Introducing Shirley Braverman

by Hilma Wolitzer

Oh dear. Why was I so nervous again? I had to concentrate. It was a word I had studied. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, something I always advised Theodore to do to help him relax. “‘Rhythm,’” I said. “R-h-y-t-h-m.”

  “Very good!” Dr. Vanderbilt said and I said, “Whew!” right out loud, which made him smile again.

  Then Sheldon missed a word I had never studied. “Chauffeur.” I could hear Dr. Vanderbilt say, “I’m sorry, Sheldon. That isn’t the correct spelling. Please wait and we will see if Shirley can spell it.”

  “‘Chauffeur,’” I said aloud. The room was very quiet. The five teachers looked at me with serious faces, like five judges in a courtroom. How had Sheldon spelled it anyway? I couldn’t even remember. It was a nice word, full of soft sounds. “C,” I began, “h-a-u.” Was it one f or two? I imagined a tall handsome chauffeur tipping his hat as I entered a limousine. Good evening, madam.

  “F,” I said, and paused. “F-e-u-r.” I shut my eyes and held my breath. Nobody said anything for what seemed like a very long time.

  “Congratulations, Shirley!” When I opened my eyes Dr. Vanderbilt was standing behind his desk holding his hand out to me. I took it. I was the winner! Me! I was the best speller in P.S. 247!

  Then Dr. Vanderbilt shook Sheldon’s hand too, and Sheldon said, “CongratulationsShirley,” as if it were just one long word, and I guessed that his mother had told him to say that to whoever won, if it wasn’t him.

  “Thank you, thank you!” I said. The other kids gathered around me and Miss Cohen came over and gave me a hug. “Room 155 did very well today,” she said, including Sheldon in her smile.

  Then I was outdoors again and the air had never seemed so sweet. I raced across the schoolyard, toward the little groups of kids waiting to hear the results of the spelling bee. As I ran I felt as if I were flying, as if my legs weren’t moving at all. I could see Mitzi running toward me, ahead of the other girls, her arms stretched out. “You won, oh Shirley, you won!” Her voice came across the yard to me, and even after the words were lost in the wind, I still heard them over and over again inside my head.

  Thirteen

  Hidden Treasure

  “WHAT DO YOU WANT to do?” Mitzi asked.

  “I don’t know. What do you want to do?”

  Mitzi paused for a moment with one finger pressed against her face. “I don’t know. What do you want to do?”

  Velma took the book she was reading and slammed it face-down on the arm of her chair. “If you girls say that one more time, I’m going to scream!”

  “Well, we really don’t have anything to do,” I said. I guess I whined a little when I said it. It was a rainy Sunday afternoon and Mother and Daddy had gone to visit Grandpa Small without either of us. He was sicker than he had ever been before and Mother said he was much too weak for any extra company.

  Theodore and Arthur, another little boy who lived in our building, were pushing toy cars and trucks under the skirts of the living-room sofa and chairs. They were making motor noises with their mouths and calling each other Jim and Bill for their game. “Jim, deliver this here cement to 162 Brooklyn Avenue.” “Okay, Bill.”

  “Nothing to do?” Velma said in her bossiest voice. “Why, there’s plenty you can do.”

  “Name one thing,” I said.

  Velma looked thoughtful. “Why, you could do some extra schoolwork.”

  Mitzi made her fainting face, rolling her eyes up so only the white parts showed, and letting her tongue hang out.

  “Well,” Velma said, pretending she couldn’t even see Mitzi. “You could knit some afghan squares for the Red Cross.”

  “Me?” I said. “The way I knit? It would have so many holes, the poor person who used it would end up with double pneumonia.”

  “You girls will just have to think up something yourselves,” Velma said, picking up her book again. “I want to see what happens to poor Jane Eyre.”

  “J-Jim,” Theodore said to his friend Arthur. “Get this truckload of coal over to the lady’s house.”

  “Right, Bill,” Arthur said. “Lady, where is your coal chute?”

  Mitzi and I went into the kitchen. The rain slanted against the window and dark clouds rolled across the sky. I opened the refrigerator and looked inside. “Do you want an apple?”

  “No, thank you,” Mitzi said. “I’m not hungry. I’m just bored, bored, bored.”

  I shut the refrigerator. I wasn’t really hungry either.

  “Sunday is my worst day,” Mitzi said. “Especially if it rains and I can’t go outside.”

  “Yes. In books, people always live in those big old houses with attics and basements, and when it rains they go looking for hidden treasure.”

  “That’s right,” Mitzi said. “There’s always some old trunk with valuable papers inside that prove somebody in jail is innocent or something.”

  “Or that the mean old man on the other side of town is really their grandfather. And when he finds out, he’s not mean any more.”

  “Well, I’m not going to look for any hidden treasure in your basement. That place is really haunted.”

  “Oh, it’s not so bad,” I said. “The ghosts are all friendly. Ha-ha.”

  “Ha-ha,” Mitzi echoed in a tiny voice.

  “But,” I said, “we could look in a closet for something.”

  Mitzi looked interested. “For what?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, wishing I could think of something. Mitzi always had the best ideas.

  “Maybe we’ll find out that Dr. Vanderbilt is really your long-lost uncle,” she suggested.

  We both giggled. But then Mitzi said, “Are you sure your mother won’t get mad if we snoop around in the closets?”

  “Of course not,” I said. “At least, she probably won’t, especially if we do a little spring cleaning at the same time.”

  “A little what?”

  “Cleaning. You know, straighten things out and make them neat.”

  “I don’t know...” Mitzi said. She hated housework and her mother was always complaining that Mitzi’s room looked like it had been hit by a tornado.

  “Who knows?” I said. “Maybe we’ll find a valuable letter from George Washington or Abe Lincoln.”

  “Or a five-thousand-dollar bill stuck in an old envelope.”

  “Or a gigantic diamond ring that my mother forgot she had.”

  We were both laughing so hard that we almost forgot it was a rainy Sunday afternoon with nothing to do.

  The hall closet seemed like the right place to begin our investigation. That was where Mother always put the things we couldn’t find any other place for. When the hall closet was completely filled, my mother and father would make a trip to the basement, where each family had a storage bin to keep the junk they couldn’t bear to throw away.

  In the closet, Mitzi and I found boxes filled with old report cards and autograph albums and birthday cards. Mother kept her wedding dress in there as well. It was in a blue zippered garment bag filled with moth balls. Mitzi and I unzipped it halfway and put our hands in to touch the creamy satin of the long skirt. At the bottom of the bag, wrapped in tissue paper, were Mother’s wedding veil and headpiece.

  When Velma and I were very little, even before Theodore was born, Mother let us each have a chance to dress up and play bride, while Daddy sang “Here Comes the Bride” at the top of his lungs. First Velma walked down the “aisle,” which was really only the long hallway at the entrance to our apartment, and I walked behind her, holding up the train. I thought it was the funniest word I had ever heard for a part of a dress and I remember that Mother and Daddy laughed when I said, “Chooo chooo,” as I walked behind Velma. Mother had made a bouquet of tissue-paper flowers and candy-box ribbons. Of course there was no one there for us to pretend to marry when we got to the end of the “aisle” and landed in the kitchen.

  “Oh, what beautiful brides you’ll be,” Mother said, clasping her hands together under her chin.

  Daddy smiled and
said, “If you take my advice, young ladies, you’ll elope!” He had to explain how that meant running away to get married, and Mother became very upset. “It’s only a joke, Etta,” he said, putting his arm around her waist and pulling her close to him. “They will be beautiful brides.”

  When it was my turn to get dressed, the wedding veil kept slipping over one ear, but I thought I looked splendid anyway. Ta-da te-dum! Here comes the bride...

  “Let’s look for the diamonds and the money,” Mitzi said now, zipping the garment bag and pushing it back in place. She knew I wouldn’t take the wedding dress out unless Mother was home.

  But we did find other clothes we could try on: old hats and shoes and things that Mother had put aside for the War Relief Rummage Sale the PTA was going to hold at the school that week.

  “Oh, you look simply gorgeous, dahling,” Mitzi said when I pulled a gray beret down over one eye.

  She tried to walk around on Mother’s old platform ankle-strap shoes, but her ankles wobbled and her feet kept turning over on their sides.

  Then Velma came in with her book still in her hand. I thought she was going to start yelling at us for making a mess, but instead she took a big-brimmed straw hat with one drooping pink rose on its crown and put it on. She really looked pretty. Was it possible that my sister Velma was pretty? “You look nice,” I said.

  “Oh, do you really think so? Here, let me fix that. You have to get just the right angle with a beret. There, that’s perfect. You look sweet, Shirley.”

  We were nicer to one another than we had been in a long, long time.

  Velma helped Mitzi to button the back of a tea-rose crepe evening gown, and then she suggested a little dusty-pink lipstick and some matching nail polish, which she said she just happened to have in her room. I have to admit that I did look in the drawers of Velma’s dresser once in a while, but I had never found lipstick or nail polish there. All I ever saw was her underwear and her pajamas and her socks, all folded neatly in little piles. Of course, whenever Velma caught me, she always started yelling about her precious things. The nail polish and lipstick were under one of the neat piles of underpants in Velma’s dresser drawer. Mitzi still bit her fingernails pretty close, so Velma could just put a tiny dab of polish on each one. But they looked nice, anyway. Then Velma put some lipstick and nail polish on me too and she said that I had very artistic hands.

  I felt happy and embarrassed at the same time. “By the way,” I said, just to change the subject, “what happened to Jane?”

  “Who?”

  “Jane, in your book.”

  “Oh. Jane Eyre. She lived happily ever after,” Velma said.

  From the other room we could hear “Jim” and “Bill” calling to one another, and outside the rain beat the same light rhythm against the windows. Only now it seemed pleasant and cozy in the apartment instead of boring and dreary. Mitzi didn’t even mind that there had been no real hidden treasure, no diamonds or money or secret papers. And she helped with the cleaning part of the agreement, standing on a stepstool while we handed boxes up to her.

  “That looks good. Mother will be surprised,” Velma said.

  But I was the one who was really surprised. For a little while Velma and I had been friends.

  Fourteen

  Mirror, Mirror on the Wall

  Feb 15, 1945

  DEAR PEE WEE,

  It was so much fun getting a letter from you. How could you think I would forget who you are? Of course I know that you and Mitz are growing up and I have been away for such a long time. When I come home you girls will have to wear red roses in your hair, so I’ll be sure to recognize you!

  Mitzi wrote and said that you are the champion speller in your school and that you will probably end up being the champion of all New York City. I’m sure she’s right. Spelling was never my best subject and I hope you don’t find too many mistakes in this letter.

  Well, Peewee, take good care of yourself and if you have time, I would enjoy hearing from you again. Good luck in everything you do.

  Love from

  Buddy

  Love from Buddy. Love, love, love. Everybody watched me when I took the thin V-mail letter from the kitchen table. But I went into the bathroom to read it, feeling excited and nervous. Love from Buddy. He said that Mitzi and I should wear red roses in our hair so he would be sure to recognize us. That sounded so romantic! I looked into the mirror above the sink. Would I really look that different when Buddy came home? The funny thing was you never saw the changes in yourself, even though you were changing and growing every single minute of the day. Buddy said that I would probably be the champion speller in all of New York City. That made me feel very proud. Somebody far, far away across the ocean had faith in me.

  “Mirror, mirror on the wall,

  Who is the greatest speller of them all?”

  Of course I didn’t say who is the fairest of them all, the way Snow White’s stepmother did. I knew I wasn’t bad-looking and I thought that if my hair was blond instead of brown, if I had dimples and if my nose was a little different, I might even look a tiny bit like Shirley Temple. Yet I had to admit that I wasn’t the fairest in the land.

  But spelling! Buddy had written that letter three weeks ago and he didn’t even know what had happened since then. A few days before, I had won the district-wide spelling competition against kids from eight other schools. It was very close, though. A boy named Alvin Michael Jones from P.S. 205 went right down the line with me. When everyone else was eliminated (with two of the girls crying like babies), Alvin and I just spelled one hard word after another. This time the bee was held in the auditorium of a neighborhood school, and the superintendent of the district was the one who read the words to us. The principals of all the schools were the judges.

  Before the bee, Dr. Vanderbilt gave me another speech about being the pride of the school and the future of America, etc., etc. The auditorium was filled with teachers and parents and friends of all the contestants. Theodore had to sit on my father’s lap.

  When only Alvin and I were left, neither of us made a mistake for what seemed like forever. Once in a while you could hear a tiny gasp from the audience or a nervous cough, but they had been told not to clap or cheer until the winner was declared. It looked as if we would be there all day, but then Alvin had trouble with the word “bookkeeper,” the only word I know of in the English language with three sets of double letters, one right after the other. He was so mad that he didn’t even congratulate me when I spelled it correctly. He just went stomping off the stage muttering about girls who think they’re so smart.

  Of course the audience cheered and applauded all at once, and it sounded strange to me, like a great roar, like the ocean sound you hear in a seashell. A hundred people came up to shake hands with me and flashbulbs kept going off.

  The next day my picture was in the newspaper. Underneath, it said:

  BENSONHURST GIRL IS WINNER IN DISTRICT-WIDE SPELLING BEE

  Shirley Braverman, a sixth-grade student at P.S. 247, took first place in a spelling bee held yesterday at P.S. 143 in Brooklyn. The runner-up, Alvin Michael Jones of P.S. 205, was defeated on the tricky word “bookkeeper.” Miss Braverman, an attractive young lady with curly brown hair and sparkling brown eyes, told a reporter for this newspaper that her secret formula for success was to study hard. She will go on to compete for the mayor’s medal in a competition to determine the best speller in all of New York City.

  I didn’t even remember talking to a reporter! And that secret formula didn’t sound any more mysterious than the ones in Mrs. Golub’s Secrets of the Stars album.

  My father bought ten copies of the newspaper with my picture in it and he taped the page to the front of the refrigerator. Every time I went to get a glass of milk or an apple, my own face smiled back at me. BENSONHURST GIRL IS WINNER...

  I talked about it at dinner and after dinner, and even after Theodore and I were in bed. I talked about how great it felt standing up on that stage...
Theodore made loud snoring noises as if he were asleep, but I knew that he was only fooling, so I just went on talking.

  The next morning at breakfast, I went right to the refrigerator to get the oranges and to sneak another look at the newspaper article.

  Velma was very grouchy at the breakfast table. Right after the bee she had been as nice as she could be, congratulating me and saying how wonderful it was that I had won. But at breakfast she started picking on me for leaving the cap off the toothpaste and not helping with the supper dishes the night before. Was Velma jealous of me?

  I was standing in front of the mirror, holding Buddy’s letter and thinking about it all. “Mirror, mirror on the wall...”

  And there was Velma again, standing in the doorway watching me. Velma the spy, always sneaking up when you least expected her. “Are you talking to yourself?” she asked.

  “What?” I said, pretending that I was doing something to my hair. I didn’t have a comb or brush, so I sort of combed it with my fingers.

  “Are you talking to yourself?” Velma said again.

  “Of course not. Can’t you see, I’m just combing my hair.”

  “Oh? Without a comb? Besides, I heard somebody talking in here.”

  What an old snoop! “Well, it wasn’t me,” I said.

  “Anyway,” Velma said. “Somebody is getting very conceited around this house.”

  “I am not!”

  “I never said who was getting conceited,” Velma said, in her meanest voice. “You must have a guilty conscience.” I opened my mouth, but before I could say anything, she said, “Just remember, Shirley Braverman, that pride goeth before a fall.” And she marched away with her nose up in the air.

  Well! What was that supposed to mean anyway? Pride goeth before a fall. People were always saying things like that to me. All that glitters is not gold. A stitch in time saves nine. Don’t count your chickens before they hatch. Proverbs. She was just jealous because her picture wasn’t in the newspaper, because she wasn’t famous in Bensonhurst. Somehow, I knew that wasn’t really true. After all, she had been nice about my winning in the first place. She only seemed mean when I wouldn’t stop talking about it, when I couldn’t help bragging and looking at my own picture all day. I sighed, a long sad sigh like the sound of air going out of a balloon.