On the street where Frankie grew up is a rock the size of the Volkswagen van her father had piled all his belongings into before setting off on a road trip that would never end. The rock sat, gray and smooth, at the crest of a lazy suburban hill, the halfway point between her and Ethan’s houses. It was a subject of dispute between the two houses on either side of the rock over whose property it fell on and because it belonged necessarily to no one, it belonged to Frankie and Ethan.
In the years after her father left, she’d climb the rock with Ethan–they knew intimately all the footholds, the momentum needed to carry a small body to its peak–and dangle their legs over the side, calves stinging with residual heat, and from the slightly elevated vantage point she imagined she was looking down on the whole world that her father was off exploring. It seemed small and lonely.
Frankie’s mother had always been a drinker and an occasional smoker but the problem expectedly worsened in the wake of her abandonment, a loss which she hardly fought. This had, of course, a compounding effect as Frankie found herself less and less inclined to spend time around the home in which her mother made a den of misery and so there were, in the end, three absences to mourn: Frankie’s father, Frankie, and Frankie’s mother, removed from herself. And only the empty home to mourn them.
The only true presence Frankie found was with Ethan. Backs flat on their rock, watching the clouds shift and slither above. Talking, laughing, breathing in sync with forearms protecting the eyes. Old Lady Marble waving politely from the street with her elegant Great Dane trotting beside her. Kicking the rock like a horse’s hindquarters. The pioneers used to ride these babies for miles. She didn’t know a funnier person than Ethan and she never would. With him, she could be anyone, anywhere. The problem would come much later, when anywhere was no longer enough. When anywhere began to feel less like a place and more like a carrot on a stick tempting an insatiable hunger that had been placed in her stomach while she looked directly at it.
For a while though, they had their rock and it held them. Even precious things erode.
Frankie was ten when her father set off. The last thing he said before he hit the road, with his bird’s nest head out the VW’s window and miles in his eyes: Frankie, listen to me. This life is longer than it seems. A single place isn’t enough for walking legs. Don’t stand still. You’ll know, kid: when it’s time to run, run.
The silverware clinks and scrapes. Laughter swells and stymies. Candles flicker without warmth. Frankie casts her gaze somewhere past the dewy window where slush muddies the curbside and car tires squish and splatter. The roads in this city are narrow and congested but she can see for miles and miles to the place where the pavement ends and the sea opens its arms to the wandering and lost. The smell of salt on the air. Her smallness.
Ethan jostles her with one of his bony elbows. “Where are you?” he asks through muffled cotton.
Reluctantly, she returns to the room, forks tortellini to her tongue. “I’m here.”
Across the table, Ben and Thomas smile and go on about their new house in Vermont. Restored roof and painted shutters. She smiles and nods and even interjects when the occasion calls for it but she can feel Ethan watching her out of the corner of his eye. He’s not looking for anything but hoping to see something fade away.
They hug on the sidewalk through layers of winter wear. “It’s so good to see you,” Ben says in her ear. “Two feet on the ground.”
She kisses him on the cheek like a debutante, locks arms with Ethan, and they descend one block over into the furnaced subway. He puts his head on her shoulder and rattles with the shaking of the train car on its preset tracks. Watching her reflection in the darkened window, watching her see something he can’t.
They don’t speak until they’ve arrived home and bolted the apartment door behind them and Ethan stands with his beanie in his hands like an officer about to inform the parents their child has been gunned down overseas and he says, “You told me you were done.”
Frankie removes the strangling scarf from her neck, extricates her weary fingers from the trap of leather gloves, unties her cinderblock boots and places everything in its designated spot, all without looking to Ethan with his back to the door like a meager ward. She smooths the drunken flush from her face and pushes her hair back over her shoulders.
“I am,” she says. “I’m done.”
It’s his only rule that she does not lie to him so the hurt is instant. Though she’s done it plenty, it never gets any easier, the softening of his sweet brown eyes like breaking the yolk with a knife.
“I can’t do it again,” he strains, abusing the hat. “If you leave, you have to be gone.”
Ethan’s tears have a strangely numbing effect on her. If she licked them from his face, would they taste like morphine. Her heart has been split and sutured so many times that it hardly registers the betrayal of her own soft smile. She’s going to lie again; the reflex throbs dully.
“Okay,” she says. “I’ll be gone.
The first time Frankie left took her by surprise. For a long while–what could be designated as her entire life–she’d been waiting, on the balls of her feet, tense and sore, though what she was waiting for was anyone’s guess. A signal or sign, something obvious, a slap across the face.
She and Ethan were 22. Moved in together immediately following graduation. Old furniture from Ethan’s parents adorning the scarred hardwood. They got a white cat. Their life together was inevitable, sweet, and Frankie was happy but impatient, for the beginning of something. When would all the feeling start.
Her mother called in October with the fatal diagnosis and the fuse was lit. The time had come. It was a low blow Frankie hadn’t yet known herself to be capable of, to abandon her mother in her final days as the man she’d married had done in the long yawn of the middle years. But that man had been right. The time arrived like all the tumblers in a lock clicking into place and her legs began to move of their own accord. She ran.
They had no car then, lower class city slickers. She took the commuter rail out to the farthest suburb with just a backpack and a can of mace. On the side of the road she stuck out her thumb and caved in her chest and stood steadfast as a statue until in the twilight hours she was picked up by a lady trucker with a gun on the dashboard and a cigarette lodged in the gap of her missing tooth. Name was Bev.
She took Frankie as far as Kansas City, left her at the rest stop with a fiver and two cigarettes. In the roadside gift shop Frankie bought a postcard for fifty cents and wrote a short note to Ethan letting him know she was gone but she’d be back. No timeline, no destination, no reason. Just a tumbleweed woman, moving along ‘til the wind stopped its blowing.
With Bev’s cigarettes for bargaining chips she hitched twice more out to Olympia, Washington. She bowed before the great Pacific Ocean under a green sky and wet her thick hair with saltwater. She slept in the sand, both soft and hard to the shape of her, and when she woke she knew it was time to go home.
To Frankie it was all rather simple. The gut’s push and pull, animal instinct, a feeling gnaws until it is fed. When she arrived home after her three week absence to find Ethan sleepless and ragged and desperate and furious, she couldn’t understand. Her own mother had been so stoic and indifferent in the face of departure. These sorts of things happen outside of anyone’s control, these forces of nature. Hadn’t he known she’d be back?
His face was red and weary for weeping weeks, for her or for her mother whose passing Frankie did not inquire about. A sense of required atonement hung in the air but Frankie found it difficult to apologize. She wasn’t sorry, yet she couldn’t explain herself either.
“It was just a feeling,” she’d said to his naked fetal spine the night she returned.
“Just one?” he’d muttered. “I can’t count how many I’ve had in the past month. I can’t.”
It’s the absence that yawned with possibility. She must have strung across the country on every manner of drug. She must have fucked a hundred strangers. She ran for fear or for loathing or for the purpose of abandonment–her intention was to hurt. None of these things were true. The truth was wordless. The truth was selfish. The truth came out in the lie, stroking the brown nubs of his spine in a sickly November light: “I had to get it out of my system. It’s out. I’m here now.”
There’s no sense of finality this time though she can feel Ethan attempting to impose such a sense on her. It takes like water to her duckling back. She packs a bag like always. He stands in the doorway and speaks to her spine with his watery voice. He speaks of the years and months and days, the love and loss. He really believes she won’t come back this time. It will hurt to disappoint him.
For a moment Frankie is outside herself, behind herself. She is Ethan watching her own absent host’s departure. What is there to be upset about? This is the outline of a woman. Here or not, she is an absence. He’d have reached out for her once, to remind her the timeless warmth of his touch, but he has come to understand he cannot touch what is not there. Hands pinned to his sides, resisting. “I don’t know where you went,” he says. “I don’t know when.”
The sun is struggling through the clouds and squeezing through the gaps in the buildings when he leaves for work with the click of the front door. The cat nuzzles up against her and she sits back on her haunches, tugging its downy ear. The windows are dirty, muffling the light. Soft purring against her thigh like an idling engine. Even these moments of stillness hold such potential energy.
On the kitchen table she finds his wedding ring placed next to her half-finished mug of coffee. She takes it as a gift, a totem of protection that she will carry with her and then return to his thin finger with her own when she is back and they can settle again. The apartment exhales as she closes the door behind her where Ethan’s scent lingers in the hall, dewy and floral. It will be good to be gone and it will be good to return home again.
The day grows thickly clouded and dim like a weakening bulb as she loads up the trunk of her old Chevy Cobalt and settles behind the wheel to begin yet another Odyssey. The wide world stretches on into obscurity, snow hanging over the city like an unfulfilled threat, not touching. When she pulls out onto the highway, she doesn’t look back.
Frankie hasn’t kept track but if she were to go through Ethan’s journals and take a tally of every time the entries grew panicked, desperate and hopeless, she’d find that she’s run nine times, an almost annual event. After the first, the departures no longer required an excuse though they could be spurred on by one. Each time, she lied to Ethan that it would be the last but she stayed honest with herself. The feeling would come again and again, the urge to run was natural as breath, a cycle required to sustain her. Frankie is no rock. She could never truly settle.
She hitched. She snuck onto buses and trains and ran from admonishing conductors. She wove jagged lines across an ugly country. No destination, movement the imperative. Swimming the muddy Mississippi. Watching egrets rise like angels over deep swamps in the Everglades. Cowering before the beige desert sprawl in Santa Fe with the particulate ground humming beneath her feet. Frankie paused each place only long enough to hear the ambient frequency it hummed, to wonder if it might calm this reckless instinct in her but each quiet moment only urged her onward.
There were people all over, of course, little tapestries of lives that she needled through for a time.
The couple in Billings who let her roost in the attic for a weekend. The wife teased her gray hair up into a beehive every morning and the husband carved figurines from spruce on the porch. They spoke to one another in cross-house shouts of endearment and left Frankie to her own devices.
There was the man in San Francisco with the bowl cut and 70’s porn ‘stache who drove her over that big golden bridge like a ropey portal and said he wouldn’t touch her bare thigh and he didn’t.
There were the stoop women in Detroit who offered warm brown swigs and back staircase guided tours to a high, high view of the rugged city. They called her Tits & Ass and fed her pot roast at tiny, crowded tables in their wallpapered dining rooms.
In the later trips when an array of temp jobs stimulated better money and used cars were purchased from weedy lots, she could finally crank the music high from her own radio, drape her arm out the window and bob her head to the rise and fall of the pulsing interstate arteries. She scrawled wordless postcards at cross country rest stops, postcards that made it to the door but never onto the fridge. Washing her armpits in shallow sinks, combing her hair in key-scratched, peeling mirrors. Sometimes she’d sit in those grimy, hectic food courts reading Kerouac until she spied the balding head of a man in the shape of a departing memory and then she’d hit the road again.
Frankie was faithful in her trips. Ethan chewed his fingernails to nubs over her possible betrayals but she was good and she loved him as true as she could and even missed him when she was away for weeks on end. The problem arose when she came back loving him more and found him loving her less. This impasse yawned and deepened and still Frankie reached across it to pull Ethan into her arms after each return and hold him weeping like a child and she finds herself filled with a hatred in those moments that she cannot seem to direct toward anything in particular.
In that restless holding, she’d trace the narrow of his shoulders and say, “No lying. You can ask me anything about my time out there and I’ll tell you, truthfully.”
That was the deal she offered, but he never took it.
“Stop trying to sell me something,” he’d say, bathed in a shared late night sweat. “I don’t want to bargain my love, Frank.”
It seems maybe the rock isn’t as big as she remembers. Or maybe it was never very big at all. She stands before it with her hands in her pockets, poring over its smooth bald dome which offers no mirror. Its memory hangs around her neck.
This chunk of upheaved earth is the place where Ethan first confessed his feelings in the 8th grade through the curtain of his unkempt bangs, and then his love in the 10th grade in a voice so quiet it got snatched away on the breeze. They drank from the bottle here on prom night with her dress hiked to her hips and his hand hot beneath the hem of her panties. He slipped and scraped his left shin down the side when he was eight, a pale and fleshy scar that still remains. They decided here they’d go to the same school in the same city and make lives that weave together through all the threaded moments. And in the midnight dark when she could not sleep, she came here by herself to be as small and lonely as she felt in the day. She never told him that, and how could she? Ethan made worship of their days on this simple geological deposit. He’d have put the rock on a ring and used it to propose if he could have. He’s a sentimentalist. He holds onto things.
It’s not the first time she’s come back to this rock on this street with every heavy worn down thing it holds. The house she grew up in is the same, someone lives there by themself with the rotting brown clapboards and a difficult dog chained in the front yard. Ethan’s was torn down a decade earlier and rebuilt to be uglier and lonelier and more expensive. The rock is unchanged but its relativity is always in flux. She’s never seen it through the same eyes twice. She’s the girl Ethan first loved but something else entirely.
When it’s all laid out in front of her like this, it’s impossible to pinpoint where she became this creature incapable of sitting still. Was she always like this? Was everything before just a costume?
“Francine Baum?”
She blinks the years away and in the blur almost calls the woman Old Lady Marble. It’s what she and Ethan called her long before she was truly old but her skin fine and cracked like a soft statue. Age has truly taken her now and she’s allowed for it with grace. Her hair is stacked and silver and she smiles a crooked crescent moon, thin jewelry bridging the tendons in her neck. A peculiar solemnity hangs about her without her big, beautiful dog by her side but she’s the sort of person who is wizened by grief, not minimized. You can see it in her soft eyes.
“Ms. Needham,” Frankie says.
“Well, I would know that big head of hair anywhere,” she laughs and the sound falls like snow dotting a lake. “I can put a kettle on the stove for tea,” she explains. On a day like this.
Frankie sits in Ms. Needham’s carefully cluttered sunroom cradling a mug with stinging palms.
“I was just thinking of your mother the other day,” Ms. Needham says with her chin in her palm, thoughtful. She was once the only neighbor that Frankie’s mother tolerated. The others yelled at their kids too loud or mowed the lawn too early but she’d watch out the window for Ms. Needham, to offer a hello and a short conversation which was more than she offered to most. Perhaps because Ms. Needham never married and seemed content with this decision she was a sort of portal into a different life, a vicarious being. Or maybe she was just kind.
“How long has it been?” she asks. “Ten years already?”
Frankie nods her head while Ms. Needham shakes hers. “I still remember that awful funeral. You weren’t there.”
“I wasn’t,” Frankie says.
“That boy of yours, Ethan, he was there crying, more than anyone else. Such a sweet child. Are you two still together?”
“We are,” she says and holds her ring up to the pale light. His sits lost inside her pocket.
Ms. Needham smiles. “One of the very last gentleman. His grieving was something to see. The rest of us though, we were on such edge, afraid that your father was going to show up. It was the dominant feeling, like sensing a storm in the air and waiting for the thunder.”
Frankie’s body unsettles. “My father,” she says. “Why would he have shown up?”
“Oh, he was always trying to come back. Your mother managed to keep him away but I was terrified to think he might show up at her funeral to bother her one last time.”
The tea in her lap seems to be sapping the warmth from her very skin. The world outside unturning. “He tried to come back.”
The old woman blinks. “Oh, dear. You didn’t know?”
The axis is tilting, there is nothing to stand on. “He told me he left because he wanted to see the world. And he wouldn’t be coming back. He told me he was running, it was time to run.”
Ms. Needham laughs, from the back of her throat. “Time only because your mother told him so.”
“My mom kicked him out,” Frankie says with her eyeballs slipping to the pale, depleted world outside.
Ms. Needham puts her own mug on the table and places a hand atop Frankie’s. “I’m sorry to be telling you all this, honey. It’s none of my business. Your father…he was a careless man. He went where he wanted and did as he pleased and your mother tried—women always try harder than they should. But she grew tired of asking him for things she wasn’t going to receive. I can’t say I’m surprised that he told you another story. The only story that mattered was his.”
Frankie nods and smiles and sips her tea even as her head departs from her body through the fogged window out onto to the wet streets, over the house that was once hers and up toward the gangrenous clouds, above them where the air is sparse and cold and she holds her breath and looks down on the whole world which she will never see even a fraction of and it is so lonely in a way she cannot possibly put into words no matter how she chases that understanding to the edge of the very earth.
When her head returns to its perch on her neck in Ms. Needham’s sunroom, the old woman is saying sweet things about Frankie’s mother and she listens as best as she can while the ring in her pocket grows heavy and loud. She’s practically vibrating.
Ms. Needham thanks her for stopping by and asks that she pass her love along to Ethan. He’s a good one the old woman says and Frankie agrees. If nothing else is true, Ethan is good.
He was the one who cried the day her father left. Frankie had stood, blank-eyed and wooden watching the van round the corner and willed herself to exit her body and follow wherever he went. Ethan, only ten years to his name, stood with both feet on the gravel as if he had no other choice. His sweet, pudgy little hand grabbed for hers but she could not feel it. She was off, chasing. Her head was off, getting lost.
And in the months that followed his leaving, Ethan cared for Frankie’s mother when she could not bring herself to. When he came over after school and Frankie wanted only to escape to their rock, leave her mother to her degeneration and liver-rotting, he’d stand at the stove and make her dinner, empty her ashtray, put ice in a glass. If an episode of Jeopardy! came on, he’d sit beside her on the smoke-drenched couch to answer every prompt aloud and she’d ask him how he knew so much and he’d just smile and say “I pay attention.” It was only then that Frankie saw her mother pay attention, too. She’d look around the room as if just waking up from a long hibernation and see the waste she’d made of her life. The time spent on a man who was never going to find comfort beside her. The coffee table clutter that could not disguise the disuse of a home. Cinders burnt periods into the carpet. She’d reach for a bottle.
Frankie could not watch it. She laid on her bed in the dark with the curtains drawn until Ethan guided the haggard woman to her bed, wreathed her in downy quilts, and closed the door behind him. Her mother’s gratitude was minimal and rarely vocal but that’s not what he did it for. Ethan takes care of people. Ethan is steady. Frankie comes and goes and runs in restless zig zags in search of her lost head but Ethan is always there to return to. Ethan is the rock, the relative object she’s never seen through the same eyes twice. She’s never fathomed that he might change.
Even precious things erode.
It’s been three days since she left. Never has a trip of hers been so short but she had to come back and she knows why. On the long drive back toward the city she counts roadside crosses and their wilting flowers, tallying the losses of others to measure up against her own but when the scales are weighed out it seems there is nothing she’s ever truly allowed herself to have and so nothing to have lost. The scale tips with the weight of all the world’s grief and lifts her, alone, to watch it all from the clouds.
“What are you looking for out there?” she imagined Ethan asking her once, on the shore of Lake Michigan where the waves were gentle. It was a rare moment in her running in which she’d wished he was there with her, that she was not alone.
“That’s not what you want to ask,” she replied in her head.
“Okay,” he said. “What is it that I can’t give to you?”
“You give it all to me,” she explained. “This is what I need. You are exactly what I need.” And when he begins to explain what he needs, her head is out the window, her head is on the road, her head is off searching for her head. The conversation never happened anyhow—would it have changed anything? She still hasn’t found her head.
When she unlocks the door to their apartment and drops her bag in the hallway, its thud echoes out and into the empty space. Winter light soaks the floorboards in sepia cool. The tiny space is massive without furniture, tall and wide as the world. Nowhere to put her boots.
The only sign anyone had lived there just days before evidenced in the marked floors, the shadows of picture frames on the dirty walls, cat fur balled up in the corner. He moved quickly, decisively. And it was merciful of him. To leave without making her watch.
Frankie sits on the floor in the dusty place where the couch once rested. The feeling of crying is so foreign she doesn’t notice it’s happening until the salt slips between her lips and wets her tongue. The crying is so obvious it makes her laugh. The roomy laughter makes her miss what could have been her entire life.
There is nothing to claim, no trace of love to carry with her. Just the ring in her pocket. She leaves the emptiness behind, locks the old door with the requisite finality. Out on the street, it’s just beginning to snow. The feeling swells in her gut—she could truly go anywhere and this time she could just keep going, make a home of displacement, move without meaning, blink one sunny day and find she doesn’t know where she is or how she got there. But there’s another feeling, too, an older one and perhaps one that she killed to heed the words of a man who did not know how to stay. It’s her warm back on an ancient stone and the clouds slipping by above at their only pace. It’s the slow passing of a full day. It is stillness.
So when the car starts, the decision is made. She’ll go stay with Ben and Thomas in Vermont for a while. Shovel their driveway, cut their hair, take their dog for long runs beneath tall trees, drink coffee with the clouds. Then, when the time comes, she’ll find somewhere to settle.
when you know, you know / it’s time, it’s time to go
This is excellent
Beautiful, incredible story. Moved so easily it didn’t even feel long