The argument—Martin’s theoretical argument—rested on the fact that the marginally obscure ycleped could be spelled in just that manner, as his copy of the Oxford English Dictionary clearly indicated. Not yclept, at least not exclusively, as the panel of judges for Springfield’s first ever Adult Spelling Bee deemed, and on which grounds his team, the Boston Spelltics, was eliminated in the semi-final round.
Helen told him to cool it. “You’re lucky you were even allowed to register a team at all.” Initially, it had struck her as a conflict of interest, she being the head of the Springfield rejuvenation committee’s subcommittee to organize the spelling bee. She’d culled the words—delivered them, even, on contest-day—and it had seemed obvious to her that Marty would have the advantages of pre-study, osmosis, collusion.
Dr. Suzy Greenberg, professor of Elizabethan Studies at the University, and the first of the four judges of local celebrity to sign on, had assured her it was “all in good fun. Besides, there will be so many people competing once word about this gets around, he’ll have his competition cut out for him.”
“Words she lived up to, I’ll bet,” Martin fumed, banging the cover of the Dictionary. “Oh, she made sure to insist upon her little title, there … Doctor … when she made her grand introduction. Y-C-L-E-P-T indeed!”
Helen stirred the cookie dough. “Look, just because Suzy is a doctor doesn’t mean she holds anything over you—“
“She holds everything over me. You see the way she” blah blah blah.
Helen knew Marty was sensitive—defensive about his intellectual acumen. Having never achieved a Master’s degree (unlike Helen, in Business Administration), he was a veritable class-warrior in regard to academic order. He taught high school across the river in Warner. He wrote poetry and prose, which he rarely, if ever, sent out for publication (which he won, sporadically and in the past, to no alleviation of his general chagrin and increased dyspepsia over the general state of the written word, English language, etc.)
Martin: “You know? You know? I mean, the arrogance of those people …”
Helen formed the dough into neat balls and fork-pressed them down. Peanut butter, with chocolate chips. For the bake sale in two days. It was the least she could do, but really all she could take on after the nightmare of phone calls, paperwork, and delegation that was the Adult Spelling Bee. The fundraiser, writ large, was nowhere near over. The spelling bee, however, was. At least for her.
“You know, I’m going to take this to the next level.”
She laughed. “Marty, there is no next level.”
“I mean, who knows what might have happened? If they were wrong about ycleped, what else were they wrong about?”
“By they, you mean me?” She batted lashes at him over the tray.
“Honey, this isn’t about your being wrong—” Martin began, but she cut him off.
“No, it’s about you being wrong—”
“Your, Helen. It’s a gerund with a possessive—”
“Fine: your being wrong.”
“My not being wrong.”
“Whatever.” (Blah blah blah.)
Martin suffered up from the couch and heaved the Dictionary back onto the shelf. “I want to see the tape.”
Helen rolled her eyes. “The tape …”
“If such a tape exists.”
“Well, it doesn’t.”
“I think you’re just saying that because you don’t want me to—”
“No, I don’t, you’re right.” She blushed and shook it off. “I hate the way I look on tape. Plus, it’s embarrassing. When you do something like that live … you know, stand before a crowd of what? Three, four-hundred people—”
Martin mentally calculated the capacity of Springfield’s town hall, then nodded. “At least.”
She nodded back with slant eyes. “You make one little mistake, or stumble over some words, or make a Freudian slip … like when I said uterus instead of Eucharist? Did you catch that?”
“I’m surprised Eucharist was an approved word … secular competition and all …”
“But you didn’t hear me say uterus?”
“Never mind how easy that word is …”
“How did you not hear that?”
He shrugged, tapped his feet, waiting to move his own agenda forward.
“It was in one of the sentences. You know how Suzy wrote all those sentences about the Mrs. Mouse and Mr. Cat using all the words …?”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. The job you didn’t trust me to do.”
“Hey, you said you were busy.”
“Afraid I’d be inappropriate. Like I’m some kind of sick-minded—”
“Look, who’s sick-minded? I said uterus in front of—”
“That’s not sick. What’s sick about that?”
“Put the uterus into his mouth? That was the sentence. A mouse puts a uterus into a cat’s mouth. Everyone laughed. I can’t believe you didn’t hear that. You must have not been paying attention.” Helen breathed deeply. “Anyway, it was over in an instant and that was it. Gone.”
His eyes ballooned, incredulous. “And that’s why there’s no tape? Because you were embarrassed? Did you, like, destroy it? Destroy the evidence?”
“No, Marty … that’s why I don’t care about a tape. I’m not particularly interested in seeing myself bumble through introductions for all those silly team names and mangle all those words again.”
“So, you think you mispronounced a few?” His fingers twitched. More fuel for his suspicions of error.
“Jesus, I don’t know …”
“So there’s no tape?”
“When will you listen? I don’t know. There might be. I certainly don’t care, but one of the committee members might have taped it. Or one of the other teams … the Spell Chicks had their cellphones out the whole time …” She winked at him. “See if one of those girls took some footage.”
“I don’t know those girls, Hel; they go to Springfield.”
She opened the oven. “Well, I don’t—”
“Just because I’m a high school teacher doesn’t mean I know every sixteen-year-old girl in—”
“They were at least seventeen … or else we wouldn’t have let them compete.”
“Fine, I don’t know every seventeen-year-old girl in the area, Hel.”
“You wish.”
“C’mon …” He drew near her, encircling her waist with hands newly liberated from the Dictionary. “I don’t wish.” He kissed her. “Let’s make a baby.”
“Martin,” she pushed him lightly, lovingly. They’d been trying for six months.
“What?”
She squared against him, hands on her hips. “What do you wish?”
He considered. “I wish to see the word-list.”
She threw her shoulders aside, huffed, rolled, stomped. Pushed an empty tin bowl into the sink.
“Just let me look at it. I want to see if there are any other mistakes.”
“Martin, you know I went over that list a million—”
“I know.”
“You helped me.”
“I know. That’s why I know I can look at it. We can look at it together. C’mon. For old times—”
“Oh, yeah …”
They drew closer. Kissed. Made a baby.
Eventually, afterward, she let him look at the list.
* * *
The list contained several errors: glossomachical, probably too obscure for such a list anyway, was missing a final l; pasquinadeer had an extra e (and had thus likely been mispronounced … Martin would have to see the tape to confirm that); plenilunia wasn’t even in the Dictionary; and of course there was yclept, the alternative spelling of which the Dictionary clearly indicated and endorsed.
Martin had made a habit of the Oxford English Dictionary in his time—his rather short time as a young adult, and increasingly as a middle-aged man (is thirty where middle-age begins?)—but yclept was the only one of these he immediately recognized as fishy. The other three just sort of looked suspect (along with a few others that turned out to be legitimate). Upon inspection of that blessed tome, he struck the bible-thin pages victoriously, hour-fresh cookie suspended in his hand.
“Right here, look: plenilune, –lunal, –lunar, –lunary, and –lunium. No plenilunia. No such word.”
“You’re welcome,” Helen mused and pinched the end off the cookie to sample her work. The crumbs fell onto the pages. They would leave tiny grease spots if Martin wasn’t quick to brush them off onto the floor (which he was).
“Careful,” he said. “And thank you.”
“Well,” she half-heartedly posed, “maybe we weren’t using the Oxford English Dictionary.”
He blinked and scoffed. “What do you mean, maybe we weren’t?”
“Well, I—”
“What else would you use? Merriam-Webster? C’mon, Hel, give me a break.”
“Hey.”
“Besides, don’t you know? Didn’t you have a plan? Wasn’t there, like, a certain dictionary that was declared the official dictionary of the contest by the judges’ panel?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I could call up Suzy—”
“Ugh, no thank you.” He burped and stood up in his boxers. She went back to the bed and lay down, legs up, in her conception-facilitating position. “But it does bear minding, this … this …”
“Injustice!” Helen yelled between her knees.
“It is!” He wasn’t joining her in sarcasm. Martin had been wronged in many ways. Discounted professionally, disregarded artistically, growing increasingly ineffectual in his position at Warner High. Not the cute, young, male teacher-guy anymore. They ignored him: students and staff. Not such the, well … leavened classroom, anymore. The failures were piling up. And then there was this … his Helen, there on the bed. Eternally upended as such. Never even so much as a scare in seven years.
But that wasn’t what it was about. Personal shame and embarrassment aside, this was about English, the language, his language. And lexicographic miscarriages such as these … forget yclpeped, that was old news now, in light of such errors as plenilunia … why they, they, they … they debased the very language itself!
He picked up where his mind was, expecting Helen to catch his drift. “I mean, who’s the authority, now, on English? Suzy Green? The chick with the doctorate?”
“She’s a woman, Martin. Not a spell-chick.”
“I know, I know, it’s just, it’s just …” I mean c’mon: the sanctity of an entire language in the hands of the wealthy and privileged? Look at us! What have we come to? Plutocracy of language! Academic hierarchy choking on ivy weeds, taking the whole of Western civilization down with it! Could he vocalize such things to his wife? Wouldn’t she rebuke him? Wouldn’t she tell him he has a complex?
“You think I have a complex, don’t you?”
“I think you’re passionate.” Helen breathed deeply. “But you can’t take this—”
“Oh, I can, Helen,” he began. “What I can’t do is let an issue like this drop. I mean, there were all kinds of arbitrary spellings being accepted, and some being rejected, totally at whim! You see?” He pointed to the print-out she’d dug up for him after they’d finished making a baby. “On top of that, there are these misspellings that flew totally under the radar, so until I have the video tape, I can’t be sure—”
Helen swung up into a sitting position. “Look, Martin, I had four-hundred words to deal with—”
Oh, he thinks. “No, Helen, look—”
“And for whatever stupid reason, the software for the power point that Jillian gave me for the projection and all that … for whatever reason I had to manually enter all of them, all four-hundred—”
“Look, Helen, this isn’t about—”
“So excuse me if I made a mistake or two.” Her conclusion hummed with that tremolo that meant she was on the verge of shouting at him, visibly containing her anger by locking up her jaw.
Martin felt himself rise to the occasion. He and Helen fought a lot. Not fisticuffs, just yelling. Real serious—not real mean or nasty, but real serious yelling. About intellectual stuff. Big theory stuff. Bigger than this.
“Okay, you’re excused.”
She huffed and stood and walked panty-less to the dresser, Martin’s seed descending to a less advantageous depth of her vaginal cavity. So much for that one, he thought, getting angrier and angrier.
“Well. Thanks.” She put her shirt on resentfully.
“No problem.” He bided. “Look, I think I need to—”
“Do whatever you want,” she spat. “I’m done with this.”
“With what?”
She turned to face him, beautiful, sexy splash of auburn hair (almost unnoticeable grays asserting themselves) against her flushed face. The look of love still in her. “With this crusade of yours.”
“So you won’t help me?”
“No.”
“Fine.”
He had another cookie from the orange tupperware container before she took them away from him. “Those are for the bake sale,” she snapped, and slammed the fridge door.
* * *
The next day, Martin hooked up with the three girls from Spell Chicks. He called in a favor with one of his older male jock students, Matt, who had a girlfriend—or several girlfriends or something—on the Springfield side of the river. After a few awkward, probably scandalous (from an outside perspective) phone calls to a few teenagers’ cellphones, he procured a meeting with the Spell Chicks at Brewbears, the little coffee shop right downtown, next to the town hall, scene of the crime. The crime against English.
They were very weird with him. Treated him like a creep. His credentials as a professional teacher across the river in Warner didn’t seem to help—in fact, made it worse. It took a lot of time to explain the dilemma and get one of them to open up her phone (that is, get into the menu and seek out the actual recording of the Adult Spelling Bee … their three phones remained physically open, either in their palms or on their knees just under the table, the entire duration of the interview). Finally one of them—Kourtnee—did call up the one-and-a-half-minute clip. Martin scooted his chair over to look over Kourtnee’s shoulder. They all balked slightly at his sudden closeness.
Kourtnee played the clip; the other two quickly lost interest and started texting, messing around with their own phones. Martin watched, rapt. The footage was terrible. The sound, worse. Martin still used a phone with a receiver. He had a cellphone for a few weeks and had to cancel service. He literally could not understand what people were saying. “Too condensed,” he’d said to Helen, who didn’t know as much about sound-engineering terms as he did. “Without all the other frequencies present, I can’t even make out the simple phonemes of the words I know. It’s like decoding. I can’t decode and listen at the same time, let alone drive a car … hey, maybe that’s why kids these days text so much: because they can’t understand cell-phone voices either, so they’d rather type …” He’d gone on, ranting, seeking Helen’s implicit permission to ditch the cell, reconnect the old touch-tone, get back to basics. Consent wasn’t hers to give, though; why had he cared what she thought? She was a postmodern woman. They were a postmodern, progressive couple. She’d just shrugged and sighed (as she did) and said, “I can hear just fine on mine.” Besides, she needed hers for her administrative work at the University. To be in touch at an instant. Or to help with the Springfield rejuvenation committee. To coordinate with people like Doctor Suzy Greenland. But whatever; it’s not like Martin was trying to convince her to do something: get rid of a cellphone, get closer to reality, get with the program. I mean, who was he, right? He was just some high school English teacher. Doesn’t even have his Masters. Doesn’t even use a cellphone. Can’t understand the voices, he says …
As it would appear, though, Martin understood enough. Enough to hear not only Helen’s mispronunciation of ungulate, but also to hear the spokesperson for the My Spelloria team offer one of several dubious variants of yacht, which Helen took after a cursory glance to Suzy, who nodded sagaciously, as if the word’s spelling hadn’t been consumed in documented contention for years … (It was hard, Martin admitted, to determine the exact level of gestural subtlety between Helen and the judges’ panel, due to the blocky, pixelated footage, but his mind was already flooding with the memory of the event, the injustice, the sheer arrogance, the academic pretense of the whole thing …)
“Uh, Kourt: why’d you save this?” one of the girls sneered, not looking.
“I thought the sentences were funny,” she said around the straw of her to-go mochalatta super chiller. “Mr. Cat and Mrs. Mouse. Good stuff.” She turned over her shoulder, lips nearly in his face: “You write any of those?”
He shook his head. “Why?”
She shook her own, dismissing him, and prepared to clip her phone shut. “Just figured. Matt said you were, like, married to this chick or something.” Her eyes seemed on the cusp of receiving some expected gift from the tiny screen. “Oh yeah, check this out. This is why I kept the clip …” She nudged the tiny girl to the right, who quit her text and scooted over to see.
Martin heard his wife say, “… and the pious Mr. Cat opened his mouth to receive the uterus—uh, the Eucharist …” then a flood of condensed laughter.
“HA!” Kourtnee guffawed like a guy. “That’s some funny shit.”
* * *
“But they didn’t even win, Martin! I don’t see what it proves!”
“It proves error, Helen!”
“Human error is part of life, Marty—”
“Yeah, but not part of competition. Not when the object of the contest is proving competence in a system like English, which can be analyzed objectively—”
“But competition? What? What?” She grew flustered. Entirely too much for this early hour. “Martin, it doesn’t make sense. Spellorama didn’t even—”
“But they did unseat us, Helen. My team. And however many other teams, you know?” The obviousness of it all—and especially her refusal to countenance the facts—infuriated him. “And hey, Helen, it’s My Spelloria. It’s a Pixies reference. You know, My Velouria?”
Helen blinked. “Oh yeah.”
He threw his hands. “Oh, whatever. You don’t even know what I mean.”
“I do, I do. My Veloooouria …” She grunted the first few chords of the song and made little air-guitar gestures with her hands. Supposed air-guitar gestures. Not that you could ever hold a guitar that way in real life, but what did she know? Helen never learned how to play guitar.
“Whatever.”
“You—” She pointed and inched toward him. “Think I don’t know the Pixies?”
“No, I know you do, okay! Jesus, I’m just—”
“Think I’m a poseur?”
“Of course not! Look, this is about the so-called spelling bee, Helen. I just think—I mean, as a teacher and all—”
“Yes you do! You think I’m an intellectual poseur!”
“No, I think we have an obligation … or maybe only I have this obligation … I mean, I’m a teacher of English, okay? English! You’re just a—”
“Oh just a Business Admin. major? Huh?”
“This is, like, my thing. To protect. English is my—”
“Who can’t pronounce words to save her life?”
“Look, those are hard words. I know that. I’m not judging you, Helen, Jesus!” It had come to this again: the wincing, the closed eyes, the flexing fists, the stepping back and forth, waiting for his anger to subside. Why couldn’t she see this simple point? “It’s not about you. It’s about the English language—”
“It’s the same thing. You think because you studied English—creative writing, actually, Mr. Hotshot—that you’re the end all be all of—”
“No, I think that’s why you have judges—”
“—and I’m just this secretary chick who enters data all day, doesn’t know a lick about what I’m reading, sort of just mindlessly signing execution orders or whatever—”
“—that’s why you had judges, Helen. Experts in the field. Allegedly. To keep stuff like that from happening—”
“Oh, stuff like that!” Now she overturned a chair, and they both knew where this was headed. “Stuff like my boneheaded mispronunciations, right?”
He prevaricated. “Well, sure—but more importantly, misspellings not being properly identified with that batshit-crazy clusterfuck of a judges’ panel that—”
She yelled, “Well, I did the best I could! I only had, like, three weeks, and Jillian was calling me every day and piling all this shit on my plate—” Here she broke down. Started sobbing. She moved toward the fridge, presumably to get the cookies out, but Martin caught her halfway there with his “hey, hey” and his apologies.
She told him she was trying the best she could and that if he didn’t think it was good enough then maybe blah blah blah.
He told her that he was sorry. It’s just that he was passionate. It’s just that he cared about English, preservation of blah blah blah.
They made a baby.
And Helen was late to the bake sale.
* * *
While Helen was gone to the bake sale, Martin sat by the phone and called his guy, Matt. He answered like, “Uh, hello … ?” and Martin suffered through his salutations, teacher-to-student on the outs, in all its awkwardness, while the garbled sounds of teenage boys and girls, all in audience to their counsel, swarmed the line. Cellphone. It meant Matt knew who it was before he answered. But before Martin could figure that out, Matt said, “Yeah, I know. What’s up, Mr. Reston?”
“Look, I need to get in touch with that Kourtnee girl again.”
Awkward pause. Had he crossed the line? Giggles and hushed secrets in the interlude. Maybe she was right there, in the pickup with him, at the party. Maybe guys from Warner and chicks from Springfield hung out all the time. Maybe she was right there with Matt in the bedroom. Maybe they were making a baby when he called. Maybe he was keeping them.
“Uh, I don’t know, Mr. R.,” then he obviously pulled the phone away from his face before he—what? Laughed? Wept? Screamed? Other voices, other voices. “Look, Mr. R, can I call you back?”
But Martin had already hung up the line.
* * *
Helen thought the issue was dead. Things seemed improving. The bake sale went as bake sales do, and she’d done a decent enough job of cleaning up her smeary eyeliner and sex-hair by the time she was introduced to Jillian’s husband and their one-year-old, Seamus. Plus, Suzy called her that Wednesday to let her know she’d received a lot of positive feedback about the Adult Spelling Bee. She went so far as to say it was the most successful campaign for the Springfield rejuvenation committee since she resigned her chair.
Helen teased her out. “What did you find—if you don’t mind me nibbling your ear a bit—were the most successful fundraisers you remember from your time on the committee?”
Suzy cooed over the cellphone, sounding warm and grandmotherly to Helen. Before the Adult Spelling Bee, they had communicated exclusively through email, and only since that night had Helen had the opportunity to really talk to her. She was wildly influential locally, a real pillar. So Helen was happy to hear about the polar-bear plunges and the wacky raffles and the human-slave auctions (joke, of course) that had been so popular in her time with the committee (even if such a conversation’s only appreciable service was Helen’s advancement among women of her order—that is, professionals … that is to say: a strengthening of the bonds of communication between women of action).
“Of course, that was all before Steven was born,” Suzy mused. “Would I do it again?” As if Helen had asked the question. “Chair the committee? Oh, I don’t know. There was a time for that, then there was a time for family. I’m sure you understand.”
Helen smiled hard enough for Dr. Suzy Greenberg to feel it through the cellular connection. “Oh, sure I do. Sure I do.”
“That biological clock starts ticking.”
Helen nodded.
“Now, you’re married, yes?”
Helen said, “Mmhmm,” and looked at the desk calendar.
“I thought so. I thought Jillian said you were married to a teacher, yes? And does he work at Springfield High School?”
“No, um, actually he commutes across the river to—”
“My Steven went to Springfield High School. Must have been—oh, Lord … how old are you, again, Helen?”
“Thirty-two.”
“Goodness! You’re almost as old as my Steven!” Then, a little of the antique bawd in her tone, “A shame you’re, shall we say, spoken for?”
At this, Helen laughed. And eventually found a way out of the conversation. And went home feeling good about her job, her connections (however vapid the whole game was, admittedly), the Adult Spelling Bee … the whole deal.
* * *
All through dinner, the baby-making, and the soft murmurs that followed, Martin seemed almost entirely over the subject of the perceived injustice. He held her ankles softly above her shoulders for her and mused over baby names like a regular, well, chick, until they both rolled over, and fell asleep, a picture of postmodern matrimonial bliss.
* * *
Except that Marty was often at the Dictionary, tapping his finger. She never saw him cross-checking it with the list. But she didn’t know where the list was, either. It had just sort of disappeared.
And for whatever reason, he’d reactivated the cellphone he’d been so adamant about getting rid of last year. Helen had thought he’d literally thrown it away, but apparently he’d squirreled it away in one of his million boxes.
Which she guessed made her glad. She liked the idea of being able to call him in case of an emergency. But why did she never see him making calls? What, just voice-messages? No actual conversations? Was he only having conversations out of the house? Was he afraid she’d check messages left on the touch-tone in the living room? Was he having an affair?
Stupid, she knew. No amount of academic degrees would ever convince her that when she was jealous it wasn’t just plain old stupidity, something she had to fight against.
Then she got her period, that long wash of relief mixed with regret. So they didn’t make a baby for a while.
Martin said, “It’s okay, we’ve got all the time in world,” and she said, “Speak for yourself, bucko,” and he laughed and rolled over.
So it was fine, right? Sure. Besides, pregnancy wasn’t the only blah blah blah.
* * *
On Tuesday night of the next week, Helen sat taking notes at the fortnightly Springfield rejuvenation committee meeting. Beyond their little illuminated board table, the town hall’s multi-purpose room was dimply lit; a few minor figures in aluminum folding chairs attended from the shadows: Poly-Sci students from the University, the rare local reporter, more often a smattering of nosy, concerned-citizen types … an audience so meager and passive the board members hardly even acknowledged them. There was a customary Q-and-A session—a sort of true-democracy moment—at the conclusion of every meeting, during which any Springfield taxpayer might air concerns, make suggestions, dish impromptu with the movers and shakers (like, she supposed, herself).
She was tired. Drifting. On the verge of losing her attention, as was often the case at these soporific meetings (at least since the Spelling Bee had wrapped up, and she’d regressed back to regular-member status). Jillian was going on about some new idea, a toys-for-tots drive, and Helen could feel herself sinking, her writing looping lazily, then stopping altogether, then trailing off in a somnolent line …
… When an obviously incorrigible (drunk, even?) man essentially stormed the proceedings. He materialized from that ghost-audience with his eager pick-me hand, demanding attention, not even waiting for official recognition before rasping out his vulgar monologue. No, she thought. No.
Yes. Into that space of soft politics and low tones arose Martin, until now so invisible to her that he might have worn a false mustache the whole time. Acting the role of a disinterested citizen, making only cursory eye-contact with her. Stuttering and hemming over his word-choice. Coughing like he’d been smoking. And he waved something in the air. Pink. A cellphone. But not his. Jesus.
She was too shocked, frankly, to record his statement word-for-word, but in summation, here were his (self-avowed “concerned citizen and gate-keeper of the English language”) main points regarding the recent Adult Spelling Bee, held at this very hall and organized by this very committee: the pre-approved contest lexicon and sentence-list contained several dubious or downright incorrect spellings. The panel of judges (whose credentials, he pointed out, underwent no third-party review) variously accepted and rejected variant spellings of various words in a manner that was “totally arbitrary … almost at whim.” In addition, the host of the event, a member of this very committee, had mispronounced some words, and delivered sentences, written by one of the judges (he named her: “Dr. Susan Greenleaf”), which were at times inaccurate in their demonstration of the words’ meanings. For example, see the sentence for nauseous: Mr.Cat’s vain attempt to prepare a skunk-cabbage casserole made Mrs. Mouse feel both nauseous and unfulfilled … a classic English lexical blunder, and certainly one to be understood, but not, under any circumstances, to be edified by competitions such as this as acceptable usage. Such foibles, in short, rendered the entire basis for fair and honest and transparent contest negligible. As such, he was demanding, on behalf of his ad hoc committee for truth and transparency (Helen saw, now, how in his other hand he held a mashed leaflet of paper, presumably a petition … was it a bluff? Did Martin just hiccup?), that the Springfield rejuvenation committee, or perhaps the sub-committee that planned the Adult Spelling Bee, form a sub-committee to investigate these, these—did he seriously call them abuses?—and further, to address an apology and retraction of official results to the paper (“which could be done right now,” he said, gesturing to his left where, to her horror, Helen recognized the hippy-dippy young beat reporter from the Valley Times, “as Max found the time to come with me tonight to” blah blah blah), and finally, to contact the members of the Spellunking Munkies, the so-called “winning team,” and order them to surrender all claims as Springfield’s first-ever Adult Spelling Bee champions.
Against this demand, Martin leveled the threat of imminent legal action. His time frame was one month, before he’d go all out. Then he offered to answer any questions, which is when everything went absolutely crazy …
* * *
It was like: I’m taking the child and leaving, she mused to herself. Only there was literally no chance of that being true, not this month. Not ever. Not unless she waited there on the sofa, or lay on the bed with her ankles above her shoulders … waited for her husband—drunk, hateful, and mad with professional jealousy—to come and help her make a baby.
But he came back too late. Or else she got out too quickly. Either way. Both were acceptable explanations to her.
* * *
He protested outside the town hall for about a week, maybe two. No one came. Most people thought he was advertizing some new, upcoming Adult Spelling Bee, which infuriated him.
They spoke a few times over cellphone, but Martin couldn’t understand a word she said. She was probably mispronouncing them all anyway.
It took a lawyer to get the required language through to him: he was being sued for divorce. This took an unforeseen toll on his work with the ad hoc committee for truth and transparency, and the whole thing just sort of fizzled out.
* * *
She took a new apartment, and a new position at the University—a lateral promotion out of development and into admissions, where she worked beside a newly repatriated Steven Greenberg. He was gay, though. She eventually made a baby with a gentleman from New York and evaporated from the Springfield rejuvenation committee as seamlessly as Suzy had once done, at the beck of a tiny body inside her. Perhaps to materialize once again as judge, grandmother, Doctor. Etc.
* * *
He didn’t. Make a baby. Or get a promotion. Unless you count the benign step-increase all public high school teachers get, climbing the ladder of security, away from the kids and babies and the common rabble and up, up, up, into retirement. Okay, early retirement. Okay, forced retirement, over a rather arbitrary issue. Rather arbitrary issue.
He didn’t get his Master’s either. A vain pursuit. “All I ever needed,” he said to no one, banging the Dictionary shut, heaving it up onto the shelf in the same place it had always been, but never quite finishing his sentence.
He didn’t get his apology or his retraction or his investigation or even any recognition at all for his efforts toward rectification of the English language. The ad hoc committee dissolved. He got a cease-and-desist letter from a lawyer representing the town’s rejuvenation committee. He got sneers and faces around town, until eventually everyone made babies and moved away, and no one remembered him anymore.
Then he didn’t get anything. Which was fine for some time.
* * *
Eventually, he did get something: a free coffee from the girl, Kourtnee, when he came upon her behind the counter at Brewbears. Five, ten years later … who knows? She was pregnant—five months, let’s say, but who was Martin to tell? They’d exchanged pleasantries—both adults, finally, admittedly, obviously—and she’d let him go with a generous tip and a wink and a smile.
… Okay, maybe he’d conned it—pushed the issue. She didn’t know who he was, but he told her the story anyway. “Right here, right here,” he demanded, fresh cup in his hand and ready to go, pointing to the corner. “Right over there.”
“That’s crazy,” she said and eyed his hands, waiting for him to pay for the coffee.
“You had that video clip on your cellphone. Adult Spelling Bee.” He huffed and put his fingers up like quotation marks. “Spelling Bee.”
Recognition dawned in her blue eyes out of the relative fear of his shaking form. “Oh, yeah … Now I remember. Cool.” She seemed to wait for something again—money, perhaps—or for him to move—but he just stood there.
“What are you going to name it?” he said, but she didn’t quite hear him. Her fingers were reaching for something—a button, an alarm, a napkin, a saucer …
“What are you going to name it?”
“Hey, weren’t you married to that chick who said … aw, what was it, now? Shit, some slip of tongue …”
“What are you going to name it?”
She rubbed her belly in thought. “That shit was a joke between me and my friends for years …”
“What are you going to name it?”
She looked him straight in his eyes and said, “Look, why don’t you just take it. This one’s on me, okay? It was cool seeing you again. I hope you” blah, blah, blah.
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This story was first published by _______, circa 2012