George and Lizzie

by Nancy Pearl

  “No, of course not,” he assured her (but it didn’t assure her). “I’m just surprised, that’s all. If you don’t want to talk about it, we won’t; but if you ever want to tell me about it, I’m here for you.” He pulled away but kept his hands on her shoulders. “Now, on to the important stuff. When are you going to pay me the ten bucks for the magazine you’ve just destroyed? Should I put it on your tab?”

  They both laughed (although the laughter sounded false). Lizzie took a collection of Philip Larkin’s poetry off Jack’s bookshelves and sat down to reread some of her favorites, and Jack sat down at his desk and began making notes on Clarissa. It could have been any evening at all.

  But when they got back from a depressing dinner—neither Lizzie nor Jack had much to say—and had sex, Lizzie felt disengaged from her body, as though she were floating above it, watching but not participating in what was going on. She understood that Jack was trying to please her, doing everything he knew she liked, but she wasn’t any longer inside the experience with him. Her mind, racing madly along a circuitous path that always ended up where it began, and then beginning again, kept her so tense that she couldn’t feel Jack’s touches. That feeling—or lack of feeling—was all too familiar to Lizzie. It reeked of the Great Game. It was exactly how she’d felt with Rafe and Lafe and Leo and with Billy Jim and Loren and all the rest of the team.

  Lizzie was panicked now by the thought that, even loving Jack, sex with him was reduced to something much less than pleasure and much more like an onerous task. “Stop,” she said.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I want to ask you something.”

  “Right now? This isn’t such a good time. Maybe we could find a better time to talk.” He started to stroke her breast again.

  Lizzie pushed his hand away. “Jack, do you promise that knowing what happened with the football team won’t change anything about us being together? Do you absolutely promise me that?”

  Of everything that was terrible about that afternoon and evening, Jack’s hesitation before he answered her was perhaps the hardest for Lizzie to bear. He finally spoke, very slowly, searching for the right words. “No, I don’t think it changes my feelings for you, but I guess I wonder why you did it. It just doesn’t seem like you.”

  “For fun,” Lizzie answered shortly. “I did it for fun.”

  “But it’s an odd sort of fun, isn’t it? And then what about everything else? Does that mean that something like this”—indicating the rumpled sheets—“isn’t fun? Or what about going to a poetry reading? Or some movie, or to Gilmore’s for breakfast with me? Are those fun too? How do they compare?”

  Lizzie bit down hard on the inside of her cheek, forcing herself not to tear up again but perhaps making her words difficult to understand. “It’s too complicated to explain,” she said, “but, yes, of course all those things we do together are fun. What I did, it was a huge mistake.”

  “Okay, I can accept that it was a mistake. Everyone makes mistakes, right? Maybe we can just forget that article. I promise that it doesn’t change anything about you and me.”

  But it does, Lizzie thought with sadness. Everything is different now.

  * A Confrontation, or Not *

  When Lizzie got back to the dorm later that night, Marla was drinking tea and listening to an old Lyle Lovett tape. She took one look at Lizzie, though, and immediately turned off the music. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “Jack found out about the Great Game,” Lizzie said, giving in to the tears she didn’t cry during her last discussion with Jack. “And now he despises me.”

  “He said that to you? Really? That he despises you? That doesn’t sound like the Jack I don’t really know.”

  “Well, no,” Lizzie admitted. “He didn’t exactly say that, but it’s how he acted after he found out. Like I was all of a sudden not who he thought I was.”

  “Go back—I still don’t understand how he found out about it.”

  “It’s my parents—it’s always my parents who ruin anything good that happens to me.”

  “They told Jack?”

  “No, of course not, I’d never let them meet Jack. He read an article they wrote in Psychology Today that was partly about that and sort of put two and two together and came up with me. But it was really my fault.”

  “Why?”

  “I told him the truth, because I was so upset by something he said. It’s my fault,” Lizzie said gloomily. “If I learned anything from my parents, it’s that I can never do anything right.”

  Those ever-present voices in her head, always alert to any weakness she showed, agreed with one another that it was about time to take her out of the game, maybe for good. “She’s a loser, pure and simple,” one of them said. “Hardly pure,” the other replied. “But definitely simple.” They mimicked cheerleaders and chanted, “Loser, loser, loser, loser.”

  Lizzie cried harder.

  “Lizzie, try to stop crying now and tell me exactly what happened so we can figure out what to do.”

  Lizzie tried. She went into the bathroom and blew her nose and splashed her eyes with cold water. Coming out, she said, “If I’d just kept quiet and not reacted to what he said, everything would be okay. I ruined everything.”

  “I have no idea what happened or what you’re talking about. You need to start at the beginning. You went to Jack’s apartment and . . .”

  After Lizzie recited what she hoped was an accurate record of the events in the right order, Marla thought for several minutes before she spoke. “Forget what happened with Jack for a second. The important part is what your parents did to you, which was just awful. They’d really promised not to?”

  “I don’t think they promised, I don’t remember anyone using that word, but I know they told me they wouldn’t write about it.”

  “Wow. You need to talk to them, Lizzie. You need to make it clear how much it hurt you, what a betrayal it was.”

  Lizzie was aghast. “Are you kidding? I can’t talk to them about what they did. I can’t talk to them about anything. I’ve told you how they are. They’ve never cared about my feelings. My feeling bad wouldn’t interest them in the slightest.”

  “If it was my parents and they lived a mile away, I’d go over there right now. I’d wake them up and tell them exactly what they did to me. They need to know that.”

  “But, Marla, don’t you see, that’s your parents. They’re normal. They care about you. Mendel and Lydia would just figure out a way to make it seem as though I was the one who was wrong. But I’m not. I know I’m not. They shouldn’t have included me in the article.”

  “No,” Marla said slowly. “You’re not wrong. They are. I really wish you could confront them about what happened.”

  “It’d be totally useless. It’s done, and I can’t think about it anymore tonight. All I hope now is that Jack was serious when he said that what I did didn’t matter to him. But I know it did.”

  That night the voices had the final words. “Know it did, know it did, know it did,” they sang. It was the last thing Lizzie heard before she fell asleep.

  * Jack Leaves for Home *

  The night before Jack left, they walked to Island Park and sat on a bench and watched the sky turn a deep dark blue, become nearly indistinguishable from black, and then turn really black. Stars slowly became visible, and Lizzie began quoting one of their favorite Housman poems:

  Stars, I have seen them fall,

  But when they drop and die

  No star is lost at all

  From all the star-sown sky.

  The toil of all that be

  Helps not the primal fault

  It rains into the sea,

  And still the sea is salt.

  Jack let her finish before he spoke.

  “Nice.”

  “Nice? I don’t think it’s nice at all. It’s scary, that nothing really changes, no matter what happens. ‘It rains into the sea, and still the sea is salt.’ That means that change is
impossible—terrifying.”

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right,” he began, clearly not paying much attention to what she’d said. “Listen, Lizzie, let’s head back. I’m leaving really early in the morning and haven’t packed or anything. I need to box up my stuff and put it in the storage locker because I’ve sublet my apartment for the summer.”

  “Can I help?”

  “No, I think it’ll go faster if I do it myself. I need to figure out what I should take with me.”

  They walked back to the dorm in the dark, their arms around each other’s waist. At the door they kissed, most unsatisfactorily from Lizzie’s point of view. She didn’t want to let him go. She didn’t want to let go of him. Jack gently untangled himself from her and said, “I’ll see you at the end of August.”

  “Will you write me lots and lots of letters?”

  “Sure,” he said, giving her one last kiss.

  “Don’t go,” Lizzie whispered to herself, trying not to cry as she watched him leave. “Please, please don’t go.”

  Marla was sitting on the floor of the common room, paging through some art books; James was playing solitaire. They both looked up when Lizzie came in. “Gone?” Marla asked sympathetically. Lizzie nodded. “It’s only three months till he’s back,” she reminded Lizzie. Lizzie nodded again, not trusting herself to speak.

  James said, in a declaiming sort of tone, “‘And when it was all over, Arthur said, Well, it’s all over.’”

  Marla looked as though she were going to throw one of those heavy art history books at her boyfriend. “James, you idiot, what’s wrong with you? That’s a terrible thing to say to Lizzie. Besides, it’s not all over, it’s just for the summer.”

  Lizzie knew that as much as Marla and James loved her, they weren’t necessarily huge fans of Jack’s. They tolerated him for Lizzie’s sake, but Lizzie could always hear an undertone of disapproval in their voices when they talked about him.

  James shrugged. “I don’t know. It seemed appropriate.”

  “Well, it’s not. It’s rude and hurtful.”

  “It’s okay,” Lizzie managed to say. “This part of it is over, so it does fit in a way.”

  The days went by slowly. She and Marla moved to an apartment. Summer-school classes wouldn’t begin for another three weeks. Lizzie worked extra hours at the library shelving books, all of which looked frighteningly uninteresting. Nothing she did managed to keep her from brooding over Jack’s absence from her life. It was a lousy time.

  * The Fullback *

  Dustin Devins, the fullback, was also the kick-return specialist; he ran back five (five!) kickoffs for touchdowns in one game, an achievement that no one before or since had ever come close to duplicating. (When she was bored, Lizzie periodically checked that his record was intact. Last time she looked it was.) Dusty read compulsively, and often quoted Schopenhauer and Heisenberg to the rest of the team, who listened (according to Maverick) in mystification. Everyone thought he’d go to Harvard, but he didn’t. He got a free and full ride to Earlham, in Indiana, where he became a Quaker, majored in sociology, and wrote forcefully in alternative newspapers about the intertwining of football and violence, to the great detriment of football. He’d grown to hate the game.

  * Dr. Sleep *

  That summer—the summer after Lizzie’s freshman year, the summer Jack went home but was supposed to come back to Ann Arbor in the fall to start his PhD program—was the beginning of Lizzie’s antagonistic relationship with sleep.

  Growing up, Lizzie loved going upstairs to bed. She greeted sleep with relief. Mendel and Lydia insisted that her door be open all the time, except when she was sleeping, so bedtime was her only time for privacy. Those relatively few nights when she couldn’t fall asleep, because she was worried about school, or something Andrea said, or her stomach ached or her head pounded with pain, she’d get up quietly and take two aspirins (for the headache) and then read until her eyes felt too heavy to keep open and then she’d sleep.

  She’d decided to take two classes that summer, Political Geography and Transformational Grammar. The geography class met at seven a.m. on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Lizzie figured that because there would be so few students in attendance (because who in their right mind would want to study geography at such an ungodly hour?) she’d be forced to focus her mind on something besides Jack in order to get a decent grade. The grammar course met at a much more conventional time, but since Lizzie had only the foggiest notion of what transformational grammar was, and suspected that just a handful of other undergrads might actually understand it, and even fewer find the subject interesting enough to spend their summer hours (usually the most beautiful time in Ann Arbor) studying, the class would be small enough, and the subject difficult enough, that she’d have to pay close attention to what was going on. She was correct on all counts. For a brief six hours a week she had a respite from her obsessive thinking about where Jack was, what Jack was doing, and why he hadn’t written her.

  After a week, and then another week, had passed without hearing from Jack, Lizzie began to yearn for sleep. She’d walk home from class or the library as slowly as she could, in order to give the letter from Jack, because surely this day there would be one, more time to arrive at her apartment. If only there’d be a letter there, waiting for her. It could be as prosaic and dull and short and unforthcoming as “See you in August.” Please, Lizzie prayed to Jack, please write me.

  She and Marla never got much mail. It was easy to riffle through the credit-card offers, the ads, and the requests from various charities and immediately see there was nothing from Jack. But Lizzie was unable to go through the envelopes only once. She’d compulsively examine them again, and then a third time, giving each envelope a shake just in case another was stuck to it. Then she’d begin the wait for another chance to hear from him. She hated Sundays, when no mail came. Lizzie wondered whether it would be better or worse to have lived in England during the nineteenth century, when mail was delivered twice or three times a day, and still there’d be nothing from Jack. Would that have increased or decreased her sadness? She didn’t know. She did know how much more miserable she felt every day.

  When she finally crawled into bed at night, she couldn’t fall asleep. She wanted to sleep. She thought that sleep would not only “knit up the raveled sleeve of care” (see, she had paid attention once in a while in her Shakespeare class) but also speed up time until the mail came again. Every day she finished working at the library around four and walked home to the apartment she and Marla and James had rented for the summer, only to find there was no letter from Jack. Then, in desperation, she’d begin counting down the minutes, carelessly doing her homework until she felt it was late enough to go to sleep as though she were a normal college student and not some quivering Jell-O-y mass of misery. Most evenings she was alone. Marla was in the art building looking at slides. James was at the library studying.

  She couldn’t eat. Her stomach had a hollow anticipatory feeling that led her to believe (rightly, it turned out) that eating anything would lead to a disastrous outcome. The lack of sleep made her even more vulnerable to tears. She wasted hours at the end of the day walking around the three rooms of the apartment, hugging herself, repeating “Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry” until the words lost their meaning and became merely sounds. She lost a lot of weight very quickly and avoided looking at herself in any mirror she encountered. Whenever she did fleetingly glimpse her reflection, she didn’t immediately recognize herself. One night when James and Marla were home for dinner and Lizzie was pushing food around her plate, James told her that she was way too thin.

  “You’re making yourself sick. Eat something, Lizzie, please,” Marla begged.

  But she couldn’t eat.

  And she couldn’t fall asleep. Though her desire for oblivion, even temporary oblivion, was strong, sleep would not come, declining to accommodate her yearning for its appearance.

  Oh, she tried all the usual measures. F
irst, a cup of warm milk, to which—because she was now an adult—she added a good measure of brandy, purchased specially for this purpose, but later in the summer used it the way it was intended: straight. She didn’t sip it either. She ate saltines, sometimes with peanut butter, if her stomach felt up to it. She took long bubble baths.

  James told her that he’d heard that a good technique for falling asleep was to take each worry you had and dump it into a trash container, one by one, until all your worries were disposed of and you were asleep. She tried it one night, taking her many-claused worry that Jack didn’t love her, had never loved her, would never come back, would never be seen by her again, maybe he was dead and nobody thought to tell her, maybe he’d never taken their relationship seriously, maybe she was just like the girl in his high school who nobody would date, maybe the Great Game had ruined any chance she had at being with Jack, maybe he was gone forever. She ceremoniously emptied all those fears into a large silver trash can. But they refused to stay there, jumping up like magic beans and relodging themselves in her mind. She reported to James that, regretfully, it hadn’t worked.

  She played “A . . . My Name Is Alice” but made it harder for herself by adding an adjective to whatever the carload was and the car had to be filled with people, not things, so instead of organic oranges and boring books, she had carloads of dastardly Danes, eager electricians, cowardly criminologists, and nasty neurosurgeons. Q, Z, and X were always difficult, but her years of reading made them easier to do. “Q my name is Queenie / And my husband’s name is Quentin / And we come from Queens / With a carload of questionable quislings.”

  That sort of thing. She was bothered a little by the use of Queenie and Queens, so substituted Quebec for the location, which made her feel a bit triumphant but didn’t help with falling asleep. Perhaps this game had never been a particularly good sleep magnet. There was too much concentration involved. Maybe she needed something easier.