George and Lizzie

by Nancy Pearl

  Though he hated being woken up, George really enjoyed the word games they played, although it was a shame that the only time they played them was in the middle of the night. George was especially grateful that they didn’t have to get out of bed. He just wished Lizzie would be happy playing them during the day. Having George right there in bed with her broadened Lizzie’s scope of ways to trick herself into sleep. Sometimes they’d make up sentences out of five- or six-letter words. Thus “Marla” became “Maybe a rabbi left already” or “Many accountants remembered little addition” and “Elaine” was “Even Leon and Inez nodded eagerly.”

  They often played $100,000 Pyramid, with the top prize being, of course, sleep.

  George (host), speaking slowly and deliberately, with a longish pause between each name: George, Marla, James, Mendel, Lydia.

  Lizzie (contestant): Thinking out loud, “Well, I thought I knew, but the last two make it impossible to be ‘People who Lizzie loves.’” Hmm.

  George added: “Allan, Elaine.”

  Lizzie unceremoniously gave up.

  “Ha,” George said triumphantly. “It’s ‘People who love you.’ Now go to sleep.”

  “I strongly object. Mendel and Lydia never loved me. You know that.”

  “They did too. They just weren’t successful at showing you that they did. Now go to sleep,” he repeated.

  Lizzie turned her pillow over to the cool side and tried to obey him, occasionally successfully.

  * The Defensive Ends *

  The two defensive ends were Richard “Dickhead” Dickman and Jeff “Stinky” Smelsey. Richard joined the Peace Corps, was sent to Liberia, and stayed on there to teach at the high school in Tubmanburg. He sometimes contributed articles about Liberia to the Ann Arbor News. Stinky Smelsey became a successful podiatrist in Laurel, Maryland. If there was nothing else having to do with the Great Game that made Lizzie laugh (and there wasn’t), the thought of the perfectly named Stinky Smelsey spending his days considering people’s feet could almost make her smile.

  * A Difficult Conversation *

  It was unusual for George to get home first, but one afternoon Lizzie found him there, waiting for her. “Let’s go out to dinner,” he said. This was also very unlike George, who felt that because of all their traveling they ate out way too much and he’d much rather stay home and relax.

  They went to Yummy Café, the incongruously named Chinese restaurant down the street from their apartment. While they waited for their food, Lizzie told George about her day. “I felt like I was running behind all day, because Foucault insisted on seeking out a fire hydrant that he’d never made use of before, so I didn’t get to Billy & Sister’s until way late, which was why I was late getting home.”

  “You weren’t really late. I came home at lunchtime to do some work and decided to cancel my afternoon appointments.”

  This was unprecedented. George never canceled on his patients. He didn’t believe in it. Plus his tone of voice sounded slightly off to Lizzie.

  Lizzie was just about to ask what was wrong, when the waiter came by for their order. Once he left, George asked abruptly, “Who’s Jack?”

  “Jack?” Lizzie asked stupidly, stalling for time and hoping that there was some innocent explanation for his question, that he wasn’t really asking about her Jack. When George just continued to stare at her, with an expression that made it clear this wasn’t a casual question, she said, “How do you know about Jack?”

  “I don’t know about Jack,” George told her in the patient tone of voice you would use with someone for whom English was not her native language. “That’s why I’m asking you.”

  Naturally Lizzie’s first thought was to lie, but her second thought was that if George knew about Jack’s existence, maybe he knew all about what happened and was just testing her truthfulness. Her third thought was that this didn’t seem like something George would do; he wasn’t the gotcha type. Her fourth thought was that maybe Marla was right, that omitting a fact or two from the résumé of your life was one thing, but telling an enormous whopper to the man you were married to was quite another. Lizzie took a deep breath, trying not to panic.

  “Jack is who I dated spring quarter of my freshman year. He went home for the summer and then didn’t come back to start grad school like he was going to. That’s who he is, just someone I dated for a little while.” Lizzie knew that the most inaccurate word in that sentence was “just.” It was the word that made the statement false. She tried not to look at her bracelet. Here she was, lying even when she tried not to. It was pathetic, really.

  Days, months, years went by before George spoke. The waiter brought their food, moo shu vegetables and orange chicken. Lizzie felt too sick to eat. Finally George said, “I read Marla’s most recent letter to you. You know, the one you left on the counter in the bathroom. As if you wanted me to read it. That’s the letter where Marla asks if there’s any news on the Jack front.”

  “You shouldn’t have read it.”

  “If it was so private, why did you leave it out? Do you want to tell me what’s going on?”

  No, not really. Lizzie definitely didn’t want to tell him anything at all. “I just couldn’t,” she began. “I just can’t seem to get over him. I think about him a lot and I’m always looking for him, wherever we go.” There. Surely that was enough. She didn’t have to go into a detailed description of all those phone calls in the various cities they visited for George’s speaking gigs, did she?

  “How come you never told me about him?”

  “Oh, George, come on. Look how upset you are, and you have all that Opportunity for Growth stuff to fall back on. Of course I couldn’t tell you. And anyway, what would I have said? Did you want me to say, ‘No, George, I can’t marry you because I’m still in love with this old boyfriend who walked out of my life and I’ve never heard from him again’?”

  A gaping hole opened between them. George said quietly, “And are you? Still in love with him?”

  This was getting more difficult by the moment. Lizzie tried to figure out what she wanted to say. “I don’t know, George. It sounds crazy, even to me, to think that I could still be in love, whatever that means, with a guy I haven’t seen for longer than we’ve been married. All I know is that I can’t seem to stop thinking about him.”

  “Do you still want to be married to me?”

  “Yes, of course! I love you, George, really. I usually think our life together is great. But it’s different from the way it was with Jack.”

  “Of course it’s different; all relationships are different, one from the other. And are you sure you remember what it was like with Jack? Sometimes you can’t even remember to return your library books on time.”

  “Don’t be mean to me, George.”

  “Mean to you? Are you kidding me? Don’t you think your lying to me for our entire marriage justifies a little hostility on my part?”

  Neither of them had eaten anything. They refused the offer of boxes to take the food home. George paid the bill and left the restaurant, not waiting for Lizzie to catch up. Back at the apartment, he pretended to watch the news on TV, and Lizzie pretended to read her book. They avoided looking at each other. When Lizzie went into the bathroom to brush her teeth, George said, “I’ll sleep on the couch.”

  “No, don’t,” Lizzie said, suddenly terrified of being alone in their bed. “I don’t want us to be apart tonight. Can we pretend until tomorrow that this never happened?”

  They got up the next morning still without looking at one another. Lizzie carefully measured out the coffee and made sure to use the filtered water for the French press, both of which she knew were important to George and both of which she usually blew off. She sat down at the table with her toast, waiting for him to finish showering. A stranger watching wouldn’t have been able to tell that it was any different (other than the filtered water and the carefully measured coffee) from virtually every other morning of their marriage, but to Lizzie it felt momentous, as
though she and George were about to enter into unknown, previously unexplored territory. Everything had changed.

  After pouring his coffee, George sat down across from her and began the next part of the conversation. “Look, Lizzie, I love you, but you can’t have it both ways. You can have our life together or you can go off and chase your fantasy. You have to choose. You don’t need to decide this minute. I’m willing to wait, but I want you to know that it can’t go on this way forever. And you have to be honest with me about your feelings, even if that’s hard for both of us.”

  Once George left for work, Lizzie called Marla, to tell her what happened.

  * The End of Many Things *

  James was dying.

  Marla phoned early one morning about a week after the Difficult Conversation to tell Lizzie that James was still coughing a lot, which of course Lizzie had noticed the last time she visited, but that now he’d started coughing up blood, which was something frighteningly new. Their family doctor immediately sent James to a specialist. The future wasn’t bright.

  “Ironic, isn’t it, that the only thing he ever smoked was pot. He never touched tobacco,” she added. Lizzie could hear that Marla was starting to cry. “Although his parents were cigarette fiends, so maybe it’s all that secondhand smoke.”

  “Oh, jeez, Marla, I am so sorry. You don’t need to deal with this by yourself. I’ll see if I can get a flight for later today, or at worst I’ll be there tomorrow morning.”

  “No,” Marla said tiredly, “don’t come now. My mother’s been visiting us for the past few days; she leaves at the end of the week. Come then. I’d much rather have you here than her, but at least she can take care of the girls so I can go with James to his appointments. And the whole situation is . . . just so weird. It’s all happened so quickly. I feel as though I’m in the middle of a particularly awful nightmare. I keep thinking that if I could wake myself up everything would be okay. Oh, Lizzie, evidently there was so much blood two days ago that James finally realized he needed to tell me, and of course I panicked and insisted he finally see a doctor, and here we all are.”

  “Is he home? Can I talk to him? What does the doctor say?”

  “He’s lying down. You’re probably the only person he could bear to talk to now, but I don’t want to disturb him. We have an appointment this afternoon to discuss the next steps, but nobody’s hopeful. I can tell that from the way they look at us. Oh God, Lizzie, he’s going to die, I know he is. I wish you were here. I always wish you were here, but I feel like I need to save you for the even worse times that are coming.”

  “That’s ridiculous. You don’t need to save me for anything. I’m coming now,” Lizzie said. “And I’ll be with you whatever happens.”

  “That would be nice, wouldn’t it,” Marla said, “to live in the same place again.”

  “I’ll be there as soon as I can get a flight to Albuquerque, and I’ll rent a car,” Lizzie promised, “so you don’t have to come get me.”

  “Do you remember Mama Marla and Auntie Lizzie?” Marla asked.

  “Of course I remember.”

  “That was a long time ago, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Lizzie said simply. “It was a pretty long time ago. Tell James I love him, and the girls too.”

  Nothing had exactly returned to normal in the days since George and Lizzie had their Difficult Conversation. They were being very careful with each other. Lizzie made sure to turn off the lights when she left a room (a pet peeve of George’s) and to put whatever she took out of the refrigerator back in the exact same place she’d found it (another pet peeve of George’s). She tried her best to roll up his clean socks the way George liked them (yet another of his pet peeves) and when she failed he didn’t remind her that he’d showed her how to do it numerous times in the past and couldn’t understand why she didn’t grasp the process. She made dinners from George’s childhood that she knew from Elaine he loved, especially the mac and cheese from The Joy of Cooking and the pork chops with scalloped potatoes from the I Hate to Cook Book. She baked mandel bread, which took hours of her time, but since she made the decision not to go to the library to try to find Jack in the city phone books, she had a lot of time for baking. George bought a whole gallon of peanut-butter-cup ice cream because it was Lizzie’s favorite. He ironed two of her blouses that she’d left on top of the dryer. He cleaned out the drains in both the kitchen and bathroom sinks. He formally thanked Lizzie for making his favorite dinners and Lizzie formally acknowledged his thanks. Besides that, and a few stray comments like “I’m going to take a bath” or “We need more Life cereal,” silence reigned. When they were both home they tended to stay in different rooms, and at night in bed George didn’t put his arm around her and draw her close to him, which Lizzie had always found a great comfort. Neither one slept well. A lot of warm milk was drunk, but they didn’t play any word games. Lizzie thought it was like living with a ghost. George was concentrating on all the tips and techniques that he taught in order to resist looking ahead to a future that didn’t include Lizzie.

  As she was dialing the phone to tell George about James, a passing thought occurred to her. How had it happened, when had it happened, that nothing in her life seemed completely real until she shared it with George? Was it possible that having told George about Jack would change her memories of Jack in some way? Maybe not the specific details, but the important place that he still had in her life?

  “There’s terrible news,” she blurted out without any preliminary niceties when he answered. She went on without giving him a chance to reply, “But, George, promise that you’re not going to get all Opportunity for Growth-ish. Please don’t tell me it’s not terrible. I’m not one of your feel-good groupies, remember?”

  “C’mon, Lizzie, don’t be ridiculous. I’m not going to promise that. What’s happened?”

  “It’s James: he has stage-four small-cell lung cancer. Marla told me that the doctors think it’s probably past the point that chemo will help, but she wants to try it anyway. I don’t know yet what James wants to do. I need to be there with them.”

  For a moment George remained silent, then said, “Of course you should go, as soon as you can.”

  “It’s a tragedy, right? I mean, if anything can qualify as a tragedy in your philosophy of life, it has to be this. He’s young, he has a devoted wife, three beautiful daughters, a job he loves and is good at, and he’s going to die. And don’t tell me that we’re all going to die. I know we are, but it’s not the same.”

  Once again George paused before speaking. “Do you want me to tell you what I think?”

  “You might as well. I know you’ll insist on telling me eventually, or it’ll come up in some speech you’re giving. I already know I’m going to hate what you say and totally disagree with it. You’re going to say it isn’t a tragedy, right? Go ahead, then, and when you’re done I’ll call the airlines.”

  Taking a deep breath, George began. “Someone backing out of the driveway and running over their child is a tragedy. The Holocaust is a tragedy. People abusing their children is a tragedy. None of those things have to happen. But it’s in the nature of things for people to get sick and die, sometimes of cancer. And the outliers get it young. It’s just statistics. Contrary to what you might believe, even I am nowhere near optimistic enough to believe that we can ever have a world in which there’s no disease. That’s the realm of science fiction.”

  “George, listen to me for once. James is dying. Don’t you care?”

  “I hear that he’s dying, and of course I care. What kind of person do you think I am that I wouldn’t care? I feel terrible that James is dying. I feel terrible for Marla and the girls. And you, I feel terrible for you too, because I know how much he means to you. And I feel terrible for me, because he’s become a good friend. All our lives are going to change because of his death. But that’s not a tragedy. Don’t you see that?”

  “No, I don’t see. And you can’t make me.”

  Geor
ge laughed. “Are you sticking your tongue out at me? Nyah, nyah, you can’t make me agree with you.”

  Lizzie couldn’t help smiling. “I don’t know why I said that. It just sort of came out that way.”

  “Go make your reservation,” George said. “I’ll be home as soon as I can. See if you can get an afternoon flight; I’ll take you to the airport.” He called back almost immediately. “Listen, don’t go there just for a few days. I think you should plan on staying with them as long as Marla needs you. And, Lizzie, this is a good time for you to think about what you want to do with your life. Our lives.”

  For the next four months, the time James spent dying, Lizzie stayed in Santa Fe. Neither Marla nor James wanted their parents there. Lizzie and later the hospice nurses who came in daily to check on James were the only people they wanted to see. Lizzie slept on the trundle bed in Beezie’s room, and whatever Marla wanted her to do, she did. She took Beezie to her swimming classes. She stepped in as co-leader of Lulu’s Brownie troop. She took India to her speech therapy appointments. She made drugstore runs to pick up prescriptions, and supermarket trips to buy ice cream and hot fudge sauce. She made cookies with the girls. She cooked dinner and did the dishes.

  Surprisingly, she and George talked every night. The evening she got there she called to fill him in on the results of James’s consultation with the top oncologist in Santa Fe, who sent him to Albuquerque for more tests. The next night she felt he needed to know what the tests revealed (nothing to provide any basis at all for optimism). The next night George called to say she’d left her parka at home and did she want him to send it, and that he’d been thinking about how good it was that she was there to help out and that she should give his love to Marla and James. The next night George called to tell Lizzie that Elaine had a touch of the flu and would probably love to talk to her. The night after that Lizzie called George to tell him that his mother seemed to be feeling better but that it was good she’d called. After that it began to seem natural to share all the events, big and small, of their days—India finally learning to say R at the beginning of words; meeting the team of hospice nurses who would see the family through what was to come; George’s invitation to speak in Reykjavik and how if the timing worked out maybe Lizzie could come with him, since he knew she’d always wanted to see the northern lights; the amazing sunsets in Santa Fe that were in such stark contrast to everything that was happening to James; Lizzie reading Phaedo, Plato’s dialogue about the death of Socrates, aloud to James; Marla’s decision to become a vegetarian; how much renting a hospital bed cost; Beezie jumping off the three-meter diving board at the pool where the girls took lessons. They never talked about George’s ultimatum or Lizzie’s feelings about Jack.