George and Lizzie

by Nancy Pearl

  The other tackle suffered in comparison with Mardy Preatty, but then, almost any tackle playing on the same team as Mardy would. Leon Daly chose not to go to college, or perhaps he dropped out before graduation, and was last seen by Lizzie working at the local Toyota dealership, where he was a highly skilled and much-valued mechanic.

  * Lizzie Makes George Laugh *

  When Lizzie was little, Sheila used to tell her about watching the submarine races at Island Park with her boyfriend. It sounded really exciting to Lizzie: submarine races! Whoa! What submarine races were didn’t become clear to her until one morning in Tulsa when she and George were walking on the River Parks Trail and she wondered aloud if they had submarine races on the Arkansas River too. George looked at her and gulped loudly. At first Lizzie thought he was choking and regretted that she’d never learned how to do CPR, but then he started laughing. George was a laugher, all right—it was one of the things Lizzie loved about him. His was the sort of laugh that had people who heard him rolling on the floor, joined in a fellowship of mirth. Lizzie had obviously missed the joke, if a joke there was. In any event, George was bent over, chest heaving, hands on his knees. Every time his laughter seemed to be slowing down, he would gurgle something mostly indistinguishable that sounded to her like “submarines, Arkansas” and go off again. Finally, when he got himself more or less under control, he explained as you might explain to a young child.

  “Lizzie, honey,” he began. “I have some breaking news for you. Submarines are underwater, right? So you can’t see them. Saying you’re watching a submarine race is a euphemism for making out.”

  Oh, how embarrassing, Lizzie thought then, her face reddening. I am so glad I never told Jack about those stupid submarine races.

  George was constantly surprised at how naive Lizzie was, how easy it was to tease her. His favorite Lizzie story, which he tried not to remind her of too often, had to do with IGA grocery stores. Passing one on their way home in Ann Arbor, Lizzie wondered aloud what the initials stood for.

  “You know about the International Geophysical Association, right?” George asked, in the tone of voice that indicated that absolutely everyone knew and anyone who didn’t was impossibly lacking in smarts.

  “I guess,” Lizzie said. “I mean, I sort of know what the words mean, especially ‘international’ and ‘association.’ Those I’m sure about. Why?”

  “Their hundredth anniversary was about ten years ago, and they decided to start a chain of grocery stores to make some money for the group.”

  George thought that Lizzie must know that he was joking—that his explanation was so ridiculous it had to be invented—but had chosen not to laugh because she knew he wanted her to. He believed that until several years later, when they were in Sheridan, Wyoming, for a dental convention and saw another IGA store.

  “Oh, look,” Lizzie exclaimed. “There’s another one of those Geophysical stores. They’re everywhere, aren’t they?”

  Her gullibility was only one of the many reasons that George adored Lizzie. And the fact that she usually could laugh at herself was another.

  * George Proposes, Christmas, 1994 *

  Lizzie was in the kitchen with Elaine when George asked her to go for a walk with him. Lizzie didn’t want to go. It had poured in the middle of the night and rain was still falling fitfully. That morning the sun never really seemed to rise and the sky was a dirty gray. It was not great walking weather. If the temperature had been about fifteen degrees colder, it might have snowed, but it hovered around thirty-five degrees. In neither of the two Christmases Lizzie spent with the Goldrosens in Tulsa had she seen one flake of snow. She doubted that it ever got cold enough to snow in Oklahoma, but whenever she offered that opinion everyone within earshot quickly brought up freezing rain. They all had stories to share. Elaine told her about trying to get to her dentist’s office at Sixty-First and Yale (a notorious Tulsa hill) to have an abscessed tooth dealt with, when only her father’s driving skills (he and her mother had been visiting from Montreal, where they had plenty of experience driving in snow) got her there on time, or at all. They could see cars skidding, racing their engines, trying to make it up to the top and failing. And George remembered the snowball fights of his youth and the times in Stillwater that Theta Pond froze and they’d all gone skating. Hot chocolate was mentioned several times in the retelling of these memories. Allan chimed in to remind Elaine and George of the time they were coming home from a long weekend at Silver Dollar City and an ice storm that quickly descended doomed a car that they’d already agreed was going way too fast when it passed them. They saw it later, upside down, on the side of the road, having slid through the guardrail. She wasn’t sure she really believed any of them. She’d like to see it snow in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for herself.

  “We’re not done with the baking yet,” Lizzie told him, straightening up from putting a cookie sheet in the oven. “Batches more to go before I sleep.”

  Out of the corner of her eye she saw George and Elaine exchange a meaningful glance. Now, this was decidedly odd. It happened that Lizzie rightfully considered herself an expert on the explication and implications of meaningful looks. Something was up. This was clearly not business as usual for the Goldrosens, whose lives, unlike the Bultmanns, mercifully lacked enough secrets to make such glances necessary.

  Meaningful looks were a stock-in-trade for Mendel and Lydia. Lizzie could remember all the times when she had complained about something—the food at dinner, a classmate’s behavior, the book she had been assigned to read, her head hurting (she had had many headaches as a child), and how her parents would look at one another, nod, and then Mendel would take out the notebook he always carried and carefully make a note of whatever it was that was bothering Lizzie and detail her reaction to it. Try as she might, Lizzie had never been able to find even one of the notebooks, so she couldn’t be sure that’s what he was doing. Still, the timing indicated it was, and what else could he be writing down so assiduously? Lizzie suspected that there were dozens of notebooks and that after each was filled, Mendel gave it to a favored graduate student to transcribe. She knew there were many dissertations based on her childhood; she’d seen the bound copies lying around the house, but she’d never found the original notes. After her parents died, the notebooks were the first things Lizzie searched for, but they were nowhere to be found. Perhaps they were in some hitherto undiscovered and now inaccessible bank vault.

  “You two go on,” Elaine advised. “Don’t worry, Lizzie, there’ll still be plenty of cookie dough left when you come home. We’re nowhere near done.”

  By the time they got to the Arkansas River Trail and started their walk, Lizzie had descended into a bad mood. She hated the weather. She missed snow. She worried about that look that George and Elaine had exchanged. What did it mean? She complained to George that he always got stopped by every red light whenever he was driving; she carped about the fact that they had to park a few blocks away from the start of the trail; she grumped that she hadn’t planned on walking that day; she grumbled about how boring the walk was, that the Arkansas might be much better known than the Huron River, but that it was nowhere near as lovely and lively, especially on this dark, dank, rain-filled day. She whined to George that the path was puddled and muddy and she was ruining her shoes. She knew that she was being both mean and unfair to George, and that he didn’t deserve any of it. More importantly, she knew that she didn’t deserve someone like George, so intrinsically kind and forgiving. But she couldn’t help it.

  Her bad mood deepened as she read aloud the engraved plaques that marked many of the benches, indicating for whom or in whose memory the bench had been given. “‘Rest Awhile: Auntie Never Met a Stranger,’” she mocked. “What sentimental crapola. ‘For Our Darling Darling Nini, Who Loved This Park.’ She loved this park? Nini? Why? Oh, yeah, I know why, because she’d probably never seen a real park.”

  Stop, stop STOP Lizzie, she admonished herself. Just keep quiet. Be nice to Georg
e. He’s so nice to you.

  Throughout all of this, George remained heroically silent. He held Lizzie’s hand firmly. In fact, Lizzie realized, he wasn’t really listening to her at all. He was whistling the “doe, a deer” song from The Sound of Music, a movie Lizzie despised partly because she enjoyed being in a minority and complaining about how misguided the majority was, and partly because she hated the film’s utter sappiness and predictability.

  Lizzie stopped reading the plaques’ messages out loud. It was actually no fun behaving this way if George wasn’t responding to it, either by agreeing with Lizzie’s sentiments (no way that was going to happen this time, Lizzie knew; he’d chosen to watch The Sound of Music dozens of times) or by arguing with her. Honestly, she’d much prefer being at home with Elaine.

  Then she noticed Blake and Alicia up ahead, sitting on a bench.

  “Oh, no,” she groaned. “Did you know they’d be here?”

  “They’re pregnant,” George said, continuing to ignore her comments. “Isn’t that terrific?”

  Lizzie, down for the count, didn’t reply. Honestly, she was tempted to stamp her foot in utter frustration.

  Alicia stood up. “Look,” she said, gesturing to the plaque on the bench, “this is lovely: ‘Commemorating the Sixtieth Anniversary of Helene and Franklin Brown, December 23, 1927, from Their Children, Grandchildren, and Great-Grandchildren.’” She squeezed Blake’s arm. “I hope someone buys a plaque for us when we’ve been married that long.”

  Against her better judgment, Lizzie said, “Really? I can’t imagine being married to anyone for that long.” Except Jack, Lizzie said to herself.

  “Are you kidding? Why?”

  “Well, Alicia, for one thing, wouldn’t you run out of things to talk about after so long? It seems as though it would get awfully boring. You’d know everything about the other person already.”

  “I like that about marriage,” Blake protested. “The more I know Alicia the more I love her.”

  Alicia gave Blake’s arm another presumably loving squeeze. Lizzie barely succeeded in restraining herself from sticking her finger in her throat and gagging loudly.

  Just when it was unclear to her whether she could control herself or whether her behavior would regress even further to that of a cranky two-year-old, George and Blake exchanged a meaningful look. Another meaningful glance in front of Lizzie in Tulsa, Oklahoma! Something was definitely going on.

  “Come on, Alicia, honey,” Blake said, “let’s get some lunch. We’ll see you guys later.”

  “Sure,” George said. “I’ll call you. Maybe a movie later this week?”

  Lizzie stood watching them as they left. They were exactly at the right heights so that they could walk with Blake’s arm around Alicia’s waist and her head on his shoulder. They were in step—left foot, right foot, left foot, not missing a beat. It was disgusting, really.

  “Sometimes I almost wish I was like Alicia, or that I was Alicia,” she said to George. “Dumb, blond, and happy. Knowing everything there is to know about makeup and hair and how to dress. I mean, I hate the way she dresses, but I still wish it.”

  “Oh, Lizzie,” George said, pulling her down next to him on the bench. “I think you’re just about perfect just the way you are.” He resumed his whistling; Lizzie slumped back into her bad mood.

  After a few minutes George stopped whistling. “Gosh,” he said. “Look at that.” He pointed. “There’s something under the bench.”

  Lizzie peered down through the slatted seat at a brown paper bag. “Ugh, just leave it, George. It might be a dead rat or something. It might have rabies.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I’m pretty sure that you can’t get rabies from touching a dead rat. And in any case, who’d put a dead rat in a bag and leave it here? Or put a dead rat in a bag at all? Blake or Alicia probably dropped it and didn’t realize it.”

  “Please, George, don’t touch it; it’s filthy.” Lizzie noticed that her voice was more than a little shrill and wondered why she was getting so upset. Oh, yeah, it had to do with a trip she had taken with her parents to Toronto when she must have been about five. It wasn’t a vacation, of course. Instead, Mendel and Lydia had driven there to present papers at a conference, taking Lizzie along because most unfortunately Sheila couldn’t stay with her while they were gone. It was raining then too, Lizzie recalled now. Mendel and Lydia decided they’d go to a nearby restaurant rather than eat at the hotel. While they walked there, Lizzie bent down and ran her hand through the water that had pooled at the side of the street. Mendel went ballistic, grabbing her arm and yanking it away from the puddle, yelling at her not to ever do that again. People stared at them; she still remembered how terribly frightened and mortified she felt.

  Of course George didn’t get angry. In fact, he didn’t pay any attention to Lizzie’s concerns. This was because he knew what was in the paper bag. He leaned over to reach for it under the bench. “Lizzie,” he began. “I love you, you know that, right? And I get what you said to Alicia, that you can’t imagine being married to someone for sixty years, but what about if we just took those years one at a time, together?”

  He opened the bag and handed her its contents.

  It was a gorgeous ring, a large diamond-cut sapphire (although Lizzie wouldn’t describe the stone that way, not knowing the lingo; all she knew was that it seemed enormous) surrounded by smaller (but still substantial) diamonds. Despite the size of the gems, the ring wasn’t gaudy. It didn’t call attention to itself. It was refined, graceful, tasteful, and simply elegant. It was the sort of ring that you should probably keep in a safe-deposit box and take out only for special occasions. It was the kind of ring passed down from a grandmother to her favorite grandchild. It looked nothing like Lizzie, nothing like anything she’d ever dreamed of being, or wearing. This ring was meant for someone who was Lizzie’s polar opposite.

  “Oh, George,” Lizzie said weakly, not knowing what else to say.

  “Will you marry me, Lizzie? I can’t imagine a life without you in it. Do you like the ring? It was my grandmother’s, and I had the stones reset in a more modern setting that I thought you’d like.”

  “It’s beautiful, George.” Lizzie mustered all the enthusiasm she could, which was not a lot but was enough to make George happy. “But can we not think about getting married yet—can we concentrate on being engaged? Just engaged, for a while, so I can get used to the idea?”

  He put the ring on her finger—it fit perfectly, of course (trust George to have found a way to make sure of that). Tears started rolling down Lizzie’s face and George, being George, thought she was crying from happiness.

  * George & Lizzie Tell Allan & Elaine the News *

  Elaine and Allan were over the moon when they learned of the engagement. Lizzie and George found them in the den. Allan was taking a nap with his head on Elaine’s lap, and when George told them the news, they both tried to get up off the couch at the same time, with the result that Allan’s head collided with the book that Elaine was reading and Elaine, in her eagerness to stand up, knocked over the mug of tea that she’d had been drinking, which soaked into the couch, her clothes, and the carpet.

  “Oh, my darlings,” Elaine said, undismayed by the potential stains. “We’re just thrilled at the news. We were so hoping that George would propose on this trip so we could be with you to celebrate.”

  They sat around admiring Lizzie’s ring. “You did a wonderful job picking out a new setting, Georgie,” Elaine said. “Do you like it, Lizzie? It was my mother’s.”

  “It’s amazing,” Lizzie said. That was probably objectively true. “I love it.” Maybe not quite totally the truth, but still, what could Lizzie say?

  “So when’s the wedding going to be?” asked Allan.

  “Yes,” Elaine chimed in. “I’ve never been a big fan of long engagements.”

  George looked at Lizzie, who smiled gamely back at him. “Mom, give us time to enjoy being engaged before we start planning for anythi
ng, okay?”

  Later that day, though, Elaine dragged them both to Dillard’s to scope out potential gifts to register for. Lizzie always enjoyed being with Elaine, but this long afternoon was a trial. She didn’t really care about color schemes for towels and sheets, she was indifferent to the potential need for a good set of china as well as an everyday one, and had no opinion about silverware patterns except that she didn’t like anything too ornate. “See, you are interested in silverware,” George whispered behind Elaine’s back. “That’s why we have to do this.” Lizzie nodded grimly. She had to do this.

  George left to meet Allan for a father-and-son lunch, and Lizzie and Elaine went on to the bridal department at Miss Jackson’s. After a few minutes of looking at the array of white, ivory, and ecru possibilities, Lizzie got so anxious that she grabbed Elaine’s arm and dragged her away. “I have to go. I think I’m going to faint.” The saleswoman wasn’t noticeably fazed: she’d seen this and worse before.

  Lizzie was also having trouble concentrating on the here and now, because she kept thinking how stupid Jack would find all this and how crazy she was to go along with it. She sketched out in her mind how she could break off her engagement to George in the nicest way possible when Jack came back to save her from this disastrous mistake. Please make it soon, she silently begged him. The announcers in her head loved it. “This girl’s the absolute limit. Marrying someone she’s not sure she loves,” the second-to -the-meanest one said. “Oh, she’s sure, all right. She doesn’t love him at all. She’s just a liar, born and bred,” said the meanest one.