That she always, always either loses one of a pair of earrings or gets an ineradicable stain on a white shirt.
That she looks exactly like Mendel, if Mendel were female, although she supposes that it’s better than looking like the witch Lydia.
That she’s failed so miserably in so many different parts of her life.
That she is the same rotten housekeeper that her mother was. George was the total opposite. He could walk into a room, give it a stern glance, and it immediately resolved itself into neatness: the books lie attractively on the coffee table, the magazines arrange themselves in a pile from oldest down to newest; and the dust bunnies cast themselves into the air and disappear. On the other hand, when Lizzie walks into a room, chaos ensues. No matter how hard she tries, the room remains a mess. George counseled patience (he pretty much always counseled patience), advising her to vacuum more carefully, to take her time and do one thing to completion at a time. This was very hard, not to say impossible, for Lizzie to accomplish. She hated herself for this thought but secretly wished that George had some grad students that she could co-opt to clean their house.
*?Christmas chez Goldrosens, 1992?*
December 21
Part of the Goldrosen tradition was that George always came home on the twenty-first of December and flew back early on the twenty-sixth. For Lizzie, the day they left Ann Arbor proved frustrating in the extreme. Already nervous and regretting her decision to accompany George home, she twice came close to bolting from her seat while they were waiting for their flight and finding her own way home. Nothing that happened on the trip down to Tulsa boded well, in her opinion, for future trips to Tulsa (and she was right; their Christmas flights never went particularly smoothly). Their plane out of Metro Airport departed late because a fierce storm over Lake Michigan caused whiteout conditions at O’Hare, so they missed their connection in Chicago and were rerouted via Salt Lake City, which involved an endless stay in a terminal that Lizzie thought resembled a waiting room for long-haul buses. Of course George was perfectly content. He read old issues of the Journal of the American Dental Association, fascinated by the intricacies of veneers, tooth decay, implants, and whether or not a dentist had a moral, if not legal, obligation to report suspected child abuse. Although Lizzie’d brought a novel with her (Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees), she couldn’t sit still long enough to open it and begin reading. Instead she paced.
Lizzie hated waiting for anything: she became bored and edgy, inclined to snap at everyone around, even strangers. She walked around the terminal, growing more upset by the minute. At first she tried to decide if she’d made the right decision by coming with George. She wondered what Jack would say if he knew what she was doing. She wondered if she knew what she was doing. Meeting Mendel and not meeting Lydia at Thanksgiving hadn’t sent George scurrying out of her life. He didn’t exactly enjoy Thanksgiving dinner with the Bultmann family (what sane person would?), but he didn’t give up on Lizzie as a result. She sort of wished that Jack had come home with her sometime that spring they were together; maybe that would have helped him understand her better.
All this thinking about the present, the past, and the future was exhausting. By the time they finally landed in Tulsa, Lizzie was worn-out, hungry, wired from drinking too many Cokes in the Salt Lake airport and too much coffee on the plane. She’d had it with the weather gods and (unfairly—it was mostly unfair to blame George for much of anything; Lizzie knew this, but it didn’t prevent her from doing so) with George for dragging her to Oklahoma. George was simply glad they’d finally arrived. Now his parents could meet Lizzie.
Elaine and Allan were waiting for them at the gate. They took turns hugging George and Lizzie. “We’re so happy you’re here,” Allan told them.
Lizzie tried not to smile too widely, wondering if either of George’s parents noticed that one of her incisors was slightly crooked.
“Lizzie,” Elaine said, hugging her again, “we’re just thrilled to finally meet you. It’s lovely that you came home with George. He’s told us so much about you.” Lizzie tried not to pull away from Elaine too quickly, but she was, sadly, too much of a Bultmann, used to Bultmann pseudo-hugs, to feel comfortable in Elaine’s embrace.
“I’m glad to be here too,” she managed to say.
“George, you and Dad wait for the suitcases in baggage claim, and we’ll meet you at the car.”
“George’s told me a lot about your family’s Christmases,” Lizzie said as they walked. Walking to the car! This was like a toy airport compared to Detroit’s.
“We do have a ton of family traditions,” Elaine admitted. “Some of them go back to my childhood, but mostly they’re things we’ve just come up with since the boys were babies. I love this time of year. You’ll see. It’s sort of sad that the days just whiz by.”
Just at the moment, days whizzing by sounded good to Lizzie.
“Oh, here they come. Good. You both must be starving. Let’s hurry and get you home.”
The Goldrosens’ house was at the end of a cul-de-sac. It was redbrick, two-storied, stately, and serene. It looked only a little smaller than the Kappa house in Ann Arbor. It looked nothing at all like the house where Lizzie grew up. “I’ve put you in the bedroom that’s directly across the hall from George,” Elaine said. “Let’s get your luggage upstairs, and as soon as you come down we can eat. It’s just so lovely that you’re here,” she repeated. “I wish Todd had come home. Australia’s so far away. It’s always so nice to be together on holidays, especially Christmas.”
The Goldrosen traditions turned out to be many and various. Throughout them all, Lizzie tried to look happy and as though she were enjoying everything. This was mostly not very difficult, although at night her jaw ached from smiling. She would recall that first Christmas visit much later, when she’d go to parties honoring George and have to appear to be having a good time in that same determined way in front of his devoted fans and avid followers.
December 22
Right after a sumptuous breakfast that included bagels (which arrived via FedEx, every week, from the St. Viateur Bagel Shop in Montreal. “These are the bagels I grew up with,” Elaine told Lizzie. “I think they’re so much better than the ones everyone raves about in New York”), cream cheese, lox, tomatoes, Swiss cheese, and red onions, George and his father left to go to Allan’s office so he could show George all the latest equipment and generally talk teeth.