by Nancy Pearl
Jack grinned. “I’m so glad you told me. If you hadn’t gotten it, I would’ve been really disappointed in you.”
They stared at each other for a few moments.
“I still think he’s an insensitive, pretentious asshole whom I already dislike intensely. Maybe nobody reads Millay these days except me, but isn’t that what he should be doing? Introducing us to poets who might not be so popular now?”
“Okay, okay, don’t despise me for this, but I’ve never actually read her.”
“As long as you start to remedy that condition, I’ll forgive you.”
“Thank you, Lizzie,” Jack said formally. “I appreciate your generosity. Do you think I’ll like her?”
“Honestly, I’m not going to pretend that Millay’s not romantic or doesn’t write almost always about being in love and having your heart broken, and her poems always rhyme, like Housman, which I’m quite sure Terrell despises, but she’s so good at making you understand how love and loss feel. I mean, they’re not light verses, like Dorothy Parker, who I also read obsessively, and she’s not ironic and detached at all. She writes these wonderful lyrical poems that I find so moving and true. They just work for me,” Lizzie finished, somewhat apologetically.
Jack had been listening intently, leaning toward her. “So where should I begin? What’s your favorite poem?”
“Mostly it’s individual lines that capture my imagination. ‘Neither with you nor with myself, I spend / Loud days that have no meaning and no end.’ I suppose that a man could have written that, but he probably wouldn’t. I mean, I bet that a lot of the poets Terrell admires might have had that feeling about someone, but they’d never admit it in a poem. Don’t start with ‘Renascence,’ which is the poem she first became famous for when she was a teenager. Maybe read the sonnets.” She thought a moment. “Yeah, start with those. I can lend you my copy if you want.”
“Sounds great,” Jack said. “Bring it to class on Thursday.”
For some reason Lizzie felt unaccountably shy and quickly changed the subject. “So, what’s your favorite Housman poem?”
“No,” Jack said decidedly. “Housman’s too depressing for spring, or at least this spring. Let’s wait until it snows to talk about him.”
Can you fall in love this quickly? Lizzie wondered. And that was the beginning.
* What We Need to Know About George *
George rarely got annoyed at anyone, never at his patients (even if they obviously weren’t flossing enough) or his parents. Even when Lizzie pushed him beyond endurance (and he could endure a lot), he’d usually only sigh heavily, clamp his lips together, and somehow radiate an air of frustration tinged with regret. Probably very few people besides Lizzie, or maybe Elaine as well, would notice anything different about him in those situations.
George even looked like the perfect purveyor of happiness. He radiated health. He looked steady and safe, dependable and kind. You just knew that he could competently handle any situation that might arise. He had an infectious smile (and, of course, perfect teeth), and he smiled a lot. To those who had been his patients from the beginning, when he and Lizzie were newly married and he was straight out of dental school, those patients who had been through cleanings and routine fillings and impacted wisdom teeth and gum disease and root canals and crowns, who had suffered more than once through the dreaded tap test to determine which tooth, exactly, it was that hurt so badly, he was held in high esteem, even loved.
He had one seemingly impossible desire, which was to do a standing backflip. He had fantasies of entertaining his patients, while they were waiting patiently in the dental chair as their gums numbed, with a flashy (and to all appearances effortless) little backward twirl into space and back to earth again. He didn’t aspire to the Olympics. He didn’t necessarily want to be known as the dentist-who-excelled-at-backflips. He just wanted to be free of gravity for a few short seconds, launching himself into the space behind him and then returning to his normal existence.
On Saturdays and Sundays, watching football, he would gnash his teeth in envy as lithe and superbly muscled tight ends or wide receivers would do an insouciant backflip after scoring a touchdown. This happened so frequently that George began worrying about the state of his molars and took to wearing his plastic night guard while he was watching the games.
George had always dealt affirmatively with his desires. For several years, beginning in college, he had subscribed to an early online motivational website called LiveYourDream.com. On the day he signed up, he had to submit a list of what he wanted to accomplish that year: getting an A in organic chemistry and losing fifteen pounds were what he remembered he’d included. He’d then receive daily messages urging him on toward the fulfillment of those goals. (“Pay attention to your desires.” “Don’t be discouraged by setbacks.” “Affirm. Affirm.” “Forge on.” “Breathe deeply and go forward.”) He had never included his dream of doing a backflip, feeling that it was too frivolous. But later, when he was in dental school, he decided to come clean and e-mailed the company. “I would like to revise my automated online goals for the coming year. My new goal is to conquer the standing backflip. Thank you. George Goldrosen.”
Lizzie felt that the advice the company proffered was puerile and altogether useless, but couldn’t convince George to see it that way.
* The Guards *
Brendan “Toker” Tolkin, the right guard, was the biggest stoner in high school. He smoked dope before, during, and after games. Maybe all that pot left him too zonked for any semblance of enthusiastic sex. Or maybe it was Lizzie. He was also way too spaced-out to have any sort of sensible conversation with. All in all, a week lost in Lizzie’s life, one she’d never get back again.
Billy Jim Estes was just about what you’d expect from a left guard named Billy Jim. Billy Jim was always sweaty, always smelling faintly but noticeably of BO. Each time he successfully blocked someone, he’d rub his hands together in a gesture that indicated that he’d been there, done that, and succeeded beyond everyone’s expectations. He took to the idea and practice of the Great Game with great enthusiasm. Though Lizzie had to breathe through her mouth when she was with him, it made for a nice change after her experience with Toker.
* The Last Down *
By the time it was finally Leo deSica’s week in the Great Game, Lizzie was counting the minutes until the whole project was done and she could get on with what was left of her life. She was sick of sex in the backseats of cars, sick of sneaking up to an empty bedroom at a party, or, when the weather had been good in the fall, having sex in someone’s backyard after the game, where Lizzie and the football player du jour were often ineffectively hidden by the leaves of one tree or another. Because sex with those twenty-three guys was completely uninspiring, not to mention embarrassing, she was glad the act itself was quick. No one lingered around, before, during, or afterward. Of course, as a result of such hurried sex during high school, some of those boys would find themselves in a few years at a doctor’s or therapist’s office, dealing with issues of premature ejaculation. Still, Lizzie more or less sailed through the first few guys on offense with determination and a sense of triumph: she could do this, wasn’t it larky, wasn’t it going to be great to look back on it later, during the dull years of her forties and fifties (impossibly old), and brag about what she’d done as a high school senior? But as the weeks went by she felt increasingly aggrieved and sorry for herself and then mostly furious at Andrea, who was supposed to be here playing the Game at the same time. It wasn’t fair that Andrea had simply opted out of it.
Offense or defense, Lizzie found nothing at all approaching pleasure in the sex. It was a chore, like slogging through Vanity Fair had been the previous year. Dull and boring and hard to figure out why anyone would choose to read Thackeray’s novel, let alone name it as one of their favorite books of all time, as Mrs. Syllagi, her English teacher, told the class it was. She just knew, in both cases, that she had to get through it, check it off h
er to-do list. Chapter 17 done, done, done. Dusty Devins, done, done, done. On to the next. With every chapter read or player screwed, that much closer to the end. And she’d actually finished the assignments, although you couldn’t say triumphantly, in both cases.
The Great Game officially ended on March 30, 1991, at 11:38 p.m., when Lizzie whispered good-bye to Leo deSica, strong safety, closed the front door behind him, and began walking back upstairs to her bedroom. Leo was generally regarded as the best-looking player on the team, and he didn’t lack for brains. He was the kind of football player that college coaches drool over, and was courted by all the schools whose teams perennially ranked in the top twenty. But in addition to all those qualities, Leo was a thoroughly nice guy. Rumors abounded that he and his longtime girlfriend Gaby had never actually done it, and Lizzie had hoped that this was true, so that Leo would be extra interested in sex with her. She told herself that she deserved to have the Great Game end with a big bang. (This was a pun that George would have really appreciated, but of course there was no way that Lizzie would ever be able to share it with him.)
In light of her sizable hopes for the grand finale, Lizzie decided that they’d end the evening in her bedroom. Mendel and Lydia tended to go to sleep early, so it would be no problem to take Leo up to her room without their knowing. All this went according to plan. But once Lizzie steered him into her bed and they’d gotten down to business, it turned out not to matter how good-looking or smart or sexy Leo was, all Lizzie could think about while he was kissing her—with great expertise, it must be said—was what a mistake this all had been and that Maverick, not to mention Andrea, was right all along. This realization, which made her want to cry, came out instead as a loud and bitter laugh.
Leo, confused, immediately stopped what he was doing. “What’s the matter? What’s funny?”
“Nothing. It’s nothing,” Lizzie assured him. “Everything’s fine. Don’t stop.” She was tempted to tell him that the joke had turned out to be on her, but decided that would confuse him even more than the laugh had, and she just needed this to be finished so that she could start trying to forget about it. And then, finally, Leo was done. The Great Game was over. Hallelujah.
As Lizzie walked Leo down to the front door, they were unexpectedly met by Lydia, who was on her way up the stairs. Mendel followed her, holding two mugs of the strong herbal tea they favored. Nobody spoke, although it was possible that Mendel nodded at them before continuing up. When Lizzie locked the door behind Leo, she wondered if she’d just imagined the meeting on the stairs. It was pretty much every teen’s worst nightmare, wasn’t it, to be discovered by your parents more or less in flagrante delicto?
Upstairs, she went into the bathroom and undressed for the second time that night. She turned on the shower to the hottest water that she could stand and stood there until the spray became lukewarm, and then reluctantly turned off the taps and got out. The mirror was so steamed up that she could see only the faintest outline of her body. It might have been anyone, actually, which Lizzie thought was a good thing. She didn’t really want to look too closely at herself. Not because of what she imagined that she might see—maybe a scarlet A above her breast, the word “wanton” incised on her forehead, things like that—but because she was afraid she’d see no difference in herself at all. Aside from probably now resembling a boiled lobster, she knew that any stranger looking at her body would never be able to guess how she’d spent twenty-three Friday nights since September. But, oh, Lizzie knew, with a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach, that everything had changed for her since she’d embarked on the Great Game.
The next morning, rather than ask her parents if she could use their car, Lizzie took the bus out to the mall and bought eight packages of the whitest and cheapest cotton underpants she could find. Size XL. She might have gotten the L’s, but she didn’t see them and was too embarrassed to ask a saleswoman. Two dozen pairs of humongous and ugly undies; they lasted Lizzie for decades. When she got home she changed into a pair, enjoying the fact that they barely touched her body. She put on her loosest and rattiest jeans and a T-shirt that Maverick gave her when they were dating. The front proclaimed, “This is Dick. Dick is an Ohio State Fan . . .” while the back said “Don’t be a Dick.” This outfit was basically what she wore for the rest of the spring and all through the summer.
On Sundays Mendel and Lydia generally went into campus for only a few hours, instead spending most of the day at home reading the papers and journals of psychology that piled up around the house. Lizzie ventured out of her room only twice, once to put her sheets in the washing machine and then again when she transferred them to the dryer. Unless she’d invented the incident on the stairs, she was pretty sure that her parents would have something to say to her, although she couldn’t imagine what that would be. She found out at dinner.
Lizzie, who wasn’t hungry, pushed a grayish piece of meat loaf around her plate and wished they had a dog she could surreptitiously slip the food to. Just as she was about to ask to be excused from the table, Mendel said, “So, I take it that was your boyfriend?”
Lizzie tried to think of what to say. She was certainly prepared to lie; she’d spent a good deal of her life lying to her parents. But if she agreed that Leo was, indeed, her boyfriend, would there be any follow-up questions? Maybe. Lizzie didn’t think she had the energy to make up much more of a story and decided to tell the truth.
“Well, actually, no. He’s not my boyfriend,” she began. “He was part of an extracurricular assignment I’ve been involved in since school began, which was to have sex with a lot of guys on the football team. He was the last one, and now I’m done. There were twenty-three altogether. Andrea was supposed to do it with me, eleven each, with one extra that we’d flip a coin for. We thought it would be fun, but she changed her mind. So I went ahead and did it myself. That’s why he was here.”
Neither of her parents responded for what seemed like a long time to Lizzie, then Lydia said in an encouraging sort of tone, “Goodness. That’s pretty adventurous of you. How did you come up with that idea?”
“Andrea did,” Lizzie said shortly, already regretting her honesty. She was staring at her plate, which looked even less appetizing than it had before, but out of the corner of her eye she saw her mother pick up the pen and pad of paper that were never far from either of her parents. “Don’t write that down,” she screamed at her mother. “Don’t write anything about it down. Just don’t.”
“Of course we won’t, Lizzie,” Mendel said soothingly.
“I was just going to make a few notes about a paper I’m working on. Nothing to do with you,” her mother said. And Lizzie chose to believe her.
* Lydia and Mendel *
Lydia and Mendel were all and everything to each other. Perhaps if they’d been able or willing to share their lives with Lizzie, she might have better understood how they got to be who they were, and why they treated her as they did. But of course that was impossible, since they hardly talked to her at all, and certainly never about their pasts.
Lydia grew up in New York, in a small town not too far from Syracuse. Because the western boundary of Richland was Lake Ontario, the winter snows were monstrous, heavy and constant from October to February. The wind cut through her, no matter how many layers of clothes she wore, and her hands were always red and chapped. Lydia’s parents met and married each other in a displaced persons camp in Ebelsberg, in Austria, after the war. A distant relative of Lydia’s father, perhaps the foster son of a sister-in-law’s brother’s second or third cousin, had come to America in 1935 before the trains started chugging with determination toward their grim destinations of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzżec, Chełmno, Ravensbrück, Majdanek, Sobibór, Treblinka, and other points east and west. He had for some reason nobody quite understood settled in Richland (perhaps he thought that the name was prophetic, that the streets there really were paved with gold) and built up a thriving wastepaper company. By the time the war ended he was so s
uccessful (especially as compared to the remnants of the family who’d survived the war in Europe) that he needed additional help with the business, so he sponsored Lydia’s parents, Moishe and Brona Levinetsky, which allowed them to join him in Richland, in America.
They arrived—Brona was pregnant with Lydia—exhausted and in immediate need of warm clothes, English lessons, and cosseting, in the fall of 1947; they were among the lucky ones who got out of the DP camps relatively soon after the war ended. Their distant relative found them an apartment to live in, scavenged up sweaters and coats and secondhand shoes. He figured they would pick up whatever English they needed, which they did. Outside of work, he ignored them. There was no cosseting. Possibly the concept was unfamiliar to him.
While some of the survivors clung desperately to the memories of their past lives and circumstances, Moishe and Brona determinedly discarded all evidence of the people they’d been. One of the first things they did when they got to Richland was to adopt American names. They went to the county clerk’s office, where Moishe morphed into Mike and Brona Ronnie. They also legally changed their last name to LeVine. How young they were.
Their response to having survived when so many others did not was guilt, but guilt wrapped in layers upon layers of anger, until the kernel of shame and self-reproach was unrecognizable, or at least they didn’t acknowledge it in themselves. All that was left was a deep and abiding rage. They were furious about the recent past and disgusted with the present, and didn’t view the future with any sanguinity. They came to America determined to forget their religion, which they blamed for the disaster that had all but destroyed European Jewry, and quickly made the decision that their child would be raised with no religion at all. Ronnie and Mike never understood why anyone would bring Jewish children into a world that would never let them forget their Jewishness and that would likely reward them with suffering, pain, and a tragic death.