Having gotten nowhere so far in her search for Jack, Lizzie was guiltily aware that George had unknowingly described her predicament. He went on, “I just don’t see how you can be satisfied with all the part-time jobs you’re doing. Are you? Satisfied, I mean.”
“I don’t know. I guess so. If this is the first day of the rest of my life, I still don’t know what I want to do with the rest of it.”
“I can’t even keep up with what you’re doing every day,” George complained.
She patted his hand. “You don’t need to, you know. I keep track of them.”
“But . . .” he began.
“Don’t let’s talk about it anymore, George.”
So they didn’t, that night.
In fact, Lizzie considered her real job to be finding Jack, but naturally this wasn’t something she was ever going to share with George. She tried to divert his concern at her lack of ambition or worry about how she was spending her days by keeping busy at several part-time jobs. Sometimes she had three or four going at the same time, so over the course of a week, say, she’d have to run from one to the other to cover them all. This led to a busy series of days, days that Lizzie considered wasted because she didn’t have much time to go to the library to search through phone books for Jack. Other weeks she’d be barely busy at all and after spending time at the library she’d come home and bake cookies or, after consulting Marla and/or Elaine, concoct an elaborate dinner for George. He was happy about that too.
In no particular order, these were the jobs that had occupied Lizzie’s time since she graduated from college:
Dog walker: Lizzie was an excellent dog walker, although she came to that career only after she and George married. As a child, she’d always wanted a dog for a pet, but when she was eleven and first raised the issue with her parents, they told her absolutely not, that dogs carried germs. Plus they were just too much trouble. In any case, Mendel and Lydia didn’t want to find hair all over the house, not to mention fleas. Lizzie did some research and found that poodles (a) didn’t shed and (b) were actually incredibly intelligent. A potential pet’s high IQ was something that she felt would impress her parents; her attempt to convince them by the use of this factual information was duly noted, but their answer was still no.
Lizzie found that it was quite easy to set yourself up as a professional dog walker. One morning she posted an ad on the bulletin board at Gilmore’s and by evening she’d heard from three dog owners who wanted her to start walking their beloved pets the very next day. Lizzie enjoyed the work. She found that the busyness of wrangling three or four dogs at a time was a good way to prevent her from wondering if she’d ever find Jack. She didn’t mind picking up the not-inconsequential amount of poop that three dogs produced. Her regulars were Princess, Foucault, and Andrew; she took one or more of them almost every day to the park, where they could run free for an hour or so. Somewhat surprisingly to Lizzie, it turned out that she was wildly in demand by other owners. She wondered if it was the dogs themselves who recommended her to other dogs, who in turn somehow communicated with the people in their life, who then got in touch with Lizzie. In any event, there was a long waiting list of dogs eager for Lizzie’s expert handling.
Indexer for the Midwest Fire Protection Association: this job involved studying magazines and newspapers in search of articles about fires, big or little. She read about house fires, forest fires, gasoline fires, electrical fires, fires set deliberately, and the occasional chemical fire. For every fire she found, Lizzie created an index card, noting where the article had appeared, its author and title, date of publication, date of the fire, pages the article was on, and a brief summary, which often included the number of deaths in said fire. The days she worked at this job she had a lot to talk to George about at dinner, although it was often gruesome stuff, and she secretly prided herself on knowing the details of any fire in the whole country that someone might bring up in the course of a conversation. Fires were only very rarely the topic of conversation, but whenever they were, Lizzie had much to contribute.
Proofreader: George was in the habit of reading the want ads while he and Lizzie ate breakfast. He’d helpfully point out any potential jobs he thought might interest her.
“Oh, look,” he said one morning. “Some company called Michigan Printing and Bindery is looking for a proofreader. You’d be good at that, Lizzie, and I bet they’d love to have you as an employee. You should check it out.”
It was true that as far as it went Lizzie appeared to be a natural proofreader, which basically meant that she got annoyed at the typos and grammatical errors that were constantly showing up in the books, magazines, and newspapers that she read. Radio and television announcers who used ungrammatical language were also an irritation. Though she was loath to admit it, Lizzie knew that her annoyance at misspeaking and miswriting evildoers had been passed down to her from her mother. One memory involved Lydia groaning loudly whenever someone said “between her and I.” Lizzie knew she grumbled in exactly the same way.
To make George happy, Lizzie called and was invited to come in for a short interview. The specific question of her knowledge of grammar and usage was never raised. Instead the interview involved the woman in HR asking Lizzie about her background and then telling her that she seemed overqualified for the job. Evidently having an undergrad degree in English from the University of Michigan opened more doors than Lizzie had been led to believe. She’d always been told that a master’s degree at minimum and even better a PhD was necessary in order to find useful work. And here was Michigan Printing and Bindery willing to hire her once she assured them that proofreading for them was exactly the kind of work she was looking for. She’d start the next morning, directly after finishing her dog-walking chores.