Be Frank With Me

by Julia Claiborne Johnson

  Yikes. Still, it was the most Mimi had said to me at once and I’d been trying to engage her in conversation since day one. So I ran with it. “You go to PTA meetings?” It was hard to imagine M. M. Banning sitting on a folding chair, accepting a handout on peanut allergies from the person on her right and passing the pile along to the person on her left.

  “Not anymore.”

  “So,” I persisted, determined to keep her talking. “How did it go in Frank’s classroom?”

  “The fourth graders are proud of being big kids, so I was the only mother in the classroom. But Frank gets so anxious.” Mimi seemed pretty anxious herself. She kept looking out the window, as if she was afraid some perky mother might jump from behind a hedge to peck our eyes out.

  “He’s getting pretty big himself,” I said.

  “You say that like it’s a good thing.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “Not for someone like Frank. Kids like him have their charm when they’re little. But they grow up, the magic wears off, and they’re just bigger and lonelier and living in their mother’s basement. If their mother still has a basement for the kid to live in.”

  “Frank will be fine,” I said.

  “You need to stop talking now.”

  So much for Mimi opening up.

  School was three miles away as the crow flies, but the crow didn’t have to deal with rush-hour traffic. We pulled into the gate half an hour later.

  “Be prepared to pick up Frank later today,” Mimi said before she got out of the car.

  “Of course,” I said.

  “I gave them your cell phone number.”

  “Okay. The school day ends at two-fifty-six, right?”

  “Something like that.” Mimi slipped off the heels Frank had selected for her, tucked her gloves inside them, and walked into the house in her stocking feet, shoes in one hand, unwrapping her T-shirt headdress with the other as she went.

  I’d harbored this fantasy that Mimi and I would really get down to work together now that Frank was tucked away in school. But the way she banged her office door shut just as I reached it made me think maybe not. I stood there for a few minutes, wondering if I should knock anyway so I could assure Mr. Vargas I was doing everything I could to keep the whole writing process moving. I took a breath to steel myself, then another and another. Just as I raised my knuckles, Mimi yanked the door open and said, “Why are you still here? I can hear you breathing. Are you waiting to be invited in? Then let me spell it out for you. You are not welcome in this office, ever. You’re bothering me. Go away.” Slam. Then I heard the tumble of typewriter keys.

  Fine, I remember thinking. I will never knock another unscheduled knock on that door. Not if I could help it. Not even if the house were on fire.

  A superstitious person might say I brought that down on us just by thinking it.

  BACK IN MY bedroom I washed my hands and held a damp cloth over my face and counted to a hundred. After that I changed into a pair of shorts, slipped my cell phone into my pocket, and headed for Frank’s closet. He’d gone through a major growth spurt lately and I’d been eager to purge clothing he shouldn’t wear in polite company anymore. Which had been out of the question while Frank was in the house.

  I should note here that Frank’s bedroom was surprisingly austere for a little boy who dressed like a Savile Row version of the Artist Formerly Known as Prince. White walls. A simple bed and nightstand that wouldn’t have been out of place in a monk’s cell, with a studio portrait of Buster Keaton hanging over the headboard where the crucifix would be. A desk furnished with a battered dictionary and Dr. Frank’s copy of The Merck Manual, circa 1917. The windup clocks, out of sync again and staying that way.

  Frank’s closet was more what you’d expect. It was outfitted with a dazzling array of built-ins, all stuffed to capacity: cupboards and shoe racks and shelves with cubbies for hatboxes and a dressing table with a mirror that had folding panels you could adjust to check your side and rear views. The cupboards were fitted with little brass rings in the drawer fronts that flipped out to pull open. It was the kind of hardware used in the outfitting of yachts, Frank had explained, since a random wave could fling an unsuspecting yachtsman against a plain old outie knob and thus mar the smooth perfection of his yachtsman tan. Also a nice feature for a young man in a thrashing rage unable to find the cummerbund he’d had his heart set on wearing that day. Another excellent platform for the tantrum-tossed was the Oriental runner on the floor, a thick, soft rug that was the only nice one in the house, really. In place of a porthole a skylight spilled natural light into the closet, a key feature when distinguishing navy socks from black from charcoal.

  But all that sunshine spilling in, plus Frank’s enthusiasm for heavy jackets, long sleeves, and woolens made the place a hot box. After twenty minutes I would have traded all that closet’s fabulousness for my pathetic window opening onto the airshaft back home in Bushwick. I needed water.

  Mimi had stopped typing, so I stood at the kitchen sink, wondering what she was up to. Reading her manuscript and making notes? Napping? Wishing she could enjoy having her house all to herself now that Frank was in school but knowing she couldn’t leave the office without bumping into me?

  As I rinsed out my empty glass it struck me that something was different about the yard. No station wagon. I checked the front door for the keys. Also MIA. Mimi was driving again? How about that. Good for her. I hoped she had a valid driver’s license.

  There was a time—yesterday, for example—when I might have been tempted to dash into her office and give it a quick vacuum and dust, with a heaping side of snooping. But after the way she snapped at me for breathing outside her office door, no thank you. Imagining the look on Mimi’s face if she reappeared while I was pretending to straighten up the pages of her manuscript—I pictured something steps beyond “skeptical”—sent me scuttling back to Frank’s closet.

  I WAS SO in the purging zone that I yelped when a coyote howled from what sounded like its nest in my hip pocket. It took me a minute to realize it was my cell phone. Frank must have changed its default ring so I’d recognize it as mine in a crowded room. Like, for example, a room crowded with all his clothing, and me.

  The call was from Frank’s school.

  “This is Paula in the office,” a scratchy, friendly-sounding voice on the other end said. “You need to come and pick Frank up.”

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “His teacher says he’s disrupting class. Wait. What? Stop crying, honey, and use your words.” She hung up abruptly. Was she talking to Frank? Was he hurt? Had he hurt another kid? Set a vexing math textbook on fire with sunlight and his monocle? Anything was possible.

  I scooped up the pile of too-small clothing I’d winnowed from Frank’s wardrobe, ran to my room, and stuffed it under my bed. In the hallway I could hear Mimi’s typewriter clacking away again, which meant the car was back. I checked my watch. Eleven-thirty. I slapped a sandwich together and wrote a note that said, Picking up Frank a little early. I sped Mimi’s lunch tray to her office door where I slid the note under the door and left without knocking.

  I was at school by eleven-forty. I must have looked pretty wild-eyed when I got there, because the first thing the woman behind the desk said when I lurched into the office was, “Calm down. It’s not a bad break. We’ve got her arm iced down and splinted with a vocabulary workbook and an Ace bandage. That should hold her until she gets to the emergency room.”

  “She who? He broke somebody’s arm?”

  “Who are we talking about here? Aren’t you Fiona’s mother?”

  “I’m nobody’s mother,” I said. “I’m here to pick up Frank Banning.”

  “Oh. I thought you might be the new third-grader’s mom.”

  Again? I was twenty-four years old. Twenty-four. Did I really look old enough to be the mother of a kid more than halfway out of grade school? Oh, wait. This was Hollywood. So, yes.

  The office lady was still tal
king. “Tough start at a new school, getting her arm broken the first day.”

  “Frank broke a third-grader’s arm?”

  “Fiona was pretending she was an astronaut and jumped off a swing. You’d think she’d be old enough to know better. Frank had nothing to do with it. But that boy, bless his heart, is the best argument for life insurance I ever met. Are you Alice?”

  I recognized Paula’s scratchy voice then. “Yes. And you must be Paula. Is Frank okay?”

  “Oh, honey, did I not tell you that? When I call I usually say that right after ‘hello. I’m calling from school, blah blah isn’t hurt.’ I’m so sorry. Fiona came in with her arm at a crazy angle right as I was dialing you and it threw me off my game. You have to pick Frank up at Room Five. Sign him out here first.” Paula handed me a pen. She had a big smile and glasses and fluffy caramel hair and was wearing a macaroni necklace like the ones my kindergarten students made me.

  “Can you tell me what happened?” I asked.

  “Not exactly. Nothing bad, I know. Some days are just harder than others for Frank. You tell him I’ll miss him at lunchtime. He sits right here at my desk with me every day and we eat together. I love him to death.”

  I’d wondered how Frank made it through the days at school. Now I had a much better idea.

  I GUESS I was meeting Frank’s teacher the first day of school after all.

  I found Frank on his back across the doorway just inside Room Five, looking like a cross between a pinstriped doormat and a felled statue of a deposed Communist dictator. “Oh, hello,” his teacher said. “I’m Miss Peppe. You must be Alice.”

  We stood just outside the classroom so we could talk while she kept one eye on the children inside. “We were worried you wouldn’t get here before lunch,” she said.

  “What happened?”

  “His circuits overloaded. His third grade teacher warned me this would happen. When Frank gets overwhelmed, he jumps out of his seat and heads for the exit. I think he wants to keep running, but being out in the open makes him more anxious than being in here. So he lies down across the doorway and goes stiff. Then the children can’t get out. They don’t like stepping over him.”

  “I can’t blame them.” I went and crouched alongside Frank. His eyes were closed and he looked remarkably serene. “Frank,” I said. “What are you doing?”

  “I was on my way to the gentleman’s room when quite by accident I ended up here. I suspect myself of having fallen asleep, as we were doing mathematics at the time. If my mother should ask, Alice, please tell her the only thing I threw today was my body onto the floor.”

  “Get up, Frank,” I said. “Right this minute.”

  “No thank you please,” Frank said. He opened his eyes. “I see you changed your mind about the skirt,” he added, and closed them again.

  “You have to move him,” Miss Peppe told me. “We aren’t allowed. His mother is so small, I don’t know how she manages it. She said she’d tell you that you might have to come pick him up before the day was out.”

  I replayed the morning in my head and realized that Mimi had said that very thing. I knelt beside Frank again. “To pick you up, Frank, I’m going to have to put both my hands on you,” I said.

  “That will be all right,” he said. “Until you master the art of levitation.”

  BY THE TIME I got to the car, mastering the art of levitation seemed like a great idea. Carrying a fourth grader impersonating a statue is like trying to get an armload of two-by-fours from the checkout counter at Home Depot to a parking spot in the farthest corner of the lot without using one of those orange metal carts. My arms were shaking when I put Frank down to unlock the car. Frank brushed off his jacket, hopped into the backseat, and strapped himself in as if it was just the end of another of our adventures.

  “Thanks for all the help, Frank,” I said.

  “You’re welcome,” he said. He held his monocle to his right eye socket and regarded me through it. “You’re sweating.”

  “It’s hot,” I said. “And you’re heavy.”

  “Not according to the charts at my pediatrician’s office, where I rank somewhere in the fiftieth percentile for weight among boys in my age group. That places me firmly in the ‘average’ category.”

  When I didn’t respond, Frank added, “If the warm weather inspires you to change clothes again today, consider the Bedouins. They dress in flowing black robes to maximize air circulation on their skin. The heat absorbed by the fabric rises, taking body heat with it. That’s why I opt for dark suits even in the warmest weather.”

  “Thanks for the advice,” I said. “So if your suit was keeping you so cool and comfy, why didn’t you walk across the playground yourself?”

  “Because you were carrying me.”

  “I DON’T WANT to go home yet,” Frank said when we turned into his street. I peered through the windshield to see if any of Mimi’s stalkers were huddled by her gate. It hadn’t happened often, but it had happened.

  The point is, whenever we came home to a lurker I’d drive on past, park at the end of the block, and let Frank play with my cell phone until the poor slobs got bored with the vigil and left. This time, however, I didn’t see anyone waiting.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “I’d rather my mother didn’t know I left school early.”

  I pulled over and turned around to look at him. “Do you think she’ll be angry?”

  He shrugged. “She worries. Her worried face scares me more than her angry face.”

  I could understand that, though I was surprised he did. “What do you want to do instead?” I asked.

  “Let’s find a playground.”

  “I thought you hated playgrounds.”

  “I love playgrounds except for the times when I hate them. The times I hate them are summertime, during the school year after three P.M., and on weekends.”

  “Too many kids?”

  “Too many big kids.”

  “Fair enough,” I said, and hung a U-turn. This was the kind of adventure I’d been waiting for. Museums are fine in moderation and I’ve had some refreshing naps at the opera, but I was kind of desperate to see for myself how Frank interacted with other children. Even if it was just the pre-K brigade.

  “You hungry?” I asked after we got out of the car and walked past a hot dog cart at the edge of the parking lot on our way to the sandpit.

  “Not really.”

  It was getting close to lunchtime, so I bought each of us a hot dog anyway. We sat on a bench together while Frank wolfed down both his and mine. Then he bounded up and began circling the field of play, clockwise, monocle gripped in his right eye socket and hands clasped behind his back. He peered at the sky and muttered about the Kaiser, not the sandwich roll I’m guessing, while platoons of sweet, pudgy babies got pushed in those little swings that look like inverted leather biplane helmets and legions of toddlers dug tiny ramparts in the sand.

  By the time we left the playground it was evident Frank had marshaled a successful campaign inside his head against the forces of evil, armed only with hope, pluck, and the ragtag playground troops circumstance had dealt him. Also, I saw that his preferred mode of interacting with other children was not interacting with them at all. The little kids, the ones who weren’t too busy hitting each other on the head with plastic shovels to notice Frank, were thrilled to have such a colossus walking among them. That the colossus wasn’t about to get down in the sand and play with them didn’t diminish their excitement in the least.

  BACK HOME, FRANK made a mad dash for his bedroom and slammed the door. Like mother, like son. I stood listening to the faint fusillade of Mimi’s typewriter keys sounding in the distance, enjoying a sweet-scented breeze rearranging the wisps of hair around my face.

  Then it struck me that the breeze meant one of the flattened-out cardboard delivery boxes I’d taped over the door hole when the dry cleaner plastic tore must have slipped loose. I hadn’t quite gotten around to finding workmen to fix that door. Fr
ank and I had driven to the nearest Home Depot a week or so ago to ask for recommendations and pick up some supplies. But when I pulled into the lot, the station wagon was besieged by a scrum of out-of-work day laborers who elbowed each other aside and pressed their desperate faces against the car windows, shouting you need help lady you need help you need help in half a dozen different accents. Frank started screaming and we’d had to beat it out of there fast.

  I hung up the car keys and went to the living room to retape the cardboard. But it had all been taken down and folded in a neat pile. The door hole was framed out in raw wood and a brand-new set of sliding doors leaned against the living room wall.

  I stood in the framed-out doorway. In the yard, bent over two-by-fours laid across sawhorses, his back to me, a man in a tight black T-shirt was going at the lumber with a handsaw. Old school. I was so mesmerized by the ticktock rhythm of his arm going up and back, up and back, that I didn’t hear Frank coming.

  “There he is,” Frank said.

  “There’s who?” I asked. “Don’t tell me that’s Hanes.”

  “I won’t,” he said. “Because it isn’t.” He ran across the yard and grabbed the guy by the biceps and pressed his face against his shoulder blade. Black Shirt lay the saw across the two-by-fours, turned around and swept Frank up as if he still weighed no more than a toddler. Frank’s face went pink and he giggled wildly. I’d never seen him laugh like that.

  Xander set the kid on his feet again and looked at me. “Long time no see,” he said and smiled in a way that made me feel noticed for the first time since I’d come to California.

  Frank ran across the grass, grabbed my hand and dragged me forward. “Inside the Hanes T-shirt you will find Xander.” It dawned on me then that Xander, Frank’s sometime piano instructor and itinerant male role model, must also be Mimi’s Mr. Fix-it who did things around the house whenever he was in town.

  “Xander was wearing an Egyptian cotton shirt with French cuffs and a spread collar this morning,” Frank continued, “but we decided for his trip to the lumber yard and subsequent carpentry, a T-shirt would be more appropriate. As you know, we have many boxes on hand.”