The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady (8 page)

“It’s not that bad,” Vic said.

Caroline made a scoffing sound. “I’m the one who looks after him all day. I should know.”

Suzi clambered to her feet. “I’ve got some social studies to finish. The Incas and Mayans.” She smiled politely at Nance and thanked her for coming. Then she stopped, just before rounding the corner, and stood there dramatically. “So can I go to Italy with Nance? Can I?”

“No, you can’t,” Caroline said.

Suzi said, “What? Why not? She needs me.”

“We’ll talk about it later,” Vic said, when Caroline didn’t reply.

Suzi waved at her friend and disappeared.

Nance scooted forward in her chair and gazed at Caroline. Vic expected her to make a case for Italy, but she surprised him. “My new house doesn’t have any yard to speak of. I miss it so much. Maybe I could come work in yours sometime.”

“There’s not much to do,” Caroline said.

Nance began blinking her eyes rapidly, obviously disappointed.

“Come by anytime,” Vic told Nance.

“Mary,” Caroline said, apropos of nothing.

Nance jerked her head quickly toward Caroline, frowned, then looked quickly away.

“What?” Vic said. “Why’d you say that?”

“Mary?” Caroline said again. “Isn’t that your name?”

“It’s Nance.” Nance giggled, even though she was having to apologize for not being Mary.

“Oh, right.”

Had Caroline really forgotten the poor woman’s name that quickly? Vic was living in a house full of lunatics. He wouldn’t blame Nance if she never darkened their door again.

Nance was the kind of woman he’d always wished his own mother could have been—helpful, interested in other people, someone who wasn’t afraid to be ordinary, domestic, happy. She had no idea about the nest of yellow jackets she’d just stumbled into.

Everything that used to work didn’t.

Even with the air-conditioning cranked up, she was hot. She kicked the covers off during the night and lay there fuming, and during the day she wore tank shirts and boxer shorts around the house. She couldn’t stand her hair touching her face and neck. She was always “sweating like a hog.” One time Ava made the mistake of reminding her that hogs don’t sweat. “Come over here and feel my chest, then,” Caroline snapped, which caused Ava, and everyone else, to flee the room.

She was awful to her husband. She once informed him that she never wanted to have sex again … with anyone, she assured him. She couldn’t stand anyone “at her, wanting something.” Then, another time, she blurted out that she felt like having sex with every man she saw. Well, almost every man, she added, as if that made her statement more palatable.

“Me, too?” Vic had asked, just to humor her, she could tell, because, well, she was a sweaty hog with scary ponytails.

Even though she didn’t have high expectations, when they did have sex she had to conceal the feeling afterward that it hadn’t been worth the bother. Maybe she was done with the whole nonsense. How depressing was that?

She was awful to her children. To her own dear children! She was
used to having her hands full, but this summer, because of the older kids’ developmental lags, the adolescent desire for distance from one’s parents seemed to come over all three of her children at the same time. Caroline couldn’t engage any of them in conversation. She got only monosyllabic answers to her questions, eye rolling, deep sighing. Of course, she was in demand as a driver, as there were doctor’s appointments; counseling appointments; Suzi’s soccer practice; Ava’s piano lessons and classes at the community college, where she was finishing up her first year; carting Otis to his part-time job at McDonald’s and to Sunny Side High School, when he didn’t have gas money for his Pontiac; and of course there was always shopping, laundry, meal preparation, fight referee—but she could do all these things on autopilot. On many occasions her presence was required, and her cooperation was always expected, but she was supposed to perform her duties and stay in the background.

She often felt helplessly reduced to her children’s level. Below their level. One time she slapped Ava in the face for getting an F on her take-home algebra exam—she’d spent hours working on it and then forgotten to turn it in. Another time she scattered Suzi’s basket of clean laundry in the front yard because Suzi wouldn’t fold it. She held her nose around Otis because he stank like McDonald’s and refused to take a shower. After these occurrences her family had to endure her self-flagellation and profuse, weepy apologies. There were more incidents like this than she cared to count.

She was awful to her poor father, who enraged her by sitting at the kitchen table, patiently drinking coffee, waiting for her to read the newspaper to him because he couldn’t see well anymore, or waiting for her to take him to a doctor’s appointment or out to Target or CVS or Lake Ella to look at ducks. She’d taken to hiding from him in her bedroom, wondering how it could be that she had another person to take care of, cursing her gadabout younger brother who couldn’t take care of
an ingrown toenail, hoping that the old man would finally give up and shuffle back downstairs to his little bedroom.

Her father’s presence in her home was a constant reminder that she’d never had a mother—a fact that she’d been more successful at suppressing when he was living back in Iowa. The old question kept resurfacing—what had her father done to run her mother off? The answer to this question had never been obvious. Caroline had never seen him drink more than the occasional glass of wine, and there was no evidence that he’d spent money wildly—but he hadn’t clutched at it in a miserly way either. He’d lavished love and attention on the two wives—one nice, one mean—that he’d had after Mary Conner. He’d never shown signs of being a philanderer. But her mother wouldn’t have left behind a nine-month-old baby girl unless Wilson had done
something
to force her away. He’d never been willing to talk much about it, not while Caroline was growing up and not now. He didn’t talk much about anything anymore. On her worst days it seemed like he was simply there in her house to remind her of her mother, to give her more work to do, and then to die where she’d be the one to find him.

She was tired of being awful to the people she loved, but since she couldn’t stop being awful, the only alternative was to get away from all of them. Leave them far behind so as not to expose them to her anger. Maybe this was how her own mother had felt—that her family would be better off without her. But her mother had left a tiny baby! And never came back! Caroline would only be taking a sabbatical from grown and half-grown people who either resented her or took her for granted, or both—not leaving for good, just until she stopped wanting to slap them all silly. Suzi dismissed her. Otis patronized her. Being around Vic the way he was now—middle-aged—frightened her, because when she really noticed him, she was reminded of who they used to be and never would be again. Two people who’d backpacked in New Mexico on their honeymoon. Who’d howled with wolves from
a canoe in northern Minnesota. Who, when they couldn’t afford cable TV, watched Lawrence Welk on Saturday nights so they could dance to Myron Floren’s accordion. Then the kids came along, and everything was different but always a new adventure. Now she felt like they were waiting for it all to be over. She couldn’t wait anymore. She wouldn’t. Next! But what was next? Leaving was next. It was the only option she could come up with, because she was losing her mind.

The truth was, Caroline had been losing it for a while. But she didn’t want to go down without a fight.

Three years ago, when she turned forty-five, after having spent most of her life laughing at the suckers who’d buy such things, she started hemorrhaging money on expensive face creams with pseudoscientific names that promised miracles. She would apply each cream hopefully and study herself in the mirror, asking her husband periodically if she looked any different, and every time he said, “Yeah, sure,” until she stopped believing him. Around this time she started wearing T-shirts with skeletons and rhinestones on them and, with her already-tattooed friend Billie, she went downtown and got the names of her three kids tattooed on her left shoulder. Her family was horrified, which pleased her.

But after a while all this age-fending-off behavior started feeling like wasted energy, a finger in the dike. The sure prospect of old age and death hits different people at different ages. For Caroline, forty-eight was the magic year. She turned forty-eight on May 2, 2006.

The day after her forty-eighth birthday, that dreadful birthday when she couldn’t get out of bed, Caroline dumped all her expensive face creams in the trash and gave all her rock T-shirts to Ava, since Suzi tended more toward stripes and Nike swooshes. That’s when she started in with the boxer shorts and tank shirts and the little ponytails and the simmering anger and longing to run away, the same shameful longing that her mother must’ve felt, and then Mrs. So-called Nancy
Archer appeared in her living room, the first time when Suzi invited her, the second time when she dropped by with a book about Elvis—one of those huge coffee table books of photographs that end up in the remainder pile at Barnes & Noble.

The poor woman had lugged that big useless book three blocks in the heat. She was so thin and pale and dry, and not a smear of sweat anywhere on her—it was like she was trying to mock Caroline, who was red-faced and sweaty and not yet back—mentally, that is—from her morning run. She and Vic used to run together, but now, because he went in to work so early, he got up to run at five a.m. Caroline ran slower when she ran by herself, but she tried to stay in decent shape, which meant something different at age forty-eight than it did at age twenty-eight.

She didn’t know what to make of this insistent old lady. Caroline didn’t trust her, but what could she do but invite her in?

“Well, for a few minutes,” Nance said in her breathy voice, stepping quickly into the house.

Oh, but this was an opportunity, Caroline realized. Vic was at work, Ava supposedly studying in her room, Otis at Sunny Side High School, and Suzi at Miccosukee Middle School. Her father was in the den, and she would get to witness the meeting between Nance and her father. It would be a big moment. Either it would be a reunion between her parents, or else a first meeting of two strangers. She’d surely be able to tell which one it was when she saw it happening.

She suggested that Nance set the Elvis book on the dining room table so Ava could look at it later. Then she explained that she’d just finished reading the
New York Times
to Wilson, who liked to be kept abreast of the news, and that the two of them were now working on the crossword puzzle—they did it on Mondays and Tuesdays but after that, forget it, it was too hard.

“I’d love to help, but I’m not too good at crosswords,” Nance said in the dim hallway.

“Neither are we,” Caroline said, wondering if poor crossword solving skill was genetic.

The previous evening, after Nance had left their house, Caroline called her best friend, Billie, and told her what she suspected. It was when Nance mentioned having lived in Memphis when her father had and having been a patient at the clinic where he worked that Caroline began to feel that there was something else going on with Nance, a hidden agenda. Then when Nance talked about the daughter she hadn’t gotten to see grow up, the suspicion began to form in Caroline’s mind. She knew that her mother had met her father at that clinic—that her mother, Mary, had been a patient there. And the daughter she hadn’t known? Might that be Caroline? And then there were the identical birthmarks—the same place on Mary in the wedding photo and on so-called Nancy Archer.

She knew better than to tell Vic what she suspected—he’d tell her she was imagining things and accuse her of letting Billie egg her on. It was true—Billie did egg her on, but that’s what any good friend would do.

“My God!” Billie said to Caroline on the phone that night. “She
could be
your mother. But why has she come now? What does she want? Why the secrecy?”

“Exactly,” Caroline said, feeling slightly sick and dizzy. She was sitting in her own living room, usually her favorite place in the world. Who had picked out that pink floor lamp? Who were the innocent-faced children in those watercolor portraits?

“Maybe she’s afraid you hate her,” Billie suggested. “If it is her, she’s got a reason to be afraid. Abandoning you like that.”

“I don’t hate her,” Caroline said but knew she’d spoken too quickly. Her feelings about her mother changed periodically—had gone through various permutations over the years, and could even bounce all over the map—anger, sadness, longing, acceptance, hatred—in one hour. “Maybe she just went out of her mind and had to leave,” Caroline had said to Billie, and Billie snorted.

“She’s still out of her mind, if she’s showing up and pretending to be someone else.”

And now she’d shown up again! It was an opportunity for a do-over. During Nance’s earlier visit, Caroline had gotten more and more addle-brained when she began to suspect Nance of being her mother. She had acted rashly, pretending to have forgotten Nance’s name and called her Mary. Nance had seemed startled, but really, who wouldn’t have been if they’d been called Mary out of the blue? Right now Caroline had no proof of anything, there were only some odd coincidences and her own intuition. Today she would remain calm. She would strive for detached curiosity. Not an easy state for her to achieve these days, but she’d try.