Frannie in Pieces (3 page)

I develop a routine:
arriving at school at the very last second, lunch in the chemistry lab, and then directly home, where I mostly lie on the floor and space out on the light, although a huge evergreen outside the window blocks most of it. When I say I'm spacing out on the light, I'm really lying on my back eating chips. No one bothers me, because my mom works her butt off and The Mel commutes to the State University at New Paltz, an hour away. (Sometimes I call him “The Mel” because it sounds beasty, sometimes simply
“Beastoid.” With his hulky bod, bizarre hair wave, many freckles that I think of as spots, he definitely qualifies as part creature.)

Even at breakfast Mom is rarely present. At about five
A.M
. she drives to the flower markets in Poughkeepsie to buy what's fresh. When I was little, I would go with her, and I became expert at predicting which rosebuds would open and which would stay tightly closed until their heads drooped and it was curtains. With roses, the trick isn't cutting them and plunging them (Mom always says “plunge,” like it's a submarine, not a stem) into hot water. There's a second sense about whether a flower will blossom, and if you hang around enough of them, eventually you get the gift. Although once they open, there's no telling when they'll die. Sometimes they keep opening bigger and fuller and more and more gloriously. Sometimes a rose looks young and fresh and perky when you go to sleep, and the next morning the blossom flops like its neck's been broken.

For two weeks Jenna calls every night. Mom gives me the messages, but I ignore them. Finally I suppose that her mom called my mom, because my mom comes into my room, sits on the edge of my bed while I'm considering whether to sleep, and says, “I hear you're not seeing Jenna much.”

I just shrug.

“You guys have been friends forever, Frannie.”

“Things change.”

She rubs my foot through the blanket. “Do you want to talk about your dad?”

What does one have to do with the other? “No.”

“I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, sweetheart.”

She's not sorry, not deep down. I pull the covers up so only my eyes are showing.

Whenever my parents came face-to-face, I watched them carefully. Like when Mom and I bumped into Dad on Warren Street. “Hello, Sean,” she said.

I looked to see if she was smiling, but she wasn't.
She was opaque, which, if you look it up in the dictionary, means “impenetrable by light.” You wouldn't have a clue from looking at her what she was feeling.

“Where are you guys headed?” asked my dad. He never said her name, Laura.

“Liberty Diner,” I said. “Want to come?”

“No thanks.”

“He's on his way to the hardware store,” said my mom.

“As a matter of fact, I am.”

“How'd you know Dad was going to the hardware store?” I asked her while I ate my favorite sandwich, BLT, minus the T, on white toast with mayo.

She said, “Some things never change.” That was a negative remark. Here's the deal. They were frenemies. Public friends, private enemies. Now that he's gone, how miserable could she be?

The night after Mom's attempt at sympathy, both she and Mel show up. He sits in my desk
chair and polishes his glasses. She perches on the bed again.

“Don't think you're going to be my father,” I tell Mel.

“Good grief.” He gets up and leaves the room. One down. Maybe they'll have a fight about me later.

“Your dad left you everything, Frannie.”

I'm watching
This Old House
on my own personal TV.
This Old House
was my dad's favorite show. They're framing a porch. My mom picks up the remote and hits the mute button.

“We should go over there. When is school out for the summer?”

“Next Wednesday.”

“Saturday then. I'll take off work. You should take what you want to keep, and we'll pack up the rest for Goodwill, okay, sweetheart?”

On Saturday I wake up
with my head throbbing and have to keep a pillow over it. “I have a migraine,” I tell Mom.

“That's something new. How do you know about migraines?”

Who doesn't know about migraines? When Jenna's mom (aka BlueBerry) gets them, she lies on the couch, closes the blinds, and puts an icepack on her forehead, and everyone tiptoes. The slightest noise sends stabs of pain down her neck.

“I have pain shooting down my neck.”

Mom gently removes the pillow, tilts my head forward, and presses her fingers into the back of my neck. She rubs around and around. It feels fabulous. “That hurts and it's not helping.”

She leaves and returns with two Advils and a bowl of yogurt with honey.

“I can't swallow pills.”

“I know. That's why I'm putting them in yogurt.”

“Don't mash them.”

“I won't mash them.” She taps the pills into a spoonful of yogurt. “Come on, I swear this will work. Let the yogurt slide down your throat. I heard about this on talk radio.”

I am forced to follow her instructions, and the technique works. Thus ends a lifetime of near choking.

An hour later Mom and I are pulling up to Dad's.

The house looks the same, as sturdy as ever. I can't tell you how strange that is. I expect it to be crying. A crying house. Not really, or maybe really.
What I mean is I expected evidence. Not crying, but drooping.

The small one-story house was built two hundred years ago. It has wide weathered shingles and a narrow front porch supported by plain posts. There used to be two small windows, one on either side of the door, but my dad removed them and cut bigger ones. He framed them in wood he'd scavenged from an old barn. The window wood, gray-ish, did not match the house wood, more brownish. “We're not into matching, are we?” Dad even found old glass for the new windows. For reasons I can't explain, thanks to this old glass, flat reflections appeared to have texture and depth, like ripples and pleats. “Just an illusion,” Dad pointed out, “but life is an illusion.”

Why is life an illusion?

I have to think about that, because frankly that is one thing he said that I don't get.

Two birch trees tower over the house. We called them the twins. Elegant with white trunks, they're
lean, spare in the branches department, and tend to bend and sway. A lilac bush grows right out from under the porch. “An act of will if I've ever seen one,” said my dad. Judging from the scads of petals strewn about, it bloomed this spring. Out of respect, it shouldn't have produced a single blossom.

Dad didn't like grass. He planted curly moss instead. No upkeep. As a result, he was not popular on Rosewood Avenue, because everyone else's lawns look like golfing greens. “How long you keeping that stuff, Sean?” “Still like it?” “Aren't you getting sick of it?” Mr. Kinokan, two doors away, never shut up about Dad's moss. “He's stuck on the moss,” my dad used to laugh. “What's Mr. Hate Moss going to say today?” I would whisper when we happened to be outside at the same time he was. I guess Mr. Kinokan has high hopes now that there will be a new owner, perhaps another enemy of originality. I mention new owner because the shock when we drive up is a
FOR SALE
sign.

We sit in the car for a second looking at it.

“Who put it up for sale?”

“Your dad's lawyer. Whatever it brings is yours. We're going to put the money away for your college education.”

“Has he been inside?”

“Who?”

“The lawyer.”

“I suppose.”

I'm thinking about the white mold and wondering if it has spread. Maybe the mold is taking root like the moss. Moss outside, mold inside. Suppose the mold gets me?

“Come on, Frannie. You'll feel better if we take care of things.” Either better or dead from an attack of mold.

When we get to the front door, my mom commences a hunt through her purse. “My God, where is it?”

“What?”

“The key.”

To my knowledge my mom has never been in Dad's house, ever. “Who gave you a key?”

“His lawyer.”

“Look under that big rock. That's the one I use,” I say, but at the very same time, she holds up a key dangling off a miniature wooden pennywhistle. “Here it is.”

“Where'd you get that?”

“I just told you, your dad's lawyer.”

“But that's Dad's key. That's his key chain. He carved that pennywhistle.”

“I assumed that.”

“Mom, how did they get Dad's key?”

“Frannie, what's the problem? They didn't steal it. It was probably with his stuff. Like his wallet.”

“You mean the police went trolling through the house? Do you have the wallet, too?”

“Yes. I have it at home.”

“And you didn't tell me?”

“Frannie, calm down.”

“I don't want you to come inside.”

“What?”

My mom paces back and forth on my dad's porch.

“I'm sorry, but I don't.”

“You want to do this alone?” She drops her purse and presses the fingers of both hands into her forehead. I guess now she's got the migraine.

“Yes, I do.”

“You don't want my help?” She moves her hands to her hips and looks every direction but at me. Is help on the way? Is a posse expected? Is Mel going to screech up in his trusty Honda?

“Is it my house or not?”

“Frances Anne, you are a bronco.” She always uses my whole name when she is utterly exasperated. “I will leave for two hours. Then I'll see how you're doing. Come on, help me get the cardboard boxes out of the trunk.”

She leaves me on the porch with about twenty collapsed cardboard boxes and one of those gigantic tape dispensers, which she demonstrates how to
use, assembling one box for me. I have to face Mold World alone.

I am scared. Scared and acting stupid. How could Mom have left me here?

I put the key in the lock and do the trick Dad taught me—pull the door toward me and then turn the key. It clicks. The door swings back and sticks in the usual place, where an old floorboard juts up. I push the door open the rest of the way.

His living room now reminds me of Dr. Glazer's waiting room. Dr. Glazer is my dentist. The magazines are stacked on the trunk in three even piles. Someone has plumped the pillows along the back of the couch and covered the bottom cushion, faded green, with one of Dad's striped blankets, a stack of which, on the floor, used to serve as a kind of reclining spot. The blanket is stretched and tucked tightly, possibly with hospital corners. I'm not familiar with hospital corners, but I've heard about them, and these excessively neat folds have hospital written all over them. His rectangular hooked rug, another
street prize, which he always set at an angle, is centered in front of the couch. All the small stuff we collected, displayed on the bookshelf, is spaced evenly in a row, small objects in front. And dusted.

I guess his lawyer brought in a cleaning patrol.

Mess is so comforting. I didn't realize this until now, until I look at Dad's living room with none of his personality left in it.

The shades, rolls of bamboo, are unfurled. Never, in all my time at Dad's, have the shades been down and the light, sun or moon, shut out.

I peek into the kitchen. His chipped tile counter gleams, and to the right of the faucet stand Fantastic, Joy dishwashing detergent, and a sponge. Not my dad's. Whoever cleaned is planning to return and clean again. The place smells arid and artificial. Lemony. I open the cabinets—his dishes are stacked too neatly. I check the utensil drawer, where Dad threw things willy-nilly. Still chaos. What a relief. As for the refrigerator…It takes nerve to look inside, but I do. There are no leftovers
growing crusty or taking root. All that remains are a few jars, each with a secure lid and long shelf life: mayonnaise, Tabasco, Dijon mustard, ketchup.

If you think I'd want to draw this bunch of jars, you'd be wrong. An open milk carton, a wastebasket with crumpled paper inside—those images suggest life. Carefully organized objects—like a fake arrangement of some apples and a pear—suggest the opposite, which would be D-E-A-T-H.

Except one thing. I might draw the tomato can holding pencils. Pencils sharp. Waiting.

I'm not going into the bathroom. Fortunately the door is closed. No sign of mold seeping out from under it.

The narrow hall leads to our bedrooms, mine so little and cozy that my dad dubbed it “the bird's nest.” He built a loft bed, and I climb the ladder to look at the red down comforter and the pillowcases with their covered wagons and cowboys. Too babyish for me, but still I want them. I toss the pillows down, pull the comforter off the bed, and then drag it all into the living room.

I venture into Dad's room next.

He didn't believe in bureaus. Well, it might not have been a belief exactly, since he never made any declarations about it, and you may have noticed he was big on declarations. He kept all his clothes on open shelves. He constructed them from the beautiful old barn wood he also used for the window frames. The hardest thing about going through Dad's house is that he made almost everything with his own hands or else found it. He didn't buy his bedroom set
and shelves at IKEA, the way Mom did for me when we moved in with Mel. How will I choose what to take? How can I leave anything behind?

The only thing on the wall in his bedroom is a giant corkboard. “This wall belongs to you, Frannie.” From top to bottom and side to side, he tacked my artwork galore, some from when I was very small drawing pigs and chickens with crayons or markers. For some reason I was really into pigs and chickens. He also displayed my recent efforts: an open car trunk with bags of groceries inside, a rake abandoned in a pile of autumn leaves, an issue of
Condé Naste Traveler
“All about Italy,” open, facedown in bands of bright sunlight.

I wonder if Dad ever thought about what he wore, because he kind of had a uniform—a light-blue work shirt worn unbuttoned with the tails hanging out over a T-shirt; black or blue jeans; a brown leather belt about two inches wide with a brass buckle shaped like a star. Sometimes I used his favorite sweater, a light beige pullover, for a blanket while I watched TV. He'd had it forever. When I was younger, like around six years old—right after the divorce, when I was a scaredy-cat about sleeping over at my dad's—he'd light a fire and read to me from my favorite book,
Where the Sidewalk Ends
. He'd be wearing that sweater and his arm was around me. I remember picking at the sleeve.

The sweater lies on top of the shirts, folded carefully, not carelessly the way my dad did it. I pull it over my head. The sleeves dangle below my hands, the V comes down practically to my waist, and the bottom skirts my thighs.

Next to the shelves are my dad's duck-hunting boots. My dad would never hunt a duck, but that's
what they're called in the catalogue, and they're useful for tromping in mud. I yank off my shoes and put my feet into the boots.

I assemble a few boxes and pack up the rest of his clothes. I'm keeping them. In a way they're friends. Even though the shirts were identical, I can tell them apart. One has a frayed collar; another, a black ink spot on the pocket; a third, purple stains from being thrown in the washing machine with my red comforter (my mistake). After that, I clomp back into the living room. It isn't easy to walk in his shoes. I have to clench my toes each time I lift my foot to make sure I take the boot with me and don't leave it behind. It's fun actually. Fee fi fo fum. For a second I forget why I'm here.

I put together a bunch more boxes. First I'll pack his clothes, then all the objects we collected. I need newspapers to wrap our treasures securely, so I tromp through the backyard to the big shed. I know where the key to the padlock is, above the
window tucked between overlapping shingles. It's a big iron key. I fit it into the heavy old padlock, need both hands to turn it, and the lock releases. I lift off the padlock, turn back the metal flap, and hear the familiar creak as I open the door.