“You know what I mean. Is that even possible? Or how about if we don’t get married at all? Let’s just live together.”
That was not going to happen. Over the course of the following year it became clear that a wedding would take place. Conversations on what this would actually entail were endless. After some tears (Elaine’s), some frustration with his beloved wife-to-be as well as his mother (George), and a mad desire to just run away and hope she ran into Jack somewhere (Lizzie), they reached a compromise. They’d get married by a judge in Ann Arbor on the Sunday after Thanksgiving. The only guests would be their immediate families, which included George’s grandparents and Marla and James. And Blake and Alicia, if they could get time off from work, George added firmly. Lizzie wanted to offer a mild objection to having Blake and Alicia (especially Alicia) at the wedding but knew how much that would hurt George and didn’t say anything. Maybe she’d get lucky and there would be a late-November snowstorm in Tulsa, making it impossible for anyone to fly up to Michigan.
Then, on New Year’s Eve, Allan and Elaine would host a dinner (with a band and dancing and an open bar and a sweet table) in Tulsa to celebrate the wedding. It would have everything that Lizzie didn’t want, aside from the chuppah and rabbi and marriage vows. Lizzie would need to buy something lovely to wear. “It’ll be my special gift to you,” Elaine told her.
*?The Bracelet?*
Just hours before she was going to marry George, Lizzie was emptying the contents of her dresser drawers into a suitcase when she found the bracelet. Following the ceremony in Judge Larry Martin’s chambers and the luncheon that followed it, she and George were going to move the remainder of Lizzie’s stuff to his apartment (now their apartment) on Nob Hill Place. Lizzie was looking forward to none of it. In the immediate future she particularly dreaded the lunch, which would bring together Allan and Elaine, both sets of George’s grandparents, and Lydia and Mendel. Plus Blake and Alicia. Even knowing that Marla and James would be there didn’t make her feel much better. So here Lizzie was, emptying out her dresser drawers, waiting for George to pick her up and take her to the courthouse for the wedding.
Of course the bracelet hadn’t really been lost. She’d put it there herself, underneath her socks and underwear, over three years ago, when she more or less accepted the apparent fact that Jack was no longer part of her life, and probably wouldn’t ever be again. It was intended to be his graduation present, something meaningful that represented how they’d met and what they loved about each other. A book would have been the easy choice, a collection of the poems of Housman, say, which would certainly evoke their shared past. But a book didn’t seem special enough. You can buy a book for anyone. Books were one of Lizzie and Jack’s things, it was true, but Lizzie had been sure that there was something better out there, something amazingly wonderful that was meant just for Jack.
In July, when Lizzie was still hopeful that, despite the lack of letters, he would for sure be back the next month, she wandered through the annual Ann Arbor art fair, looking for the perfect gift. After poking through the many booths displaying sculpture, paintings, photographs, drawings, and jewelry for sale she found the present she’d hoped to find. It was a bracelet, a silver bangle bracelet, perfectly round, about a quarter of an inch wide (just barely wide enough, Lizzie would discover, to accommodate an inscription). It was both endless and somehow self-contained. It fit over your hand and was clearly meant to remain on your wrist through thick and thin, during the bad times and good, the days and the nights, the months and the years. She slipped it onto her own wrist to see how it looked. She pictured Jack wearing it, his arm, tanned from the Texas summer, a sharp contrast with the silver of the bracelet. She closed her eyes because the image made her so sad.
That night, lying in bed and unable to fall asleep, Lizzie remembered the note she’d sent Jack with the line from Millay’s “Modern Declaration,” and first thing the next morning she took the bracelet back to the man who’d fashioned it and asked him to engrave “Jack, shall love you always” on the inside, where it would touch his wrist.
Well. That was then, this is now, as George would often say, quoting the title of S. E. Hinton’s novel. It was his favorite book from his early adolescence and he never tired of reminding Lizzie that Hinton was also from Tulsa, and that she’d come to talk to his ninth-grade English class. And autographed his much-beat-up copy. And smiled at him and said that it looked like he’d read it more than once, which was certainly true. He’d pressed the copy into Lizzie’s hands during her very first Christmas visit to Tulsa and insisted that she read it. When she dutifully finished it, she wondered if she could tell George that while she could see why he’d loved it so much, she actually felt that at this moment in her life she might just be the wrong demographic to appreciate it as much as he had when he was fourteen.
And when September came and went without a letter, without Jack, she stuck the bracelet in the back of a drawer and tried to forget it existed. But it did exist, and here it was. When she heard George coming into the apartment, she hesitated for a moment, then took the bracelet and put it on. Lizzie was ready to get married.
“I’m here,” she called, somehow happier than she’d been for a long time.
After the ceremony, after the “I now pronounce you husband and wife” and after their first married kiss, after everyone had already hugged Lizzie and shook George’s hand and congratulated them both and were busy putting on coats and arranging rides to the restaurant where the wedding lunch would be held, Marla pulled her aside.
“Tell me, my dear Mrs. Goldrosen, that I’m not seeing that bracelet on your wrist. Don’t you think that wearing something that was supposed to be a gift for another guy as part of your wedding ensemble is a bit much, even for you?”
Lizzie grimaced but allowed as how Marla might be right. “But I didn’t know what else to do with it; I was packing and there it was and then George showed up and—”
“Well, one option is that you just left it where it was. Or, I know, you could have thrown it away the moment you saw it in the drawer. It just doesn’t look good for the future, you know?”
“I don’t think it’s that significant,” Lizzie said, but Marla shook her head in disagreement.
“Look, take it off, give it to me. I’ll hide it for the rest of your life. You don’t want George to find it, do you? Or your kids? I can just hear them: ‘Who’s Jack, Mommy? Why will you always love him? What about Daddy?’ How will you answer that?”