Be Frank With Me - Julia Claiborne Johnson Page 0,15

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