The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady (18 page)

The first Sunday she’d lured Suzi into Genesis Church she’d gotten drunk with power. Thank God she’d gotten scared out of her wits and left her at Dunkin’ Donuts, unable to proceed with her impulsive plan to take Suzi out to Lake Jackson, propose a canoe ride, and then brain her with an oar. That didn’t pan out. Now she was back on track with her goal: creating Jesus freak Suzi.

At the same time she was seeing to Suzi, she was mounting her campaign on all fronts. Otis and Ava. There was something anxious and vulnerable and permanently innocent about both of them. Their mother tried to explain to Marylou that they had some sort of disability, and Marylou could see that there was definitely something different about them. She’d had quite a few students like them over the years, and although many of them had been troublesome and frustrating to deal with, she also found such students engaging because of their peculiar interests. They were always social outcasts, usually ignored and sometimes persecuted, and that broke her heart.

But she steeled herself and proceeded with her plans to derail Otis and Ava, telling herself it was for a good cause. She steered Ava away from her studies and toward the trashy world of modeling and shallow self-absorption. Otis she would merely expose by writing a letter to the EPA. There was all kinds of illegal stuff in that shed. She didn’t have to be a Nobel Prize–winning scientist to tell that.

Vic she felt little to no sympathy for. He was detached from his family, and nothing that went on in his house seemed to affect him. Vic was a cretin not to realize what he had. Work would be the best place to get him, so she signed on to be a scorer at FTA. She would cause as much trouble there as best she could.

Caroline was a neurotic, insecure woman, obsessed with Ava and merely tolerating everyone else. She was in desperate need of someone to help her and support her, the way her husband should’ve been doing, but Marylou did not intend to be that person. The best thing to do to Caroline, Marylou decided, was to pretend to be helpful and supportive but all the while work behind the scenes to poison everything Caroline took for granted.

Vic and Caroline needed to shit or get off the pot, as Teddy would’ve said. Their marriage stank to high heaven, but she wasn’t going to be the one to point this out to them. Let them wallow in their own filth while she dirtied the rest of their nest.

Of course she would have to make sure that, while she was doing her dirty deeds, the family would tolerate her, even want her around. In the long run, it probably would work in her favor that she’d left Suzi alone at Dunkin’ Donuts—it had established, in the minds of the Witherspoon family, that she was scatterbrained, which could come in handy later on. The truth was, she was the furthest thing from scatterbrained. Well, maybe not the furthest thing. But none of the Spriggs family members—except Wilson whom she’d told outright that she planned to kill him but it didn’t seem to faze him a bit—suspected that she was guilty of anything but being a pathetic and annoying busybody. They did probably suspect her of locking Wilson in the shed, but they’d never said anything to her about that. And Wilson, she knew, would never tell on her. He seemed not to care how badly she treated him or how much she threatened him.

In addition to her crushing-his-family agenda, she kept up her efforts to make him remember. Even though she reminded him every
so often that she planned to kill him, he willingly climbed into her car. She took him to Barnes & Noble, “for a treat,” she told Caroline; and the two of them sat in the coffee shop for an hour and a half while she showed him books about the horrors of radiation. He sipped his café mocha and nodded, not even bothering to defend radiation, glancing around at the other café customers, especially the young pretty college women bent over their fashion magazines. Finally he announced that it had been a real pleasure talking to her, but didn’t they have any lighter reading material available at this bookstore?

Another day she took him to a nearby park, and they sat on a bench in the shade and watched the kids and their parents play on the thick plastic slides and jungle gyms, all connected to big plastic fortlike contraptions, so unlike the thin metal playground equipment Helen had enjoyed. And no more concrete under the equipment—now it was poky, splintery fresh-smelling cedar chips. Marylou spotted a little girl with long blond hair and fair skin like Helen’s and pointed her out to Wilson and reminded him again that he’d killed Helen. “Who is Helen?” he asked her. She’d told him a million times, but she’d try again. How could she begin to describe Helen?

She told him about how Helen used to love playgrounds and that there was one near their house in Overton Park with an old shell of a fire truck in it that Helen loved beyond reason when she was four, loved sitting in it and turning the wheel and making the siren noise, and she’d really wanted to be a fireman, and Teddy bought her a fire hat and toy fire trucks and books about fire trucks even though Marylou didn’t approve of encouraging something that a girl could never do, and had actually told Helen one night at dinner that girls could never be firemen, and Helen had physically attacked her mother, calling her a liar. The next day Helen threw away all her fire-related items, and now Marylou regretted saying such a thing to Helen, for all kinds of reasons, because of course today she could’ve been a firefighter if she’d wanted
to be, but beyond that, why had she felt compelled to throw water on Helen’s dream? This wasn’t the kind of memory Marylou wanted to relive about Helen, and had never told anyone about this before, and in fact she never spoke about Helen anymore to anybody.

She realized she was trembling and then realized, that, sweet Jesus, Adolf was actually holding her hand, and she was letting him. She screeched and flung his hand aside.

Kids stopped their play and turned toward Marylou and Wilson.

“Are you all right?” said the nearest mother, wearing the playground mother’s uniform of baggy shorts and baggy T-shirt. Cedar chips hung from the front of her shirt.

“Ants,” Marylou said, brushing off her hand. “I got rid of them.”

After the playground got busy again, Wilson spoke up. “I remember that fire engine,” he said. “I used to take Caroline to Overton Park every Saturday, when she was in elementary school. She howled when she had to get off the swings. Remember that big monkey they had there in the late sixties, in the zoo, the one that used to get mouthfuls of water and spit on people? After he started doing that he disappeared. Wonder what they did with him. Poor bastard.”

Marylou did remember that monkey. He was as big as she was. “He probably got used in a radiation experiment,” she said. She grabbed Wilson’s upper arm and squeezed it hard. “No, wait. You only used humans for those.”

“The zoo was never the same after he left,” was all Wilson said.

“I could spit on you, if it would make you feel better.”

“No thanks. Don’t think it would.”

* * *

One Sunday she took Wilson to Genesis Church along with Suzi, hoping he’d feel the need to repent, but afterward he claimed that the sound system had screwed up his hearing aid and he couldn’t
make heads or tails of what they were singing and saying. “All sounded like caterwauling to me,” he said.

Another time, in the evening, she took him for a walk around the neighborhood and as they were plodding down Nun’s Drive, him walking twice as slow as she was, she got an idea and stopped. “Just wait here,” she told him.

“What? Why?” It was nearly dark, and the crickets were striking up their chorus.

She pointed at a nearby house, no lights on, no cars in the drive. “Got to run ask my friend something. Be right back.”

She marched up the driveway as quickly as she could with her stiff ankle and gimpy hip. Fortunately her “friend” didn’t seem to have a dog. The back of the house was dark, too. How could she possibly explain herself if someone caught her? She was sneaking around just like the person who climbed up on her roof at night. She would hide back here until Wilson wandered away.

Suddenly, motion lights came on over the patio like a play was about to start, and she ducked into the shadows. That metal patio furniture. Bright colored chairs with backs like oyster shells. And a brick fireplace with a spit. She hadn’t seen chairs like that, or a fireplace like that, in years. Not since the fifties, not since that horrible patio party at Teddy’s boss’s house.

She hadn’t wanted to go to the damn party in the first place, mostly because she didn’t know anyone there. When they arrived, there were three couples sitting in the same kind of metal chairs on the flagstone patio—much like this one—drinking orange-colored drinks with cherries and colored umbrellas floating in them. Two of the men were dark, hairy, and bespeckled, just like she expected engineers to look, but the third man was blond and tanned like a country clubber. He was Teddy’s boss. The women were a bit harder to categorize. One wife was young, dark, and overmade-up. She was smoking a cigarette and scowling.
Another wife was fat, fair, and pleased with herself. The third wife was old and wrinkly with white hair—she looked as old as a grandmother, though probably she was only fifty. It was impossible to figure out who went with whom.

The bossman stood up to shake their hands. His wife, it turned out, was the overmade-up smoking woman. She stubbed out her cigarette in a huge pink ceramic ashtray and asked them if they wanted mimosas, gesturing at a big glass pitcher on a white metal table.

Teddy asked for Coke, Marylou for lemonade. They were Baptists, after all.

“Oh, come on, drink a real drink!” cried Mrs. Boss. It appeared that Mrs. Boss had had a few mimosas already.

Teddy glanced at Marylou, then shrugged. “Guess it wouldn’t hurt none. Never had one of those things.”

Marylou felt annoyed by how quickly he gave in. “I don’t drink,” she said. “But thank you.”

Mrs. Boss poured Teddy’s drink in a tall fluted glass, dropped an umbrella and a cherry into it and handed it to him. Then she went into the house for a few minutes and returned with a clear, fizzy drink in a plastic tumbler for Marylou. No cherry or umbrella for her! “Tonic water,” Mrs. Boss said out of the side of her mouth.

Teddy sipped his mimosa and exclaimed about how good it was.

“Invented at the Ritz in Paris,” Mrs. Boss said. “Over there, we drank mimosas in the morning, but what the hell. I say they’re good anytime.”

“Buck’s fizz,” said Bossman. “That’s what the British call them.”

“A manmosa has beer instead of champagne,” added one of the hairy men. “Ever tried it that way?” he asked his boss, who shook his head.

“Uggh,” said Mrs. Boss, swinging her bare, tanned leg. “Sounds disgusting.”

Marylou, feeling swollen and pale and unsophisticated, sat in a springy metal chair, sipping her bitter, bubbly tonic water. She was plainly pregnant, wearing a ruffly flowered maternity dress, but nobody asked her about her baby. Nobody seemed interested. Instead they discussed some of the people they worked with, one of whom had just been arrested for indecent exposure at the Memphis Zoo, a scandal everyone but her seemed to know all about. So the next time around she accepted one of the mimosas. Mrs. Boss—Vivian?—poured more drinks for everyone, announcing that there was another pitcher waiting in the fridge.

Charcoal was smoking in the fireplace grill in the corner of the patio, but nobody was paying any attention to it, and there wasn’t any meat in evidence. There weren’t any finger foods or snacks available either. What kind of cookout was this? Marylou slurped down her drink, and had another and another, and by the end of the evening she and Vivian were lying in the yard sticking their stockinged legs up in the air, talking about how they were hanging off the side of the world! Wheee! Teddy had had to carry her home.

Nowadays pregnant women knew better. What kind of damage had she done to Helen that night? Maybe all those mimosas had contributed to Helen’s cancer as well.

The motion lights went dark. Play over. The end. Marylou was back in Tallahassee, trespassing in some stranger’s backyard. She crept around the side of the house, a two story with aluminum siding, and peeked around the corner. Wilson, damn him, was standing there, under the streetlight, where she’d left him. She stepped behind a prickly waist-high holly hedge and watched him, not minding the mosquitoes whining around her face. As long as she wasn’t standing on a fire ant nest, she could stand there forever.

He glanced left, then right. Somebody down the street slammed a car door. A bat swooped in a figure eight under the streetlight, but he
didn’t appear to notice. He probably had no idea where he was or what he was doing there. Finally, he backed up and lowered himself down onto the edge of the lawn that sloped right up to where she was hiding.

She could sneak away now, walk back home, and it might be a while before anyone found him. But someone would find him, eventually, and eventually he’d be returned to his proper owner. His family would be very angry at her, but she might worm herself out of being blamed, since they seemed to be willing to believe anything that made their lives easier. But
he
wouldn’t care. Either he’d remember and forgive her, or he’d forget. Exasperating creature. She watched him a while longer, his white shirt and white hair glowing under the streetlight. The sharp smell of gasoline wafted up from the nearby garage. Her ankle went from stiff to achy. A car with rock music blasting came rushing past him, too close, but he didn’t budge. She didn’t feel sorry for him, she didn’t. But this wasn’t any fun.

Without deciding to, she broke through the hedge and strolled boldly down the strange lawn toward him, the ground soft from armadillo tunnels, praying she wouldn’t slip and fall. Hello, Canterbury Hills, I am making myself right at home here! “Yoo-hoo,” she called to Wilson. “Avon calling!”

He didn’t turn around. He didn’t even glance at her.

“Ready?” she said in a chipper voice. “My friend, Vivian, Viv, was making mimosas and wouldn’t give me one.” His legs stuck straight out in front of him, like a kid’s legs. Her white tennis shoes were half the size of his. “You got big feet. But then so does Viv.”