Holy Bluebeard’s castle. How could I sleep with the kid wandering the halls swinging his bat or maybe a big sharp knife he’d borrowed from the kitchen drawer? Yes, okay, I confess, too many late-night horror movies when I was old enough for the TV to babysit me while my mother typed legal documents because the night shift paid better than days. When I finally told her why I was having trouble sleeping, she said, “Alice, you’re too smart for that. Learn how to take care of yourself and silly things like zombies and escaped psychopaths won’t scare you quite so much.” I hoped that meant karate lessons, but what I got instead was my own toolbox and electric drill. My mother showed me how to rewire lamps and tighten loose doorknobs and to examine broken things closely to understand how they could be fixed. She trained me to collect random screws and extra buttons in baby food jars so I’d always have extra on hand in a pinch. After that, she taught me how to balance her checkbook and keep track of her tax receipts. Then she tuned our ancient television to the cooking channel, pulled the dial off, and pocketed it, handed me her splattered copy of The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking and left for work. From then on I was the family cook, handyman, and accountant. When I was done with my chores I got in bed and went straight to sleep. I was too tired to do anything else.
So that first wakeful night in California, I unpacked my suitcase. Brushed my teeth and flossed. Made a list of meals I might cook for Mimi and Frank in the next week and ingredients I would need to do it. Filed my nails. Read some more of Mimi’s book. Drew a funny little sketch of Frank on the first page of my unicorn notebook, under the heading I’d scrawled earlier: “Who is Frank?” I had no clue who Frank was yet, but in my drawing he looked like a grade-school Charlie Chaplin who’d misplaced his hat, shoes, and cane.
After what seemed like an eternity the murmuring stopped and I heard a door click shut. I locked my door then and tucked the notebook under my pillow with my cell phone.
EVERY BED I’D ever slept in before that night had been a couch, a cot, or a twin bed, so I woke up around 3:00 A.M. disoriented by the wasteland of mattress on either side of me. This time when sleep wouldn’t come I got up and opened the curtains. In my microscopic studio in glamorous Bushwick, Brooklyn, I had a view of an airshaft, its sooty brick opposite so close I could lean out and touch it if I were crazy enough to try. Now I had Los Angeles, serene and twinkling, shot here and there with parti-colored neon signs and snaking lines of red that were taillights of cars crawling home from places exciting enough to make staying up past three in the morning seem worth it.
I sat on that love seat for what seemed like forever, just looking, the way those old immigrant ladies in the City with black babushkas and hairy moles on their stevedore arms put pillows on their windowsills and park themselves all day to take in everything streaming along the sidewalks of their new world. From that high up, language or the lack of it didn’t matter much. The swirling currents of people were way better than anything on TV. Even on cable. Except, possibly, the Armenian Channel.
Which made me wonder then if my hotel-ish room came with television. I got up and checked the cabinets. Empty. So I crawled in bed with my cell phone and typed in Fred Astaire Broadway Melody 1940. Fred’s jaunty artistry didn’t translate to a playing-card-sized screen. I remembered that later, when Frank introduced me to Sunset Boulevard, starring Whitley Heights resident Gloria Swanson as washed-up silent film star Norma Desmond. “I’m still big,” she said. “It’s the pictures that got small.”
I OPENED MY bedroom door the next morning at six and smothered a little shriek. Frank was on the floor in the hallway, staring at his hands. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Did I wake you?”
“No, you just surprised me. I didn’t think anybody else would be up. I’m still on East Coast time. Have you been out here long?”
“About an hour.”
“Where’s your mom?”
“Asleep. Your door was locked.”
“You tried to come into my bedroom?”
“I knocked first. You didn’t answer. I got worried.”
“Why?”
“The raccoons around here big enough to scramble over a ten-foot wall are notoriously acquisitive and sometimes rabid. Also, there are coyotes. Dangerous to pets and snack-sized people.”
“I’m from the Midwest,” I said. “Nobody from the Midwest is snack-sized.”
“There are people out there, too,” he said. “Fanatics. One of them climbed the wall to get at my mother before I was born. Which explains its crown of razor-wire thorns.”
“These fanatics,” I said. “Are you talking about your mother’s fans?”
“Fan is a derivation of the word fanatic,” Frank said. “An overzealous follower of a person or thing. She has millions. Maybe billions. My mother says she doesn’t like to drive because the fanatics used to rush the car every time she pulled out of the driveway. There aren’t as many now, but that doesn’t seem to provide her the comfort you would expect.”
“I don’t think your mother’s fans would hurt her,” I said. “They probably just want to talk, or get her autograph.”
That didn’t seem to provide him much comfort, either. Frank was wearing a straw boater tipped onto the back of his head, and two pieces of his hair had fallen forward on either side of his part, forming a parenthesis around a forehead gone rumpled with concern. An expression, I realized later, he’d borrowed from the tool kit of Jimmy Stewart, circa It’s a Wonderful Life. I could see his cuff links today were little green and silver shamrocks. The pants of his blue and white seersucker suit, also rumpled, were hiked up so that his yellow and blue argyle socks showed. A navy bow tie with white polka dots dangled untied from his buttoned shirt collar. He looked like he’d been up all night, either policing the perimeter with his yellow bat or hanging off the back of a streetcar with Judy Garland, singing.