George and Lizzie Read online

  “We’d be legends in our own time,” Lizzie said, willing to play along.

  “Not legends,” Andrea said, slightly alarmed. “We’d only be legends if people knew, right? And we can’t tell anyone about it.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. We don’t have to tell anyone, but do you honestly think the guys we have sex with will keep quiet about it? They’ll broadcast it far and wide.”

  “My parents would kill me if they found out.”

  “Your parents would ground you until you were thirty,” Lizzie said. “Then they’d kill you. But you know what my parents would do?” Without waiting for Andrea to respond, she said, “They’d want to watch. Maybe they’d bring along a grad student or two to take notes.”

  “Oh, ick, Lizzie, don’t even think that. That’s disgusting. Nobody’s parents would do that. Not even yours.”

  Lizzie shook her head in disagreement. “They definitely would. Then they’d write articles about Girl X, a high school senior acting out sexually. More stuff to add to their overflowing CVs. So of course I don’t want them to know about it. I don’t want it to show up next year in some adolescent psychology journal. This is ours, ours and the team’s.”

  Lizzie thought about what she’d just said to Andrea. Was it true? She wondered what it would mean to her parents to discover that their daughter—their little developmental psychology project, as she often thought of herself when she felt especially unloved by them—had had meaningless sex with multiple members of the football team. Lizzie knew that Mendel and Lydia believed that they were uniquely qualified to raise a psychologically healthy child just because they happened to have devoted their lives, professionally and personally, to psychology. And Lizzie had done nothing to dissuade them from that belief. She had been, in their eyes, a more or less perfect daughter. She had been well behaved, seemingly untroubled, a good student (that had been easy for her), and surely headed for a successful life; a daughter who validated all their theories about children and child-rearing. When she was young, she had just wanted to please them. As she got older, especially once she reached adolescence, she saw how her collaboration with them on that view of her (and of themselves as parents) kept them off her back. But she’d also begun to understand the price that she’d paid for that collaboration: they had no idea who she really was. Some of her teachers probably knew her better than her parents did. Heck, Andrea’s mother almost certainly did—that was why she didn’t want Andrea to spend so much time with her. She wanted Mendel and Lydia to see her, Elizabeth Frieda Bultmann, as she really was (or at least as she saw herself, from the inside). She wanted them to be curious about her, to want to know what went on below her polished surface. She wanted them to know her sadness, and her fears that she wasn’t attractive, that she’d never be happy, that she felt lost and frightened most of the time, that she was, deep down, in her bones, a terrible person, a liar and a cheat. Maybe if they did find out about the Great Game, it would wake them up enough to finally see her.

  “All right, I’m in,” she said abruptly.

  “You are?” Andrea’s voice came back into focus. “That’s terrific.”

  As they got farther from the high school, the sounds of the football practice receded. After a few minutes Lizzie asked, “Would it be just the starters, or all the seniors on the team? Which, d’you think?”

  “I think it makes more sense to do the starters, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, maybe so. Easier to keep track of, anyhow.”

  “I think we should do them in alphabetical order.”

  “Last name or first name?”

  “Actually, I was thinking more in order of their positions.”

  “Missionary, et cetera?”

  “Be serious, Lizzie, this will be the defining act of our lives. If we did it alphabetically, who would we start with?”

  “The center—and nobody pays much attention to the center, so he’ll be easy to convince, although they’ll all be easy to convince. After all, we’re offering them sex with no commitment and no guilt. It’s all on us.”

  “Too true,” Andrea agreed. “You’re right; it shouldn’t be too hard at all.”

  Lizzie might have made another jokey comment (“Oh, they’ll all be hard enough, I bet” or “I certainly hope they will”), but she was still thinking about the center, whose name she didn’t then know. (It was Thad Cornish, and he was pathetically grateful to Lizzie for the rest of his life.)

  “‘The center cannot hold.’ That’s from a poem by Yeats.”

  “Don’t show off. This isn’t the time for poetry. We need to get this settled really soon. We only have a couple months until the season ends, and twenty-two guys to go, eleven each.”

  “Twenty-three if we include the kicker, which you’d know if you’d ever been to a game. I guess we can flip a coin to see whose team he’s on, yours or mine.”

  “Yeah, good idea. Twenty-three it is.” Andrea laughed. “Eleven, possibly twelve boys, eleven, possibly twelve weeks. It definitely sounds like something exciting to look forward to.”

  “Yeah,” Lizzie agreed, “and think of how much fun we’ll have.”

  They arrived at Lizzie’s house. “I’ll call you if I have any more brilliant ideas,” Andrea said.

  “It’ll be hard to top the Great Game, for sure,” Lizzie said as she started up the stairs to her front door.

  The next day Lizzie took her tray to the farthest corner of the lunchroom so that there was no possibility of being overheard. She waved Andrea over and waited impatiently for her to sit down before she began. “So I thought about it a lot last night and this is how I think it should go: let’s divide the team up so that one of us takes the defense and the other the offense. You should take the offense, because of Maverick.” She stopped for a moment. “Or maybe it should be the other way around, and I should take the offense? Never mind, we can figure that out later. Anyway, if we each take half the team, we can help each other out if we have to deal with clingers, although I suspect they’ll all be clingers, don’t you?”

  While Lizzie stopped to take a breath, Andrea started to respond but didn’t get a chance, as Lizzie began talking faster and faster. “I was thinking that we’d take, like, a week with each guy. Two days flirting, two days fooling around, and then a sex-filled Friday night with whoever’s turn it is. We could call it like the Three-F tactical approach. If my math is correct, that should take us into December, and gives us some wiggle room in case something comes up.” She grinned. “And I’m about ninety-nine-point-nine-percent sure that something will come up, every week.”

  She took some books out of her backpack. “Look at what I got from the library last night: everything they had in on football, both coaching and strategy. I put all the others on hold, so hopefully we’ll get them before we start.”

  Andrea looked puzzled. “Why’d you check out those books?”

  “Because I figured we needed to know more about football. Well, you need to. I already know enough to get by. We’re going to have to talk to those guys too, in addition to everything else we’re doing with them. We don’t want to seem dumb, like we’re just after them for sex, even if we are.”

  “But, Lizzie, listen, we don’t need those books.” Andrea’s face had unease written all over it. “That was just a joke, my idea, the Great Game and all that. It was just to sort of preemptively punish Jon. But he called last night, and I’m not so worried. Besides, my mother said that I could go down to Durham sometime this fall to see him. And he’ll be back here for Thanksgiving and Christmas.”

  “A joke? Really?” Lizzie was incredulous. “Yesterday you sounded awfully serious for it to be a joke. And why shouldn’t we go ahead and do it, even if you’re feeling better about Jon? Maybe tomorrow you’ll start feeling insecure again.”

  “You can do what you want, Lizzie, but I’m not going to do it.”

  “But you thought of it.”

  “It was a joke,” Andrea repeated. “I changed my mind. I’m not
going to do it. And you shouldn’t either.”

  “But, Andrea,” Lizzie sputtered. “It’s such a good idea. Why won’t you do it?”

  “I just can’t,” Andrea said doggedly. “I don’t think it is.”

  “Well, you did think it was. You came up with the whole plan.”

  “Yeah, well, I was joking.”

  “Don’t rewrite what happened yesterday. You weren’t joking. You weren’t. You loved the idea.”

  “No. Maybe. But now I don’t love it. It’s an awful idea. It’s nuts. It’s wrong.”

  “Like a sin, you mean?” Lizzie knew that Andrea’s family belonged to a Conservative synagogue. (She herself had never set foot inside it. When Andrea had her bat mitzvah, Lydia had forbidden Lizzie to attend the services. “Religion,” she’d admonished thirteen-year-old Lizzie, “is not the opiate of the masses, as Marx thought, but rather an excuse to kill others in its name. You need to learn that. History tells us that more people have been killed in the name of religion than any other justification for murder.” There and then Lizzie crossed history off her list of interesting subjects to pursue.)

  “Not a sin, not exactly a sin. Just wrong.”

  “Did your mother find out about it already? Did you tell her?”

  “God, no, of course not. You know she suspects that Jon and I slept together last year, but she really isn’t sure. I don’t tell her anything. You know that.”

  Lizzie did know, but still couldn’t figure out why Andrea had changed her mind. It was Andrea’s overactive conscience, she decided. Andrea’s conscience was evidently in overdrive.

  Andrea interrupted her thoughts. “I . . . I don’t know, I started thinking about me and Jon, and how I’d feel if he had sex with someone he didn’t care about, how I’d hate that. And this would just be fucking; it wouldn’t mean anything at all. That’s not me.”

  “But wouldn’t you hate it more if Jon had sex with someone he was in love with? I think that’s the whole point. What we’re doing isn’t supposed to be meaningful. It’ll be a diversion. A way to get us through the months until we graduate.” And a way to get back at my parents, she added silently.

  “Yeah, in a way it would be worse if he fell in love with another girl. It would be horrible, but at least it would mean that he wasn’t having sex just to have sex. Trust me, Lizzie. You’re crazy if you go ahead with it. Why’s it so important to you, anyway? You could get Maverick back anytime you wanted to, you know that. Maybe I can find someone I could stand to go out with so we can double date like last year. Wouldn’t that be more fun than having sex with a bunch of football players? I just don’t understand why this stupid Big Game or whatever you called it is so important to you.”

  “Because when my parents find out about it, and I think everyone’s going to find out about it, they’ll finally have to realize that I’m not who they think I am. Parents are supposed to love their children even though the kids aren’t perfect, but they don’t love me like that. You know Mendel and Lydia: they think they can get rid of any behavior they don’t approve of by treating me like I’m some rat they can retrain to do better. I honestly think they never loved me at all.”

  Andrea reached out to touch Lizzie’s hand in sympathy, but Lizzie twisted away from her. “Lizzie, listen to yourself. You’re going to do something totally asinine just to show your parents you can do something asinine? That’s ridiculous.”

  “If you think it’s so ridiculous, then, okay, don’t do it. I couldn’t care less. But I’m going to.”

  Andrea had almost the last word as they walked out of the lunchroom. “You know, Lizzie, I think my mother was right when she said you needed therapy.”

  “Wait, your mother said I needed therapy? When did she have that great insight? When you told her about the Great Game?”

  “I didn’t tell her, I already told you that.”

  “When, then?”

  “I don’t know, back in the sixth grade, maybe. She was talking to my dad.”

  “How come you never told me?”

  “Because I knew how angry you’d be.”

  “But now you’re telling me?”

  “Yes, because you’re making a huge mistake and you won’t admit it, even to yourself, so I don’t care how angry you are. I’m your best friend and I feel like I’m trying to save you from yourself.”

  That was the end of Lizzie and Andrea’s friendship. After the yearbook staff meeting that afternoon, Lizzie walked home alone, making a list in her mind of all that she needed to do before the next day and the first F of the Great Game. She had to choose what to wear and decide what she was going to say to Thad Cornish. Finding out the location of Thad’s locker was third on the list. Homework was easily neglected in favor of the more important stuff.

  From the middle of September to the middle of April Lizzie was consumed by sex. It wasn’t great sex. It wasn’t even good sex. It was pretty awful. It was nothing like sex with Maverick had been. When she and Maverick slept together, it was exciting and a lot of fun. They learned the basics from one another, and then a little bit more. It felt as though they were fellow explorers, gingerly (and often not so gingerly) filling in all those blank spaces on the map of the body. It didn’t have to do with passion or need, but rather good fellowship and camaraderie. Friendship. It was totally satisfying and Lizzie never regretted a moment she spent with Maverick.

  But after the first four or five guys, the sex involved in the Great Game wasn’t even fun. Still, she charged on, grimly and doggedly. At first the flirting was diverting, but once she got to the eighth or ninth player on the list even that palled and became more and more like a boringly repetitive homework assignment, something she had to do to get a good grade. In the midst of intercourse she often found herself reciting poems in her head. She wished she could talk to Andrea about what was happening. She’d come home after the deed was done, take a shower, brush her teeth, get the Great Game notebook from one of the drawers in her desk, cross off a name, and then crawl into bed, falling instantly and thoroughly into sleep. She came to count on those dreamless Friday nights that somehow seemed so much more restful than the other nights of the week.

  * The Center *

  Thad “Cornball” Cornish was the team’s center for his sophomore, junior, and senior years. As a born-again Christian, he was the player who led the team in their pre- and postgame prayers. He was very selective about the sins he’d commit, and it turned out, luckily for the Great Game, that fornication, or maybe just fornication with Lizzie, wasn’t on his proscribed list.

  * Lizzie Meets Marla *

  Lizzie was lying on her bed, reading I Capture the Castle, waiting for her roommate to arrive. It was a little nervous-making. She’d never shared a room with anyone before, although she and Andrea, in their younger and friendlier days, had often spent the night at each other’s house. Earlier that morning, the first day the dorms opened to incoming freshmen, Mendel had driven her to Martha Cook, where she’d be living for the next year. Together they’d carried up the heaviest of the cartons, filled with whatever she couldn’t bear to leave at home. When Lizzie opened the door of her third-floor room, what she noticed first were the many boxes piled in one corner. They were from someone named Marla Cantor, from Ohio. Marla Cantor, whoever she turned out to be, was going to be her roommate.

  She almost started to tell Mendel about how anxious she was but saw that, after putting down the last box from the car on the floor, he was heading toward the door. He stopped before he reached it and hesitated; for a moment or two Lizzie thought that her father might, weirdly, want to shake her hand before he left. But instead he reached out and gave her one of the typical Bultmann hugs, a sort of sideways embrace that denied any concession to actually touching one another except in those places that absolutely couldn’t be avoided.

  When he was gone, Lizzie closed her eyes and turned around a few times and pointed. When she opened her eyes she saw she’d selected the room’s left side, with
its uniform and institutionally bland bed, desk, chair, and dresser. No matter what sort of person her roommate was, Lizzie couldn’t imagine Marla might possibly think one set of furniture was more desirable than the other. She began unpacking her books; she had a brief discussion with herself about the best method to arrange them on the bookshelves and decided just higgledy-piggledy in whatever order they came out of the boxes was fine. There were some of her favorite novels, books that she thought she’d better read if she wanted to be an English major, as well as books by the eclectic group of poets she loved most: A. E. Housman, Randall Jarrell, W. H. Auden, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Philip Larkin, and Dorothy Parker. Once she’d finished unpacking, she made several trips back and forth from the dorm to Mendel and Lydia’s (as she’d always thought of the house where she’d lived her whole life) to get clothes, sheets, and towels. By the time she finished the last trip, unpacked everything, and made the bed, it was early afternoon.

  She’d just gotten to one of her favorite parts in Dodie Smith’s novel, the incident with the bear, when she heard voices at the door.

  “Hi,” she said, getting up. “You must be Marla. I’m Lizzie.”

  “Wow, you sure got here early. It felt like we left at the crack of dawn.”

  “Well, I live here. I mean, in Ann Arbor. Easy walking distance. Practically on the campus.” She knew she sounded ridiculous but didn’t know what to do about it.

  “Oh, that’s terrific; you can show me around.”

  There was a slight cough from the woman who’d come in the door right behind Marla.

  “Oh, sorry, Mom. Lizzie, this is my mother, Abby Cantor.”

  Mrs. Cantor smiled at Lizzie, who gamely smiled back. “It’s nice to meet you, Lizzie. How would you girls like to have a late lunch or a very early dinner with me before I leave?”

  Marla spoke before Lizzie had a chance to say anything.