George and Lizzie

by Nancy Pearl

  * What Does Lizzie Do All Day? *

  This was a question that George spent much time mulling over. In the middle of drilling a patient’s tooth, say, he’d all of a sudden start to wonder what Lizzie was doing at that very moment. Was she home? Was she thinking about him? Was she at one of her many and varied part-time jobs? Later on in his and Lizzie’s marriage, the same thing would happen when he was standing at the lectern, waiting to give one of his speeches. It was of course a no-brainer if she’d come with him—he could then find her in the audience: she always sat as far back as she could, as close to one of the aisles as possible. He knew what she’d be doing, both before he began to speak and all during what plenty of reliable people told him was a rousing presentation: she’d be reading a book. He’d watch her long enough to see her turn a page or two and then he’d start his speech. She almost never looked up at him, except at the end, when she clapped enthusiastically. George was never sure whether she was applauding out of genuine approval or whether she was clapping because she was relieved that it was over.

  But when she wasn’t with him, George wondered about it a lot. He’d come home from work and they’d talk about their days, or rather George would talk about his day. When he asked Lizzie what she’d done with her time, her standard answer was “Nothing much.” This was probably three or four shades darker and quite a bit bigger than a little white lie, because Lizzie was spending most of the hours from eight to five trying to find Jack using the public library’s collection of city phone books, a fact that she didn’t ever intend to share with George. George wanted to bang his head against the nearest wall and pull out his hair strand by strand whenever she answered him that way.

  “Come on, you must have done something. Did you talk to my mother?”

  Lizzie acknowledged that, yes, she and Elaine had had a good conversation; Elaine and Allan were fine and looking forward to seeing them sometime soon.

  “Yeah, and then? How did you occupy yourself for the next seven or so hours?”

  “I went to the library, I walked some dogs, I dusted at Billy and Sister’s, and then I did some indexing. Then I read a little, made dinner, read some more, and waited for you to come home, and now we’re eating.” She smiled the Lizzie smile that George loved. “So what did you do all day?”

  On one of their first dates they’d talked about how they saw their futures unfolding. It was a pretty short conversation. George was going to finish dental school and set up or buy into a practice somewhere, maybe Ann Arbor, maybe Tulsa, maybe somewhere entirely new that he’d always wanted to explore, like Sitka or Salt Lake City or St. Paul.

  Lizzie laughed. “That’s your criterion for a place to explore, is it? Anywhere as long as it begins with an S?”

  “I never thought of that. They all just sounded like interesting places to me. But what about you?”

  “What places sound interesting to me, you mean?”

  “No, what your future is going to look like. What you’re going to be when you’re all grown up.”

  “People have been asking me that since I was a little girl,” Lizzie said. “I remember that once in third grade I didn’t do the career assignment at first. You were supposed to interview someone who did what you wanted to do when you grew up. I mean, clearly you were supposed to interview your father or mother, which I wasn’t going to do. So I just wrote ‘I don’t NO!!!!’ with four exclamations at the top of a piece of paper and turned it in. I thought I was so clever—I mean, of course I knew the difference between ‘no’ and ‘know,’ but the teacher wasn’t at all impressed with me.”

  “What happened?”

  Lizzie shrugged. “Oh, first she wanted my parents to come in for a conference, but of course Mendel and Lydia weren’t about to interrupt their busy schedules to talk to her, so they had my babysitter, Sheila, schedule an appointment with the teacher and meanwhile I pretended that being a babysitter was my goal in life, so I interviewed Sheila. The point is, I still don’t know what I want to do with the rest of my life, except that I know that there’s no way I would ever be a psychologist like my parents are.”

  “Really? That’s always seemed like an interesting career.”

  “Trust me, George, it’s absolutely not,” Lizzie assured him. “It’s deadly. I wouldn’t major in psychology in a gazillion trillion years. So I’m majoring in English because I’ve always liked to read, but I’m finding those classes pretty awful too. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll marry someone really wealthy and not do anything. Or just live with Marla and James after they get married and take care of their children after they have them.”

  “That would validate your third-grade paper, right?”

  Lizzie smiled appreciatively. “That’s good, George. I never thought of that.”

  While they were dating, George refrained from bringing up Lizzie’s future, but after they were married he sometimes couldn’t help himself. It wasn’t that George was super-eager for money or renown for himself—he really just wanted to make the world a better place—but he wanted more than anything else for Lizzie to be happy, and he had trouble understanding how she could possibly be happy when she was doing nothing with her life. It became one of their earliest and ongoing Difficult Conversations.

  “That’s not fair, George. I do plenty.”

  “Oh, right,” George would correct himself. “You actually do a lot, except it doesn’t get you anywhere.”

  Having gotten nowhere so far in her search for Jack, Lizzie was guiltily aware that George had unknowingly described her predicament. He went on, “I just don’t see how you can be satisfied with all the part-time jobs you’re doing. Are you? Satisfied, I mean.”

  “I don’t know. I guess so. If this is the first day of the rest of my life, I still don’t know what I want to do with the rest of it.”

  “I can’t even keep up with what you’re doing every day,” George complained.

  She patted his hand. “You don’t need to, you know. I keep track of them.”

  “But . . .” he began.

  “Don’t let’s talk about it anymore, George.”

  So they didn’t, that night.

  In fact, Lizzie considered her real job to be finding Jack, but naturally this wasn’t something she was ever going to share with George. She tried to divert his concern at her lack of ambition or worry about how she was spending her days by keeping busy at several part-time jobs. Sometimes she had three or four going at the same time, so over the course of a week, say, she’d have to run from one to the other to cover them all. This led to a busy series of days, days that Lizzie considered wasted because she didn’t have much time to go to the library to search through phone books for Jack. Other weeks she’d be barely busy at all and after spending time at the library she’d come home and bake cookies or, after consulting Marla and/or Elaine, concoct an elaborate dinner for George. He was happy about that too.

  In no particular order, these were the jobs that had occupied Lizzie’s time since she graduated from college:

  Dog walker: Lizzie was an excellent dog walker, although she came to that career only after she and George married. As a child, she’d always wanted a dog for a pet, but when she was eleven and first raised the issue with her parents, they told her absolutely not, that dogs carried germs. Plus they were just too much trouble. In any case, Mendel and Lydia didn’t want to find hair all over the house, not to mention fleas. Lizzie did some research and found that poodles (a) didn’t shed and (b) were actually incredibly intelligent. A potential pet’s high IQ was something that she felt would impress her parents; her attempt to convince them by the use of this factual information was duly noted, but their answer was still no.

  Lizzie found that it was quite easy to set yourself up as a professional dog walker. One morning she posted an ad on the bulletin board at Gilmore’s and by evening she’d heard from three dog owners who wanted her to start walking their beloved pets the very next day. Lizzie enjoyed the work. She found that the busyness of
wrangling three or four dogs at a time was a good way to prevent her from wondering if she’d ever find Jack. She didn’t mind picking up the not-inconsequential amount of poop that three dogs produced. Her regulars were Princess, Foucault, and Andrew; she took one or more of them almost every day to the park, where they could run free for an hour or so. Somewhat surprisingly to Lizzie, it turned out that she was wildly in demand by other owners. She wondered if it was the dogs themselves who recommended her to other dogs, who in turn somehow communicated with the people in their life, who then got in touch with Lizzie. In any event, there was a long waiting list of dogs eager for Lizzie’s expert handling.

  Indexer for the Midwest Fire Protection Association: this job involved studying magazines and newspapers in search of articles about fires, big or little. She read about house fires, forest fires, gasoline fires, electrical fires, fires set deliberately, and the occasional chemical fire. For every fire she found, Lizzie created an index card, noting where the article had appeared, its author and title, date of publication, date of the fire, pages the article was on, and a brief summary, which often included the number of deaths in said fire. The days she worked at this job she had a lot to talk to George about at dinner, although it was often gruesome stuff, and she secretly prided herself on knowing the details of any fire in the whole country that someone might bring up in the course of a conversation. Fires were only very rarely the topic of conversation, but whenever they were, Lizzie had much to contribute.

  Proofreader: George was in the habit of reading the want ads while he and Lizzie ate breakfast. He’d helpfully point out any potential jobs he thought might interest her.

  “Oh, look,” he said one morning. “Some company called Michigan Printing and Bindery is looking for a proofreader. You’d be good at that, Lizzie, and I bet they’d love to have you as an employee. You should check it out.”

  It was true that as far as it went Lizzie appeared to be a natural proofreader, which basically meant that she got annoyed at the typos and grammatical errors that were constantly showing up in the books, magazines, and newspapers that she read. Radio and television announcers who used ungrammatical language were also an irritation. Though she was loath to admit it, Lizzie knew that her annoyance at misspeaking and miswriting evildoers had been passed down to her from her mother. One memory involved Lydia groaning loudly whenever someone said “between her and I.” Lizzie knew she grumbled in exactly the same way.

  To make George happy, Lizzie called and was invited to come in for a short interview. The specific question of her knowledge of grammar and usage was never raised. Instead the interview involved the woman in HR asking Lizzie about her background and then telling her that she seemed overqualified for the job. Evidently having an undergrad degree in English from the University of Michigan opened more doors than Lizzie had been led to believe. She’d always been told that a master’s degree at minimum and even better a PhD was necessary in order to find useful work. And here was Michigan Printing and Bindery willing to hire her once she assured them that proofreading for them was exactly the kind of work she was looking for. She’d start the next morning, directly after finishing her dog-walking chores.

  Lizzie didn’t know exactly what she expected Michigan Printing and Bindery to actually print and bind, but when she reported for work her first day she was told she’d be proofing a manual for Bendix repairmen. The manual consisted of page after page of numbers, which she was then supposed to compare to the numbers on thousands of pieces of loose paper. The only words on each page were “Bendix Model,” followed by yet another number. How could anyone proofread column after column of numbers? Lizzie admitted defeat almost immediately. Her choices seemed clear. She could either ensure—through her ineptness (and boredom)—that the repairmen who used the manual would be unable to complete their repairs correctly or she could quit. Half a day was the shortest amount of time she’d ever held a job.

  Duster at Billy & Sister’s: Lizzie went into the Billy & Sister’s shop for the first time when she was looking for an anniversary gift for Marla and James. She discovered that you could find almost everything there, from framed pictures of birds that actually came from the hand of Audubon himself to Sheraton sideboards, from ceramic Staffordshire dogs that always made Lizzie think of the ceramic dogs in Anne of the Island, her favorite of the Anne of Green Gables books, to a genuine Morris chair that Billy never really wanted to sell. Sister was a connoisseur of antique jewelry, so there was an exquisite (and expensive) collection of that, as well as a carefully curated section of out-of-print books. There were, for example, no Danielle Steel titles to be found at Billy & Sister’s.

  Before Billy hired her, Lizzie hung around the store a lot, admiring a pair of wooden sheep, life-size, with very realistic woolly coats. Sister would decorate them for every holiday with cleverly tied ribbons and nosegays and put them in the front window. Lizzie coveted those sheep with all her imperfect heart. She was sure George would love them as much as she did. But, alas, Billy refused to let them go. In her life of major regrets, not being able to buy those sheep was among the major minor sorrows Lizzie experienced.

  Perhaps to make up for not parting with the sheep, Billy asked Lizzie if she’d be interested in a part-time job dusting the merchandise and occasionally, when they were particularly rushed, gift wrapping purchases, and she agreed enthusiastically. Dusting, Lizzie felt, especially played to her strong suit of being unable to do anything that required talent. She hoped she’d never have to wrap anything, though. The resulting package would not advance the shop’s reputation. Also, dusting allowed her to eavesdrop on the customers, who were almost all women, as they chatted to one another. Whenever she saw someone from high school come in, she’d tiptoe around behind them and energetically pass her dust mop over the items in whatever section they were in so that she could easily hear what they were saying. Nobody ever recognized or even acknowledged her, although this was how she learned that Andrea had gotten married to some guy she met at Stanford and Maverick was working as a sports commentator in Seattle.

  * George & Lizzie Take Many Trips Together *

  Lizzie was happy for George in his growing success as a public speaker, even though she personally didn’t buy a word of what he was telling people. She considered him not so different from those annoying door-to-door salesmen, except that he was proffering real happiness rather than vacuum cleaners or encyclopedias. He wanted his brand of happiness to go to unwashed and hungry children, to unfulfilled bespoke-suited stock traders, to housewives without hope and kindergarten teachers and butchers and mealymouthed politicians around the world. She accused him of trying to create his own religion, or at the very least his own multinational company. George halfheartedly denied it, but Lizzie was pretty sure she was right about this. It inevitably led to yet another Difficult Conversation.

  Oh, George wanted to take her in his arms and tell her that everyone’s Difficult Conversations, about sex, child rearing, nuclear proliferation—everything, in fact—would be much easier if people didn’t insist on thinking of their differences as a zero-sum game. If you took part in these Difficult Conversations (okay, call them arguments) but didn’t feel you had to come out a winner—I’m right, you’re wrong—then each of these DCs was an Opportunity for Growth. Each discussion was a simply grand Opportunity to develop a deeper understanding of oneself and others, to embrace differences, to grow as a human being. To have the emotional age of an adult.

  Lizzie was mightily unconvinced, although George mightily tried to convince her, just as he had convinced the thousands upon thousands of people who read his books and attended his lectures, which Lizzie somewhat snidely called the performative aspect of George’s life.

  After dental conventions, where no one came close to his popularity as a speaker, George got his biggest audiences at college campuses. This was fortunate, Lizzie felt, because the sole reason she accompanied George to his speaking gigs was that it meant that she could look for J
ack in every city they visited, and she thought that of all the places Jack might have ended up, a college campus was the most likely. They’d normally arrive the day before the speech, and after his hosts picked him up for a round of media interviews and meet and greets the next morning, Lizzie would walk out to buy some bottles of Diet Pepsi, then find a library and settle in with the area phone book.

  Whenever they got to a new hotel, Lizzie would feel energetic, ready to get started. She’d unpack their suitcases and put their clothes away neatly in the dresser, even if they were just staying there overnight. She’d fill the ice bucket and pour herself some soda. But when it became clear, once again, that she wouldn’t find Jack in that particular city, she’d be in an abyss of loss, with her arms feeling so heavy that she could barely pick up the phone.

  “Jack there?” she’d ask, trying to still sound nonchalant after the fourth hopeless call. “Oh, sorry, I must have the wrong number. D’you happen to know a Jack McConaghey? No? Well, thanks anyway.”

  She talked to a Jerusha McConaghey in Newark, Delaware; a Jon McConaghey in Pittsburgh; a Jesse McConaghey in Tunica, Mississippi; and a Jackson McConaghey in Denver, but it wasn’t Jack. There were a relatively large number of McConagheys in Austin, Texas, and at first Lizzie had high hopes she’d find him there. Austin seemed like a perfect home for Jack. It was especially frustrating on those trips when she’d discover that there were no McConagheys in the city at all. How could there be not one McConaghey in Lincoln, Nebraska? It seemed impossible.