“I was probably sleeping,” I said. “I understand your concern. But no walking into my room uninvited. Ever. Got it?”
At the private school where I’d taught third grade math after being kicked upstairs from kindergarten when the pretty teacher who’d preceded me ran off with the father of one of her students, I could never get over how many of the children I’d been put in charge of had never had anybody say no to them. One girl used to walk up to my desk during class to go into my purse looking for cough drops. At the age of eight some of them were cheating off other kids’ papers with a sense of entitlement that took my breath away. I could imagine any number of them ending up in the slam. A nice white-collar joint where, after getting over their surprise at being not only caught but also punished for stock fraud or fudging their income taxes, they’d recast the whole jailbird experience as time well spent polishing their racquetball game and networking. I hadn’t been the least bit surprised to learn that the investment adviser who’d rooked Mimi had a grandchild at that school.
I’m just saying, you have to set boundaries with these privileged kids or all is lost.
“Yes, ma’am,” Frank said. He sat up straight and tied his bow tie with impressive quickness and precision. Frank’s eyes couldn’t quite scale the heights to my face so they’d come to roost on my kneecaps. He looked at his hands again and cut his eyes to my nostrils for the briefest of moments before finishing his sentence with “Alice.” I noticed then that he’d written my name on his left hand, spelled Alis. He saw me looking and slipped that hand into his pocket. “As family archivist, I have brought this album of photographs for you to look at,” he said. I hadn’t noticed it propped against the wall, one of those old-fashioned leather-bound volumes that must have weighed twenty pounds.
“I’d love to see that,” I said. “How did you know I’d want to?”
“I have uncanny intuition unencumbered by the editorial reflex,” he said. “I heard Dr. Abrams explain it that way to my mother when I pressed my ear to the door during one of their marathon discussions. My mother’s response was, ‘Where I come from we call that tactless.’ Can you tell me what she meant by that? I have tacks. Quite a nice collection, in many colors. I understand that thumbtacks have fallen out of favor since the invention of the Post-it note, but my mother knows I am still a fan. When I asked her why she said I was tackless, all she did was sigh. Can you explain that to me?”
“I can try,” I said. “The kind of tacks you have are spelled t-a-c-k-s. What your mother was talking about is spelled t-a-c-t.”
When I paused to think about the most diplomatic way to proceed, Frank said, “Oh. It was a case of homonym confusion. I see. Well, do you want to look at these photographs or not?”
“I do,” I said, glad to be off the hook. “Very much.”
He patted the floor beside himself. “Can I offer you a seat?”
I slid down the wall to sit next to Frank and he laid the album across our knees, opening it to a crumbling newspaper clipping showing Elvis Presley being kissed by a beautiful young woman in a swimsuit and a tiara.
“You like Elvis?” I asked.
Frank shrugged. “I don’t know much about Elvis, other than that his middle name was Aaron and he had a stillborn twin named Jesse Garon and he drove a truck for Crown Electric Company in Memphis before he cut his first record, a single called ‘That’s All Right.’” His voice had just enough tincture of Mimi’s Alabama in it to make him pronounce Memphis as Mimphis. He tapped the woman in the photo. “I do know something about this lady, though. She’s my mother’s mother.”
“She’s your grandmother?”
“Indeedy.”
“Let me see.” I leaned closer and read the caption aloud. “‘Crawfish Carnival Queen and Ole Miss student Banning Marie Allen welcomes Elvis.’ Wow.” Banning. I couldn’t decide whether I was more surprised to find out that Mimi’s mother was a beauty queen, or that a beauty queen was the source of Mimi’s pen name.
Frank’s grandmother may not have looked like his mother but there was a lot of her in Frank. “Do you see her much?” I asked.
“Not when I’m awake. She died in a car wreck when my mother was pretty young. Not a kid still, but not old like you."
“That’s terrible,” I said. I almost said, I can’t imagine, but of course I could. “So, how old do you think I am, anyway?”
“I don’t know. Old enough to know better?”
I laughed. “Indeedy,”
“You must be twenty-five then,” Frank said.