The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady (30 page)

The portfolio scoring was going swimmingly. Training sessions for portfolio scoring were over, and so for the scorers, the relative excitement of training and qualifying had given way to the drudgery of scoring, of just showing up and getting through the portfolios. Each had to be scored by two readers. Readers scored each essay on a bubble sheet and slipped the sheet into an envelope so that it wouldn’t influence the other reader’s assessment. Gigi had to be on call to answer the scorers’ questions and resolve nonadjacent scores, and Vic was back to overseeing all the trainers. This batch of scorers, surprisingly sane and reliable, were working quickly, and it looked like they’d be finished ahead of schedule. Ron, Vic’s supervisor, was as pleased as he’d ever been, and Vic expected a raise and a promotion when the project was over.

Nance was one of the stalwarts. She hadn’t missed a day. She was
there every morning at eight thirty, carrying her lunch in a red oilcloth bag—turkey sandwich on whole grain bread, a ziplock bag of pretzels and another of baby carrot sticks. She either ate with some fellow senior scorers or ate alone and perused
People
magazine. She never gave Gigi or him any more trouble about scoring; in fact, she never said much to Vic at all, but sometimes when he was chatting in a corner of the room with Gigi, laughing with her, making plans for after work, he’d glance over and catch Nance staring at him. It was unnerving.

He and Gigi had taken to eating their own lunches at a picnic table outside, telling themselves it was because they were the only two people at FTA who wanted to deal with the heat. Inside it was so cold that at first the heat felt wonderful, and being alone with Gigi felt wonderful, too. The picnic table, an old wooden one, was back under some giant pine trees, always covered with pine needles and sap, but that didn’t deter them. It felt like time travel, like junior high, eating lunch with his girlfriend.

On this particular Friday, a week before the end of the project, they swept the needles off the table, plopped right down in the sap, and gobbled their brought-from-home sandwiches—his peanut butter and honey and hers chicken salad wrap—chewing and smiling but not talking. They both wore sunglasses. His wire framed, hers white-framed cat’s eyes.

Vic shared his strawberries and blueberries and vanilla yogurt, and Gigi shared her sesame sticks and Milano cookies, and then they drained their sodas, wadded up their trash, and, leaving their lunch boxes—his Scooby-Doo, hers Lily Pulitzer—went for a walk around the parklike grounds of FTA. By then the heat had thawed him and was cooking him, but he didn’t want to go back inside, even though their lunch hour was nearly over.

It was strange how, when Gigi first started working with him, they’d done nothing but talk, and now they didn’t talk much at all. As
they strolled on a paved path through a weird little glen dotted with stone benches that nobody ever sat on, Vic felt pulled toward Gigi, the same way he’d once been drawn to his former FTA coworker Wendy, the pregnant one, the one on whom he’d practiced successfully his all-and-nothing technique of avoiding adultery. He and Wendy used to saunter along these paths on their lunch break, and he had wanted nothing more than to wrap her in his arms, big belly and all, but he never did. They’d never even kissed, not once.

He and Gigi had already kissed, many times. They’d been having drinks and sometimes dinner every night after work. Hugging good-bye in the restaurant parking lots had escalated to kissing good-bye and finally to making out in her car like a couple of adolescents at a drive-in movie. It was ridiculous, shameful, and exhilarating.

Now he wanted more, or told himself he wanted more. He wasn’t sure which. As they moved together down the path, he was aware of the curve of her breast, the dimple in her left cheek, her hair bouncing on her bare shoulder. They walked down a little hill, Gigi’s sandals clacking on the pavement, and followed the path into a grove of pines, Gigi a few steps ahead of him. The hem of her wildly colored dress hit her a couple of inches above her knees, her freckled calves tightening each time she took a step. He imagined lifting her dress over her head, revealing nothing but her underneath. What was she thinking? Why didn’t she say anything? But he didn’t say anything either. He wasn’t ready yet. He was committing petty crimes, getting used to the idea of himself as a criminal, working up to the felony. It wasn’t too late to go straight, he reminded himself. He savored the excitement of teetering on the edge, feeling young and reckless. Nowhere near dead.

Gigi had stopped and turned toward him, one hand on her hip, like a model posing—Hipster in Hicksville. The two of them were at the edge of the FTA property line, marked by a barbed-wire fence. Across the fence was a pasture; and way off, under an oak tree, a group of
Cracker cattle, brown with white spots, stood patiently waiting for the sun to go down. Little egrets hopped among them, eating bugs.

He pulled Gigi into his arms and kissed her neck, her ear, her lips. “You feel so good,” he managed to say.

She struggled away from him. “How long are we going to play this little game?” she asked him, sounding more hurt than angry.

Drunk with lust, no blood in his brain, he took the question literally. How long? Huh. Let’s see. Out in the field, fire ant mounds were scattered around like huge brown sand castles. “Would you look at the size of those ant hills?” he said.

Gigi harrumphed and gave him a shove. “Such a boy,” she said, and began clomping back up the path toward the low, flat-roofed brick building, sixties faux-prairie architecture gone amok. A landscaping guy on a golf cart crossed behind Gigi and waved at Vic. Had he seen anything? Why was he waving?

Gigi, a siren in her mod dress, kept walking toward the building and another afternoon of game playing, and before he knew it he was jogging after her.

* * *

Later that afternoon, after the scorers had gone home, Vic wandered into the language arts scoring room to ask Gigi if she was ready to go to Andrew’s. She had her back to him, so he snuck up on her as she sat at a long table under those god-awful lights, bent over a portfolio, her hair now drawn back in a messy ponytail with a plastic grip, moss green sweater wrapped tightly around her. As Vic tiptoed toward her, holding his breath, he wanted to wrap his arms around her and nuzzle her neck again. His all-and-nothing plan of action hadn’t worked worth a damn. And to answer her earlier question, he wanted to end the game right now. He was ready, even eager, to do something incredibly stupid and cruel and destructive. There was an almost painful relief in this realization.
Let’s just go to a hotel, he would say. Forget the drinking and the dinner and the extended foreplay. In his mind, he was already there. They were already there, the full length of their naked bodies locked together on a bed, her legs parting.

Just as he was about to lean down and embrace her, he saw what she was doing with her yellow number-two pencil on the bubble sheet. She was erasing one scorer’s score and changing it so that it matched the other. He watched her do this to another score sheet without even looking at the portfolio, let alone reading the essays to determine which was the right score. For a few seconds he actually considered pretending he hadn’t noticed, but as he watched her change score after score, his desire shriveled up and anger replaced it. Finally he said in a low voice, “
What
are you doing?”

She shrieked and threw her pencil. “Fuck!” She turned to Vic, her face flushed, from either embarrassment or surprise or both. She didn’t answer his question but stood up and backed away from him, trying to recover her equilibrium.

“How long have you been doing that?”

She shrugged, like one of his teenagers. “I don’t know. Couple of days.”

There was noise in the hall, a clanking sound, which could have been the janitor emptying the trash can. There could be straggling scorers lurking about or other FTA employees. He tried to keep his voice down. “You’re compromising the whole project! How can you know which is the right score unless you read them?”

She took a few more steps away from him, arms folded on her chest. “What difference does it make? I mean, come on!”

“One’s right and one’s wrong. That’s the difference.” Ironic, him saying that, after what he’d just been thinking about sex and hotels.

“Oh, really?” she said, trying for coy. “Didn’t you say yourself that all holistic scoring just pretends to be unbiased?”

“I said it
tries
to be unbiased.”

Gigi smiled a tight little smile and displayed her palms, like,
same difference
.

Vic dropped down onto a nearby table. It was happening again, and he’d so hoped that it wouldn’t, not with Gigi. He was weary, so weary, of being saddled with the task of trying to make unreasonable people see reason, which he’d been doing, it seemed, all his life. The most unreasonable people of all had been his own parents.

Caroline swore that the Asperger’s gene, if there was such a thing, must’ve come from Vic’s side of the family, and he really couldn’t argue with that. Vic’s father always wore his trousers, as he called them, belted up above his waist and too short besides. You could always see his black socks, even in the summer when he wore sandals. Vic drew his father’s attention to these fashion errors, but his father couldn’t have cared less. For a while Vic’s father played drums, badly, in a small circus that toured Iowa, and before Vic knew enough to be embarrassed, he went to hear his father’s band accompany Tonja, the henna-haired trapeze artist, as she swung by her knees over their heads. The absurdity of it was stunning. But Vic’s father was a college professor, and, among his university colleagues, eccentric behavior was tolerated, even expected. The man taught in the English Department, after all. He taught the Bible as literature, and he was an atheist! What sense did that make?

His mother collected unbeautiful, unnecessary things—magazines, dolls, Kleenex boxes—and stacked them around their house, forcing the occupants to walk ever narrowing pathways between the rooms. Forget about sitting on the furniture. His mother never once answered the phone or the door, not wanting, she explained, to be put on the spot.

By the time his parents went into assisted living they decided, after never exchanging a cross word in their entire marriage—or not one Vic remembered—that they hated each other so much they had to have separate apartments. But even that wasn’t enough, because they ran into each other around Melrose Meadows and became offended by the
other’s cruel or show-offy or childish behavior. They called Vic to complain about each other, but nothing he said made a bit of difference, and they died, three years apart, bewildered about why they’d ended up alone.

And the unreasonableness went on. There was his wife, who was convinced that Nance was one of Wilson’s radiation victims, even though she had no evidence whatsoever for her theory. There was Ava, to whom he’d explained over and over again that if she didn’t learn to deal with her anger and quit physically attacking her sister she’d attack somebody else someday and end up in jail. Suzi, who wouldn’t do her physical therapy exercises, even though she claimed she wanted her knee to get better. Otis, who hid out in that infernal shed all the time. Wilson, who wouldn’t go out of the house by himself anymore because he was convinced that a bogeywoman was waiting to get him.

Vic had assumed that he wouldn’t have to take up the mantle of village explainer, or village scold, with Gigi, not because of her behavior, which had never been especially reasonable, but because of how he felt when he was with her. He’d thought, he’d hoped, that
he
could be unreasonable, too, at least for a while, when he was with her, but it seemed that it was not to be. Sigh.

“We’ve got to try to make scoring as accurate as possible,” he told Gigi. “That’s what we’re here for. There’s a lot of money riding on this project.” He sat down on the edge of the table, hating himself for saying these things and her for making him.

She shrugged and looked down at the floor. “It’s so boring, reading all those essays.”

“Lots of kids are going to get the wrong scores. Doesn’t that bother you? What if it happened to Travis?”

She wrinkled up her nose and grimaced. “I haven’t been doing it the whole time. I was just trying to hurry, so we could get out of here.” She stepped forward and started to hug him, pressing her breasts against his chest. How easy it would be to give up, give in, say to hell
with his job the same way he’d been planning to—let’s admit it—say the hell with his marriage. But he kept his arms at his sides.

She finally gave up and dropped her arms, cocking her head and making Bambi eyes at him. “Let’s talk about this at Andrew’s,” she said.

“I’m not going to Andrew’s,” he said. “I’m going home. I need to figure out what to do about this.”

“I’m really sorry,” she said, stepping back, her face now pale. “I really didn’t think this was that big a deal. You didn’t act like it was.”

He hadn’t? Maybe he hadn’t known how important the project was to him. How important his job was. “I’ve got to think,” he told her. But so far, thinking too much, about the wrong things—in other words, rationalizing—was what had gotten him into this mess.

“Fine.” She started gathering up her stuff—her glasses, her pens and pencils, her pack of gum, not looking up at him.

When he turned around to leave, he saw Nance in the doorway, her small neat figure, standing there, watching them, purse slung over her shoulder, that red lunch bag clutched in her hand.

“Why are you still here?” He had no idea how much she’d overheard.

“I want to talk to you.”

He turned back to Gigi, but she’d gone.

* * *

In his office, seated behind his desk, he felt better. “About Gigi,” he began.

Nance picked up a picture on his desk—Soccer Suzi, from two seasons ago. “You and Gigi have a thing going.”

“Of course we don’t.” So maybe she hadn’t overheard his argument with Gigi. He felt relieved. “Is
that
what you wanted to talk to me about?” he asked her. “Not that it’s any of your business.”