Running Away with Frannie

(from the novel Running Away with Frannie)

 

by Renée Manfredi

 

 

The day I left home for what turned out to be forever, I met my fate in the form of Frannie, a West Virginia truckstop waitress who was just minutes away from being fired for flushing a potato down the toilet.

There were just two waitresses in the place, a middle-aged woman with a beehive hairdo and a name tag pinned over a lace hanky (“Delores,” quotes included), and the girl who I knew right away was some kind of wild. She was young, not much over twenty, with shoulder-length blonde hair and eyes just a shade or two above black. She looked a little like a young Jessica Lange, beautiful despite the tacky pink uniform and the ketchup in her hair.

I took a booth by the window and sat unattended for maybe ten minutes before she finally came over, a portable CD player blar­ing Neil Young. She didn’t bother to remove the headphones before taking my order.

“What can I bring you?” she said, loud enough to be heard all over the restaurant. Only the night manager at the register looked over, so I figured the other customers, truckers mostly, were probably repeaters and used to this. She recited the spe­cials through the haze of the music. There was a novelty button pinned to the lace hanky where her nametag should have been: “It’s over and don’t ask me about it.” Sticking out of the kangaroo pocket of her apron was an ancient-looking book called Tribal Wisdom from Africa.

I gave her my order and pulled out my road map. I’d left Pitts­burgh a couple of hours ago, after everyone had gone to bed. This was a cowardly way to leave, but I was walking out on the job my father had gotten me at the steel mill, on the crew he’d fore­maned for twenty years and this was just further confirmation that I was a lousy son. My job had been to calibrate and heat-ready the molds. I lasted five months. Of course there was a girl, too, a girl I was leaving. But I had no definite plans, no destina­tion in mind other than driving south and ending up someplace warm. I looked at the map. I was in Beckley now, and if I drove hard I could probably make it to the middle of Virginia before I had to stop.

Headphone Blondie brought my food over and I was waiting for her to bring the ketchup when the business with the potato started. Water was seeping from beneath the door of the men’s room. One of the truckers at the counter called it to the attention of the squirrely manager who went in to investigate. “Frannie,” he called. She was sitting at the far end of the counter, tapping her feet to Neil and staring at her book, oblivious to the fury of her boss and to my need for condiments. He yelled her name again. She looked up. “What?” she yelled back.

“Do you know anything about this backed-up toilet?”

“Do I look like a plumber?”

A few of the men chuckled. The manager went red. “Delores says she saw you go into the men’s room with the potato.”

“Cut the shit, Donald. I flushed it, all right? How was I sup­posed to know it would get stuck?”

From what I could gather, Frannie was trying to root the potato, a big Idaho baker, in a mason jar in the kitchen. It had caught and begun to vine, but the bottom turned dark with rot.

“Why didn’t you just throw it away like any normal human being would? You been living with that drug dealer too long, Frances. First sign of trouble, it all gets dumped in the crapper, huh?” He winked at the truckers at the counter, none of whom responded. He was smug and pathetic, in his late twenties or early thirties, slightly built with hair already starting to thin. Even his mustache looked like a comb-over.

Frannie sighed, looked bored. “What do you want me to do?”

“Get back to work. I’ve called a plumber. I’ll take his price out of your next paycheck.”

He was a little too pleased with confronting her. I knew this attitude. You want a woman who doesn’t want you, and getting her under your thumb is the next best thing to simply getting her under you.

“Oh, like that’s fair,” she said. “It was an accident. Accidents happen.”

“Flushing a potato down the toilet was an accident?”

“I didn’t know it would get stuck like that. How would I know it wouldn’t pass through?”

“Whatever. You’re responsible.”

“Well, I won’t be,” she said.

“Then I have no other choice but to fire you.”

“Boo-hoo,” she said. “I’m on the verge of tears.”

His face got even redder, if that was possible. “Turn in your uniform and get out.”

By this time she had an audience and she played for drama. She leaned against the counter, took a puff off a cigarette, and idly began to undo her buttons. She slipped her shoes off then stepped out of her dress, which she draped over the squirrel’s head. The men at the counter, after a moment of stunned silence, began to whistle and cheer. She had a terrific body, wholesome and sweet in a man’s long undershirt that skimmed the tops of her thighs. I wondered about the color of her panties. “Now,” she said. “I want my last paycheck, in cash, plus severance pay.”

The squirrel laughed nervously, glanced around. “Severance pay. What do you think this is, IBM? You can come by when the checks are cut next Wednesday.”

She shook her head. “Now,” she said, and held out her hand.

He cut his eyes around at the faces at the counter, hit the no-sale button, and placed some bills in her outstretched palm. She slipped on her shoes and grabbed a sweater from the coat rack then walked out to a round of applause.

She was sitting on the hood of my truck when I came out. “Hi,” she said. “Sorry I forgot your ketchup. Would you mind giving me a lift? Just down the road. I usually walk home, but that might be a little dangerous tonight, dressed like this.”

“How did you know this was my truck?”

“Pennsylvania plates. I figured you weren’t from around here. Would you mind?”

I shrugged. “Why not?” I glanced over at her as I started the engine. She was nice, long-legged and tall, with the narrow deli­cacy of a woman much shorter; her ankles and wrists were tiny, her hips no bigger than, say, the span of my hands.

She watched me watching her. “Look, don’t try anything, okay? I know I look like I’m ready for action, but please don’t do anything violent.”

I laughed. “If you thought I looked like the violent type why did you get in my truck?”

She didn’t answer. “What’s your name?”

“Sam.”

“Sam. That’s nice. I’m Frannie.”

I nodded. “So where am I taking you?”

She directed me down a narrow road off the main highway that deadended in a trailer park.

“The last one on the left,” she said, but made no move to get out when I pulled up. She sat there so long I thought maybe she was expecting me to go around and open the door for her. “Something wrong?” I said.

“Where are you going?” she said suddenly.

I shrugged. “Just passing through.”

“To where?”

“Somewhere down south.”

“To do what?”

I smiled. “Why do you want to know?”

“Look, I know this will sound strange. And you can say no if you want. But I’m desperate. I’ve been trying to leave him for more than a year. He’s threatened to kill me if I leave. Would you let me ride along with you for awhile?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m more or less directionless. And I sure don’t want to get in the middle of any domestic thing.”

“Please. I’m desperate. I’ll help you pay for gas. I’ll help with the driving. I’ll do anything you want.”

The last thing I wanted was this kind of heartache riding beside me, but how could I say no? A woman tells you she’s trapped and miserable and wants a ride out of hell, would any decent man say no?

“Sure,” I said. “All right. But just till I stop somewhere.”

“Thank you thank you thank you.” She kissed my cheek, whispered, “You’re saving my life.” She straightened, took a deep breath. “I’ll just go and gather up a few things and get some money. I’ll be right back.”

“Is it safe to go in there? Will he be waiting up for you?”

“Oh, no,” she said breezily. “He drinks himself to sleep. He won’t hear me.”

She came out a few minutes later dressed in cut-offs and a sweatshirt, carrying three green trash bags full of her belongings.

“That didn’t take long,” I said.

“I was already packed.”

I pulled out onto the highway.

“So what about you?” she said. “Who are you giving grief to?”

“Who says I’m giving grief to anyone?”

She shrugged. “I can spot a restless heart from six miles. I mean, look,” she said, indicating the floor, the bed of the truck, with its strewn clothing and assorted junk. “You’re not even in one place long enough to buy a suitcase. Plus the wool sweaters and winter jacket that I’m guessing have been there since the last time you left wherever you left.”

I laughed. “That’s pretty good.”

“Thanks.” She pulled a six-pack of Iron City out of one of the trash bags. “Want one?”

“No thanks.”

“Okay then, here we go. I’m twenty-two and have been on every major interstate. I’ve had sex in three oceans, two suicide attempts, and have been in love once. I’ve been a waitress all my life. I have no ambition to go to college, sell real estate, Craft­matic adjustable beds or anybody a bill of goods. Those are the facts of Frannie, in case you were going to ask.”

“I probably would have at some point, yeah.”

She sipped noisily at the beer. “What about you? What do you do for a living? How old are you, how many times has your heart been broken and all that bullshit.”

“Are you always like this?” I said.

“Like what?”

I shrugged. “Never mind.”

“People always want to know too much, don’t you think? My philosophy is, Hey, my life is not a buffet table, you can’t just walk up and help yourself. You take what I put on your plate, asshole, or there’s the soup kitchen.” She lit a cigarette. “How about you? Where are you from?”

“Pittsburgh.”

“Pittsburgh. What do you do in Pittsburgh?”

“That’s where my family is.”

“Family? You’re from a family?”

She made it sound like Mars.

“Yeah. Big family. Eight brothers and sisters, including me.”

“Wow! And you’re leaving them? Why would you leave a family?”

“I’m twenty-five years old. It’s not like I can still live there.”

“Oh. What do you do?”

“Good question. Odds and ends, mostly. I’ve tried college five times in five different states. I’ve been a mail carrier, a factory drudge, a mill hunk, a roofer, hospital orderly, and Chuckles the clown.”

“Chuckles the clown?”

“That paid decent money, believe it or not. Birthday parties for rich kids, you know.” That job I actually enjoyed and I had it awhile. But then I started volunteering at the hospital where they gave me a group of terminal kids and nothing seemed funny anymore. One little kid asked if Jesus looked like me. I quit that same afternoon. That particular boy’s face was so disfigured by cancer that I thought, but did not say, yes, Jesus, if there is such a person, must look like me or you wouldn’t look like you. God is not Batman, my friend, God is the joker.

“Hey,” Frannie said. “You gotta girl?”

“No.”

“But you had one, right? Is that why you’re leaving?”

I didn’t answer.

“Am I right, yes or no?”

“Well, half right I guess.”

She tossed her cigarette out the window and immediately lit another. “No big deal. Everybody eventually leaves, don’t you think?”

I shrugged.

“Really,” she said. “Lovers are like pantyhose. Sooner or later they all run.”

 

We got to Richmond, Virginia just after sunup and took a motel room that smelled like mold and baby powder and had one lumpy double bed. I watched Frannie’s reaction as she walked into the room and my respect for her increased. She didn’t bat an eye at the seediness of it. Of the two women in my recent past, one would have shown disgust and made me ashamed, the other would have turned the thready squalor into some charming adventure.

“What’s tomorrow holding for you?” Frannie said.

“Don’t know yet. I figured I’d rest a few hours then decide what’s next. What about you?”

She shrugged, slid into bed and moved to the edge.

I grabbed one of the pillows and the blanket and spread it out on the floor.

“What are you doing?” she said.

“I thought you might not be comfortable with both of us in the bed.”

She looked down at me. “I don’t mind if you take the bed. You just can’t take me. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said.

I lay awake a long time thinking what I would do, where I’d go the next day. Not only did I have no notion about where to land, I didn’t even know why I left this time. There was no rea­son, really. There was a calm in the house, one of the spans when my father went on the wagon and time passed without broken china or trips to the emergency room. I didn’t know which was worse, the drama of his drunkenness or the violent tedium of his soberness, those long stretches of days when he was just a silent presence at the dinner table, a chain-smoking insomniac sitting for hours on the front porch staring at the road as though waiting for his life to come driving by.

The day before I left, my father asked me to join his weekly poker game. We were sitting on the porch after work waiting for supper. I said, “All right, sure.”

“Rogers tells me production is up thirty per cent on your crew,” he said. “That’s good.” This was the closest he could ever come to a compliment.

“We really put out this month,” I said.

He nodded, lit two cigarettes and handed one to me. “You got plans tonight?”

“Thought I’d go to the Third Base or the Alpine, drink a few.”

“By yourself?”

I shrugged. “Yeah.”

“Still seeing that Anne May woman?”

“No,” I said. “Sorta seeing Sally Seward again. You remember Sally. In my class at school. Father manages the lumber yard on route 19.”

“Sure,” he said. “She working?”

“Heinz factory,” I said. “But we’re casual. Nothing hot and heavy. Saw her one night at the Alpine and we just started being friends again.”

He nodded. “She’s a pretty thing.”

I nodded. “She’s a good woman.”

I’d known Sally since we were children and she was the first girl I ever dated. I saw early on how it wouldn’t work, saw that I couldn’t marry her like she wanted me to: I saw exactly how my life would unfold with her. A brief courtship during which time she’d make exotic dinners from a borrowed cookbook, desperately calling her mother or a girlfriend to ask how do you know when the “cream is reduced”? Or, What does it mean when it says, “add meat when the sauce has glazed”? All this to show me what a good wife she’d make. Then the fuss over babies in every restaurant I’d take her, enthusiastic for my benefit, all the while dying to go to the ladies’ room and sneak the cigarette she’s sure I’d disapprove of. She’d get her weight down for the wedding then put it all back on after gaining ten more permanent pounds with each baby, cursing and cranky with fatigue. I knew all this, knew how these local girls were trained, by example, for generations—I’d seen these transformations in the girlfriends of more than a few of my friends. Six months after the wedding the same woman who had delighted him with lamb and Bechamel sauce and glamorous earrings, was now water-reten­tive and bulky with pregnancy, opening cans for dinner and serv­ing it on trays in front of the TV where they would stay till bed­time, each in their private, stunned aloneness.

I didn’t mean to hold myself above someone like Sally; in many ways she was a finer person than I ever could be. And there were times when I thought it could work between us—usually after I ended a relationship with another woman, and saw Sally in a fresh light all over again. Sometimes I thought if she wasn’t so understanding, if she would just disapprove of me in some small way, show up in paint-splattered jeans and a sweatshirt for our dates, tell me to go fuck myself when I cut our time together short so I could meet my friends at a bar, I might have seen her for who she really was and loved her in the light of it.

The night before I left, Sally and I had more or less decided to try it again. I’d been home about six months, having moved back from Ohio where I was trying school once again after ending my engagement to Anne.

Anne May was the daughter of the owner of a chain of department stores. She was older than I was, fine-boned and blonde and finished. I thought I loved her. That she held things close was what I found intriguing, gave parts of her life and its secrets in small measures. She was remote, but not in a studied or snobbish way, and I felt privileged that she was with me, liked the way other couples we hung out with played to her, tried to win her approval.

I met her in the Stephen Foster Memorial Museum where she worked as a tour guide. I was working for a vending machine company, and the business next door to the museum was my last run of the day so I went in and took the tour. Anne was calm and self-possessed and I asked her out as soon as the last third-grader made his sticky way out the door. To my amazement, she said yes. We were dating steadily within two weeks, became engaged after three months. Her true ambition was to design interiors, and sometimes I caught her looking at me the way I’d seen her study fabric: like I was raw material that had to be fashioned and finished. But I thought the differences between us would work themselves out in time. I loved her, or I wanted to, anyway. Her family liked and approved of me, though I figured Anne’s unmarried status at the troubling age of thirty-one had something to do with it. I was a compromise, financially speak­ing, but I made their daughter happy, and premium grade A though she might be, she was fast approaching her sell-by date.

I worried for a solid week before the night she came to dinner to meet my family, though it was fine. Anne wore a plain cotton skirt and white blouse, no jewelry except the ring I engaged her with. Including my parents, our family numbered ten, and we all crowded around the dining room table that night. My mother cooked steak, something we never had except as celebration—a raise, one of our twenty-first birthdays, an engagement.

My mother worked in a commemorative plate factory and the seconds that couldn’t be sold were all the china we ever knew. Over the years we were privileged with the “Gone with the Wind” series, eating hot dogs and macaroni and cheese from the opulent interiors of Tara, and tuna casseroles from the high drama of Rhett carrying Scarlet up the stairs. There was a “Wizard of Oz” series too, along with a Movie Greats limited edition and every major film and pop culture icon imaginable.

For the past few years, Elvis Presley crockery and collectibles were all the factory produced; Elvis was the biggest money-maker of all, and the ’68 Comeback Special plate sold so phe­nomenally that the factory added another shift. Mama was promoted from a packer—someone who stood at the conveyor belt and boxed the plates for mail order—to the design department: her job, among other things, was to sign Elvis’s name in gold at the bottom of each plate. I liked to think that my mother’s handwriting was on these treasures displayed in curio cabinets across the world. Over the years, she probably wrote his name many more times than she wrote her own, and definitely with more flourish and confidence.

The Elvis plates in our family grew in numbers and signifi­cance: they became a way to express my mother’s feelings about a dinner guest without her ever saying a word. Someone she felt neutral towards, for instance, got a relatively benign plate, one that showed Elvis in front of Graceland. A person she didn’t like at all—my brother Anthony’s first wife—got the Elvis of his last years, the fat and bloated man already in decline. It was a horrible depiction, and the guest who got this plate would never win Mama’s favor. Self-indulgent and excessive was the message conveyed, the lecherous look in Elvis’s yellowed eye recalling every perverted story in the tabloids about the studded, wasted man with a bevy of sixteen-year-old girls in white cotton panties.

So we were all waiting that night for Anne to eat enough of her mashed potatoes and greens so we could see which one Mama had given her. If she was uncomfortable before, she must have been doubly so now: with every bite she took the silence and ten­sion deepened. It was finally revealed to be the Elvis at the height of his fame: the Love Me Tender plate. I read respect in every pair of eyes, including my father’s, who thereafter called her Anne instead of Miss May.

The only mistake Anne made that night was asking “where the lavatory was.”

“What’s a lavatory?” my youngest sister Bernadine asked.

“Where they study things under microscopes,” my sister Ada said. And turning to Anne: “We don’t have one.”

But after six months Anne and I were finished. Just about the time I began to have doubts, she’d gotten over her own and was ready to set a date and spend our Saturdays looking for caterers and florists.

I know now there is such a thing as love, but it is rarer than people like to admit, that it has more in common with icebergs than it does with lightning. It’s a kind of motion: the dark invis­ible parts of yourself moving toward the frozen mass of someone else. Love is not heat, it is the collision of two solidities, the vio­lent shattering of what keeps us separate and apart. With Anne, I began to feel that I would be joined to just what I could now see on the surface, that my whole life would be a kind of denial of movement.

“I need some time,” I said to her one afternoon.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that I can’t get married next year. I don’t think I’d be a very good husband to you right now, Annie.”

“Is this about money again?”

We’d been arguing about this subject on and off for months. She wanted to finance my education, help me get a degree in some­thing so I could have a real profession. I knew her family was probably pressuring her about my lack of a career; I was an odd enough choice let alone the fact all my jobs were odd, too.

“It’s not about money,” I said. I stared up at the ceiling fan, the whir of the white blades cutting through the filigree of tree shadows. Her bedroom was always the coolest part of the house and this is where we spent all our time in the hottest part of the summer.

“Sam.”

I looked at her, the cool drape of her hair hanging down, the tiny crescent of a scar above her eyebrow from a boating accident at ten. Her skin and the linen bedsheets seemed all of a piece.

I said, “Do you love me?”

“What kind of question is that?” She sat up, lit a cigarette. “I don’t sleep with people I don’t love, and I certainly don’t agree to marry them.” She smoked in silence awhile. “You’ve changed,” she said coolly. “It’s like once I said I would marry you, you weren’t interested anymore. Was I some kind of challenge to your ego? See if you could get the rich girl?”

“You know that’s not true.”

“Your family hates me.”

“They don’t. They just never met someone like you.”

“Right. Now comes the part where you tell me about how there are fundamental differences between us that can never be resolved.”

“Give me six months. I’ll be back in six months.”

“For what? Where are you going?”

“I don’t know yet.”

She watched me dress. “What do you want, Sam? What do you want from me?”

“I want to make sure we’re not making a mistake. When I get married, I want it to be for life. I don’t believe in divorce. I will never be divorced.” I slipped on my shoes, picked up my keys. “And I wanted you to tell me you loved me.”

“Don’t think you’re going to get a second chance. Don’t think you can just come dancing back into my life. I might be available when you get back, or I might not.”

“I’ll write.”

Three months later when I was living in Ohio trying college once again, she wrote to tell me she was engaged to someone else.

I hadn’t regretted not marrying her like she said I would. It was Sally I thought about that night with the potato-flushing waitress in bed beside me. I figured I should call her, at least call and let her know I wouldn’t be making our date this evening. But what could I say other than, “Sorry, left town again, this time for no reason, I swear.” Which was true. I didn’t know I was going to leave until half an hour before I did. Sally and I had met at the Third Base Lounge and spent the whole night talking in one of the booths in the back. She kept it light—her job in the fac­tory, the absurd pageantry of her sister’s upcoming wedding—all the while I was thinking how good she looked, how relaxed and at peace with things, and half-waiting for and dreading the inevitable topic of What Went Wrong in our Relationship.

But she never brought it up. I asked her to dance, and holding her close I remembered what it was about her body that I liked. The warm herbal smell of her skin, her small breasts, which she was always so self-conscious about, pressed tight against me so I could feel her heartbeat through them. There are few things sex­ier than this. I never understood why small-breasted women felt physically inferior. Dancing Sally around, I imagined it was her heart itself I was feeling against me, the chambers external and small enough to cup in my hand.

“This is nice,” she said. “Like old times.”

Here it comes, I thought. But that was all she said. Later, in the parking lot when I was walking her to her car, I asked what she was doing the next night.

She shrugged, smiled.

“Why don’t you meet me back here?”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Why not?”

She sighed. “I can’t fall in love with you all over again, Sam. I was too in love with you too long.”

I nodded. But I was genuinely happy being with her, felt giddy with possibilities: we could go slow, just do this for a while, casual dates every now and then and see how it went.

“I want to see you,” I said.

“No,” she said. Then, “Why?”

“Because. I think maybe we should try again. I think maybe it could work this time.”

Her face brightened. “Really? You do?”

I really did. I told her I’d call her tomorrow, but late as it was when I got home, I didn’t go to bed. My brothers were sleeping in the room we shared. My sister Tess was up with her baby in the kitchen. She’d recently moved back home after leaving her hus­band. I held my nephew for awhile and handed him back. Before I knew it I was packing the few things I had unpacked. I grabbed some fishing poles from the hall closet—maybe thinking I could talk myself into just a fishing trip, I don’t know.

Tess shook her head when she saw me, drew her mouth up.

“Not a word,” I said.

“What now?” she said. “Why are you leaving this time?”

I told her I’d be in touch.

It was close to noon when I woke the little blonde in bed beside me. “Hey. Frannie. It’s check-out time.”

She stirred and squinted at me, looked around. “Oh, yeah,” she said, yawning and considering me. “Who are you again?”

I said, “I’m not sure.”