When would I learn? “Knock knock. Keep talking.”
“—The Manhattan Project, which led to the American invention of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. Did you know that the Enola Gay, the airplane that dropped the first atom bomb, was built in Omaha in 1945?”
“I didn’t know that,” I said. “So, Frank, you must love school. You know more than most grown-ups I’ve met.”
“The other kids say I’m retarded.”
“I thought they said you were crazy.”
“They say that, too.”
“They’re probably mad because you’re smart and make good grades. Kids are stupid like that. The teachers love you, though, right?”
“I’ll tell you what my mother says teachers don’t love,” Frank said. “Being corrected.”
Sheesh. “You don’t do that, do you?”
“Only when teachers make factual errors.” In the mirror, his shoulders hadn’t tensed up, but he’d put his goggles over his eyes again. “Winston Churchill failed the sixth grade,” he added.
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yes. Frank Lloyd Wright never finished high school. Neither did Cagney or Gershwin or Ansel Adams or Irving Berlin. Charlie Chaplin and Noël Coward never even finished grade school.”
“Is that true?”
“My mother keeps a list in the drawer of her bedside table. You can go look at it sometime if you don’t believe me.”
“I believe you.”
“I want to go home now.”
“You’re the boss,” I said and crept off the highway at the next exit. Neither one of us said anything for the rest of the trip. The next time I stole a look at Frank in the mirror, he was sleeping like a baby, his goggles down around his neck and his face pressed against the window.
When we pulled into the driveway I could hear Mimi hammering away on the typewriter through an open window. Frank started awake when I turned off the engine and ran for the house like an electrified rabbit with a live greyhound at its heels. I found him crouched outside Mimi’s bedroom door, rocking in a little chair invisible to Earthlings like me.
“Are you okay?” I whispered.
“I just want to sit here with her for a while.”
I got that. I would have given anything to sit with my own mother again for a while. “That’s fine. Just don’t bother her while she’s working, all right?”
He nodded and I decided to trust him. I went to the kitchen and hot-potatoed Mimi’s cell phone out of my pocket and onto the counter so she would see and relieve me of it as soon as possible. Then I took the list of emergency contacts from another pocket and entered them into my phone so I’d never have to touch hers again, ever.
After all that guilty business was taken care of I sorted through the mail I’d picked up from the box as we came in, separating trashable junk from the bills. There was rarely much of anything else in her mailbox, though sometimes Mimi got fan mail, recognizable by virtue of being hand addressed and stamped. Or, more unsettlingly, stamp free, saying only “M. M. Banning” on the rumpled envelopes, missives clearly shoved through the mail slot by one of her fanatics. Every time I handed her one of those pieces of somebody’s heart sealed inside an envelope, she tossed it in the trash unread.
Today, however, there was a postcard. It showed a shack with big stuffed animals—the kind you win at a fair and then lug around regretfully for the rest of the day—nailed all over it like lumpy and disheveled siding. I flipped the card over, thinking it might be some kind of nutty advertisement for a roofing company or maybe an invitation to check out an unusually depressing day care center. The card was addressed to Frank. I didn’t mean to read it, but there was so little written there, my eyes couldn’t help taking it in.
Outside Salt Lake City. Xander.
Xander again. Who was Xander? I put the card, writing side down, by Mimi’s phone, pulled a big knife from the drawer by the sink and started savaging basil for tomato sauce. I put a pot on to boil and slopped some olive oil and crushed garlic into a saucepan, and after that, cherry tomatoes. By the time I had the noodles draining in the sink, Frank wandered into the kitchen and said, “I’m hungry.”
“Lucky you,” I said, and put a plate of pasta in front of him.
“Can I eat this on the couch?”
“‘May’ I eat this on the couch. No. Gentlemen do not eat on couches.”
“Why not?”
“Because mankind went to all the trouble of inventing tables to save good trousers from bad stains. Couches deserve the same consideration.”
“That makes perfect sense,” Frank said. Then, “She’s never coming out, is she?”
“She will. She has to eat, too. Look, you got a postcard.”
Frank ignored the postcard, too caught up in the thrilling fork pursuit of tomato around the velodrome of his pasta bowl. I nudged the card toward him when he was done.
“Look, I got a postcard,” he said.
“You did? Spectacular. Who’s it from?”
“Xander. He’s back on our side of the Continental Divide.”
“Who’s Xander?” I said, hoping I sounded more innocent than I felt.
“Xander is my piano teacher. When he’s around.”
“Oh, yeah? How long have you been taking lessons?”
“Off and on since I was little.”
“You know, I’ve never heard you play.”
“I don’t like playing much. I’d rather listen.”
“So why do you take lessons?”
“Because my mother says my gifts shouldn’t be squandered. Also, Xander is my friend. He’s been coming here to play our piano since before I was born. He tried to teach my mom to play. She says she wasn’t any good because she was too old to learn, but she liked him and he likes our piano, so she gave him a key to our house so he could let himself in and play it anytime.”
I had to turn to the sink so he wouldn’t see the avid look on my face. Not that Frank was much for reading facial expressions, but it shamed me to show my evil twin, Nosey Parker, to anything more sentient than a crusty skillet. “So, Xander stays here?”
“Sometimes. When he’s in town. He makes money teaching piano lessons. He plays in restaurants, too, and fancy department stores until he gets a wad of cash up. Then he wanders all over the place until the money is gone. In my gallery I’ve mounted a retrospective of his postcards. Would you like to see?”
As someone who had vacuumed every inch of the house outside the forbidden zone of Mimi’s office, I had to wonder where this gallery might be. Frank led me through the sliding doors, blasted right past the art installation in the tree and stopped in front of the garage. I’d seen the garage a million times, but had gone so far past not noticing it backed up close to the stucco security perimeter that I’d never even wondered why the car wasn’t parked in it, ever. Unlike the house, it had a shake roof with moss growing on the wood shingles shaded by a eucalyptus tree, and stucco walls instead of floor-to-ceiling windows. All the better, I supposed, to stuff it floor to ceiling with junk.
Frank threw the door up with one hand and swept a bow to the interior, like Aladdin welcoming me to his cave. But it was neither cave nor junkyard, and in fact so not of a piece with the house that it took my breath away. The walls were whitewashed boards and exposed studs with a bank of windows on the backside tucked under the rough beam-and-plank ceiling that was also the floor to the loft spanning much of the garage. More light spilled in through skylights set on either side of the peaked roof. The concrete floor must have had some kind of seal on it because it shone like marble and there was neither oil stain nor faded memories of leaking radiator fluid to be seen anywhere. The oddest part was that there was nothing in the bottom floor at all, no old bicycles nor toys nor rusty tools nor screens to windows that didn’t exist anymore. Not even a rake or a hose. I’d never been in a cleaner garage in my life. Or a bigger one. It could have housed a dozen tractors.
“Look how nice
it is in here,” I said. “You could eat off the floor.”
“Even gentleman could?”
“No, gentlemen could not. I didn’t mean you could literally eat off the floor. That’s just something people say when a floor is really clean. Most garages look like Dagwood Bumstead’s closet, with junk falling out all over the place every time you open the door.”
Frank lit up when I said that. “Fibber McGee had a closet like that, too, but since it was a radio program they had to convey its overstuffed nature through the medium of sound. My mother is not an archivist like I am and doesn’t believe in keeping things. She says the more you have, the more you have to lose. So if she doesn’t have any use for something, it’s gone before you can say ‘Fibber McGee’s Closet.’ Come on. The gallery is up here.” Frank scrambled halfway up a ladder of two-by-fours nailed between a pair of studs. There was a trapdoor up top that he pushed open and climbed through. He poked his head back into the frame of the hole to watch me ascend. “Careful,” he said. “The old lady fell off this ladder. And she was way closer to the bottom than you are.”
“What old lady?”
“The old lady my mother bought the house from. She built it when she was young. This garage went with the original house and the old lady couldn’t get a permit to build a new one, so she never tore this one down. She turned it into her painting atelier.”
Once I got up there I could tell the old lady was an amateur, because she had everything a real artist could ever dream of in a studio but can seldom afford. Here there was not just light and space but wide cabinets with shallow drawers for storing drawings and slotted racks against the wall for canvases and an easel. A sink for cleaning brushes and counter space alongside it and even more drawers under that. A couple of sunflower-yellow straight-backed chairs arranged around a yellow table I couldn’t imagine anyone getting up there in the first place, and a yellow wooden day bed and bedside table.
“Van Gogh at Arles meet Barbie’s Dream House,” I said.
“Yes,” Frank said. “Or somebody got a very good deal on yellow paint. Look, here’s the bathroom.” He opened a door and showed me a tiny bathroom fitted with a teacup-sized copper tub and a demitasse sink and one of those old-fashioned high-tanked toilets with a chain I couldn’t resist pulling. It flushed with a sound like a jet taking off from an aircraft carrier. Frank covered his ears and grimaced.
“Sorry,” I said when he uncovered his ears again. “It’s just that I’ve never seen a toilet like that.”
“Van Gogh would have done the same thing,” he said. “He never saw one, either. Or these.” By the sink, he twisted the knob on the top of what looked like a vertical row of drawers. The lot swung open as one and presto—a tiny concealed refrigerator that released a puff of stale, chilly air. Another drawer by the fridge pulled out to reveal a little two-burner electric stovetop.
“Wow,” I said. “You could live up here. Does your mother come here a lot?”
“Not so much. The ladder scares her. When the son moved the old lady out, he just left all her stuff, see?” He opened another drawer to show me brushes with dried-paint evidence of use on the handles but whose bristles had been so well cared for they were as soft and immaculate as they must have been in the shop. There were tubes of paints and pastels and balls of string and wire and clamps and a hammer and nails and many blue tin cups of tacks segregated by color, all laid out in their drawers as if they were in a shop window in Paris. I say that like I’ve been to Paris. I haven’t, except in movies, or my dreams.
“I don’t know if it was too much trouble to move out, or if it made the old lady too sad to bring it with her. She didn’t want to sell the place but her son didn’t want her anywhere near that ladder again. My mom said she couldn’t bear to pitch everything because the old lady had it all arranged so beautifully and she was about to be dead but her materials were still so alive with potential. Then of course I came along and by the time I was three my mother was pretty sure I was going to be famous for something someday. Since that something might be painting, she kept everything like it was. My mother bought a lot of art back then, too. We don’t have that anymore. But thanks to us keeping all the old lady’s stuff here, the potential for us having it again is alive even if the old lady is dead.”
I reached for one of the brushes. “Oh, don’t touch,” he said.
“I’m sorry. I forgot to ask. Is it yours?”
“I told you all this stuff belongs to the old lady.”
“I thought she was dead.”
“She is, probably. A lot of the pieces in museums used to belong to people who are dead but you aren’t allowed to touch them, either. Here, let me show you my favorite thing up here.” He darted across the loft to a big wire basket on the top rail of the waist-high fence that separated us from the concrete floor a dozen feet below. He flung the basket over the edge, and I gasped. “Don’t worry. It’s attached to this pulley, see? It’s how you get groceries and stuff up and down, since the ladder is so dangerous.”
I came to the fence and peered over. “That’s quite a drop. You be careful,” I said. “If you fell over you’d break your neck, and probably every other bone in your body.”
“I couldn’t fall over that. It’s too high. I’d have to jump it.” Frank leaned his elbows on the top of the fence and looked over.
“Don’t even think that,” I said. “And please, don’t lean on it. What if it gives way?”
“My mother says the same thing. She doesn’t like it when I come up here because she’s sure I’ll manage to find a way to fall like my uncle Julian did. So I have to curate my collection when she isn’t looking.”
Uh-oh. “Wait. Are you not allowed up here?”
“I’m not not allowed. I’m just strongly discouraged from coming here alone. And besides, you’re here. Now step this way, please, to the gallery.” He backed away, palms up and fingers waggling like a tour guide, to a corner of the loft where he’d put his tack collection to good use attaching a crazy quilt of postcards to the studs. He took a magnifying glass from a hook on the wall by the exhibit and handed it to me. “Use this,” he said, “to savor the details.”
So I did. Had to, almost. There were so many details in every four-by-six-inch card that it was hard to appreciate the whole of any of them. There was a sidewalk mosaic of the Mona Lisa which, when magnified, proved constructed entirely of buttons. A tower built of every crazy, broken-down material delight a city dump offers—bicycle parts and rusted bedsprings, discarded water tanks and twisted pipes, limbless dolls and worn-out brooms. There was a multilevel tree house constructed of scrap lumber and lengths of firewood, with windows of bottle butts and crystal punch bowls and a door made from a metal highway sign that read REST AREA, THIS EXIT. NEXT EXIT 47 MILES. I moved from postcard to postcard, increasingly boggled by the too-much muchness of it all. At last I lowered the magnifying glass and stepped away from the wall. “What a trip! I want to meet your Xander.”
“No you don’t,” Frank said. “He’ll only disappoint you.”
“How would he disappoint me? I don’t even know him.”
He shrugged. “That’s what my mother says about Xander. Also, that he’s too good at too many things to ever succeed at anything.”
I was going to press him for details, but he held a finger up. “Shhh.”
After a moment or two of intense listening, I said, “I don’t hear anything.”
“She’s stopped typing,” he said, and was through the trapdoor, down the ladder, and out the door like a shot. I hurried after him and cleared the garage door just in time to hear Frank shout “Mama!” with all the joy and intensity and sweet, pure love that makes a woman’s womb ache if she doesn’t have children of her own. Mimi had just stepped outside the sliding glass door. She smiled at Frank as he hurtled across the yard. Frank launched himself into her arms.
It’s kind of unimaginable the carnage caused by the locomotive force of one slight nine-year-old boy traveling at the
speed of light, colliding with his tiny mother, midfifties, a little off balance because she was twisting around to close the door behind herself. He hit her with enough velocity to explode that antique sheet of cracked glass into about a million lacerating diamonds.
I’ve seen a lot of blood in my day, but never quite that much.
( 7 )
FRANK AND I had been in the emergency room for a couple of minutes, listening to the symphony of shushes, clicks, and beeps coming from all the monitoring equipment hooked up to Mimi and other unseen patients sequestered in curtained-off cubbies. I’d told the expedient fib that I was Mimi’s daughter and Frank was my brother so they would let us come see her together. I was more than a little nervous about Frank blowing our cover.
“Is she asleep?” Frank asked, not in a whisper.
“Shhh. Looks that way.”
An emergency room nurse whisked past us. “Don’t worry. She’s okay. Just tired.”
Mimi didn’t exactly look okay—one of her eyebrows had been shaved off and the skin seamed back together there, and her head was wrapped in a wimple of bandages. Frank put his goggles on and gripped my hand like it was the only thing tethering him to this earth.
“You all right?” I asked.
“Mama,” he said with all the urgency that odd, flat voice of his could summon. Mimi’s eyes popped open and I held his hand more tightly, just in case he was thinking of rushing her again. “What’s that thing you’re wearing?”
“They gave me this nice clean gown to put on when I got here,” Mimi said. “My other clothes were dirty.”
“You call that a gown? I’d better check you for brain damage.”
“What?” The emergency room nurse had reappeared by then.
“One of the EMS guys taught Frank how to check for brain damage,” I said.
“He gave me his special little flashlight, see?” Frank said, pulling a penlight from his pocket and holding it forth on his flattened palm for all to admire. “He said I was a natural. He also likes my coat.” He was still wearing his white cotton duster, now smeared with Mimi’s blood.
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