Be Frank With Me

by Julia Claiborne Johnson

  “You’re not curious, Alice. You’re selfish.”

  I’ve been called a few names in my life—boring, mousy, Goody-Two-shoes, suck-up. Not selfish. Never selfish.

  Xander pushed past me. His eyes passed over my face this time like he’d never seen me before in his life. Like I was air.

  MIMI WAS RIGHT. It had been nice to be so sure of myself. Now that I didn’t have that compass anymore, I’d never felt so lost. I dropped onto the red love seat and hated myself for a good long time. Here are some adjectives I aimed at myself: Self-righteous. Judgmental. Perfidious. Smug. The kind of person who’s convinced the world would be a better place if everybody else would just shut up and listen.

  I was the voice of Dr. Matthews coming through the air vent.

  From the rain the hills had sprung a tender, hopeful green that wouldn’t last out the week. My stomach started growling but I wasn’t hungry. I needed to call a cab but I didn’t do it. It wasn’t like I was going to miss my plane or anything. My plan was to show up and take the next spot on standby any airline offered up.

  When the knock came the second time, I didn’t answer. Mimi didn’t knock again. She let herself in. “You’re still here,” she said.

  “I was just calling a cab.” I didn’t turn to look at her.

  “I need you,” she said.

  “Whatever it is, Xander can help you out.”

  “Xander can’t drive.”

  “What do you mean? Of course he can drive.”

  “He doesn’t have a license.”

  I turned around when she said that. Even though she was more than old enough to be my mother, I’d never thought of Mimi as old until then.

  “He drove the station wagon to pick up lumber to fix the door,” I said.

  “He can’t kill lumber,” she said. “I need you to drive me to the hospital. Frank is on his way there in an ambulance.”

  “IT’S ALL MY fault,” Mimi said.

  I was driving as fast as I could without killing us. “It’s not your fault. Don’t say that.”

  “It is,” she said. “After you got through talking to me, I was sitting at my desk thinking I wouldn’t have had to let you in my house if Frank had never been born.”

  They had called from school to tell Mimi that Frank had had a seizure.

  “A seizure?” I said. “That’s not so terrible. A seizure can be caused by almost anything. Low blood sugar. Lack of sleep. Heat. An allergic reaction.” Brain tumor. I skipped that one.

  “Brain tumor,” Mimi whispered. “That would explain so much.”

  The not-Paula office lady had telephoned. “I called your partner Alice,” she told Mimi. “But she wasn’t answering. You’ll probably want to get in touch with her before you leave for the hospital.”

  Frank had two mommies. Honestly, the kid could have used a dozen.

  ON THE WAY to the hospital, Mimi told me the whole sad unfictional story of the end of Julian.

  It started like this: “I always thought my mother was a fool. Then I had Frank.”

  Up until Frank, Mimi felt confident she’d be a better mother than Banning had been. Mimi had Julian all figured out. Her brother was astoundingly good at a few things and terrible at everything else. So when their mother told him he needed to come inside and do his homework in some subject Julian had no talent for, like French or physics, Mimi would slip in and do it for him. It was easier to get away with than you might imagine, since Julian’s handwriting was so illegible that when he started high school his mother buckled and bought him the portable typewriter Mimi used now. All Julian had to do was scrawl his name at the top of the lessons Mimi typed up while Julian threw balls at the side of the barn until the siding splintered and broke and it got so dark you couldn’t make out the white of the ball against the weathered gray of the wood anymore. So what if Julian didn’t know the difference between the Treaty of Versailles and the Treaty of Verdun? Her brother was different from other kids. Special. He’d outgrow being an oddball someday; or he’d be so famous for something that no one would care about his awkwardness anymore.

  Still, it had been a relief when her brother left for college. She loved him, of course, but sometimes found his strange flatness as off-putting as everybody else did. The house was so much more peaceful without him banging around in it. The rest of them could get some sleep at night. Well, Mimi could, anyway. Her mother had stopped looking like she slept, ever, years ago. Dr. Frank spent most nights at the hospital, sewing up drunks, pronouncing victims of car crashes dead, delivering babies, what have you.

  Mimi could see how upset Banning got when she tried to talk to Julian on the phone while he was away at school. He never spoke in sentences. Just “fine,” or “okay,” or “not really.” And when his grades came Banning would hold the envelope in her hand for a long time, then open it, scan the paper inside, crumple it, and toss it in the trash without showing it to anybody else. It was too bad, Mimi thought, that she couldn’t be with Julian to do his schoolwork for him.

  Then Mimi went off to college, too. Being away from home was a relief she hadn’t anticipated, like giving up a pair of shoes you loved but hadn’t realized were pinching the life out of your toes until you put on ones that fit. At college, Mimi didn’t talk about the Gillespies. She realized it was a whole lot easier to ask other people questions about themselves. Everybody said she was so easy to talk to, but “talk at” was closer to the truth. Still, Mimi was happy, or pretended to be, which almost made it seem so.

  Halfway through the second semester of her freshman year, Julian showed up at her dorm. She was in her room reading. Mimi remembered the sentence passing under her eyes when she heard the crazy pounding on the door to her suite. “nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands” She’d just gotten finished thinking that the line of poetry itself was beautiful but would it kill the guy to capitalize the words at the beginning of each line and use proper punctuation?

  Then one of her roommates came to get her.

  She sighed, put her book down, and went to the door. “Julian,” she said, and gave him a hug even though he never wanted to be hugged. She knew her roommates would think it was weird if she didn’t do it.

  “He’s really your brother?” one of them asked. Mimi couldn’t for the life of her remember the girl’s name. “You never told us you had a brother.”

  Julian took all this in but didn’t say anything. He did look kind of upset, for Julian anyway.

  Mimi led him into her room and sat on the chair at her desk and he sat on the chair by her roommate’s desk. Mimi was glad her roommate was out. She was always out with that boyfriend she talked about every waking minute. Conrad. Funny, Mimi couldn’t remember that roommate’s name, either. “What’s up, Julian?” she asked.

  “I’ve been scouted by the Atlanta Braves. The scout said he wasn’t leaving until he had Julian Gillespie’s signature on an Atlanta Braves contract.”

  “Oh, Julian! That’s so exciting! That’s what you’ve always wanted. What happened after that?”

  “What happened after that was he left without my signature, because my signature is worthless without parental approval because I’m still a minor. The signature he needed was from Dr. Frank Banning. Or Mrs. Frank Banning. Either one, or both.”

  “Well, that won’t be a problem, right?”

  “It will be a problem. It is a problem. Mother won’t sign and she won’t let Father do it, either.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’ve flunked out of school.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Mother says I have to finish college first. Mimi, I’m no good at school. I hate it there.”

  “Did you tell her that?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She said if I applied myself I could make good grades like I did in high school when you were doing my homework.”

  “She doesn’t know I was doing your homework.”

  “No, but I do. It’
s hopeless, Mimi. Mother said we aren’t the kind of people who have sons who grow up to play sports and marry movie stars. We’re the kind of people who have sons who make good grades and grow up to be doctors.”

  Mimi couldn’t help noticing that no mention was made of what kind of daughters their kind of people had. But in fairness this story wasn’t about her.

  “Did she say anything else?”

  “She said if she was going to have a son who was going to grow up to be Joe DiMaggio, she might as well have married Elvis.”

  Mimi could never quite figure out that line of reasoning. But she couldn’t help wondering if marrying Elvis had ever been an option for Banning. Every time her mother mentioned the splash she’d made with Elvis, which was often, it made Mimi remember overhearing Banning on the telephone, saying to one of her friends what a shame it was that Julian was beautiful and could have his pick of the girls if he’d just show any interest, but Mimi, bless her heart, was such a homely, frowny-faced runt that nobody would ever want her. She’d have to get a job. Banning said “job” like it was “leprosy.”

  “You have to help me, Mimi,” Julian said.

  “I don’t know,” Mimi said. “Sounds like you may have to figure this one out for yourself. I have a paper to write. Nobody is going to write it for me.”

  “I’ve figured this one out already. I want to play baseball. I’ll die if I can’t play.”

  Julian was staring at her. Mimi knew that numb look, that posture, that set of the jaw. When he got like that he couldn’t be reasoned with. At least he was still on the chair. Sometimes when he got especially mulish, Julian would lie on the floor and refuse to budge. Mimi was only about half his size now, so that was the last thing she wanted to let happen.

  “You’ll be fine. Daddy survived the Marne. You’ll make it through this.”

  Julian didn’t say anything for a while. When he did, it seemed like a non sequitur. “Those girls out there didn’t believe I was your brother,” he said. “They said if you had a brother, they would know about it.”

  “So? I don’t have to tell everybody everything.”

  When Julian didn’t say anything else she picked up her book again and went back to reading. She hoped he’d get bored and leave. If he didn’t, well, he could spend the night on her roommate’s bed and she’d worry about him in the morning.

  As it turned out, that wasn’t necessary. After a few minutes of sitting there while Mimi studiously ignored him, Julian got up and left. She didn’t realize he hadn’t left by the door but had chosen instead to step out a window in her suite that looked over a quadrangle six stories below until she heard a tangle of voices far away, and then a siren.

  “I never told those girls I had a brother,” Mimi told me. “And then I didn’t have one.”

  WHEN MIMI AND I got to the emergency room admissions desk, she tried to tell them why she was there. “My son—” she said, and the rest of the sentence stuck in her throat. It happened over and over. “My son—” she’d say, and choke.

  Finally I put my hand on her arm and said, “Our son Frank Banning came here in an ambulance. We just got a call from his school.”

  I said that without thinking. I suppose the office lady we didn’t know planted that idea in my head. The way it flowered turned out to be a thing of beauty. At the hospital, of course, they wouldn’t let anybody beyond the swinging doors who wasn’t a member of the immediate family.

  The clerk at the admissions desk checked her roster. “You got here fast,” she said. “His ambulance hasn’t arrived yet. You should think about driving ambulances yourself.”

  ( 19 )

  UNTIL HE WAS stabilized, the clerk told us, only one parent could go behind the swinging doors to meet Frank as they wheeled him from the ambulance to the emergency room.

  “You go.” Mimi’s lips barely moved when she said it. She was pale and still and had her fists clenched in her lap and her eyes closed.

  When they rolled him in, it took me a minute to realize it was Frank because he was dressed in the T-shirt and khakis and tennis shoes he’d cried over wearing that morning. Then I saw how slowly the gurney was moving and put my palm against the wall to keep from collapsing. There’s no need to rush, I thought, because he’s already dead. The T-shirt did it, on the playground, with a knife to his heart.

  But the paramedics looked neither crushed nor sympathetic. They looked pissed. Frank’s body wasn’t covered by a sheet, either, as it would have been in a hospital drama. Why waste budget on hiring an actor to play a corpse, I could hear Frank’s explaining voice say, when nonunion pillows under a sheet work equally well? Frank’s eyes were squeezed shut in a way that didn’t suggest death. Also, he was moving, his limbs jerking ever so slightly, arrhythmically, like a horse twitching off flies on a hot summer afternoon.

  He was faking.

  Once, standing on a street corner in New York waiting for the light to change, I saw a bicyclist get hit by a taxi. He’d zipped through a red light the way bicyclists do sometimes, and the greenlit taxi was going fast, as taxis will. The bike crunched under the tires and the bicyclist got tossed onto the hood. His body shattered the windshield before he rolled up and over the roof. I don’t know if the bicyclist lived or died, because that was when I did an about-face and walked as quickly as I could in the opposite direction. A good person would have stuck around to help, would have called 911 and made a statement to the police. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t stick around to bear witness to an act of such shattering foolishness, something that would ever after alter the life of the bicyclist, the taxi driver, his passenger, and the innocent onlookers like me who couldn’t unsee the guy rolling over that taxi roof. I didn’t want to know how it actually ended. I needed to believe that everything turned out okay.

  Seeing Frank lying on the gurney like that, I fought the urge to pull another about-face. I willed myself to go to him, and almost but not quite put my hand on his forehead.

  “Frank,” I said. “Are you okay? What happened?”

  “I was being pursued by a pack of coyotes on the playground and ended up flat on my back. I assumed I’d been brought low by some type of seizure. The principal saw me lying there and told me to get up. I explained my situation and he said, ‘If you’re having a seizure, we need to call an ambulance.’ Miss Peppe told him that wouldn’t be necessary. But he said if I claimed I was having a seizure, then by gum, I was going to the hospital.”

  “He said that?” I asked.

  “Not exactly. He didn’t use the phrase ‘by gum.’ But that seemed appropriate to the situation. Did you know ancient man chewed a gum derived from birch tar during the Neolithic period more than five thousand years ago? Also, I’m guessing, ancient woman.”

  I felt a little bit like having a seizure myself. “So Dr. Matthews called an ambulance to come and get you instead of calling me?”

  “In his shoes, I would have opted for giving you a jingle, but I would rather not be in the principal’s shoes because they were right by my head while I was convulsing and I would rather drop dead than wear horrible shoes like that. I suppose the principal called the ambulance because he is a doctor and so he might assume I required hospitalization.” While he spoke, Frank forgot to twitch.

  I had to put the hand I’d had hovering over his brow on the gurney to steady myself. “He’s not that kind of doctor, you know,” I said.

  “I know,” Frank said.

  “CAN’T YOU SEE he’s faking?”

  I’d pulled one of the paramedics aside while the other carted Frank into the emergency room.

  “You his mother?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said. It was easier than explaining.

  “Can I see he’s faking? Hmm. What do you think?”

  “Then why did you pick him up?”

  “When the school called, we had to go. Once we got there, we had to take him. We’re legally bound to. As the principal told me more than once, in case I’d forgotten.”

  “B
ut I don’t understand. Frank’s done this before. The school never used to call an ambulance to come for him. They called us.”

  The paramedic shook his head. He looked disgusted. “That guy’s a tool. Stood over the kid, saying, ‘You have a seizure, we call an ambulance and you go to the hospital. That’s how things work in the real world, my friend.’ Like that’s any way to teach a kid a lesson. Give an eight-year-old boy a chance to cut class, run red lights, and blast a siren? What kid says no to that?”

  “He’s almost ten,” I said.

  He shrugged. “Still.”

  “The school told us Frank was having a seizure,” I said. “They didn’t say ‘faking a seizure.’ I’ve never been so scared.”

  “Maybe you’re the one the principal wanted to teach a lesson. He seemed like that kind of guy.”

  IN THE WAITING room, I explained what had happened. “Mimi,” I said. “Frank’s all right.”

  She opened her eyes but her face didn’t register any emotion. “He’ll never be all right,” she said. “He’s like my brother.” She picked up her purse and headed for the door.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Back to work.”

  “What about Frank?”

  “You stay with him. I’ll take a cab home.”

  “You’re going to leave without seeing him?”

  “I’ll see him when he gets home.”

  “Mimi,” I said. “He needs to see you.”

  “I understand that you’re trying to help, Alice,” she said. “But I don’t need to see Frank as a patient in an emergency room setting if I don’t have to. I don’t want that image stuck in my head. Not right now. I’m very near the end.”

  I touched her forearm. “Of course,” I said. “I get that. Go. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of everything.”

  “How gratifying for you,” she said. “Now take your hands off me.”

  I did. She left.

  I PUSHED THROUGH the swinging doors again in time to hear Frank saying to a nurse, “Tinkerbell gave my mother a gown when she had to come to the emergency room, so I wondered if you might loan me a waistcoat. Or, failing that, a doctor’s white lab coat. Size small.”