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.