George and Lizzie

by Nancy Pearl

  “Can we wait till next time you come up? I want to get my stuff put away and then I want Lizzie to give me the grand tour. And you have a long drive home by yourself. You should probably get going before it starts getting dark.”

  Mrs. Cantor nodded, admitting that her daughter’s observation was correct, but clearly not happy about the conclusion. “Well, if you’re sure you’ll be okay, I suppose I should really get started.”

  “I’ll be fine, Mom.” Marla grinned at Lizzie. “Lizzie will take care of me, won’t you, Lizzie?”

  Although she wasn’t quite sure what was going on, Lizzie assured Mrs. Cantor that, yes, she would take care of her daughter, although it seemed to her on not much evidence that Marla could take good care of herself.

  Watching Marla’s mother envelop her daughter in a huge hug gave Lizzie a small, jealous pang. “Listen,” Mrs. Cantor said as she gently pulled away from Marla, “college is a new beginning. It’s a chance to start over. You’ll meet tons of new people and take interesting classes. You’ll discover yourself or reinvent yourself. It can be a way to outrun your past.” She stopped, her voice cracking a little.

  For a panicked moment, Lizzie wondered whether news of the Great Game had somehow reached the shores of Lake Erie and she was now hearing the lecture certainly due her for playing the leading role in it. But, no, Mrs. Cantor wasn’t looking at her; it was Marla she was addressing these words to.

  “Are you girls absolutely sure you don’t want to go to dinner?”

  “Mom,” Marla said patiently, “I’ll be fine. You go. We can talk this weekend.”

  “Just—” But Mrs. Cantor didn’t finish. She started walking toward the elevator, the heels of her shoes clicking on the wooden floor of the hall.

  “God, I thought she’d never leave,” Marla sighed. “Well, I’m not entirely a liar, so how about if I put away some of this stuff first and then you can show me the campus? I came on a tour with my dad and stepmom last year, but since I never thought I’d end up here, I didn’t pay much attention.”

  That was fine with Lizzie. For the next hour or so she continued paging through Dodie Smith’s novel, turning back to earlier sections whenever she came too near the end. And in between chapters she studied Marla.

  She was taller than Lizzie, which was not saying much, since Lizzie herself was only a smidge above five feet. Her wavy shoulder-length hair was the color of wet sand, and her face and arms were dotted with freckles of the same color. She moved with a competent ease from box to box, sorting and arranging their contents on her side of the room, humming a song Lizzie didn’t recognize. She quickly made her bed, but, unlike Lizzie, Marla didn’t bother with hospital corners. Mendel was a stickler for them (neatness in general was second only to cleanliness in his pantheon of greatest goods), and it was the first habit Lizzie intended to break herself of, although it was now so ingrained that it might be a little more difficult than she’d originally thought. Lacking hospital corners, the blanket and sheets immediately came away from the bottom of the mattress when Marla threw herself down on it with a grand whoosh.

  “Unpacking is exhausting. Worse than packing, I think. Well, come on, time’s a-wasting. Show me around the campus a little before we have to be back for dinner.”

  They walked through the Law Quad to State Street and then turned right. Lizzie pointed out the Union, where John Kennedy gave his “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country” speech when he was running for president and, farther up State, Shaman Drum, her favorite bookstore.

  “Looks great,” Marla commented. “If they have a good section of art books, this’ll definitely be where my allowance goes.”

  “Oh, they do,” Lizzie assured her, although she had no idea if this was true. “And this is called the Diag,” Lizzie told Marla as they reentered the campus. “There’s where most of our classes will be, I think, in those buildings,” pointing to Mason and Haven Halls. “And over there”—she gestured—“is the UGLI.”

  “Ugly?”

  “U-G-L-I.” Lizzie spelled out the abbreviation for the Undergraduate Library. “Although lots of people think it actually is. Ugly, I mean.”

  “Mmm,” Marla responded absently, not particularly interested in the aesthetics of libraries. By then they were back at Martha Cook, just in time for an uneventful dinner during which Lizzie kept glancing around and thankfully failing to find anyone who looked even vaguely familiar, and then there was a seemingly endless orientation meeting.

  Afterward, as they made their way through a crowd of girls up to their room, Marla nudged Lizzie.

  “Well, that was all pretty sobering, I thought. Way too many rules; now I know why my mother wanted me to live here. So tell me, why are you here and not one of the other dorms?”

  “Uh, I don’t know. It just seemed like a good thing. No men.”

  Marla shook her head in mock wonder, put her arm around Lizzie, and gave her a hug. “No men. Clearly, there’s a story behind that sentence. I can’t wait to hear it.”

  Later that night, when Lizzie was wriggling around, trying to make herself comfortable and wondering if she’d ever get used to the thin mattress, Marla spoke into the darkness.

  “Do you think we’ll be friends?”

  Lizzie got a sick feeling in her stomach, although maybe it was a result of the pizza at dinner. “I’m not so good with friends,” she muttered.

  “Really? That’s interesting. My stepmom, Taylor, says that the typical pattern with roommates is that first they adore each other, then they can’t stand one another, and then they come back to being friends. But maybe we can skip the middle part of not liking each other. I sort of have a feeling we can.”

  Oh God, Lizzie thought. Was Marla one of those woo-woo people who believed she could predict the future? She would absolutely change rooms tomorrow if that was the case.

  But Marla seemed to read her mind and went on to say, “No, no, it’s not like there’s an angel sitting on my shoulder telling me what’s going to happen. I just get these feelings about things. Big things. Not like passing tests or getting a date, but the deep, important future.”

  Although Lizzie wasn’t sure that she saw the distinction that Marla was making, she was interested in what Marla would say next. “And I kind of need a friend right now, to talk to. To tell something to. A sort of secret. I mean a real secret. About me. That nobody except my parents and the other people involved in it know about.”

  But Lizzie wasn’t ready for that quite yet. She wasn’t sure she wanted to tell her own secret. “So what about our future?”

  “Okay, here goes. When we’re really really old, like in sixty years or so, I see us sitting on a porch, in rocking chairs, and one of my great-granddaughters will say, ‘Mama Marla’—because that’s what I’ve decided I want to be called—‘how did you and Auntie Lizzie meet?’ And we’ll tell them that we met the very first day of college, because we were assigned to the same room, and that first night we lay in our beds and told each other great secrets about our lives. And she’ll say, ‘What are those secrets?’ And I’ll say, ‘Oh, baby, they’re secrets; they’re not for telling, not now or ever.’”

  “Why are you all of a sudden talking in a southern accent?” Lizzie asked suspiciously. “You’re from Cleveland.”

  Marla said, just a tad defensively, “I’m from Brecksville, actually, which is south of Cleveland. But that seems to me how that little story needed to be told.”

  Lizzie, enchanted despite herself with the picture of Mama Marla and Auntie Lizzie, took a deep breath and sat up in bed.

  “Okay, you go first with the secrets,” she said.

  Marla nodded, which of course Lizzie couldn’t see, and began. “Well, my mother was so weird this afternoon because she’s worried about me.”

  “Is that the secret? Because of course I got that.”

  “Hey, don’t interrupt, it’s hard enough as it is.”

  “Okay, sorry.”

/>   “I had this boyfriend, James. Well, I still have him. I mean, he’s here, going to school here. And I got pregnant last fall.” She hurried on. “James and I talked about it, what we should do, should we get married, because we are going to get married sometime, of course, and then we talked to our parents. And then . . .”

  Marla paused so long that Lizzie thought she might have stopped talking for good.

  Finally she continued. “And then,” she repeated, “nobody thought we should get married, we were way too young, and that I should have an abortion and put it all behind me. But I realized that I wanted to have it, the baby, that I wanted to keep it, that I wanted to get married. I didn’t want to have an abortion. And then everyone started arguing with everybody else, and with me, except James, who felt the same way I did, and finally we came to this terrible compromise, which was that I would have the baby and then some lucky couple would get to adopt it.

  “So that’s what happened. I spent my senior year being pregnant and having the baby in June, and then it was gone, poof, off to live with another family. So technically I didn’t graduate from high school but they let me in here anyway, and I don’t even know if it was a boy or a girl, and everyone is just tiptoeing around me, even James, and though I guess that it was the sensible thing to do—I mean, how could we raise a baby and go to college, even if we did get married; I mean, I know people do it, but it didn’t seem that people like us did it—it’s turned out to be really hard, and I spent most of the summer crying and not wanting to see anybody, sometimes even James, who I love more than anything in the world. I mean, honestly, nobody wants me to see James anymore, especially his parents, who did like me once, so that’s why my mother is freaked out about me. She doesn’t know what I’m going to do next.

  “And you’re the only one here who knows, besides James.” Marla took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

  Lizzie couldn’t think of anything to say. Everything she tested out in her mind—“Oh, wow,” or “That’s terrible,” or “I think you’re really brave,” for example—sounded lame, insensitive, or just plain dumb. She got out of bed and went over and sat down next to Marla and took her hand. Of all the secrets that passed through Lizzie’s life, Marla’s was the one she never revealed, never retelling it as a good story or a terrible heartache, not divulging it to friends or George. Or even Jack, to whom she’d told everything else.

  “Now you,” Marla said, when Lizzie was back in her own bed.

  “Okay. My secret is that I had sex with my entire high school football team last winter and spring. Well,” Lizzie corrected herself, “not the entire team; just the starters.”

  There was silence for a few moments, then Marla said, “Oh, Lizzie, I’m so sorry.”

  Of all the responses Marla could have made, that was the most unexpected. Lizzie felt tears well up behind her eyes.

  “It was supposed to be fun. We called it the Great Game.”

  “Do people know?”

  “Well, the whole school knew by the time it was over. Everybody stopped talking to me, and I kind of stopped functioning at all my last semester. And in a horribly weak moment I told my parents, which was probably a mistake. They’re totally different than your parents.”

  Marla started laughing, which shocked Lizzie. “Oh my God, Lizzie, you screwed two dozen different guys and you didn’t get pregnant? Are you kidding me?”

  “Twenty-three, actually,” Lizzie admitted, uncomfortably.

  “You know, kiddo, it would have been so much less crazy, not to mention less destructive, if you’d picked the basketball team to fuck.”

  * Maverick and the Great Game *

  Maverick Brevard was Lizzie’s first real boyfriend.

  The Brevards were a family that lived and breathed football. Wyatt, the father, grew up in Baton Rouge in an exceptionally large Cajun family. He’d always planned on playing for LSU (Geaux Tigers!) but was wooed away by a damned good recruiter for the University of Michigan (Go Blue!) who basically promised him the moon, including a free ride financially and no redshirt year: he would start at wide receiver as a true freshman. And the guy absolutely delivered on his promises. In return, Wyatt played his heart out for Michigan and Coach Bump Elliott. During his years there the team had one winning season, his freshman year, when they lost only a single game and were the Big 10 champions. The next three seasons—which he never liked talking (or even thinking) about—would have destroyed a lesser man’s love of the game in general and University of Michigan football in particular, but Wyatt remained a Wolverine fan forever. His greatest disappointment, at least prior to his realization that his two oldest sons showed some talent but probably not enough to play pro ball, was that he was never mentioned as a possible Heisman Trophy candidate. He’d chosen to play the wrong position.

  “Should have been a quarterback,” he’d say to his three boys, Maverick, Ranger, and Colton. Still, he was plenty good enough at wide receiver to be drafted by the New Orleans Saints, much to the delight of the hometown fans, who still remembered the good hands and fleetness of foot he’d possessed in high school. He spent his steady and successful career there, making the Pro Bowl once, but was cursed again with being on a team that was mediocre at best. He was happy that he’d chosen to retire in 1979, because the next season many of the Saints’ frustrated and angry fans started calling the team the “Aints” and coming to the games wearing brown paper bags on their heads so that nobody could recognize them for the fools they were, throwing away good money to watch a consistently losing team. Right after Wyatt retired and was casting about for how to fill his life post-football, Bo Schembechler, then the head coach of the Wolverines, asked him to come back to Ann Arbor to coach the receivers.

  Maverick’s mother, Pammie, grew up in suburban Detroit. She was tiny, blond, and cute, and reveled in being all three. She’d been captain of the U of M cheerleading squad (which is how she and Wyatt met), president of the Tri-Delts, and still wore her hair in a ponytail. Under the right conditions and after a glass or two of wine, she was reliably bouncy. Dispensing with the dot, she put a heart over the lowercase i in her name. She loved her sons to distraction. Her cheerleading background came in handy at their football games. And she’d never missed one.

  Maverick, like his father before him, was a wide receiver; his brother Ranger, ten months younger but also a junior (the vagaries of birthdays: Ranger was a young junior, Maverick an old one), backed up the quarterback but was projected to be a starter his senior year. Their younger brother, Colton, quarterbacked his Pee-Wee football team. Maverick was a good football player but not an excellent one. Ranger was excellent but not great. The family’s football hopes and dreams resided in Colt, who at thirteen was starting to get noticed by college football scouts. In fact, Colt went on to win the Heisman twice, joining Archie Griffin as the only two players to achieve that distinction. He had a superb NFL career with the Kansas City Chiefs and would eventually be inducted into the Football Hall of Fame.

  Before she started dating Maverick, Lizzie had never given much thought to football. Oh, she went to the occasional high school game, because that’s what everyone (except Andrea) did on Friday nights. At the beginning, though, when Maverick and Lizzie couldn’t bear to be out of sight of one another, she spent her afternoons watching the team practice. Evenings, she helped Maverick memorize the playbook. He diagrammed various pass routes and defensive alignments, went through the rosters, and described to Lizzie the strengths and weaknesses of each player on the opposing team. He told her stories about the great coaches: Vince Lombardi, Bill Walsh, Don Shula, Tom Landry (Lizzie would hear that name again—and again—from George); and the great tragedies: Ernie Davis, the first African American to win the Heisman Trophy, dead of leukemia at twenty-four before he could ever play a down as a pro; Darryl Stingley and Mike Utley, whose football careers were cut short by spinal cord injuries.

  Maverick lent Lizzie all of his favorite football books to read, which included not
only George Plimpton’s Paper Lion and Don DeLillo’s End Zone but also Mr. Quarterback and Mr. Half back, two children’s books by William Campbell Gault that Wyatt had read as a boy growing up in Louisiana and passed on to his sons. Under Maverick’s tutelage she rooted wholeheartedly for the holy triumvirate: the Pioneers (High School), the Wolverines (U of M), and the Lions, Detroit’s pro football team, which had never won a Super Bowl.

  Even before she was a teenager, Lizzie discovered novels like Double Date and Going Steady and Fifteen at the library and read and reread them regularly. Set mostly in the 1950s and early 1960s, they described a world that she couldn’t quite relate to but that was totally fascinating. She learned from them that it was always a mixed blessing to have a steady boyfriend in high school. Yes, you sometimes got to wear his football varsity jacket (Lizzie did) or his ID bracelet (Lizzie didn’t, but that was because by the time she’d read those books, in the middle of the 1980s, no one wore ID bracelets any longer). The main characters in those novels, who were all named Jane or Sally or Penny, loved the fact that they knew who was taking them to the sock hops and spring flings and who’d they share lemon Cokes with at the drugstore, but in between the lines on the page there was always the lurking problem of sex, specifically, how far to go. Jealousy ran rampant in those books. Girls you thought were your friends became enemies whose goal in life was to get your boyfriend away from you. And breakups always broke your heart.

  But none of this was true for Lizzie and Maverick. Instead, it was all good fun. Because they’d known each other since kindergarten, everything was familiar. They started dating because they found themselves always laughing at the same jokes in class, because Maverick could help Lizzie in trig and Lizzie could help him in English comp, and both of them really liked listening to duets, although neither could carry a tune, a fact that they both lamented. “I’ve Had the Time of My Life” and “Somewhere Out There” were two of their favorites. They had sex because it seemed silly not to. They broke up when Maverick went to spend the summer with his dad’s family in Baton Rouge and wanted the freedom to date other girls; he didn’t want to feel he was sneaking around behind Lizzie’s back. That was Maverick, blond and sweet and fearless, an Eagle Scout always insisting on the truth.