Lizzie sighed. “It’s fine. It’ll be okay, really. Everybody has secrets, don’t they?”
“Not secrets like this,” Marla said darkly. “I love you, Lizzie, and always will. And I will always, always, keep your secrets. But this, what this means to you and George, is an important secret. It’s not the equivalent of a little white lie. It’d be like me not telling James about the abortion.”
“But James knew about the abortion; he was with you when you had it.”
“Don’t be deliberately naive; it doesn’t become you. You know what I mean: some other James I was involved with.”
What Lizzie wanted to say was that Marla reminded her of how, in fairy tales, there was always someone at a wedding to prophesize a tragic future, but before she could respond, Allan came up to them. “Don’t hog my new daughter, Marla,” he said, smiling. “You get to see her all the time. I want to tell her again how happy we are that she’s part of our family.”
*?Why George Loves Lizzie?*
1. Her smile. When Lizzie smiles it’s pretty impossible not to smile back. George has seen evidence of this with train conductors, hitherto grumpy salespeople, and little kids. Even when he is most frustrated with her (see number two, below), her smile can almost always make everything better. Especially now that he’s fixed that incisor.
2. He’s never bored by Lizzie. Exasperated, yes, quite often. Very exasperated, yes, more than just occasionally. Extremely exasperated, yes, there were definitely times when Lizzie’s sadness and pessimism drove George bonkers, when he knew a life without her would be easier. But all she had to do was smile (see number one, above) or laugh appreciatively at one of his puns (see number three, below) and he was back in love with her. Did this make him weak or stupid or what? George didn’t know.
3. Her sense of humor. Lizzie is wonderful with sarcasm and wordplay (she shares his love of a good pun), but she’s a terrible joke teller because she usually forgets the telling detail that makes the joke a joke. Here’s where George comes in, since he always remembers that detail perfectly.
4. Her intelligence. George had known smart women before he met Lizzie (Julia Draznin, for one, and his mother for another) but he soon realized that Lizzie was probably the smartest woman he’d ever met. George thought of himself as being quite intelligent (he’d always gotten high scores on standardized tests), but he’d never been quick. He liked to read books slowly and carefully (he was virtually incapable of skimming), with frequent pauses to think about what he had just read; Lizzie devoured books, one after another, like a chain-smoker with her cigarettes. She was like a lightning streak across the sky, picking up and remembering odd and interesting facts about whatever interested her, and a lot did. George would never call Lizzie a deep thinker, but, boy, she was the ideal Trivial Pursuit or Jeopardy! partner. George was frequently surprised at what Lizzie knew or didn’t know. Perfectly ordinary facts like what latitude meant were beyond her, while the sort of minuscule details of someone’s life—the name of Albert Einstein’s first wife (it was Mileva Einstein-Maric?, George learned from Lizzie) were on the tip of her tongue.
4. Her breasts. As a late twentieth-century, well-educated male, one fully aware of the crimes the patriarchy had committed on the opposite sex, George knew that much more went into loving someone than their physical attributes, but it has to be said that he loved Lizzie’s breasts. Their size and shape fit the palm of his hand perfectly.
5. Her neediness. Lizzie needed George in ways that no one else ever had or, he believed, ever would. She needed him to do the ordinary things that anyone could have done (including Lizzie if she’d been inclined to try harder: unscrew recalcitrant jars, climb a ladder to change the lightbulb on the side of the house, slice vegetables with their mandoline), and George enjoyed the feeling of being needed. More significantly, Lizzie, in George’s view, needed rescuing from her own sadness, and George was convinced that he was the only person in the world who could do so.
*?Two Deaths?*
Three months after George and Lizzie got married, Lydia and Mendel were killed. Their car skidded one cold and rainy February night while they were coming home from a performance of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro in Detroit and I-94 suddenly became a sheet of black ice. The campus newspaper, the Michigan Daily, added black borders around the headline “stars go out in psych department” and the first line of the story began “Family, students, and colleagues are distraught at the deaths . . .” which Lizzie found hard to take seriously. She was certainly not distraught but rather somewhat unbalanced by the event. She found it unnerving but not necessarily unpleasant to think of herself as an orphan, even when she knew, intellectually, that orphanhood was the natural state of the adult child. But “distraught” implied rending of garments and weeping until your eyes were red and your skin turned blotchy, which wasn’t going to happen with her.
Actually, she couldn’t imagine who if any of her parents’ colleagues and students could possibly be that upset. Mendel and Lydia were respected and admired but not really liked. Friendship had never been on their minds: they were way too busy analyzing patterns of behavior. Yet there was some talk in the university community of calling off Saturday’s football game against Purdue—the Bultmanns brought in a whole lot of research money—but nobody except maybe the very unpopular and soon-to-depart-for-greener-pastures-in-Seattle provost took that suggestion seriously. At the University of Michigan, football ruled. The only time a game had been canceled was the Saturday after President Kennedy was shot. The team was scheduled to play their archrival, Ohio State. Many die-hard fans were still furious about that, more than three decades after the fact. So nobody in their right mind could even expect something similar for the Bultmanns, research money be damned.