I come from a caring, loving family whose company I enjoy. I do not, however, come from a mellow, noncompetitive, “it’s not whether you win or lose” family, because in the Bunting family, winning is the only thing. My brother got punted out of the will during a game of Rummikub. I joined him in the disowned club after a hotly contested round of Trivial Pursuit in which Joan Crawford figured heavily (don’t ask). After losing a game of ping-pong on a technical foul (again…don’t ask), I crayoned a will of my own which stipulated that my lying, cheating, villainous mother would receive nothing, and in fact would have to pay my estate for the privilege of hearing the will read at all. The remainder of the will consisted of instructions for the carving of my epitaph, which would say that the ball had too nicked the corner of the table on Ma’s side, that anyone with ears could have heard it when it did so, and that my death had probably resulted from my mother’s attempts to cover up that fact because she would stop AT NOTHING to win a game of ping-pong, THAT HAG. Two weeks later, after my father trounced me at dice baseball, I scratched out “Ma” and wrote “‘Dad’ — IF THAT’S HIS REAL NAME” above it.

Everyone in the family has dozens of stories like these. Just ask the New Jersey state banking commission about the phone call they received from my six-year-old brother after Dad repossessed the B&O Railroad one rainy Sunday afternoon…or anyone with the misfortune to land a court next to us during Bunting Family Mixed-Doubles Hour…or the emergency-room doctor who had to remove a bowling-alley pencil from my left forearm. “What did I tell you, Ma? Did I tell you ‘don’t pick me for Pictionary, I can’t draw’? DID I SAY THAT? What kind of FREAK would stab HER OWN DAUGHTER?” “Well, ACTUALLY, no daughter of MINE draws a STICK FIGURE with no HEAD and expects me to guess ‘DEMOCRACY’ from that, so SUCK IT UP!” “Oh yeah? Well, the spazzmatoid blocking my LIGHT? That? WAS YOU, so it’s YOUR OWN FAULT.” “Your father is never going to let us hear the end of this. I can’t believe your chiseling little con artist of a brother drew the entire Congress in thirty seconds.” “Doctor, do you hear a buzzing in here? I thought I heard a buzzing, kind of like AN ABUSIVE PARENT WHO IS DEAD TO ME.” “STICK FIGURES HAVE HEADS.” “DEAD TO ME.” “HEADS.” “SHUT UP.”

So of course when my mother invited me to participate in a charity spelling bee with her and my dad, I agreed with relish.

About a week before the event, my parents began calling me more frequently than they ordinarily do, generally on a pretext involving what we would wear as a team or did I get a 1099 from blah blah or guess whose mom I just ran into at Kings, but actually for the purpose of yelling words into the phone when I picked up to see if I’d started studying yet. (“‘Jicama’!” “Who is this?”) I hadn’t studied at all, and didn’t plan to. I figured that either I knew how to spell the words or I didn’t, and cramming would just freak me out. “‘Hippodrome’!” “Who is this?”

Cut to me in my rental car at the Holland Tunnel entrance on Sunday at noon, in traffic, cramming. “‘Pavanne’ is an intermediate word? Please.”

And outside the Holland Tunnel, calling my parents on the cell. “‘Schussboomer’!” “Yeah, you’re breaking up.”

And on the Turnpike. “Okay, they’re not going to ask us ‘ecchymosis,’ not really, right?” “‘Mucilaginous’!” “M-U-C-I gotta go, I’m at the toll plaza.”

And in the driveway. “H-I.”

We’d spent weeks telling each other that “it should be fun” and “it’s for a good cause” and whatever, we don’t care, it’s fine. By the time I got to the house, the gloves had come O-F-F. We pretended otherwise, but we wanted to win the thing. The whole thing. We spent the afternoon at the kitchen table, our noses in the official word list booklet (“P-A-I-D-E-I-A”), snarling over who got next with the dictionary like a trio of overeducated cats. “Okay, you took Latin, so you do the Latinate ones. Your father will do the science and business ones.” “Which ones are you doing?” “The easy ones.”

At the middle school, we stood in line to check in with the organizers. Everyone around us joked about how surely they’d get eliminated in the first couple of words. My parents and I did that thing where you pretend you think it’s funny too, so you smile, but your upper lip gets stuck to your teeth. Other teams had costumes, most of them bee-themed. “Ma. We should have a costume. Why don’t we have a costume?” “Because no one needs to see your father in a bumblebee outfit, is why.” I feel that, in the troubled times in which we live, everyone needs to see my father in a bumblebee outfit. My father in a bumblebee outfit would render recreational drugs obsolete. But we hadn’t worn costumes, so I had to amuse myself by glaring archly at our fellow spellers.

Now and then, my mother would mutter into my ear about other teams. “Oh…them. Pfft. We won’t see them in the finals.” We picked up our “Hot Cross Buntings” nametags (don’t ask) and got a cup of coffee, and we managed another topic of conversation for about twelve seconds before we went back to handicapping the other teams. “I think we may have some stiff competition here. Did you see some of those team names? ‘The Three Orthographers’? ‘The Bee-atitudes’? We could get knocked out early here.” “Trust me — if the email I get every day is any indication, nobody in America can spell. We’ve got it locked up and we don’t need homemade capes to do it, either.” “I kind of like the capes.” “You’re out of the will.” “When did I get back in?” “That Botticelli game at Thanksgiving.” “Oh.”

With fifteen minutes to go before the start of the bee, we clomped down to the auditorium as intimidatingly as possible. Well, Ma and Dad just walked normally. I tried to make my black coat swirl threateningly. We filed down to the front with the other bee-ites and sat in the first row behind the sound guys, in front of the plasma screens that would broadcast the words to the audience; before the bee started, the screens played *NSYNC videos. “Dad, it’s your favorite song.” “What?” “I know you like the boy bands.” “What?” “Hey, you have those pants!” “What?” “‘Sophism’!” “What?” Four o’clock came. Four o’clock went. Kids ran around with yellow and black balloons, and my father stared dully at a Nelly video while Ma and I did that thing where you sigh and check your watch all pointedly and mutter “get ON with it.” I wondered aloud why nobody had named their team The Bee-otches. “God, let’s GO. What is this, A GAME?”

At last, the MC welcomed us to the proceedings. “FINALLY,” The Hot Cross Buntings huffed. We stood to sing the national anthem, and I thought to myself that whatever differences Americans have with each other, the one experience we can all share as a nation is that moment right before “and the rockets’ red glare” where the song climbs up into a register none of us can reach from the key where we started, and we all hunch our shoulders and squint and throw our voices up towards it, and once we get past it, everybody in the room is so relieved that we practically shout the rest of the song. When Americans boom out “and the hooooome of the braaaaave,” it’s not really out of pride in our country’s bravery. It’s mostly because we can actually hit the note. The next time you go to a baseball game, listen for that hitch. It’s right after “gallantly streaming.” It’s everyone in the stadium praying that our vocal cords don’t atomize on the word “glare.”

Anyway. The semifinal heats began. I took out paper and a pen and played along with the word readers, covering my eyes so that I wouldn’t see the plasma screen. I got most of them right, and felt very very smug indeed. Then I missed “soffit” and “gnotobiotic.” Then I laughed behind my hand at the team that misspelled “weevil.” The heat before ours started, and I got nervous. My parents had elected me the writer — what if I screwed up? How much further out of the will could they kick me? What if I biffed an easy one — where would I go at Christmas?

We tromped up on the stage and tried not to look like we wanted to kill the other contestants. I sniffed our whiteboard marker; my dad did housekeeping with the whiteboard. We felt strong. Other heats had ended within five or six words. No problem.

Five words later, the first other team dropped out. I thought I might have a stroke from nerves; I couldn’t write straight. After every word, the pit crew (Dad) erased the board and fiddled with the marker cap. We kept getting French words, and we kept spelling them correctly, but so did the other teams. I muffed “jodhpur,” but my parents saved me, and then we had a little scuffle over “abattoir,” but I prevailed and we got it right. (“Aaaaand she’s back in the will.” “Again?” “Oh, don’t worry — we’ll just play a quick game of cribbage before she goes back into the city.”) Five words after that, only two teams remained in the heat — us, and the orthographers. Clearly also in it to win it, the orthographers had worn their PhD garb, including the little velvety hats, in order to intimidate the competition. After every word, they turned around with self-satisfied looks to check out our whiteboard, sure that the rookies with only three bachelor’s degrees between them had fucked up “raconteur” or “bivouac,” and when we’d gotten it right too, they’d flip their eyebrows all “well played, Hot Cross Buntings, well played,” and then they’d turn around and want us dead amongst themselves. Well, that’s we did at our table. Out loud: “Nice job! [clap clap clap]” Under breath: “Yeah…go spell yourselves.” Word after word, we spelled it right, and the orthographers spelled it right, and we stared haughtily at them, and they smiled thin smiles of icy hate at us. Six snitty, officious know-it-alls locked in a fight to the D-E-A-T-H.

Moments before I hurled a mitten to the floor and challenged the man in the Harvard colors to a duel, the judges decided that both teams could proceed to the finals. We shook hands all around and went back to our seats to wait for the last heat to finish.

“I don’t know if we can take those guys.” “Sure we can. I saw some erasing on ‘subaqueous.'” We had the orthographers right where we wanted them, we felt. The five other teams in the finals didn’t concern us; our extra-long semifinal bout had seasoned us, shown we had stamina, but surely it had worn out the orthographers. We just needed a deceptively simple word, one of those words people second-guess themselves on and misspell, something like “nascent” or “milieu.”

The finals began. Five words later, the finals ended. The orthographers beat us, and several other teams at the same time, on “fibranne,” a linen-esque fabric none of us had ever heard of or had the first clue how to spell. “If that’s a brand name, I demand a rematch.” “Just take your plaque and smile. We’ll jump them in the parking lot and they’ll have to give us first place.” “But we’ll have to jump those other three teams, too.” “Relax. Your mother’s got a mean haymaker.”

What’s the lesson here? “Your family is crazy.” Duh. “Your family needs to get a life.” See above. “Your family knows nothing about textiles.” Good point. Okay, we’ll work on that. I don’t know the lesson here. We probably should care a lot less about winning and knowing everything all the time, but we WOULD have won if the orthographers hadn’t CHEATED at the end, and if it’s a textile, that’s science, so it’s my father’s fault that we lost and he’s out of the will and dead to me and I have to go Swiffer my plaque now.

[The orthographers didn’t cheat at all. They deserved to win. They seemed like very nice people, and I almost regret grabbing the steering wheel from my father and running them all over with my parents’ car, because coming in tied for second is neat, and it’s not about winning — it’s about raising money for a worthy cause.]

[Okay, that didn’t really happen. Ma grabbed the wheel, not me, and we only hit the Harvard guy, and his cast comes off in a month, so, no harm done.]

[Okay, what actually happened is that we saw them in the parking lot and I yelled out, “Floor it, Dad — let’s see if they can spell ‘shattered sternum’!” and Dad told me to shut up, and then Ma and I started giggling because our plaques said “All Adult Team Spelling Bee,” and what if they had an “Adult Bee” next year with words like “fellatio,” and then Dad kicked us both out of the will, but I didn’t wish any real harm on the orthographers, and none came to them as far as I know.]

[Also, my mother has never stabbed me with a pencil of any kind.]

[But coming in tied for second sort of bites. “Fibranne.” Jesus.]

February 27, 2003

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