“I could ask you the same thing,” I said.
“But I’m not wearing a skirt,” he said. It was true enough. He’d suited up that morning in a severe charcoal pinstripe number, complete with pocket square, wing tips, and a monocle on a chain threaded through the buttonhole of his vest. I sat across the table, fighting the urge to tell Half-Pint E. F. Hutton what, exactly, I felt I could bring to his corporation and where I saw myself five years hence, in 1934.
“No,” I said, “but it looks like you’ve made a special effort to look nice for the first day of school.”
“That’s today?”
“Did you forget?”
“No. Although I tried my best to.”
“Well, I put on a skirt because I wanted to make a good impression on your teacher,” I said.
“Do you have to take me to school?”
“Kids have to go to school if they want their mothers to stay out of jail.”
“You’re not my mother. I’d rather have my mother take me to school today.”
“Of course you would.”
“Or Xander.”
I felt my face get hot so I opened the refrigerator door and shuffled around the cartons of milk and orange juice. “Xander?” I hadn’t seen any sign of him this morning—no unfamiliar car in the driveway, no blanket-bundled form sleeping on the couch—so I was starting to wonder if I’d only dreamed last night’s encounter. In which case I’d gotten up half an hour earlier than usual to put on a skirt and eyeliner for no good reason. Frank, not being one for eye contact, hadn’t noticed the eyeliner.
“Xander is my sometime piano instructor and itinerant male role model. The one I saw and you didn’t at the museum. Remember?”
“In-the-Manner-of-Apollo. Of course I remember,” I said. “If it’s any comfort, your mother is coming to school with us.”
“It is an enormous comfort. Just as it would probably be an enormous comfort to her to have me with her right now to select her outfit.” Frank jumped from his chair, knocking it over backward again and sweeping his plate to the floor. This time I didn’t chase down the hallway to drag him back. I stayed behind to clean up his mess.
THEY SAT IN the back for the drive, clutching hands. Glancing at the two of them in the mirror made me so nervous I worried I’d drive the car over the edge of one of the steep hillside switchbacks that make the Bel Air views so spectacularly gorgeous and driving there so spectacularly terrifying.
It was hard to resist the urge to look. Mimi had on the kind of outfit you’d expect Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly to wear to cocktails or maybe a funeral: little black dress, big black sunglasses, white gloves, pearls. In place of the chignon she didn’t have the hair for anymore, she wore black fabric wrapped tightly around her head. While I couldn’t remember what my mother had worn on the first day of my fourth grade year, I’m pretty sure it didn’t look anything like that.
“What’s that on your mother’s head?” I asked Frank before we set out, when Mimi skittered back to her room to fetch her cell phone.
“A stylish head wrap I made by cutting up one of her ex-husband’s black T-shirts,” Frank said.
“You’re kidding,” I said. “She has his T-shirts? She hasn’t seen him in twenty years at least.”
“It’s quite possible she saw him last week.”
“Last week? Where was I when all this was going on?”
“Sleeping, probably.”
“He came in the middle of the night?” Which, it struck me, was when Xander had put in his appearance. Maybe it wasn’t Frank I’d heard out there stumbling around every night since I’d arrived.
“My mother’s ex-husband was an actor in the moving pictures,” Frank said. “I noticed one of his films showing on the classic movie channel last week, Tuesday night at three A.M. and again Thursday at twelve A.M. It’s possible she saw him there though I don’t think she really likes bumping into him even on the classic movie channel. That’s why we only have the one television set. To minimize such chance meetings. Also why she told him he had to stop coming to our house.”
As noted, I’d started tuning out during some of Frank’s long-winded harangues, but now he had a hundred and ten percent of my attention. “Her ex-husband kept coming to your house after they divorced?” I asked. I tried to remember what the guy looked like. Like Frank, maybe, a little? But I couldn’t call up his face or for that matter his name. Only the torso. “How long did that go on?”
“For years.”
“So, wait, have you met him?”
“Not in real life, though I’d like to. Reviewers of my mother’s ex-husband’s oeuvre say his smolder and physical presence were genuinely Oscar-worthy and that when he opened his mouth his acting was on par with Pinocchio’s. Quite a compliment in my book, since Pinocchio, the eponymous Academy Award-winning film released in 1940 by the Walt Disney Studios, is one of my favorite animated movies.”