Be Frank With Me

by Julia Claiborne Johnson

  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 wo
uld 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.

  “I know what we’ll do,” I said when his eyes were able to focus on the exterior world again. “We’ll write a book, too.”

  “Good idea,” he said around the chocolate bar he’d stuffed whole into his mouth. “Then I can offer my mother pointers from the position of a knowledgeable technician rather than that of a dilettante.”

  “Dilettante, huh?” I said. “You know what I like best about you, Frank?”

  “My cravats?”

  “No. Well, yes, I like your cravats, of course. But I love that you know so many interesting words. Is it all right for me to touch your face and hands with a damp towel now to clean the chocolate off it?” I hoped he’d say yes. Otherwise he’d use the shoulder of my T-shirt as his freelance napkin.

  “If you must.” He screwed his eyes shut tight and grimaced as I wiped his face and hands. “I read the dictionary for pleasure as it’s always easy to find a stopping place. Also I hope my perambulations there will improve my spelling, but that hasn’t happened yet.”

  “I see,” I said. “So, what are we going to call your book?”

  “As Webster’s Third is taken, I will call my book I Shall Commute by Submarine.”

  I wasn’t surprised to hear that. The kid loved being bundled up and pressed against things; he was a big fan of tight spaces. He wedged himself between cushions on the family room couches, played Clue on the floor of his closet, and chose the inside of the station wagon as a play space over the wider world of the yard. We’d crawl under the kitchen table to read a book, him inside and me outside the cocoon of his sleeping bag, pretending we were traveling in an overnight compartment of a Pullman train.

  We wrote his book on my computer, sitting at the kitchen table. We finished it by lunchtime. I Shall Commute by Submarine chronicled the adventures of Adult Frank, a guy with some kind of amorphous job that required constant undersea travel between his hundred-square-foot apartments in Tokyo and New York City. Frank used one of my graphic design interfaces, untutored by me or the computer help program, to draw tall buildings and tight cubicles and a little man dressed in a tux that he dropped into the text as if he’d been doing that all his life. All this work on his book made me wonder what the real Adult Frank would do for a living one day. Graphic designer, maybe? Maître d’ on a cruise ship? Understudy James Bond?

  After we stapled his book together, we lay on our backs under the kitchen table as I read it to him.

  “I must confess that I’ve never been inside a submarine,” Frank said, taking his book back from me and flipping through the pages.

  “That’s okay,” I said. “It’s fiction.”

  “But it could be about me someday.”

  “I suppose. But you understand nobody can see into the future.”

  “Cassandra could. Also, my mother.”

  “Your mother can’t see into the future.”

  “Yes she can. She’s always telling me I’ll end up living out of a shopping cart if I don’t learn the multiplication tables. She can’t fathom how numbers could elude me. I tried explaining that I lose my way among a series of digits like Hansel and Gretel lost among the trees in the forest after the birds have devoured their trail of crumbs. She said I was too smart for that. I tend to agree, as I would use gravel to mark my way instead of something as evanescent as bread crumbs. I like my gravel in the utilitarian gray of gray flannel suits, though I suppose white marble chips might be a better choice in the chiaroscuro of a forest.”

  “Your mother doesn’t mean the part about the shopping cart, Frank,” I said.

  “Maybe not. Sometimes she says I’ll end up in jail. But that’s usually after I’ve broken something or somebody.”

  “When have you broken somebody?”

  “I slammed a taxicab door on my mother’s hand once and broke her finger. Also, there was an unfortunate incident with a jump rope in preschool that sent a girl flying across the playground. But I was exonerated of that. I’ve never understood why the girl got upset. Doesn’t everyone dream of flying, Alice?”

  While the way he said it made me think maybe somebody shouldn’t have been exonerated, I have to confess I was thrilled to hear Frank drop my name. After Alis wore off his hand he’d been saying “Excuse me?” to get my attention.

  “Here,” Frank said, handing his book back to me. “Take this book in lieu of the one my mother promised. You can leave today. I will call a cab while you pack.”

  It seemed our relationship wasn’t progressing as well as I thought.

  AS FOR MIMI’S book, it was hard to know how it was getting along. Around noon each day Frank and I would eat together, then I’d arrange her lunch on a tray while Frank went outside to pick a flower to go with it. We’d put his offering, often badly mangled, in a juice glass on the tray and I’d carry the whole thing to her office and leave it on the floor just outside her closed door. I always made Frank swear to wait for me in the kitchen, but he’d trail me in the hall like Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief, pressing himself into doorways to hide if I happened to look over my shoulder. After I put the tray down and knocked, I’d hear a mad scramble behind me as Frank hotfooted it back to the kitchen. I’d count to ten before I returned to give him time to arrange himself under the table with a book and catch his breath. Then we’d have a cookie.

  He wasn’t the only one trying to fake me out, though. As soon as my knuckles connected with her door I’d hear a burst of typing from the other side—Mimi didn’t use a computer—which always made me think of those recordings people have of dogs barking in place of a doorbell. I guess she was worried I was keeping tabs on her output. Which, in fairness, I was. Mr. Vargas had worked up a schedule to keep her on track, and part of my job was to somehow make sure she turned in pages, however rough, once a week or so. I was supposed to enter her typescript into “Mimi’s computer,” a tool that lay fallow as far as I could tell except for when she used it to order things online or trawl eBay for Frank’s outfits. Then I was to e-mail the pages to Mr. Vargas. He wasn’t looking for high polish or even any polish. Just evidence of a story, coming together, not coming together, whatever.

  Except Mimi hadn’t surrendered pages yet.

  When I texted Mr. Vargas to confess as much, he answered with one word: Patience.

  PART II

  OUR ADVENTURES BEGIN

  ( 5 )

  AFTER MUCH OF June spent under house arrest, I decided it was time Frank and I staged a jailbreak. I put a note on Mimi’s lunch tray that said: “May I borrow the car keys?” Frank and I had climbed in the Mercedes a few times to watch a movie on my computer and pretend we were at a drive-in. Other than using it as a stage for imaginary adventures, though, no one had touched the car since I’d been there. The crud accumulated on its windows and dead leaves puddled under its wheels were a testament to how long it had been since it had moved. “Does this thing drive?” I asked Frank.

  “Yes. But not by itself, in the way my piano plays itself. I would be an enthusiastic supporter of such technology except that the self-driving car gives my mother less incentive than ever to buy me a horse.”

  Mimi emerged from her office while Frank and I were having our after-lunch cookie. Frank jumped out of his chair so quickly he knocked it to the floor and flung himself into her arms with such force that she staggered back a few steps.

  “Careful, Frank,” she said. “Where did you get the black tape?” Frank was wearing his alternate, unragged tailcoat and intact morning pants, and had applied black tape to his eyebrows and upper lip in the manner of Groucho Marx.

  “What black tape?” he asked.

  “The black electrical tape that I hid from you so that
you wouldn’t put it over your eyebrows again. Remember how much it hurt getting it off last time?”

  “Oh, that black tape,” he said. “You can have it back.” He started peeling it delicately from his upper lip.

  “Where do you need to go, Penny?” Mimi asked.

  “Alice,” I said as automatically as you would say “God bless you” to a stranger sneezing. “I don’t need to go anywhere. But I thought Frank would enjoy getting out. I figured we could find a playground where Frank could hook up with other kids and—”

  “—No!” Frank and Mimi all but shouted in unison.

  I must have looked startled because Mimi was quick to explain, “Frank doesn’t like waiting his turn at the swings.”

  “Waiting your turn isn’t fun,” I said to Frank. “But it’s something you have to do in life if you’re planning on getting along with other children.”

  “Something I have to do in life is bang my head against the metal pole when people tell me to wait my turn at the swings,” Frank said. “And I don’t plan on getting along with other children. No thank you please.” Mimi closed her eyes and grimaced in a way that made me suspect they’d been through all this a few times already.

  “Well, how about this?” I said. “Frank and I could go on a drive. Feel the wind on our faces. Sniff the salt air. If I’m going to chauffeur him to school in the fall, now’s a good time for us to get used to being out in the world together.”

  “I would like to feel the wind on our faces,” Frank said. “I’d better get these eyebrows off.” He jackrabbited down the hall.

  “I’m not so sure about this,” Mimi said. “You don’t know where anything is. You’ll get lost.”

  “I won’t. The beach is downhill.”

  “So is the Valley.”

  She made that sound like a bad thing. “True,” I said, “but my phone has GPS.”

  She looked at me blankly.

  “Global positioning system,” I said. “It’s a—”

  “I know what GPS is,” she said. “I’m thinking. You don’t know how difficult Frank can be out in the world.”