bottle service, because that’s what she does. Now she’s got proof of how inappropriate she is magnetically fixed to her fridge.
It was also through This Week in Pictures: The Frances Andrews Edition that I learned she’d gotten married. I was in grad school at the time, and the “wedding” to which I did not receive an invitation had taken place a few months before. The groom was this African guy named Isa, who was gay and illegal. Frances wore garb for the “ceremony,” which in five-by-seven looked like it took place in the kind of church basement slash community center slash banquet hall in which fake marriages are held. Less than two years later, they were found out by the Feds when neither one could remember (a) the last time they had sex or (b) which way the toilet paper rolled off the handle. Frances said two weeks ago and under. Isa said two months ago and over. The INS agent decided to be merciful and file their interview in a trash can. Better it never existed.
Frances is an oxymoron personified. She grows ganja next to her geraniums and “Gee milacres!” is her go-to exclamation. She thinks having a nice pair of “slacks” is synonymous with success but will never set foot in a mall and whines whenever you ask her to try something on. Ikea is her Shangri-la, but every piece of furniture she owns was “found” on somebody’s curb. She has absolutely no clue what O.P.P. stands for but has a seemingly endless catalog of original-score birthday songs. When I turned twenty-eight, she sang a new one to my voice mail. And I thought I’d heard ’em all.
Blowing out the candles on my birthday cake,
my birthday cake, my birthday caa-ake.
Blowing out the candles on my birthday cake,
I’m another year old to-day.
Blowing out the candles on my birthday cake,
my birthday cake, my birthday day caa-ake.
Blowing out the candles on my birthday cake,
and when I do a wish I’ll maa-aake.
Blowing out the candles on my birthday cake,
I’m another year old to-day.
On this Saturday morning over the drone of the hair dryer, her voice is just as clear, cutting through the metal hood like a cake knife when she says, “Oh yeah, Grandmommy and Auntie and all them thought I was going to sell you on the black market in Spain. They thought I was on crack.” Since I’m in the beauty salon and not an insane asylum, screaming is out of the question.
When we were six and thirty-five, Frances decided to move us to Madrid. We were living in Lancaster then, a place Californians refer to as the high desert, not to be confused with the low desert, which doesn’t exist to my knowledge, or is otherwise known as Los Angeles, the city Frances and I are technically from.
She never once sat me down to explain why we were becoming expats—if we were running away or toward something. All I know is that one day we were settled in “a two-story house with snow” (my personal request), and the next we were in a constant state of moving—selling my Snoopy scooter and giving away the wild horse she bought me for my birthday. She never framed it as a question like they do on 1950s sitcoms: Hey, Little Ricki, how’d ya like to go to Cuba?
We moved allllll the time. And by all the time, I’m not using the suburban kid pejorative where moving maybe once or twice in one’s little lifetime is so soul-crushing and eventful that one grows up wanting to be established and home-owning. No, I mean we moved whenever she felt like it, and because everything she felt meant everything to me, moving became our secret game. Secret in that only I knew the rules, so technically every time I won.
If I came home from school, and Frances said, “Guess what?” I didn’t immediately start searching the house for a new Cabbage Patch Kid. I knew the score. With this woman, a “guess what” wasn’t an invitation to imagine; it was a prerequisite for packing. In place of “Guess what? Ground chuck was 39 cents off today. Tacos!” I got “Guess what? The dollar is way up. Learn Spanish!” I wasn’t scarred by it or anything—at least not in the beginning. ’Cause see, I liked moving. Loved it, actually.
Then came the trip to Spain that went terribly wrong, forever ruining our secret game.
I don’t have a childhood home—but homes. There does not exist in the greater