Published: May 28, 2012
ON Wednesday, nearly 300 kids will take the stage in the Maryland Ballroom to sweat it out at the Scripps National Spelling Bee. Fewer will make it to the following day's semifinals, where one mistake means elimination. I'd wager that many of them will be silently praying, Not on the first word. At least this was the plea — and later, the lament — that hummed in my head at the very same bee, 17 years ago.
I was 14 years old, too anxious to be dazzled by the monuments and memorials of Washington. My mother and I had flown from Kentucky, but she was no stranger to the capital. My older sister had already competed three times at nationals, having performed an unprecedented three-peat at the state spelling bee in grades six, seven and eight.
"Don't worry," a spelling bee official told me after one of her victories. "Your turn'll come too!"
I thought, "Does it have to?"
When the time came, I hurtled headlong into words. When my sister was 14 and I was 12, we trained together. We began with the Suggested List distributed at school — hundreds of words printed in 7-point font on a poster that folded up like a map. When the words along the creases began to vanish, we bought additional spelling books, including "Valerie's Spelling Bee Supplement," by a legendary trio of spelling sisters.
Sometimes my mother tested us, squinting with the intensity of a palm reader at words most English teachers wouldn't know how to pronounce, let alone my Indian-born mother. She jotted a disheartening dash by the misspelled words, even when I pretended to blame her accent for my errors: oh, you mean eudaeMONic!
I lost my first school spelling bee to my sister, but not without a face-off that rendered the entire student body nearly comatose with boredom. It came down to the two of us at the mike, spelling word after word in an awkward duet, each waiting for the other to hit a false note. Two years later I arrived at nationals. I wore a board around my neck with the name of my sponsor and home state. The stage was crammed with seated spellers facing the roving eye of an ESPN camera. I had no idea where my mother was seated, but I felt her everywhere at once.
For my first word, I approached the microphone and awaited my fate.
The announcer was somewhere to my left, a man who enunciated so emphatically, his lips could be read from the back of the convention room. "Barbican," he said.
It's likely that a good number of my competitors were inwardly groaning at the relative ease of my word. But I seized on the end. That last syllable could go two ways: C-A-N or C-O-N. I asked all the requisite questions — "Can you repeat the word?" "Definition?" "Use it in a sentence?" "Etymology?" — and finally gambled on C-O-N.
The pause. And then: the sickening tinkle of a tiny bell, whose clapper seemed to ping! against my very heart. There went the Suggested List, the hotel room, the hope, the arsenal of words — gastrocnemius, papeterie, appoggiatura — that would never now prove useful. There went my vaulting ambition, which didn't know what it wanted and so flung itself everywhere: spellings bees, tap dance contests, thumb wars, whatever my sister was doing or had done. There went my mother, sighing somewhere in that pitying sea, gathering up her coat and purse.
But I didn't go to meet her just yet. I was ushered offstage by an angel of a college student, dewy and beautiful in her sympathy, telling me, in my brain-dead state, that we were going to the Comfort Room, a term with the biblical weight of the Promised Land. I yielded to her like a lamb.
The Comfort Room was a room cordoned off from parental or public interference. Inside, the most recent losers were sitting around a table abundant with junk food, in fairly credible portrayals of calm and normalcy.
We snacked on Ho Hos and cheese sandwich crackers. We casually mentioned the words that defeated us, a brief bloodletting to initiate each new arrival, but then we dropped the subject of spelling altogether, as if we'd already moved on from missed words and lost opportunities, as if the specter of our common failure wouldn't follow us forever. We were told we could stay as long as we wanted.
In the years since, I've watched spelling bees from the other side of the camera, and it's always painful to see a speller fail. The first one out always prompts deafening applause; you can feel the sympathy gushing out of all those parents. But we keep watching these young people with so much skill and innocence, who haven't figured out how to be guarded on camera, who might possess five times the average kid's vocabulary but lack the ability to hide their relief or joy or disappointment when directed to the wings.
I take comfort in knowing what is found there — the crackers and Sprite of the Comfort Room and, eventually, my mother.
"Well," she said, "I guess you won't be doing this again."
I saw it then: the tarnished silver lining. Next year I would be 15 and forever ineligible.
Tania James is the author of "Aerogrammes: and Other Stories."
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on May 29, 2012, on page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: Spelling Out the End.
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