The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady (9 page)

She led Nance back into the little sitting room where her father hung out. Each time she entered that oppressive room she was struck again by the old man smell. Sometimes she felt like everyone in her house was trying to take it over, take up all the air and space and sound waves until there was nothing left for her. The big old farmhouse she and Vic had rented in Iowa haunted her. The quiet. The space. And they’d been so eager to fill it up with kids! What the hell were they thinking?

Her father, the old man who smelled, sat in his favorite chair near the TV, the nubby chair with the permanent imprint of his butt in the cushion. They’d have to throw it away when he died. Not that she ever thought about that.

“You must be Dr. Spriggs!” Nance gushed. “So good to finally meet you.” She glanced around the room and then arranged herself on the love seat across from him, settling in among the pages of the newspaper.

Her father stared at Nance in bewilderment.

If this woman was his long-lost wife, wouldn’t he recognize her? True, it would have been forty-eight years ago that she left him, and
his mind was going. But maybe he was only
pretending
not to recognize her.

Nance kept staring at him, looking him slowly up and down.

Wilson Spriggs was a commanding presence, even in his old age. If you saw him working in the yard, you might think, if you were a certain age yourself: why it’s Cary Grant’s look-alike! The old Cary Grant, when he wore those cool black glasses. And if you were to stop and talk to him, you’d think that he must be a paid advertisement for Geritol. Clear-eyed and friendly but not overfamiliar. If you talked to him only briefly, you would never suspect that his mind was slipping. Wilson still radiated that doctor vibe:
I’m important! Pay heed!
The man had been married three times, the last two times to adoring nurses. But now he was unshaven, wearing his hideous brown bathrobe. If Caroline had known that Nance was coming over, she might’ve insisted that her father get dressed and shave. She felt like a matchmaker.

Nance didn’t appear to be smitten. She now gazed at him with a stony expression that contradicted her earlier gushiness. “Finally,” Nance muttered. “Wilson Spriggs, in the flesh. As I live and breathe.” And then, in a louder voice, “Yep, still living and breathing here, Wilson Spriggs!”

“Me, too,” Wilson said in a jovial way.

“So I see.
Dr
. Spriggs.” Nancy Archer, or Mary Conner, seemed to be harboring resentment toward Wilson. How could she resent him if she didn’t know him? Interesting.

“Nancy Archer is our new neighbor.” Caroline had to speak loudly, because her father wouldn’t wear his hearing aid. She was speaking too loudly, but she didn’t care. “She brought Ava an Elvis book.”

“Good morning,” he said to Nance, and smiled like his old charming self.

Nance refused coffee, and glanced at Caroline expectantly. Entertain me, is what her expression said. Christ, another person who
wanted to be taken care of. If this woman was her mother, had she come expecting Caroline to nurse her in her twilight years? Was she looking for a handout? Nance had claimed to have plenty of money, but was that true? There were many questions that must be answered, and answered to Caroline’s satisfaction.

Back in Iowa City, when Caroline was in junior high school, Wilson had told her what he knew about her mother, which was disappointingly little. The two of them had known each other only two months before they got married, Wilson explained, and they got married only because Mary was expecting a baby. Mary was eighteen at the time, a country girl from Arkansas who’d come up to the city to seek her fortune. Wilson claimed he knew nothing about her family or exactly where she’d grown up. How could you not know those things? Caroline had always wondered.

Later on, when Caroline was in high school and Wilson was married to wife number three, he revealed to Caroline what had happened the day Mary disappeared back in 1959. He’d dropped Mary and baby Caroline at his mother’s house in suburban Memphis and had gone off to do some errands downtown. When he returned a couple of hours later, Mary was gone. What did he mean, gone? She wasn’t there. She’d left. Didn’t he ask his mother what had happened? Sure, but his mother swore to her dying day that she didn’t see Mary leave and didn’t know why or where she’d gone. Didn’t he try to find her? Sure he did. He checked with all their friends, visited all their old hangouts, like the Arcade and the Tick Tock. He even put an ad in the paper. No, she never asked for any of her things. Oddly enough, Wilson said, his mother’s precious grand piano also disappeared a few days after Mary did, and his mother claimed that she’d just felt like selling it. Wilson immediately suspected that his mother, who’d never liked Mary, had offered to give her the piano if she’d disappear, but he didn’t voice his suspicions to his mother, who would’ve denied it. So had Mary been a
music lover? Had she ever taken piano lessons or expressed an interest in playing piano? No, Mary had never shown much interest in any kind of music. But what kind of person would swap an object they didn’t care about for their own baby? Mary, apparently. What kind of person would deprive a child of her mother? The child’s grandmother, evidently. Why would you suspect your own mother of secretly bribing your wife to leave and then lying about it? He did, and he couldn’t explain why. The whole thing was too vexing to think about.

Caroline had long since given up expecting her mother to show up on her birthdays or to call, even send a card. Maybe that’s why she’d always hated her birthday. So what had prompted her might-be mother to return now?

Keep quiet until you’re sure, Caroline told herself. She sat down at the other end of the love seat, picked up the paper, shook it, and read, too loudly, “Six-letter word for animus.”

“Romulus and Remus,” said Nance in a singsong voice.

Okay. Caroline took a sip of her cooling coffee. “Dad? Animus.”

He shook his head slowly. “Do we know any letters?”

“No! I told you that.”

“Hate,” he said.

“Six! Letters!”

“Betty Bordney fairy sway,” Nance said, and snorted with laughter.

Her father laughed, too, a startling sound. Caroline hadn’t heard her father laugh in ages. The crossword puzzle segment of their morning was usually done in a businesslike manner, because it was one of the things the doctor had said they needed to do to help keep Wilson’s memory intact. Caroline had suspected that her father didn’t enjoy it much either.

“Who is Betty Bordney?” Wilson asked Nance.

“A lady I knew. In Memphis. A nurse. Betty Bordney fairy sway. That’s what we used to call her. Or was it Betty fairy
Bordner
sway?”

“Did you hate her?” Wilson asked. “Was there animus between you?”

“Oh, no. The opposite. She and I had a lesbian affair.”

Wilson blanched, uncomfortable about such things being said boldly aloud.

Was her mother a lesbian? Was that why she left? Caroline felt hysterical laughter bubbling up and tried to swallow it.

“Just playing with ya,” Nance said. “I’m not a lesbian.”

“Betty Bordney sounds like a cow,” Wilson said.

“And fairy sway sounds like a dairy dessert.”

“Moo,” Wilson said.

What the hell? Was this an inside joke from when they were married? Caroline broke out into snickers, clamped her lips together, then exploded with laughter. She laughed and tried to stop and stopped and started up again, the way she and Vic used to laugh, the way she and her high school buddies used to laugh, the way she never laughed anymore; and she kept it up until she was crying. No. Not that. She finally got control and wiped her eyes with a handy napkin.

Both Nance and her father were staring at her, her father with a worried smile and Nance with a big pumpkin grin. This Nance was a different person than the one who’d sat in their living room a couple of days earlier—the old Nance had been earnest and eager to please, even if she hadn’t been convincing talking up her and Suzi’s trip to Italy.

“I’m sorry, kids,” Caroline said in a jolly voice. She dabbed her eyes and blew her nose. “Let’s get back to the crossword puzzle. Okay. Thirty-two down. An eight-letter word for nocturnal creature.”

“Huh,” Wilson said. He glanced over at Nance.

Nance pursed her thin little lips and shook her head. “Armadillo?”

“That’s nine letters,” Caroline said. “Good guess though.”

“I saw an armadillo in your yard just now,” Nance said. “He squeezed out from under that shed in the back.”

“That’s my pet armadillo,” Wilson said. “Animus.”

“Tee-hee,” Nance said.

Caroline set down the newspaper. She picked up her coffee cup, wanting to hurl it across the room. “Anyone else want coffee?”

They both refused, eager, Caroline felt, to get rid of her.

When she returned, blowing on her third cup of the morning, Nance was reading an article from the paper aloud to Wilson, her voice changing when there were quotes. Caroline always read the paper in a bored monotone. Nance must’ve been able to tell, just by being around Wilson for a short time, that he was in dire need of levity and a fresh face.

Caroline stood in the doorway to listen. She studied the old woman’s sharp features. She could see no resemblance at all between Nance and herself.

“Frank Comas,” Nance read in a newscaster’s voice, “a physician, appeared before the president’s advisory committee to defend the work done by the Oak Ridge doctors.” Here Nance’s voice changed to a basso profundo. “ ‘It is with some sadness and also some annoyance, I must confess, that I am obliged to try to exonerate ourselves for something perceived by some as devilish acts where science was God and damn all other considerations.’ ”

Wilson sat in his chair, head down, his fingers twined together in his lap. Caroline hoped he wasn’t falling asleep. It was odd. She’d just read most of that section of the paper to Wilson, and she didn’t recall the article that Nance was now reading.

Nance went on reading, something about a committee and a hearing, blah, blah, blah. Caroline stood and listened for another minute—well, not really listening but watching her father to make sure he seemed content—and then, with a slightly lighter heart, she drifted away.

She knew she should stay away from Ava, but somehow she found
herself in the hallway outside Ava’s door, where she often ended up, back at the scene of her many failures to communicate with her daughter, wondering whether or not she should go in to make sure she was studying for her algebra test. Ava, when she was involved in some activity, could react angrily to being interrupted. Caroline knew this from years of experience, but of its own accord her hand was on the doorknob, turning it, and she was looking into the room where Ava sat cross-legged on the bed, studying a book, the big book of Elvis photographs Nance had just brought over. How had she gotten hold of it so fast?

The sound of Elvis’s melodramatic, self-mocking voice came from Ava’s room from morning until late at night. “Polk salad Annie, / the gators got your granny.”

“Ava,” Caroline said now. “Please turn the music down.”

Ava ignored her.

“Shouldn’t you be studying algebra?”

Ava kept studying the photographs, hunched over, her dark hair hiding her face, the fingers of one hand busily rattling the corner of the page she was looking at. She sat surrounded by all her Elvis memorabilia—her Elvis posters,
Jailhouse Rock
Elvis clock, Teddy Bear Elvis pillows, Aloha Elvis lamp. She wore a new Elvis T-shirt, a fitted pink one which showcased the fifties Elvis. When had she gotten that one? How had she paid for it? “Ava!”

Finally Ava glanced up at her, disoriented, like she’d just woken up. “This has some pictures in it I’ve never seen before,” she said. “From when he lived in Germany. Where’d this come from?”

Caroline explained that Nance had brought it, which made Ava sit up straighter and smile. If only Ava weren’t so beautiful, Caroline thought for the millionth time, and then scolded herself for thinking such a dumb thing, for wishing ugliness on a girl who already had the cards stacked against her.

“After you finish studying, there’s some forms you need to sign,” she told Ava. “For Rhodes College.”

Ava kept looking at the book.

Elvis sang that he was just a roustabout. Going from town to town.

Caroline marched over and pulled the plug on the iPod dock. “We need to get those forms in the mail as soon as possible.”

Ava, surrounded by pictures of Elvis, kept looking at the book with a little smile on her face that indicated total absorption. Mother did not exist. Nothing else existed but Elvis.

Caroline considered her options. She could go get the forms from her desk and thrust them in front of Ava’s face. She could rip the Elvis book from Ava’s hands. She could thrust the math book in front of Ava and yell at her about passing math and how she wouldn’t get into Rhodes College if she didn’t pass math this time. Ava would scream back at her that she didn’t care, didn’t care about math or college or anything and just wanted to be left alone, and she might even start in yelling about how dumb she was, how ugly, how fat, and even start hitting herself, until Caroline ran from the room holding in tears.

This scene had happened many times, even though Caroline knew better than to start it, knew better because of all the years of therapy they’d had and books she’d read about how to deal with Asperger’s syndrome; but it was hard to act like a calm, disinterested therapist with your own child.

Caroline, like all the other mothers she knew who had autistic kids, had become the designated therapy parent in the family. Vic’s only contribution to their therapy was to get the kids hooked on watching reruns of
Seinfeld
. He pointed out that the show was all about social gaffes and miscommunication, and, who knows, it could be that watching
Seinfeld
and afterward discussing the many ways that Kramer, Jerry, Elaine, and George screw up might help Ava and Otis more than anything. Could be, Caroline agreed, but we can’t just stop
there. Sometimes she admired and envied his ability to stay aloof, but other times it maddened her. She needed help and he wouldn’t help her. She knew it was good for the kids to have one calm person in the family, but why did it have to be him?