“I guess,” Lizzie said. “I mean, I sort of know what the words mean, especially ‘international’ and ‘association.’ Those I’m sure about. Why?”
“Their hundredth anniversary was about ten years ago, and they decided to start a chain of grocery stores to make some money for the group.”
George thought that Lizzie must know that he was joking—that his explanation was so ridiculous it had to be invented—but had chosen not to laugh because she knew he wanted her to. He believed that until several years later, when they were in Sheridan, Wyoming, for a dental convention and saw another IGA store.
“Oh, look,” Lizzie exclaimed. “There’s another one of those Geophysical stores. They’re everywhere, aren’t they?”
Her gullibility was only one of the many reasons that George adored Lizzie. And the fact that she usually could laugh at herself was another.
*?George Proposes, Christmas, 1994?*
Lizzie was in the kitchen with Elaine when George asked her to go for a walk with him. Lizzie didn’t want to go. It had poured in the middle of the night and rain was still falling fitfully. That morning the sun never really seemed to rise and the sky was a dirty gray. It was not great walking weather. If the temperature had been about fifteen degrees colder, it might have snowed, but it hovered around thirty-five degrees. In neither of the two Christmases Lizzie spent with the Goldrosens in Tulsa had she seen one flake of snow. She doubted that it ever got cold enough to snow in Oklahoma, but whenever she offered that opinion everyone within earshot quickly brought up freezing rain. They all had stories to share. Elaine told her about trying to get to her dentist’s office at Sixty-First and Yale (a notorious Tulsa hill) to have an abscessed tooth dealt with, when only her father’s driving skills (he and her mother had been visiting from Montreal, where they had plenty of experience driving in snow) got her there on time, or at all. They could see cars skidding, racing their engines, trying to make it up to the top and failing. And George remembered the snowball fights of his youth and the times in Stillwater that Theta Pond froze and they’d all gone skating. Hot chocolate was mentioned several times in the retelling of these memories. Allan chimed in to remind Elaine and George of the time they were coming home from a long weekend at Silver Dollar City and an ice storm that quickly descended doomed a car that they’d already agreed was going way too fast when it passed them. They saw it later, upside down, on the side of the road, having slid through the guardrail. She wasn’t sure she really believed any of them. She’d like to see it snow in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for herself.
“We’re not done with the baking yet,” Lizzie told him, straightening up from putting a cookie sheet in the oven. “Batches more to go before I sleep.”
Out of the corner of her eye she saw George and Elaine exchange a meaningful glance. Now, this was decidedly odd. It happened that Lizzie rightfully considered herself an expert on the explication and implications of meaningful looks. Something was up. This was clearly not business as usual for the Goldrosens, whose lives, unlike the Bultmanns, mercifully lacked enough secrets to make such glances necessary.
Meaningful looks were a stockin-trade for Mendel and Lydia. Lizzie could remember all the times when she had complained about something—the food at dinner, a classmate’s behavior, the book she had been assigned to read, her head hurting (she had had many headaches as a child), and how her parents would look at one another, nod, and then Mendel would take out the notebook he always carried and carefully make a note of whatever it was that was bothering Lizzie and detail her reaction to it. Try as she might, Lizzie had never been able to find even one of the notebooks, so she couldn’t be sure that’s what he was doing. Still, the timing indicated it was, and what else could he be writing down so assiduously? Lizzie suspected that there were dozens of notebooks and that after each was filled, Mendel gave it to a favored graduate student to transcribe. She knew there were many dissertations based on her childhood; she’d seen the bound copies lying around the house, but she’d never found the original notes. After her parents died, the notebooks were the first things Lizzie searched for, but they were nowhere to be found. Perhaps they were in some hitherto undiscovered and now inaccessible bank vault.
“You two go on,” Elaine advised. “Don’t worry, Lizzie, there’ll still be plenty of cookie dough left when you come home. We’re nowhere near done.”
By the time they got to the Arkansas River Trail and started their walk, Lizzie had descended into a bad mood. She hated the weather. She missed snow. She worried about that look that George and Elaine had exchanged. What did it mean? She complained to George that he always got stopped by every red light whenever he was driving; she carped about the fact that they had to park a few blocks away from the start of the trail; she grumped that she hadn’t planned on walking that day; she grumbled about how boring the walk was, that the Arkansas might be much better known than the Huron River, but that it was nowhere near as lovely and lively, especially on this dark, dank, rain-filled day. She whined to George that the path was puddled and muddy and she was ruining her shoes. She knew that she was being both mean and unfair to George, and that he didn’t deserve any of it. More importantly, she knew that she didn’t deserve someone like George, so intrinsically kind and forgiving. But she couldn’t help it.
Her bad mood deepened as she read aloud the engraved plaques that marked many of the benches, indicating for whom or in whose memory the bench had been given. “‘Rest Awhile: Auntie Never Met a Stranger,’” she mocked. “What sentimental crapola. ‘For Our Darling Darling Nini, Who Loved This Park.’ She loved this park? Nini? Why? Oh, yeah, I know why, because she’d probably never seen a real park.”
Stop, stop STOP Lizzie, she admonished herself. Just keep quiet. Be nice to George. He’s so nice to you.
Throughout all of this, George remained heroically silent. He held Lizzie’s hand firmly. In fact, Lizzie realized, he wasn’t really listening to her at all. He was whistling the “doe, a deer” song from The Sound of Music, a movie Lizzie despised partly because she enjoyed being in a minority and complaining about how misguided the majority was, and partly because she hated the film’s utter sappiness and predictability.
Lizzie stopped reading the plaques’ messages out loud. It was actually no fun behaving this way if George wasn’t responding to it, either by agreeing with Lizzie’s sentiments (no way that was going to happen this time, Lizzie knew; he’d chosen to watch The Sound of Music dozens of times) or by arguing with her. Honestly, she’d much prefer being at home with Elaine.
Then she noticed Blake and Alicia up ahead, sitting on a bench.
“Oh, no,” she groaned. “Did you know they’d be here?”