Let's Be Frank

by Brea Brown

  “They won’t be.”

  “How do you know?”

  He starts packing his bats and helmet and batting glove into his duffel bag. “‘Awkward’ is the time Mom took aside Karin Fowler at the church Easter egg hunt and assured her that she’d told you and me all about how to please a woman, because she felt she had a moral obligation to raise men who were considerate lovers.”

  I laugh at the eighteen-year-old memory.

  “It wasn’t funny! Karin thought Mom was confessing to something illegal. It took me forever to convince her we’d never been molested and Mom was simply relaying to her—however inappropriately—that she’d contributed to the torturous ‘birds-and-bees’ talk Dad gave us.”

  “Gosh. I still can’t even read the word ‘clitoris’ without hearing it in Mom’s voice,” I reveal with a wince.

  Nick shudders and zips his bag. “I went months without so much as a wet dream after that talk. I was terrified Mom would show up in my sex dreams. And her well-intentioned stunt delayed the loss of my virginity by nearly a year. Karin dumped me, and she told a bunch of her friends what Mom had said.”

  “Sounds like free PR to me.” I shove my baseball equipment willy-nilly into the main compartment of my duffel, promising myself I’ll reorganize it later, before I put it back in storage.

  “My point is…” He stands and loops his bag’s strap over his shoulder. “…it sounds like it was a normal first meeting, for our parents. If they didn’t like Frankie, they would have told me for sure, right?”

  “Unless they think she’s the best I can do.” I zip my bag and stand, pushing my arms into my coat and buttoning it.

  Nick watches me, letting his mouth hang slack while he looks me up and down. He fingers my wool collar. “What the hell is this?”

  “It’s a peacoat,” I say while hoisting my bag.

  He claps a hand on my shoulder. “This coat—which looks like something mom would have made us wear with sailor hats for a portrait… when we were pre-schoolers—is about to prove my point.”

  “This should be good.”

  “Maybe you don’t have the luxury of being all that picky anymore.” When I snort, he talks louder. “Hear me out, Bro.” I put my hand on my hip but quickly let it fall to my side when he gestures derisively at my posture. “You’re not getting any cooler. Or younger. Maybe if you had a better sense of style or made more money or drove a flashier car, but… that would be a negative on all fronts, so…”

  “I need to aim lower, is that what you’re saying?”

  “From what I’ve heard, Frankie is hardly ‘aiming low.’ Still haven’t seen for myself, since you can’t seem to make up your mind about her enough to introduce us, but that’s a whole other discussion.”

  He turns and leads the way from the building to the parking lot. I follow, lengthening my strides to catch up, feeling like I always did when we were younger, and I tagged after him. I think I was perpetually out-of-breath until we hit high school.

  Halfway across the lot, he pushes a button on his key fob to pop open the trunk on his gleaming black Audi, which is already idling in the snow that’s accumulated since we’ve been inside the batting cages. White clouds billow from the car’s dual exhaust pipes. Who knows how long it’s been running out here, sending pollution into the ozone for the sake of my brother’s ultimate comfort.

  When I mutter something to that effect under my breath, he says, “I make a living saving lives. I think it evens out,” as he tosses his duffel into the yawning trunk and closes it just firmly enough for it to latch. A hydraulic mechanism hums, finishing the job and bringing the trunk flush with the rest of the car. Using the end of his scarf, he wipes his hand’s oils from the surface. “Now, are you ready to hear what I think you need to do?”

  “Are you going to tell me, no matter what?”

  “Yes. Because you filled my entire evening whining to me about your love life, when I could have been with my fiancée—”

  “Don’t say it.”

  “—doing a lot less talking.”

  I sigh.

  “So now I’m going to do the talking, and you’re going to listen.”

  I close the hatch of my car and lean against the cold, dark taillights. Shoving my hands as far down into my woolen coat’s pockets as they’ll go, I grumble, “Fine.”

  His arms crossed over his chest, his legs spread wide, he takes a deep breath, as if about to debrief a group of surgical residents. “Here’s how I see it. You want some kind of lifetime guarantee on a life partner, but guess what? That’s not gonna happen, Bro. You’re gonna have to give someone a chance to prove to you that moldy dishes and a cluttered coffee table aren’t deal-breakers.”

  “But—”

  “And are you gonna make it easy for her to stick to her cute abstinence pledge?”

  “Yes, because that’s what decent guys do. They respect the wishes of the women they’re dating, especially in regards to sex. What’s wrong with you?!”

  “If that was really her wish, I’d completely agree. But it’s like when Heidi says she doesn’t want…”

  “Careful…”

  “…dessert when we go out to eat. She wants dessert. She just doesn’t want to be the one to order it. She wants me to know what she wants and order it for her.”

  “Gosh, I used to hate that.”

  “Yeah, well… she makes up for it in other ways.”

  I throw up my hands. “I don’t know how we’re even brothers. You’re such a pig.”

  “I know women, that’s all.”

  If I didn’t suspect he was right, I’d continue to argue, but—as uncomfortable as this comparison makes me—something tells me Frankie’s using her sexuality like I use Saf-T-Pops with the kids at work, as motivation to coax me into giving her what she wants. I’m always straightforward about the agreement with the kids, though (“Hold still for this shot;” “Let me look into your hot, painful ear;” “Try not to flinch while I press on your boo-boo to check for broken bones”); I haven’t figured out what Frankie’s aim is. And I don’t understand her motives for keeping me in the dark. She’s not usually averse to asking—or demanding—anything.

  Barely short of whining, I ask Nick, “Why can’t I meet someone who’s funny and smart and good-hearted? Someone who doesn’t play games. Someone who’s relatively normal. And tidy.”

  “Because that person doesn’t exist.”

  “I can’t believe that. I won’t believe it.”

  “You’re free to believe whatever the hell you want to believe. Doesn’t mean it’s true. All I’m saying is, maybe you shouldn’t be so quick to quit on Frankie. Instead of focusing so much on the negative, focus on what life can be like if you stop holding back because you’re afraid to be vulnerable.”

  I laugh. “Whoa. Heidi’s been reading Cosmo out loud in bed, hasn’t she?” His sheepish smile confirms my hypothesis. “I knew it!”

  “It’s still good advice. Plus, I’m assuming Frankie’s seen your scrubs organized by color, and she’s seen you in that coat, but she’s still hanging around, so… she sounds pretty tolerant to me. She has a good sense of humor, if nothing else.” He blows into his hands and squints through the flurries at me. “I’m freezing my nuts off. You wanna go grab a beer and continue this conversation, or what?”

  I shake my head and push away from my bumper. “Nah. I’m gonna head home and… defrost.”

  “You’re going to take a hot bubble bath, aren’t you?”

  “Maybe,” I grudgingly admit, swiping the fine layer of snow from my car’s back window with the sleeve of my coat.

  With a shake of his head, he unlocks his fully defrosted car with a chirp and slides in. “Seriously. Examine what you really want. What’s scarier, coming to grips now with the reality that there’s no such thing as a perfect woman and dealing with it, or being in stubborn denial about it and ending up alone for the rest of your life?”

  Frankly, neither of those options appeals to me.


  *****

  I do my best soul-searching in the bathtub. Don’t judge, guys. Like I tell Nick, it works. Check out Mr. Darcy (the Colin Firth one). He was a smart guy, ruminating in the tub. Try it sometime. Get the water as hot as you can possibly get it, so hot it makes you sweat. Yeah, it’ll feel counterproductive, but you’re not in the bath to get clean. You can—and should—shower later. After all, you’re soaking in your own sloughed-off skin cells, hair, and body soil. But don’t think about that! Add some bubbles to make it at least smell good.

  I find that a nice scent—tonight, I’ve chosen a manly sandalwood, because I like irony—also softens the blow of some of the less pleasant things I realize about myself and my life while participating in this cleansing exercise.

  Scary realization #1: At the very least, I’m becoming that guy. You know, that guy. The guy who ends up alone for the rest of his life, because he’s impossible to please. I’ll be the guy who shuts himself up in his immaculate house, barking at kids to stay off his lawn. Who wants to be that guy? Not this guy.

  I want to be the guy who not only waves to his neighbors as they drive by his house while he’s working on the yard or washing his car in the driveway but knows them by name and takes time to actually talk to them once in a while. I want to chuckle good-naturedly with male neighbors about the “Honey-Do” list. I want to share baby due dates and deliver hot dishes to neighbors who’ve brought home their new babies. I want to exchange recipes. I want to commiserate about sick kids and humble-brag about Little League victories and track meet wins.

  Entry into that club, however, requires a wife and kids. And I’ll never have them if I don’t stop being so… selective.

  Scary realization #2: I’m no better than Heidi used to be when she’d nit-pick me to the point of change… from the way I shaved to the brands of food I purchased.

  Heidi had definite ideas about what she wanted and expected in a spouse, and she made it her mission the two years we were together to shape me into that guy before we walked down the aisle. And I didn’t mind, for the most part. Despite her Type-A personality, Heidi was (is, I suppose) a sweet, generous person… as long as the people in her life conform to her ideals.

  I considered myself lucky to be worthy of her efforts and was excited to be part of her charmed future. I didn’t give a shit what I’d be wearing in that life (nothing from last season… ever), as long as I had that life. It wasn’t until she snatched the dream away from me that I realized I didn’t even recognize myself anymore.

  In an effort to rediscover myself, I stripped my bachelor pad of anything there only because Heidi had made it so. That left me with a closet full of brightly-colored and cartoon-character-patterned scrubs, a few mementos from high school, college, and nursing school (including a beer bong), my laptop, and my entertainment system.

  I also pulled down a box of chick flicks that had been hiding and gathering dust in my closet, and I loaded up my Kindle with as many funny, quirky girlie books as it could hold by authors like Jennifer Weiner, Jane Green (old school, not her newer, darker stuff), Marian Keyes, Sophie Kinsella, Hester Browne, and anyone else Amazon recommended to me based on those selections. I went on a rom com bender on the naked mattress in the middle of my Beirut-chic bedroom and reacquainted myself with a guy I’d forgotten existed.

  When I emerged from my isolation at the end of that weekend, I felt shaky, like someone who’s come up on a horrendous accident scene, realizing if he’d not had to backtrack to the house to retrieve his jacket or stop for gas along the way, he might have been one of the people in those body bags.

  Unlike medical shock, though, this emotional shock was beneficial, healing. It reminded me that I was, indeed, alive, and I had escaped with my personality intact. Mostly. What I could remember of it, anyway. Some things I’d lost weren’t as obvious.

  At the time of our breakup, Heidi and I were looking for a house to buy together. None of the ones we viewed had fewer than five bedrooms, five bathrooms, and three living areas, and they all had master suites that looked like they came straight from the pages of Heidi’s favorite magazines about celebrities. The properties were sodded and landscaped to the hilt and would require hours and hours of upkeep on the weekends… or a gardener, which I knew we wouldn’t be able to afford, on top of the massive mortgage we’d be taking on.

  A few weeks after Heidi called off the wedding, I threw away all the real estate listing books, dripping tears and snot as I stood staring at them in the paper recycling bin. Was I mourning the idea of the crippling debt and all the yard work I knew I would have hated and grown to resent? No. I was mourning the death of the guy who had been willing to take that on in the name of love. I know, it was pathetic.

  Once the pain lessened to a dull ache following Heidi’s departure from my life (well, when I thought she was departing, anyway), and friends and family truly believed me that I didn’t need to be on glorified suicide watch, I’ll admit I over-corrected on my personality in an effort to relearn who I was. I promised myself I’d never let anyone—not even a woman I love—make me lose myself so fully again. It’s a perfectly good promise, but I may have taken it too far. Now it’s time to stabilize.

  Scary realization #3: I’m about to blow it with the smartest, most interesting, most beautiful woman to be interested in me since… well… you know.

  And why? Because of her brand of shampoo? Because she steals every single pickle from my plate when we go out to eat? (I love pickles, but still…) Because she drinks coffee at 10 p.m., then can’t sleep, then calls me at 1 a.m. to ponder why that’s the case and asks me to keep her company until she’s sleepy? Because she never turns off a light when she leaves a room? Because she mutters to herself and laughs out loud while reading, then refuses to share what’s so funny? Because I feel like I need to wear a Tyvek suit every time I enter her apartment? Most of those things don’t speak to her character, and if they do, they don’t necessarily point to a bad character. Just a different character than mine.

  Isn’t that a good thing? If we were too much alike, we’d drive each other crazy, right? Opposites attract. It’s science.

  Why is the fine line between compromise and settling such a hard one for me to walk? Why must the two be so synonymous in my mind? And why do I view anything short of my ideal as such a negative? Is all my pickiness a way to convince myself I’m on the road to male spinsterhood by choice, when the reality may be that I’m too odd to find someone who fits, someone willing to put up with my quirks?

  Because I have plenty of them. I’m not blind to that. Hell, I’m sitting in a bathtub right now. This behavior is… unusual for guys in the twenty-first century. I get that.

  It’s painful to admit this, but… maybe Nick’s right. I’m not getting any younger. My career may be on the right track, but my personal life feels hollow and empty. I want to lead a full life, not a half-life. I’m ready to get on with the life I want, not the one I currently have. And I think Frankie could bring my life a good balance, if I’d only relax.

  Like Nick said, maybe I should spend more time recognizing how nice it is that Frankie hasn’t tried to change a single thing about me, rather than fret about all the admittedly petty things I’d like to change about her.

  It’s time to stop being so guarded, so critical, so pessimistic. It’s time to be accepting, loving, and open to the idea that “different” isn’t wrong. I’ve been trying to convince people of that my whole life. Shouldn’t I give Frankie the same consideration?

  In a paraphrase of a line from one of my favorite movies, I’m ready to get the shit kicked out of me by love.

  Chapter Eight

  It’s been a month since my bathtub soul-searching and my conversation with Nick at the batting cages. During that time, I’ve been like someone who’s resolved to go to the gym “every single day,” at the start of the new year. In other words, I’m failing miserably.

  Fortunately, I didn’t tell anyone about my resolution to be more
accepting, and I only see my girlfriend on the weekends, when I can usually fake it pretty well, so I’m the only one who knows what a failure I am. As far as everyone else knows, things are progressing well with Frankie and me. Frankie doesn’t even suspect anything. And that’s good. Because I just need more time.

  I tell myself it’s taking me a while to come to grips with… everything… because I so seldom see her that it takes half of the weekend for me to reacquaint myself with all the things I’m supposed to be more accepting about. By the time I have the hang of ignoring the things that niggle at me so much, it’s Sunday night, and she’s pushing me out the door so she can pack for her next week on the road.

  I’m seeing some improvement, though. Like the new runner who finds his endurance increasing with each session on the treadmill or lap around the block, I’m noticing the weekends are feeling shorter and shorter. I actually missed her this week while we’ve been apart, and I’m looking forward to seeing her this evening.

  That anticipation is tempered by the fact I’ve barely heard from her all week. And I know, technology works both ways; I could have called or texted or even emailed her, and I have. Once or twice. But she never answered me.

  I’m sure it’s nothing, though. Sometimes she just has busy weeks, in and out of airports and conference rooms, and she barely has energy to eat dinner before passing out in her hotel room. That’s probably been the case this week. When I see her tonight, I guarantee that’s what she’ll tell me.

  First, I have to make it through the last day of one of the longest weeks of my life. There’s been an outbreak of stomach virus, which everyone keeps calling “the flu” (major pet peeve of mine), so I’ve been up to my eyeballs in puking kids all week.

  I’m sighing over the latest file for a ralphing patient when Lynette breezes by. “TGIF, Nate! Got any special Valentine’s plans with Frankie this weekend?”

  Oh, yeah… I forgot to mention that, didn’t I? It’s Valentine’s Day. Well, it was Valentine’s Day yesterday, but even a “holiday” as contrived as this one gets its own weekend nowadays. (What’s up with that, anyway?)