Children: George couldn’t wait to be a father; Lizzie couldn’t wait for George to stop saying that he couldn’t wait to be a father.
Dogs: Irish setters (George); cocker spaniels (Lizzie). Lizzie’s preference for cockers was almost entirely due to a book called Bonny’s Boy, which she’d checked out from the library at the impressionable age of ten. After searching for years, she finally found herself a copy at a book sale run by the Ann Arbor Public Library. The copy she bought might even have been the copy she’d read over and over as a child.
Eggs: over easy (George); over hard (Lizzie).
Forgiveness: Naturally George believed in forgiveness; it was a core tenet of his philosophy. Lizzie, as she once told George, did not have a forgiving bone in her body. This worried him, as he felt that, whatever was causing Lizzie’s unhappiness, the first step to ameliorating the pain was to forgive herself. It didn’t, however, look to George like this was happening anytime soon.
Grapes: green and seedless (Lizzie); red with seeds (George, because he thought the seeds made him slow down and eat fewer).
Hamburgers: George ordered his burgers medium rare, while Lizzie wouldn’t eat anything that looked un-or undercooked. George couldn’t fault her for this, though, knowing she had many memories of those mostly raw turkeys at the Bultmanns’ Thanksgivings.
Itching: George left mosquito bites strictly alone; Lizzie scratched them until they bled, which meant that after a Michigan summer she had scabs and scars in various stages of healing all over her arms and legs.
Jazz: George’s favorite album of all time was Miles Davis’s Shades of Blue; Lizzie only liked music with lyrics. She didn’t get jazz at all and, sadly for George, found listening to jazz (or classical music) boring. “So shoot me,” she said to George when he expressed amazement at this.
Kimchi: George, having been introduced to it by his Korean American roommate his freshman year at OSU, loved it. There were no Korean restaurants in Stillwater, but Jae’s mother always brought some with her when she flew in from Los Angeles. Lizzie tried it once at a fancy restaurant in New York but disliked it intensely. Too spicy.
Listerine: George actively discouraged his patients from using this particular brand of mouthwash. He didn’t think it was worth the trouble or was at all necessary to subject oneself to the burning sensation taking a capful would cause. Lizzie loved that sort of painful experience. It felt like an appropriate punishment for everything she’d done wrong. You might as well also add love in here too, George thought gloomily. He still held on to the hope—fat chance of it happening, though—that someday Lizzie would love him as much as he loved her.
Magazines: George’s favorite magazine was Consumer Reports. It was his holy book, his scripture. He read it cover to cover every month and never bought anything—from towels to tires—without checking it first. One year the editors raved about the Toyota Camry and afterward George refused to buy any other make or model of car. To George’s shock (and, it must be admitted, a bit of awe), Lizzie never checked any reviews at all before she made a purchase. Lizzie preferred the New Yorker, which she read in this order: cartoons, poetry, “Talk of the Town,” stories, “Shouts and Murmurs,” and finally the articles. George could never really connect with the short stories and felt that much of the time the New Yorker’s articles were, quite frankly, way too long. They did both read Sports Illustrated cover to cover.
Nightclothes: briefs (George); Tshirts belonging to George (Lizzie).
Opera: George tolerated it; Lizzie didn’t have the patience to sit still through even one performance. Ditto ballet.
Patience: George had it in unlimited quantities. Lizzie had none.
Queen of spades: George played it safe while playing Hearts, only rarely trying to shoot the moon. Lizzie’s favorite card in the game was the queen of spades, and whenever it looked even remotely likely she went for broke.
Regret: George didn’t believe in it. There was nothing to be gained from regret. You can learn from your experiences and decide to do something different next time, but that’s different from regret. Regret was a dead-end street, a dark alley on a cold night. It took you nowhere. Edith Piaf could sing (in French) with great conviction that she regretted nothing, but Lizzie regretted almost everything she’d ever done. She reveled in regret, George believed. He found it greatly frustrating.
Sex: Obviously, but George didn’t want to think about that. Shampoo, then, instead. George grew up with a terrible hang-up about dandruff and thus relied on Head & Shoulders shampoo. He kind of liked the smell of it too. Lizzie hated its medicinal odor (it reminded her of Mendel) and kept begging George to switch to another brand.
Tea: No, thank you (George), give him coffee anytime; Assam (Lizzie).
Umbrellas: George appreciated the usefulness of umbrellas but only for other people. A harsh thought would never cross his mind when, during an Ann Arbor drizzle, a small person uneasily navigating with a too-large umbrella blocking much of her peripheral and even face-on vision bumped into him. Lizzie, on the other hand, took an umbrella with her if the forecast even hinted that rain was possible. Rain frizzled her hair. She bought umbrellas like other people buy packs of gum at the airport. Nearly every place she and George had traveled to, every conference, every speaking gig, she’d found it necessary to purchase a new umbrella because she’d neglected to bring one. But because Lizzie refused to spend the money necessary to buy an umbrella that might actually last longer than one or, at the most, two uses, she had accumulated a large collection of them, most now in various states of disrepair.
In downtown Ann Arbor once—because she was, indeed, one of those small people whose vision is blocked by their overly large umbrellas—Lizzie ran into a policeman who then indicated in no uncertain tones that he was not particularly happy with her. “You can’t even call this rain,” he snarled. “Put that damn thing away.” She got the feeling that he wished he could have given her a ticket for reckless walking and endangering a police officer.
Valentines: George, blessed (according to himself) or cursed (according to Lizzie) with extreme sentimentality, would have given Lizzie a valentine every day of the year. Lizzie considered February 14 a manufactured holiday and bought George a card only because she knew it would make him happy. “Here’s your Valentine’s card, George,” she’d say. “You know I only got it because I knew it would make you happy.” Well, in fact it did make him happy.