Robbie Guajardo had never worn makeup before. It felt wet and thick, but strangely soothing, as the makeup lady brushed it across his cheeks and forehead.
They’d arrived in the vast confusion of LAX and everything had amazed them, especially the luggage wheel, which had magically dumped their bags onto the conveyor when the plane landed. Outside, the air was warm and dry, the airport rimmed with palm trees which, Robbie informed his impressed family, are the only flowering plant in the order monocot. He clutched the almanac in his pocket in the same way his mother clutched her perfumed rosary. Facts were his religion.
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Like athletes before the Super Bowl, each contestant had his or her own unique pregame ritual. Amanda sat in a corner wearing a giant pair of headphones. She hugged herself and rocked back and forth gently, mouthing along to a downloaded dictionary. Yun endured his mother’s preening while his father read to him from the periodic table of elements. For his part, Robbie sat in a folding chair, twanged thoughtfully at a rubber band that stretched taut from a hook on his braces, and considered his chances. If Geography was a category, he would dominate. Most 16-year-old Americans couldn’t find, say, Slovakia on a map. Robbie could not only find it, he could tell you its capital, major exports, GNP, and national bird. He could also sing the first four bars of its national anthem: “Lightning flashes over the Tatras, thunder pounds wildly / Let us pause brothers, they will surely disappear / The Slovaks will revive!”
Maria Guajardo worked full-time cleaning bathrooms at O’Hare and worked weekends at a Lincoln Park late-night taqueria where drunken postcollegians congregated for burritos when the bars closed. She had taken this second job for the exclusive purpose of paying for Robbie’s braces, because she believed that a set of straightened teeth the most tangible of class markers: it was what separated the first-generation immigrants—the cat-food eaters, the wrong-verb conjugators—from the second generation: the college-educated, the acrylic-nailed. Robbie’s mother was the kind of grim, selfless woman with chapped hands and a nose threaded with broken capillaries who was content to suffer so that her son could live a more comfortable life, and it was this combination of factors—his mother’s sacrifices; the pain of his braces; uncles who long ago gave up hope of distinguishing themselves in their own right in order to fold their dreams into those of their brilliant young nephew—that accounted for Robbie’s early lead. He’d swept both the Russian Literature and the Six-Syllable Word categories, and at the end of the first round he was in the lead by almost $4,000. Best of all, it was clear that he’d gotten his hooks into his competitors’ mental games. To his left, Amanda was breathing heavily, struggling not to cry. She had a score of -400; she’d buzzed in for two of the first four questions, answered them incorrectly with an audibly shaking voice, and then hadn’t even attempted to answer a question for the rest of the round. During the commercial break, a producer had led her into the corner, given her a paper cone of water, and whispered encouragingly to her while she dabbed at her eyes with a tissue.
“Horses! Walt Disney! And finally, Sports and Fitness!” The twanging stopped momentarily. Of six categories, these three were beyond his expertise. Robbie experienced a disturbing, if fleeting, moment of self-doubt.
“Orlando is the correct response, Amanda,” he heard Trebek saying. “Please pick again.”
Alex Trebek called for commercial, and Amanda looked out into the audience and found her parents, who nearly glowed with Waspy pride. Her father waved at her vigorously, the silver wristwatch winking on his thick, hairy wrist, and her mother, wearing a lemony cardigan the same color as her daughter’s hair, gave the thumbs-up sign. Robbie saw a tongue-colored thumbnail that matched exactly the color of her lipstick.
