The Excellent Lombards(26)

Kyle Covell laughed and called out, “I’m not in a tribe!”

That sent us all fluttering around the room, to the dictionaries on the LANGUAGE! shelf, and to the computers in the back to define the word tribe, and to think how or if we belonged to one.

One morning Mrs. Kraselnik said what I was already well aware of. Among her other talents, as I intimated, she was a mind reader. She said, “Do you understand that everything about the place where you live determines Who You Are?” Her flank was against her desk as she looked sternly at each of us. “Who You Are,” she said again. “You would not be who you are if you did not live right here, in this town, in this county, in this state, and in this time.”

“Okay,” was all William said, when I tried to replicate her speeches.

It was Gloria who set the actual problem before me. I was at the cottage one afternoon, having offered her the opportunity to quiz me.

What state does not experience frequent tornadoes? Florida or Iowa?

The Maldives are located off the southeast coast of what country on mainland Asia?

Which New England state has more forested land? Maine or Vermont?

“Do you and Amanda quiz each other?” Gloria first asked me. “Do you study together?”

“No!” I said.

“No?” We were sitting cross-legged in her living room, on her hard, bare floor. “Mary Frances?” she said, in an odd warning tone.

“What?”

“I want to ask you something.” The beating of my heart, for some reason, sped up. She said, “How will you feel if you win?”

What kind of question was that? The answer was: Elated. Triumphant. Victorious. I will feel victorious. She saw she needed to elaborate. “If you win and Amanda doesn’t?” Gloria with her long blond braids and her enormous gray eyes behind her glasses said something more. She said, “Do you understand that it can be harder to be the winner, harder to win than to lose?”

That could hardly be true. She was making something simple seem complicated and confused. I said, “I’m older than Amanda.” All things being equal that was the reason I should win. However, in our after-school practice sessions lately I often had the slightest edge, Amanda probably spending too much time on pre-algebra.

“Yes, you are older,” Gloria said, as if my logic had been wrong, as if I should let Amanda win precisely because of my greater age. Was that what Gloria was asking me to do? Amanda had recently gone to the hairdresser with high expectations, Dolly allowing the stylist to cut her daughter’s long hair and give her a perm. Instead of glossy curls, though, the black hair fell straight from a center part before it became a dry frizz. Was that disappointment my responsibility? She’d gotten glasses, too, the frames tinted purple.

I had not envisioned Amanda being the winner until Gloria let a sliver of that darkness into my mind. If anyone else had made the suggestion I would have thought it mean, a jab intended to knock me off balance. I didn’t want to think why Gloria would wish me to lose, and I left the cottage soon after, trying as best I could to dismiss her idea.

I wandered over to the library, where right away there was another disturbing conversation. Traditionally, if Dolly had the need to tell my mother something she’d walk the hedgerow path and no matter the delicacy of her news bulletin she’d stand at the circulation desk and talk. She and my mother rarely spoke on the phone, and I doubt they wrote each other emails. Even if Mrs. Sherwood Lombard went into my mother’s office, the rest of us out in the stacks, the patrons and those people who had jobs shelving, could hear at least her side of the conversation. The two wives had the joke of calling each other Mrs. Lombard. “Mrs. Lombard,” my mother would say, “how are you?”

“Don’t ask, Mrs. Lombard”—Dolly usually laughed—“don’t ask.”

In any exchange Dolly had to first tell my mother a little something about Adam and Amanda because a day didn’t pass without one or another of them excelling, and there was always a catastrophe involving her Muellenbach relatives.

After I’d left Gloria’s cottage and had been in the library for about five minutes, in comes Dolly for the usual exchange, Mrs. Lombard, hello, and, Don’t ask, Mrs. Lombard.

Dolly said to my mother after the opening bit, “It’s going to be tough, is what I think.”

I looked up from my spot in the beanbag chair by the Junior section.

“I know, I know,” my mother said, lowering her voice, glancing my way, “but maybe, you know, someone else—”

“Mine is fixated on the money.”

“Oh God.”

“…already planning how to finance college.”

They both laughed.

“You think we could rig it?” my mother said, which made them laugh again.

“Oh well, Mrs. Lombard,” Dolly sang out.

“It’s in the Lord’s hands, I guess,” my mother said.

Maybe I had heard most all of their conversation and maybe I hadn’t but whatever drift I’d gotten made me understand that my mother, who was not religious, who for some reason had invoked Jesus, was talking about me.

In those weeks before the bee I was only happy in school, when Mrs. Kraselnik said to all of us, but looking at me, that she’d never had a group of students who were so enthusiastic about geography. She’d never seen all of her boys and girls working so hard together to learn such interesting facts and to master map reading. In her book, she said, we were all winners, even though Amanda and I, and maybe Max Peterson and Derek Casper, were clearly in a realm apart from our classmates. Sometimes, though, in the middle of thinking and working, in the middle of eating or brushing my teeth, Gloria’s absurd question rang out: Do you understand that it can be harder to be the winner?