Be Frank With Me

by Julia Claiborne Johnson

  But as I had explained to Frank, nobody can foretell the future, particularly not me. The Student of All Fabrics in Frank was so fascinated with the guard’s jacket that he hadn’t seemed to notice the poke. “What kind of fabric is that?” Frank asked.

  “Washable,” the guard answered.

  “May I?” Frank asked, pointing at the guard’s sleeve. I opened my mouth to remind him not to point, but I figured that in this instance pointing was better than touching the guy without asking. Or pressing his cheek against the man’s lapels, the way he did with me.

  “Knock yourself out,” the guard said.

  Frank fingered the fabric. “Hmmm,” he said. “The texture is interesting. Rough. Scratchy. Stiff. Is it flammable?”

  The guard guffawed. “A hundred percent polyester, so yeah, I’m thinking it would probably go up like a Roman candle on the Fourth of July.”

  “I had the misfortune of sleeping through the July Fourth display this year,” Frank said, “so I suggested we purchase a few Roman candles for home use. I refer to the delayed ignition fireworks, of course, not the beeswax-dipped papyrus wicks the Romans invented as portable sources of illumination. ‘Not in this lifetime,’ my mother said.”

  “Mom’s probably right about the fireworks,” the guard said. “Better leave that to professionals. Those things are dangerous to play with. Even for a smart kid like you.”

  “My mother says I have a very large brain, which is, however, not always a corollary of genius. Einstein left his brain to science. It wasn’t any bigger than average but did feature an unusual number of grooves and fissures. That suggests an abundance of connections and agility of thinking not common in the general public.”

  “Let’s go, Frank.” I wanted to leave before he launched a lecture on brain anatomy. “Thanks for your help,” I said to the guard.

  “You’re welcome,” the guard said. “Have a wonderful day.”

  “Thank you,” Frank said. “We will.”

  “Nice kid, Mom,” the guard said. “Smart. Polite. You need to fill the house up with more like him. You need to fill up the world.”

  I surprised myself by getting choked up by that. All I could do was nod and smile and hustle Frank out of there, making sure this time to keep a tight hold on his wrist. When we were out of earshot Frank said, “What a nice gentleman. Do you think that guard is a good painter?”

  “Huh? What makes you think he’s a painter?”

  “Someone needs to use his nailbrush more diligently. And turpentine. Gasoline might work, too. Oil paint is notoriously difficult to remove.”

  If you never looked a person in the eyes, I guess it made okay sense to look them in the cuticles. “Maybe he paints houses,” I said.

  “Roy G. Biv,” Frank said.

  “Roy Who?”

  “Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. Roy G. Biv. It’s a mnemonic for recalling the colors in the visual spectrum.”

  “Oh, that Roy G. Biv. Remember, Frank, I studied art in college.”

  “How could I remember something I never knew? As I was saying, a house painter wouldn’t have that many different colors under his nails. Either he’s an artist or he goes up to the paintings in his galleries when nobody’s looking and gives them a good scratch.” Frank pondered his own fingernails. “I would like to try that sometime.”

  “Don’t,” I said, a little more forcefully than I meant to. I was tired. I needed a day off. I hadn’t had one since I’d gotten there.

  Mimi, of course, hadn’t had a day off since Frank was born.

  “Why did the guard keep calling you ‘Mom’?” Frank asked on our way out of the museum.

  “I guess he thought I was your mother.”

  “Why do people keep assuming that?”

  “Because I’m lucky?”

  “Probably,” he said. “My mother always tells me before I go to sleep that she’s lucky to be my mom.”

  THE NEXT TIME I dreamed of statues, In-the-Manner-of-Apollo was bent over my bed, evidently surprised to find me there. The full moon was shining through my open curtains, and in its silvery light his skin wasn’t pitted and worn at all. It was like alabaster. I couldn’t resist reaching up and laying my hand against his cheek. He put his hand on top of mine and curled his fingers around my fingers. “Who are you?” he asked. “And what are you doing in my bed?”

  “Keeping it warm,” I said. When I said the word “warm” I awakened to the fact that the cheek my palm lay on was neither cold nor the least bit stony, and the hand that grasped mine had all its fingers intact.

  That’s how I came to meet Xander.

  ( 11 )

  YOU’RE WEARING A skirt,” Frank said the next morning as I put a plate of French toast in front of him. “Why are you so dressed up?”

  “I could ask you the same thing,” I said.

  “But I’m not wearing a skirt,” he said. It was true enough. He’d suited up that morning in a severe charcoal pinstripe number, complete with pocket square, wing tips, and a monocle on a chain threaded through the buttonhole of his vest. I sat across the table, fighting the urge to tell Half-Pint E. F. Hutton what, exactly, I felt I could bring to his corporation and where I saw myself five years hence, in 1934.

  “No,” I said, “but it looks like you’ve made a special effort to look nice for the first day of school.”

  “That’s today?”

  “Did you forget?”

  “No. Although I tried my best to.”

  “Well, I put on a skirt because I wanted to make a good impression on your teacher,” I said.

  “Do you have to take me to school?”

  “Kids have to go to school if they want their mothers to stay out of jail.”

  “You’re not my mother. I’d rather have my mother take me to school today.”

  “Of course you would.”

  “Or Xander.”

  I felt my face get hot so I opened the refrigerator door and shuffled around the cartons of milk and orange juice. “Xander?” I hadn’t seen any sign of him this morning—no unfamiliar car in the driveway, no blanket-bundled form sleeping on the couch—so I was starting to wonder if I’d only dreamed last night’s encounter. In which case I’d gotten up half an hour earlier than usual to put on a skirt and eyeliner for no good reason. Frank, not being one for eye contact, hadn’t noticed the eyeliner.

  “Xander is my sometime piano instructor and itinerant male role model. The one I saw and you didn’t at the museum. Remember?”

  “In-the-Manner-of-Apollo. Of course I remember,” I said. “If it’s any comfort, your mother is coming to school with us.”

  “It is an enormous comfort. Just as it would probably be an enormous comfort to her to have me with her right now to select her outfit.” Frank jumped from his chair, knocking it over backward again and sweeping his plate to the floor. This time I didn’t chase down the hallway to drag him back. I stayed behind to clean up his mess.

  THEY SAT IN the back for the drive, clutching hands. Glancing at the two of them in the mirror made me so nervous I worried I’d drive the car over the edge of one of the steep hillside switchbacks that make the Bel Air views so spectacularly gorgeous and driving there so spectacularly terrifying.

  It was hard to resist the urge to look. Mimi had on the kind of outfit you’d expect Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly to wear to cocktails or maybe a funeral: little black dress, big black sunglasses, white gloves, pearls. In place of the chignon she didn’t have the hair for anymore, she wore black fabric wrapped tightly around her head. While I couldn’t remember what my mother had worn on the first day of my fourth grade year, I’m pretty sure it didn’t look anything like that.

  “What’s that on your mother’s head?” I asked Frank before we set out, when Mimi skittered back to her room to fetch her cell phone.

  “A stylish head wrap I made by cutting up one of her ex-husband’s black T-shirts,” Frank said.

  “You’re kidding,” I said. “She has his T
-shirts? She hasn’t seen him in twenty years at least.”

  “It’s quite possible she saw him last week.”

  “Last week? Where was I when all this was going on?”

  “Sleeping, probably.”

  “He came in the middle of the night?” Which, it struck me, was when Xander had put in his appearance. Maybe it wasn’t Frank I’d heard out there stumbling around every night since I’d arrived.

  “My mother’s ex-husband was an actor in the moving pictures,” Frank said. “I noticed one of his films showing on the classic movie channel last week, Tuesday night at three A.M. and again Thursday at twelve A.M. It’s possible she saw him there though I don’t think she really likes bumping into him even on the classic movie channel. That’s why we only have the one television set. To minimize such chance meetings. Also why she told him he had to stop coming to our house.”

  As noted, I’d started tuning out during some of Frank’s long-winded harangues, but now he had a hundred and ten percent of my attention. “Her ex-husband kept coming to your house after they divorced?” I asked. I tried to remember what the guy looked like. Like Frank, maybe, a little? But I couldn’t call up his face or for that matter his name. Only the torso. “How long did that go on?”

  “For years.”

  “So, wait, have you met him?”

  “Not in real life, though I’d like to. Reviewers of my mother’s ex-husband’s oeuvre say his smolder and physical presence were genuinely Oscar-worthy and that when he opened his mouth his acting was on par with Pinocchio’s. Quite a compliment in my book, since Pinocchio, the eponymous Academy Award-winning film released in 1940 by the Walt Disney Studios, is one of my favorite animated movies.”

  “That is quite a compliment,” I said.

  “I’ll say. I wonder what’s keeping my mother? If we’re too late setting out for school, there isn’t any point in going at all.”

  “Hold on. I don’t understand. Why did her ex-husband keep coming back?”

  “For the T-shirts.”

  “You lost me.”

  “No, I didn’t. You’re standing right in front of me.”

  I sighed. “Yes, Frank, I know. But the T-shirts. I don’t understand why your mother’s ex-husband kept coming back for them.”

  “Oh,” Frank said. “When he was a movie star, my mother’s ex-husband didn’t wear shirts much. But when he did he was famous for wearing tight black T-shirts. In fact, he got his actor name out of the collar of a shirt he was wearing.”

  “His actor name? What was his real name?”

  “Milton Fuller, but his friends called him Milt. Or, if they were pals from his Muscle Beach days, Milt the Built. Even though that sobriquet was well earned, you can see why as a serious actor he opted to change it to Hanes Fuller. Changing one’s name was a common practice among entertainers in the olden days. Fred Astaire’s original moniker was Frederick Austerlitz and his friend Benjamin Kubelsky was known to the world as Jack Benny. Why Hanes aka Milt would go to the trouble of changing his name but then go out in public in a shirt meant to be worn as underwear is baffling to me.” Frank grimaced at his shoelaces, which were, of course, untied.

  I knelt down and double-knotted the laces for him. “Can’t be tripping on these bad boys on the playground,” I said. “So why are his shirts still here?”

  “Once Hanes aka Milt became famous and the story about how he selected his actor name got out, the underwear company that provided him with his inspiration sent him boxes of their shirts gratis. After he wasn’t such a big movie star my mother suspected the underwear company wasn’t mailing them anymore, but that Hanes aka Milt was. My mother started marking the boxes ‘return to sender’ and told him not to come over ever again. Even though there were about a hundred shirts in boxes here he’d opened and forgot. In this context, my mother accompanies the word forgot with this gesture.” He made air quotes with his fingers. “Under normal circumstances my mother would have thrown something like that out, but as you can see, they’re very handy to have around. I like to use them for polishing silver. I wish we had a goat.”

  “A goat?”

  “If we had a goat we could strain its milk through his T-shirts and make ricotta cheese. My mother and I could sell it at the farmer’s market. To make money.”

  “Sell what at the farmer’s market to make money?” Mimi asked. She was standing in the doorway by then, looking distressed.

  “Goat cheese. You and I could man the booth together, although of course neither one of us is technically a man. We would need aprons. The long white kind, like waiters wear in restaurants in France.”

  I could just see it. I could also see that Mimi was working herself into a state. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “I can’t find my cell phone.”

  “I’ve got my cell phone,” I said.

  “I can’t leave the house without my cell phone,” she said. “I need it.”

  “Oh, well. If we can’t leave the house it follows that I’ll have to stay home from school today,” Frank said.

  “Should I call your phone?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Mimi said.

  I called her cell and within moments we heard a tinny, muffled Cab Calloway singing “hi-de-hi-de-hi-de-ho” from the neighborhood of Frank’s pocket square.

  “I think your phone is in Frank’s pocket,” I said.

  Frank fished it out. “Ah, yes. I changed your ringtone, Mommie. It was on a default setting so if you happened to be in a crowded room when it rang you might not recognize it as yours. Now you won’t have that problem. Are you glad I changed it?”

  “Of course I’m glad, Monkey,” Mimi said, though she didn’t look it.

  “But you’re making the angry face,” he persisted. “Are you angry with me?”

  “What angry face?” Mimi asked.

  “Dr. Abrams has a chart in her office. We’ve been using it to prepare me for the resumption of school. The oval that looks like this”—Frank lowered his eyebrows and pressed his lips into a thin, straight line—“is the ‘angry’ face. If you raise one eyebrow on the angry face like this”—he demonstrated—“you’re ‘skeptical.’ ‘Pleased’ looks like this.” He relaxed his eyebrows, crinkled his eyes, and shaped his mouth into a smile. “I thought the whole exercise tedious until Dr. Abrams pointed out that the greats of the silent era were masters of these subtleties of facial expression.”

  “Is that why you were talking about Buster Keaton?” Mimi asked.

  “Yes. I countered by saying that Keaton was known as The Great Stone Face for his ability to convey so much with so little facial movement. To which Dr. Abrams replied that while Keaton was a genius most elementary school students are not, so for my own sake I’d better learn how to be more overt in expressing what I am feeling. What you’re doing now,” Frank told his mother, tipping his head to one side as she had, “turns ‘pleased’ into ‘tender.’”

  Mimi wrapped her arms around Frank and kissed the top of his head. Ah, Mimi. So what if she didn’t like me? Every bit of affection she had she channeled to Frank, who needed it more than I did. Particularly today. After she’d wrangled Frank to bed Mimi must have been awake all night worrying about what would happen to him at school. She had to be exhausted. That explained a lot, I decided. Mimi was exhausted. Not mean.

  Mimi lay her cheek on the top of Frank’s head and caught me considering the two of them. “What are you looking at?” she snapped. Correction: exhausted and mean.

  “I DON’T BELONG HERE,” Frank said when we got to his school.

  “Of course you do,” Mimi said with a conviction I had to wonder if she felt. “You’ll be fine. I’m going in there with you, so there’s nothing to worry about. Now that you’re in the fourth grade, no excuse for throwing things, okay? No head banging or pulling out your hair. Please. No matter how upset you get.”

  We all got out of the car in the parking lot behind the playground. Frank looked my skirt in the eye and said, “You heard her.
My mother will walk me to class. You stay here.”

  “Oh. All right.” I’ll admit I was disappointed. I’d been looking forward to meeting his teacher. Teachers always liked me. Once a teacher’s pet, always a teacher’s pet.

  “Don’t just stand there staring at us,” he said. “Get back in the car.”

  I felt my face get hot.

  “That’s not nice, Frank,” Mimi said. “Alice is your friend. Is that how you treat your friends?” I managed to keep from laughing at the shock of having Mimi defend me.

  “Alice is staff,” Frank said. So much for my status as his friend and first pajama party invitee.

  “It’s fine,” I said. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll wait in the car.”

  I watched them walk away in the rearview mirror. They were easy to track, since they were the only pair on the playground dressed like they were going for drinks at the Algonquin after a funeral.

  MIMI WAS GONE for almost an hour.

  There was an awkward moment when she opened the back door of the station wagon, then closed it and got in the front with me. “I’m so used to riding in the backseat of taxis,” she said. “I’ve almost forgotten what it’s like to sit up here. I really ought to drive more.”

  “Do you want to drive now?” I asked.

  “No.” She looked out the window. “Did you see how alike they all are?”

  “Who? The kids?”

  “The mothers. They’re all so perky and interchangeable. ‘Isn’t it a beautiful day?’ Please. Every day here is a beautiful day. I guess they didn’t move here because they’re geniuses. If you ask me, I think every small town mean girl in America who’s pretty but not much else comes out here to die. Which they start to do the minute they realize there are a million girls already here who look just like them but have more talent. Even the ones who don’t even pretend to be actresses think they’ll show you what good actresses they are anyway by pretending they aren’t bitter. The ones who smile like lunatics and wear yoga pants all day are the worst. At PTA meetings they’re like those chickens that have to wear tiny eyeglasses in poultry barns so they won’t peck each other’s eyes out.”