Be Frank With Me (5 page)

“You like Elvis?” I asked.

Frank shrugged. “I don't know much about Elvis, other than that his middle name was Aaron and he had a stillborn twin named Jesse Garon and he drove a truck for Crown Electric Company in Memphis before he cut his first record, a single called ‘That's All Right.'” His voice had just enough tincture of Mimi's Alabama in it to make him pronounce Memphis as
Mimphis
. He tapped the woman in the photo. “I do know something about this lady, though. She's my mother's mother.”

“She's your grandmother?”

“Indeedy.”

“Let me see.” I leaned closer and read the caption aloud. “‘Crawfish Carnival Queen and Ole Miss student Banning Marie Allen welcomes Elvis.' Wow.” Banning. I couldn't decide whether I was more surprised to find out that Mimi's mother was a beauty queen, or that a beauty queen was the source of Mimi's pen name.

Frank's grandmother may not have looked like his mother but there was a lot of her in Frank. “Do you see her much?” I asked.

“Not when I'm awake. She died in a car wreck when my mother was pretty young. Not a kid still, but not old like you."

“That's terrible,” I said. I almost said, I can't imagine, but of course I could. “So, how old do you think I am, anyway?”

“I don't know. Old enough to know better?”

I laughed. “Indeedy,”

“You must be twenty-five then,” Frank said.

“Close. Twenty-four. How did you know?”

“Dr. Abrams says that's when the prefrontal cortex usually finishes developing. That's the part of your brain that controls impulsivity.
According to her forecast, by the time I'm twenty-five I'll be old enough to know better. If we're lucky. It might happen later, when I'm thirty. Or never. Some people's prefrontal cortexes mature earlier than others. Women's, mostly. Debbie Reynolds was a teenager when she made
Singin' in the Rain
, for example. Look at this.” Frank stopped flipping pages to show me a photo of a gray horse. “That's Zephyr. He belonged to Uncle Julian. My grandmother said that while there was breath in her body Julian would never get behind the wheel of a car, so she got Zephyr to take him everywhere he needed to go. I wish I had a horse. Horses were native to the North American continent until the last Ice Age. The Spanish conquistadors reintroduced them and the Native Americans were glad. Until they got to know the downside of horses.”

“What's the downside of horses?”

“The Spanish conquistadors.”

“That's funny,” I said.

“What's funny?”

“What you just said.”

“Why?”

“I thought you were going to tell me something else about horses. I didn't see ‘the Spanish conquistadors' coming.”

“Neither did the Native Americans.”

“Good point. Hey, want to hear a joke my boss in New York told me about a horse?”

“Yes.”

“A horse walks into a bar and the bartender says, ‘Hey, buddy, why the long face?'”

When I didn't elaborate, Frank said, “Then what?”

“Then nothing. That's the whole joke. ‘Hey, buddy, why the long face?'”

“I don't understand.”

“Horses have long faces.” I motioned with my hands to stretch my own face to a horsier length that ended someplace around my belly button. “Get it?”

“No,” Frank said. “If I had a horse, I would name him Tony.”

So much for jokes. “Tony?” I asked politely.

“Cowboy star Tom Mix's horse was named Tony. His hoofprints are in the cement outside Mann's Chinese Theatre. My grandparents fenced their yard and turned the garage into a stable for Uncle Julian's horse. Then my grandmother wrecked her car into said fence. She was going fast and wasn't wearing a safety belt so she went through the windshield and died. Zephyr ran away through the broken place in the fence. They found him the next day standing in somebody's peony bed all the way across town.” Frank turned another page. “Since he was in a bed I imagine Zephyr asleep and wearing a flannel nightcap. Horses sleep standing up, did you know that? This is my uncle Julian.” He pointed to a photo of a young man in a pair of embroidered jeans and a bead necklace, no shirt, a cigarette tucked behind his ear, sitting on a fence I suspected of being said fence. He had a tooled leather bag strapped across his muscular chest and long blond hair with sideburns like people wore during the Summer of Love, plus an incandescently beautiful face a lot like Frank's grandmother's, circa Elvis.

“Wow,” I said. “He's a handsome guy.”

“Was. He's dead, too.”

“What happened to him?”

“He fell out of a window when he was visiting my mother at college.”

“Oh,” I said. Ohhh. “How?”

Shrug. “I don't know. He got kicked out of the college he was going to for making all Fs. He was probably so busy thinking about how he'd tell his mother that he didn't notice the floor had ended. In my head it plays out kind of like Wile E. Coyote stepping off a cliff he hadn't seen coming. Do you want to see a picture of my mother's father? He's dead, too, just so you know.”

He showed me a picture of a distinguished-looking young man in a military uniform. “My grandfather was a doctor, also named Frank. Which is a nickname for Francis. My mother named me after my grandfather and my uncle because she says she has always had a hard
time coming up with names. Dr. Frank volunteered as a field surgeon in World War I before the United States entered that war, then known as the Great War. Because nobody could foresee the Second World War coming yet, although given the enormous reparations the world community forced on Germany after it lost the first war and the resentment that financial burden engendered, the world community should have known.”

“What happened to Dr. Frank?”

“Cerebral hemorrhage. In layman's parlance, his head exploded. My mom's whole family died within a year or so of each other, but her father lived the longest. He was born in
1894
and died in
1976
. It was a first-in, last-out kind of a thing.”

“In
1894
, huh?” I said. “He'd be one hundred and fifteen years old if he were alive.”

“He's probably glad he isn't, though I wish he were. I suspect we'd have a lot in common.” Frank paged past a series of black-and-white photos: Mimi's mother, in a two-piece bathing suit that looked like bulletproof underwear, a kerchief on her hair and red lipstick that showed black in the photo. Dr. Frank smiling at his wife as he settled his tuxedo jacket around her shoulders at their wedding, his young bride staring straight into the camera and grinning. Alongside that, another yellowed newspaper clipping, no picture, with the headline “Banning Marie Allen weds Julian Francis Gillespie” and a first line that read, “Under an antique veil of finest illusion—”

Before I could read any further, Frank turned the page.

After that, toddler versions of Julian and Mimi with chocolate-smeared faces, holding hands and squinting across a battlefield of ruined birthday cake. Preteen Julian and Mimi in a photo Christmas card, sitting back to back on the horse, Mimi facing the mane and Julian the tail, all three wearing Santa hats. Printed across it the line “We don't know if we're going or coming this Christmas!”

The color shots hadn't aged as well. A Polaroid of Julian in his pitcher's uniform on the mound, hair and face faded to a pale green.
A prom portrait of him in a sky-blue tuxedo, face and hair yellowed out, a necktie knotted around his head like a kamikaze pilot's, his arm around an empty space where his date should have been. Mimi at what must have been her high school graduation, dressed in a shiny black gown and mortarboard and looking worried.

Frank closed the album and put it on the ground beside him. “The end,” he said. “Everybody in these pictures is dead except for my mother.”

“Well,” I said, “who's hungry?” But what I was thinking was, What about your daddy? Where's his picture? Is his photograph not in there because he's not dead yet?

The kid was right about having uncanny intuition because just then he said, “My mom has pictures of my dad somewhere, but she says he doesn't belong to our family so they don't go in this album.”

“Because your dad's not—” I couldn't figure out a tactful way to finish that sentence.

“Dead? I don't think so. Maybe. I've never met him.”

“Have you seen the pictures?” I asked.

“Yes. But we keep our photos put away because otherwise they make my mother feel too sad. We don't talk about him, anyway.” Frank picked up the album and tucked it under his arm. “I know how to make waffles. I'm very good at not spilling the batter.”

“I love waffles.”

He offered me a hand up. I knew I was allowed to accept it because he'd offered his hand to me, as stated in the Second Rule of Frank. “Of course you love waffles,” he said as he hauled me up. “You aren't crazy.”

“How do you know that?” I asked as I followed him down the hall to the kitchen.

“The kids at school say I'm crazy and you don't remind me much of me. Also, I just know things. For example, Thomas Jefferson had a waffle iron he bought in France.”

“You're lucky. When I want to know something, I have to look it
up. You've got so much stuffed in your cranium, Frank, I don't know how you remember anything.”

“My mother says my brain is so full of facts that there's no room for nuance. Our waffle iron is from China. We ordered it from a catalog called Williams-Sonoma. There was a sale for very special customers.” He dragged a stool to the counter, climbed onto it, and stood on his toes, straining to reach the waffle iron, still in its somewhat-battered original box, stored on the top shelf.

“Here,” I said. “Let me get that down for you.”

Everything happened fast after that. Frank shrieked, “NO NO NO NO NO NO NO,” swatted the box and sent it flying toward me. I covered my face with my arms and ducked. The box crash-landed someplace behind me and I lowered my arms and looked over my shoulder to see where. When I turned back, Frank was laid out on the linoleum like a corpse on a mortician's slab, his eyes closed and hands bunched into fists. His straw boater rolled toward me in slow motion like a freed hubcap in the aftermath of a car crash.

“Frank?” I asked. “Are you all right?”

Mimi bounded into the kitchen in her nightgown then, one side of her face still creased by her pillow and her hair in two messy braids. She picked up his boater, stepped over the waffle iron box and knelt beside Frank. “Did he bang his head?” she asked.

“Bang his head? I don't think so. I don't know what happened. Does Frank have some kind of seizure disorder?”

“No, Frank does not have some kind of seizure disorder. For god's sake. You've upset him somehow. Obviously.”

“But I didn't do anything,” I said.

“She,” Frank said, eyes sealed, elevating an undead fist and switchblading its index finger free to point in my direction, “wanted to touch my waffle iron.”

“I offered to help him get it down, that's all,” I protested.

“No touching Frank's things. I told you that.” Mimi picked her son
up, set him on his feet, and put his hat on his head again. “There we go. Are you okay, Monkey?”

“I might be someday,” he said. “According to Dr. Abrams.”

When Mimi turned her attention to me I understood how a rabbit must feel when the headlights hit him, just before the car does. “We don't have a lot of rules around here, Penny,” she said to me. “If you don't think you can follow the ones we do have, you might as well leave now.”

“Alice,” I said. “My name is Alice.”

But she was halfway down the hall already. After I heard her door slam, I put my freezing hands to my hot cheeks. Don't let her scare you off, Alice.

Frank, meanwhile, had freed the waffle iron from its box and bubble wrap, plugged it in and opened the refrigerator. “I love chocolate chips in my waffles,” he said with all the ardor of the voice on a telephone answering tree. He took out a carton of eggs and promptly dropped it. Then picked up the carton, checked inside, and said, “Good. None broke this time. Well, well, well. I guess today is our lucky day.”

W
E DON'T GET
OUT MUCH
,
I scribbled in my unicorn notebook ten days after I'd arrived. I was in the laundry room, waiting out the last few minutes of the dryer cycle so I could grab the sheets before they wrinkled and hide the notebook in between the folds to smuggle back into my room. I was also keeping an eye on Frank outside as he plunged into and out of a rosemary hedge brandishing a big plastic machete. Frank's psychiatrist Dr. Abrams was out of town for all of July. There would be no school to trundle the boy off to until well after Labor Day. Everything that was needed to keep body and soul together—groceries, office supplies, Frank's clothing—came to the gates in a delivery van. Even drinking water, despite the fact that it flowed free and sweet from every spigot in the house. With no solid reason to go anyplace, we didn't.

Frank a very special customer,
I wrote
. As for Mimi, I never see her. Always locked in her office.
What I didn't add, but wanted to was,
Because she hates me
.

Mimi shut herself away as soon as she ate breakfast and stayed gone until dinnertime. After dinner, she'd read to Frank or they'd play Clue, his favorite board game; or they'd watch a movie together while she plowed through a stack of bills, groaning audibly from time to time. Mimi averted her eyes whenever we had to talk. You couldn't call what passed between us conversation. An exchange of information was more like it, though there wasn't even much of that.

Frank and I, however, seemed to be getting along well enough after our early episode with the waffle iron. When I apologized for my
infraction, he said, “That's okay. You hadn't learned your lesson yet. I don't care what people say. Ignorance is not bliss.”

After that, he explained and reexplained and then explained all over again the byzantine Kremlinology of rules chez Frank Banning. His laundry, for example, I could wash, fold, and put away with impunity; but once an item was clean, pressed, and shelved, hands off. I could feather-dust the surfaces in his bedroom, but under no circumstances was I allowed to touch anything on them with my hands. A lesson I had to relearn the hard way when I made the rookie mistake of resetting the old-fashioned windup alarm clocks on his desk and bedside table. Those clocks drove me crazy. Both ticked loudly and out of sync and neither showed the correct time in Los Angeles or anyplace else on earth. Frank watched me without comment or changing his expression, then took the reset clocks and winged them across the room. Once that was done he banged his forehead against his desktop like a gavel.

“Frank!” I gasped. “Stop!” Miraculously, I remembered not to touch him—Rule Two—and put my hands on the desktop over the spot he was pounding. I guess the feeling of his forehead hitting flesh wasn't as satisfying as hammering it on wood, so he quit. When he straightened I saw a coin of red blooming on his forehead. I hoped it wouldn't turn into a bruise.

“No touching my things,” he'd said matter-of-factly. “Rule One.”

“I'm so sorry, Frank. My bad. Please don't ever hit your head like that again. I can't bear it.”

“Most people can't,” Frank said. “My mother in particular. She says the cheap histrionics I use to test boundaries with new authority figures will give me a concussion someday.”

“You're testing me?”

“According to my mother. In my opinion, I'm trying to keep my head from exploding.”

I struggled with Rule Two as well. While it was okay to encourage Frank to chew with his mouth closed and use a napkin, brushing away
a bit of egg that dangled from his chin for most of a morning without asking was absolutely unacceptable. On his voyage to the floor and rigor mortis post-Egg Dangle Incident, Frank somehow managed to take me down as well.

At first I suspected he was the kind of demon spawn who'd take malicious pleasure in “accidentally” using me to cushion his fall. But to make amends for knocking me over, that night Frank surprised me with a juice glass filled with gardenias for my bedside table so, he explained, I could enjoy the smell of them last thing before I went to sleep and first thing when I woke up. I decided then that the kid was not so much evil as a clumsy, sweet-natured boy whose whole body seemed to be made of thumbs. More oblivious than obnoxious, a sleepwalker both night and day. I was convinced he meant well. Even after his acting out of the trajectory of fragrance to my pillow knocked the glass over moments after its delivery. I had to strip my bed pronto before the water soaked into the mattress.

By the time our first week was out, we'd established a routine. After breakfast I'd tidy up while Frank selected his wardrobe. You had to give him credit: He might not bathe or wash his face or brush his teeth without prompting, but Frank could put an outfit together. The high point of my day was seeing Frank emerge from the chrysalis of his closet to unfurl his sartorial wings.

The low point came hard on the heels of that, when I looked past him to the piles of rejected clothing shed on the floor. Getting him to return everything he'd nixed to a hook, hanger, or a drawer was usually a job of work.

“It's not enough to dress like a gentleman,” I told him. “You need to act like one, too. Gentlemen do not disrespect their clothing by leaving it crumpled on the floor.”

“You can pick it up,” he said.

“Rule One says I can't. You know that.”

“Then my mother can do it.”

“Your mother most certainly cannot do it. She's working on her book.”

If he continued to balk, I'd pocket the remote to the house's only television, saying, “No cinematic education for me today until those clothes are put away.” In the spirit of “ignorance is not bliss,” Frank had undertaken schooling me on film. Threatening to deny him the joy of lecturing me on his favorite topic worked every time.

Not that he didn't protest. One day he'd be the untamed Helen Keller pre-Annie Sullivan in
The Miracle Worker,
dumping out drawers and kicking the contents around the closet, or tearing his hair and banging his head against the wall; the next, he was Boy Mahatma in
Gandhi,
lying stiff and motionless on the floor, the only thing folded up and put away being Frank's connection to the outside world. If I ignored all that, sooner or later the kid caved. Once he'd taken care of the task at hand, though, he needed to spend some time wrapped in his comforter, rolling on the floor and muttering to himself before he could calm down enough for us to move on.

I tried to project the serenity my mother had when she'd dealt with my own bad behavior. But it was exhausting work. I lay awake at night, trying to come up with some developmentally appropriate Montessori way of inspiring Frank to discover the restraint buried somewhere deep inside him so I wouldn't have to strong-arm him anymore. One night as I drifted off I had what seemed to me a brilliant idea. Frank was a devotee of film. We'd watch those two tales of the triumph of self-control, then discuss. He was an intelligent young man. He'd get the picture.

“I've got two of my favorite films for us to watch next,” I said, holding the DVDs of
The Miracle Worker
and
Gandhi
out for Frank to inspect as soon as they were delivered to our door.

“But I didn't select them.”

“I know. I thought it could be my turn to pick.”

He looked dubious. “Is there dancing?”

Dancing in a movie about Helen Keller or even, let's face it, Gandhi, seemed like the preamble for some particularly tasteless jokes. “I don't remember,” I said. “Maybe not.”

“If you can't remember, then they can't be very good.”

“I'm not like you, Frank,” I said. “I forget stuff.”

I outlined plots. He listened solemnly, giving my eyebrow his full attention while I talked. When I was done he said, “No thank you please.”

I confess. I caved. We watched what the kid wanted to watch. Which, for Frank, meant starting with the special features, “making-of” addendums on DVDs or broadcast specials that explained how the stories had been hammered out, which actors had by some twist of fate or ankle been cast or not cast in a role, and why the characters they played on-screen said or didn't say the things they really had on their minds. Only after we'd watched those a few times did we see the movie itself.

Frank talked all the way through, drowning out the dialogue as he explained how an actor could open a living room door in one location and step onto a porch on the other side of the real, nonmovie world. As if I hadn't sat through the same making-of documentary many times over, too, he'd explain to me why a particular make of car or member of the cast was parked in the corner of a frame, or how it was a failure on the part of the script supervisor if an actor held something in one scene that vanished in the next, only to reappear again in the one after that. Sometimes Frank sidled up to the screen, arranged his features to match the actor's expression, and delivered the next line of dialogue in sync with the character.

With so much extracurricular stuff going on, there were times during our movie marathons when I found it hard to follow the film's plot. Not so Frank. Though he seemed to have no interest in the narrative he still knew it intricately. Revealing the twist moments before it untwisted, telling you who was about to get it right between the eyes—nothing gave Frank more pleasure. When I tried to explain to
him that giving away the plot was considered bad form even among film critics, he refused to believe me.

“If you could know what was about to happen, why wouldn't you want to?”

“Because it ruins the surprise,” I said.

“But I don't like surprises.”

“Well, most people do. At the movies anyway. So put a sock in it.” Which, during our
Sunset Boulevard
screening, translated into Frank crouched beside me, rocking and looking miserable even before the opening credits were over. He started to speak and I shushed him, which prompted him to rip off his shoes, fling them across the room, and start tearing at his socks. The look he had on his face frightened me a little.

“What are you doing, Frank?” I asked.

“I'm putting my socks in it. It being my mouth. Otherwise I will tell you that Gloria Swanson shoots William Holden before the movie even gets going, though she's decades past old enough to know better than to do something impulsive like that.”

And then, like magic, Frank relaxed. For someone who'd just been all but frothing at the mouth, he was now remarkably serene. I think that must have been the first time I understood how impossible it was for Frank to bottle up information. He had so much knowledge trapped inside that giant brain of his that if he didn't let some out from time to time, his head might explode just like his grandfather's had.

“So, wait, William Holden is dead?” I asked.

“William Holden is dead,” Frank confirmed. “I was confused by that cinematic technique at first myself, as William Holden is a corpse as well as the movie's narrator. By ‘William Holden is dead' of course I mean Joe Gillis, the character William Holden plays, not William Holden himself.”

“Of course.”

“William Holden himself died November twelfth,
1981
, after falling and striking his head on a coffee table.”

“Got it.”

“May I continue?”

“Please.”

“In the scene where Joe Gillis meets Norma Desmond she thinks he's come to show her caskets for her dead chimpanzee. When the cinematographer asked director Billy Wilder how he wanted the chimp scene framed, Wilder is quoted as saying, ‘You know, your standard monkey funeral shot.' Some connoisseurs of film believe that scene prefigures Joe Gillis's death. I don't understand why you'd need to prefigure Joe Gillis's death when we've already figured out he's dead. Can you explain that?”

“Search me.”

“Search you? Why? Do you have the answer on a piece of paper tucked in your pocket? Is that the sort of thing you're writing when you're scribbling in that notebook?”

“What notebook?” I asked, disingenuously. Had Frank seen me taking notes for Mr. Vargas?

“The one you're always writing in. The pink one, with the unicorn on the cover.”

I changed the subject fast. “‘Search me' is a way of saying ‘I can't answer that.' Do you want me to pick up those shoes for you?”

“Yes thank you please.”

I handed them to him and didn't say another word. He hugged his shoes against his chest in a way I couldn't imagine him hugging me and rested his head on my shoulder. “You're bony,” he said, but left his head there anyway.

WHILE IT WAS
true that I couldn't touch Frank, that didn't keep the kid from becoming an honorary citizen of my personal zip code. He especially enjoyed pressing his face against my shoulder blade, as if I were a pane of glass he needed to see through.

“Don't let him do that,” Mimi said the first time she saw him at it. “He needs to learn to respect your personal space.”

But the thing was, I didn't mind. I knew Frank missed his mother pretty desperately. He didn't see why a book that didn't even exist should take her from him, even though he tended to ignore her when she was around and preferred talking to himself over anybody else in the room. If he slipped away from me during Mimi's workday I knew I would find him outside her office, a drinking glass held between his ear and the door that separated them.

One morning Frank threw himself down and starting pounding his head against the carpeted floor outside her office. He ignored me when I asked him to get up. Also when I asked if it would be okay for me to help him up. I don't think he even heard me. I decided under the circumstances that no answer was an answer and that I had to do something before Mimi came out and turned the high beams of her contempt on me again. I grabbed Frank by the ankles and dragged him to the kitchen, where I waved an unwrapped chocolate bar under his nose until he came around.