Be Frank With Me (6 page)

“I know what we'll do,” I said when his eyes were able to focus on the exterior world again. “We'll write a book, too.”

“Good idea,” he said around the chocolate bar he'd stuffed whole into his mouth. “Then I can offer my mother pointers from the position of a knowledgeable technician rather than that of a dilettante.”

“Dilettante, huh?” I said. “You know what I like best about you, Frank?”

“My cravats?”

“No. Well, yes, I like your cravats, of course. But I love that you know so many interesting words. Is it all right for me to touch your face and hands with a damp towel now to clean the chocolate off it?” I hoped he'd say yes. Otherwise he'd use the shoulder of my T-shirt as his freelance napkin.

“If you must.” He screwed his eyes shut tight and grimaced as I wiped his face and hands. “I read the dictionary for pleasure as it's always easy to find a stopping place. Also I hope my perambulations there will improve my spelling, but that hasn't happened yet.”

“I see,” I said. “So, what are we going to call your book?”

“As
Webster's Third
is taken, I will call my book
I Shall Commute by Submarine
.”

I wasn't surprised to hear that. The kid loved being bundled up and pressed against things; he was a big fan of tight spaces. He wedged himself between cushions on the family room couches, played Clue on the floor of his closet, and chose the inside of the station wagon as a play space over the wider world of the yard. We'd crawl under the kitchen table to read a book, him inside and me outside the cocoon of his sleeping bag, pretending we were traveling in an overnight compartment of a Pullman train.

We wrote his book on my computer, sitting at the kitchen table. We finished it by lunchtime.
I Shall Commute by Submarine
chronicled the adventures of Adult Frank, a guy with some kind of amorphous job that required constant undersea travel between his hundred-square-foot apartments in Tokyo and New York City. Frank used one of my graphic design interfaces, untutored by me or the computer help program, to draw tall buildings and tight cubicles and a little man dressed in a tux that he dropped into the text as if he'd been doing that all his life. All this work on his book made me wonder what the real Adult Frank would do for a living one day. Graphic designer, maybe? Maître d' on a cruise ship? Understudy James Bond?

After we stapled his book together, we lay on our backs under the kitchen table as I read it to him.

“I must confess that I've never been inside a submarine,” Frank said, taking his book back from me and flipping through the pages.

“That's okay,” I said. “It's fiction.”

“But it could be about me someday.”

“I suppose. But you understand nobody can see into the future.”

“Cassandra could. Also, my mother.”

“Your mother can't see into the future.”

“Yes she can. She's always telling me I'll end up living out of a shopping cart if I don't learn the multiplication tables. She can't fathom
how numbers could elude me. I tried explaining that I lose my way among a series of digits like Hansel and Gretel lost among the trees in the forest after the birds have devoured their trail of crumbs. She said I was too smart for that. I tend to agree, as I would use gravel to mark my way instead of something as evanescent as bread crumbs. I like my gravel in the utilitarian gray of gray flannel suits, though I suppose white marble chips might be a better choice in the chiaroscuro of a forest.”

“Your mother doesn't mean the part about the shopping cart, Frank,” I said.

“Maybe not. Sometimes she says I'll end up in jail. But that's usually after I've broken something or somebody.”

“When have you broken somebody?”

“I slammed a taxicab door on my mother's hand once and broke her finger. Also, there was an unfortunate incident with a jump rope in preschool that sent a girl flying across the playground. But I was exonerated of that. I've never understood why the girl got upset. Doesn't everyone dream of flying, Alice?”

While the way he said it made me think maybe somebody shouldn't have been exonerated, I have to confess I was thrilled to hear Frank drop my name. After
Alis
wore off his hand he'd been saying “Excuse me?” to get my attention.

“Here,” Frank said, handing his book back to me. “Take this book in lieu of the one my mother promised. You can leave today. I will call a cab while you pack.”

It seemed our relationship wasn't progressing as well as I thought.

AS FOR MIMI'S
book, it was hard to know how it was getting along. Around noon each day Frank and I would eat together, then I'd arrange her lunch on a tray while Frank went outside to pick a flower to go with it. We'd put his offering, often badly mangled, in a juice glass on the tray and I'd carry the whole thing to her office and leave it on the floor just outside her closed door. I always made Frank swear
to wait for me in the kitchen, but he'd trail me in the hall like Cary Grant in
To Catch a Thief,
pressing himself into doorways to hide if I happened to look over my shoulder. After I put the tray down and knocked, I'd hear a mad scramble behind me as Frank hotfooted it back to the kitchen. I'd count to ten before I returned to give him time to arrange himself under the table with a book and catch his breath. Then we'd have a cookie.

He wasn't the only one trying to fake me out, though. As soon as my knuckles connected with her door I'd hear a burst of typing from the other side—Mimi didn't use a computer—which always made me think of those recordings people have of dogs barking in place of a doorbell. I guess she was worried I was keeping tabs on her output. Which, in fairness, I was. Mr. Vargas had worked up a schedule to keep her on track, and part of my job was to somehow make sure she turned in pages, however rough, once a week or so. I was supposed to enter her typescript into “Mimi's computer,” a tool that lay fallow as far as I could tell except for when she used it to order things online or trawl eBay for Frank's outfits. Then I was to e-mail the pages to Mr. Vargas. He wasn't looking for high polish or even any polish. Just evidence of a story, coming together, not coming together, whatever.

Except Mimi hadn't surrendered pages yet.

When I texted Mr. Vargas to confess as much, he answered with one word:
Patience.

A
FTER MUCH OF
June spent under house arrest, I decided it was time Frank and I staged a jailbreak. I put a note on Mimi's lunch tray that said: “May I borrow the car keys?” Frank and I had climbed in the Mercedes a few times to watch a movie on my computer and pretend we were at a drive-in. Other than using it as a stage for imaginary adventures, though, no one had touched the car since I'd been there. The crud accumulated on its windows and dead leaves puddled under its wheels were a testament to how long it had been since it had moved. “Does this thing drive?” I asked Frank.

“Yes. But not by itself, in the way my piano plays itself. I would be an enthusiastic supporter of such technology except that the self-driving car gives my mother less incentive than ever to buy me a horse.”

Mimi emerged from her office while Frank and I were having our after-lunch cookie. Frank jumped out of his chair so quickly he knocked it to the floor and flung himself into her arms with such force that she staggered back a few steps.

“Careful, Frank,” she said. “Where did you get the black tape?” Frank was wearing his alternate, unragged tailcoat and intact morning pants, and had applied black tape to his eyebrows and upper lip in the manner of Groucho Marx.

“What black tape?” he asked.

“The black electrical tape that I hid from you so that you wouldn't put it over your eyebrows again. Remember how much it hurt getting it off last time?”

“Oh, that black tape,” he said. “You can have it back.” He started peeling it delicately from his upper lip.

“Where do you need to go, Penny?” Mimi asked.

“Alice,” I said as automatically as you would say “God bless you” to a stranger sneezing. “I don't need to go anywhere. But I thought Frank would enjoy getting out. I figured we could find a playground where Frank could hook up with other kids and—”

“—No!” Frank and Mimi all but shouted in unison.

I must have looked startled because Mimi was quick to explain, “Frank doesn't like waiting his turn at the swings.”

“Waiting your turn isn't fun,” I said to Frank. “But it's something you have to do in life if you're planning on getting along with other children.”

“Something I have to do in life is bang my head against the metal pole when people tell me to wait my turn at the swings,” Frank said. “And I don't plan on getting along with other children. No thank you please.” Mimi closed her eyes and grimaced in a way that made me suspect they'd been through all this a few times already.

“Well, how about this?” I said. “Frank and I could go on a drive. Feel the wind on our faces. Sniff the salt air. If I'm going to chauffeur him to school in the fall, now's a good time for us to get used to being out in the world together.”

“I would like to feel the wind on our faces,” Frank said. “I'd better get these eyebrows off.” He jackrabbited down the hall.

“I'm not so sure about this,” Mimi said. “You don't know where anything is. You'll get lost.”

“I won't. The beach is downhill.”

“So is the Valley.”

She made that sound like a bad thing. “True,” I said, “but my phone has GPS.”

She looked at me blankly.

“Global positioning system,” I said. “It's a—”

“I know what GPS is,” she said. “I'm thinking. You don't know how difficult Frank can be out in the world.”

“I supervised twenty-five third graders on a field trip to the Bronx Zoo on my own and lived to tell the tale. I'm not worried.”

Mimi ran her hand across her mouth while she pondered all this. I noticed her nails were gnawed to the quick. “Frank and I used to go on adventures all the time,” she said finally. “He was the cutest little boy you've ever seen. I was so worried somebody would kidnap him that I thought about hiring a bodyguard. But Xander was around more then.”

“Xander?” I asked. “Who's Xander?”

As if she hadn't heard my question, she continued, “Somehow Frank's pediatrician got wind that I was worried some lunatic might snatch Frank, so she gave me a card for a psychiatrist who deals in anxiety issues. For me! Like I was crazy to think somebody would want to kidnap my son. I gather she's not much of a reader, that one. Not familiar with my book. Too busy saving lives.”

“I haven't read your book,” I said. I don't know what possessed me to say that.

She must have stared at me for a full minute before she responded. “Did it occur to you to read it before you came to work for me?”

“Bad enough to have me underfoot,” I said. “I thought you might not want me inside your brain.” Dear god, I prayed, keep Mimi out of my bedside table drawer. If she opened it, she'd find the dog-eared, food-stained copy of
Pitched
I'd bought in the New York airport and had read twice on the flight out and had dipped into many times since, when writing in my notebook left me too rattled to sleep.

Mimi, who usually avoided looking at me at all, eyed me like my mother had after I presented my pajama-clad self to her, claiming I'd bathed when I'd only run water in the tub and stood at the sink making fashion-model faces in the mirror until I thought enough time had passed for her to believe I'd soaked and scrubbed. Mimi had to know I was fibbing. My mother always did.

“That's the most idiotic thing I've ever heard,” she said.

I shrugged. “I majored in accounting. I guess I'm not much of a reader, either.”

“I don't believe you. Why would Isaac hire an assistant who doesn't read?”

“I'm good with computers.”

“Good with computers. That's all that matters now, isn't it?” The funny thing was that she seemed more pleased than angry. “The car keys are on the hook by the door. Bring Frank home right away if he bites anyone or pulls his hair out or bangs his head against anything.” She went to the counter and scribbled some things on a pad of paper there, frowning intensely as she wrote. When she'd finished writing she tore the paper from the pad and handed it to me. “Take this with you.”

She'd written out Dr. Abrams's phone number at her beach house, along with the names and numbers of her emergency room of choice and Frank's pediatrician, Dr. Not-a-Reader. “Frank doesn't swim well, so if you stop at the beach, stay in the car.” She thrust her cell phone at me. “Here. Take my phone, too, in case you lose the paper. All the numbers are in there.”

“I don't lose things,” I said. “What if you need to call somebody?”

“Who would I call?” she asked. “Take it.”

I was halfway down the hall to gather Frank when Mimi called after me, “Alice. Thank you.” Alice, not Penny.

AFTER FRANK GOT
the tape off his eyebrows, he'd refreshed himself with a pass through Wardrobe. Now he was wearing an outfit more suited to an afternoon's motoring: white canvas duster over chinos and a white shirt, leather aviator's cap and goggles, a silk scarf and old-school binoculars around his neck. He had his plastic machete stuck in his belt and his pith helmet under his arm. “Is that what you're wearing?” he asked.

“What's wrong with it?” I had on a T-shirt, Bermuda shorts, and
tennis shoes, my New York-via-Nebraska idea of standard Southern California daywear.

“Everything,” Frank said. “I know just what you need. Tartan! Let me get you my plaid cravat.”

“That's okay,” I said. “I'm not big on plaids.”

“What's wrong with you?” he asked. He launched into a brief-for-Frank disquisition on the importance of tartans as clan signifiers in Great Britain from ancient times forward, which segued into a history of the evolution of the striped necktie as a means of differentiating university rowing teams from afar. He paused to take a breath and I groaned, figuring this might go on a while. Instead, Frank used the air he'd taken in to bellow, “Gentlemen, start your engines!” Then he whipped the machete from his belt and charged the station wagon, carrying the pith helmet in front of him like a shield in his left hand and brandishing the machete in his right.

After I got over my surprise at his enthusiasm for our adventure I was pleased to see how eager he was to go. So of course the car wouldn't start. “Why?” I asked the ozone.

Frank, mouthpiece for the ozone, answered me. “The battery's dead. If an automobile isn't driven for weeks or months, the cables should be disconnected to prevent the charge leaking out. However, my mother refused to allow me to perform the necessary operation. She said disconnecting the battery was abject capitulation. And that I would get grease on my cuffs.”

“Abject capitulation to what?”

“To her not driving.”

“Does she ever drive?”

“Sometimes not for weeks or months. As if the driving weren't bad enough, once you reach your destination you have to find a place to park. God help you if you end up in a parking garage because chances are you'll never find your car again. If you do find your car, then you've lost the stupid parking ticket. That's it. You're doomed. Why did you ever leave the house? Better to stay home. According to my mother.”

“Don't you ever go anywhere?” I asked.

“We do,” he said. “In taxis.”

After an eternity—or maybe what just seemed an eternity to me, as Frank was lecturing, not briefly, on the ins and outs of internal combustion engines, which segued into an explanation of Nikola Tesla's alternating current (A.C.) engine, which, I don't know if you know this, revolutionized the delivery of electricity over long distances, much to the chagrin of Tesla's archnemesis and purveyor of the direct current (D.C.) delivery system, Thomas Edison—a guy from roadside assistance showed up at the gate carrying a briefcase-sized battery to shock our engine back to life.

“Drive your car at least half an hour before you turn the engine off again,” he said once he got it up and running.

“It's not my car.” I signed the papers on his clipboard while he unclamped the jumper cables. “But don't worry. We may not stop driving until we get to Belize.”

The guy eyeballed the pair of us. “Not yours either?” he asked, nodding toward Frank.

“Nope,” I said. “I'm the chauffeur.”

“Nice gig,” he said. “Enjoy Belize. Don't forget your sunscreen.”

After the gate clanged shut behind the guy, Frank said, “I don't think my mother would like it if you took me to Belize.”

“I was joking.”

“Your jokes are not funny. I wish you would say ‘knock knock' when you're trying to make a joke so I would know.”

“Great idea,” I said. “Listen, Frank. I was going to take you to a museum today but since it's getting late, let's just go for a drive along the beach. No getting in the water, though. Okay?”

“Just as well. The lifeguards say I swim like a drowning man. I don't see why that matters as long as I don't in fact drown.” He handed me the pith helmet. “This is for you, Alice. Sir Howard Carter didn't wear sunscreen in the Valley of the Kings.”

In that small gesture I saw another leap forward in my acceptance
into the Banning household. “Thank you, Frank,” I said. “That's sweet of you. Let's leave the machete at home, okay?”

And without complaint or hesitation, he flung the machete straight up into the air. I cringed and covered my head with my arms—I know it was plastic, but that sucker looked heavy. When it didn't thunk to earth again I peered at the sky, wondering if he'd somehow launched it into orbit. But there it was, lodged in the upper branches of a tree where, I noticed for the first time, a number of other items hung camouflaged by leaves and branches. A pair of kid's sneakers I couldn't imagine Frank ever wearing tied together by their laces, a Hula-Hoop, a tennis racket, a jump rope.

“We ought to get a ladder out one day and take all that stuff down,” I said.

“No,” Frank said. “It's art. My mother and I hold hands and look at it together sometimes. We enjoy its random nature.”

WE DROVE OUT
the big Banning gates, south to Sunset, then looped west through all the fancy neighborhoods with Tudor mansions and Italianate palaces and faux Norman farmhouses tucked away behind clusters of palms and groves of citrus trees or stretches of lawn and rose garden. Sometimes you could see just a gatehouse here and a turret there peeking over a high wall or hedge. Lots of those big giant houses had
FOR SALE
signs posted out front. I couldn't imagine who had enough money to buy even one of them, and we must have cruised past a dozen.

When we hit the Pacific Coast Highway we hung a left, away from what my phone told me was Malibu and back toward the city of Los Angeles. As I drove I kept stealing glances right, to the beach, where I caught flashes of bikers and Rollerbladers and volleyball nets strung close to the highway. Closer to the water I saw bright beach umbrellas and blue lifeguard shacks on stilts and deep white sand and gray, cold-looking water. Which surprised me. I'd never seen the Pacific in close-up and I'd expected it to be blue and clear, like a kid's crayon drawing of a tropical paradise.

In the side-view mirror I could see Frank behind me, oblivious to the beach's half-naked activity. He was leaning out his open window to enjoy the feel of the wind in his eyebrows and eyelashes and on his fingertips. His scarf snapped in the wind behind us.

“Watch out for your scarf.”

“Isadora Duncan met an untimely end in France on September fourteenth,
1927
, when her scarf got entangled in the wheels of the convertible she rode in.”

“That doesn't sound like fun, does it?”

“No. Thank you. Please.”

“So watch out for your scarf.”

Frank tucked it under his jacket and rolled the window up again. We drove along in silence for a while after that, slipping past the Santa Monica Pier with its miniature amusement park, complete with Ferris wheel and a little roller coaster pinned there against the sky.