by Nancy Pearl
Lizzie had (still has, in fact) a less-than-comfortable relationship with honesty. By the time Maverick told her this, she’d been feeling a little burdened with twosomeness. She’d started to think wistfully of weekends without a date; she wanted to spend some time by herself. She’d grown tired of football and football statistics, at least for a while, but she never would have told him that. She drove Maverick to the airport; she enthusiastically kissed him good-bye and went home, completely fine. The year that she was seventeen and Maverick Brevard’s girlfriend was the lightest of heart Lizzie would ever feel, but back then she thought it was just the way her life was supposed to arrange itself.
Once she’d decided to go on with the Great Game, even without Andrea, Lizzie thought she should move Maverick up to the second week, right after Thad Cornish, since the Game involved also having sex with his brother Ranger, which would be a little awkward. She wanted to explain the situation to Maverick and see what he thought. When they met on the Wednesday night of his week and she told him her plans for the next twenty weeks or so, Maverick immediately responded that he thought playing the Great Game verged on lunacy. Plus it didn’t sound like the Lizzie he’d dated all last year. Because Lizzie couldn’t explain why it wasn’t an insane thing to do, there was little left to say. There was no flirting involved. Thursday night they picked up the argument right where they’d left off. Lizzie finally told him what a stick-in-the-mud he was being. She’d slept with him, hadn’t she? And he enjoyed it. A lot. Hadn’t he?
“That was different,” Maverick said. “I’m pretty sure Ranger’s a virgin. It’s not fair to him that the first girl he’s going to have sex with is someone who doesn’t love him. You were the first girl I slept with, but we were dating, we loved each other. Don’t you see how different that is?” There was no fooling around that night.
Friday night after the game, when they were due to have sex, they drove out to the park and walked along the river. “Can’t you just go along with it?” Lizzie pleaded. “Just because we were happy together?”
“Oh, crap,” Maverick said, “you are certifiably nuts. I know I’m going to regret this,” but he gave in, as she knew he would.
* George’s Childhood *
By any objective standard, George had a pretty wonderful childhood. In fact, there were only three downsides to it that he’d ever been able to identify: his conflicted feelings about his father, his conflicted feelings about his older brother, Todd, and the frustration of riding the Hebrew school bus.
He lived in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Elaine, his mother, occasionally tutored students in French, but was mostly a stay-at-home mom. His father, Allan, was the Jewish orthodontist. What this meant was that whenever the sons and daughters of members of the Jewish community needed orthodontia—which was almost always—it was Allan to whom they turned. He understood the importance of teeth in bat and bar mitzvah photos, and it was not unknown for him to remove a set of braces for the big day and then reattach them when the festivities were over. For no extra charge, of course. Because he deserved his excellent reputation as an orthodontist, a large number of Tulsa’s non-Jewish community also brought their offspring to him when they were in need of braces. It was not uncommon for George to see someone from middle school, his bowling league, or his Sunday school class whenever he went to his father’s office.
It was because of his father’s profession that George hated pain. Even though Allan was the soul of generosity, kindness, and care—he’d purchased three large arcade games so everyone, parents included, would have something to do while the kids waited to be called into the treatment rooms—he still inflicted a great deal of pain on his patients. George never forgot those awful monthly appointments when his braces needed to be tightened. He understood even as a kid that while the shoemaker’s children may go barefoot, the orthodontist’s sons must have perfect teeth. Hence those dreaded visits to his father’s office.
George likened his father’s smile—fake, false, and totally fearsome—to the grin left behind by the Cheshire cat. And who smiles like that when they’re about to hurt you? Sadists, that’s who. He knew, even at thirteen, that Allan was smiling in order to try to reassure each patient that it would all be okay, it might hurt a little, just for a second or two, but that straight teeth were a necessity for a certain type of young person in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the 1980s, and this small step, done every four to six weeks, was a necessary part of the treatment. George knew this, and knew for certain that his father loved him, but he couldn’t get over the fact that the torturer/orthodontist was his own father, coming toward him in order to dispense some not inconsiderable pain on his own son. For his own good.
George didn’t read the ne plus ultra example of dental malfeasance, William Goldman’s Marathon Man, until he was in dental school. When he did his hands shook so much that he had trouble holding the book; he found it so distressing that he never finished it, although he never seriously considered changing his career plans.
But for the three weeks and six days between visits, George deeply loved and admired his father. He was proud that Allan worked in a free dental clinic twice a month, and that he braced up (as George thought the verb should be) poor adults and kids in his office for free. There were scrapbooks in the waiting room filled with pictures of before (buckteeth) and after (the ultimate dental ideal), as well as letters of appreciation from patients, praising Allan for his concern, skill, and pleasing manner. Dopey Annette Silverberg, who went to dancing class with George, once told him during a waltz that his father was “jovial.” Jovial! How could you be considered jovial when you were inflicting pain on someone?
The biggest lesson he learned from his childhood was this: that he wanted to grow up to be exactly like Allan, except that he knew that he would never, under any circumstances, become an orthodontist. In his junior year of college George had had a passing thought that maybe he’d become a gerontologist, but the thought of Allan and Elaine being old enough to possibly need his services made him sick to his stomach.
It had perhaps been a mistake to later share these thoughts with Lizzie, who was given to an abiding interest about George’s childhood, so different from her own. Although she was also devoted to Allan (she couldn’t imagine a better father-in-law, or father, if it came to that), she wanted George to think deeply about his relationship to his dad. She pointed out that his older brother, Todd, having presumably suffered similarly at his father’s hands, was a surfer bum, with no connection to teeth at all.
“But of course,” Lizzie told George, “you never ever see a surfer with bad teeth. Maybe we should move to Sydney, too, and you could become the dentist who specializes in kids who want to be surfers.”
George was not particularly introspective and only occasionally wondered why, given what he’d felt about his father and pain, he had decided to go into anything relating to teeth at all and had not studied engineering or agronomy or really anything else. What he thought about a lot, though, during the long years of his greatest successes, was whether those months and months of getting his braces tightened had been the source of his slowly developing belief that perhaps pain could be rendered mute and weaponless.
“But, George, don’t you think it’s a bit weird that you, someone who denies the existence of pain, became a dentist? I bet you inflict as much pain or more on your patients than your dad did. I bet Freud would say that what you were really doing, what you needed to do to grow up, was to deny pain and Allan’s power over you.”
“First of all,” George answered patiently, “I don’t deny the existence of pain. What I think I’m denying is that pain, or at least suffering, is ever really necessary. And I’m certainly not causing the pain. People come to me when they’re in pain. Great pain, sometimes. My job is to make the pain go away by fixing what’s wrong. Which I do. And thirdly, I’m not denying my dad’s influence on me. He’s—he was—a terrific father. You know that. If I could be even half as good a father to my own kids, I’d be thril
led. I just didn’t want to be responsible for that fucking monthly tightening-of-braces routine for any other kid in the world.”
“Well, why’d you go to your dad for braces? I know I read somewhere that doctors shouldn’t treat their own families.”
“He was the best in Tulsa,” George said simply, and not without pride. “Everyone knew that. All my friends went to him, whether they were Jewish or not. For those who were, it was like a rite of passage. Hebrew school. Learning your haftorah portion. Braces from Dr. Goldrosen.”
Lizzie was far from convinced that George’s career had been a purely free choice and not some working out of an ancient father–son curse, but that particular day she let the matter drop, though she continued to ponder it all.
The second downside was Todd. He was only twenty-one months older than George, but because Todd skipped the sixth grade, they were three grades apart. In some ways this was a relief to George, because each year there was then the chance that Todd’s teachers would have transferred to a different school, moved out of state, or retired, and the people hired in their place would be unaware of Todd’s unnerving combination of superior intelligence and scorn for the human race and its ridiculous conventions. But more often than not, what happened on the first day of classes in September was that the teacher, taking attendance, would say, “George Goldrosen.” Pause. Sigh. “Any relation to Todd Goldrosen?” And when George acknowledged that, yes, indeed, he was Todd’s younger brother, the teacher would look at him for a long time, assessing what he saw, before finally going on to the next name. George guessed that the teacher was hoping that he was as smart as his older brother but that he lacked Todd’s interest in defying authority. Actually, both of these were true.
There wasn’t a physical resemblance between the brothers. Todd inherited a mixture of all of Allan’s and Elaine’s most attractive physical qualities and out of that olio of genes he became himself. He had dark eyes, skin that tanned easily and evenly, thick black hair, and eyelashes to die for (this was according to their Stillwater grandmother; their Montreal grandmother wasn’t interested in such trivialities). His eyes were dark brown, he had no need of glasses, and he possessed a killer smile both before and after orthodontia. In short, he looked like Adonis. George knew this last fact about Todd because one of Todd’s many girlfriends had told him so, and he knew which girlfriend it was because George happened to regularly read Todd’s journal, which included intimate details about his girlfriends and who said what and what was done, and Todd had no trouble with including all the graphic details. George would often feel that he needed to wash his hands after putting the journal back in the top drawer of Todd’s desk, but he never felt so dirty that he stopped sneaking into Todd’s room whenever Todd was out on a date, and reading it.
George, on the other hand, resembled nobody else in the family. He was much fairer skinned, with red hair that curled up into short, tight ringlets on his head and that, sadly, began receding when George was in his early twenties, just when he and Lizzie became a couple. The sun was his enemy; during those impossibly hot Oklahoma summers of his childhood he couldn’t stay outside nearly as long as Todd did. He’d have to huddle under a towel when he came out of the pool at the Jewish Center.
There was also no getting around the fact that, in sharp contrast with his parents and brother, George was, as a kid and early teen, although by no means fat, definitely pudgy. “Chunky” was perhaps a kinder, more masculine-sounding description. The worst part of being more than a tad overweight was having to shop for his clothes in the Husky Department at Dillard’s, praying hard from start to finish that nobody would see him there. He hated those shopping trips.
When he began to become really interested in girls, George feared that his was the sort of face that only his closest relatives could love, the kind of person that’s always described as having a great personality. George didn’t undervalue the benefits of a good personality, but he also aspired to handsomeness. Cuteness at the very very least. He almost got his wish. By the time he started college he’d lost some of the pudginess of his youth and his face had become thinner and more defined. He started working out a lot, so if physique was what you were interested in, there George’s muscles were. Lizzie thought the best part of George’s face, besides the general fact of liking that it was George’s face, was his eyes. They were a variable sort of hazel and, depending on the color of the shirt or sweater he wore, they’d become grayish or bluish or greenish. Lizzie adored George’s eyes and thought he looked most handsome in deep-blue shirts. There was still no way anyone would describe George as Adonis-like, but on the attractiveness spectrum that stretched from handsome to downright ugly, he’d ended up somewhere between cute and handsome.
Both sets of his grandparents were face pinchers, sometimes painfully so. Invariably, whenever they saw him they’d first hug him and then step back and take a piece of his cheek between their thumb and forefinger, “Oy, what a punim,” they’d murmur. “A she yn e yngl.” They marveled that they couldn’t think of anyone in the long and proud history of both sides of the family that he resembled, living or long dead. He was sui generis. One of a kind in the Goldrosen and Lowen clans. His Stillwater grandparents would look accusingly at Elaine. Had there been a randy car salesman in his mother’s recent past? His Montreal grandparents would look reproachfully at Allan, their expressions clearly indicating that they blamed him entirely. If she didn’t keep her marriage vows, you ganef, it’s all your own fault for being such a rotten husband. Of course nobody said any of this out loud; George just imagined that’s what they were thinking.
But the main reason that all his grandparents doted on George was that he had a marshmallow heart. He cried when he watched sad movies and he cried when he read sad books (Beautiful Joe almost did him in). Even commercials on television could bring tears to his eyes. Todd couldn’t stand it. “That is so goddamn sappy,” he’d say scornfully, watching George weep at an ad for dog food. “Yeesh. Can’t you see how they’re just manipulating you?” No, George couldn’t.
One result of being softhearted was that George constantly felt sorry for people. He would empty his pockets of change for a man sitting on the ground in front of Swenson’s holding a sign saying “War Veteran. No Home. No Job. Anything Will Help.” If the vet looked hungry (and they all looked hungry) he’d go in and buy the guy a hamburger and fries. If he got to choose kids for his class spelling bee team, the first three people he chose were the least popular, the outsider, and the worst speller in class.
George’s attitude infuriated Todd. “Don’t you see how presumptuous it is to assign unhappiness to someone? What right do you have to do that? Maybe they don’t mind how they’re living, even if it is different from what other people think is a good life. Maybe they feel sorry for you and your little bourgeois life, taking a shower every day, getting good grades, going to dances, living in a big house, and some woman is paid a pittance to vacuum up the dirt you bring in and wash your clothes and iron your oxford cloth shirts. Yes,” he’d continue in a fake judicious tone, “I believe they must definitely pity you, because I certainly do.”
It wasn’t only people that he cared about to excess. He regularly brought home stray animals and begged his mother to let him keep them. Elaine relented only once, for a three-legged kitten George named Twinkie, who he’d found shivering in a storm drain. When George was ten he stole a small stuffed animal from his cousin Shelley’s house in Montreal because he thought the rabbit was neglected and in need of a great deal of love, a task George was eager to take on. As far as George knew, no one even realized that the rabbit was gone, which only went to show that he’d been right. He named it Rabbit Elias, after the Goldrosen’s rabbi, and in an early example of George’s already well-developed sense of humor, he realized that Rabbit Elias was actually a pretty good pun, so he changed its name to Rabbit Pun Elias, known familiarly as Pun. The first Christmas Lizzie visited the Goldrosens, George introduced her to Twinkie and Pun
, who by that time were both suffering from age-related conditions. Twinkie was basically incontinent and Pun had lost most of his stuffing.
One afternoon when George was twelve he was walking home from Hebrew school and encountered a sick squirrel resting under a tree.
“But how did you know he was sick?” Lizzie asked years later, which was one of the litany of questions his parents had asked when he arrived home and explained why his wrist was bleeding.
“He had this look, like he wanted me to help him. So I did. Or tried to.”
After he bit George, the squirrel leaped out of his grasp and ran away, clearly not very sick, or even sick at all. The result for George was a painful series of rabies shots.
Lizzie kissed the tiny squirrel scar on his wrist. “You would think,” she commented, “that would teach you that no good deed goes unpunished. But it didn’t, did it?”
No, George admitted. It didn’t teach him anything, except perhaps that it was harder to read a squirrel’s state of health or state of mind than he had once thought.
“But he let me pick him up,” he told his parents. “If he wasn’t sick, why would he do that?”
No one at the time had an answer for him, but years later Lizzie came up with one. “Maybe he’d just had a miraculous escape from a man driving way too fast, and wanted revenge on humanity. He probably immediately saw that you were the perfect mark.”
George doubted that theory but couldn’t totally dispute it. He was the perfect mark.
For all of Todd’s relentless criticisms of him, George didn’t hate his brother. He idolized him, until the day that Todd, at seventeen, either intentionally or not (nobody except Todd knew for sure), mishandled an experiment in chemistry class and blew out all the windows in the lab. He walked outside with the rest of his class when the school was evacuated but then never walked back inside. Late that night, or early the next morning, he bailed from his bourgeois life in Tulsa and left home, first for Boulder, then Portland (where he worked on an organic farm and changed his name to Kale), and then Sydney, where he started surfing. When George saw how all this had devastated his parents—his mother cried constantly for what seemed like the whole next year and couldn’t be comforted, and his father started behaving weirdly, smoking a pipe and loudly guffawing at odd and inappropriate times—he realized that while he still loved Todd, he didn’t, any longer, want to be him, Adonis or not.