? Quiet. Discreet. Sane.
Before I worked for him I’d had a string of fresh-off-the-Greyhound jobs, the kind people my age go for when they’re not quite ready to settle into the practical careers they may have been wise enough to train for while they were in college. I had an accounting degree but hadn’t quite been able to bring myself to use it yet. I’d worked as a pet groomer, leaflet distributor, barista, sketcher of tourists in Central Park, black-shirted-to-blend-in catering staff, kindergarten assistant. When we met, I was working weekends at a computer store because my salary as a private school math teacher wouldn’t cover rent and food and insurance. At the store I had to wear a piece of plastic over my heart that read HI! I’M A GENIUS! ASK ME ANYTHING! After an hour of demonstrating shortcuts for managing his flow of information, Mr. Vargas told me I deserved every exclamation point on my name tag and asked me if I’d like to come work for him. “Does this job you’re offering me provide insurance and sick days?” I asked, though I had never missed a day of work in my life. It did. In those days when acquiring your own insurance was both astronomically expensive and hard to come by, a paying job that sounded glamorous and provided benefits sounded like a dream come true. The job came with insurance, sick days, and two weeks of vacation annually. Mr. Vargas didn’t have to ask me twice. I took it.
Which is how I’d landed on M. M. Banning’s welcome mat being chewed out by one of the premiere voices of this or any generation. I pulled myself together before she called the cops and said, “I am the girl Mr. Vargas sent.”
She put the phone in her cardigan pocket. “Well then,” she said. “If you’re done staring at me, I guess you can come inside.”
( 2 )
HIS NAME IS Frank.”
M. M. Banning and I were seated on the living room couch, watching her son playing outside in the hot, bright sun. The kid, dressed in a tattered tailcoat and morning pants accessorized with bare feet and a grubby face, looked like some fictional refugee from the pages of Oliver Twist, one who’d walked all the way to Los Angeles from Dickens’s London and had slept in ditches at night along the way.
When I say Frank was “playing” what I mean is that he was assaulting a peach tree with a yellow plastic baseball bat, scattering the green midsummer fruit as if the future of the human race depended on it.
“Does he always dress like that?” I asked.
“Some version of it.”
“That’s fantastic. Most kids don’t care about their clothes that much. They’re just as happy wearing T-shirts and a pair of shorts.” My mother always said that the best way to connect with anybody who was a mother was to find a way to compliment her child. An approach that served me well when I taught at the private school, even the times when it had been a stretch to come up with something nicer to say than “Your child is such a good little mouth-breather.”
“I know.” She sounded more irritated with me than pleased.
Strike one. I tried again. “Frank looks pretty energetic.”
“I go to sleep exhausted,” she said. “I wake up tired.”
Yes. I had a nice flight. Thank you so much for asking.
Frank went at the tree again, but in a slo-mo, Kabuki kind of way—his swing stylized, his face a mask. I decided to give it one more go. “Hey, is that a T-ball bat?” I asked. “I used to coach the T-ball team at the private school where I worked.”
“Then you should know a T-ball bat when you see one.”
She’s not one for small talk, Mr. Vargas had warned me. No kidding. I gave up and settled in to watch the kid strip the tree of the last of its unripe fruit. It was awkward sitting so close to M. M. Banning when we’d just met, but there wasn’t much furniture in the living room to choose from. Just the white slipcovered couch we occupied and a black baby grand player piano that had been working through a selection of jaunty Scott Joplin rags since my arrival. There was a piano bench, but I thought it would be weird to go to sit on that. No rugs, but wall-to-wall carpet in the hallway. My mother would have been interested to hear that, since she found nothing in the world tackier than wall-to-wall carpet, even though we’d lived in more apartments with it than without. There were no photos on the piano, no art on the walls. Unfaded squares of paint, though, where pictures must have hung until recently. Looking around the room, you got the sense M. M. Banning and her son were just moving into their house, or just moving out.
“Frank seems like an interesting kid,” I ventured finally.