But the real suffering came once Frank started back to school. When I drove him there on the first day he leaned up between the seats to expound on the origins of the national dance of the Dominican Republic, a step whose name for some reason or other was based on the French word meringue and whose tight footwork was informed by the chains that once bound its enslaved creators together. Frank liked to imagine the hula girl loved that particular two-step most of all, even though she supposedly hailed from an unfettered island on the other side of the world. He was still muttering about that to himself when I dropped him off. It was mid-January and just cool enough to make his E. F. Hutton suit a seasonally appropriate choice. He was wearing a pair of gold elephant-head cuff links Mimi had given him for Christmas. The way the tassel on his fez kept time to his step as he merengued across the playground made me feel almost cheerful. I couldn’t believe I had been so nervous about blowback from December.
So of course there was an incident. Mimi was called in to the principal’s office. But when I, Mimi-by-proxy, turned up to see the principal I was turned away with a stern note saying he wanted to have a word with Frank’s mother not one of her employees.
“What happened?” I asked Paula.
“Since you are not his custodial parent, I’m not allowed to release that information to you.”
“Since when?”
She leaned across the counter and whispered, “Since we have a new principal. He’s big on protocol and accountability. Insists we call him Dr. Matthews because he has a Ph.D. in child development. Doesn’t have kids of his own, so he’s an authority. In his opinion, anyway.”
Frank was in a chair by Paula’s desk, clutching his crushed fez to his chest and rocking. She shepherded him out to me without touching him once, a tour de force performance worthy of a theremin virtuoso. Before passing him off, Paula stooped to make herself eyebrow-to-eye level with Frank. “We’ll lunch together soon, okay, honey?”
“Pip pip,” Frank said.
She straightened up and said to me, “Dr. Matthews says Frank can’t come back to school until Frank’s mom comes in to meet with him.”
“The new principal is a doctor?” Frank asked. “My grandfather was a doctor. He stitched soldiers back together in the trenches during World War I so they could go home and be with their loved ones again.”
“Different kind of doctor,” Paula said.
In the car, I asked Frank what had happened to the old principal. “Paula told me he went to a better place,” he said.
Oh, dear. “What better place?” I asked anyway.
“Istanbul,” he said. “Or Constantinople. I forget which.”
I decided to let it go. “So, what happened to your fez?” I asked, checking him in the mirror as I did so. He cradled its battered carcass and started making a horrible sound, like the shrieks of a clubbed walrus. I’d never heard Frank cry before so it took me a minute to realize that was what he was doing. I didn’t waste time pulling over to comfort him. The kid needed to go home.
FRANK HAD STOPPED crying by the time we pulled into the driveway, but it was a struggle getting him out of the backseat as he’d gone all statue-of-a-deposed-dictator on me again. Somehow I managed to drag him out and lean him against the car. I was trying to boost him up over my shoulder when Xander appeared. “What’s up, pal?” he asked Frank.
Frank broke away from me and stumbled over to Xander, pressed his face against his shoulder, and said, “I don’t belong here. I want to go home.”
“You are home, my friend,” Xander said.
“No, I’m not, no I’m not, no I’M NOT!” The howling started again.
Before I could fill him in, Xander swept Frank up and ran into the house with him. I followed. He lay the kid across his bed and I wrapped Frank up tight in a blanket. Then Xander sat on the edge of the bed and took him across his lap. He rocked and hummed something to him I couldn’t quite make out. Frank stopped making the walrus sounds and said, “‘Over the Rainbow.’ Louis B. Mayer tried to cut that number from The Wizard of Oz because he thought it slowed the story down.” Then he fell asleep.
Xander eased Frank onto the mattress and I wedged pillows around him. “Nice touch with the blanket,” Xander murmured. “What the heck happened?”
I felt my face flush dangerously. Why was Xander the only one who ever seemed to appreciate me? “There’s a new principal at Frank’s school,” I said.
“Uh-oh.”
We backpedaled into the hall and found Mimi just outside Frank’s door, pressed against the wall and looking as terrified as a jumper on a ledge working up the nerve to end all the suffering once and for all. “What’s going on?” she asked.
“Frank got sent home,” I said. “They wouldn’t say why and he was too upset to tell me. Paula in the office said to give you this.”
Mimi opened the note and read it in front of us. She put the paper back in the envelope when she was done. “My life was so much easier before I had Frank,” she said.
WE LEFT XANDER with Frank while Mimi changed into her Audrey Hepburn ensemble and we drove back to the school. It wasn’t an outfit I would have chosen, but I think she wore it in solidarity for her son. I was glad to see she left the head wrap and glasses at home this time.
Since I wasn’t a custodial parent Paula “showed me to the waiting room,” which meant she set me up on boxes filled with Xerox paper in a storage room, pointed to the air vent it shared with Dr. Matthews’s office, then held a finger to her lips. I nodded.
The guy had the kind of piercing, self-satisfied voice that carried well. Good for clandestine listening-in, but undoubtedly hellish for anyone trapped in an elevator or an office or an area code with him. Mimi was a lot harder to hear, but I was able to make out enough words here and there to follow the conversation. Seems our darling Fiona had asked Frank if she could try on his fez. I could imagine Frank’s face as he handed it over, his sweet, blank expression only those closest to him could read as delight. I could see him thinking maybe Fiona wasn’t like the others after all.
Fiona took the fez, threw it down, and stomped it. When Frank snatched it back she incited the mob of bullies she’d gathered to chase Frank around the playground, trying to grab it again.
We talk, and then we join hands and run from our enemies.
I heard Mimi say “Fiona” but I couldn’t make out the rest of what she said.
“Fiona’s motivations are understandable. New girl, looking to establish her place in the playground hierarchy,” Dr. Matthews said. “But my feeling is that Fiona isn’t the one at fault here. We need to examine what you as an involved and caring parent can do to forestall incidents like this in the future. If you’re honest with yourself, Mrs. Banning, you have to admit that you’re allowing Frank to make himself a target.”
After hearing that, my feeling was that Dr. Matthews should never have children of his own.
I heard Mimi murmur something, which he countered with, “You must realize that Frank’s manner of dress separates him from the other children.”
I waited for Mimi’s outraged answer, “But Frank isn’t like the other children!” She said something, but in a voice so soft I couldn’t catch it.
MIMI WAS SILENT on the way home. When I couldn’t take the suspense any longer, I asked, “How did it go?”
“It’s none of your business how it went,” Mimi said.
“Mimi, look, I know—”
“You know nothing, Alice. And what makes you think you can call me Mimi?”
“You told me to call you Mimi.”
“I never told you to call me Mimi.”
“You did,” I insisted. “The day Frank asked to stay late after school. I made you eggs. My hair was wet. Remember?”
“Why are you arguing with me? Stop the car. Stop the car right now. I can’t bear your face for another minute.” Not that she was even looking at me.
I pulled over and put the car in park. Its nose was pointed downhill, so when Mimi flung the
door open it scraped and hung on the curb. I’ve never seen curbs as high as the ones in Los Angeles. Frank explained to me on one of our adventures last summer that they were built tall to keep the sidewalks from flooding during the rainy season. Having weathered that now, I understood.
I imagine Mimi intended for her exit to be fast and dramatic, but what followed was a Chaplinesque struggle of tiny woman vs. world. She had to scale the Kilimanjaro of that curb through an opening hardly wider than a handbag. Her shimmying ascent made her Audrey Hepburn sheath scale her thighs and one of her shoes fall off. Once she summited, Mimi dropped out of sight behind the car door. From what I could see through the crack and from the way she was grunting, I guessed she was lying on the sidewalk, fishing around underneath the car for the lost shoe. Eureka! She stood again, leaned against the car to put the shoe on, yanked her dress down and brushed it free of sidewalk grit before turning to address me. As a courtesy I pushed the button to roll down the passenger-side window so she could say her piece.
“It must be exhausting to be so sure of yourself all the time,” Mimi said. “Well, I’ll let you in on a little secret, Alice. Being perfect doesn’t make people love you.” Then she tried her go-to move, slamming the door in my face. Even though it wasn’t open very wide, the door of a Mercedes station wagon weighs about a thousand pounds, and I don’t think Mimi weighed a hundred, so it took some work for her to unstick the door from the curb to shut it.
“Can I give you a hand with that?” I finally asked.
“I don’t need you to give me a hand with anything,” she said. “Ever again.”
“Have it your way.” I rolled the window back up.
Once Mimi struggled the car door shut, she fumbled her phone out of her purse and dropped it on the sidewalk. I was worried she’d broken it and thought about rolling the window down again to ask her to let me drive her home. I still had enough kindness wiggling around inside me though to resist the urge. I know from my time in New York that anger can be an exhilarating tonic that lifts some people over life’s rough patches. I was pretty sure Mimi was one of those people. So I sat tight and watched her pick her phone up and dial, talk for a minute or two and check her watch. I waited on the side of the road until a cab pulled up and she got in. She never looked at me once.
LATER THAT AFTERNOON Mimi appeared in the kitchen while I was chopping red peppers for a salad. I knew better than to think she’d come to offer an apology.
“Here’s my credit card,” she said. “You need to go out and buy Frank some T-shirts and jeans and tennis shoes.”
I wiped my hands on a towel. “I’ll do it if you really want me to, but he won’t wear those things. Not in a million years.”
“He has to,” she said. “That windbag I had to waste an afternoon talking to said Frank would be safer if he’d learn to disappear.”
“Frank will be miserable,” I said.
“Frank is a child. He’ll get over it. That sanctimonious idiot in charge of his school now says if he can’t learn to fit in he has to go somewhere else.”
“If Frank has to ‘fit in’ to go there, maybe Frank should go somewhere else.”
“I wouldn’t give that man the satisfaction.”
I picked up the knife again and really gave those peppers what-for. “This isn’t about the principal or you,” I said. “This is about Frank.”
Instead of blowing up at me, Mimi closed her eyes the way Frank did sometimes when the world was just too much for him. It was the first time I’d ever seen anything of his face in hers. “Frank has already been somewhere else, Alice,” she said. “He’s been invited not to return to so many somewhere elses that any other somewhere he hasn’t been to yet might be even worse than this one.”
THE NEXT MORNING I explained to Frank that khakis would probably be okay for him to wear to school with his new T-shirts and tennis shoes, and that we’d work up to wearing jeans in a week or two. Or not. Up to him. I wanted to make it seem he had some control over the situation.
Frank stood there in his underwear and argyles, staring at the clothes I’d laid out. Two fat tears rolled down his cheeks. “I don’t know how to wear these,” he said.
“It’s easy,” I said. “The shirt pulls over your head and you don’t even have to button it.”
“But surely no one can want me to go out in public in a shirt meant to be worn as underwear.”
“Lots of kids wear T-shirts out in public and think nothing of it.”
“Lots of kids chase me around the playground, too, but that doesn’t make it right.”
I didn’t have a comeback for that.
Frank didn’t eat his breakfast. He sat at the table, staring at his waffles and plucking at the place where his collar should have been, stroking his bare forearms, scrabbling at his wrists that would under normal circumstances be cuffed and cuff linked.
Xander had to carry Frank out to the car and ride with us to school. I offered to let him drive Frank on his own, since Frank would probably like that better anyway. “Don’t be ridiculous,” Xander said. “I’ll just sit back here with my buddy. I’ll walk him to class, too, to be sure he gets there safe.”
When he got back in the car, Xander said, “This is a bad idea. A bad, bad idea.”
“I think so, too,” I said.
“Mimi is a genius, you know. But sometimes smart people do the stupidest things.”
“Mimi doesn’t know what else to do,” I said, surprising myself now by sticking up for her. “Frank has gotten kicked out of so many places already.”
Xander shrugged. “So what? Who hasn’t?”
Me, I didn’t say.
“It’s lucky I could drop everything and come when she called,” Xander added. “You know, I have to wonder sometimes what that woman would do without me.”
HER BOOK WASN’T finished yet, but I was. I told Mimi I was leaving before I told Mr. Vargas. I wanted my bridges burned.
“Nobody’s holding you prisoner here,” Mimi said. “Go.”
“You’ll be all right,” I said. “As long as Xander’s here you don’t need me.”
“Xander,” she said. “Ha.”
( 18 )
PACKING MY BAGS was easy. E-mailing Mr. Vargas to explain why I was deserting my post wasn’t. No matter how sane I sounded at the outset of each effort, by the time I was a line or two in, I started to sound as whiny as a jilted lover. How can I help Mimi when she keeps me at arm’s length? She doesn’t appreciate me. There’s someone else, someone blonder, prettier, and more popular. I’m coming home.
I got a call from Frank’s school but pressed “ignore” and turned my cell off. If there was a problem, it was Mimi’s problem now. Or Mimi’s and Xander’s. Not mine. I sat there holding the phone, feeling guilty and worried and not typing anything else to Mr. Vargas. Somebody knocked. If Mimi needed me to pick up Frank, I’d do it. Just this one last time.
It was Xander. He hadn’t been in my room since last summer when I thought I’d dreamed In-the-Manner-of-Apollo to life. Back when I was a know-it-all teenager, I’d wondered how my sensible mother had gotten hornswoggled into marrying a deadbeat like my dad. Seeing Xander there on my doorstep, I finally got it. Sometimes smart people do the stupidest things.
“Mimi says you’re going back to New York,” Xander said. “How long will you be gone?”
“I’m not coming back.”
“What?”
“Mimi won’t let me do the work Mr. Vargas sent me to do. She doesn’t like me. Frank only tolerates me. I don’t belong here. I want to go home.”
“Mimi likes you as much as she can like anybody. Frank loves you. He’ll be devastated.”
I felt a twist in my gut. “Not with you around, he won’t.”
“That’s not true.”
“Of course it is. I’m sloppy seconds whenever you’re here.”
“Not in my book.” Xander stepped closer. “Don’t I count? Maybe I’ll be devastated when you go.”
“Ha,” I
said. That syllable reminded me of something, but I couldn’t remember exactly what.
“Hey.” He touched my cheek so lightly that only the tip of his middle finger brushed against my skin. “Are you leaving because of me?”
“Are you Frank’s dad?” I asked.
He stared at me for a minute, then took my forearm and shoved me farther into my room and closed the door. “Why would you ask me that? Do you think I would have gone after you in Mimi’s house if Mimi and I had been together once?”
He went after me? I’m ashamed to say how that thrilled me. “I never said you two were romantically involved. You could have done it as a friend. People do that.” I imagined then how Mimi would phrase that request. Pardon me, could you spare a thimbleful of sperm? Although of course she would have worded it more carefully. “Thimbleful” isn’t a unit of measure you want to link up with a guy’s manly parts in any context. Not if you want something from him.
“We’re friends,” Xander said. “But not like that.”
“What kind of friends are you then?” I asked. “Because for the life of me, I can’t figure out how you fit into the picture here.”
“What do you mean?”
“Frank told me you were in the delivery room with Mimi the night he was born. That’s kind of a lot to ask of some guy who’s just a friend.”
Xander sat down on my bed and collapsed back, his arms splayed wide. “Sweet suffering Jesus,” he said. “Mimi has nobody, Alice. Nobody.” He lay there for a minute, staring at the ceiling. Then he sat up and said, “Do you know what that’s like?”
“So, what are you saying? It’s you? Not you? I’m curious.”
He gave me one of those long hard looks you give someone on the street when you start wondering if that’s somebody from your old neighborhood or an actor you’ve seen on television or an enemy from another life.
Be Frank With Me Page 17