The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady (19 page)

His cheeks were well shaven and smooth for an old man, but he smelled like fresh sweat. “Help me up,” he said. “Take me home.”

Glad that she wasn’t yet as old and stiff as he was, she pulled him to his feet and he walked off by himself, a little way down the street, and then turned around, facing her.

“Am I going the right way?” he asked.

“What is this, some existential drama?” she said. “Keep walking and find out.”

He exhaled loudly. “Just go ahead and kill me,” he said, “if that’s what you want to do. I’m right here. Get it over with.”

She almost burst out laughing. It was just like her fantasy, the one she’d had the first time she’d seen him in his yard overwatering his azalea bushes, when she wished he’d just pop up and ask to be killed and hurry up about it. “Should I hurry up about it?” she couldn’t resist saying.

“Please.”

“No. I won’t. You can’t make me.” She went forward, took his arm, and they started down the block in the direction home should’ve been in. Immediately she felt uneasy. Nun’s Drive looked different in the dark. Houses seemed to have rearranged themselves, driveways looked like streets, streets like driveways. Lights in the houses made them seem even more remote. One house had a huge TV, glowing blue and green like an aquarium, that took up most of a wall. Two large-sounding dogs in someone’s backyard barked ferociously. He was leaning on her, making it hard to walk. “I’ve changed my mind about killing you,” she said. “But I’m not done with you. You are not off the hook, Adolf.”

“Verna Tommy will have left the light on,” he said. “She never forgets.”

* * *

That night Tropical Storm Alberto crept over the Florida Panhandle. The next morning the weather channel reported that near Homosassa two people who did not evacuate required water rescue. And at Egmont Key State Park a woman fell off a boat when a band of showers and surging currents made navigation difficult; her husband and a friend drowned after jumping in to save her without life jackets, though the woman returned safely to the boat.

Marylou went outside into her twig-littered carport to get the newspaper, and she discovered that her blue rug had mysteriously reappeared. A couple of mornings ago it had
disappeared
from the bottom of the steps, and she’d looked all around the yard but couldn’t find it. Who, she’d wondered, would want an ugly little Walmart rug? And now it was back in the same place, looking exactly the same. Somebody had come out in a tropical storm to replace the rug, just to make her think she was losing her mind.

It was similar to the mysterious tennis-shoe thing. One morning Marylou’d found a brand-new pair of men’s black Converse sneakers, size 10, on her front porch. She threw them away, but the next morning there was another pair, exactly the same kind and size, in the same place. It might’ve been the same pair.

Was there some message intended? What did a disappearing and reappearing rug and black tennis shoes mean? She couldn’t tell anyone about this stuff, because it sounded crazy. She had no idea who would do such things, but, in her moments of paranoia, Marylou suspected that it must be someone who saw beneath her nice old lady exterior and was trying, in the creepiest sort of way, to let her know that she wasn’t fooling everyone.

Alberto. What a wimp. And Vic had had such high hopes for him.

On June 8 he’d watched baby Alberto hatch in the western Caribbean, held his breath as the baby burst out of his red egg, causing a colorful disturbance on Vic’s computer screen as he crawled slowly northwest, fed by sweet winds. By June 10, toddling around Cuba, Alberto had blossomed into a tropical depression, and his predicted path was smack-dab into Florida’s Gulf Coast. When he read this forecast, Vic, down in his basement closet, silently raised his fist in celebration.

Vic’s boy wobbled in the Yucatán Channel—increased wind shear—but he hung tough. On June 11, a red-letter day, he intensified into Tropical Storm Alberto, and Floridians started paying him the attention he deserved. It was hard for Vic to discuss the lad with family and friends and not sound gleeful. And then, praise be, on June 12, the NHC predicted that Alberto would attain hurricane status before he made landfall—in the Big Bend, the armpit of Florida, near Tallahassee! Vic celebrated by having three beers after dinner. But, alas, on June 13, Alberto, weakened due to an infusion of dry air, came straggling ashore fifty miles southeast of Tallahassee, near St. Marks. He remained just a run-of-the mill storm—undernourished and undistinguished.

Yeah, sure, there was flooding, storm surge, downed trees, power outages, and Alberto fathered a few impotent tornadoes; but all in all, he turned out to be a disappointment, an underachiever, a failure. Utterly forgettable.

Meanwhile, there was the rest of his life, which at that time was the portfolio project. Vic’s other baby.

The portfolios included samples of each student’s work in the subjects they took—lab write-ups, essays, the solutions to story problems, the whole shebang. Scoring them was a bitch, and it was Vic’s job to try to figure out how to train people to do that scoring as fast and accurately as possible. Otherwise, students (and ultimately their teachers and their schools) would be assessed on the basis of nothing other than standardized tests.

Portfolios from ten pilot high schools were pouring into FTA offices. Vic and his staff had to read through some of the writing samples and, for each subject area, assemble the packets that they could use as examples to train their scorers with. Vic had persuaded his supervisor that Gigi, with her Ph.D. in English, would be an excellent person to train the language arts scorers. He finagled her a temporary raise. Since Vic was a language arts person himself, he would help Gigi.

Vic and Gigi spent hours alone in a conference room piled high with cardboard boxes labeled Language Arts with the name of the high school written underneath, reading through hundreds of writing samples to find examples of different ways a student could get a score of one, two, three, and so on, so that they could photocopy the samples for training packets. Sometimes they read the papers aloud to each other or asked the other one’s opinion on what score a certain paper should get, and in between reading and discussing student work they talked about themselves and their families and graduate school and their lives since graduate school.

In the hallway, outside the open door of the conference room,
there periodically came the deep buzzing sound of somebody pressing a button on the soda machine and the clunk, clunk, clunk of a can of soda falling down the chute and then the trickling clink, clink, clink of coins in the change slot. It was pathetic how much Vic loved hearing those sounds when that machine was buzzing and clunking and clicking for him and now, for Gigi, too.

Gigi sipped her fresh Diet Coke and Vic cracked open his Mountain Dew, and the dreary green walls of the windowless conference room and the fake wood tables and the chemical smell of industrial carpet and the frigid recycled air—everything was transformed into something magical by the presence of Gigi, with her wild mane of hair and dark blue eyes and lively personality. Vic’s life had gone from shades of gray to Technicolor. He felt like he was back in graduate school, when he and his fellow strivers used to go out for beer and gossip and to flirt and argue and dance. He hadn’t realized how much he’d missed it.

Sitting across from each other at the end of a long table, surrounded by the manila folders that Vic saw in his sleep, they talked about the American Lit. professor they’d had who thought every short story had a hidden key planted by the author that unlocked all the meaning, and the Modern American Poetry professor who only wanted to discuss the boring dreams she’d had the previous night, and the grad student who wrote stories about a young man (much like himself) who hitchhiked around America, sleeping with women and causing their long-awaited menstruation cycles to magically resume.

Gigi updated Vic on her love life. She’d been married and divorced—her second marriage—since graduate school. She wasn’t seeing anyone at present, because she’d gotten very choosy. She was over forty and she didn’t want to waste any more time on losers. Both her husbands had been alcoholics, and she wasn’t going to make that mistake again.

“Travis has problems,” Gigi said. “He gave me so much grief in
high school. Talking ugly, punching holes in walls. Refusing to get out of bed. The doctors didn’t know what was wrong with him. Oh, they
said
they knew. Slapped disorders on him left and right. ADD, ODD, OCD, bipolar. You ever wonder if we’re doing the right thing, getting our children saddled with all these labels? Seems like every other person has Asperger’s these days. Hell, Travis might even have it. I sent him to one of those support groups just to see if he felt comfortable with those people.”

Vic suggested she call Caroline for advice. He didn’t really feel competent giving advice about Asperger’s, and he didn’t want to waste precious time with Gigi, talking about Asperger’s. He was sick to death of Asperger’s. Sometimes he wished old Hans Asperger had never been born. Vic didn’t even like to speak the A-word aloud to people not in the know. It usually elicited either chuckles (“Did you say
ass
something?”) or blank stares. And the word
autistic
was even worse, as it conjured up head-banging devil children. But Caroline never hesitated to throw those A-words out like firecrackers. Although she wouldn’t admit it, she enjoyed the disturbance those words caused. If asked why she brought it up with people, she would say that she was only making people aware so that they’d be more sympathetic to Ava and Otis, cut them some slack, realize that they weren’t just weird but weird for a reason.

But Vic would argue with her. We’re all on the spectrum somewhere. Why label people? We’re all weird. And aren’t people with obsessions more interesting than those who have no idea what they like? Some people turn their obsessions into great careers. About the social problems. Who doesn’t just not “get it” sometimes? Some of us are more “typical” than others, that’s all.

So Vic, sitting in the suddenly cozy conference room with Gigi, finding himself unwilling to waste time deconstructing Asperger’s with Gigi, segued into Ava’s obsession with Elvis, thinking Gigi would find it as bizarre as he did.

The thing about Gigi was, he could never predict how she’d respond to a question or what take she’d have on a situation or a subject. Of course, if he’d been married to her for twenty years, she might have been as predictable as he found his wife to be. But he realized that he didn’t really know Gigi well at all, and he wanted to remedy this situation. He looked forward to hearing what she had to say, even if she disagreed with him.

“I suppose you like Bob Dylan better,” was Gigi’s response to his complaining about having to listen to Elvis music nonstop.

“Well, yeah. He wrote his own songs, for one thing.”

“Dylan was a poseur! Rich Jewish kid pretending to be an Oakie. He did write some great songs. It’s apples and oranges, anyhow. Elvis was an interpreter. He drew from all sorts of music and put his own stamp on it.”

“He didn’t have such hot taste. ‘In the Ghetto’? Come on.” Vic was surprised to find himself feeling energized, and it wasn’t just the Mountain Dew. Unlike the spats with his family, he was actually enjoying this little tiff with Gigi.

Gigi tossed her loosely curled blond hair over her shoulders. High-maintenance hair, Caroline called it. Caroline had recently cut her hair short and stopped coloring it. It was her hair—she could do what she wanted to with it—but looking at Caroline’s gray streaks made him feel old.

“Here’s the thing,” Gigi told him. “Elvis didn’t get access to some really good songs because the Colonel insisted that Elvis get all the royalties. You have to understand Elvis’s background to understand why he didn’t fight the Colonel. You’re just like everyone else who doesn’t like Elvis because he was white and Southern.” She poked Vic in the chest with her well-manicured index finger. “Face it, Vic Witherspoon. You are a snob.”

Vic swatted her finger away. “Didn’t know you were such an Elvis fan.”

“I’m not,” she said. “It’s just my duty to fight Yankee misconceptions. I’m a Johnny Cash fan, myself. Now. Listen up. Is this a good example of a three?” She held up an essay and read a pitiful little movie review of
The Incredibles
that was four sentences long. The first sentence said, “Listen up, dudes and dudettes,” and the last sentence said, “You just gotta see the movie your own self!”

“Any misspellings? How’s the punctuation?” Vic asked her. “It might be more of a two.”

“I can’t bear to give this poor kid a two,” she said. “He’s got some flair.”

“How do you know it’s a he?”

“This is a three or I’m walking right out of here.”

Vic swept his hand toward the door. “Feel free. Dudette.”

She checked her big red watch. “How long till happy hour? Can you go out after work for one drink?”

“Maybe. Just one.”

Gigi, who must’ve picked up on his reluctance, smoothly shifted gears and asked about Suzi’s knee injury. “Must be hard on
all
of you,” she said.