Editor’s note: This is an article from the September 1997 issue of UCLA Magazine.
“Don’t let white people impress you,” Mother told me. “Win because you want to win.” We lived on Macdonald Avenue. The nicest street in town. Wide and lined with tall eucalyptus trees that smelled so sharp and clean even a blind man would have known what street he was on. Rolling green lawns and square-trimmed privet hedges surrounded the old Victorian houses with their double front doors and long rectangular windows. In the late thirties and early forties, 10 years before the time I lived there, Hollywood used Macdonald Avenue as a location for “every street America.” Of course, Mother’s and my getting there was bumpy, and our presence, well, conditional. We lived behind four-zero-five in a two-room house without a stove or refrigerator — a servant’s quarters. Mother was a maid.
Before that it was a shack behind a house on B Street, not too far from Macdonald, but not nearly as nice. And before that in a room that Mother had rented in the Hotel Figueroa, a dump tucked in that stretch of neon dives, pawn shops and used-clothing stores on lower Fourth. Yes, we’d moved up, a steady climb since the hotel. But now things were beginning to change again. I was becoming steadily aware of how little of that plant-green and sky-blue space outside my windows was mine. Day by day the world was shrinking and, before long, would hold itself against the corners of my small house.
But I found someone to help me. I found a companion: Mary Beth Polk, the daughter of the people in the big house, Mother’s bosses, Mr. and Mrs. Polk. No matter that Mary Beth was white and rich. She had everything and nothing. She was a girl in a family where the sun rose and set on the boy. In school she was the dork with glasses, having graduated from her earlier status as cootie bug.
One evening close to five, her father, a tall man, pale and austere with a thick scar running from his temple to his cheekbone, pushed through the swinging doors of the household kitchen and said, “What do we do with Mary Beth?” He was talking to Mrs. Polk, who was standing across the wide counter from Mother, dipping a finger into the clam dip Mother had apportioned into three silver bowls for the Polks’ dinner party. Mrs. Polk sucked her finger, and when she turned and faced her husband it was hard to tell if what was on her mind was the clam dip or her husband’s question.
“She can come to my house,” I blurted out.
We’d hardly been at the Polks’ a month, and despite Mother’s repeated warning to mind my place, to speak only when spoken to, I couldn’t contain myself. It made perfect sense. Mary Beth’s parents were having a function for her brother — dinner for his friends and their parents — and, after a half-minute discussion, they would decide to send Mary Beth to her room with dinner and schoolwork. I’d seen it happen before.
Mrs. Polk looked up, found me and Mary Beth behind my aproned mother. She held her sucked-clean finger in mid-air, about six inches from her face, indicating her surprise.
“Iris,” Mother snapped over her shoulder.
“No,” Mrs. Polk said to Mother. “It isn’t a bad idea.” She craned her neck to check with her husband. The bright overhead light caught the curve of her unbelievably long neck, highlighted by the way she pulled her hair up and tight in a twist. A sprig of short bangs sprang tastefully from her forehead; I thought she looked like Audrey Hepburn on the cover of Life magazine. She and Mr. Polk gave each other a look I knew well; I’d seen it in teacher’s eyes when it was my turn to have my fingernails and hair inspected.
Mother, quietly slicing celery into uniform sticks, sensed as much, too. I saw her pause, the stained knife still a moment, before she resumed her work and said, “Go on out, Iris.”
I was suddenly embarrassed. I crammed the celery stick I was holding and eating into my dress pocket and turned to go.
“Wait,” Mrs. Polk said. I spun back around and froze at attention. I thought she might reprimand me for talking out of place. Either that or she would tell me not to take food off the counter that wasn’t mine. But I was surprised. “It’s OK. That is a good idea,” she said to me. Then she turned to Mother. “I mean, if it’s OK with you, Elba. They can do their homework together. They are in the same class, after all.”
You’d think she was trying to persuade Mother, but of course she was talking for the benefit of Mr. Polk. He was inscrutable. Mrs. Polk looked from him to Mother and back again.
“Yes, that’s fine,” said Mother. What else could she say? Her eyes found mine as I stood next to the kitchen door and then she turned back to her chopping. I knew I’d have hell to pay. But just then Mary Beth, who had been still and quiet as the copper-bottomed pots hanging on the wall behind her, rushed toward me and, in one clean sweep, we were out the door.
A month is an eternity in a child’s life, and yet in that time, the time I’d lived at four-zero-five, I didn’t know Mary Beth. We rode together to and from school every day; Mother took us in the Polks’ old Ford, the extra car. We were in the same class, sat one in front of the other. But what was tacitly understood — who I was and who she was, what our parents each in their own way told us — followed us to school and kept an invisible line between us. And it was the same line, like a rolling fence, that was circling tighter and tighter around my world on Macdonald Avenue.
But Mary Beth wasn’t a free bird herself: big, plastic blue-rimmed glasses; hair the color of pale egg yolks that frizzed even from the braids her mother or my mother took pains to tie tight each morning; and allergies, forever a stuffy nose, so that when she talked, and she always talked facing the ground, she sounded as if she were speaking from the inside of a tin pail. There was plenty to keep her cut off from the world, too. In fact, I was playing volleyball with the other girls while Mary Beth was still relegated to the bench with her books and daffodil-painted lunch box. Despite the glances and occasional whispering I’d catch from huddled schoolmates looking in my direction, I might have done OK. That is, if Allison Witherow, the tall girl at the very top of the pecking order, hadn’t said out loud what everyone else only whispered.
“What is it, anyway?” she asked. “What’s a Indian?”
Even then I knew where the word had come from, who at school uttered it first: Mary Beth’s brother. Who else knew what I was? Mary Beth didn’t talk to anyone. Patrick, her brother, made it his business to know and spread everyone else’s. I watched him the way a mouse watches a snake.
“You’re a Indian,” Allison pushed.
It was after school. I was walking to the parking lot, Mary Beth trailing with her armful of books. Earlier, during noon recess, I’d spiked the winning point against Allison’s team. I thought she was mad at me. Two other girls joined her, the three of them surrounding me as I walked. I looked up, beyond them, and there was Mother, a red gingham scarf tied around her head, her thick brown arm hanging out the car window. Her eyes were peeled.
I don’t know what possessed me. “My mother,” I said and pointed. I don’t know if I meant to scare them. Perhaps I simply wanted to deflect their attention so I could run. Maybe both. Regardless, they ran. Mother did scare them. With her hard, sun-blackened face and fat arms, she was ugly. She was everything they weren’t. The girls didn’t mention “Indian” again not out loud and I was careful not to cross Allison on the volleyball court.
I was lighter-skinned than Mother. At night, while taking a bath, I’d hold our enamel-backed mirror over my stomach and on my thighs where the sun hadn’t touched my skin, and imagine my entire body the fair color reflected in the round of the glass. I would almost be the color of my classmates. And my hair wasn’t too thick or black, and didn’t grow low on my forehead the way Mother’s did. I didn’t think I was ugly, not just to look at me. And my clothes were acceptable — dresses clean and what everyone else was wearing. But my house! I hadn’t given it a second thought until I saw Mary Beth at the door, wide-eyed. \
Surely she had been in the place before. Hadn’t she seen servants come and go? Perhaps she’d only seen the quarters empty, between employees, never with someone living in them, never furnished. I saw what she saw: the small wooden kitchen table with its two mismatched chairs; the folded clothes on top of the table, Mother’s slips and stretched, gray-white bra, my panties; the cold box not a refrigerator in the corner with a gunnysack of potatoes plunked on top; the couch with the bunched-up blankets and the pillow on top of the pile, its case yellow-stained in sprawling islands that made the pillow look, from where Mary Beth was standing, like a faded and deflated globe of the world. She gazed up at the naked light bulb over the table, then dropped her eyes to the window shades, yellow-stained like the pillowcase. Mother had talked of sewing curtains.
I thought fast. With one turn, I scooped the underwear off the table and stepped into the other room my bedroom. When I reappeared I held, in place of the underwear, a Monopoly board.
Mary Beth still hesitated at the door. She braced herself, arms stretched, palms pressed flat against each side of the door frame, as if someone was about to pull her inside against her will. For all her haste to get out of her house, she was in no hurry to come into mine.
“Monopoly,” she said, unimpressed. “What’s the big deal.”
“Sit down,” I said. I spread the board on the table and pulled a chair aside for her. She came, slowly, and plopped herself down. I sat opposite her. Her large glasses reflected the room. She held her face in the palms of her hands, elbows propped on the table, and stared at me. As if it weren’t enough to show her reluctance before, now she was challenging me.
“Loser has to take off her clothes,” I said. I counted 10 long seconds, let her stew and then rolled the dice: a pair of sixes. “To see who goes first,” I said and pushed the dice across the board to her.
She rolled cat’s eyes. She was losing from the start. I rolled and moved eight spaces from GO. And that’s the way it continued. She lagged, always a good half dozen spaces behind. I was buying more property, good property, Park Avenue, and stockpiling my earnings. She was quiet. I didn’t say anything either. I didn’t have to. It was clear I was winning.
Then Mother came in with dinner. I pushed the Monopoly board aside, making room, and Mother set the stiff paper plates of steaming beef stroganoff on the table. “Get a fork and knife,” she said, then turned and left.
From the standing closet next to the cold box I grabbed silverware and paper napkins, nice paper napkins, cloth-soft and embossed with fancy curlicues, that Mother had amassed from the Polks’ kitchen and that I was certain Mary Beth would take notice of. She was watching my every step. But still she said nothing, not even after I sat down and we began eating, not about the napkins, or even about the food, which, like the napkins, came from her kitchen. Her silence both annoyed and alarmed me.
Was she thinking of Mother as a thief — a napkin thief — and would she tell her mother?
“Everybody’s doing it,” I said.
“What?” she asked, finally looking up.
“Playing strip Monopoly,” I lied.
She picked a tiny thread of beef from her teeth and wiped it on the edge of her plate. She was looking directly at me the whole time. Then she turned her fork and looked down at her food. Not long after, no more than a couple minutes, she got up and went to the door, and at that moment Mother appeared, just as if Mary Beth had been expecting her. She held Mary Beth’s schoolbooks in her arms, which she left on the couch and disappeared as quickly as she had come. Mary Beth lingered at the door. Even after she sat back down, she kept looking back over her shoulder. Once, as she turned back in my direction, I caught her wistful gaze. Then I felt sorry for her. I was about to speak. But she all at once looked up and said, “Where’s your father?”
I was stunned. Point is, I never thought of my father. I didn’t know him, much less where he was. There wasn’t much to know, which is essentially all Mother said. He was a man who didn’t want a family. I thought fast. I guess I still felt sorry for Mary Beth. I told another lie. “He’s with my brother,” I said. “My brother was the favorite. My father left with him, and me and my mother had to come here.”
I only meant to show empathy for her, that I understood her plight. But her flat blue eyes were suddenly wide as saucers; I’d scared her to death. Was she seeing her mother and herself before long in a two-room hovel?
“We go and visit them sometimes,” I said to mitigate the damage. But from the look on her face, I was only digging myself in deeper. Finally, I said what I’d meant to say in the first place, before she interrupted me. “Let’s do our homework.”
Which we did. Or at least started to. Sat on the couch with our maps of Europe. We had to locate and name each country and its capital. And, if the country was communist, put a red star next to the capital. We filled in Russia and Moscow and, on the other side of the map, England and London. Mary Beth helped me with Czechoslovakia. She was friendly, and before long, before we’d filled in even half of the blank spaces on our maps, we’d let our books and papers fall aside. She told me about her piano lessons, how she hated them, and how her teacher, a flatulent fat woman with a Frankenstein-like wart on her neck, made her play the same composition over and over.
“Sounds like Sister Agnes Jean,” I said of the nun who was my teacher during the six months I went to St. Rose Catholic School, compliments of Mother’s last boss, the lady on B Street. I hadn’t thought of suggesting we do homework because it would be fun, or even that it might lead to friendly talk, but because I felt badly and thought it might let Mary Beth forget that foolish game I’d pulled her into. Now, seeing how much happier she was, I felt worse.
“I lied,” I told her.
She smarted, looked at me. “About what?”
“The strip Monopoly,” I confessed. “Not everybody’s doing it.”
“I know that!” she shot back. “Did you think I was going to take off my clothes?” She spoke to me as if I were an imbecile. She spoke as if she had known the truth all along and could’ve and would’ve stopped the game at the drop of a pin. She was hostile; I’d meant to be conciliatory. I let it go.
“Dumb idea,” I said. There. What more could I do? Slowly we began talking again, about what I don’t remember. I know that when Mother came to take Mary Beth home, I was still worried she was upset with me. But as she stepped out the door, she looked back and said, “Thank you for getting me out of the house.” She was sincere, so much so that when Mother came in and called her a brat, I retorted loud and clear, “You don’t know.”
Mother, untying her soiled apron, sighed. She bunched it in her hands and let it fall on the table by the dinner plates. Gross, I thought.
Who would have guessed what that night would bring? I didn’t, not at first. Mary Beth and I were in trouble. Neither of us had completed our homework; our maps were full of blank spaces.
“How are you going to know which countries are communist?” our teacher Mrs. Tomlinson barked in front of the entire class.
So during the noon recess we found ourselves benched, me unable to play volleyball, Mary Beth with someone to talk to. “I don’t give a damn,” she said, her eyes on the girls playing ball.
It surprised me, egghead that she was, that she suddenly didn’t care about her schoolwork and, of all things, the word “damn.” She sat close to me, and though we weren’t supposed to talk, confided from the side of her mouth a world of gossip: Our teacher, Mrs. Tomlinson, didn’t have a husband who died in the Korean War; he found another woman before he came home. And Mrs. Kennedy, who we would have next year in seventh grade and whose baby died before it was born, went with Allison Witherow’s father to a movie, and Mrs. Witherow said Mrs. Kennedy would never be any teacher of Allison’s. There was more, and I saw as much when the bell rang and Mary Beth shook my hand as if we’d made a silent pact we were partners in crime. Communists.
And we played it to the hilt. Antics, anything we could think of: simultaneously stepping out of line when Mrs. Tomlinson wasn’t looking; and, at noon, switching clothes, blouses, skirts, even socks, but only one sock so that we’d be wearing mismatched pairs when we came out of the girls’ restroom. At night, while we were supposed to be studying, Mary Beth came to my house after dinner, whether or not her family had company, and we’d plot the next day’s activities. And I changed how she looked. Replaced braids with a ponytail; even if her hair frizzed, at least it flew freely now. And no more buttoning up just the top button of her cardigan like an old lady.
Our classmates noticed. During those long afternoons while Mrs. Tomlinson droned on about geography or the decimal point, they amused themselves with our latest change of clothes. They laughed, seeing our synchronized jumps in and out of line. Mrs. Tomlinson never did find out who caused these commotions, nor did she ever notice our wardrobe switches. And that way the other students joined me and Mary Beth as partners in crime. The truth, of course, is that was the way we joined them.
Success wasn’t without its drawbacks. Our grades dropped, Mary Beth’s most noticeably since she had been an A student. So I shouldn’t have been surprised when, after our next report card, Mrs. Polk stormed into the house one night and stood wild-eyed over the table. She looked at Mary Beth and then at me. “This isn’t good,” she said. Then she ranted about Mary Beth’s slipping grades and languishing interest in piano lessons.
“You noticed,” Mary Beth quipped, at which point Mrs. Polk yanked her out of her chair saying, “You girls must be separated.”
Afterward, alone at the table, I felt like a thief who’d been enjoying the loot and had finally gotten caught. My free ride was over. And it didn’t help that Mother came in and threw the incident in my face again. “See, I told you that girl’s no good.”
As it turned out, Mrs. Polk commuted the sentence and allowed me and Mary Beth one hour a day together after school, between Mary Beth’s piano lesson and dinner. I don’t know what changed her mind, whether Mary Beth threw an untamable tantrum or what. Point is, we made the most of that hour. We studied. Both of us got straight As. Mrs. Polk was happy and soon allowed us all the time together we wanted. At school we kept up our silly antics, but our sudden good grades proved intriguing to our classmates, a new twist. They bet potato chips and their mother’s homemade chocolate cake on which one of us would score highest on the next test. Which is how the annual spelling bee turned into such a big deal.
Mary Beth and I vowed to make them all losers. We’d tie.
Announcement of the spelling bee came sometime before Thanksgiving I remember because Mary Beth and I were hard at work over the four-day weekend, and minutes before the Polks’ Thanksgiving dinner, Mrs. Polk once again stormed into the house, this time to get Mary Beth’s nose out of the pages and pages of word lists. “Iris,” she said to me, “there’s more to life than books. You must learn to do other things, broaden your horizons.” Again, I felt like the culprit of some crime.
Other kids signed up for the spelling bee. But if any of them harbored any hope of winning, if they betrayed as much with their eyes, I didn’t see it. Only their excitement over who would win: me or Mary Beth. So the pressure was on, not only for the two of us to stay in the race, but to hit the finish line together.
A general vocabulary list was passed out to all the contestants and, to ensure our victory, Mary Beth and I would have to know every word. Neither of us would go down, and after the time allotted for our class contest was up, before the examiner could move on to the next grade, he’d have to declare a tie. Mary Beth had it all figured out.
I was nervous. I thought Mary Beth was too, although she had won the contest for her class the last two years. Which was the source of at least part of my anxiety: Mary Beth had experience and, truth be known, she was a better speller than me. But my real problem was the contest itself, specifically the notion of standing before the entire school and being asked to spell something. Someone would see I was faking it, that I didn’t know the answers, that I had no business up there on that auditorium stage. And the news would travel so that I’d see people whispering, I’d catch their doubtful glances, and then not a single letter would roll off my thick tongue. I dreamt of Mrs. Polk coming toward me, yanking my arm, and hauling me off the stage.
Mother saw my nerves. She saw me at night, long after Mary Beth had gone back to her house, hunched over the lists spread out over the kitchen table. One day I came home and found a dictionary on the table. It was old, a tattered cover and all, probably something Mother stumbled upon during one of her jaunts to the lower Fourth Street junk shops. Still, it was enormous, a Webster’s unabridged with indexes marking each letter of the alphabet. Mary Beth and I dug through it as if it were an open box of precious jewels.
“My father has one this big in his office,” Mary Beth said. “It’s full of lawyer words.”
I thought Mary Beth was as delighted as I was with Mother’s dinosaur, maybe even a little envious. When one of us got stumped on a word, we exclaimed, “Use the dictionary!” And that way, we not only found the correct spelling of the word, but also its meaning. It was amazing to us how many words we could spell and yet did not understand.
Use the dictionary. It’s what Mother heard when she came in to take Mary Beth home for dinner. She must’ve figured it was protocol, a long-established study technique, because later that night when she sat down with me, she said the same thing. She snatched the word list out from under my nose and began pitching words. Granted, she couldn’t pronounce half of them correctly. Pot-poor-we for potpourri. Pay-pie-er-match for papier-mache. We worked far into the night, past my bedtime. Then, just as quickly as she’d picked up the list, she set it down.
“Iris,” she said. Startled, I looked up from the dictionary, met her eyes. “Don’t let white people impress you. Win because you want to win.” Her eyes were black and sharp. She sat back, resting her hands on the dirty apron she hadn’t taken off, waiting as if she had asked me a question and wanted an answer.
“I want to win,” I told her.
She looked at me and nodded. “Go to bed,” she said as she got up and made her way to the closet. But, before I could move she was back, standing alongside the table. She opened her fisted hand, her fingers slowly unfurling, and there in the exact center of her palm sat a small square of Angelica. The dried, gnarled root was about the size of a single dice and looked like a tiny Monopoly house built into her palm. After Mother knew I’d seen it, she tilted the flat of her hand ever so slightly, letting the root roll and fall on my papers. “To protect you,” she said.
I knew about Angelica, the cut-up, celery-smelling pieces of root Mother kept in a brown bag on the top shelf of the closet. And in her purse, whenever she sent me in there looking for money, I’d see it a chunk the size of a grown-up’s thumb wrapped in Kleenex and secured by a rubber band. For our protection, Mother always said, against bad spirits, against bad things in the world.
I never thought much about it. Just another of Mother’s peculiarities, nothing obvious and embarrassing, nothing my friends could see like her busted seams and unraveling hems, or her fat brown arms. More in line with her Indian stories, her talk about spirits and Old Uncle, that relative who disappeared one day and then returned singing in all of creation.
“Do you hear him singing, Iris?”
I told her no, once and for all, after an enormous rattlesnake — it was supposed to be Old Uncle — did nothing more that I could see than slither under some oak leaves and scare the life out of me while I was helping pick acorns. She finally quit asking.
Two weeks from Christmas, and two days from the spelling bee, Mary Beth asked me if I thought my mother was weird. It was after school and we were sitting at the table going over the word list, which we had gained a great command of, me noticeably so. I was shocked. I thought first of the piece of Angelica root I’d stuck in my dresser drawer, then I thought better: Mother helping me late at night after Mary Beth went back to her house. Had she hung around outside the door and listened? Could she see through her window into our house?
“What do you mean?” I asked.
She’d been scanning a page of the open dictionary and didn’t look up. “Like my mother,” she said finally. “She’s weird.”
“What?” I was genuinely perplexed now.
With her finger she marked the word she’d been looking for, then slowly lifted her eyes from the book. “She has this thing in the bathroom,” she said. “It’s this rubber bag Allison says her mother has one, too. It’s to wash out their you-know-whats.” She gestured with the thumb of her free hand to her lap.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“Because I saw it. It was hanging over her shower door and Allison told me what they do with it.”
As outlandish as the rubber contraption sounded to me, I neither tried to picture it or gave it a second’s thought. I was relieved. Mary Beth only wanted to talk.
“That’s not as weird as my mother,” I said. “Look at how she dresses rags, a hobo.”
“Yeah, since your father left.”
“Well,” I quickly added, “she was never a great dresser.” Mary Beth shrugged and looked back down at the dictionary. “What’s the word again?”
“Miscellaneous,” she said.
Easy, I thought to myself. It was her word I’d pitched it to her, but I spelled it anyway. “M-I-S-C-E-L-L-A-N-E-O-U-S.”
“Yep,” she said.
After she left, and before Mother came back with my dinner, I asked myself why I’d been so alarmed by her question. What was I afraid of? When Mary Beth asked if I thought Mother was weird, I felt as if I’d gotten caught cheating.
Mother wore a dress: ink black, three white buttons the size of half-dollars in the front, low-collared; I had no idea she had it. And a white wool sweater, buttoned at the neck, somewhat old lady-like, but from my point of view on stage, it looked like a mantle of soft flowers over her shoulders. I hadn’t seen her before I left the house. I had to be at the auditorium early, so I went with the Polks. But there she was, only a few rows in from the front, and if not for her wide brown face and shining black hair, which was pulled back clean and tight, she could have been anyone’s mother. She seemed still, quiet, as if she might be uncomfortable; but as the losers in front of me drifted one by one off the stage, I could see her more clearly and knew otherwise. Her eyes were only on me.
We were in rows, me in the back row, and before long, only three of us were left. It was then, looking at the other two contestants Allison Witherow and Sammy Finley, a long shot that I realized Mary Beth was no longer on stage. I hadn’t seen her stumble. The school principal, Mr. Ridgeway, had been throwing the toughest words at us, going up and down the lines, hitting each student with a sinker. He was a tall man, bald, smelling of cigars, and he sounded so bored, so uninterested, that each word he pitched seemed to drop on the floor with the spittle that flew from his thick, wet lips. “Sorry,” he would say flatly before moving on to the next student.
I looked at Mother. She was so close now, and clear, that I could see the half-dollar buttons on the front of her dress were bone white, not pearl white or alabaster, not plastic shiny, but bone, bone white. Her eyes were so close that I saw how they caught each of Mr. Ridgeway’s words and reflected them back to me clean as a cue card.
First Allison was out, and then Sammy Finley. “Sluice,” a short, easy word, but Sammy couldn’t see it. He forgot the “i.” I saw it a long trough of water and remembered the “i.” For the longest time I stood there expecting I don’t know what, perhaps for Mr. Ridgeway to toss another word, before I realized that I was the only one left and that all of the clapping was for me.
I was ushered offstage and made to wait in the dark for what seemed like forever. What happened to Mary Beth? Where was she? It wasn’t until I was brought back on stage with the winners from the other two contests — seventh and eighth grades — that I realized we were to be pitted against one another in a final spell-off. I thought we were going back for our prizes. Mary Beth had never mentioned a spell-off. What would we have done? Before I knew it, I was in line with the other two winners, and Mr. Ridgeway was pitching words again.
The audience was still. Mother looked enormous. She nodded ever so slightly, as if she had read my thoughts and agreed. I hadn’t a prayer in hell; the other contestants were older. Yet 11 words later it was between me and the eighth grader, a gawky boy with horn-rimmed glasses who looked like he could spell the dictionary backward and forward. “Argillaceous,” of or having to do with clay, clay-like. He forgot the second “l.” I didn’t. Iris Gonzales. My name sounded through the loudspeakers, and the stunned crowd looked as if they were expected to rise up in unison and spell it back. Mr. Ridgeway handed me a certificate and then slipped a silver medal strung with blue ribbon over my neck. When I turned and found the other contestants standing at the edge of the stage, I saw that they were looking at me just as Mr. Ridgeway was: with disbelieving eyes. You’d think a Martian had landed right in front of them, and her name was Iris.
That night I drove home with Mother on account of Mary Beth and the Polks leaving before the spell-off. She warned me about the likelihood of my classmates’ jealousy. “The stakes are high, Iris. Keep your eyes open,” she said. That and a short lecture about humility. “Humbility,” she called it. But nothing she said prepared me for what happened.
First there were Mary Beth’s exuberant congratulations in the car the next morning, and then her laughing with the throngs of students who surrounded me on the playground. Not only my classmates, but a lot of the older students had collected around me. When an older, pretty girl asked my name, Allison Witherow stepped forward and proclaimed: “Iris. She’s the new school dork.” Giggling. Laughter. But the crowd didn’t bother me just then; I wasn’t embarrassed by their laughter because I wasn’t seeing or hearing them. Only Mary Beth. She cut her eyes away, glanced at the ground, but not fast enough for me to miss the victory that was full on her face.
I never let on that I saw and understood what had happened. What good would it do? Mary Beth used me. She used me to get into the world that had shut both of us out. She was a brat. Mother was right. She sat those endless hours in my small, stuffy house until her mission was complete, until she successfully abdicated her position as school dork. But I never said a word. That would do no more than admit defeat. And maybe the game wasn’t over.
