George and Lizzie

by Nancy Pearl

  Will you forgive me for being unable to talk to you about how I was feeling and just leaving? NO NO NO NO NO NO. YES, JACK, THAT’S A NO. NEVER. Can you forgive me for being the way I am? I hope so. NOT GONNA HAPPEN, DIPSHIT. I hope that we run into each other somewhere someday—leaving a movie, or more likely it’ll be at a poetry reading—and smile and remember how wonderful it could be when we were together, and not think about how it ended. AS SOMEONE FAMOUS ONCE SAID, NOT IF I SEE YOU FIRST. I hope we can someday be friends. CAN YOU REALLY THINK THAT? AIN’T EVER GOING TO HAPPEN EVER EVER EVER EVER.

  With all the (imperfect) love I’m capable of, Jack I’M TOTALLY NOT INTERESTED IN YOUR (IMPERFECT) FUCKING LOVE. STICK A FORK IN ME—WE ARE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE. AND YOUR PARENTHESES MAKE ME FEEL LIKE SLITTING MY WRISTS. HOW FUCKING PRETENTIOUS YOU ARE, JACK. AND THAT’S THE LAST WORD.

  Lizzie put down the red pen and went into the kitchen. She got another can of soda. When she closed the refrigerator door she searched among the pictures, the long-outdated invitations, the cartoons and notes all stuck on with magnets, and finally found what she was looking for. She studied it for a few silent minutes, smiling as she remembered the bowling debacle, and then she picked up the phone and called George.

  * The Kicker *

  The kicker Steve Wender had an extreme outie belly button. It seemed awfully petty of her to find it so off-putting, but that’s what Lizzie felt. Her time with Steve was highly educational if you were majoring in football. During his five days of the Great Game, Steve talked about nothing but that, focusing on his great hero, fellow kicker George Blanda, who, Lizzie learned, played in the NFL for an unbelievable twenty-six seasons, first as a quarterback and then, in the last eight years of his career, as the kicker for the Oakland Raiders. Steve’s ambition was to play twenty-seven seasons in the NFL, but admitted to Lizzie that it wasn’t likely. Blanda retired in 1975 when he was forty-eight but that was a different era entirely.

  * George and Lizzie’s First Date *

  George and Lizzie met for lunch at Drake’s Sandwich Shop. As they sat down, Lizzie could hear the Baird Carillon chiming the quarter hour and murmured, “‘Oh, noisy bells, be dumb.’”

  “What?”

  But Lizzie knew that if she began explaining to George that it was a line from a particularly depressing Housman poem that was one of Jack’s absolute favorites, it would open up the conversation in ways she wasn’t prepared to follow through on.

  “Oh, nothing, really. I was just mumbling.”

  Lizzie ordered a grilled cheese on rye bread sandwich. It was her go-to choice for stressful times, and George, seemingly unfazed by her prevailing winds of tension and anxiety, a BLT. They both had iced tea, which seemed counterintuitive, since it was the coldest Ann Arbor January since 1908. Lizzie apologized again for the bowling fiasco and ruining George’s game, and after George gallantly said that it was unimportant, in fact he’d totally forgotten about it until she mentioned it, and that he was sorry they hadn’t been able to get together in December after she called but he’d been swamped with assignments because it seemed that the second year of dental school was much more demanding than the first, and then he always went home for Christmas, so this was his first chance to see her, a silence fell. They chewed companionably. It made Lizzie happy that George was also drinking iced tea. She’d always been the only one she knew who ordered it no matter how cold it was outside.

  Lizzie felt pressured to say something in return. The bells, thank God, were quiet. She had about ten minutes before they rang again. Why had she agreed to come here, anyway? Okay, here goes. “Where’s home?”

  “Tulsa. I’m pretty sure I’m the only Oklahoman in the dental school. At least, I’ve never met anyone else from home.”

  “Me either,” Lizzie said. “I mean, you’re the first person from Oklahoma that I’ve ever met. I did know someone from Texas, though. Does that count?”

  “Absolutely not,” George said. “We hate Texas, except maybe for the Cowboys. You know, the football team from Dallas. Are you a football fan?”

  Lizzie hesitated, thinking about Maverick and the Great Game. “I kind of have a love-hate relationship with it, actually.”

  “That sounds pretty mysterious.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe we can talk about it another time,” Lizzie said. “So tell me, what’s it like there in Oklahoma?”

  “Hot and dusty and lots of tornadoes. We had a dog when I was a kid, and we could always tell when bad weather was on the way because he would start shaking and whining and immediately go hide in the front closet, where we could hear him whimpering. Even though I was always really scared, Doodle made me look good by comparison.”

  “Doodle’s a great name.”

  “Doodle the Poodle,” George said happily. “He was my mom’s dog from before she and my dad got married. His formal name was Drummer Boy the Fourth, but we called him Doodle.”

  “I always wanted a dog, but my parents aren’t pet people,” Lizzie told him. “So I always envied my dog-owning friends here.”

  “Here?” George asked. “You mean you grew up in Ann Arbor? Do your parents work at the university?”

  Lizzie delayed answering until she’d gotten the waitress’s attention and requested a refill on her iced tea. Then she tried to change the subject. “Do you want to hear something funny? I always thought that only women drink iced tea. You’re the first guy I’ve ever met that drinks it too. Even the words ‘iced tea’ seem kind of quaint and southern somehow. You know, big houses, wraparound porches, ladies with their fans, rocking chairs, the Union Army rumored to be on its way.”

  George laughed. “And now you know at least one man who’s pro–iced tea. Plus, as my mom would tell you, Oklahoma is definitely a southern state. She’s a real tea drinker, and I got in the habit from her, I guess. Plus I think it’s a lot healthier than soda is, although tea can really stain your teeth.”

  Lizzie, who also drank a lot of tea, both hot and iced, immediately resolved not to open her mouth again just in case her teeth were stained.

  “So you didn’t say where you grew up,” George reminded her.

  By now Lizzie was ready with her answer. “Oh, I grew up here, a faculty brat. Both my parents teach here.”

  “What do they teach?”

  “Psychology. They’re pretty weird.”

  “Weird how?”

  “When I was little,” Lizzie began, “maybe about three, I was in the lab preschool that the School of Education runs here. One night at dinner I asked my father if I could aim his penis when he was urinating. In our house we always used the correct word for body parts—no wee-wees or pee-pees for us.”

  George smiled. “What did he say?”

  “He put down the book he was reading, probably something about school testing, then looked over at my mother, who was also doing something else at the table at that moment, probably making notes on an upcoming lecture. I’m sure that he was hoping for some help from her as to what to say to me, and just as clearly, at least to me, was the fact that he wasn’t going to get any.

  “He finally said, very kindly, ‘No, Lizzie, I have to aim my own penis, to keep things neat in the bathroom.’ And I said, ‘But, Mendel, I always aim Sanjay’s at school.’”

  “You called your father by his first name when you were three?” George asked incredulously.

  “Yes, both of them, Mendel and Lydia. I used to think that everyone did.” She paused. “This is a weird conversation to have.”

  “I think it’s nice. So don’t stop now. What happened next?”

  “Mendel started chuckling. Lydia put down the pen she was using and began laughing too. It was actually quite wonderful for a moment or two. Then they both went back to what they were doing.”

  “Well,” George admitted comfortably, “we were definitely a wee-wee or pee-pee and poop family. But here’s a story you’d like, I think. We were all sitting down together, eating dinner—my mother’s big on meal-together
ness. My dad always began by asking us what we had learned in school that day, or from the newspaper, or if we had any questions. I must have been a bit older than you, maybe six or so, and Todd, my older brother, was seven.

  “I said that one of the boys at school told me babies are made when a man and a woman stand on opposite sides of a room and then the man holds his penis out and runs at the woman yelling ‘Charge.’ And my dad, very seriously, said, ‘No, George, that’s not usually the way it’s done, although it does sound like a compelling idea. Would you like me to explain how and where babies come from?’

  “Well, by now I was really embarrassed, and I told him no, not right then, maybe later, but Todd said that, yes, he really wanted to know, that he had a lot of theories about it but was interested in the truth.”

  “The truth,” said Lizzie, giggling. “So were you there when your dad explained it to your brother?”

  “No, I didn’t want to be there,” George said. “I waited another year or two before I got my own sex-ed talk. What about you?”

  “When I was six, Lydia gave me a book called From Egg to Chick. That was her way of eliminating any chance of a discussion. I think maybe one of her grad students told her about it. I must have lost it or something. I’d love to know now what it really said.”

  “When you got older, did you think that’s why girls were sometimes called chicks?” George asked.

  “I did! How’d you know that?”

  “A wild guess,” George said. They smiled at each other.

  * George Calls His Mother *

  George called his mother. “Hey, Mom,” he began.

  “Georgie,” she answered, her voice delighted. “Drill any producing wells recently?” She chuckled; chortled, really. He felt the reality of her, warm and loving and so solidly there, although there were almost a thousand miles between them.

  Her joking question referred to one of a number of possibly apocryphal stories she’d recounted over and over when George and Todd were children, stories of her own experiences as a kid going to Dr. Ted Gratz, her family’s dentist in Montreal. He was, Elaine said, probably the nicest man she’d ever known, hands down, although this was not always a good thing. He was so nice that he was unable to turn anyone away who needed him, so making an appointment for a cleaning, say, was pretty useless, because when you arrived at the office, it would already be filled with people waiting patiently to see him too, whether they had an appointment or not. Here she’d pause and say with a wink and a smile, “Do you get it: they were waiting ‘patiently’?” When Todd and George nodded that, yes, they got it, they got it, Ma, they always got it, every single time she retold the story, she went on. “And then there were those who weren’t waiting patiently, so that there were always muffled and sometimes not-so-quiet cries of pain echoing throughout the waiting room. But we got used to that sort of thing. We’d pack lunches and get ready to spend the whole day there.

  “Occasionally,” Elaine went on, “there would be people kneeling on the floor, praying to God to deal with their aching tooth before the dentist could get his hands on it.”

  Evidently Dr. Gratz was also unable to keep any staff for very long. “Despite his niceness?” George asked Elaine once.

  “Probably because of it,” she said, an answer that George didn’t understand until he became a dentist himself. This meant that while Novocain injections were taking effect, or X-rays were developing, Dr. Gratz would grab a broom and energetically sweep the floor. Or answer the phone, or whatever else needed to be done, depending on which employee had quit or hadn’t shown up that day.

  There was never any privacy in Dr. Gratz’s dental offices: his was a booming voice and he never tried to modulate it to hide what he was saying to his patients. “You call those teeth?” Elaine once heard him say, admonishing the poor patient in the adjoining room. “They look like cigarette butts to me.” This, Elaine added to her sons, was the major reason she never smoked and wanted them to swear they’d never take up smoking either. Plus, the cigarette-butts comment was also an incentive to brush morning and night. Sometimes at noon too.

  But the neatest thing about Dr. Gratz, she told them, was that he always inscribed the silver fillings he used with “Ted drilled here” and the date. This just had to be something Elaine invented, George felt. How could someone do that, write so small? But wasn’t it true that there was a whole industry of people who wrote on tiny grains of rice?

  “Let me see your teeth,” he demanded of his mother when he was seven and she’d finished telling him the story for the bazillionth time. “Oh, Georgie, I’m happy to, but I’m afraid it won’t do any good to look at my teeth, because all those old silver fillings that Dr. Gratz did have been replaced with composite ones.”

  “Let me see,” he repeated, and she obediently opened her mouth and allowed him to peer in. “There’s a silver one,” he told her, “way in the back.”

  “Oh, that one,” she replied quickly. “I didn’t have that filling done until after Dr. Gratz had retired and I was in college. That was done by this young guy, Dr. Sidlowski. He didn’t ascribe to the inscribing that Dr. Gratz did.”

  George was still suspicious but couldn’t think of what to ask next.

  “Oh,” Elaine would continue, nostalgic, “those were the days when going to the dentist was a real test of courage. And the spit-sinks. Did I ever tell you two boys about the spit-sinks?”

  “Yeah, Ma, you did,” Todd would say, already way past boredom into desperation to get away.

  “You did, but tell us again,” George amended his brother’s statement.

  “Well, these days, the dentist drills or the hygienist cleans, and they spritz water in your mouth and then they use a suction tube, so you can never see what they’re vacuuming up. In the olden days, when I was a child in Montreal,” she’d say dreamily, “Dr. Gratz would work for a while, drilling away, and then he’d stop, thank goodness, and say, ‘Spit now.’”

  “Why’d he stop drilling then?” George asked.

  “His hand got tired,” Todd responded before Elaine could.

  “Oh, I imagine that he felt you needed to have a rest from opening your mouth so much,” Elaine speculated. “You’d take a sip of water from this teeny tiny paper cup and then you’d spit, and out would come bits of tooth, and blood, and sometimes pieces of popcorn. And there was water running around the sides of the sink, so you’d see all that stuff be washed away. Dr. Gratz’s spit-sink was green, I remember. Those spit-sinks certainly made you feel brave. Now I feel as though I’m missing out on the best part of going to the dentist.”

  George, at nine, already suspected he wanted to be a dentist, although not at all like Dr. Gratz, and his mother’s stories always gave him much to ponder. “Why were there pieces of popcorn in your teeth? Didn’t you floss enough?”

  “Georgie, you ask the best questions. It’s because they didn’t have floss when I was a little girl. Dr. Mordecai Floss hadn’t invented it yet.”

  Todd, the (young) man of the world, rolled his eyes. “That cannot be his name, Ma. You’re making it up.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. I might be mistaken in thinking his name was Mordecai. It may have been Milton.”

  Todd stalked out, highly insulted at not being taken seriously, but George always hung around, waiting for more of his mother’s stories.

  George adored his mother, always had and always would, but he felt that as a loyal son he needed to curb her tendency for puns and bad jokes, especially when he knew for a fact that she’d told those same stories to his father back in the years before Allan left dentistry and returned to school to become an orthodontist, and tightening braces became his stock-in-trade.

  “Way not funny, Mom. As I’m sure Dad told you once upon a time. And for that matter, it’s unseemly to mock your son’s profession. Plus your jokes would be a lot funnier if you didn’t laugh at them yourself before anyone else has a chance to respond to them. I might have laughed,” he went on, “if you�
�d given me the chance.”

  “Oh, Georgie, don’t be such a stick-in-the-mud. Laugh now. Make me happy.”

  “Ha ha,” George responded obediently. “Mom, I’m not coming home for Thanksgiving.”

  Her voice lost some of its timbre of happiness; a stranger wouldn’t have noticed, but George, who was so attuned to his mother’s feelings, did. “Oh, what a shame. Do you have to work?”

  “Yeah, I’m on call Saturday, so it would have been hard anyway, but it’s mostly that this girl invited me to have dinner with her family.”

  “A girl?” The lightheartedness was back in her voice. “Someone new? Is she in school with you? Where did you meet her? When did you meet her? What’s her name?”

  George answered her in order. “I met her a while ago, bowling. She grew up here, and her parents are professors. She’s still an undergrad, a junior. Her name’s Lizzie. We’ve been dating since January, I guess.”

  “Since January?” Elaine was incredulous. “It’s October now. How come this is the first time I’ve heard about her?”