Frank (fiction)

Her teacher advised them to “write about what you know”, but as she sits in front of her laptop at the kitchen counter she is more than a little unsure that anyone would be interested in what it is she knows. Likely the people that are in the class with her have known more things than she has. No, that’s not correct. It would be more apt to perhaps think that the things that they have experienced are more interesting than, say, the time she seemingly lost a year to the fugue state that she was in after the birth of her child. Who wants to hear about her dim recollections of chapped and sore nipples and of days that flew by and yet somehow she was still not able to have dinner on the table for her husband when he returned and, surely, every time she went to the grocery store to pick up that one missing item she returned with bags of food that included everything but.
She thinks about Jenna – one of the only people whose name she was able to remember after their first class – and the way she leaned forward so intently tonight that her shirt rode up a little bit and she was able to see the lace edging of her panties and then, above that, the darting tendrils of tattoo that snaked out from underneath her shirt. Darkened curlicues. The snaking remnants of Japanese characters or perhaps a butterfly or some Celtic pattern. What would Jenna know? What has Jenna experienced? When she was Jenna’s age she was married to the first boyfriend she had ever known and they lived in a dark and always musty basement suite that had brown and orange shag rugs that always seemed to be slightly damp underfoot while she worked as a teller at the bank and he was a fledgling window salesman and, after paying for rent and utilities and food, they would tuck whatever denomination of bills (mostly twos, because they still existed back then, and fives) into a jar that was secreted in the back of their closet, hoping to have a house of their own one day.
She wonders about Jenna, who is beautiful. She imagines her to be waitress or a hostess at one of the chain restaurants downtown with her beautiful smile and her wide eyes and her long, slightly mussed blonde hair. Jenna makes tips hand over fist and is paying her way through school (she wants to be a nurse, a veterinarian, a legal secretary or possibly she is just taking general courses, dabbling in history and psychology which she finds infinitely interesting, but she knows that there is no financial future there), and is taking this creative writing course because she writes poetry and her friends ceaselessly encourage her to pursue it. Unfortunately the poetry isn’t very good. It’s overwrought and clichéd and could be the next Nickleback song of the week.
Aren’t we judgmental, her inner voice chides. And what is it that you spend your time listening to these days, it asks. Barney. Dora the Explorer. Not the Teletubbies: she never understood the allure of those amorphous, unintelligible things.
Back to Jenna, though. Jenna with the slim, curving waist and the long legs. Jenna bringing trays of Dewar’s and Stoli and Grenache to businessmen who become increasingly ribald as their business lunch wears on, though Jenna handles it with graciousness and aplomb because with her beauty, even at the young and tender age of twenty-one, she understands men and how to handle them. She endures their laviscious grins and their progressively uninventive come-ons and closes out the night counting her tips which are in the hundreds.
What then? Then a boy – a nice boy – comes to pick her up on his motorbike after work. He asks her how it was tonight after he parks the bike at Spanish Banks and they walk down onto the beach, spreading a blanket and lying down, feeling the coolness of the sand through the blanket as they gaze up at the few stars that reveal themselves through all the light pollution, listening to the gentle lapping of the ocean as the heady scent of damp sand and the ocean and pot waft over them. She says it was fine and reaches for his hand though he knows it was not fine and he has seen her at work and it has made his blood boil to see the way she is treated by some of her customers, but he feels impotent because he doesn’t have the means to offer her a better life. Not yet, anyways.
He will, though.
Still, this is not what she knows. This is what she surmises. She pauses as her baby makes hiccupping sounds that could indicate that he is on the verge of waking, of squalling out for her. She glances at her watch: her husband will be home in two hours which means she should start dinner in about an hour so that it is ready for him whenever he deigns to take it. Tonight she is making beef stroganoff. She has decided to stick to the tried and true since the night she tried to make chicken jalfrezi and, after two bites, he declared it inedible and fed it to the garburator. It wasn’t inedible, she knows. He just doesn’t like it when she tries to think or do anything that he can’t control. We live in Canada, he told her, Why can’t you just stick to the basics? She has since wondered if he would even get it if she made him mulligatawny soup. Maybe some ptarmigan.
She leans back, away from her computer and sips on her chai tea which is now tepid, wondering what is the point of it all. Why is she taking this course? Is she really going to become the next J.K. Rowling? What does her teacher know, anyways? Clearly she is not so accomplished in her own right that she has to pay the bills by teaching this course at the local community college. How many fledgling authors received rejection notices and bad reviews by critics less skilled than them?
She recalls the lover she had a few years ago. He was an architect and had put forth the same argument after watching his fellow students advance, proverbial cap in hand, as they put forth their models, their renditions, their terminals, schools, art galleries, low income housing, private residences and then sat back as their ideas and theories were questioned, shaken, torn asunder by people men and women who were architects in theory only.
“What did you do?” she had asked him one afternoon, propping herself up on one elbow and gazing down at him, the edge of her hair trailing against his shoulder as he idly traced his hand over the slight ridges of her ribcage and over the contour of her hip.
“I wanted to say, ‘I think Frank would’ve liked it’. But instead I went back to my residence, had a nervous breakdown and seriously contemplated a change in career,” he had responded.
“But you didn’t,” she encouraged him, smiling, bending forward to kiss the smoothness of his shoulder.
“I didn’t,” he said. “‘Don’t let the bastards get you down’,” he told her, loving her so much at that moment: the way the light filtered through the sheers of her bedroom and highlighted the shimmering auburn in her hair, taking in her half smile and then tugging at her so that, unbalanced, she fell against him, her warm skin pressed against his.
He committed suicide six months later when she was two months pregnant. During a spectacular winter storm, the owner of a home that he designed and built on the rocky shores of Tofino had died when a wave surged through the glass wall of the bedroom, gravely injuring him. He was despondent for days, even though he had advised his client to either build the house further back on the property, or to install a concrete barrier on the deck in front of the bedroom. The owner would not be dissuaded and had insisted on the glass wall. His housekeeper found him dead in his Volvo in the garage, the car still running.
Thinking of this, she pushed her chair away from the kitchen table and went into the baby’s room, staring down at his face which was turned away from her, facing the pale yellow wall that she herself had painted and bordered with a paper emblazoned with gamboling puppies and kittens.
She had never had a paternity test. She couldn’t stand the thought that her baby might belong to anyone else.