Wine: red (George). Red wine gave Lizzie a headache. If she was going to indulge, she’d rather have prosecco. Or Riesling. Even better was switching away from wine and drinking beer. Oh yes, and the memory of vodka, straight from the freezer.
X-Men comics: George began buying these when he was about ten. Although he lacked the earliest ones from the decade before he was born, he had what almost anyone would consider an enviable collection. In recent years he’d begun scouring eBay to fill in the ones he was missing; Lizzie didn’t see the point of them and George hadn’t been able to convince her to read more than one issue.
Yams: George couldn’t tell the difference between a yam and a sweet potato. Unless it was clearly labeled at the store, he was unable to tell which was which. This was fine with him, since he didn’t find any difference in the way they tasted either. Lizzie disagreed. They did taste different.
Zoos: George enjoyed visiting zoos. When he was in nursery school, his class went on a field trip to the Oklahoma City Zoo. Just at the point that all the kids were standing directly in front of the elephant cage, the biggest elephant trumpeted. Everyone (probably including one or two of the teachers) began screaming in panic. Was the elephant now going to wrap his trunk around the bars and twist them enough to set himself and the other elephants free, thereby trampling the mostly three-year-old crowd underfoot? But George was entranced with the noise itself and the way it echoed and reechoed throughout the stone building. He knew that old elephant wasn’t going anywhere but rather just showing off for the audience. He wasn’t scared at all. Lizzie, on the other hand, wouldn’t set foot in a zoo. Seeing the animals caged in, no matter how spacious the cage, made her too sad.
It was all so depressing, right?
*?The Strong Safety?*
Leo deSica’s dad, born and raised in Italy, taught in the Romance languages department at the U. He really wanted a soccer-playing son instead of one who played strong safety on the football team, but when Leo pointed out to his dad that they lived in America now and his high school didn’t even field a soccer team, Dr. deSica acquiesced to his son’s choice. Gaby Craft, Leo’s girlfriend, was one of the girls who were particularly vicious to Lizzie when the news of the Great Game trickled out. In truth, Lizzie didn’t much blame her. Leo was incredibly sexy and Lizzie often wondered if his Italianness had anything to do with it. A different kind of girl might have tested this theory out by traveling to Italy and picking up men to sleep with, but Lizzie had stopped being that different kind of girl once the Great Game ended.
*?A Long Drive with Lizzie, Marla,?* Beezie, Lulu, & India
Late in August 2000, James flew to Santa Fe to start preparing for his job at St. John’s College. George was busy working on a book he’d sold to Crown, so Lizzie and Marla and the girls drove from Ann Arbor to New Mexico by themselves, transporting, among other possessions, a plastic swimming pool that they did their best to securely fasten to the car’s roof.
It was a great trip. Beezie (four), Lulu (three), and India (two) took to the long hours in the station wagon as though they were born to travel the interstates. Marla attached India’s pacifier to a piece of ribbon and pinned it onto her shirt so it would always be there for her. They stopped at every rest area (and often supplemented those stops with the bathrooms at gas stations or McDonald’s) because Lulu was still nervous about her big-girl pants. Beezie read Frog and Toad Are Friends over and over again to her sisters, even when they weren’t listening. They had Dairy Queen cones every night (it seemed that every town had a Dairy Queen near the highway) and slept in the same room, which inevitably made for unevenness of sleep quality but gave them all a lovely sense of togetherness.
They stopped in Tulsa and stayed with Elaine and Allan for a few days, then hit I-40 for the final push into Albuquerque and finally on to Santa Fe. Marla and Lizzie talked and talked and talked. It was almost like being back in college.
“Why are you still wearing that bracelet?” Marla asked. “Doesn’t George wonder why you always have it on?”
“George is the most uncurious person that I’ve ever known. He never really notices anything. I could lose all my hair overnight and the chances are he wouldn’t even comment on it,” Lizzie said. “But if he ever did ask, I’d tell him I found it at a garage sale or something. He’s also gullible,” she added unnecessarily.
Marla took her eyes off the road for a second and looked at her. “Don’t lie to George anymore, Lizzie. It’s not fair to him. It’s sad enough that you’re really lying to him by not sharing things, but an out-and-out lie is so destructive. Is what happened with Jack still so important to you? It’s been years. Why does it still matter?”
“That’s sort of what George says. Oh, not about Jack, but about how much I still despise my parents, even though they’re moldering in their graves. Or why I hate myself so much. He thinks that I’m much too attached to my thoughts. That I hold on to things too long. But I have no idea what he means. They’re your thoughts, right? How can you not think them?”
Marla struggled to answer. “I don’t know, but people do it. I think I let go of things, or at least try to. You have to, really, otherwise you’re weighted down with all those cumulative bad memories. James and I used to talk about that baby missing from our lives, whether it was a boy or a girl, whether we could find out who adopted it, whether we’d ever forgive our parents, why we just didn’t say ‘Screw you’ to them back then and get married after I got pregnant. I mean, you know, it was so present. It was always there in our lives. But if we kept that up there’d be no place for anything else. And now we just acknowledge that all that awful stuff happened, that maybe we made the wrong decision, that we were just kids. We were just kids. You have to forgive yourself eventually, right?”
Marla used the rearview mirror to check on the girls. Beezie was turning the pages of her book from back to front, Lulu was eating graham crackers, and India was napping. They were fine.
“It’s going to be so hard with you not in Ann Arbor,” Lizzie said. “We have to write at least once a week.”
Marla agreed. “I don’t really know what I’m going to do without you. We should set a regular time every week to talk too.”
“We have to stay in each other’s life,” Lizzie said.
“Of course we will. How could we not? We’re going to spend our golden years together, remember, playing with our grandchildren.”
Marla returned to their earlier topic. “You know that James and I never liked Jack all that much, right? I know you’ve said the sex was great. So what? It’s not doing you any favors, this obsession with him. It’s never done you any favors. I still can’t believe you don’t see that.”