MIMI SEEMED GENUINELY surprised when Frank took the T-shirt blindfold off her head and swept up a hand to indicate the watercolor. “Ta-da,” he said. “Merry Christmas, Mama.”
I have to admit, the watercolor looked pretty good up there. The light was hitting it just right and my tight deadline had kept me from overworking it. You wouldn’t be able to pick the kid out of a lineup with it by any means, but you could see Frank in it if you really looked.
Mimi sat on the couch for a long time, really looking. When she finally said something, it was, “Where did you get that?”
“Alice,” Frank said.
“Where did she get it?” she asked, as if I weren’t standing right there.
“She painted it,” Frank said. “I wish you had been there to see her do it. It only took her about an hour, start to finish. Maybe less. It was like magic.”
Mimi nodded. I could see her eyes fill with tears.
“What do you think of it?” Frank asked.
“I think it absolutely captures you,” she said.
THAT NIGHT AFTER I’d gone to bed somebody knocked at my door. My heart started thumping. Had Mimi come to thank me? More likely it was Frank. “Come in,” I said.
It was Mimi. “Do you have to take everything that belongs to me?” she asked. I couldn’t believe I’d been foolish enough to think she’d have anything nice to say.
I WOKE UP a few nights after Christmas because of the piano. The thing I noticed about it right away that I don’t think I’d ever understood before was that it didn’t sound like it was playing itself. I looked at my alarm clock. It was after midnight. I stumbled into the living room and found Xander planted on the piano bench, giving the keys a good going-over with as much uncomplicated joy as ever. Mimi was right. You really could tell the difference.
I stood in the doorway listening for a while before I said, “What’s that you’re playing?”
He smiled at me angelically, as if he hadn’t been MIA for a minute. Then he said, “It’s a song by Frank Loesser.”
“What’s it called?”
“‘What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?’”
“You’re pathetic,” I said, and went back to bed.
PART V
AFTER THE RAINS CAME
January 2010
( 17 )
THE DELUGES ENDED suddenly, without sending the glass house sliding off the cliff and onto the 405 freeway; but for those of us inside, things went downhill fast anyway.
Having Xander around didn’t improve Mimi’s temperament much that I could see. Frank, of course, was delighted to have his itinerant male role model back. For belated Christmas Xander had given Frank a hula dancer you stick to a car’s dashboard. He let Frank sit up front while they backed the station wagon down the driveway and drove back up again, over and over, all the while watching the hula girl shimmy. Frank invited me along for the ride, but the last thing I wanted was to be in close quarters with Xander, even if only for a few hundred feet.
With Xander on-site again, I was forced to play the heavy, always prying Frank free to eat or take a shower or brush his teeth and go to bed. Although Xander looked well fed, flossed, and rested, none of us were witness to the effort that went into any of that anymore. Xander didn’t eat with us, I didn’t sleep with him, and if the walls of the Dream House bathroom were closing in on him while he brushed his teeth, Xander wasn’t sharing his pain.
But the real suffering came once Frank started back to school. When I drove him there on the first day he leaned up between the seats to expound on the origins of the national dance of the Dominican Republic, a step whose name for some reason or other was based on the French word meringue and whose tight footwork was informed by the chains that once bound its enslaved creators together. Frank liked to imagine the hula girl loved that particular two-step most of all, even though she supposedly hailed from an unfettered island on the other side of the world. He was still muttering about that to himself when I dropped him off. It was mid-January and just cool enough to make his E. F. Hutton suit a seasonally appropriate choice. He was wearing a pair of gold elephant-head cuff links Mimi had given him for Christmas. The way the tassel on his fez kept time to his step as he merengued across the playground made me feel almost cheerful. I couldn’t believe I had been so nervous about blowback from December.
So of course there was an incident. Mimi was called in to the principal’s office. But when I, Mimi-by-proxy, turned up to see the principal I was turned away with a stern note saying he wanted to have a word with Frank’s mother not one of her employees.
“What happened?” I asked Paula.
“Since you are not his custodial parent, I’m not allowed to release that information to you.”
“Since when?”