The Excellent Lombards(27)

I’d chew briskly. I’d brush with more vigor. If Gloria ever had a real baby, I felt sorry for it already.

The night of the competition we were lined up on stage in the gym, all twenty-seven of Mrs. Kraselnik’s champions. I was wearing a French brushed cotton blue-and-white-striped dress with a yoke, which Gloria had found in a resale shop, white tights, and blue ballet flats. My clean straight hair was without tangles in the customary pageboy. For the occasion Amanda had decided on navy pants and a red blazer, a jacket a businesswoman, a banker, would wear. She had nylon stockings under her pants, and black pumps with a slight heel. Nowhere in evidence was the girl who wanted to eat her crackers like a beaver. She stood next to me with her hands folded behind her back, and she stared far past the audience, the EXIT sign apparently her portal to knowledge. I remembered right then that I should put good in the world, a generosity that surely would ricochet back to me. And so I said to that weirdly dressed girl, my cousin, I said, “Good luck, Amanda.” That moment was something no one knew about but the two of us, a secret, the virtue of Mary Frances, a point on the scorecard.

I looked out to the audience, to the way the spectators had arranged themselves, as if there were the bride’s section and the groom’s section. Sherwood and Dolly and Adam were on one side of the gym, and my mother and father and William and Gloria were on the other. Everyone in their proper places, waiting for the action to begin. Even before Derek Casper was eliminated, before it was just the two of us, Amanda and I, goodness must have been working its wayward logic in my mind, winding itself up of its own accord. Goodness waiting to pop up again, the cheery clown, goodness bobbling helplessly.

Many of our classmates were serious and well prepared and it therefore took an hour for everyone else to go down. Sherwood always blinked in that thoughtful way of his when Mrs. Kraselnik asked the question, Sherwood thinking, thinking, weighing his own answer. You felt he was on the side of each contestant in the freighted moment. Adam was playing his very own new Game Boy, a forbidden item for us. Dolly also had a new haircut, her hair spun into a glossy black bubble. She had taken so much trouble with her hair but nothing she could do would ever make her beautiful. I didn’t want anyone in the world to be ugly—what if you were ugly?—and yet ugliness for some reason had to exist. Someone had to do the job of carrying it.

When Derek Casper was finally out we arranged ourselves, Amanda and I, on either side of Mrs. Kraselnik.

“Well, here we are,” she said. “Amanda. Mary Frances.”

I looked at Amanda, her shoulders pinched back, her hands clasped by her rear, her long gaze past the audience. She didn’t seem to be aware that I was on the stage with her. It was as if she were already the ambassador to Egypt, so that I both wanted to laugh and also was slightly unnerved.

“Which state,” Mrs. Kraselnik asked Amanda, “has a climate suitable for growing citrus fruits—California or Maine?”

That was so easy it was not in any way funny. “Cali-FONia,” Amanda snapped.

“Mary Frances,” my lovely teacher said, “which country has the world’s largest Muslim population—Indonesia or Mexico?”

Up flipped my mental map of world religions. Symbols across the continents, arrows flashing to show the way. It was additionally helpful to know that Mexico had been settled by the Spanish, who generally are Catholics. I knew that Indonesia was the correct answer, and I knew, also, that I would say so. I noticed Dolly on her side staring at me, her little teeth, her pointy bottom teeth on purpose cutting into her upper lip. My father, about six rows back, on the other aisle, was sitting forward, his head down. My mother was looking at Gloria’s lap, and Gloria herself had turned to face the clock. Only William was watching me, his chin up, a slight smile, no blinking. I remembered the once upon a time when he’d told me the story about how our house would come to find me, it loved me that much. Once there was a girl who lived near the end of the world. A place no contestant in the Geography Bee could ever know or find.

“Indonesia,” I said.

“That’s correct,” Mrs. Kraselnik pronounced. The audience clapped, although so long into the contest their tributes seemed halfhearted.

For Amanda: “To visit the ruins of Persepolis, an ancient ceremonial capital of Persia, you would have to travel to what present-day country? Iran or Syria?”

Again, a cinch. “Eye-wan,” Amanda said.

I was asked a question about physical geography with the answer of isthmus, and Amanda had another improbably easy question about what a barometer measures. “You girls are spectacular,” Mrs. Kraselnik said, “aren’t they?” The audience clapped in earnest, a few people cheering. “My goodness, you really are both winners.”

I noticed Dolly again. She wanted to look like a respectable person with the hairdo, like someone who lived in a subdivision. Like the mother of a winner. How was it that Sherwood had married her, so that forever he had to be in public with the former Miss Muellenbach? Dolly having latched on to him for her single and only dream: Adam and Amanda in cap and gown. Her children were going to go to a great college, she always said to customers at the apple barn, maybe a place hidden with ivy. By hook, she said, or by crook. Her children, she’d explain, scored off the charts. A logical therefore kind of question: Therefore, what did I need with a scholarship since I was going to stay on the farm?

Maybe Dolly didn’t just want Amanda to win for the sake of it. Maybe she needed her to win. That’s why she was biting hard into her lip, about to draw blood. Because of the impossible sum. Fifty thousand dollars for national champion, far more than my father and Sherwood ever made for themselves in a year. I began to sweat. Was this what my parents, what William and Gloria had been trying to tell me? And maybe, yes, Mrs. Kraselnik had, too, her whole sermon about putting good into the world meant only for me.