George doubted that theory but couldn’t totally dispute it. He was the perfect mark.
For all of Todd’s relentless criticisms of him, George didn’t hate his brother. He idolized him, until the day that Todd, at seventeen, either intentionally or not (nobody except Todd knew for sure), mishandled an experiment in chemistry class and blew out all the windows in the lab. He walked outside with the rest of his class when the school was evacuated but then never walked back inside. Late that night, or early the next morning, he bailed from his bourgeois life in Tulsa and left home, first for Boulder, then Portland (where he worked on an organic farm and changed his name to Kale), and then Sydney, where he started surfing. When George saw how all this had devastated his parents—his mother cried constantly for what seemed like the whole next year and couldn’t be comforted, and his father started behaving weirdly, smoking a pipe and loudly guffawing at odd and inappropriate times—he realized that while he still loved Todd, he didn’t, any longer, want to be him, Adonis or not.
The third blemish on his otherwise blue-skies childhood was the situation with the Hebrew school bus. This bus picked up all the twelve-year-old Jewish boys after school two days a week and took them to the temple to study with Rabbi Elias and Cantor Ferber in preparation for their bar mitzvahs. Two hours later the lucky boys who lived on the other side of Thirty-First Street got driven home. The talk on the bus, both to and from Hebrew school, was almost exclusively about sex and girls. Generations of Jewish boys in Tulsa learned about sex on the Hebrew school bus. The problem was that George rode the bus only one way, since he could walk home when Hebrew school was over. This meant that he learned only half as much as Michael Minter, say, or all the other boys who got to ride the bus both ways. George worried about this a lot and wondered how he could possibly measure up to them when they started sleeping with girls and all the other boys knew things of which George was unaware.
Lizzie thought this was a perfectly wonderful story and wondered whether there was some kinky sexual practice that occurred among Jewish men bar mitzvah’d in Tulsa at a rate much higher than the national average and that could be ascribed to the erroneous information the boys had exchanged. “In any case,” she told George when they were lying in bed one night, “you don’t seem to have missed anything important.” George was greatly relieved that Lizzie felt that way.
*?The Wide Receiver?*
Maverick was one of the wide receivers. The other was Loren “Speedy” Gonzalez, probably the worst player on the team, although a lot of the reason for that was genetics, not lack of enthusiasm or desire. Speedy was slim verging on skinny and, under orders from the coaches, he ate constantly and spent a lot of time trying to muscle up in the weight room, to no good effect. Ranger avoided throwing to him as much as possible, but of course the opposing teams would double-and triple-team Maverick. It was discouraging for everyone. When Speedy wasn’t on the football field, in class, or the weight room, he played bass in a rock band. What Lizzie remembered best about Speedy was that even away from his bass he was always tapping his foot to some rhythm only he could hear. During sex too. It was more than a bit distracting.
*?Jack McConaghey?*
Lizzie overslept the first day of classes spring quarter of her freshman year and, after running across the campus and dashing up four flights of stairs, she was out of breath and already late to her twentieth-century poetry class. It was taught by the best-known poet on the English faculty, Addison “The Terror” Terrell. Keeping his nickname in mind helped Lizzie, and no doubt others, remember that Terrell, who had won or been nominated for the Pulitzer and National Book Award several times in his distant and not-so-distant past, pronounced his name with the accent on the first syllable, Terrell like terror, not like Tuh-RELL. His fellow poets and departmental colleagues knew Terrell as a formidable and ferocious critic who brooked no careless language, who hated loosey-goosey pronouns, who knew exactly what he liked and what was good (very little and nothing by a woman or anyone under, say, the age of forty). No surprise that the same group of poets made up each category. He didn’t hesitate to let you (especially if you were a student) know what he thought, whether you’d asked or not. He was equally venomous in deconstructing a pantoum or a petition to the dean. He delighted (or seemed to, anyway) in using your own words to impale you, then somehow twisting them so that he left a gaping wound in your writing hand, or your head, or your heart. No real writer—although Terrell never actually acknowledged that there was another one besides himself—wanted him to review his (never her: Terrell refused to acknowledge the existence of what he invariably called “poetesses”) new book of poetry, even if a bad review generated the same amount of publicity that you’d get with a good one, or even more, sometimes, if you happened to write a letter back to the editor complaining about the perfidious Terrell’s review.
Lizzie read and wrote a lot of poetry. At sixteen she’d won a contest sponsored by Seventeen, and her poem was published in the magazine. She approached poetry in a careless, loving sort of way. She planned to major in English knowing it would, at the very least, seriously annoy Mendel and Lydia. Hence, the need to spend time with the Terror every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday from eight to nine (that’s a.m.), April 1 to June 24.
“Hah! No foolin’ about that startin’ date,” George would have added, had she known him then.
She entered the room just as Terrell finished calling roll and then made her way to the first open seat, which happened to be in the middle of the first row and thus involved climbing over four unhappy pairs of knees. “Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry” she muttered as she sat down.
“Your name?”
“Uh, Bultmann, Lizzie.”
“Ah,” he said grimly. Did he know her parents? Surely he didn’t. It was a huge faculty and she couldn’t imagine what they would have to say to one another if they had ever met at a cocktail party. To which her parents never went, anyway.