George and Lizzie

by Nancy Pearl

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing,” Lizzie said quickly. “I was just surprised.”

  “Really? I thought this was what we both expected would happen.”

  “It’s . . . it’s just that it seems so sudden. No, that’s not what I mean, it’s not sudden; I mean, it is sudden in a way, but that’s not what I meant.” She floundered on. “I don’t know what I mean. Never mind. Forget I said anything.”

  “It’s more what you did than what you said, actually,” Jack said.

  “Okay,” Lizzie said desperately. “Let’s start again. You put your arm around me and start kissing me and I’ll kiss you back, okay?”

  Jack didn’t move. “Look, are you a virgin?” he asked.

  This was one question Lizzie could answer honestly. “No, of course not. Really, I just had a sort of minor freak-out for a second. Can we please forget it?”

  They did, and after that it seemed a pretty natural progression that they’d wind up in bed.

  They were just beginning to undress when Jack said, “Are you on the pill?”

  Lizzie hesitated. “Why?”

  “Because if you aren’t, then I’ll get a condom.”

  “Um, I’m not, actually.”

  “Okay, give me a minute to find one.”

  While Jack looked through the drawers in the bedside table, Lizzie tried to get her underpants off as unobtrusively as possible, but Jack too quickly found what he was looking for and turned back to her while she was still in mid–panty removal.

  He stared at them, stunned into silence. Finally he said, “Jesus, Lizzie, those are the most anticlimactic things I’ve ever seen. What sort of subliminal message are they supposed to project to people who encounter them? Where do you even buy them?”

  Lizzie blushed. Why hadn’t she thought to borrow a pair of Marla’s?

  “Actually, nobody else has ever seen them. Except my roommate.”

  “Really. Can I ask why you wear them?”

  Lizzie fumbled for an answer. “They’re comfortable, for one thing.”

  “Okay, I’ll grant you that comfort’s important, but it’s like you’re hiding yourself in granny underwear.” No one could ever say that Jack McConaghey hadn’t understood Lizzie from the get-go.

  In between the kisses and caresses that followed, Jack promised her that he’d try to block her hideous underpants out of his mind, but the fact that they were so large and so white might distract him at critical moments during the next, say, hour or so. He hoped she’d understand.

  Afterward, they lay next to one another in Jack’s single bed, holding hands, until their breathing returned to normal.

  “Well . . .” Lizzie spoke first. “I’m glad that in the end they weren’t too terribly anticlimactic.”

  “It was touch and go for a while, but lust prevailed over aesthetics.”

  Lizzie didn’t much like the word “lust,” especially when applied to what had just happened between them.

  “So, Ms. Bultmann,” Jack began, but Lizzie interrupted him.

  “Don’t call me that. I hate it.”

  “Really? Why?”

  It was obvious to Lizzie that Jack loved the question “Why?” but she wasn’t going to explain her parents and her past to him. “I guess it’s the double n at the end,” she said. “It just seems so pretentious.”

  “Okay. I apologize,” Jack said. “It’ll be ‘Lizzie’ from here on out, but what I was going to ask you was—”

  Before he could finish, Lizzie cut in again. “Are you thinking that you want to have the sexual-history talk now? Because I don’t.”

  Jack sat up. “Wow, moving along quickly here, aren’t we? That’s not what I was going to ask, but if you want to remain a woman of mystery who wears enormous granny underpants, that’s okay for now. I’ll tell you about me instead. Okay?”

  Lizzie nodded. “I’d like that.”

  “I’m twenty-two; I grew up in a tiny town in West Texas. My high school was so small that we could only play six-man football, but still people felt that if you weren’t a football player you were a wimp. Only they used other words.”

  “And you didn’t play, right?”

  “Right,” Jack said. “I think it’s a sport for barbarians. It’s like we’re the ancient Romans watching the gladiators. But life was even worse if you didn’t play football and your favorite class in school was English. Then you were in real trouble. But you know what’s weird?”

  Lizzie had no idea.

  “I still go back there every summer, to the same job mowing lawns that I had all through high school. It’s like I have to go home and mow lawns. Either it’s the real world—the dust and dry air and the emptiness all around us—and I need to revisit it every year, or this is the real world, the books, and the libraries, and professors wearing cords and suede patches on their jackets—and sometimes I need to be done with it.”

  Lizzie got a peculiar pain in the general region of her heart. “What about this summer?”

  “Oh, you mean because I’m graduating? Of course I’ll go home.”

  Jack waited to see if she had any more questions, but Lizzie remained silent. “Do you still want to remain mysterious?” Lizzie nodded. “Okay, then the question I was going to ask, which started this whole detour, is this: If this”—he indicated their naked bodies—“is going to be repeated frequently, which I definitely hope it is, what would you think about making an appointment at Planned Parenthood to get a prescription for the pill? So there wouldn’t be any possibility of babies in our near future? I’ll go with you if you want.”

  “Really? Really?” She hugged Jack, the fact of his going home for the summer forgotten for the moment. “I love that question. Let’s do it. Let’s call right now and see if we can go in this afternoon.”

  * The Offensive Tackles *

  The right and left offensive tackles were the cringe-worthy Cringebeck twins, and that was the best you could say about them. Lafe (rt) and Rafe (lt) were somewhat attractive in a hayseedy sort of way, especially if you were drawn to very large, loopy guys with freckles and dirty-blond hair. They were known for their weird sense of humor, which had caused Lafe to have lt tattooed on the right side of his neck, while Rafe’s tattoo, on the left side of his neck, said rt. They both thought this was hysterically funny and didn’t understand why nobody else did. They sometimes were a little unhinged on the football field, which Maverick had assured her was fairly typical for tackles. But in bed they were perfect lambs. Rather than have sex with Lafe the week after Rafe (which seemed to Lizzie to be a little too kinky for comfort), she scheduled the kicker and wide receiver in between them.

  * Jack Sends Some Postcards *

  The day after they visited Planned Parenthood, Jack sent Lizzie a dozen red roses, along with a postcard that read “Take your pill.” Even more than the roses, Lizzie thought the card itself, which was a photo of Edna St. Vincent Millay, was wonderful. Marla, who hadn’t yet met Jack but wondered aloud whether it was entirely wise for Lizzie to become so involved with him so quickly, agreed that it was a very romantic gesture.

  For the next twenty-seven days that the doctor had said to wait before they could rely on Enovid for birth control, Lizzie got a postcard in the mail that said simply, “Take your pill. Love, Jack.” Each card had a photo of a different writer, many of them poets. It was clear that Jack had spent a lot of time at the bookstore choosing cards that he knew Lizzie would like.

  She saved every one of them until a few days before she and George got married. Afraid that he might discover them and ask her about Jack, she cut them into strips and ceremoniously burned each one of them in a large ashtray she’d taken from her parents’ house. Photos of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, and others quickly disappeared in the flames. More quickly, much more quickly, than her memories of Jack.

  * The Tight End *

  The tight end Dylan Mosier also ran track. His goal was to compete in the 1998 Summer Olympics
in Tokyo in the long jump. He worried constantly about potential injuries, that he’d tear his ACL or wreck a shoulder in a game. He’d just as soon not have played football at all but he didn’t want to disappoint his father, who had been Ann Arbor High’s tight end back in the day. Dylan was killed when his motorcycle skidded on a dry road late on the night of the senior prom. It was still not clear what happened or whose fault it was, if anyone’s. That was a sad story.

  * Spring Quarter, 1992 *

  The only times Lizzie didn’t think about Jack was when she was with him. She wanted to be with him all the time. She hated that the day contained so many minutes without him. She hated that he couldn’t come up to her room in the dorm, that she ate breakfast without him, hated that she had four classes without him, hated the random chitchat with other students. She especially hated that there were times when he told her that he needed to concentrate on some work he was doing and didn’t want her around to distract him. She hated that for some strange reason he didn’t want her to stay overnight in his apartment. (She would have moved all her stuff over there if he’d let her.) All that mattered to her was being with Jack, although, looking back, it wasn’t totally clear to her what they actually did with the time they spent together.

  Well, sex, of course. Sometimes it seemed as though they were constantly ditching whatever else they were doing to have sex. They walked out in the middle of movies. (Lizzie figured that in the time they’d been together they’d only seen one movie from start to finish. It was a revival of Chinatown, and they almost made it through the credits because Jack loved knowing who catered every film he saw, but gave it up and got back to Jack’s as fast as they could.) They snuck out of birthday parties for their friends. They left dinners half-eaten, all so they could go to Jack’s apartment and make love. And Lizzie and Jack didn’t bother getting to the bedroom before they began pulling off each other’s clothes. They’d made the sensible decision to sit several rows apart in Terrell’s poetry class so they wouldn’t be tempted to hold hands or worse. One day she passed him a note—altogether it went through the hands of the eight people sitting between them—that said, “shall love you always,” a line from one of her favorite Millay poems. After he read it, Jack turned and smiled at her. Then a few minutes later he piled up his books and left, and a few minutes after that Lizzie walked out of the room too. Terrell was still droning on, punctuating his lecture by pounding his fist on the table. Outside the classroom, now frantic with desire, they found the nearest place where they could have some expectation of privacy. It was the girls’ bathroom, where the tile was cold and not particularly clean, but of course none of that mattered. Afterward Lizzie thought with a malicious kind of pleasure how displeased Mendel would have been had he seen how dirty the floor was.

  Or they’d be studying together at the UGLI, sitting side by side at a long table, Jack reading and making notes on some important English-major classic like The Castle of Otranto and Lizzie trying to memorize bits of information for her Introduction to Anthropology course. Years later, all she remembered from the class was that East St. Louis was not, as one might think, in Missouri, but actually in Illinois. Why this was important has escaped her, if she’d ever known. She had a vague memory it had something to do with mounds, but wasn’t sure anymore what mounds were in an anthropological or historical context. Anyway, Jack would run his thumb over her palm, making her shiver, or she’d stop underlining in the textbook and reach under the table and touch his thigh. They never got much studying done when they were together. This didn’t matter to Jack, who’d already been accepted into several MFA programs for the autumn and was trying to decide among them, and Lizzie knew she could eke out passing grades with the barest minimum of studying.

  They had lots of sex.

  * The Ouija Board Predicts Lizzie’s Future *

  Lizzie came home late after a date with Jack (which both began and ended up in bed). She found Marla and James sitting in one of the public rooms in the dorm. They’d been studying but were delighted to take a break and listen to Lizzie talk about how wonderful Jack was. “Oh, I know what let’s do,” she said. “Let’s get the Ouija board out so we can ask it about our futures.” The Ouija board was kept in a closet with all the other games; Lizzie had noticed other girls using it, but had never done it herself. Marla categorically refused to take part, but James, after some coaxing and then determined pleading by Lizzie, finally agreed.

  They warmed the board up by asking it simple questions that could be answered by a yes or no. “Are you in Ann Arbor, Michigan?” “Is George Bush the president?” “Is four plus four nine?” Once they were satisfied that the board was working well, Lizzie asked, “Who am I going to marry?”

  She and James both kept their hands on the planchette. James promised her that he wouldn’t try to influence its answer by a well-camouflaged nudge toward any particular letter. Lizzie held her breath as it took off on its own almost immediately, darting around the board to spell out J-A-C-K-M and then refusing to move again.

  “Oh, wow,” Lizzie said, delighted and impressed with the results. “Look, Marla, that’s what I hoped it would say. You guys should definitely do it.”

  “We know who we’re going to marry,” Marla said. Her tone was a bit tart but Lizzie didn’t notice. She was floaty with bliss.

  * Jack Learns About the Great Game *

  Lizzie came by Jack’s apartment one afternoon to study with him before they went out for a celebratory dinner; it was June 1, two months since they’d met. She expected to find him at his desk, working on one of his senior papers, but instead he was sitting on the couch, immersed in an issue of Psychology Today. “Hey,” he said, holding up the magazine. “I picked this up at Shaman Drum because the cover story is about poets and depression, but then I saw this article.” He gestured to the piece he was reading. “These must be your parents, right? I mean, Bultmann, at the University of Michigan.”

  A ghost walked over Lizzie’s grave, and she shivered. There didn’t seem to be a way to deny that her parents were her parents, however much she’d like to. The title of the article was “What College Students Think About Adolescent Sexual Behavior.” Another ghost started pacing.

  “I guess it’s about sex, then,” Lizzie said.

  “Yeah, and it’s pretty interesting,” Jack said. “Why didn’t you tell me your folks were on the faculty?” He didn’t wait for Lizzie’s answer. “Anyway, they asked a bunch of undergraduates what they thought about all sorts of different sexual behaviors, ranging from a couple who made a commitment to chastity until marriage at one end to a high school senior who slept with her school’s entire football team on the other.”

  Could this be happening? Was it possible that Mendel and Lydia had lied to her when they promised they wouldn’t write about it? Well, yes, it seems they did. Why had she ever believed they wouldn’t make use what she’d told them? Now they had another publication, plus they’d gotten their names before a larger audience than any academic journal possibly could have. And if, as a result of discovering their perfidy, their daughter was devastated, unable to breathe, what did that matter to them? It mattered exactly nothing to them. Zip. Nada. Nothing. Zero. Lizzie walked carefully to the couch and sat down next to Jack.

  “I’m not sure I buy any of it,” Jack went on. “Do you think they just invented their examples? I can’t imagine marrying someone without ever having sex with them, can you? I mean, wouldn’t you want to find out if you were compatible or not?”

  “Yeah, I guess I’d want to sleep with someone before I married him.” We are sleeping together, Jack, she wanted to say to him. Let’s get married and never talk about my parents again.

  “But I don’t think that other one could be a real case either. Why would a girl fuck an entire football team? Do you think anyone could be that insecure? Or pathetic?”

  The two announcers in Lizzie’s head were gleeful. “He’s nailed her,” one said. “Pathetic and insecure: couldn’
t have done better myself.” “Absolutely,” said the other. “Describes her to a T.” Lizzie shook her head, trying to dislodge the voices. She wanted to say something but wasn’t sure what. She just wanted Jack to stop talking.

  “It’s not the sex part of it,” he continued, “that’s just sex, but . . . I don’t know, I guess every school has a slut or two. There was a girl in my class that might have done something like that. Everybody felt sorry for her, but it was hard not to laugh at her too. She was so damn desperate. A lot of the guys were happy to sleep with her, but nobody wanted to date her.”

  Lizzie started to cry. She reached over and grabbed the magazine, trying to tear it in half. Jack stared at her in confusion. “What’s wrong? What did I say?”

  Lizzie ignored him. Trying to tear the magazine in half wasn’t working, so she began pulling out handfuls of pages and ripping them into shreds. When the magazine was no longer intact and she was surrounded by tattered and torn bits of paper, she said through her tears, “First of all, it wasn’t the whole team, just the starters. That’s a huge difference. And I don’t think that I was pathetic at all. I think I was pretty popular. At least before.”

  “Wait a second,” Jack said. “This is you? That part is about you? You did that?”

  He walked over to his desk and started rearranging the piles of books there. Without turning around to face her, he said, “God, Lizzie, I never would’ve said those things if I’d known it was you. What I said, I know you’re not like that girl at all. Honestly.”

  Lizzie got up and went over to him. “Will you hug me?” When his arms were around her, she muttered into his shirt, “I just have one question and then I don’t want to talk about it anymore. Does knowing I did that change the way you feel about me? Are you, like, shocked? Or disgusted?”