Bee Season. Myla Goldberg

Saul is not walking but running to the stage. He is oblivious to the rows of chairs, to the clusters of people and journalists, his body reminding Eliza of a bumper car as he bounces off them on his stageward trajectory, eyes locked on her. His face is like a page from Eliza’s illustrated Old Testament: Jew beholding Promised Land. Eliza feels like Moses. She feels like Superman. She holds her trophy aloft, the stage her Mount Sinai, Saul her Jimmy Olsen. When Saul reaches the stage and lifts her into a hug like manna in the desert, Eliza is flying.

      The first time Perfectimundo finds Miriam, it is a complete surprise, a game of hopscotch in which the stone falls into the perfect center of square 3. It is a magic moment. The absolute rightness of the stone’s placement in the square opens something deep inside Miriam that had, until this moment, always been shut. Miriam can feel the release. Her body fills with warmth at the sight of the stone, beckoning like a talisman to another world. It is this other world that Miriam wants to inhabit, this other world to which she really belongs. Miriam stops the game, infuriating her play partner, a frilled neighbor whose father is big in pork belly futures. Miriam insists upon staring at the rock, and then upon tossing and retossing other rocks until they land in the exact centers of squares 1, 2, and 4–8, respectively, an activity which has not ended by the time Miriam is called in for dinner, the frilly neighbor having long ago fled in self-righteous boredom back to Mummy.

      Later that same year Miriam receives a kaleidoscope as a gift. When she first puts it to her eye, she forgets to breathe. It is a window into the world of the perfectly thrown stone, the land of Perfectimundo. Miriam wishes she could squeeze through the eyehole and into the tube, joining the flawless symmetry. Failing that, she decides she is fully prepared to spend the rest of her life holding the cylinder to her face. When a well-meaning adult rotates the cylinder, Miriam screams so loudly her nanny fears a piece of colored glass has lodged in her charge’s eye. The kaleidoscope is grabbed away just as Miriam realizes that the movement did not destroy perfection, but created it anew. She demands the present back, spends the rest of the day frozen except for the rotation of one hand, the kaleidoscope pointed toward the sun. By the time Miriam goes to bed, the kaleidoscope clutched to her chest, she has decided that where there is a window there has to be a door. That night Miriam vows, with the solemnity of all seven of her precocious years, that even if she must spend her whole life searching for the door to Perfectimundo, she will find it.

      Saul comes to breakfast with multiple copies of the Norristoum Times-Herald and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

      “Good morning, star,” he says, presenting the papers to his daughter.

      The Times-Herald’s front page proclaims HUNTINGDON GIRL SPELLS HER WAY TO V-I-C-T-O-R-Y while the Inquirer places its more sedate “EYRIR” TAKES METRO AREA SPELLER TO NATIONALS in its Neighbor section.

      The Times-Herald, with its photo of Miriam, Saul, and Aaron joining Eliza in the winner’s circle, holds Eliza’s interest longer, it being one of the few family pictures ever taken. Eliza’s face is a still life of suspended disbelief, her trophy a baby she didn’t know she was about to have. Saul grasps her shoulders, his face glowing with pride and possession. Miriam stands to their left, her hand caught midway to Eliza’s arm as if unsure whether it is safe to touch. Aaron stands at the frame’s edge, face out of focus, largely concealed by the people around him. Everything is much smaller than it seemed at the time.

      It is not the photo Eliza was expecting. Her family doesn’t look anything like the stuff of photography studios. Theirs is no pearl-finish portrait of interlocking hands and matching smiles. Instead, they more closely resemble odd puzzle pieces, mismatched slots and tabs jammed into each other to force a whole. Eliza examines the picture with the detachment of a stranger, seeing for the first time the way her father and mother avoid contact, her brother’s perpetual old woman slouch, and the way she freezes at Saul’s touch as if immobility will preserve the moment. Eliza spots unfamiliar hard lines around the man’s eyes, a strange emptiness to the woman’s face. Even the girl starts to look unfamiliar, her eyes a little too bright, her face a little too eager. Eliza struggles to convince herself that when she looks away from the picture she will be surrounded by familiar figures and not the strangers in the photo. Looking up from the newspaper is like walking into a darkened room from the noonday sun. It takes a moment for Eliza’s eyes to readjust. But there is her father, whistling one of his morning songs as he pages through the paper. There is her mother, head tilted to one side as she scours the pan Saul used to scramble eggs. She knows these people. She turns the Times-Herald