Frannie in Pieces (11 page)

Rewarding me instantly,
I get a match with the first two pieces I try. For the next two hours I am so focused that I can memorize the bumps on a jigsaw piece, keeping the visual in my brain while I unerringly locate the one that completes it. Wielding the flashlight proves an impediment—I like having both hands free. I move my desk lamp to the rug and adjust the arm. The beam hits my group of similar-colored puzzle pieces but in no way brightens up the room enough to attract my mom's attention.

The coral color, which appears to be primarily the structure's wall, glows so vividly in spots that it seems as if there are lights behind it. Is it transparent? The gray, a roof, may be an awning; its edges appear to ripple as if buffeted by a wind. Another piece snaps in. I love this. I love that a small, utterly abstract piece joins with another and something real is born. If some abstract art can be described as stripping down an image to its essence, then “puzzling” is the opposite. Here I'm moving from abstract to concrete. Very cool. Dad would get that. Maybe he gets that. Maybe he knows. Present tense. Dad knows.

Lou, lou, skip to my lou. My mom used to dance around the room with me and sing that song. Before Mom and Dad separated. I remember she danced me outside and swung me into the air, once, twice, three times, and into his arms. He was washing the car, his arms were all soapy, and he put a dab of suds on my nose. Lou, lou…a final piece clicks in. I definitely discern blurs behind the
wall—wispy shadows that must be people. Are they? I lean closer.

An old woman's face peers into mine. Shrewd black eyes, thick black brows flecked with gray that meet and greet over her nose, a mole on her cheek. She frowns and wipes her hands on a white cloth that hangs from her waist. All in black. Except for that cloth, she's dressed in black.

Is she Death?

That's crazy. I am so crazy. Death isn't a woman. Death isn't even a person, and if it were, it wouldn't have a dishtowel hanging from its waist. I doubt if Death's eyebrows would need tweezing either. I sense that this woman is seriously efficient and I'm holding her up for some reason.

She speaks. I can't understand a word she says.

She leans closer. I lean backward.

A chair. I'm in a chair. There's a red carnation on the table. My mom is anti-carnation. They're tacky, she told me, and if she used them in bouquets, she'd be out of business. This carnation, this single stem
in a glass bud vase, confirms absolutely that I am no longer at home.

I'm in the puzzle again.

The woman's hair is short—gray and wavy, sprayed to stiffness. Jenna's mom says that “going gray” is “going to seed.” She told Jenna that if it came down to eating or dying her hair, she'd pick dye. Hardly any women in Hudson Glen have gray hair, but I bet that Ireland is full of gray-haired grandmas. I wonder if she's a relative. So not Death. Maybe a relative.

Fortunately, I didn't inherit any big moles like that.

Wires are crossed. That's the sound I hear, the drone of interference, and as it gets louder, it softens into the hum of conversation, and in spite of the fact that a possible relative is waiting for me to answer a question I don't understand, I look around.

I'm in a restaurant, a cheery place that Dad would like. “No affect, Frannie.” That's what he would say, meaning nothing fancy. Plastic patio
furniture, a checkerboard floor of tan-and-white tiles. Strings of tiny lights, hung like garlands, twinkle on the ceiling. Pretty lights in the palest orange. Coral. Of course, coral. The ceiling itself is a striped gray awning. Coral and gray. People around me chatter and eat, and I can't understand a word they say. My hand rests on an oilcloth. Only it's not oilcloth, it just feels like oilcloth from Dad's studio. In fact it's a tablecloth, plastic coated for easy wiping, as a busboy demonstrates, swiping a sponge across it.

I'm sitting at a table and an old woman with stiff hair and a stiff shiny black dress is talking to me in a language I don't understand.

The busboy lays a placemat in front of me. A white paper placemat with scalloped edges.

At the next table a woman points at her plate.
“Troppo salato, troppo salato,”
she scolds a waiter, and the lady in black who is failing to communicate with me rustles over, takes her plate, hands it to the waiter, and waves him away. This woman works
here. She might be the boss.

This restaurant, an outdoor patio, is sheltered and protected on three sides by sheets of heavy plastic. The fourth wall, solid, has a swinging door through which waiters, balancing multiple plates, glide in and out. This wall, painted with grape vines, tweaks my memory. Rendered in thick broad strokes, the vines meander like country roads. Fat bunches of green and purple grapes, outlined in black, remind me of drawings in a child's coloring book. Maybe one of mine from when I was five. That could be it. They're tucked away in my subconscious along with the flavor of strained carrots.

Is my dad here?

I spring up. My eyes bounce from table to table, searching the room. A young girl sticks a rose in my face. It's so startling, I can't respond. The flower girl, no more than eight years old, cradles several red roses, each wrapped in cellophane. When I'm apparently struck dumb by a rose, she leaves me,
goes to a table, and offers them there. They shoo her off.

Not here. Not now, anyway. Dad's not here.

“Troppo salato.”
The disgruntled woman complains again, although her dinner has been whisked away, and she consoles herself adjusting her bust, wiggling and lifting large breasts in a silky dress that coats her skin like syrup, then letting them settle. The man with her is performing surgery on a fish, carefully lifting out a perfectly intact backbone, admiring it for a second before he lays it down. He's far too busy with his fish to appreciate that she is not just having dinner with him, she and her breasts are keeping him company.

I wonder if James is more interested in fish than Jenna's breasts.

The woman's hair is swept on top of her head into a curly pile. Looks like a shrub. No kidding, Mom could pass off that head topping as an azalea. With a gentle pat the lady assures herself that the “do” is still in place. I take in all the hairstyles. Her
dinner partner—slim, handsome, and exotically dark skinned—has jet-black hair, parted on the side and combed over flat. What sort of product has he used? I can see the comb marks clearly. It's as if his hair has been tilled. A lady twirling pasta has a cap of tight gray curls inspired by local sheep. Aren't there sheep in Ireland? Another woman has a raven-colored mane twisted into a snail-like concoction and stabbed with a tortoiseshell comb.

The styles are not as old as the town. But practically.

The woman with the snail-shaped twist ceremoniously devours oysters on the half shell, raising each shell as if for public viewing before tilting her head back and letting the oyster slide down her throat. She dabs her lips with a white napkin and selects another oyster, holds it up, and sees me watching. Abruptly she sets the shell back on the plate. Her eyes lock on mine, and then, like a virus that spreads from table to table, people stop slurping oysters, forking penne, twirling
spaghetti, filleting fish, sipping wine, and turn their heads my way.

They know I don't belong here.

I am definitely science exhibit A—I feel gigantic, misshapen, two headed as I weave between tables and dodge waiters, searching for the way out.
USCITA
. There is a sign. That must be the name of the restaurant. Or does it mean bathroom? Am I headed for the bathroom? The woman in black jabbers at me when I pass. What is she saying, why don't I understand anyone? I see another sign with the same name,
USCITA
. There's an opening, a seam in the plastic wall. A way out.

Pushing aside the plastic, I enter a swirling mist. Whirls of fog wrap me up and blind me, then unwind and breeze off, leaving behind a trail like a jet stream. In the sudden clearness, I spy a stone wall webbed with moss and ivy before I'm enveloped again, and this time the fog just sits on me. “Hello.” I toss a greeting into nothing. I can see my hand when I hold it in front of my eyes, but as I
lower my hand, it fades, as if covered with gauze, then disappears altogether. Nope, no hands, and no feet either, thanks to this soup. I stay put. No way am I hip-hopping around in fog as blinding as the wrapping on a mummy; who knows what I'll crash into. A strip of fog peels off, then another. They dance like streamers—does someone have them by the tail, is someone rippling them with the snap of a wrist? It's a shimmery sight, because in between the ribbons of fog are ribbons of life, which I try to assemble into one image. A wall here, there, too? Lots of leafy green. Red flowers. The sightings are disorienting—the glimpses are too brief, the images too wiggly. I can't be sure what they are or how they fit together, and then mercifully the fog thins and spreads to an even film and the world stops gyrating. Through a fine, fine mist like fairy dust, I can see where I am.

An ancient garden paved with rough uneven stones. Here and there, big terracotta pots boast geraniums so fat and lush and laden with red
blooms that Mom might have been here dumping in packets of plant food by the dozen. The high walls veined with moss and ivy are crude, rocky patchworks. There are two of them, one to my left and one to my right. Behind me the restaurant glimmers a soft amber behind the protective plastic, and directly ahead is a lagoon from which the fog rises like steam. Perhaps it's a hot spring.

Jenna's mom once went to a hot spring. In order to be in constant communication with her office, she'd gotten a BlackBerry. For weeks she did nothing but walk around the house with her head down punching that BlackBerry. We nicknamed her BlueBerry. We were hoping that one week relaxing at a hot spring might cure her addiction (and neck). So did Jenna's dad; her housekeeper, Alice; and probably even Mambo. But when BlueBerry came home, she was still obsessed. Finally Jenna's dad threw the BlackBerry in the garbage disposal, mangling it, and her mom and dad had a fight, screaming, slamming doors. Jenna was scared. We stayed
on the phone the whole time, and she asked, “What's divorce like, really?” and I said it wasn't a big deal, which was a big lie. I said the worst thing was that you had to travel from one house to another, but that was another big lie. The worst is that your family is gone, dead and buried, so even though you still have a mom and still have a dad, your family is history.

You worry about your parents, too, that they're okay…and you work hard to make them happy. I don't know why, but you do. (I know it doesn't seem like I try to make Mom happy. It might even seem like I try to make her miserable, but that's a post-Mel development.) The arrival of Mel meant I could go from trying to make her happy because maybe her life was wrecked to thinking that she was trying to wreck my life. The point is, divorce means your parents are on your mind. One way or another, they loom.

But anyway, I didn't tell any of this to Jenna, and fortunately her parents made up, and BlueBerry got
another BlackBerry, but she agreed to stop using it after seven at night.

I inch to the edge of the steamy pool, expecting to see bubbling water beckoning me in for a dip, but the lagoon is empty, a crater breathing forth smoky mist.

Keeping safely back, I skirt the rim. It curves, then hooks sharply, and I find myself at the tip of a skinny finger of land no wider than the length of an arm. Dusky air billows up the front and sides. I don't want to look into the pit again—it seems perilous; at the same time, I'm compelled to sneak a peek. No bending over, no risky neck extensions. I try to get a gander at what's down there by angling my eyeballs southward. The crater's edge is jagged, stones shaved and broken as if the person paving it got fed up and didn't finish the job. How easy it would be for some rock to come unglued—pressure from a size–nine-and-a-half foot in this clunky boot could do it—and I would plummet in.

As I retreat to safer ground, taking baby steps,
the air churns again with intermittent powdery blasts that dissipate in seconds. I hear murmurs. A man's low voice, a woman's giggle. Then they're silent and I notice the quiet, really absorb the utter absence of noise. This busy air that thins and thickens, swirls and blinds, is soundless. No whoosh, whirr, or whistle. No rasp of ivy against stone or flutter of those red geranium blossoms. The plants don't move at all. Why isn't there wind, if there's all this swirling action? My shirt hangs as limp as it would on a still day. Hedge hair doesn't ruffle either. More giggling.

Something about the giggles makes me cautious. I don't know why. “Who's there?” I whisper. Another fit of giggles. With the crater belching dragon breath on my right, and on my left a high stone wall, I cautiously proceed in the direction of the noise, and soon begin a downward trek on steep stone steps. I take each one sideways because the drop, at least a foot, requires a routine: balance on one foot, deep knee bend as I reach down to the
lower step, bring second foot down, and straighten up. Begin again. Each time the first foot lands, the impact sends a jolt up my thigh. Between cursing and concentrating, I don't see them until we virtually collide.

A man dressed in gray and tan is camouflaged against the rock. As far as I can tell, he has no idea I'm here. He faces the wall. With his arm raised, using his hand to brace himself, he's created a little alcove where, judging from more giggles, a woman is happily trapped. I can't help myself, I stare. Of her I spy only some limbs: her pale naked calves between his trousered legs, one arm dangling, her fingers looped around the thin strap of a small patent leather purse.

The man pivots slightly as he presses against her. Beside him, a plume of mist curls upward. What is that? Where's it coming from? His jacket. Is it smoke? “Fire,” I start to shout but slap my hand against my mouth because he pivots more. The lake of billowing mist widens, I now see, and cuts across
the steps and up the wall. Up the wall? How is that possible? How could this hole in the ground continue up the wall? How could it take a chomp right out of a man's back? Because that's what it does. His shoulder is there, his hips are intact, but a piece of his back as big as my fist is just plain missing where the crater invades it. Seemingly oblivious, the man continues romancing the woman.