Be Frank With Me (18 page)

“Lots of kids chase me around the playground, too, but that doesn't make it right.”

I didn't have a comeback for that.

Frank didn't eat his breakfast. He sat at the table, staring at his waffles and plucking at the place where his collar should have been, stroking his bare forearms, scrabbling at his wrists that would under normal circumstances be cuffed and cuff linked.

Xander had to carry Frank out to the car and ride with us to school. I offered to let him drive Frank on his own, since Frank would probably like that better anyway. “Don't be ridiculous,” Xander said. “I'll just sit back here with my buddy. I'll walk him to class, too, to be sure he gets there safe.”

When he got back in the car, Xander said, “This is a bad idea. A bad, bad idea.”

“I think so, too,” I said.

“Mimi is a genius, you know. But sometimes smart people do the stupidest things.”

“Mimi doesn't know what else to do,” I said, surprising myself now
by sticking up for her. “Frank has gotten kicked out of so many places already.”

Xander shrugged. “So what? Who hasn't?”

Me, I didn't say.

“It's lucky I could drop everything and come when she called,” Xander added. “You know, I have to wonder sometimes what that woman would do without me.”

HER BOOK WASN'T
finished yet, but I was. I told Mimi I was leaving before I told Mr. Vargas. I wanted my bridges burned.

“Nobody's holding you prisoner here,” Mimi said. “Go.”

“You'll be all right,” I said. “As long as Xander's here you don't need me.”

“Xander,” she said. “Ha.”

P
ACKING MY BAGS
was easy. E-mailing Mr. Vargas to explain why I was deserting my post wasn't. No matter how sane I sounded at the outset of each effort, by the time I was a line or two in, I started to sound as whiny as a jilted lover. How can I help Mimi when she keeps me at arm's length? She doesn't appreciate me. There's someone else, someone blonder, prettier, and more popular. I'm coming home.

I got a call from Frank's school but pressed “ignore” and turned my cell off. If there was a problem, it was Mimi's problem now. Or Mimi's and Xander's. Not mine. I sat there holding the phone, feeling guilty and worried and not typing anything else to Mr. Vargas. Somebody knocked. If Mimi needed me to pick up Frank, I'd do it. Just this one last time.

It was Xander. He hadn't been in my room since last summer when I thought I'd dreamed In-the-Manner-of-Apollo to life. Back when I was a know-it-all teenager, I'd wondered how my sensible mother had gotten hornswoggled into marrying a deadbeat like my dad. Seeing Xander there on my doorstep, I finally got it. Sometimes smart people do the stupidest things.

“Mimi says you're going back to New York,” Xander said. “How long will you be gone?”

“I'm not coming back.”

“What?”

“Mimi won't let me do the work Mr. Vargas sent me to do. She
doesn't like me. Frank only tolerates me. I don't belong here. I want to go home.”

“Mimi likes you as much as she can like anybody. Frank loves you. He'll be devastated.”

I felt a twist in my gut. “Not with you around, he won't.”

“That's not true.”

“Of course it is. I'm sloppy seconds whenever you're here.”

“Not in my book.” Xander stepped closer. “Don't I count? Maybe I'll be devastated when you go.”

“Ha,” I said. That syllable reminded me of something, but I couldn't remember exactly what.

“Hey.” He touched my cheek so lightly that only the tip of his middle finger brushed against my skin. “Are you leaving because of me?”

“Are you Frank's dad?” I asked.

He stared at me for a minute, then took my forearm and shoved me farther into my room and closed the door. “Why would you ask me that? Do you think I would have gone after you in Mimi's house if Mimi and I had been together once?”

He went after me? I'm ashamed to say how that thrilled me. “I never said you two were romantically involved. You could have done it as a friend. People do that.” I imagined then how Mimi would phrase that request. Pardon me, could you spare a thimbleful of sperm? Although of course she would have worded it more carefully. “Thimbleful” isn't a unit of measure you want to link up with a guy's manly parts in any context. Not if you want something from him.

“We're friends,” Xander said. “But not like that.”

“What kind of friends are you then?” I asked. “Because for the life of me, I can't figure out how you fit into the picture here.”

“What do you mean?”

“Frank told me you were in the delivery room with Mimi the night he was born. That's kind of a lot to ask of some guy who's just a friend.”

Xander sat down on my bed and collapsed back, his arms splayed wide. “Sweet suffering Jesus,” he said. “Mimi has nobody, Alice. Nobody.” He lay there for a minute, staring at the ceiling. Then he sat up and said, “Do you know what that's like?”

“So, what are you saying? It's you? Not you? I'm curious.”

He gave me one of those long hard looks you give someone on the street when you start wondering if that's somebody from your old neighborhood or an actor you've seen on television or an enemy from another life.

“You're not curious, Alice. You're selfish.”

I've been called a few names in my life—boring, mousy, Goody-Two-shoes, suck-up. Not selfish. Never selfish.

Xander pushed past me. His eyes passed over my face this time like he'd never seen me before in his life. Like I was air.

MIMI WAS RIGHT.
It had been nice to be so sure of myself. Now that I didn't have that compass anymore, I'd never felt so lost. I dropped onto the red love seat and hated myself for a good long time. Here are some adjectives I aimed at myself: Self-righteous. Judgmental. Perfidious. Smug. The kind of person who's convinced the world would be a better place if everybody else would just shut up and listen.

I was the voice of Dr. Matthews coming through the air vent.

From the rain the hills had sprung a tender, hopeful green that wouldn't last out the week. My stomach started growling but I wasn't hungry. I needed to call a cab but I didn't do it. It wasn't like I was going to miss my plane or anything. My plan was to show up and take the next spot on standby any airline offered up.

When the knock came the second time, I didn't answer. Mimi didn't knock again. She let herself in. “You're still here,” she said.

“I was just calling a cab.” I didn't turn to look at her.

“I need you,” she said.

“Whatever it is, Xander can help you out.”

“Xander can't drive.”

“What do you mean? Of course he can drive.”

“He doesn't have a license.”

I turned around when she said that. Even though she was more than old enough to be my mother, I'd never thought of Mimi as old until then.

“He drove the station wagon to pick up lumber to fix the door,” I said.

“He can't kill lumber,” she said. “I need you to drive me to the hospital. Frank is on his way there in an ambulance.”

“
IT'S ALL MY
fault,” Mimi said.

I was driving as fast as I could without killing us. “It's not your fault. Don't say that.”

“It is,” she said. “After you got through talking to me, I was sitting at my desk thinking I wouldn't have had to let you in my house if Frank had never been born.”

They had called from school to tell Mimi that Frank had had a seizure.

“A seizure?” I said. “That's not so terrible. A seizure can be caused by almost anything. Low blood sugar. Lack of sleep. Heat. An allergic reaction.” Brain tumor. I skipped that one.

“Brain tumor,” Mimi whispered. “That would explain so much.”

The not-Paula office lady had telephoned. “I called your partner Alice,” she told Mimi. “But she wasn't answering. You'll probably want to get in touch with her before you leave for the hospital.”

Frank had two mommies. Honestly, the kid could have used a dozen.

ON THE WAY
to the hospital, Mimi told me the whole sad unfictional story of the end of Julian.

It started like this: “I always thought my mother was a fool. Then I had Frank.”

Up until Frank, Mimi felt confident she'd be a better mother than
Banning had been. Mimi had Julian all figured out. Her brother was astoundingly good at a few things and terrible at everything else. So when their mother told him he needed to come inside and do his homework in some subject Julian had no talent for, like French or physics, Mimi would slip in and do it for him. It was easier to get away with than you might imagine, since Julian's handwriting was so illegible that when he started high school his mother buckled and bought him the portable typewriter Mimi used now. All Julian had to do was scrawl his name at the top of the lessons Mimi typed up while Julian threw balls at the side of the barn until the siding splintered and broke and it got so dark you couldn't make out the white of the ball against the weathered gray of the wood anymore. So what if Julian didn't know the difference between the Treaty of Versailles and the Treaty of Verdun? Her brother was different from other kids. Special. He'd outgrow being an oddball someday; or he'd be so famous for something that no one would care about his awkwardness anymore.

Still, it had been a relief when her brother left for college. She loved him, of course, but sometimes found his strange flatness as off-putting as everybody else did. The house was so much more peaceful without him banging around in it. The rest of them could get some sleep at night. Well, Mimi could, anyway. Her mother had stopped looking like she slept, ever, years ago. Dr. Frank spent most nights at the hospital, sewing up drunks, pronouncing victims of car crashes dead, delivering babies, what have you.

Mimi could see how upset Banning got when she tried to talk to Julian on the phone while he was away at school. He never spoke in sentences. Just “fine,” or “okay,” or “not really.” And when his grades came Banning would hold the envelope in her hand for a long time, then open it, scan the paper inside, crumple it, and toss it in the trash without showing it to anybody else. It was too bad, Mimi thought, that she couldn't be with Julian to do his schoolwork for him.

Then Mimi went off to college, too. Being away from home was a relief she hadn't anticipated, like giving up a pair of shoes you loved
but hadn't realized were pinching the life out of your toes until you put on ones that fit. At college, Mimi didn't talk about the Gillespies. She realized it was a whole lot easier to ask other people questions about themselves. Everybody said she was so easy to talk to, but “talk at” was closer to the truth. Still, Mimi was happy, or pretended to be, which almost made it seem so.

Halfway through the second semester of her freshman year, Julian showed up at her dorm. She was in her room reading. Mimi remembered the sentence passing under her eyes when she heard the crazy pounding on the door to her suite. “nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands” She'd just gotten finished thinking that the line of poetry itself was beautiful but would it kill the guy to capitalize the words at the beginning of each line and use proper punctuation?

Then one of her roommates came to get her.

She sighed, put her book down, and went to the door. “Julian,” she said, and gave him a hug even though he never wanted to be hugged. She knew her roommates would think it was weird if she didn't do it.

“He's really your brother?” one of them asked. Mimi couldn't for the life of her remember the girl's name. “You never told us you had a brother.”

Julian took all this in but didn't say anything. He did look kind of upset, for Julian anyway.

Mimi led him into her room and sat on the chair at her desk and he sat on the chair by her roommate's desk. Mimi was glad her roommate was out. She was always out with that boyfriend she talked about every waking minute. Conrad. Funny, Mimi couldn't remember that roommate's name, either. “What's up, Julian?” she asked.

“I've been scouted by the Atlanta Braves. The scout said he wasn't leaving until he had Julian Gillespie's signature on an Atlanta Braves contract.”

“Oh, Julian! That's so exciting! That's what you've always wanted. What happened after that?”

“What happened after that was he left without my signature,
because my signature is worthless without parental approval because I'm still a minor. The signature he needed was from Dr. Frank Banning. Or Mrs. Frank Banning. Either one, or both.”

“Well, that won't be a problem, right?”

“It will be a problem. It is a problem. Mother won't sign and she won't let Father do it, either.”

“Why not?”

“Because I've flunked out of school.”

“Oh, no.”

“Mother says I have to finish college first. Mimi, I'm no good at school. I hate it there.”

“Did you tell her that?”

“Yes.”

“What did she say?”

“She said if I applied myself I could make good grades like I did in high school when you were doing my homework.”

“She doesn't know I was doing your homework.”

“No, but I do. It's hopeless, Mimi. Mother said we aren't the kind of people who have sons who grow up to play sports and marry movie stars. We're the kind of people who have sons who make good grades and grow up to be doctors.”

Mimi couldn't help noticing that no mention was made of what kind of daughters their kind of people had. But in fairness this story wasn't about her.

“Did she say anything else?”

“She said if she was going to have a son who was going to grow up to be Joe DiMaggio, she might as well have married Elvis.”

Mimi could never quite figure out that line of reasoning. But she couldn't help wondering if marrying Elvis had ever been an option for Banning. Every time her mother mentioned the splash she'd made with Elvis, which was often, it made Mimi remember overhearing Banning on the telephone, saying to one of her friends what a shame it was that Julian was beautiful and could have his pick of the girls
if he'd just show any interest, but Mimi, bless her heart, was such a homely, frowny-faced runt that nobody would ever want her. She'd have to get a job. Banning said “job” like it was “leprosy.”

“You have to help me, Mimi,” Julian said.

“I don't know,” Mimi said. “Sounds like you may have to figure this one out for yourself. I have a paper to write. Nobody is going to write it for me.”

“I've figured this one out already. I want to play baseball. I'll die if I can't play.”

Julian was staring at her. Mimi knew that numb look, that posture, that set of the jaw. When he got like that he couldn't be reasoned with. At least he was still on the chair. Sometimes when he got especially mulish, Julian would lie on the floor and refuse to budge. Mimi was only about half his size now, so that was the last thing she wanted to let happen.

“You'll be fine. Daddy survived the Marne. You'll make it through this.”

Julian didn't say anything for a while. When he did, it seemed like a non sequitur. “Those girls out there didn't believe I was your brother,” he said. “They said if you had a brother, they would know about it.”

“So? I don't have to tell everybody everything.”