Some fans thought that if Joe Parsons chose to devote his life to football he could rival Dick Butkus at the middle linebacker position. Joe played hard (he was a vicious tackler) and had great instincts for what was going to happen next on the field. What Lizzie remembered best about him, though, was how polite he was—the only guy on the team who opened the car door for her when he drove her home after his Friday of the Great Game was done. Following a great career with the Vikings, Joe became a noted play-by-play announcer with ESPN. His cogent analyses were a big hit with George, and the fact that Lizzie went to high school with him made listening to him even more fun. Of course Lizzie couldn’t tell him that what she most associated Joe Parsons with was the Philip Larkin poem that began “They fuck you up, your mum and dad / They may not mean to, but they do,” which was what she recited to herself instead of paying attention to what was going on between Joe Parsons’s body and hers.
*?Difficult Conversations Involving?* Plans for the Wedding
Over the next year there were many Difficult Conversations about the wedding. They began almost immediately after Lydia and Mendel and Allan and Elaine met. The meeting did not go well. The Goldrosens flew up from Tulsa for the weekend to celebrate George and Lizzie’s engagement and insisted on taking everyone out to dinner, which was almost certainly a mistake. Allan and Elaine kept trying to make conversation and Lydia and Mendel kept rigorously resisting having anything to do with their conversational gambits. When Elaine enthused about how happy they were about the engagement and how much they loved Lizzie, Mendel nodded gamely in agreement—Lizzie could tell that he was mentally writing the article that would come out of this dinner—and Lydia said that they liked George a lot too. Small talk was impossible. Politics was a nonstarter. Books were out. Nobody wanted to talk about the weather (it was cold and threatening to snow). Since the Bultmanns rarely if ever went to the movies, it was immaterial to them whether or not the Goldrosens liked any particular film. Each family was way outside its comfort zone. To the Bultmanns the Goldrosens were like exotic animals, and the only animals they were interested in were rats. To the Goldrosens the Bultmanns were equally exotic, survivors of what they’d always thought was an extinct tribe. George was dumbfounded at seeing firsthand oil and water not mixing; he kept throwing out new topics for discussion. Lizzie was mortified and promised herself that for the rest of her life she would do all she could to keep the two families apart.
Lizzie knew, from all the articles that Elaine had sent her, the exact kind of wedding that she wanted them to have, which included pretty much everything Lizzie didn’t want. She didn’t want a wedding wedding. She told George that if they were getting married, then they should just get married. She didn’t want to buy a dress she’d wear only once, she certainly didn’t want her father to walk her down the aisle. She didn’t want an aisle. She didn’t want anyone there, except his parents and Marla and James. She didn’t want a party. She didn’t want an open bar and an orchestra and dancing and a dinner followed by an overfull sweet table. She didn’t want to cut a cake. She didn’t want a chuppah to stand under during the ceremony. She didn’t want the rabbi who bar mitzvah’d George to marry them. She didn’t want photographs taken of the festive occasion.
Have her parents there? Forget it. They’d probably be frowning over their ever-present yellow pads of paper, making it clear that they didn’t want to talk to anyone except each other, taking notes all during the supposed festivities on the behavior of wedding guests. Mendel and Lydia were so foreign, so dark and closed in, especially when compared to the sunniness of the Goldrosens and all the friends of the Goldrosens. Plus Lizzie feared that when her parents saw that a rabbi was involved in the ceremony, they would just get up and leave in disgust.
She knew she was being horribly unreasonable and was already prepared to give in as gracefully as she could manage to many of Elaine’s wishes (which she knew were more than likely George’s wishes as well), but she wanted to give herself lots and lots of room to negotiate.
As Lizzie suspected, George actually wanted all those things that Lizzie professed to despise.
“I do despise them, George,” Lizzie retorted. “Why do you have to say ‘profess to despise’ as if I’m not really telling the truth?”
(“We’ve got her back, folks,” the voices in her head announced. They addressed her directly, saying, “Because everyone knows you lie all the time. Your life is a lie.”)
“Okay, I apologize, you’re right. I understand that it’s the way you think you feel now, but, Lizzie, your parents have to be at the wedding. Just imagine how they’d feel if they weren’t even invited. If we snuck off somewhere and got married without even telling them where it was or when.”
“Honestly, George, sometimes I wonder just how smart you are. In the face of all evidence to the contrary, you continue to believe that Mendel and Lydia are just like your parents, only perhaps a lot more introverted. But they’re not. They don’t do social things like parties. They just do the bare minimum to keep the dean of the psych department happy. And we can’t have a wedding in Ann Arbor. I don’t want to plan it. I don’t even know where I’d start figuring out how to do it. And who would pay for it? Do you want to ask them? They’d laugh in my face if I asked them.”
“I don’t believe that. But what if we have the wedding in Tulsa? We could let my mom plan the whole thing. She’d love doing it.”
“George, please, please listen to me. I really do not want that kind of a wedding. Dee-oh Not, with a capital N, whether it’s in Tulsa or Ann Arbor or Timbuktu. If we have to have a ceremony, then let’s just find someone to do it. Maybe James could wangle some way to become a judge for a day. Maybe we can marry ourselves.”
George chuckled, but Lizzie knew he wasn’t amused. “We are marrying ourselves,” he said.