Be Frank With Me (17 page)

“I'm sorry. I'll find another.” She started rifling drawers.

“Fiona,” the office lady I didn't know said. “Stop making such a racket. Pens, top left drawer.”

Fiona. The girl was tall enough to be a third-grader, and skinny. A cute but fairly average-looking kid with blond hair and huge blue eyes that would seem less arresting once her face grew big enough to accommodate them. She wasn't wearing a sling or a kilt or a cardigan or a bow in her hair. But how many Fionas could there be at one school? “You're Fiona?” I said. “Will you be at Frank's presentation?”

She handed me the pen. “I'm Fiona. What presentation?”

“Frank is student of the week. He's giving his presentation this afternoon. He said you might be able to get a pass and come to it.”

“Who's Frank?”

“I'm sorry,” I said. “There must be another Fiona at this school.”

“I don't think so.”

I had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. “Frank has a friend named Fiona. She's in the third grade.”

“I'm in the third grade,” she said. “If there is another Fiona, she isn't in the third grade. I would know.”

“I must have the details wrong then. This Fiona broke her arm the first day of school.”

“I broke my arm the first day of school,” she said. “But I don't know anybody named Frank.”

Paula brushed past on her way into the principal's office. “She's talking about the fourth grader who dresses up,” she said. “My little friend who eats lunch with me every day.” She disappeared down the hallway.

Fiona wrinkled her nose. “Oh, that kid. He asked me if he could try my sling on once. He's weird.” She drifted away from the counter, which I was glad of, because otherwise I might have lunged across it and grabbed her neck and used my thumb to wipe those contemptuous wrinkles off her nose. And I might have pushed her septum through to the other side of her skull while I was at it. Then we'd talk about the difference between weird and one-in-a-million.

FRANK'S PRESENTATION BEGAN
with the night-light and the bit about mankind's fascination with the planets and stars. I hadn't thought much about how all that was supposed to tie in with the story of Frank's origins and his life until the present day. Here's how: Frank's story was that his father was a rocket scientist and a pioneer of unmanned travel to Mars.

The kid didn't get any further than that. He said, “I don't belong here,” and just stood there while the stars rotated on his axis. Then he lay down on the floor and went stiff. Miss Peppe turned on the lights and unplugged the night-light and thanked him for sharing. A couple of the kids applauded weakly and one raised his hand and asked if Frank's dad was R
2
-D
2
or C-
3
PO. Miss Peppe shushed him and I hoisted Frank over my shoulder in a fireman's carry, grabbed the night-light, and got out of there.

I left the brownies on the desk where I'd been sitting. I hoped that the kid who raised his hand would eat one and choke on it.

“
IT WASN'T MY
best performance,” Frank said on the drive home. “I'm sorry you came.”

“I'm not,” I said.

“Why wasn't my mother there?”

“Your mother had to work. She had a deadline.” I didn't mention that she'd missed every deadline in the schedule Mr. Vargas drew up before I left New York.

“Ah. Well. She heard the chapter about her last night anyway.”

“Yeah, what happened to that part today?”

“I noticed that she wasn't there to hear it, so what was the point? I suppose Xander couldn't make it, either.”

“No,” I said, and left it at that.

“I understand. My father missed my birth because he was working out a glitch with the Mars Odyssey before liftoff. Xander must have had a deadline, too. The thing that's great about Xander is that sometimes you can count on him to be there when you really need him. For example, when we needed to replace the sliding glass door. Also, the night I was born he drove my mother to the hospital and stayed with her while I made my entrance into this world.”

The rearview mirror wasn't big enough to encompass this conversation. I pulled to the side of the road and turned around to look at him. “Wait a minute. Are you saying that Xander was there when you were born?” I asked.

“In the delivery room, holding my mother's hand,” he said. “Feeding her ice chips. Encouraging her to push. Apparently it was quite dramatic. There was lots of blood, plus screaming of bad words that anyone with a soul would consider forgivable under the circumstances. Xander tells me that I was a little jaundiced when I emerged, so he sat beside me in a rocking chair in the nursery while they finished baking me under a heat lamp. I often wonder how differently the famously jaundiced Algonquin wits might have turned out if there had been heat lamps in their day to finish baking them at birth. It's too bad Fiona wasn't able to make it to my presentation.”

I was so rattled by what he'd just told me that I said without thinking, “I met Fiona in the office.”

Frank didn't say anything and I could see that he was folding up inside himself.

“Are you okay, Frank?” I asked.

When he didn't respond I got out of the car and came around to sit with him in the back. “Can I put my arm around you?” I asked.

“No.” After a while Frank pressed his face against my shoulder. “I met Fiona once, too,” he said. “I heard that her injury came about thanks to a surfeit of imagination and then her name was so lovely and full of promise that I decided I really ought to introduce myself. I was terribly frightened at the thought of doing that but I hoped we might be friends so I was brave. But as it turned out she was just like all the others.”

W
INTER BREAK SAVED
Frank from the hell of other children for almost a month.

The rainy season had started, so we didn't go much of anywhere. I was unprepared for the forty-days-and-forty-nights quality of rain in Los Angeles. Insane apocalyptic downpours that went on steadily for hours without interruption, as if some celestial somebody had turned on a tap in the heavens full blast and forgotten about it. Sometimes at night I'd open my curtains just to watch the waterfall outside and listen to its monsoonal roar. You could smell the dampness of the earth inside the house, even with all the windows closed. I thanked god for the stucco wall that would, I hope, save us from sliding down the hillside or at least cushion our fall if we did.

Most mornings Frank and I would suit up in big black oilskin raincoats and wellies and struggle giant mortician's umbrellas through the deluge out to the Dream House to work on our project. The portrait wasn't going so well. The air was wet and heavy, the oil paint refused to dry even with three portable fans pointed at it, and there was no accelerant in the Dream House that I could find. Instead of waiting out the wet paint I pressed on, which meant the portrait gradually took on a queasy muddiness of blurred pigments and smudged lines that reminded me of how hog slop looks on hot days when it smells so bad that even the pigs are put off their feed.

Frank, bless his heart, hovered and offered pointers. But it was hopeless. I should have put the canvas aside and played Clue with the kid
until the weather or my head cleared, but I was on a deadline. I hated to disappoint Frank, and now his disappointment seemed inevitable.

“I don't understand why you're having so much trouble,” Frank said to me a few mornings before Christmas. “Your sketches are utterly charming.”

“Thanks,” I said. We were across from each other at the yellow table. I felt so dejected I closed my eyes and put my forehead on the table and left it there. The air was so full of moisture, even that paint felt damp.

I heard the kid get up to rummage around the Dream House. There were no big sharp knives in the joint. If he wandered too close to the edge, the creaky floorboards would give him away in time for me to stop him from going over. I couldn't open my eyes. I needed a break from seeing.

I listened to him open one of the flat files, rustle some paper and bang around this and that. It was sort of like listening to a radio play. Despite myself, I was enjoying trying to figure out what he was up to. After he was done with whatever it was, he came and pressed his cheek against my shoulder blade. “Alice,” he said, “wake up.”

When I raised my head and looked I saw that Frank had plucked my soggy canvas from the easel and clipped a big piece of watercolor paper in its place. To the upper-right corner he'd pinned a sketch I'd done of him in his Little Prince outfit with binoculars in his hands and scarf billowing behind him. “I've been observing your technique and have come to the conclusion that oils are not your first love,” he said. “I thought you might be more comfortable doing something more impressionistic, maybe along the lines of this sketch writ large and brightened with a watercolor wash. There are some Auguste Rodin portraits done that way that I'm very fond of.”

I was willing to try anything. “Watercolor drips, so the paper needs to be flat,” I said.

“Is that so?” Before I could scrape my chair back Frank had fetched the paper and smoothed it out on the table in front of me. “I don't know much about watercolor other than it's sometimes undervalued
in comparison to oils as it is easily damaged, hard to preserve, and pooh-poohed by critics as the province of hobbyists and Victorian ladies, despite being one of the most vital yet difficult mediums to work in. I hadn't considered the dripping, although of course it makes perfect sense. Alice, I learn something from you every day.”

I was done with the thing in the hour. It was dry by dinnertime. The hardest part of the whole business was getting the portrait back inside the house without tearing it or crumpling it or getting it soaked in the downpour.

The most outstanding characteristic of my finished piece, I thought, was that it was big enough to cover the unfaded square over the mantel. There wasn't time to frame it, so we didn't. Frank and I stole into the living room as Christmas Eve flipped over into Christmas day and tacked it up there. As we did I saw that his stocking—one of his argyle socks, actually—hung from the lip of the mantel, lank and empty. I hoped Frank hadn't noticed, too. After I herded him back to bed I gathered up whatever I could find to stuff in it. A pair of scissors. A roll of tape. A pack of chewing gum. My hairbrush. A set of fake mustaches I had planned to wrap for him and put under the tree. Anything to fill the void.

Christmas morning, Frank's sock bulged with nothing I'd put in it. I found my contributions tossed in a mixing bowl outside my bedroom door, with a note from Mimi that read: “I believe these things are yours.”

Everything except for the mustaches. Those she wrapped very nicely, adding a typed tag that read: “For Frank, With Love, From Alice.” Frank was so delighted with the mustaches that he put on three right away. One on his lip and the other two over his eyebrows. After that he said he would like for me to hug him and he stood there without flinching while I did it.

MIMI SEEMED GENUINELY
surprised when Frank took the T-shirt blindfold off her head and swept up a hand to indicate the watercolor. “Ta-da,” he said. “Merry Christmas, Mama.”

I have to admit, the watercolor looked pretty good up there. The light was hitting it just right and my tight deadline had kept me from overworking it. You wouldn't be able to pick the kid out of a lineup with it by any means, but you could see Frank in it if you really looked.

Mimi sat on the couch for a long time, really looking. When she finally said something, it was, “Where did you get that?”

“Alice,” Frank said.

“Where did she get it?” she asked, as if I weren't standing right there.

“She painted it,” Frank said. “I wish you had been there to see her do it. It only took her about an hour, start to finish. Maybe less. It was like magic.”

Mimi nodded. I could see her eyes fill with tears.

“What do you think of it?” Frank asked.

“I think it absolutely captures you,” she said.

THAT NIGHT AFTER
I'd gone to bed somebody knocked at my door. My heart started thumping. Had Mimi come to thank me? More likely it was Frank. “Come in,” I said.

It was Mimi. “Do you have to take everything that belongs to me?” she asked. I couldn't believe I'd been foolish enough to think she'd have anything nice to say.

I WOKE UP
a few nights after Christmas because of the piano. The thing I noticed about it right away that I don't think I'd ever understood before was that it didn't sound like it was playing itself. I looked at my alarm clock. It was after midnight. I stumbled into the living room and found Xander planted on the piano bench, giving the keys a good going-over with as much uncomplicated joy as ever. Mimi was right. You really could tell the difference.

I stood in the doorway listening for a while before I said, “What's that you're playing?”

He smiled at me angelically, as if he hadn't been MIA for a minute. Then he said, “It's a song by Frank Loesser.”

“What's it called?”

“‘What Are You Doing New Year's Eve?'”

“You're pathetic,” I said, and went back to bed.

T
HE DELUGES ENDED
suddenly, without sending the glass house sliding off the cliff and onto the
405
freeway; but for those of us inside, things went downhill fast anyway.

Having Xander around didn't improve Mimi's temperament much that I could see. Frank, of course, was delighted to have his itinerant male role model back. For belated Christmas Xander had given Frank a hula dancer you stick to a car's dashboard. He let Frank sit up front while they backed the station wagon down the driveway and drove back up again, over and over, all the while watching the hula girl shimmy. Frank invited me along for the ride, but the last thing I wanted was to be in close quarters with Xander, even if only for a few hundred feet.

With Xander on-site again, I was forced to play the heavy, always prying Frank free to eat or take a shower or brush his teeth and go to bed. Although Xander looked well fed, flossed, and rested, none of us were witness to the effort that went into any of that anymore. Xander didn't eat with us, I didn't sleep with him, and if the walls of the Dream House bathroom were closing in on him while he brushed his teeth, Xander wasn't sharing his pain.

But the real suffering came once Frank started back to school. When I drove him there on the first day he leaned up between the seats to expound on the origins of the national dance of the Dominican Republic, a step whose name for some reason or other was based on the French word
meringue
and whose tight footwork was informed by the chains that once bound its enslaved creators together. Frank liked to imagine the hula
girl loved that particular two-step most of all, even though she supposedly hailed from an unfettered island on the other side of the world. He was still muttering about that to himself when I dropped him off. It was mid-January and just cool enough to make his E. F. Hutton suit a seasonally appropriate choice. He was wearing a pair of gold elephant-head cuff links Mimi had given him for Christmas. The way the tassel on his fez kept time to his step as he merengued across the playground made me feel almost cheerful. I couldn't believe I had been so nervous about blowback from December.

So of course there was an incident. Mimi was called in to the principal's office. But when I, Mimi-by-proxy, turned up to see the principal I was turned away with a stern note saying he wanted to have a word with Frank's mother not one of her employees.

“What happened?” I asked Paula.

“Since you are not his custodial parent, I'm not allowed to release that information to you.”

“Since when?”

She leaned across the counter and whispered, “Since we have a new principal. He's big on protocol and accountability. Insists we call him Dr. Matthews because he has a Ph.D. in child development. Doesn't have kids of his own, so he's an authority. In his opinion, anyway.”

Frank was in a chair by Paula's desk, clutching his crushed fez to his chest and rocking. She shepherded him out to me without touching him once, a tour de force performance worthy of a theremin virtuoso. Before passing him off, Paula stooped to make herself eyebrow-to-eye level with Frank. “We'll lunch together soon, okay, honey?”

“Pip pip,” Frank said.

She straightened up and said to me, “Dr. Matthews says Frank can't come back to school until Frank's mom comes in to meet with him.”

“The new principal is a doctor?” Frank asked. “My grandfather was a doctor. He stitched soldiers back together in the trenches during World War I so they could go home and be with their loved ones again.”

“Different kind of doctor,” Paula said.

In the car, I asked Frank what had happened to the old principal. “Paula told me he went to a better place,” he said.

Oh, dear. “What better place?” I asked anyway.

“Istanbul,” he said. “Or Constantinople. I forget which.”

I decided to let it go. “So, what happened to your fez?” I asked, checking him in the mirror as I did so. He cradled its battered carcass and started making a horrible sound, like the shrieks of a clubbed walrus. I'd never heard Frank cry before so it took me a minute to realize that was what he was doing. I didn't waste time pulling over to comfort him. The kid needed to go home.

FRANK HAD STOPPED
crying by the time we pulled into the driveway, but it was a struggle getting him out of the backseat as he'd gone all statue-of-a-deposed-dictator on me again. Somehow I managed to drag him out and lean him against the car. I was trying to boost him up over my shoulder when Xander appeared. “What's up, pal?” he asked Frank.

Frank broke away from me and stumbled over to Xander, pressed his face against his shoulder, and said, “I don't belong here. I want to go home.”

“You are home, my friend,” Xander said.

“No, I'm not, no I'm not, no I'M NOT!” The howling started again.

Before I could fill him in, Xander swept Frank up and ran into the house with him. I followed. He lay the kid across his bed and I wrapped Frank up tight in a blanket. Then Xander sat on the edge of the bed and took him across his lap. He rocked and hummed something to him I couldn't quite make out. Frank stopped making the walrus sounds and said, “‘Over the Rainbow.' Louis B. Mayer tried to cut that number from
The Wizard of Oz
because he thought it slowed the story down.” Then he fell asleep.

Xander eased Frank onto the mattress and I wedged pillows around him. “Nice touch with the blanket,” Xander murmured. “What the heck happened?”

I felt my face flush dangerously. Why was Xander the only one who ever seemed to appreciate me? “There's a new principal at Frank's school,” I said.

“Uh-oh.”

We backpedaled into the hall and found Mimi just outside Frank's door, pressed against the wall and looking as terrified as a jumper on a ledge working up the nerve to end all the suffering once and for all. “What's going on?” she asked.

“Frank got sent home,” I said. “They wouldn't say why and he was too upset to tell me. Paula in the office said to give you this.”

Mimi opened the note and read it in front of us. She put the paper back in the envelope when she was done. “My life was so much easier before I had Frank,” she said.

WE LEFT XANDER
with Frank while Mimi changed into her Audrey Hepburn ensemble and we drove back to the school. It wasn't an outfit I would have chosen, but I think she wore it in solidarity for her son. I was glad to see she left the head wrap and glasses at home this time.

Since I wasn't a custodial parent Paula “showed me to the waiting room,” which meant she set me up on boxes filled with Xerox paper in a storage room, pointed to the air vent it shared with Dr. Matthews's office, then held a finger to her lips. I nodded.

The guy had the kind of piercing, self-satisfied voice that carried well. Good for clandestine listening-in, but undoubtedly hellish for anyone trapped in an elevator or an office or an area code with him. Mimi was a lot harder to hear, but I was able to make out enough words here and there to follow the conversation. Seems our darling Fiona had asked Frank if she could try on his fez. I could imagine Frank's face as he handed it over, his sweet, blank expression only those closest to him could read as delight. I could see him thinking maybe Fiona wasn't like the others after all.

Fiona took the fez, threw it down, and stomped it. When Frank
snatched it back she incited the mob of bullies she'd gathered to chase Frank around the playground, trying to grab it again.

We talk, and then we join hands and run from our enemies.

I heard Mimi say “Fiona” but I couldn't make out the rest of what she said.

“Fiona's motivations are understandable. New girl, looking to establish her place in the playground hierarchy,” Dr. Matthews said. “But my feeling is that Fiona isn't the one at fault here. We need to examine what you as an involved and caring parent can do to forestall incidents like this in the future. If you're honest with yourself, Mrs. Banning, you have to admit that you're allowing Frank to make himself a target.”

After hearing that, my feeling was that Dr. Matthews should never have children of his own.

I heard Mimi murmur something, which he countered with, “You must realize that Frank's manner of dress separates him from the other children.”

I waited for Mimi's outraged answer, “But Frank isn't like the other children!” She said something, but in a voice so soft I couldn't catch it.

MIMI WAS SILENT
on the way home. When I couldn't take the suspense any longer, I asked, “How did it go?”

“It's none of your business how it went,” Mimi said.

“Mimi, look, I know—”

“You know nothing, Alice. And what makes you think you can call me Mimi?”

“You told me to call you Mimi.”

“I never told you to call me Mimi.”

“You did,” I insisted. “The day Frank asked to stay late after school. I made you eggs. My hair was wet. Remember?”

“Why are you arguing with me? Stop the car. Stop the car right now. I can't bear your face for another minute.” Not that she was even looking at me.

I pulled over and put the car in park. Its nose was pointed downhill, so when Mimi flung the door open it scraped and hung on the curb. I've never seen curbs as high as the ones in Los Angeles. Frank explained to me on one of our adventures last summer that they were built tall to keep the sidewalks from flooding during the rainy season. Having weathered that now, I understood.

I imagine Mimi intended for her exit to be fast and dramatic, but what followed was a Chaplinesque struggle of tiny woman vs. world. She had to scale the Kilimanjaro of that curb through an opening hardly wider than a handbag. Her shimmying ascent made her Audrey Hepburn sheath scale her thighs and one of her shoes fall off. Once she summited, Mimi dropped out of sight behind the car door. From what I could see through the crack and from the way she was grunting, I guessed she was lying on the sidewalk, fishing around underneath the car for the lost shoe. Eureka! She stood again, leaned against the car to put the shoe on, yanked her dress down and brushed it free of sidewalk grit before turning to address me. As a courtesy I pushed the button to roll down the passenger-side window so she could say her piece.

“It must be exhausting to be so sure of yourself all the time,” Mimi said. “Well, I'll let you in on a little secret, Alice. Being perfect doesn't make people love you.” Then she tried her go-to move, slamming the door in my face. Even though it wasn't open very wide, the door of a Mercedes station wagon weighs about a thousand pounds, and I don't think Mimi weighed a hundred, so it took some work for her to unstick the door from the curb to shut it.

“Can I give you a hand with that?” I finally asked.

“I don't need you to give me a hand with anything,” she said. “Ever again.”

“Have it your way.” I rolled the window back up.

Once Mimi struggled the car door shut, she fumbled her phone out of her purse and dropped it on the sidewalk. I was worried she'd broken it and thought about rolling the window down again to ask her
to let me drive her home. I still had enough kindness wiggling around inside me though to resist the urge. I know from my time in New York that anger can be an exhilarating tonic that lifts some people over life's rough patches. I was pretty sure Mimi was one of those people. So I sat tight and watched her pick her phone up and dial, talk for a minute or two and check her watch. I waited on the side of the road until a cab pulled up and she got in. She never looked at me once.

LATER THAT AFTERNOON
Mimi appeared in the kitchen while I was chopping red peppers for a salad. I knew better than to think she'd come to offer an apology.

“Here's my credit card,” she said. “You need to go out and buy Frank some T-shirts and jeans and tennis shoes.”

I wiped my hands on a towel. “I'll do it if you really want me to, but he won't wear those things. Not in a million years.”

“He has to,” she said. “That windbag I had to waste an afternoon talking to said Frank would be safer if he'd learn to disappear.”

“Frank will be miserable,” I said.

“Frank is a child. He'll get over it. That sanctimonious idiot in charge of his school now says if he can't learn to fit in he has to go somewhere else.”

“If Frank has to ‘fit in' to go there, maybe Frank should go somewhere else.”

“I wouldn't give that man the satisfaction.”

I picked up the knife again and really gave those peppers what-for. “This isn't about the principal or you,” I said. “This is about Frank.”

Instead of blowing up at me, Mimi closed her eyes the way Frank did sometimes when the world was just too much for him. It was the first time I'd ever seen anything of his face in hers. “Frank has already been somewhere else, Alice,” she said. “He's been invited not to return to so many somewhere elses that any other somewhere he hasn't been to yet might be even worse than this one.”

THE NEXT MORNING
I explained to Frank that khakis would probably be okay for him to wear to school with his new T-shirts and tennis shoes, and that we'd work up to wearing jeans in a week or two. Or not. Up to him. I wanted to make it seem he had some control over the situation.

Frank stood there in his underwear and argyles, staring at the clothes I'd laid out. Two fat tears rolled down his cheeks. “I don't know how to wear these,” he said.

“It's easy,” I said. “The shirt pulls over your head and you don't even have to button it.”

“But surely no one can want me to go out in public in a shirt meant to be worn as underwear.”

“Lots of kids wear T-shirts out in public and think nothing of it.”