1. Sheila telling her that Lizzie should never ever learn how sausages or laws were made. And if she happened to find out, she most definitely shouldn’t tell Sheila about it.
2. The crackly, sticky, generally uncomfortable feel of the torn leather booths at Gilmore’s, which, regardless, is her second favorite coffee shop, because it’s where she and Jack used to go.
3. Being at a family Hanukkah party at Andrea’s house when she was about ten and hearing Andrea’s married cousin Ginger saying to someone (but who?), “I have to sleep under the bed if I don’t want to get pregnant.”
4. The painting of a naked woman on the wall by the stairs at Andrea’s house, and how embarrassed she was each time she saw it.
5. Finding the rhyme “Monday’s child is fair of face” in some book from the library and, after figuring out that she was born on a Wednesday, realizing that it was why she was filled with woe. Too bad she hadn’t been born on a Tuesday, full of grace, or, even better, on a Friday, since then she’d be both loving and giving.
6. Taking a chance by telling a Health Service doctor that she felt awfully blue much of the time only to have him respond by telling her that she had an unreasonable expectation of happiness. Lizzie wonders whether her desire for happiness, as opposed to an expectation of it, is unreasonable as well.
7. The smell of Wind Song, the cologne Sheila always wore.
8. Her father telling her angrily that there were more important things to cry over than the fate of a fictional horse and being shocked that he knew that Black Beauty was a horse.
9. Her Halloween costume when she was seven: a traffic light, which Sheila created.
10. Naomi Abrams telling Lizzie (in third grade) that her mother looked like a witch. The thing was, Lydia’s appearance was somewhat witchy.
11. Her first-grade teacher announcing that the next person who talked out of turn would have to stand in the corner for five minutes, and, wouldn’t you know it, Lizzie was that person. She spent a significant amount of time in the first grade standing in that same corner.
12. How, when she was nine, in third grade, right before Sheila stopped working for the Bultmanns, Lizzie told her parents at dinner—it was dispirited pork chops and undercooked scalloped potatoes (although she knows full well that “dispirited” is not a word she’d have ever said back then)—that her homework was to draw a family tree and present it to the class, with stories about her ancestors. Mendel looked down at his plate and took a small bite of potato. Lizzie could almost hear it crunching between his teeth. Lydia said grimly, “Ah, the family genealogy. I wondered when that would rear its ugly head. You’d think the Holocaust would have put paid to that particular assignment.” (Lizzie also knew that she had never heard the word “genealogy” before Lydia said it. Or what “put paid” meant.)
Lydia continued, “A study of genealogy does not work for such happy few as we, since we have no ancestors.” (It was many years before Lizzie realized that Lydia’s “happy” was to be understood as ironic.)
“But,” began Lizzie just as Mendel shook his head.
“No. Your mother is right. Use Sheila’s family instead. Pretend they’re your own. She’ll be happy to help you draw a family tree and you can ask her if you can meet her grandparents. They’ll tell you all the stories you need to make a presentation.”
Which is how for a while Lizzie’s father (Warren) was a man who worked at the Bendix factory outside Ann Arbor and her mother (Adele) was a secretary at the university. Warren’s parents were a minister (Jacob) and a housewife (Lorene). Lizzie’s pretend paternal grandparents met when Irv was working as a chassis assembly-line supervisor at the Ford River Rouge plant in Dearborn and Mary was the waitress at a restaurant where he went on his union-authorized breaks to drink coffee and smoke. The minister collected model trains (HO gauge), which he bequeathed to his son Warren, who turned his garage over to the collection and enthusiastically built it up to an impressive degree. The garage was filled with several Ping-Pong tables that had been pushed together to display the complete setup. During her oral report to the class, Lizzie noted that it was almost time for him to find another, much bigger place to keep his trains, because the collection was rapidly outgrowing the garage. “My dad,” Lizzie continued, “loves trestles, so there are lots of them that the train has to go over as it makes its way through the big towns and small cities. There are farms and schools and lots of houses. There are even people living in those places, and they have dogs and cats and one of the houses even has a tiny rabbit on the front lawn. Kids stand on the steps of their house and wave at the conductor and engineer when the train goes by.
“My dad,” Lizzie went on, “was sorry he didn’t have a boy to share his hobby with.” Her mom, she said, wasn’t much interested in the trains. But she, her father’s daughter, loved them, although she was forbidden to play with the trains unless her dad was there.
Lizzie passed some pictures around for the class to see: a Polaroid of the railroad’s layout. Another one of her grandfather Jacob’s first church, in Milan, Ohio. And another taken at her parents’ wedding, which was at Greenfield Village, the indoor-outdoor museum that housed Henry Ford’s collections of cars.
Nobody challenged her, not even the teacher, whose name Lizzie didn’t remember, and who definitely knew who her real parents were. She might even have gotten an A on the assignment.
*?The Cornerbacks?*
The boys who played defense were much less interesting to Lizzie than the offense had been. After all, defense had originally been Andrea’s bailiwick, and Lizzie had decided to go on with the Great Game only after finishing with the offense in a badly mistaken desire to complete what she’d started. Honestly, those eleven defensive players are mostly blurred together in her mind.
The two cornerbacks were Micah Delavan and Mitchell Oberski. They were inseparable and together known as the M&M’s. Micah only had four fingers on his left hand, while Mitchell had a large birthmark the shape of Wyoming on his back. The two of them went off to college together and as far as Lizzie knew they were together still.
*?What Lizzie Hates About Herself?*
That she can’t bring herself to tell George about Jack.
That she can’t bring herself to tell George about the shame of the Great Game.
That she never should have told Jack she was the girl in the Psychology Today article, because that was why he left her and never came back.
That she is a too-easy weeper. Lizzie understands this to be a reaction to the fact that Mendel and Lydia became furious when, as a child, she cried. What sort of parents refuse to let their child cry? Unfortunately, the sort that gave birth to, and raised, Elizabeth Frieda Bultmann Goldrosen, that’s who.