The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady (5 page)

Suzi made her eyes big and wide, leaned forward, and said, mimicking Ava’s deep voice, “I love Elvis even though he wore thong underwear.”

Ava did not
overreact
, the word her parents use for Ava’s wild, physical outbursts. She turned red but kept eating her well-salted chicken Alfredo. She reminded Suzi of a long-necked goose.

Otis lay down his fork and grinned in anticipation of a rollicking good sister fight. He came to the table with greasy hair and dirty fingernails, but Mom and Dad had stopped caring.

“Would you look at that tree,” said Granddad, who still had half his dinner left. He sat next to Suzi, looking out the window and eating so slowly he made her feel like a greedy pig. He was talking about the live oak right beside the deck, a tree with long curving branches as thick as most tree’s trunks. Every time he sat down to eat, it was like he’d never seen that tree before. “Isn’t that the most beautiful tree you’ve ever seen?”

“Yes, Dad, it’s the most beautiful tree in the whole wide world,” Suzi’s mom said.

Ava smiled at Granddad, ignoring Suzi, so Suzi kept talking, saying whatever came into her head, because it didn’t matter: whatever she said would do the trick. “Elvis loved black people. Even loved geese. I declare, he’s a saint.”

Suzi’s parents, at opposite ends of the long trestle table, glanced up at each other, their faces sagging with tiredness, and Suzi knew she should keep her mouth shut, and probably would have, but her mother said, “You can’t let us have one dinner in peace.”

“What?” Suzi said. “She always talks about Elvis. Why can’t I?”

Ava couldn’t stand it any longer. “You don’t like Elvis because he’s part Native American! And part Jewish. You’re prejudiced.”

“No,” said Suzi, “I don’t like him because he sings like he has a stick up his butt.”

“I like him,” their father said, a little too heartily.

“I don’t
dislike
him,” Suzi said. “I just think he has a stick up his butt.”

“Eat. Your. Supper.” Mom’s hair was frizzed out around her face from the humidity in the kitchen, and she slumped over the table like she was 110 years old.

“Don’t you just love trees?” Granddad said, and took a sip of his water. “I think that tree has to be the most beautiful one ever.”

“Yes, it is, Granddad,” Ava said. Miss Suck Up.

“I wonder,” Suzi asked, “did Elvis have a syndrome, too? Like Asperger’s? Ass stickers?”

Otis barked out, “Shut up. Freakazoid foundling.” He meant that Suzi must have been adopted because she didn’t have Asperger’s and had kinky, curly hair.

“Don’t say ‘shut up,’ ” Mom told Otis, then threatened Suzi with lack of phone privileges.

For a moment there was only chewing and swallowing. Parson Brown wound between their legs under the table, snuffling for crumbs. Outside, the evening sky was turning a pale yellowish color.

“This is very good,” Dad told Mom, indicating the chicken Alfredo, which was one of the four dishes she cooked because everyone would eat them. Mom didn’t even look up.

“Yes, it is, honey,” said Granddad, and took an actual bite.

Mom said thanks like she didn’t mean it.

“Tropical storm Alfredo’s headed right for the Panhandle,” Dad went on and said, “St. Marks, maybe.”

“Who cares. It’s not a hurricane,” Otis said. Elbows on the table, he went back to his chicken, bent low and shoveling it into his mouth. He chewed with his mouth gaping open. Both he and Ava had terrible table manners, and Suzi was sick and tired of having to watch them eat, but she decided to practice self-control and refrain from imitating them or saying anything about how gross they were.

“It might turn into a hurricane,” Dad said.

“It’s
Alberto
, not Alfredo,” Ava corrected Dad, who smiled. He’d been testing them.

Suzi felt stupid that she hadn’t caught Dad’s error, so she tried out another angle on Ava, saying something that could, if she had the right attorney, be construed as an innocent remark in a court of law. “Will you tell your roommate at college that you have a syndrome?” she asked Ava.

Ava couldn’t help rising to the bait. “I don’t have it anymore. I’ve outgrown it.”

“Isn’t that just the most beautiful tree ever?”

“Yes, Dad. The most. Beautiful. Ever.”

When Granddad first came to live with them, all three kids had cut back on their fighting, at least in front of Granddad, but after Suzi noticed that Mom and Dad seemed to be fighting more than ever, she went back to her wicked old ways, and so did the other two. “You don’t
outgrow
Asperger’s,” Suzi announced primly. “You and Otis will have it your entire lives.” Facts were facts, after all.

Ava’s face scrunched up. The moment had come. What would Ava do? Would she throw herself across the table and try to strangle Suzi? Would she pick up her glass of milk and toss it onto Suzi’s head? Would she scream about how much she hated Suzi’s guts?

Suzi tensed up, waiting for Ava to emit the high-pitched yell she usually gave before she attacked, but this time the yell never came.

Ava thrust her chair back and left the table. Had Ava finally developed self-control? At first Suzi was disappointed, but on her way past Suzi, Ava reached out and gave Suzi’s hair a good hard yank.

“Ava!” Dad said. “No bodily contact.”

Granddad was studying his tree with a pensive expression on his whiskery face, probably wishing he lived in a nursing home.

“I didn’t do anything!” Ava yelled from the hallway. “I just accidentally bumped into her.”

“Liar!” Suzi, relieved to be the one wronged, howled, held her scalp, and burst into tears.

Mom told Suzi that she had provoked Ava and so she was grounded until further notice. “We all see what you’re doing,” Mom told Suzi, “and we all know why you’re doing it.” She looked at Suzi like she hated her.

“How do you know? You can’t read my mind.” Suzi bawled harder and ran from the room and down the hall. She slammed her door shut and threw herself on her bed. Her wailing, now muffled, continued. She’d started the whole thing, it was true, and she’d been mean and even disgusting, picking on poor defenseless Ava, but she felt like she’d exposed some deep truth that they all needed to face, and there was some relief in that.

This was the truth: her own mother didn’t like her.

From Ava’s room, Elvis sang with bold abandon: “Ta-reet me like a fool, / Ta-reet me mean and cruel, / But love me.”

I’m not a bad person, she wanted to tell her mother, and she didn’t
think she was, really, only why did she feel compelled to pick on Ava? Sometimes she really didn’t blame her mother for hating her. She promised herself she’d never pick on Ava again. But couldn’t Ava listen to something else once in a while? Even someone else old and embarrassing, like Frank Sinatra?

And her mother had actually encouraged Ava’s obsession with Elvis by taking her to Memphis to see Graceland over Christmas break. Only Ava was allowed to go, and since then, Ava’d been even more fixated on the King, and her mother had come back talking about her own mother, who had left her when she was a little baby, not even a year old. Her mother had started asking Granddad lots of questions about her mother, but Granddad didn’t have answers and her mother cried awhile about that, saying that when she was in Memphis she kept thinking about her mother and feeling down.

Well, hello! Suzi wanted to yell at her mother. How do you think I feel! You’ve never loved me like you do Ava. But she felt bad for her mother, too, because she knew what it felt like to miss your mother’s love.

After a while she started fishing around in her shorts pocket for some Kleenex, but instead she found the card with Nance’s phone number. She held it and looked at it a minute, and then, without even thinking about it, got up and walked back into the kitchen, where her parents were sitting, glaring at each other and then at Suzi. Granddad and Otis had disappeared.

She handed the card to her mother and explained how she’d met this nice old lady out walking her dog and that she was from Memphis and really cool and she really liked Suzi and thought Suzi was special. “She invited me to go to Italy with her,” Suzi explained. “We’re going to stay in a villa in Tuscany. At the end of the summer. Can I go?”

“And miss soccer camp?” said her father, acting like the trip was a joke.

But she wouldn’t let him. It wasn’t a joke, not to her. “I said at the
end
of summer. August.”

Her mother was looking at the card, and she glanced up at Suzi. “Why would she want to take you?”

“That’s real nice,” Suzi said, hurt, of course, but grimly gratified to have more evidence.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” said her mother. “What I meant was, she doesn’t even know you. It’s kind of strange, don’t you think?”

“No,” Suzi said, even though
strange
was exactly the word for it.

“She can tell you’re fun to hang out with, I guess!” her mother said, smiling like it hurt her face.

“I
guess.
”

Her mother sighed,
can’t do anything right
, and studied the card again. “Nancy Archer. Wonderful name.”

“It sounds made up,” Dad said, but nobody ever listened to him.

He never would’ve hooked up with Gigi if his kids had been out front of the roller rink, SkateWorld, like they were supposed to be.

Inside, Otis and Suzi were whizzing around the rink under the disco lights, and although he was annoyed by the crowds and the blaring music and the flashing lights in the dimness and the smell of grease and sweat and by having to come inside to get his kids—again!—it also did his heart good, as they say, to see his children enjoying themselves, even though they did it in very different ways.

Suzi swung around the rink hand in hand with Davis, a dark-haired kid who was a couple of inches shorter than she was. Davis was something of an Eddie Haskell type, somebody who could charm any adult he saw fit to charm, but Vic liked him. He came to most of Suzi’s local soccer games. He left messages on their voice mail, pretending to be Bob, a Sears appliance guy, because he knew Vic thought it was funny.

Suzi skated carefully and had Davis to hold on to, and Vic was glad. He had to keep himself from forbidding her to do any activity that might cause an injury and ruin her chance to go to the Olympic Development soccer camp in July. She hadn’t made the cut last year, but it was just
so cool
that she’d have the chance to participate this year and hopefully get chosen to go on to regionals in New Orleans in January. And then … but, no, he wouldn’t let himself get his hopes up too high.

Free spirit Otis, on the other hand, swooped around the rink alone—around and around and around he went, skillfully avoiding other people, just as he did in real life. Otis never seemed to need, or want, any attention or affection, so most people eventually let him be, even, to a degree, his own parents; but it was either let Otis be or struggle with him constantly. Skating was the only physical activity Otis had ever enjoyed, and he was damn good at it. Even so, Vic had to force him to go skating on occasional Saturday afternoons, and he had to drive him there because Otis wouldn’t waste his own gas. The only place Otis ever really wanted to be was working on his science project in that hideous shed. This place, at least, was an improvement over the shed. Without noticing his father, Otis swung past again, wearing a glow-stick necklace, which meant he’d once again won the boys speed skate for his age group.

Vic was standing there, admiring his progeny, when he felt a hand on his shoulder. “Victor? Victor Mature?” Only one person ever called him after the B-movie actor from the forties and fifties—the chump who played opposite Rita Hayworth in the forgettable
My Gal Sal
. Vic smelled her perfume before he turned around. Prada—the same scent Caroline used to wear before she pitched her bottle along with all her fancy face lotions.

There stood Gigi Carter with the tousled blond hair, a smart Southern belle who was going to seed, in a sexy way. Gigi was a friend of Vic’s from graduate school at FSU. Gigi had finished her Ph.D. in English—focusing on Southern women’s literature—but she had a trust fund income and didn’t have to look for a full-time teaching job. He saw her occasionally in the halls of Florida Testing and Assessment, where she temped from time to time. She preferred temping, she’d said, because it gave her more time to ride horses and write.

Vic gave her an awkward hug.

Gigi was wearing a sundress, so obviously she wasn’t skating. She
didn’t seem like the skating type. In fact, Gigi wasn’t athletic looking—she was pale and knobby—but in her case, appearances were misleading. She trained and boarded horses and taught riding lessons and was a skilled rider herself. She’d given riding lessons to Ava and they’d gotten along famously—until Ava had fallen off one of Gigi’s horses and hadn’t wanted to go back.

Gigi asked Vic where his family was, and he happily pointed Suzi and Otis out to Gigi, who hadn’t seen them in a while and made the appropriate fuss about how grown-up and good-looking they were.

“Is Travis here?” Vic asked her over the refrain of “YMCA” by the Village People. Travis, her son, was Ava’s age.