George and Lizzie

by Nancy Pearl

  She was standing behind a youngish woman who was very slowly paying for her groceries and at the same time conversing with the equally youngish woman who was manning the cash register. Despite herself, Lydia was listening to the conversation.

  “So I need to find a job that will give me time during the day to take classes. I can’t do these eight-hour daytime shifts and go to school at the same time.”

  “What kind of job?” said the slow payer. “How about waitressing?”

  “No, I was thinking more about babysitting; that might be more flexible.”

  Lydia liked the look of the checker, but even if she hadn’t, it probably wouldn’t have mattered. It was as though the god she didn’t believe in had answered the prayers she hadn’t prayed.

  “Excuse me,” she said, “but I’m in need of a full-time nanny, someone who will live in. My daughter is three.”

  “Really?” said Sheila, for it was she.

  Hard to believe unless you knew Lydia Bultmann well, but that constituted the whole hiring process, and Sheila moved in with the Bultmanns a week later.

  She met Lizzie, who knew nothing of a new babysitter, the next morning. Mendel and Lydia were already at work and Sheila was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee that was way, way too strong, when she heard a series of thumps. It was Lizzie, trying a new technique to get herself down the stairs. She could walk down them if someone held her hand, and she’d also taught herself to come down backward. But this morning she’d gotten herself out of her crib and had the idea of sitting on each stair and then carefully moving to the next stair down. This is what Sheila heard, the bump bump bump of Lizzie’s behind as she went from stair to stair.

  She hurried to the hall, and when Lizzie reached the bottom step, Sheila was kneeling, just at Lizzie’s height, waiting for her. Lizzie didn’t cry at the sight of a strange woman and she didn’t ask where her parents were. She just stared intently at Sheila, who said, “Hello, Lizzie, I’m Sheila, your new babysitter. I’m going to live in your house, so we’ll have lots of time to play. We’ll have a lot of fun together.” She held out her hand to Lizzie. “Let’s go eat breakfast. How do pancakes sound to you?” Lizzie smiled and took Sheila’s hand and they walked to the kitchen.

  Lizzie loved Sheila from that moment on. She could climb onto Sheila’s lap to listen to a story (Sheila was big on reading stories to her) and not be afraid that she’d be poked by a sharp hipbone or misplaced elbow. Sheila’s body was like the coziest couch in the world; it was comforting and welcoming and homey. Even when Sheila had an exam she should be studying for, she’d put Lizzie first.

  Every day after she picked Lizzie up from day care (later from elementary school) they’d do something special together. Sometimes they’d go to the park and Sheila would teach Lizzie how to weave flowers together into bracelets or tiaras. A tiara made of Queen Anne’s lace! Who even knew it was possible? Sometimes they’d look for four-leaf clovers. Throughout her entire life, Lizzie never met anyone else who could find four-leaf clovers like Sheila could. Any patch of wild clover would yield one up the minute Sheila started looking. Sometimes they’d go to the library and Sheila would check out the books that she’d loved when she was Lizzie’s age. Sometimes they’d go to Sheila’s house and watch her father’s model trains make their way over a complicated layout, and Sheila’s mother always had cookies and milk waiting for them.

  Or they’d stop at a crafts store and Sheila would buy yarn and big knitting needles and teach Lizzie to knit. She bought jars of finger paint in every color available and big sheets of paper so they could smear the colors together to their hearts’ content. At Christmastime, Lizzie, with Sheila’s help, wove potholders as presents for her teachers and Sheila’s mother. It was no use giving one to Lydia. She didn’t ever cook.

  When they did go straight home it usually meant that Sheila had some idea that involved food. Sometimes they’d spread crackers with peanut butter and pile one on top of another to make a tower. Then they’d see how many peanut-buttery crackers they could eat at one time. Lizzie’s record at age eight was eleven, which Sheila told her surely set a new record for her age group. Saltines were the best for this purpose, and Sheila made sure that the Bultmann pantry always had an almost full box of them. Sheila taught Lizzie how to make brownies in a mug using the microwave and how to pop popcorn from scratch.

  Sheila brought her portable sewing machine over to the Bultmanns’ and showed Lizzie how to use it. Sheila made most of her own clothes and she let Lizzie help with the easy seams. Once Lizzie got to put the zipper in. It’s true that Sheila then had to carefully unstitch the zipper so that she could put it in again, correctly, but still she was very complimentary about Lizzie’s first attempt at doing something that was really hard. (It should be noted that after Sheila went on to live the rest of her life, without Lizzie, Lizzie never touched a sewing machine again.)

  For a very long time, the best day of Lizzie’s life was the day that Sheila and her boyfriend, Lucas Apple, took Lizzie to the Michigan State Fair. They drove to Detroit early in the morning and spent the whole day there. Not only did they wander through the barns to see all the animals—and Lizzie got to pet a goat and a horse and a pig—but she also rode on the merry-go-round (three times), the Ferris wheel (twice), and an exciting ride called the Tilt-A-Whirl, which she only went on once because it was a little too scary. They had cotton candy and hot dogs and fried Jell-O and elephant ears. Lizzie was a little nervous when Lucas ordered the elephant ears, but when she saw they weren’t really the ears of an elephant, and especially after she tasted one, she didn’t want to eat anything else, ever. When Lizzie’s legs got tired, Lucas put her up on his shoulders so she could see everything that was happening. They didn’t leave for home until after it got dark, and they stopped for dinner on the way home at Bill Knapp’s because Sheila wanted Lizzie to have the fried chicken and biscuits and then have the chocolate cake for dessert.

  Sheila moved out when Lizzie was nine. Because Lydia and Mendel were both at home when she said good-bye to Lizzie, it was a sadly formal occasion. Neither wanted to cry in front of Lizzie’s parents. All they could do was hug each other for a long time.

  That was Sheila.

  * Mysteries of Kindergarten *

  Lizzie and Andrea both went to Hally School for kindergarten, but were in different classes. Lizzie’s teacher, Miss Beadle, was tall and stern and often cranky. It was unclear if she really liked kids or not. Andrea’s teacher was short, plump, and jolly. Could her name have actually been Mrs. Jolly? That’s what Lizzie remembers. “You have to be jolly when you’re short and plump,” Sheila told her once, darkly. “Otherwise it’s intolerable.”

  Andrea’s classroom was large—really the length and width of two classrooms. It had lots of windows. There were murals of nursery-rhyme and fairy-tale characters on the walls: Hansel and Gretel walking through the woods on their way to the witch’s house, holding hands; Humpty-Dumpty on his wall, surveying the scenery; Sleeping Beauty at her christening; the Three Little Pigs whistling happily as they built their houses. You knew, when you looked at the pictures, that bad stuff was going to happen to them all, but not quite yet. There were trunks of clothes to use for dress-up, almost anything you could think of to be: pirate, princess, carpenter, bride, goblin, hobo, and spaceman.

  At one of the long ends of the room there was a kitchen, with a miniature stove, sink, and refrigerator. The refrigerator door opened and water came out of the sink’s faucet. The stove had four painted-on burners and an oven with a door you could open and pretend to bake your pies and cakes. There were pots and pans in the cupboard under the sink, and plastic dishes and silverware. At the other end of the room was a workshop, with a variety of pretend (but very realistic-looking) tools: saws and hammers, screws, nails, and pliers.

  There was a grid painted on the floor, so that on rainy or cold days you could still play hopscotch. There was even a space large enough for a pretty good game of free
ze tag inside Mrs. Jolly’s room. There were shelves and shelves of dolls and doll clothes and puppets. Piles of games like Uncle Wiggly, Parcheesi, and Candy Land. A little library of books. Lizzie’s whole class went there for an hour two mornings every week.

  Miss Beadle’s room, where Lizzie spent most of her time, couldn’t have been more different. No windows. Big enough for the class to play Farmer in the Dell, but not much else. Shelves, yes, but fewer dolls and those in worse condition, with their arms or legs about to come off, or looking as though someone had tried to scalp them and almost succeeded. No clothes to change them into. Only one basic set of clothes to dress up in. A Raggedy Andy doll that smelled like cat pee. A checkers set with some of the pieces missing. Wooden puzzles with pieces missing. Wooden puzzles that a two-year-old could have solved in three seconds or so with pieces missing.

  The murals on the wall in Lizzie’s classroom were of the scary bits of stories: Jack and Jill tumbling dangerously down a steep and icy hill, the Wolf Granny clutching Red Riding Hood in her ferocious grasp, the troll reaching from underneath the bridge to grab an unwary walker.

  Was this memory possibly true? Surely not. There couldn’t have been one classroom with so much, and the other with so little, one so desirable and the other so desolate. And who decided which kids were assigned to which teacher? But that’s what Lizzie remembers, that sour teacher and that awful room.

  The only good part of Lizzie’s whole year of kindergarten was that Maverick Brevard was also in her class. On one of the days they spent sixty minutes in Mrs. Jolly’s room, Lizzie pretend-baked a beautiful cherry pie and gave Maverick a piece, which he pretended to think tasted delicious and then pretended to kiss her cheek.

  Much later Lizzie asked her mother how she happened to end up in Miss Beadle’s class. “I didn’t trust that other woman’s smile,” Lydia said flatly. “Or her name. What was it, Gaiety? Gaiety Jolly. Almost certainly an alias.”

  * The Quarterback *

  Of all the participants in the Great Game, the most worrisome for Lizzie to deal with was Ranger Brevard. Partly this was because he knew her as his older brother’s girlfriend, and she thought that he might not be as willing—nay, eager—as the others to participate. But mostly it was because Maverick’s depiction of her as the older-woman seductress of an innocent boy bothered her. A lot. So it was that on the Friday night of Ranger’s week, while they were lying underneath the stands by the football field and heading toward the final activity in the game plan, Lizzie said, as she unbuttoned her shirt and Ranger started taking off his pants, “So, have you done any of this sort of thing before?” She knew it sounded ridiculous—there were surely more elegant ways of asking if he was a virgin without coming right out and asking him—but she felt she needed to know. “What, you mean sex? Are you kidding me? Of course. Freshman year. Violet Burnett.” Lizzie was relieved. She wondered if knowing that would reassure Maverick (begone, O Lizzie the seductress!) or make him jealous as hell.

  * The Post (Great) Game Show *

  The postgame analyses began the very night the Great Game ended. There were two men in her head talking loudly to one another ostensibly about football, some random football game that they’d been the announcers for, but it seemed to Lizzie that she was the subject of the conversation. They were evaluating her, the quarterback of the Great Game. Some of the things the voices said made no sense. They commented on her throwing arm (“Her mechanics are awful”). The way she read the defense (“So-so at best”). The condition of the field (“Hard to get the running game going with all this mud”). The size of the crowd (“Who’d ever want to see her play?”). They analyzed dropped balls and muffed handoffs. “She’s a dead loss,” one said. “Can’t see how the team can win with her at quarterback. Thinks she’s better than she is.” They questioned incredulously why she’d juked left when there was a player open downfield on the right (“Throw the ball, you idiot. You’re not the running back, remember?”).

  And often and often, she’d hear one analyst say casually to another, “She’s always been a loser, you know.”

  “I do know. And I couldn’t agree more,” the other voice would reply. “It’s been one bad decision after another. Who’d ever want a failure like that on their team?”

  For the first few years Lizzie just wanted the voices to stop, or, if not stop, at least to let up, to talk about something else, to take a break from judging her, to advertise Chevy trucks or Budweiser. She thought she might have borne it better—it would have been easier for her—if they’d ever talked about another player in a similar Great Game, but they concentrated solely on her. In her mind she saw a blackboard filled in with X’s and O’s in complicated patterns; the voices were charting plays in which she played some role that wasn’t clear but that she knew was something she never should have taken part in. As she and Jack walked through the Law Quad holding hands or sat together in the UGLI, or went out for pizza, or played a killer game of Monopoly or dirty Scrabble—or, worse, even when she was trying to lose herself in making love—the voices in her head kept on with their relentless evaluation of who she was and what she’d done.

  Over the years those voices diminished to a low-pitched hum, a deep buzzing in her head, so that she couldn’t make sense of most of the words. But occasionally she’d clearly hear her name spoken. “Lizzie,” someone would say. She’d turn around quickly to see who was talking to her and find nobody there.

  But when the post Great Game show began, the voices were maddening. Crazy-making. Frightening. She couldn’t imagine trying to describe them to a doctor, or really to anyone except Marla and James, who already knew she wasn’t nuts. What was so strange, and so difficult for Lizzie to understand, was that when she (and Andrea) first conceived of the Great Game, they saw it as good fun, a prank, an escapade, a joke, a jape, a hoot and a holler, a conversation starter when they got old, and the ultimate showstopper. She (and Andrea) even wondered if the Great Game of their adolescence might have a place in Ripley’s Believe It or Not!

  Lizzie’d thought back then that they’d dine out on it for decades. She’d imagined that years later she’d be sitting around with her friends, having coffee, and she’d tell them about those twenty-three football players, and one of the women would say, “What a great idea,” and everyone would express chagrin that they hadn’t done the same thing themselves. Or at a dinner party far in the future, a fellow guest would ask her what she had done in high school and she’d reply casually, “Oh, I fucked the starters on the football team,” and then everyone would laugh and laugh about her glorious past. What she hadn’t realized was that once you got through with high school, nobody but you gave a damn—or even remembered—what happened to you there.

  There was a moment, before Andrea turned traitor and withdrew from the Game before it even began, that Lizzie believed that all her other accomplishments would pale in comparison, become essentially unimportant if she fucked half the football team. Who cared if you had starred in the school play, been elected class president, gotten into a great college, or won a National Merit scholarship (none of which Lizzie actually had done)? Instead, you’d had all that sex; nobody else could say that. It turned out not to be like that at all; in the first place Lizzie had ended up fucking the whole football team (which was too much sex for any high school senior to deal with). And afterward, for months and months, she was so profoundly tired that she could barely get up in the morning; there were very many mornings she didn’t get up at all. She had trouble doing her homework; she couldn’t concentrate on anything for more than a few minutes. The voices never went away. There was no one she wanted to talk to, no one who would understand what she’d done and why and what happened as a result. This silence on her part seemed irreversible, possibly making it impossible to change.

  For a long time she couldn’t read anything but poetry. This was when she memorized all those poems by Millay, whose life was a great comfort to her. Vincent—as she was known to her friends�
�had been with so many men, and yet out of those experiences came all these poems that Lizzie loved so much.

  And because for years and years the voices in her head never let Lizzie forget that the Great Game had been a stupid idea right from the beginning and that she’d been an idiot for participating in it, her past was always there, a living thing. It shaped her present and her future. There was no way that she could forgive herself because those two announcers in her head continually condemned her behavior in the Great Game. They condemned her. They hammered away at her, a constant reminder of what a terrible person she’d been and always would be. Someone so clearly undeserving of both friendship and love.

  * Jack and Lizzie Have Sex *

  Jack saw Lizzie’s rather distinctive underpants on Lizzie quite soon after they met. The professed reason that they’d gone to his apartment after the second day of class was that Jack said he wanted to lend Lizzie a paper on Housman he’d written a few years ago, but both of them knew giving her the paper was just an excuse to spend time together, which they both knew was just a euphemism for making love.

  Lizzie waited nervously while Jack rummaged through the mess on his desk, which was covered with papers, magazines, and books. His search was unsuccessful. “Crap,” he said. “I know it’s here somewhere. All, right, forget it, I’ll look for it tonight.” He sat down next to her on the couch and abruptly changed the subject. “You’ll skip your anthro class today, right?” he asked, and Lizzie assured him that that was the plan.

  When Jack put his arm around her and pulled her toward him, there was a long moment when Lizzie resisted. Oh God, she thought, this isn’t right. I’m not right. Why am I afraid about what’s going to happen next, when it’s exactly what I want to happen, what I’ve thought about happening ever since we sat in that filthy booth at Gilmore’s talking about poetry, or even before that, when he started to defend me in Terrell’s class?