The kicker Steve Wender had an extreme outie belly button. It seemed awfully petty of her to find it so off-putting, but that’s what Lizzie felt. Her time with Steve was highly educational if you were majoring in football. During his five days of the Great Game, Steve talked about nothing but that, focusing on his great hero, fellow kicker George Blanda, who, Lizzie learned, played in the NFL for an unbelievable twenty-six seasons, first as a quarterback and then, in the last eight years of his career, as the kicker for the Oakland Raiders. Steve’s ambition was to play twenty-seven seasons in the NFL, but admitted to Lizzie that it wasn’t likely. Blanda retired in 1975 when he was forty-eight but that was a different era entirely.
*?George and Lizzie’s First Date?*
George and Lizzie met for lunch at Drake’s Sandwich Shop. As they sat down, Lizzie could hear the Baird Carillon chiming the quarter hour and murmured, “‘Oh, noisy bells, be dumb.’”
“What?”
But Lizzie knew that if she began explaining to George that it was a line from a particularly depressing Housman poem that was one of Jack’s absolute favorites, it would open up the conversation in ways she wasn’t prepared to follow through on.
“Oh, nothing, really. I was just mumbling.”
Lizzie ordered a grilled cheese on rye bread sandwich. It was her go-to choice for stressful times, and George, seemingly unfazed by her prevailing winds of tension and anxiety, a BLT. They both had iced tea, which seemed counterintuitive, since it was the coldest Ann Arbor January since 1908. Lizzie apologized again for the bowling fiasco and ruining George’s game, and after George gallantly said that it was unimportant, in fact he’d totally forgotten about it until she mentioned it, and that he was sorry they hadn’t been able to get together in December after she called but he’d been swamped with assignments because it seemed that the second year of dental school was much more demanding than the first, and then he always went home for Christmas, so this was his first chance to see her, a silence fell. They chewed companionably. It made Lizzie happy that George was also drinking iced tea. She’d always been the only one she knew who ordered it no matter how cold it was outside.
Lizzie felt pressured to say something in return. The bells, thank God, were quiet. She had about ten minutes before they rang again. Why had she agreed to come here, anyway? Okay, here goes. “Where’s home?”
“Tulsa. I’m pretty sure I’m the only Oklahoman in the dental school. At least, I’ve never met anyone else from home.”
“Me either,” Lizzie said. “I mean, you’re the first person from Oklahoma that I’ve ever met. I did know someone from Texas, though. Does that count?”
“Absolutely not,” George said. “We hate Texas, except maybe for the Cowboys. You know, the football team from Dallas. Are you a football fan?”
Lizzie hesitated, thinking about Maverick and the Great Game. “I kind of have a love-hate relationship with it, actually.”
“That sounds pretty mysterious.”
“Yeah, well, maybe we can talk about it another time,” Lizzie said. “So tell me, what’s it like there in Oklahoma?”
“Hot and dusty and lots of tornadoes. We had a dog when I was a kid, and we could always tell when bad weather was on the way because he would start shaking and whining and immediately go hide in the front closet, where we could hear him whimpering. Even though I was always really scared, Doodle made me look good by comparison.”
“Doodle’s a great name.”
“Doodle the Poodle,” George said happily. “He was my mom’s dog from before she and my dad got married. His formal name was Drummer Boy the Fourth, but we called him Doodle.”
“I always wanted a dog, but my parents aren’t pet people,” Lizzie told him. “So I always envied my dog-owning friends here.”
“Here?” George asked. “You mean you grew up in Ann Arbor? Do your parents work at the university?”
Lizzie delayed answering until she’d gotten the waitress’s attention and requested a refill on her iced tea. Then she tried to change the subject. “Do you want to hear something funny? I always thought that only women drink iced tea. You’re the first guy I’ve ever met that drinks it too. Even the words ‘iced tea’ seem kind of quaint and southern somehow. You know, big houses, wraparound porches, ladies with their fans, rocking chairs, the Union Army rumored to be on its way.”
George laughed. “And now you know at least one man who’s pro–iced tea. Plus, as my mom would tell you, Oklahoma is definitely a southern state. She’s a real tea drinker, and I got in the habit from her, I guess. Plus I think it’s a lot healthier than soda is, although tea can really stain your teeth.”
Lizzie, who also drank a lot of tea, both hot and iced, immediately resolved not to open her mouth again just in case her teeth were stained.
“So you didn’t say where you grew up,” George reminded her.
By now Lizzie was ready with her answer. “Oh, I grew up here, a faculty brat. Both my parents teach here.”
“What do they teach?”
“Psychology. They’re pretty weird.”
“Weird how?”
“When I was little,” Lizzie began, “maybe about three, I was in the lab preschool that the School of Education runs here. One night at dinner I asked my father if I could aim his penis when he was urinating. In our house we always used the correct word for body parts—no wee-wees or pee-pees for us.”
George smiled. “What did he say?”
“He put down the book he was reading, probably something about school testing, then looked over at my mother, who was also doing something else at the table at that moment, probably making notes on an upcoming lecture. I’m sure that he was hoping for some help from her as to what to say to me, and just as clearly, at least to me, was the fact that he wasn’t going to get any.
“He finally said, very kindly, ‘No, Lizzie, I have to aim my own penis, to keep things neat in the bathroom.’ And I said, ‘But, Mendel, I always aim Sanjay’s at school.’”
“You called your father by his first name when you were three?” George asked incredulously.
“Yes, both of them, Mendel and Lydia. I used to think that everyone did.” She paused. “This is a weird conversation to have.”
“I think it’s nice. So don’t stop now. What happened next?”
“Mendel started chuckling. Lydia put down the pen she was using and began laughing too. It was actually quite wonderful for a moment or two. Then they both went back to what they were doing.”