“Oh, Lizzie,” George replied sadly, putting down the bowl. “Just because you haven’t come to terms with your own unhappiness, just because you wallow in it, just because you’re afraid to look at it honestly and then turn away from it, is exactly why you don’t believe that what I have to say is important. You romanticize suffering because you believe it gives you some crazy kind of nobility. But how else can we learn, except by using our despair skillfully?”
Lizzie always chose the words she used to counter George’s statements with great care, since she didn’t want George to give up on her entirely. She needed him to be pathologically optimistic. As he began his rebuttal, and the discussion segued into what any normal person would deem an argument, Lizzie, who, like many of his fans, found George’s voice extraordinarily soothing, would sidle into their bedroom, with George following close behind her. He kept talking while she put on an old T-shirt of his, got into bed, piled the blankets over her, and drifted off to sleep. Meanwhile, George was still trying to get her to see the world his way.
Lizzie hoped that George, being the kind, generous, pathologically optimistic, etc., etc., person that he was, was never going to leave her despite the fact that she refused to take him seriously, refused to accept the truth of his theories, and never acknowledged or applauded his deepest-held beliefs about suffering. Yet every speech he gave, every television or radio interview he sat down for, was aimed at Lizzie, trying his best to show her how to be happy. The audiences that hung on every word he said? They were chopped liver. That was George’s one great secret.
*?What Does Lizzie Do All Day??*
This was a question that George spent much time mulling over. In the middle of drilling a patient’s tooth, say, he’d all of a sudden start to wonder what Lizzie was doing at that very moment. Was she home? Was she thinking about him? Was she at one of her many and varied part-time jobs? Later on in his and Lizzie’s marriage, the same thing would happen when he was standing at the lectern, waiting to give one of his speeches. It was of course a no-brainer if she’d come with him—he could then find her in the audience: she always sat as far back as she could, as close to one of the aisles as possible. He knew what she’d be doing, both before he began to speak and all during what plenty of reliable people told him was a rousing presentation: she’d be reading a book. He’d watch her long enough to see her turn a page or two and then he’d start his speech. She almost never looked up at him, except at the end, when she clapped enthusiastically. George was never sure whether she was applauding out of genuine approval or whether she was clapping because she was relieved that it was over.
But when she wasn’t with him, George wondered about it a lot. He’d come home from work and they’d talk about their days, or rather George would talk about his day. When he asked Lizzie what she’d done with her time, her standard answer was “Nothing much.” This was probably three or four shades darker and quite a bit bigger than a little white lie, because Lizzie was spending most of the hours from eight to five trying to find Jack using the public library’s collection of city phone books, a fact that she didn’t ever intend to share with George. George wanted to bang his head against the nearest wall and pull out his hair strand by strand whenever she answered him that way.
“Come on, you must have done something. Did you talk to my mother?”
Lizzie acknowledged that, yes, she and Elaine had had a good conversation; Elaine and Allan were fine and looking forward to seeing them sometime soon.
“Yeah, and then? How did you occupy yourself for the next seven or so hours?”
“I went to the library, I walked some dogs, I dusted at Billy and Sister’s, and then I did some indexing. Then I read a little, made dinner, read some more, and waited for you to come home, and now we’re eating.” She smiled the Lizzie smile that George loved. “So what did you do all day?”
On one of their first dates they’d talked about how they saw their futures unfolding. It was a pretty short conversation. George was going to finish dental school and set up or buy into a practice somewhere, maybe Ann Arbor, maybe Tulsa, maybe somewhere entirely new that he’d always wanted to explore, like Sitka or Salt Lake City or St. Paul.
Lizzie laughed. “That’s your criterion for a place to explore, is it? Anywhere as long as it begins with an S?”
“I never thought of that. They all just sounded like interesting places to me. But what about you?”
“What places sound interesting to me, you mean?”
“No, what your future is going to look like. What you’re going to be when you’re all grown up.”
“People have been asking me that since I was a little girl,” Lizzie said. “I remember that once in third grade I didn’t do the career assignment at first. You were supposed to interview someone who did what you wanted to do when you grew up. I mean, clearly you were supposed to interview your father or mother, which I wasn’t going to do. So I just wrote ‘I don’t NO!!!!’ with four exclamations at the top of a piece of paper and turned it in. I thought I was so clever—I mean, of course I knew the difference between ‘no’ and ‘know,’ but the teacher wasn’t at all impressed with me.”
“What happened?”
Lizzie shrugged. “Oh, first she wanted my parents to come in for a conference, but of course Mendel and Lydia weren’t about to interrupt their busy schedules to talk to her, so they had my babysitter, Sheila, schedule an appointment with the teacher and meanwhile I pretended that being a babysitter was my goal in life, so I interviewed Sheila. The point is, I still don’t know what I want to do with the rest of my life, except that I know that there’s no way I would ever be a psychologist like my parents are.”
“Really? That’s always seemed like an interesting career.”
“Trust me, George, it’s absolutely not,” Lizzie assured him. “It’s deadly. I wouldn’t major in psychology in a gazillion trillion years. So I’m majoring in English because I’ve always liked to read, but I’m finding those classes pretty awful too. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll marry someone really wealthy and not do anything. Or just live with Marla and James after they get married and take care of their children after they have them.”
“That would validate your third-grade paper, right?”
Lizzie smiled appreciatively. “That’s good, George. I never thought of that.”
While they were dating, George refrained from bringing up Lizzie’s future, but after they were married he sometimes couldn’t help himself. It wasn’t that George was super-eager for money or renown for himself—he really just wanted to make the world a better place—but he wanted more than anything else for Lizzie to be happy, and he had trouble understanding how she could possibly be happy when she was doing nothing with her life. It became one of their earliest and ongoing Difficult Conversations.
“That’s not fair, George. I do plenty.”
“Oh, right,” George would correct himself. “You actually do a lot, except it doesn’t get you anywhere.”