Frannie in Pieces

by Delia Ephron

  “I’m sure you can figure it out. You’d better get started—everyone else has been working for a week.” Harriet nods approvingly. I can’t help overhearing Simon’s booming voice. “Sensitivity, dudes, let’s hear it for sensitivity.” He insists that they cheer several times until he’s satisfied with the level of pep. “Today we’re working on friendship and conversation,” he tells them. Mr. Marry-Me-and-Be-My-Canoe is teaching the art of conversation.

  A crackle of lightning, and everyone stops what they’re doing, waiting for the boom of thunder to follow. “Will the roof fall?” asks Isabel.

  “Maybe.”

  “The roof won’t fall,” says Harriet. “That’s ridiculous. What are you talking about, Frances?” Digging into the garbage bag, she produces several pots that she proceeds to place strategically to catch the many leaks. Meanwhile, the rain on the roof sounds like animals stampeding, and the damp, seeping through the old boards, creates areas of discoloration like sweat marks. Sure, the roof won’t fall, but the barn is sweating. Like that’s normal. The sides will collapse, I’ll be buried under debris for days and end up a vegetable. If I ever see the puzzle again, I won’t even recognize it.

  “Look, Barbie’s swimming pool.” Seymour grabs Beatrice’s doll and dunks her head in a pot. Fortunately, the pot has barely an inch of water. Beatrice snatches the doll back, and to my surprise Amber starts whacking Seymour with her Barbie, landing blows all over his head and shoulders. He stumbles backward and almost falls on Lark’s parachute. Lark throws her body over it as if she’s protecting her baby from gunfire.

  I yank Seymour away, but Amber, the tiger, keeps swinging. Simon lifts her into the air. “Sensitivity, both of you.” He moves two campers over to make space, drops Amber into the circle, and pushes Seymour in next to her. Seymour has not been working on a parachute. His sole interests are tormenting girls and gum chewing. He takes wads he’s done with and sticks them on himself. Simon plucks one from Seymour’s forehead and flicks it into the garbage can.

  “I don’t know what to make,” whines Pearl. “Frannie, what should I make?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Lark’s parachute, decorated with the face of a lion, is a remarkable creation. She’s slathered glue onto several identically sized circles of yellow tissue, about three feet in diameter, and stuck them together so the main body of the parachute has a little extra weight and stiffness. I use it for a demonstration model. The parachutes are most likely to waft down gently and the eggs to land safely if the main frame is shaped as Lark’s is, I show them. She acknowledges my compliment with a wiggle of her shoulders and a few thrusts of her fists. On top of the parachute she’s built the lion’s face: a wreath of short strips of brown, gold, and copper for a shaggy mane, flat round black eyes, a cone of brown tissue for the nose, and an open gaping mouth—the better to eat you with—which she’s working on now. As she concentrates on shaping a twisted rope of tissue into an oval and gluing it down, her own mouth gapes open in imitation. “I’m going to stuff red tissue inside,” she says.

  “The tongue?”

  “The tongue.” She sticks hers out. “I’ll rest the egg on it.”

  “I hope mine drops like a bomb,” says Gregor, who is gluing tissue around an inflated balloon (another technique suggested by the book). When the tissue dries, he’ll pop the balloon with a pin, and the hardened tissue should remain balloon shaped. Then he must cut a small hole in the tissue balloon and glue in a bunch of tissue shreds or a toothpick basket to carry the egg. Before Amber got hijacked into sensitivity training, the Barbies were building a boat parachute, powder blue with silver stars.

  “Suppose the wind won’t carry it? Suppose there’s no wind?” asks Beatrice.

  “If there’s no wind, the ground will be splattered with yolks and broken parachutes.” Out of the corner of my eye I see that Simon has arranged his campers in pairs. They face each other cross-legged.

  “I don’t know what to make,” says Pearl.

  “A butterfly. Sit right down here and make a butterfly.” Before I scream, but I don’t say that.

  “What color?”

  “Pink.”

  Rocco is making a centipede parachute. Many legs, different-colored strips of tissue, dangle off a long rectangle, the main body. His bug could never walk because all the legs are different sizes. He doesn’t cut tissue, he rips it. He and his sister are from different worlds—she methodical and exacting, he charismatically chaotic. Sitting on his shoulder, watching him splatter as much glue on himself as on the tissue, is Leo. Isabel has tied a red ribbon around his rubbery green tail, and he looks festive, a Christmas lizard in August.

  “Leo can fly. Who wants to hold Leo?” asks Rocco. “For five dollars, anyone can hold him who wants to.”

  “Me, and I’m not paying.” I place an open hand next to Rocco’s shoulder, and Leo pads on. I contemplate him, he contemplates me. I think he’s smiling, like a Buddha, as if he has wisdom and knowledge that all of us don’t. He seems peaceful. Leo the anxiety-free lizard. Brave to be anxiety-free when your primary caregiver is a maniac. Every so often his throat contracts and inflates again. Every so often his tongue flicks out, but otherwise he remains still. Have you ever heard the expression “No one’s home,” meaning that the person is vacant, empty, even soulless? With Leo, someone is definitely home. Could he be Dad reincarnated? I know that’s a bizarre notion, but imagine: Your dad dies and you find a lizard, keep it in a box, and, unbeknownst to you, it’s really your dad. You figure that out because one night he crawls into the moo shu pork, your dad’s favorite Chinese food. I could draw that—a perfect white box and Leo’s triangular head and sweet bulging eyes peeking over the top. I could call the drawing “Dad’s Back.”

  Dad is back and waiting for me in the puzzle.

  Suppose I can’t get in again?

  That thought is tormenting me.

  I put Leo in his box on top of a pile of dry grass. I tickle his tail. He stretches his legs before moving away.

  “I’ll do it with Frannie. We’ll demonstrate,” I hear Simon announce.

  I whip around.

  He waves me over to his little circle.

  “That’s okay, thanks anyway, we’re busy over here.”

  “Frances, Simon needs your help,” Honker rasps in my ear.

  “Well, that’s too bad, I’m very busy. Keep working,” I tell the kids, but they don’t. While Simon keeps waving and calling, “Come on, Frannie,” they look at Simon, then at me. Back and forth. Their brushes, poised in the air, drip glue; scissors pause mid slice.

  “Frannie, Frannie, Frannie,” Simon chants and they all join in.

  The Honker gives me a push, the nerve. While everyone cheers, I step over and around children and parachutes. It seems a very long distance to Simon and not long enough. “What am I supposed to do?” I inquire in a most businesslike way, and in response, he sits down on the floor and crosses his legs. I follow suit, facing him. He inches closer until our knees are touching, and without being obvious I avoid eye contact. My eyes dart over his shoulder, at his left ear, at the scrunched-up section of his T-shirt, the light hair on his wet arms. “We are going to close our eyes and feel each other’s faces,” he says.

  A sudden cold sweat with the humidity at ninety. I am experiencing panic. “What does this have to do with sensitivity?”

  “She’ll see,” he tells the campers. “Okay, dudes, are you ready?”

  The dudes are ready. Even Lark is fascinated. While cradling the red tissue tongue in her hands, she stares; her eyes pop to the widest shutter opening; her thin half-moon brows rise. Rocco, riveted as well, has his finger up his nose. Hazel, engrossed in peeling glue off the tips of her fingers, stops scraping. Isabel, with a beatific grin, expects to see something romantic, while Harriet, her face all pinched and practical, is viewing the proceedings scientifically. I recognize the look from biology class, whack, down comes the chopper. “Let’s slice up this frog’s head, the brains
are green, can everyone see this? Hey you, Jack, in the back row, can you see these brains?” She’s Jack in the back row, craning to see the results of the experiment. They are all waiting. Someone has waved a magic wand, and they are statues and will be freed only by my submitting to Simon.

  “We’re going to shut our eyes and feel each other’s faces,” Simon repeats.

  I am so intent on cool, so intent. I’m going to feel his face but I’m not going to feel his face when I feel his face because someone else is sitting here knocking knees with Sensitivity Man, not Frances Anne Cavanaugh. An impersonator, a stand-in. “You’re witnesses,” I tell the kids. “If he doesn’t shut his eyes, too, I expect you all to yell.” To him I hiss, “This has nothing to do with sensitivity.”

  He ignores me. “On three we start. One…two…three.”

  I shut my eyes. You know what that’s like in daylight: You’re looking at the insides of your eyelids, murky shadows, and along the bottoms, a rim of lifeless light as if the sun is setting on a brown day.

  After a few agonizing seconds, I feel his fingers touch my cheek, a hand presses down, skin rough and callused clumsily pats over my nose to the other cheek as if he’s trying to determine my species, girl or elephant. I start to giggle. “Sorry.” Get a grip, Frannie. I stick out both arms, hands up and wide open, trying to make this as silly as possible, but it’s unnerving not knowing the distance or location. Whoa, my hands collide with a land mass, his face. Tap-dancing my fingers around, I climb the little mountain of his nose, encounter an eye. His lashes tickle the tip of my third finger. Intentionally I brush the wrong way across his eyebrows. I locate a blister somewhere—it’s harder to identify face geography than I expect—but if I concentrate on touching him, I’m less aware of his hands touching me. What’s this? His chin bone? I’m tracing the line, chin to ear, when he smoothes my lip with his finger and electricity shoots down my spine.

  “That’s enough.” I open my eyes and am looking directly into his. Not the least bit unnerving, locking eyes with Simon is actually pleasant. I could walk right in and sit right down, stretch out across those pale blues and pitch a tent there without thinking twice. He’s nice. That thought surfaces the way an object floats to the surface of water and reveals itself.

  “Now Frannie has to ask me a question.” He gazes steadily at me but addresses the kids.

  “How did you learn to canoe?” I say. How lame is that? Utterly. And yet, do I care?

  I’m not wise, but I am aware, as if another part of me is watching, that my defenses are scrambling to get back into service. I have no interest in them, because I like it where I am, paddling around in Simon’s eyes, doing the breaststroke, the back-stroke, kicking from one end of the pool to the other.

  “Canoe?” says Simon. “Well, my dad. My dad taught me. My folks have a cabin in the Adirondacks. We go there on holidays and weekends. I learned everything about the outdoors from my dad. Next year my dad and I are going to Yosemite.”

  Next year his dad and he…they’ve got plans. Things they’re going to do together.

  “Now Frannie has to ask a follow-up question.” Again he addresses the campers without breaking eye contact with me.

  Next year his dad and he…I feel my chest cave, and other parts reflexively tighten, my arms, my neck, even my jaw stiffens trying to keep the sadness at bay. The only comfort is Simon’s blue eyes. They seem to see deep inside me, right to the wound. “You know what, Frannie doesn’t have to ask a question.” He takes me off the hook. “I’ll ask her one. What’s in your pocket?”

  “What?”

  “Your shirt pocket. What’s in it?”

  “Nothing.”

  I slip my hand inside to prove it and find an object instantly familiar—the weight, the flatness, the jigsawed edges. What is a puzzle piece doing in my pocket? How did it get there?

  I show it to him. “My dad made me a jigsaw puzzle.”

  Except for Jenna and James, he’s the first person I’ve told, and it escapes me that it’s not a confidence, that dozens of kids watching are also privy to this fact that has no meaning to them but means everything to me.

  The spell—if this eye captivity is a spell—breaks because I glance at the puzzle piece. It’s the very same one I put into the puzzle the night before. The yellow one with white printing, GRAVINO. In my mind’s eye I see my hand moving over the puzzle, turning the piece so the sides line up properly, and then pressing down, feeling the click that confirms the match. Is it there and here at the same time? Or just here? And how? Why?

  “Can I carry your purse? Please, please, please.” I hear Pearl’s unmistakable whine.

  My purse? I look up. Every single person, including Simon, has turned toward the door. Behold the ENP, wearing a see-through plastic raincoat. Looking at her is like looking through a shower curtain. Even though, underneath, she’s dressed in shorts and a tank top, the effect is that she isn’t wearing a single thing. Every camper is dumb-struck except Pearl, clamoring to be lackey for the day. Simon stares. He licks his lips. I guess this is the real sensitivity training.

  I tuck the puzzle piece back in my shirt pocket and, for safety, fasten the flap over the top.

  28

  I must have patted my pocket every five seconds that day, making certain the piece was still there, that it hadn’t escaped or I hadn’t imagined its presence—a side effect of Simon’s eyes, formerly as compelling as grapefruit, revealing depth and compassion and understanding, creating confusing flutters in unexpected places. All this flesh trembling couldn’t have caused a puzzle piece to transport itself through space into my shirt pocket. I mean, face pawing can electrify one’s nerve endings, but induce telekinesis? I don’t think so.

  Arriving home, I fly from the bus into my house and up the stairs. At the bedroom door I halt and take a second to make sure I’m alone and likely to remain so. I poke my head into the stairwell leading up to the attic, Mel’s hideaway office. Silence. He appears to be buried in books. I listen carefully for noises, any, anywhere. Not even a mouse. Nevertheless, opening my bedroom door softly, inch by inch, will minimize the risk of arousing Beastoid, catapulting him out of a medieval reverie into a sense of duty. “That must be dear Frannie. I’ll say hello. That will shock her hair straight. Let’s see, it’s her hundredth return home with no greeting.” I shouldn’t complain about not being greeted when I crave not being greeted, not to mention that I’m borderline rude to him. Okay, not borderline. Avoiding an encounter with The Mel at all costs, I slip quietly inside my room and find Jenna, cross-legged on my bed, tears streaming rivers down her cheeks, her face crimson from crying. Around her, many balled-up white tissues create the impression that she’s nesting in Styrofoam.

  “James,” she chokes out, and then throws herself facedown on the pillow. Her back shakes. Eventually she gets her story out (although some of it is muffled by down), about how she salted rice without tasting it first, and he said she shouldn’t. You should always taste something before salting it, he told her. She tried to blot the salt off.

  “You tried to get the salt off? Who are you?”

  “What?”

  “He tells you not to salt something and you try to rub the salt off?”

  “Blot it.” She flips over and grabs a bunch more tissues.

  “That’s ridiculous. Who are you?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.” Her voice quivers.

  “I mean it’s just James everything, James this, James that. He’s a food tyrant. He tells you not to salt something and you act like a serf.”

  “I’m not a serf.”

  “You’re obsessed with him and you act like nothing exists but him, you don’t even exist.”

  “That’s mean, Frannie.”

  “Jenna, I have something important that I have to do. Excuse me.” I get on my knees and slide the puzzle board out. Jenna kicks it back in.

  She says, “I don’t see where I’m worse than you.”

  “Jenna, really strange
things are happening—I found this puzzle piece—” She sits up straight now. No one sits more erect than Jen. “Look.” I try to be kind. “This amazing thing happened and you’re carrying on about rice.”

  “Not rice, risotto, which is a special kind of rice.” Her voice squeaks and trembles. “It takes forever to make, you have to stir it every single second, and maybe James was tired and that’s why we had an awful fight.” Fight, uttering the word, produces a new flood, but she swipes one eye, then the other, to stem it. “He made it with shrimp and he used the shells to flavor the broth, which was pretty ingenious, and then, you see, it needs Parmesan and that’s a salty cheese. I salted it, so—” She bobs her head several times. Is she agreeing with his point of view?

  “You’re losing your identity.”

  “What’s my identity?” she wails.

  That is just too deep for me, I don’t have time to deal with this now. Although…“Why am I worse than you?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Why?”

  “All you think about is the puzzle and…”

  “And what?”

  She looks around the room, eyeing the boxes that still clutter it. I can see she’s trying to decide what to say, whether to say, how much to say, so I have to set her straight on the absolute obvious. “My dad and James are not the same. I mean, if you took one of those scales of justice, and put James being mean on one side and Dad being dead on the other—”

  “He didn’t speak to me all through dinner.”

  “If you put James on one side and Dad on the other, the thing would tilt totally—I can’t believe I’m even explaining this to you.”

  “So like forever after, you hurt worse than me?”

  “Maybe.”

  “And you get to think about yourself all the time but I don’t.”

  “I don’t think about myself all the time.”

  “Yes, you do. Get real. I’ve been so nice and you don’t even notice.”

  “How’d you get in?”

  “Huh? What?”

  “Into the house, Jenna? Does Mel know you’re here? I’m wondering if he’s going to come barging in and see the puzzle, although he won’t, will he, because you kicked it under the bed?”