Since neither Mendel nor Lydia cared much about food or drink, Lizzie was always surprised at how they chose to celebrate Thanksgiving. For as long as she could remember, every year Lydia and Mendel invited all of their advisees and friends of the advisees who weren’t going home for the holiday, as well as stray faculty members, to come for dinner. This added up to a lot of people, and the year George came was no exception. Many of the faculty members brought along their own folding tables, which were set up all over the first floor of the house. Everyone also brought food of some sort, which could range from baked ham to lasagna, stuffed dates to shredded carrot salad. You never knew what the final meal would look like. Mendel and Lydia always assigned their most favored students to various shopping and cooking tasks. The chefs showed up promptly at nine a.m. on Thanksgiving morning, arms full of groceries, and took over the kitchen. One stuffed the turkey, another made pies, and the third was in charge of everything else, which included a sweet-potato casserole as well as green beans made with cream of mushroom soup with fried onion rings on top. To give the impression that she was interested in what her students were doing, Lydia sat at the kitchen table and chain-smoked while she proofed an article or read a book. Mendel futzed around the cooks, a cigarette in one hand, a bottle in the other, pouring generous glasses of wine for everyone. The wine was accepted, but his offers of help were always refused.
After the cooking and baking began, Lizzie kept well out of the way. For many years this was when she and Andrea used to meet at Island Park and sit on the swings and compare notes about their horrible parents. Freshman year she’d gone home with Marla for the Thanksgiving holiday, and last year James and Marla had been at the Bultmanns’. This year she was upstairs in her bedroom, trying to write something meaningful about Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage for her American lit class, but failing badly. What she wanted to do was sit on her bed and wring her hands. She already regretted her rash decision to invite George to come for dinner.
They had been sitting around George’s apartment, competing in a game of Jeopardy! James was Alex Trebek and Lizzie, Marla, and George were each holding a buzzer. Before George’s arrival in Lizzie’s life, the other three had devised a three-person version of it and played regularly. James usually won, Marla came in second, and Lizzie was almost always a distant third. All she knew about was literature, and questions she was sure of didn’t come up nearly often enough. This was the first time George had played with them, and halfway through the game he had a comfortable lead over Marla, while Lizzie, as usual, lagged far behind them.
“Okay, here’s a difficult question that I somehow doubt any of you will get,” James said. “I sure wouldn’t. ‘A movie title from the 1980s that also describes a kind of carpet.’”
“I know this!” Lizzie yelled as James finished reading the clue, and smashed her hand onto her buzzer just as George was saying “I got this!” and hitting his buzzer.
“Lizzie, you were a nanosecond faster,” James said. “What’s the answer?”
“What is Shag?” Lizzie said proudly. She knew it was the right answer. “I love that movie. Is that what you were going to say, George?”
“Uh-huh, it’s my mother’s favorite film, and she made my brother and me watch it with her. It’s pretty good.”
“Wow, nobody else I know has even heard of it. And I’m shocked that you like it, George, since it’s such a girlie sort of movie. You know, it’s so sweet—the whole romance subplot with Annabeth Gish.”
“Sweet’s the right description of it, but it’s not so sweet that it makes your teeth ache.”
Lizzie laughed. “Only a dentist would make a comment like that.”
“Well, I’ve never even heard of it,” James admitted. “Have you, Marla?”
“Nope,” Marla said. “But I’m not fond of sweet movies and usually Lizzie isn’t either. But you know, George, you’ve found the road into our finicky Lizzie’s heart: not only do you like a movie she likes, but you said ‘made my brother and me watch it.’ If you’d said, ‘my brother and I’ you’d have no chance with her. You’ve now passed two of her secret boyfriend tests. Oh, wait, I forgot one, you both like iced tea in any weather. That’s three tests you’ve aced. It’s a match made in heaven.”
George smiled and Lizzie frowned. “Shut up, Marla,” she muttered. But it was true. The more time she spent with George the better she liked him. At least he wasn’t boring. And he was doing awfully well at Jeopardy! She turned to him. “Marla and James go home for Thanksgiving, but if you’re around and don’t have anything to do, would you like to come to my parents’ house for dinner?”
“Is that another test?” George asked Marla. “I’d love to come to Thanksgiving,” he told Lizzie, without waiting for Marla’s answer.
“It’ll be different, that’s for sure,” James warned him. “We were there last year.”
George arrived in a scrum of other guests, doddering professors and their doddering wives, widows and widowers of doddering professors, and all of Mendel’s and Lydia’s students who had no other place to go. George was laden with packages. Even though he’d specifically told her not to, Elaine had FedExed several loaves of cranberry and zucchini breads. For some weird reason she’d also sent a challah, along with some jars of homemade jams, a large box of Frango chocolates, and several bags of gourmet popcorn. He wasn’t sure whether the popcorn was intended for the Bultmanns or not, but he brought it with him anyway. All that, along with the wine (he’d bought two bottles of white and one of red), wasn’t easy to carry. He didn’t want to drop anything but was equally worried about bumping into one of the many elderly guests who probably couldn’t keep upright if someone tapped their arm. Everyone was carrying food, but nobody was as weighed down with packages as George.
He’d been counting on Lizzie answering the door, but instead it was an older man who first greeted the other guests and then looked at George. George assumed it was Mendel.
“You are?” the man asked, raising an eyebrow.
George attempted to transfer all his packages to his left arm so he could shake hands, but was unsuccessful. He resorted to nodding politely. “I’m Lizzie’s friend George.”