It started like this: “I always thought my mother was a fool. Then I had Frank.”
Up until Frank, Mimi felt confident she’d be a better mother than Banning had been. Mimi had Julian all figured out. Her brother was astoundingly good at a few things and terrible at everything else. So when their mother told him he needed to come inside and do his homework in some subject Julian had no talent for, like French or physics, Mimi would slip in and do it for him. It was easier to get away with than you might imagine, since Julian’s handwriting was so illegible that when he started high school his mother buckled and bought him the portable typewriter Mimi used now. All Julian had to do was scrawl his name at the top of the lessons Mimi typed up while Julian threw balls at the side of the barn until the siding splintered and broke and it got so dark you couldn’t make out the white of the ball against the weathered gray of the wood anymore. So what if Julian didn’t know the difference between the Treaty of Versailles and the Treaty of Verdun? Her brother was different from other kids. Special. He’d outgrow being an oddball someday; or he’d be so famous for something that no one would care about his awkwardness anymore.
Still, it had been a relief when her brother left for college. She loved him, of course, but sometimes found his strange flatness as off-putting as everybody else did. The house was so much more peaceful without him banging around in it. The rest of them could get some sleep at night. Well, Mimi could, anyway. Her mother had stopped looking like she slept, ever, years ago. Dr. Frank spent most nights at the hospital, sewing up drunks, pronouncing victims of car crashes dead, delivering babies, what have you.
Mimi could see how upset Banning got when she tried to talk to Julian on the phone while he was away at school. He never spoke in sentences. Just “fine,” or “okay,” or “not really.” And when his grades came Banning would hold the envelope in her hand for a long time, then open it, scan the paper inside, crumple it, and toss it in the trash without showing it to anybody else. It was too bad, Mimi thought, that she couldn’t be with Julian to do his schoolwork for him.
Then Mimi went off to college, too. Being away from home was a relief she hadn’t anticipated, like giving up a pair of shoes you loved but hadn’t realized were pinching the life out of your toes until you put on ones that fit. At college, Mimi didn’t talk about the Gillespies. She realized it was a whole lot easier to ask other people questions about themselves. Everybody said she was so easy to talk to, but “talk at” was closer to the truth. Still, Mimi was happy, or pretended to be, which almost made it seem so.
Halfway through the second semester of her freshman year, Julian showed up at her dorm. She was in her room reading. Mimi remembered the sentence passing under her eyes when she heard the crazy pounding on the door to her suite. “nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands” She’d just gotten finished thinking that the line of poetry itself was beautiful but would it kill the guy to capitalize the words at the beginning of each line and use proper punctuation?
Then one of her roommates came to get her.
She sighed, put her book down, and went to the door. “Julian,” she said, and gave him a hug even though he never wanted to be hugged. She knew her roommates would think it was weird if she didn’t do it.
“He’s really your brother?” one of them asked. Mimi couldn’t for the life of her remember the girl’s name. “You never told us you had a brother.”
Julian took all this in but didn’t say anything. He did look kind of upset, for Julian anyway.
Mimi led him into her room and sat on the chair at her desk and he sat on the chair by her roommate’s desk. Mimi was glad her roommate was out. She was always out with that boyfriend she talked about every waking minute. Conrad. Funny, Mimi couldn’t remember that roommate’s name, either. “What’s up, Julian?” she asked.
“I’ve been scouted by the Atlanta Braves. The scout said he wasn’t leaving until he had Julian Gillespie’s signature on an Atlanta Braves contract.”
“Oh, Julian! That’s so exciting! That’s what you’ve always wanted. What happened after that?”
“What happened after that was he left without my signature, because my signature is worthless without parental approval because I’m still a minor. The signature he needed was from Dr. Frank Banning. Or Mrs. Frank Banning. Either one, or both.”
“Well, that won’t be a problem, right?”
“It will be a problem. It is a problem. Mother won’t sign and she won’t let Father do it, either.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’ve flunked out of school.”
“Oh, no.”
“Mother says I have to finish college first. Mimi, I’m no good at school. I hate it there.”
“Did you tell her that?”
“Yes.”
“What did she say?”