George and Lizzie

by Nancy Pearl

  * Difficult Conversations Involving * Plans for the Wedding

  Over the next year there were many Difficult Conversations about the wedding. They began almost immediately after Lydia and Mendel and Allan and Elaine met. The meeting did not go well. The Goldrosens flew up from Tulsa for the weekend to celebrate George and Lizzie’s engagement and insisted on taking everyone out to dinner, which was almost certainly a mistake. Allan and Elaine kept trying to make conversation and Lydia and Mendel kept rigorously resisting having anything to do with their conversational gambits. When Elaine enthused about how happy they were about the engagement and how much they loved Lizzie, Mendel nodded gamely in agreement—Lizzie could tell that he was mentally writing the article that would come out of this dinner—and Lydia said that they liked George a lot too. Small talk was impossible. Politics was a nonstarter. Books were out. Nobody wanted to talk about the weather (it was cold and threatening to snow). Since the Bultmanns rarely if ever went to the movies, it was immaterial to them whether or not the Goldrosens liked any particular film. Each family was way outside its comfort zone. To the Bultmanns the Goldrosens were like exotic animals, and the only animals they were interested in were rats. To the Goldrosens the Bultmanns were equally exotic, survivors of what they’d always thought was an extinct tribe. George was dumbfounded at seeing firsthand oil and water not mixing; he kept throwing out new topics for discussion. Lizzie was mortified and promised herself that for the rest of her life she would do all she could to keep the two families apart.

  Lizzie knew, from all the articles that Elaine had sent her, the exact kind of wedding that she wanted them to have, which included pretty much everything Lizzie didn’t want. She didn’t want a wedding wedding. She told George that if they were getting married, then they should just get married. She didn’t want to buy a dress she’d wear only once, she certainly didn’t want her father to walk her down the aisle. She didn’t want an aisle. She didn’t want anyone there, except his parents and Marla and James. She didn’t want a party. She didn’t want an open bar and an orchestra and dancing and a dinner followed by an overfull sweet table. She didn’t want to cut a cake. She didn’t want a chuppah to stand under during the ceremony. She didn’t want the rabbi who bar mitzvah’d George to marry them. She didn’t want photographs taken of the festive occasion.

  Have her parents there? Forget it. They’d probably be frowning over their ever-present yellow pads of paper, making it clear that they didn’t want to talk to anyone except each other, taking notes all during the supposed festivities on the behavior of wedding guests. Mendel and Lydia were so foreign, so dark and closed in, especially when compared to the sunniness of the Goldrosens and all the friends of the Goldrosens. Plus Lizzie feared that when her parents saw that a rabbi was involved in the ceremony, they would just get up and leave in disgust.

  She knew she was being horribly unreasonable and was already prepared to give in as gracefully as she could manage to many of Elaine’s wishes (which she knew were more than likely George’s wishes as well), but she wanted to give herself lots and lots of room to negotiate.

  As Lizzie suspected, George actually wanted all those things that Lizzie professed to despise.

  “I do despise them, George,” Lizzie retorted. “Why do you have to say ‘profess to despise’ as if I’m not really telling the truth?”

  (“We’ve got her back, folks,” the voices in her head announced. They addressed her directly, saying, “Because everyone knows you lie all the time. Your life is a lie.”)

  “Okay, I apologize, you’re right. I understand that it’s the way you think you feel now, but, Lizzie, your parents have to be at the wedding. Just imagine how they’d feel if they weren’t even invited. If we snuck off somewhere and got married without even telling them where it was or when.”

  “Honestly, George, sometimes I wonder just how smart you are. In the face of all evidence to the contrary, you continue to believe that Mendel and Lydia are just like your parents, only perhaps a lot more introverted. But they’re not. They don’t do social things like parties. They just do the bare minimum to keep the dean of the psych department happy. And we can’t have a wedding in Ann Arbor. I don’t want to plan it. I don’t even know where I’d start figuring out how to do it. And who would pay for it? Do you want to ask them? They’d laugh in my face if I asked them.”

  “I don’t believe that. But what if we have the wedding in Tulsa? We could let my mom plan the whole thing. She’d love doing it.”

  “George, please, please listen to me. I really do not want that kind of a wedding. Dee-oh Not, with a capital N, whether it’s in Tulsa or Ann Arbor or Timbuktu. If we have to have a ceremony, then let’s just find someone to do it. Maybe James could wangle some way to become a judge for a day. Maybe we can marry ourselves.”

  George chuckled, but Lizzie knew he wasn’t amused. “We are marrying ourselves,” he said.

  “You know what I mean. Is that even possible? Or how about if we don’t get married at all? Let’s just live together.”

  That was not going to happen. Over the course of the following year it became clear that a wedding would take place. Conversations on what this would actually entail were endless. After some tears (Elaine’s), some frustration with his beloved wife-to-be as well as his mother (George), and a mad desire to just run away and hope she ran into Jack somewhere (Lizzie), they reached a compromise. They’d get married by a judge in Ann Arbor on the Sunday after Thanksgiving. The only guests would be their immediate families, which included George’s grandparents and Marla and James. And Blake and Alicia, if they could get time off from work, George added firmly. Lizzie wanted to offer a mild objection to having Blake and Alicia (especially Alicia) at the wedding but knew how much that would hurt George and didn’t say anything. Maybe she’d get lucky and there would be a late-November snowstorm in Tulsa, making it impossible for anyone to fly up to Michigan.

  Then, on New Year’s Eve, Allan and Elaine would host a dinner (with a band and dancing and an open bar and a sweet table) in Tulsa to celebrate the wedding. It would have everything that Lizzie didn’t want, aside from the chuppah and rabbi and marriage vows. Lizzie would need to buy something lovely to wear. “It’ll be my special gift to you,” Elaine told her.

  * The Bracelet *

  Just hours before she was going to marry George, Lizzie was emptying the contents of her dresser drawers into a suitcase when she found the bracelet. Following the ceremony in Judge Larry Martin’s chambers and the luncheon that followed it, she and George were going to move the remainder of Lizzie’s stuff to his apartment (now their apartment) on Nob Hill Place. Lizzie was looking forward to none of it. In the immediate future she particularly dreaded the lunch, which would bring together Allan and Elaine, both sets of George’s grandparents, and Lydia and Mendel. Plus Blake and Alicia. Even knowing that Marla and James would be there didn’t make her feel much better. So here Lizzie was, emptying out her dresser drawers, waiting for George to pick her up and take her to the courthouse for the wedding.

  Of course the bracelet hadn’t really been lost. She’d put it there herself, underneath her socks and underwear, over three years ago, when she more or less accepted the apparent fact that Jack was no longer part of her life, and probably wouldn’t ever be again. It was intended to be his graduation present, something meaningful that represented how they’d met and what they loved about each other. A book would have been the easy choice, a collection of the poems of Housman, say, which would certainly evoke their shared past. But a book didn’t seem special enough. You can buy a book for anyone. Books were one of Lizzie and Jack’s things, it was true, but Lizzie had been sure that there was something better out there, something amazingly wonderful that was meant just for Jack.

  In July, when Lizzie was still hopeful that, despite the lack of letters, he would for sure be back the next month, she wandered through the annual Ann Arbor art fair, looking for the perfect gift. After poking through the man
y booths displaying sculpture, paintings, photographs, drawings, and jewelry for sale she found the present she’d hoped to find. It was a bracelet, a silver bangle bracelet, perfectly round, about a quarter of an inch wide (just barely wide enough, Lizzie would discover, to accommodate an inscription). It was both endless and somehow self-contained. It fit over your hand and was clearly meant to remain on your wrist through thick and thin, during the bad times and good, the days and the nights, the months and the years. She slipped it onto her own wrist to see how it looked. She pictured Jack wearing it, his arm, tanned from the Texas summer, a sharp contrast with the silver of the bracelet. She closed her eyes because the image made her so sad.

  That night, lying in bed and unable to fall asleep, Lizzie remembered the note she’d sent Jack with the line from Millay’s “Modern Declaration,” and first thing the next morning she took the bracelet back to the man who’d fashioned it and asked him to engrave “Jack, shall love you always” on the inside, where it would touch his wrist.

  Well. That was then, this is now, as George would often say, quoting the title of S. E. Hinton’s novel. It was his favorite book from his early adolescence and he never tired of reminding Lizzie that Hinton was also from Tulsa, and that she’d come to talk to his ninth-grade English class. And autographed his much-beat-up copy. And smiled at him and said that it looked like he’d read it more than once, which was certainly true. He’d pressed the copy into Lizzie’s hands during her very first Christmas visit to Tulsa and insisted that she read it. When she dutifully finished it, she wondered if she could tell George that while she could see why he’d loved it so much, she actually felt that at this moment in her life she might just be the wrong demographic to appreciate it as much as he had when he was fourteen.

  And when September came and went without a letter, without Jack, she stuck the bracelet in the back of a drawer and tried to forget it existed. But it did exist, and here it was. When she heard George coming into the apartment, she hesitated for a moment, then took the bracelet and put it on. Lizzie was ready to get married.

  “I’m here,” she called, somehow happier than she’d been for a long time.

  After the ceremony, after the “I now pronounce you husband and wife” and after their first married kiss, after everyone had already hugged Lizzie and shook George’s hand and congratulated them both and were busy putting on coats and arranging rides to the restaurant where the wedding lunch would be held, Marla pulled her aside.

  “Tell me, my dear Mrs. Goldrosen, that I’m not seeing that bracelet on your wrist. Don’t you think that wearing something that was supposed to be a gift for another guy as part of your wedding ensemble is a bit much, even for you?”

  Lizzie grimaced but allowed as how Marla might be right. “But I didn’t know what else to do with it; I was packing and there it was and then George showed up and—”

  “Well, one option is that you just left it where it was. Or, I know, you could have thrown it away the moment you saw it in the drawer. It just doesn’t look good for the future, you know?”

  “I don’t think it’s that significant,” Lizzie said, but Marla shook her head in disagreement.

  “Look, take it off, give it to me. I’ll hide it for the rest of your life. You don’t want George to find it, do you? Or your kids? I can just hear them: ‘Who’s Jack, Mommy? Why will you always love him? What about Daddy?’ How will you answer that?”

  Lizzie sighed. “It’s fine. It’ll be okay, really. Everybody has secrets, don’t they?”

  “Not secrets like this,” Marla said darkly. “I love you, Lizzie, and always will. And I will always, always, keep your secrets. But this, what this means to you and George, is an important secret. It’s not the equivalent of a little white lie. It’d be like me not telling James about the abortion.”

  “But James knew about the abortion; he was with you when you had it.”

  “Don’t be deliberately naive; it doesn’t become you. You know what I mean: some other James I was involved with.”

  What Lizzie wanted to say was that Marla reminded her of how, in fairy tales, there was always someone at a wedding to prophesize a tragic future, but before she could respond, Allan came up to them. “Don’t hog my new daughter, Marla,” he said, smiling. “You get to see her all the time. I want to tell her again how happy we are that she’s part of our family.”

  * Why George Loves Lizzie *

  1. Her smile. When Lizzie smiles it’s pretty impossible not to smile back. George has seen evidence of this with train conductors, hitherto grumpy salespeople, and little kids. Even when he is most frustrated with her (see number two, below), her smile can almost always make everything better. Especially now that he’s fixed that incisor.

  2. He’s never bored by Lizzie. Exasperated, yes, quite often. Very exasperated, yes, more than just occasionally. Extremely exasperated, yes, there were definitely times when Lizzie’s sadness and pessimism drove George bonkers, when he knew a life without her would be easier. But all she had to do was smile (see number one, above) or laugh appreciatively at one of his puns (see number three, below) and he was back in love with her. Did this make him weak or stupid or what? George didn’t know.

  3. Her sense of humor. Lizzie is wonderful with sarcasm and wordplay (she shares his love of a good pun), but she’s a terrible joke teller because she usually forgets the telling detail that makes the joke a joke. Here’s where George comes in, since he always remembers that detail perfectly.

  4. Her intelligence. George had known smart women before he met Lizzie (Julia Draznin, for one, and his mother for another) but he soon realized that Lizzie was probably the smartest woman he’d ever met. George thought of himself as being quite intelligent (he’d always gotten high scores on standardized tests), but he’d never been quick. He liked to read books slowly and carefully (he was virtually incapable of skimming), with frequent pauses to think about what he had just read; Lizzie devoured books, one after another, like a chain-smoker with her cigarettes. She was like a lightning streak across the sky, picking up and remembering odd and interesting facts about whatever interested her, and a lot did. George would never call Lizzie a deep thinker, but, boy, she was the ideal Trivial Pursuit or Jeopardy! partner. George was frequently surprised at what Lizzie knew or didn’t know. Perfectly ordinary facts like what latitude meant were beyond her, while the sort of minuscule details of someone’s life—the name of Albert Einstein’s first wife (it was Mileva Einstein-Maricć, George learned from Lizzie) were on the tip of her tongue.

  4. Her breasts. As a late twentieth-century, well-educated male, one fully aware of the crimes the patriarchy had committed on the opposite sex, George knew that much more went into loving someone than their physical attributes, but it has to be said that he loved Lizzie’s breasts. Their size and shape fit the palm of his hand perfectly.

  5. Her neediness. Lizzie needed George in ways that no one else ever had or, he believed, ever would. She needed him to do the ordinary things that anyone could have done (including Lizzie if she’d been inclined to try harder: unscrew recalcitrant jars, climb a ladder to change the lightbulb on the side of the house, slice vegetables with their mandoline), and George enjoyed the feeling of being needed. More significantly, Lizzie, in George’s view, needed rescuing from her own sadness, and George was convinced that he was the only person in the world who could do so.

  * Two Deaths *

  Three months after George and Lizzie got married, Lydia and Mendel were killed. Their car skidded one cold and rainy February night while they were coming home from a performance of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro in Detroit and I-94 suddenly became a sheet of black ice. The campus newspaper, the Michigan Daily, added black borders around the headline “stars go out in psych department” and the first line of the story began “Family, students, and colleagues are distraught at the deaths . . .” which Lizzie found hard to take seriously. She was certainly not distraught but rather somewhat unbalanced by the event. She fo
und it unnerving but not necessarily unpleasant to think of herself as an orphan, even when she knew, intellectually, that orphanhood was the natural state of the adult child. But “distraught” implied rending of garments and weeping until your eyes were red and your skin turned blotchy, which wasn’t going to happen with her.

  Actually, she couldn’t imagine who if any of her parents’ colleagues and students could possibly be that upset. Mendel and Lydia were respected and admired but not really liked. Friendship had never been on their minds: they were way too busy analyzing patterns of behavior. Yet there was some talk in the university community of calling off Saturday’s football game against Purdue—the Bultmanns brought in a whole lot of research money—but nobody except maybe the very unpopular and soon-to-depart-for-greener-pastures-in-Seattle provost took that suggestion seriously. At the University of Michigan, football ruled. The only time a game had been canceled was the Saturday after President Kennedy was shot. The team was scheduled to play their archrival, Ohio State. Many die-hard fans were still furious about that, more than three decades after the fact. So nobody in their right mind could even expect something similar for the Bultmanns, research money be damned.

  The Detroit News and the New York Times ran the same long obituary, complete with pictures of Lydia and Mendel that had been taken right after they arrived in Ann Arbor to teach, pictures Lizzie had never even seen. Her parents looked so young. Lydia had long straight hair and stared at the camera with a serious expression. Mendel had a mustache and beard and was smiling slightly. Lizzie was now older than her parents had been when the pictures were taken, another odd and unbalancing thought.