vents. Even her mother’s solitary habits have lost the feeling of a party to which Eliza is not invited. Miriam’s typing lends Eliza’s studies rhythm and tempo.
Paging through the dictionary is like looking through a microscope. Every word breaks down into parts with unique properties—prefix, suffix, root. Eliza gleans not only the natural laws that govern the letters but their individual behaviors. R, M, and D are strong, unbending and faithful. The sometimes silent B and G and the slippery K follow strident codes of conduct. Even the redoubtable H, which can make P sound like F and turn ROOM into RHEUM, obeys etymology. Consonants are the camels of language, proudly carrying their lingual loads.
Vowels, however, are a different species, the fish that flash and glisten in the watery depths. Vowels are elastic and inconstant, fickle and unfaithful. E can sound like I or U. -IBLE and -ABLE are impossible to discern. There is no combination the vowels haven’t tried, exhaustive and incestuous in their couplings. E will just as soon pair with A, I, or O, leading the dance or being led. Eliza prefers the vowels’ unpredictability and, of all vowels, favors Y. Y defies categorization, the only letter that can be two things at once. Before the bee, Eliza had been a consonant, slow and unsurprising. With her bee success, she has entered vowelhood. Eliza begins to look at life in alphabetical terms. School is consonantal in its unchanging schedule. God, full of possibility, is a vowel. Death: the ultimate consonant.
Toward the end of the silent Amidah, Aaron and Eliza play a game called Sheep that both claim to have invented. At the Amidah’s beginning, Rabbi Mayer tells the entire congregation to rise. The congregants are supposed to remain standing for as long as they wish to pray, sitting down when they have finished. A lot of people actually do begin by praying, but most stop soon after they start. They become distracted by thoughts of the evening’s prime-time television lineup or by how awful the perfume is of the old lady with dyed hair who always sits in the seat under the air duct so that the smell of her goes everywhere.
Because of this, knowing when to sit down is a problem. People want to appear prayerful, but they also want the service to end in time for “Remington Steele” or “Dallas” or “Falcon Crest.” After a period that is short enough to move things along but long enough to seem respectable, they look for a cue. That is what Sheep is all about.
The best nights to play Sheep are bar mitzvah Fridays. The synagogue is filled with people whose nephew or cousin or boss’s son is becoming a man the next morning. These people occupy the back half of the synagogue even though there are seats available up front. When they stand for the silent Amidah they never know whether to focus on the prayerbook or upon a distant point, looking thoughtful.
The key is to make scraping noises. When Eliza or Aaron chooses the moment they feel represents the perfect prayerful/let’s-get-on-with-it ratio, they rattle their chairs and rub one or two of the chair legs against the floor to make it sound as if more than one person is actually descending. Their efforts carry to the back where it is determined that if the front rows are sitting, the other rows are allowed to sit down as well. Once Eliza timed it so around three fourths of the congregation followed her into their chairs like an elaborate chain of dominoes. Even Aaron had been forced to admit she’d set a new record.
This Friday night not being a bar mitzvah, neither Aaron nor Eliza nets any followers, the regulars making it a point of pride to have a unique time to reseat themselves. Three prayers, a Mourner’s Kaddish, and two responsive readings later come the weekly announcements, which precede the final prayer. It’s the same as usual—Sisterhood meetings, Sunday school classes, and singles retreats—until Saul includes a special announcement.
“Eliza Naumann has won the honor of representing our district tomorrow in the bee finals for our area. We wish her mazel tov and best of luck.”
Then he moves on to something about adult education, as though what he has just said is the most normal thing in the world. Eliza starts smiling so hard her cheek muscles hurt. Aaron makes a point of not looking at her.
After the last prayer, everyone proceeds to the back room for oneg, where a table is waiting with tea, coffee, juice, and cookies. Eliza loves oneg even though the juice is watered down and there are better cookies at home. On the cookie plate are always a few chocolate wafers, but the majority are chalky shortbreads that crumble into little pieces unless the whole thing is ingested at once. On someone’s birthday, there is a store-bought cake sparsely decorated with candy flowers.
The trick is to get one of the wafer cookies or, if it is a birthday, a slice of cake with a flower. This takes practice. Eliza and Aaron can’t just race to the back room after the last prayer and grab what they want. They have to wait until Rabbi Mayer has come to the table and said a prayer over the food. In a way, this is lucky because sitting in the front row would put them at a distinct disadvantage if it were first come, first serve, especially with the Kaplan kids, who always sit in the back.
The key to snagging a good cookie is placement. Eliza puts herself nearest to the side of the cookie plate with the good cookies on it, then casually rests her hand by the edge of the plate. As soon as the prayer is over, her hand is in prime position.
Getting a flower is trickier. An adult always cuts the cake and there is a line. Eliza never
