Be Frank With Me - Julia Claiborne Johnson Page 0,5

up with something nicer to say than “Your child is such a good little mouth-breather.”

“I know.” She sounded more irritated with me than pleased.

Strike one. I tried again. “Frank looks pretty energetic.”

“I go to sleep exhausted,” she said. “I wake up tired.”

Yes. I had a nice flight. Thank you so much for asking.

Frank went at the tree again, but in a slo-mo, Kabuki kind of way—his swing stylized, his face a mask. I decided to give it one more go. “Hey, is that a T-ball bat?” I asked. “I used to coach the T-ball team at the private school where I worked.”

“Then you should know a T-ball bat when you see one.”

She’s not one for small talk, Mr. Vargas had warned me. No kidding. I gave up and settled in to watch the kid strip the tree of the last of its unripe fruit. It was awkward sitting so close to M. M. Banning when we’d just met, but there wasn’t much furniture in the living room to choose from. Just the white slipcovered couch we occupied and a black baby grand player piano that had been working through a selection of jaunty Scott Joplin rags since my arrival. There was a piano bench, but I thought it would be weird to go to sit on that. No rugs, but wall-to-wall carpet in the hallway. My mother would have been interested to hear that, since she found nothing in the world tackier than wall-to-wall carpet, even though we’d lived in more apartments with it than without. There were no photos on the piano, no art on the walls. Unfaded squares of paint, though, where pictures must have hung until recently. Looking around the room, you got the sense M. M. Banning and her son were just moving into their house, or just moving out.

“Frank seems like an interesting kid,” I ventured finally.

She took her glasses off and rubbed her nose. “He’s a character.”

Outside, Frank dropped the T-ball bat and wandered over to have a word with the battered black Mercedes station wagon parked in the driveway. He and the wagon’s luggage rack came to some kind of understanding and Frank took off his belt, looped the buckle end, and opened the car door. He stood on its sill while he tied the notched end to the rack.

M. M. Banning jumped up and went to the sliding glass door. She struggled with it, but the door was stuck.

“Here, let me help you with that,” I said.

“I’ve been meaning to get somebody to come out and fix this,” she said, “but the man I have do things is out of town and I don’t like having strange people in my house. What’s Frank doing out there?”

The kid went about his business, slipping his wrist through the loop in his belt, then hopping down and closing the door, being careful to raise his arm to keep the belt from getting caught. Then he kicked a leg back, fell against the door, kicked and fell again, using his free hand to alternately mimic a pistol firing at the luggage rack and make his coattails flap behind himself. I was reminded of the black-and-white westerns I watched on TV in the afternoons after school. “I think he’s robbing a stagecoach,” I said.

M. M. Banning put a hand on her chest and stepped back from the glass. “Yes. He’s playing. He’s all right. The door can wait. He’s fine. Calm down.” She didn’t seem to be talking to me.

“No worries,” I said. I’m not a person who says slacker things like “no worries” or “enjoy,” but I’ve found the best way to handle anyone difficult—rich worrywart moms, the famished Manhattan vegan ordering a late lunch—is to exude the bland calm of the heavily medicated and go about my business. I kept fiddling with the door. “It jumped the track, that’s all.” I gave the door a fierce jiggle that popped it back in its groove. “When it’s stuck, you do this.” I showed her the lift-and-bounce maneuver. “Listen, when your guy comes back, tell him to replace this glass,” I said, tracing a long jagged line that split one of the giant panes. “That’s an accident waiting to happen. What cracked it? An earthquake?” I didn’t like thinking about earthquakes, but in Los Angeles, how could I not? Still, every place I’d ever lived in had come with its own brand of potential disaster—tornadoes in Nebraska, muggings in New York. I guess beneath my thick veneer