“Don’t let him do that,” Mimi said the first time she saw him at it. “He needs to learn to respect your personal space.”
But the thing was, I didn’t mind. I knew Frank missed his mother pretty desperately. He didn’t see why a book that didn’t even exist should take her from him, even though he tended to ignore her when she was around and preferred talking to himself over anybody else in the room. If he slipped away from me during Mimi’s workday I knew I would find him outside her office, a drinking glass held between his ear and the door that separated them.
One morning Frank threw himself down and starting pounding his head against the carpeted floor outside her office. He ignored me when I asked him to get up. Also when I asked if it would be okay for me to help him up. I don’t think he even heard me. I decided under the circumstances that no answer was an answer and that I had to do something before Mimi came out and turned the high beams of her contempt on me again. I grabbed Frank by the ankles and dragged him to the kitchen, where I waved an unwrapped chocolate bar under his nose until he came around.
“I know what we’ll do,” I said when his eyes were able to focus on the exterior world again. “We’ll write a book, too.”
“Good idea,” he said around the chocolate bar he’d stuffed whole into his mouth. “Then I can offer my mother pointers from the position of a knowledgeable technician rather than that of a dilettante.”
“Dilettante, huh?” I said. “You know what I like best about you, Frank?”
“My cravats?”
“No. Well, yes, I like your cravats, of course. But I love that you know so many interesting words. Is it all right for me to touch your face and hands with a damp towel now to clean the chocolate off it?” I hoped he’d say yes. Otherwise he’d use the shoulder of my T-shirt as his freelance napkin.
“If you must.” He screwed his eyes shut tight and grimaced as I wiped his face and hands. “I read the dictionary for pleasure as it’s always easy to find a stopping place. Also I hope my perambulations there will improve my spelling, but that hasn’t happened yet.”
“I see,” I said. “So, what are we going to call your book?”
“As Webster’s Third is taken, I will call my book I Shall Commute by Submarine.”
I wasn’t surprised to hear that. The kid loved being bundled up and pressed against things; he was a big fan of tight spaces. He wedged himself between cushions on the family room couches, played Clue on the floor of his closet, and chose the inside of the station wagon as a play space over the wider world of the yard. We’d crawl under the kitchen table to read a book, him inside and me outside the cocoon of his sleeping bag, pretending we were traveling in an overnight compartment of a Pullman train.
We wrote his book on my computer, sitting at the kitchen table. We finished it by lunchtime. I Shall Commute by Submarine chronicled the adventures of Adult Frank, a guy with some kind of amorphous job that required constant undersea travel between his hundred-square-foot apartments in Tokyo and New York City. Frank used one of my graphic design interfaces, untutored by me or the computer help program, to draw tall buildings and tight cubicles and a little man dressed in a tux that he dropped into the text as if he’d been doing that all his life. All this work on his book made me wonder what the real Adult Frank would do for a living one day. Graphic designer, maybe? Ma?tre d’ on a cruise ship? Understudy James Bond?
After we stapled his book together, we lay on our backs under the kitchen table as I read it to him.
“I must confess that I’ve never been inside a submarine,” Frank said, taking his book back from me and flipping through the pages.
“That’s okay,” I said. “It’s fiction.”
“But it could be about me someday.”
“I suppose. But you understand nobody can see into the future.”
“Cassandra could. Also, my mother.”
“Your mother can’t see into the future.”
“Yes she can. She’s always telling me I’ll end up living out of a shopping cart if I don’t learn the multiplication tables. She can’t fathom how numbers could elude me. I tried explaining that I lose my way among a series of digits like Hansel and Gretel lost among the trees in the forest after the birds have devoured their trail of crumbs. She said I was too smart for that. I tend to agree, as I would use gravel to mark my way instead of something as evanescent as bread crumbs. I like my gravel in the utilitarian gray of gray flannel suits, though I suppose white marble chips might be a better choice in the chiaroscuro of a forest.”
“Your mother doesn’t mean the part about the shopping cart, Frank,” I said.
“Maybe not. Sometimes she says I’ll end up in jail. But that’s usually after I’ve broken something or somebody.”