There was also no getting around the fact that, in sharp contrast with his parents and brother, George was, as a kid and early teen, although by no means fat, definitely pudgy. “Chunky” was perhaps a kinder, more masculine-sounding description. The worst part of being more than a tad overweight was having to shop for his clothes in the Husky Department at Dillard’s, praying hard from start to finish that nobody would see him there. He hated those shopping trips.
When he began to become really interested in girls, George feared that his was the sort of face that only his closest relatives could love, the kind of person that’s always described as having a great personality. George didn’t undervalue the benefits of a good personality, but he also aspired to handsomeness. Cuteness at the very very least. He almost got his wish. By the time he started college he’d lost some of the pudginess of his youth and his face had become thinner and more defined. He started working out a lot, so if physique was what you were interested in, there George’s muscles were. Lizzie thought the best part of George’s face, besides the general fact of liking that it was George’s face, was his eyes. They were a variable sort of hazel and, depending on the color of the shirt or sweater he wore, they’d become grayish or bluish or greenish. Lizzie adored George’s eyes and thought he looked most handsome in deep-blue shirts. There was still no way anyone would describe George as Adonis-like, but on the attractiveness spectrum that stretched from handsome to downright ugly, he’d ended up somewhere between cute and handsome.
Both sets of his grandparents were face pinchers, sometimes painfully so. Invariably, whenever they saw him they’d first hug him and then step back and take a piece of his cheek between their thumb and forefinger, “Oy, what a punim,” they’d murmur. “A she?yn e?yngl.” They marveled that they couldn’t think of anyone in the long and proud history of both sides of the family that he resembled, living or long dead. He was sui generis. One of a kind in the Goldrosen and Lowen clans. His Stillwater grandparents would look accusingly at Elaine. Had there been a randy car salesman in his mother’s recent past? His Montreal grandparents would look reproachfully at Allan, their expressions clearly indicating that they blamed him entirely. If she didn’t keep her marriage vows, you ganef, it’s all your own fault for being such a rotten husband. Of course nobody said any of this out loud; George just imagined that’s what they were thinking.
But the main reason that all his grandparents doted on George was that he had a marshmallow heart. He cried when he watched sad movies and he cried when he read sad books (Beautiful Joe almost did him in). Even commercials on television could bring tears to his eyes. Todd couldn’t stand it. “That is so goddamn sappy,” he’d say scornfully, watching George weep at an ad for dog food. “Yeesh. Can’t you see how they’re just manipulating you?” No, George couldn’t.
One result of being softhearted was that George constantly felt sorry for people. He would empty his pockets of change for a man sitting on the ground in front of Swenson’s holding a sign saying “War Veteran. No Home. No Job. Anything Will Help.” If the vet looked hungry (and they all looked hungry) he’d go in and buy the guy a hamburger and fries. If he got to choose kids for his class spelling bee team, the first three people he chose were the least popular, the outsider, and the worst speller in class.
George’s attitude infuriated Todd. “Don’t you see how presumptuous it is to assign unhappiness to someone? What right do you have to do that? Maybe they don’t mind how they’re living, even if it is different from what other people think is a good life. Maybe they feel sorry for you and your little bourgeois life, taking a shower every day, getting good grades, going to dances, living in a big house, and some woman is paid a pittance to vacuum up the dirt you bring in and wash your clothes and iron your oxford cloth shirts. Yes,” he’d continue in a fake judicious tone, “I believe they must definitely pity you, because I certainly do.”
It wasn’t only people that he cared about to excess. He regularly brought home stray animals and begged his mother to let him keep them. Elaine relented only once, for a three-legged kitten George named Twinkie, who he’d found shivering in a storm drain. When George was ten he stole a small stuffed animal from his cousin Shelley’s house in Montreal because he thought the rabbit was neglected and in need of a great deal of love, a task George was eager to take on. As far as George knew, no one even realized that the rabbit was gone, which only went to show that he’d been right. He named it Rabbit Elias, after the Goldrosen’s rabbi, and in an early example of George’s already well-developed sense of humor, he realized that Rabbit Elias was actually a pretty good pun, so he changed its name to Rabbit Pun Elias, known familiarly as Pun. The first Christmas Lizzie visited the Goldrosens, George introduced her to Twinkie and Pun, who by that time were both suffering from age-related conditions. Twinkie was basically incontinent and Pun had lost most of his stuffing.
One afternoon when George was twelve he was walking home from Hebrew school and encountered a sick squirrel resting under a tree.
“But how did you know he was sick?” Lizzie asked years later, which was one of the litany of questions his parents had asked when he arrived home and explained why his wrist was bleeding.
“He had this look, like he wanted me to help him. So I did. Or tried to.”
After he bit George, the squirrel leaped out of his grasp and ran away, clearly not very sick, or even sick at all. The result for George was a painful series of rabies shots.
Lizzie kissed the tiny squirrel scar on his wrist. “You would think,” she commented, “that would teach you that no good deed goes unpunished. But it didn’t, did it?”
No, George admitted. It didn’t teach him anything, except perhaps that it was harder to read a squirrel’s state of health or state of mind than he had once thought.
“But he let me pick him up,” he told his parents. “If he wasn’t sick, why would he do that?”
No one at the time had an answer for him, but years later Lizzie came up with one. “Maybe he’d just had a miraculous escape from a man driving way too fast, and wanted revenge on humanity. He probably immediately saw that you were the perfect mark.”