Be Frank With Me Read online

  “I do,” I said, glad to be off the hook. “Very much.”

  He patted the floor beside himself. “Can I offer you a seat?”

  I slid down the wall to sit next to Frank and he laid the album across our knees, opening it to a crumbling newspaper clipping showing Elvis Presley being kissed by a beautiful young woman in a swimsuit and a tiara.

  “You like Elvis?” I asked.

  Frank shrugged. “I don’t know much about Elvis, other than that his middle name was Aaron and he had a stillborn twin named Jesse Garon and he drove a truck for Crown Electric Company in Memphis before he cut his first record, a single called ‘That’s All Right.’” His voice had just enough tincture of Mimi’s Alabama in it to make him pronounce Memphis as Mimphis. He tapped the woman in the photo. “I do know something about this lady, though. She’s my mother’s mother.”

  “She’s your grandmother?”

  “Indeedy.”

  “Let me see.” I leaned closer and read the caption aloud. “‘Crawfish Carnival Queen and Ole Miss student Banning Marie Allen welcomes Elvis.’ Wow.” Banning. I couldn’t decide whether I was more surprised to find out that Mimi’s mother was a beauty queen, or that a beauty queen was the source of Mimi’s pen name.

  Frank’s grandmother may not have looked like his mother but there was a lot of her in Frank. “Do you see her much?” I asked.

  “Not when I’m awake. She died in a car wreck when my mother was pretty young. Not a kid still, but not old like you."

  “That’s terrible,” I said. I almost said, I can’t imagine, but of course I could. “So, how old do you think I am, anyway?”

  “I don’t know. Old enough to know better?”

  I laughed. “Indeedy,”

  “You must be twenty-five then,” Frank said.

  “Close. Twenty-four. How did you know?”

  “Dr. Abrams says that’s when the prefrontal cortex usually finishes developing. That’s the part of your brain that controls impulsivity. According to her forecast, by the time I’m twenty-five I’ll be old enough to know better. If we’re lucky. It might happen later, when I’m thirty. Or never. Some people’s prefrontal cortexes mature earlier than others. Women’s, mostly. Debbie Reynolds was a teenager when she made Singin’ in the Rain, for example. Look at this.” Frank stopped flipping pages to show me a photo of a gray horse. “That’s Zephyr. He belonged to Uncle Julian. My grandmother said that while there was breath in her body Julian would never get behind the wheel of a car, so she got Zephyr to take him everywhere he needed to go. I wish I had a horse. Horses were native to the North American continent until the last Ice Age. The Spanish conquistadors reintroduced them and the Native Americans were glad. Until they got to know the downside of horses.”

  “What’s the downside of horses?”

  “The Spanish conquistadors.”

  “That’s funny,” I said.

  “What’s funny?”

  “What you just said.”

  “Why?”

  “I thought you were going to tell me something else about horses. I didn’t see ‘the Spanish conquistadors’ coming.”

  “Neither did the Native Americans.”

  “Good point. Hey, want to hear a joke my boss in New York told me about a horse?”

  “Yes.”

  “A horse walks into a bar and the bartender says, ‘Hey, buddy, why the long face?’”

  When I didn’t elaborate, Frank said, “Then what?”

  “Then nothing. That’s the whole joke. ‘Hey, buddy, why the long face?’”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Horses have long faces.” I motioned with my hands to stretch my own face to a horsier length that ended someplace around my belly button. “Get it?”

  “No,” Frank said. “If I had a horse, I would name him Tony.”

  So much for jokes. “Tony?” I asked politely.

  “Cowboy star Tom Mix’s horse was named Tony. His hoofprints are in the cement outside Mann’s Chinese Theatre. My grandparents fenced their yard and turned the garage into a stable for Uncle Julian’s horse. Then my grandmother wrecked her car into said fence. She was going fast and wasn’t wearing a safety belt so she went through the windshield and died. Zephyr ran away through the broken place in the fence. They found him the next day standing in somebody’s peony bed all the way across town.” Frank turned another page. “Since he was in a bed I imagine Zephyr asleep and wearing a flannel nightcap. Horses sleep standing up, did you know that? This is my uncle Julian.” He pointed to a photo of a young man in a pair of embroidered jeans and a bead necklace, no shirt, a cigarette tucked behind his ear, sitting on a fence I suspected of being said fence. He had a tooled leather bag strapped across his muscular chest and long blond hair with sideburns like people wore during the Summer of Love, plus an incandescently beautiful face a lot like Frank’s grandmother’s, circa Elvis.

  “Wow,” I said. “He’s a handsome guy.”

  “Was. He’s dead, too.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He fell out of a window when he was visiting my mother at college.”

  “Oh,” I said. Ohhh. “How?”

  Shrug. “I don’t know. He got kicked out of the college he was going to for making all Fs. He was probably so busy thinking about how he’d tell his mother that he didn’t notice the floor had ended. In my head it plays out kind of like Wile E. Coyote stepping off a cliff he hadn’t seen coming. Do you want to see a picture of my mother’s father? He’s dead, too, just so you know.”

  He showed me a picture of a distinguished-looking young man in a military uniform. “My grandfather was a doctor, also named Frank. Which is a nickname for Francis. My mother named me after my grandfather and my uncle because she says she has always had a hard time coming up with names. Dr. Frank volunteered as a field surgeon in World War I before the United States entered that war, then known as the Great War. Because nobody could foresee the Second World War coming yet, although given the enormous reparations the world community forced on Germany after it lost the first war and the resentment that financial burden engendered, the world community should have known.”

  “What happened to Dr. Frank?”

  “Cerebral hemorrhage. In layman’s parlance, his head exploded. My mom’s whole family died within a year or so of each other, but her father lived the longest. He was born in 1894 and died in 1976. It was a first-in, last-out kind of a thing.”

  “In 1894, huh?” I said. “He’d be one hundred and fifteen years old if he were alive.”

  “He’s probably glad he isn’t, though I wish he were. I suspect we’d have a lot in common.” Frank paged past a series of black-and-white photos: Mimi’s mother, in a two-piece bathing suit that looked like bulletproof underwear, a kerchief on her hair and red lipstick that showed black in the photo. Dr. Frank smiling at his wife as he settled his tuxedo jacket around her shoulders at their wedding, his young bride staring straight into the camera and grinning. Alongside that, another yellowed newspaper clipping, no picture, with the headline “Banning Marie Allen weds Julian Francis Gillespie” and a first line that read, “Under an antique veil of finest illusion—”

  Before I could read any further, Frank turned the page.

  After that, toddler versions of Julian and Mimi with chocolate-smeared faces, holding hands and squinting across a battlefield of ruined birthday cake. Preteen Julian and Mimi in a photo Christmas card, sitting back to back on the horse, Mimi facing the mane and Julian the tail, all three wearing Santa hats. Printed across it the line “We don’t know if we’re going or coming this Christmas!”

  The color shots hadn’t aged as well. A Polaroid of Julian in his pitcher’s uniform on the mound, hair and face faded to a pale green. A prom portrait of him in a sky-blue tuxedo, face and hair yellowed out, a necktie knotted around his head like a kamikaze pilot’s, his arm around an empty space where his date should have been. Mimi at what must have been her high school graduation, dressed in
a shiny black gown and mortarboard and looking worried.

  Frank closed the album and put it on the ground beside him. “The end,” he said. “Everybody in these pictures is dead except for my mother.”

  “Well,” I said, “who’s hungry?” But what I was thinking was, What about your daddy? Where’s his picture? Is his photograph not in there because he’s not dead yet?

  The kid was right about having uncanny intuition because just then he said, “My mom has pictures of my dad somewhere, but she says he doesn’t belong to our family so they don’t go in this album.”

  “Because your dad’s not—” I couldn’t figure out a tactful way to finish that sentence.

  “Dead? I don’t think so. Maybe. I’ve never met him.”

  “Have you seen the pictures?” I asked.

  “Yes. But we keep our photos put away because otherwise they make my mother feel too sad. We don’t talk about him, anyway.” Frank picked up the album and tucked it under his arm. “I know how to make waffles. I’m very good at not spilling the batter.”

  “I love waffles.”

  He offered me a hand up. I knew I was allowed to accept it because he’d offered his hand to me, as stated in the Second Rule of Frank. “Of course you love waffles,” he said as he hauled me up. “You aren’t crazy.”

  “How do you know that?” I asked as I followed him down the hall to the kitchen.

  “The kids at school say I’m crazy and you don’t remind me much of me. Also, I just know things. For example, Thomas Jefferson had a waffle iron he bought in France.”

  “You’re lucky. When I want to know something, I have to look it up. You’ve got so much stuffed in your cranium, Frank, I don’t know how you remember anything.”

  “My mother says my brain is so full of facts that there’s no room for nuance. Our waffle iron is from China. We ordered it from a catalog called Williams-Sonoma. There was a sale for very special customers.” He dragged a stool to the counter, climbed onto it, and stood on his toes, straining to reach the waffle iron, still in its somewhat-battered original box, stored on the top shelf.

  “Here,” I said. “Let me get that down for you.”

  Everything happened fast after that. Frank shrieked, “NO NO NO NO NO NO NO,” swatted the box and sent it flying toward me. I covered my face with my arms and ducked. The box crash-landed someplace behind me and I lowered my arms and looked over my shoulder to see where. When I turned back, Frank was laid out on the linoleum like a corpse on a mortician’s slab, his eyes closed and hands bunched into fists. His straw boater rolled toward me in slow motion like a freed hubcap in the aftermath of a car crash.

  “Frank?” I asked. “Are you all right?”

  Mimi bounded into the kitchen in her nightgown then, one side of her face still creased by her pillow and her hair in two messy braids. She picked up his boater, stepped over the waffle iron box and knelt beside Frank. “Did he bang his head?” she asked.

  “Bang his head? I don’t think so. I don’t know what happened. Does Frank have some kind of seizure disorder?”

  “No, Frank does not have some kind of seizure disorder. For god’s sake. You’ve upset him somehow. Obviously.”

  “But I didn’t do anything,” I said.

  “She,” Frank said, eyes sealed, elevating an undead fist and switchblading its index finger free to point in my direction, “wanted to touch my waffle iron.”

  “I offered to help him get it down, that’s all,” I protested.

  “No touching Frank’s things. I told you that.” Mimi picked her son up, set him on his feet, and put his hat on his head again. “There we go. Are you okay, Monkey?”

  “I might be someday,” he said. “According to Dr. Abrams.”

  When Mimi turned her attention to me I understood how a rabbit must feel when the headlights hit him, just before the car does. “We don’t have a lot of rules around here, Penny,” she said to me. “If you don’t think you can follow the ones we do have, you might as well leave now.”

  “Alice,” I said. “My name is Alice.”

  But she was halfway down the hall already. After I heard her door slam, I put my freezing hands to my hot cheeks. Don’t let her scare you off, Alice.

  Frank, meanwhile, had freed the waffle iron from its box and bubble wrap, plugged it in and opened the refrigerator. “I love chocolate chips in my waffles,” he said with all the ardor of the voice on a telephone answering tree. He took out a carton of eggs and promptly dropped it. Then picked up the carton, checked inside, and said, “Good. None broke this time. Well, well, well. I guess today is our lucky day.”

  ( 4 )

  WE DON’T GET OUT MUCH, I scribbled in my unicorn notebook ten days after I’d arrived. I was in the laundry room, waiting out the last few minutes of the dryer cycle so I could grab the sheets before they wrinkled and hide the notebook in between the folds to smuggle back into my room. I was also keeping an eye on Frank outside as he plunged into and out of a rosemary hedge brandishing a big plastic machete. Frank’s psychiatrist Dr. Abrams was out of town for all of July. There would be no school to trundle the boy off to until well after Labor Day. Everything that was needed to keep body and soul together—groceries, office supplies, Frank’s clothing—came to the gates in a delivery van. Even drinking water, despite the fact that it flowed free and sweet from every spigot in the house. With no solid reason to go anyplace, we didn’t.

  Frank a very special customer, I wrote. As for Mimi, I never see her. Always locked in her office. What I didn’t add, but wanted to was, Because she hates me.

  Mimi shut herself away as soon as she ate breakfast and stayed gone until dinnertime. After dinner, she’d read to Frank or they’d play Clue, his favorite board game; or they’d watch a movie together while she plowed through a stack of bills, groaning audibly from time to time. Mimi averted her eyes whenever we had to talk. You couldn’t call what passed between us conversation. An exchange of information was more like it, though there wasn’t even much of that.

  Frank and I, however, seemed to be getting along well enough after our early episode with the waffle iron. When I apologized for my infraction, he said, “That’s okay. You hadn’t learned your lesson yet. I don’t care what people say. Ignorance is not bliss.”

  After that, he explained and reexplained and then explained all over again the byzantine Kremlinology of rules chez Frank Banning. His laundry, for example, I could wash, fold, and put away with impunity; but once an item was clean, pressed, and shelved, hands off. I could feather-dust the surfaces in his bedroom, but under no circumstances was I allowed to touch anything on them with my hands. A lesson I had to relearn the hard way when I made the rookie mistake of resetting the old-fashioned windup alarm clocks on his desk and bedside table. Those clocks drove me crazy. Both ticked loudly and out of sync and neither showed the correct time in Los Angeles or anyplace else on earth. Frank watched me without comment or changing his expression, then took the reset clocks and winged them across the room. Once that was done he banged his forehead against his desktop like a gavel.

  “Frank!” I gasped. “Stop!” Miraculously, I remembered not to touch him—Rule Two—and put my hands on the desktop over the spot he was pounding. I guess the feeling of his forehead hitting flesh wasn’t as satisfying as hammering it on wood, so he quit. When he straightened I saw a coin of red blooming on his forehead. I hoped it wouldn’t turn into a bruise.

  “No touching my things,” he’d said matter-of-factly. “Rule One.”

  “I’m so sorry, Frank. My bad. Please don’t ever hit your head like that again. I can’t bear it.”

  “Most people can’t,” Frank said. “My mother in particular. She says the cheap histrionics I use to test boundaries with new authority figures will give me a concussion someday.”

  “You’re testing me?”

  “According to my mother. In my opinion, I’m trying to keep my head from exploding.”

  I struggled with Rule Two as well. While it
was okay to encourage Frank to chew with his mouth closed and use a napkin, brushing away a bit of egg that dangled from his chin for most of a morning without asking was absolutely unacceptable. On his voyage to the floor and rigor mortis post-Egg Dangle Incident, Frank somehow managed to take me down as well.

  At first I suspected he was the kind of demon spawn who’d take malicious pleasure in “accidentally” using me to cushion his fall. But to make amends for knocking me over, that night Frank surprised me with a juice glass filled with gardenias for my bedside table so, he explained, I could enjoy the smell of them last thing before I went to sleep and first thing when I woke up. I decided then that the kid was not so much evil as a clumsy, sweet-natured boy whose whole body seemed to be made of thumbs. More oblivious than obnoxious, a sleepwalker both night and day. I was convinced he meant well. Even after his acting out of the trajectory of fragrance to my pillow knocked the glass over moments after its delivery. I had to strip my bed pronto before the water soaked into the mattress.

  By the time our first week was out, we’d established a routine. After breakfast I’d tidy up while Frank selected his wardrobe. You had to give him credit: He might not bathe or wash his face or brush his teeth without prompting, but Frank could put an outfit together. The high point of my day was seeing Frank emerge from the chrysalis of his closet to unfurl his sartorial wings.

  The low point came hard on the heels of that, when I looked past him to the piles of rejected clothing shed on the floor. Getting him to return everything he’d nixed to a hook, hanger, or a drawer was usually a job of work.

  “It’s not enough to dress like a gentleman,” I told him. “You need to act like one, too. Gentlemen do not disrespect their clothing by leaving it crumpled on the floor.”

  “You can pick it up,” he said.

  “Rule One says I can’t. You know that.”

  “Then my mother can do it.”

  “Your mother most certainly cannot do it. She’s working on her book.”