“Frankie Fluffy,” Dr. Miller writes down on a white piece of paper. Frankie reads the words. He is a doctor. He is good, Frankie thinks, but she does not know what to do. She bends her head down a little and blushes. That is what to do. Years later Frankie will understand, or think she understands, that she chose to blush and bend down her chin because that was what she had seen her mother doing when interacting with strangers.
Frankie blushes, but she reaches out for the piece of paper. “Frankie Fluffy,” she writes under the sentence Doctor Miller wrote for her to copy and entertain herself with while waiting for her mother. Or maybe she was waiting for him to speak with her mother. When Frankie is older, she will think she has forgotten what she was writing that sentence for.
Frankie’s mom takes her to Daisy’s house. Daisy’s birthday was two days before, but her parents decided to make the party on Saturday. Frankie has not seen Daisy in a long while. As she walks into the house, she notices Daisy standing in the middle of her living room wearing a pink paper hat. This is the second birthday party Frankie attends in her life. The previous one was Pablito’s, to which Frankie went dressed in some shirt and pants that her mom had convinced her to wear. Frankie hated pants because they made her inner thighs feel itchy and hot and she always felt like putting a hand in between her skin and the cloth in order to relieve the burning, which she did, but not in public. For this party, though, her mom bought one meter of blue shiny fabric that Frankie thinks is silk, and made a little dress that reaches down to her knees in spite of Frankie’s specific instructions to make the dress as long as Snow White’s. The dress does have blue puffy sleeves that cover only her shoulders and show her arms, though. Frankie wears white socks with ample sewing lace on its border and a black velvet coat that belonged to her aunt Frances, dead even before her sister, Frankie’s mom, was born.
Daisy doesn’t move from the center of her living room; she is wearing a pink paper hat and probably a dress too, Frankie will suppose years later. There will not be recollections of many details in Frankie’s memory; she will only remember the parts that she didn’t expect to happen, and from those, only the parts that she likes the best. Frankie gets a stapled red paper cup. Inside there should be candy, like at Pablito’s, but she doesn’t open it. She takes off her coat and hands it to Daisy’s mom. She wants to tell the lady not to lose it because it was her aunt’s. In Frankie’s mind, things with a past become more recurrent because she links them to other ideas –so she thinks about those things more often– and she feels they are more important because she has them in her head longer. But Frankie doesn’t say anything, nor does she approach Daisy. Instead, she keeps on going over the possibility of not seeing her velvet coat again, and thinks that after the party she will ask her mom to show her pictures of Frances; she will ask her why she was named Frances too.
Frankie’s body is changing; soon the black velvet coat will not fit her anymore, but she has gotten a white polyester pajama torn in the chest and sewed back with white cotton thread which also belonged to her aunt. Frankie was named after her aunt because her mother wanted to remember, she was told. Frances died at eighteen, Frankie learned, and the picture she is to recall is one in which young Frances wore loose pants and a yellow shirt and was standing next to a horse, holding the reins, her other arm around the shoulders of a person that Frankie could not identify as a girl nor a boy. The gown is beautiful, like a bride’s, Frankie thinks. She wishes she could wear it every night, but very often her mom takes it away to wash, and Frankie sleeps wearing something else, maybe a pants-and-shirt pajamas.
Frankie sees Daisy again at school as she walks down the stone stairs towards the play yard. She passes by without saying hi. Daisy shouts loudly Frankie, do you want to play? Frankie turns her head and looks at Daisy and other girls wearing blue aprons, just like she does. Daisy is standing two or three meters from her cousin Laurena, and both girls’ legs are tied together by a long piece of spring that creates a four-sided figure. Another three girls form a line perpendicular to the larger sides of the rectangle, waiting for their turn to jump in. Frankie knows this game. She learned to play it at the beginning of the school year, before she started missing classes. First it was the chicken pox, then her breaking her wrist, then Christmas, and then some other things like her not feeling like going to school and her mom’s not forcing her. No, she says, I don’t want to. Frankie does want to but she imagines that if she says no Laurena or Daisy might stop playing and approach her to ask why not. Laurena does. Frankie, why don’t you want to play? Frankie, looking downwards and doing her best not to move her face, says with a grave tone that isn’t normally hers that she just doesn’t want to. Frankie wants Laurena to keep on asking, to hold her arm and go back with her to the classroom hall, to a corner where the sun can’t reach them, and tell her that she wants to play and that she is not very sad, just a little, sad just in a part of herself. Laurena insists, Frankie, please, please come. Frankie feels a little better. But she says no again. She doesn’t say anything else and Laurena doesn’t touch her. She goes back to Daisy and the other girls, and Frankie walks a little farther, maybe two or three steps retaking her original path towards the kiosk with the packed chips and the cups of red jelly. In the pocket of her apron, she plays with the money to buy her lunch and turns back, not looking at Laurena or Daisy. Is she angry asks Daisy to her cousin and she answers no, I don’t know, and they both look at each other and then at Frankie, who walks up the stairs, back to the hall, knowing she is being seen, and liking it.
Frankie’s mom picks her up after school. On the way home, sitting on the bus, Frankie thinks of something. Her mother tells her not to think so much, sweetie, tell me have you seen Daisy? What did you girls talk about today? But Frankie does her best to freeze her face and decides that she will not speak, though she thinks she might if her mom insists so much that she feels that delicious thing in her chest that feels just like a caress in her ears and a kiss.
She doesn’t look at anybody in the bus. She looks through the window; they are passing by the park near to the jail, and Frankie notices there are no animals or people there. Nor even benches. She sees some blue birds going up and down the branches of two trees with no flowers. Mom, why don’t they put benches? Remember that park near to grandma’s house where there were that font and that church and that bunch of old people sitting on benches? Remember? Why don’t they put benches here? Frankie’s mom looks at her daughter. An old mark of a chicken pox pimple under Frankie’s lip is getting reddish, she keeps on scratching it even after she has wounded the small circle of skin on it. Frankie needs to take a bath: she has been refusing to wash her hands and even her face, she has been throwing the toothpaste without making use of it, she hasn’t looked at herself in the mirror ever since her mom broke the big one on the door by hitting it with the broom. Four weeks ago, Frankie would have invited her two cousins over if only her mother had suggested it, and along with Daisy, they would have filled with purple bubbles the tub in the bathroom and taken a long, long hot bath. Her mother would have had all of them look for new costumes in her drawers. Frankie would have been looking for pieces she could wear as skirts or dresses, and after finding something she would ask her mom where the thing came from, why she bought it, why didn’t she throw it away if she didn’t use it anymore. But that morning came when Frankie didn’t go to school because her mom wanted to leave her to rest. While Frankie slept her mom cleaned up the house as usual: she took the mats out to the back yard, turned on the radio and started sweeping the entrance starting from the wall opposite to the door, walking backwards, until she hit the big crystal with the wooden handle of the broom and crackled the mirror in the bottom, with such a force that there were not big pieces of glass to clean up later but mostly crumbs. Frankie woke up, feeling a buzzing vibration resonate in her whole body, and couldn’t think of anything. She had been sleeping profoundly, not even dreaming, when the loud crash of the mirror called her back to the morning but didn’t give her space to have that necessary second of consciousness, between sleep and awakening, when all memories come back to the mind and one remembers who one is and what one should feel in the day. Frankie walked to the living room and saw her mother carefully picking up the pieces of glass that were big enough as to grab them with her hands, and felt afraid she would see one of those sharp triangles of mirror cutting her mother’s skin and making her bleed. That didn’t happen, her mom was very cautious not to hurt herself, but Frankie saw a square of broken crystal invading her mother’s hand, wounding the lines in her palm, and started to cry even though she immediately realized it was occurring only in her mind. She rubbed her eyes with her knuckles and felt that her left cheek was swollen and raw, as if someone had punched her with fury. She remembered this feeling when she was older, but couldn’t really tell what had happened.
I remember, sweetheart, says her mother looking at her. They say that this park doesn’t need any benches. She caresses her daughter’s leg with her left hand and with the other holds Frankie’s backpack so it won’t get dirty by the contact with the bus’ floor. Frankie doesn’t look back at her mom, but holds her hand over her blue apron. She has forgotten completely what she was thinking of before noticing the desolate park. Frances Francine, Frankie suckling pig, you smell like a piglet, her mom sings with a lowering tone and a big smile, trying to make a rhyme, softly caressing Frankie’s thigh. Frankie has followed the words and likes them. She thinks of the baby pigs she has seen in the past, only on TV, only cartoons. She laughs, her eyes quickly looking for her mom’s, and her little body quivers, relaxing. Frankie looks at the man in the sky-blue shirt who drives the bus, she looks at the woman with the supermarket’s bag sitting in front of her and at her own legs and arms, and wants to remember a song of her own to sing to her mom, but her thoughts are only about the things that she sees immediately.
In her house she eats broccoli and tuna and drinks chocolate milk, and doesn’t even turn on the TV for the cartoons, she wants to sleep.
Frankie, wake up. Let’s go to Doctor Miller’s. Wake up, you need to take a bath before we go. Frankie opens her eyes and remains still, pushing her head against the pillow, as if she was expecting that it would swallow her. Her mom lifts her under the armpits and tries to make her sit, but Frankie loosens her body and for a second she seems lifeless in her mother’s hands. Her mom doesn’t like the game, she lets Frankie fall back on the bed and asks her to get up, take those clothes off, hurry up. But Frankie doesn’t move, and her mom sits by her side and runs her fingers through her dirty hair. Frankie baby, you need to get up, let’s go get you clean and pretty, and as she says this, her voice lowers more and more, almost becomes a whisper. Frankie thinks of the TV pigs and wants to enter the screen and beat their noses, make them bleed, see them twisting their pink fleshy bodies on the floor of the house the three of them share. Frankie is furious, she wants to kill the pigs and kill the wolf and break down their house, and then she wants to cry a little and stay living inside the TV, but doesn’t want anyone to turn it on.
Her mom has the purple and pink soap bars that Frankie likes the best, a grape smelling crocodile and a strawberry. There are no bubbles in the tub, Frankie didn’t want them. She sits on the empty tub, trembling, because she didn’t want her mom to fill it either, and her mother passes the soap along her body very quickly, we are almost finished baby, are you sure you don’t want the tub filled? You are cold. Frankie doesn’t speak. She thinks of the pigs, the part in which she smashed her fists against their noses, and now feels regret. She goes back, over and over again, to that mental scene where she saw them, naked, dying, and then returns to the part where she entered the TV. She smiles, because she likes being able to make the pigs come alive again, to change things.
On the way to and back the Doctor’s office, Frankie sleeps in the bus. Frankie will not be able to remember Doctor Miller’s face with detail; he will simply become a man wearing black glasses and dressed in white; smiley, safe. She will only remember the phrases he used to write for her, maybe to help relieve her uneasiness. He used to write half a sentence and then ask Frankie to tell him how to finish it. “I like rope games, apples,” “I don’t like it when my mom is angry.” The last time she saw him, he asked Frankie what were her favorite things to touch, to smell, to see, and then he sat in the floor next to Frankie and told her the things that he liked to touch and smell and eat. Then he started to make up strange funny words to call himself after the things he liked, and asked Frankie to do the same with her name. He wrote down the things they both liked the most. “Doctor Tomato”, “Frankie Flowery.” But from those sentences, Frankie will only remember one in which her name was attached to a fluff, as if a thread was being tied to a bright balloon just before it was released in the middle of a morning, free to go up to the sky and get lost, or pricked.
When Frankie goes to bed that night, she takes off her under pants. Her inner thighs feel itchy and burn, as if she had worn pants all day. She puts on her aunt’s white gown and throws herself over the bed. Frankie wants to go to school the next day. She has planned to accept Laurena’s and Daisy’s invitation to play, and after they are done playing, she is going to ask Daisy to walk with her to the restrooms. Once in the big room where the flushing toilets are all always taken, she is going to tell her friend to wait until everybody is gone back to classes, she is going to lock the door and take off her apron and sit over it, on the floor near to the sinks. Then she is going to wait for Daisy to say something.
She looks at the ceiling and feels the steps of her mother approaching her room. She closes her eyes, pretending she’s asleep. Frankie doesn’t move; her teeth are tightly closed. Her mom turns off the light and covers her by rolling the bedspread over her so Frankie is the stuffing of a blue fabric canister. When she leaves, Frankie opens her eyes again and sits on the border of her bed. She can smell the fruity aroma of her body. She likes it. What is Daisy doing right now? Daisy is skinny, so pretty, she always knows new games that her older sister teaches her. Frankie didn’t like having her hair braided until Daisy had hers plaited in two long pieces of black hair, like mouse’s tails tied with yellow ribbons. Daisy doesn’t like much to talk with other people, but she is always moving. In school Daisy and she were always together, sitting in the same bench when possible. Daisy’s mom used to get her coloring books in the school’s store, and Daisy would let Frankie paint and glue noodles and dry grains on a few pages, always. In the afternoons Frankie repeated with precision each word of her conversations with Daisy to her mom. Daisy’s sister is in second grade and Pablito is her boyfriend, mom, and Daisy says she doesn’t like that because her sister is older than him, and Pablito is our age, and he should be with a girl of our age, and I felt angry, mom, so angry, I don’t know why. Daisy also showed Frankie her collection of Disney cards, each with a princess imprinted in color on one side. At first Frankie liked The Sleeping Beauty a lot, but she didn’t like the idea of the princess sleeping so many years and the castle getting old and full of thorny ivy. So she changed her for Snow White, and had liked her until that time came when she didn’t want to remember or feel certain things anymore. Her taste had not moved further from the black haired princess since, her mind occupied in trying to think about other things.
For Christmas, Frankie’s mom took her to visit her grandmother. They stayed there two weeks, the two of them sleeping in the same bed, Frankie’s legs tangled around her mother’s until late in the morning. There were no children in that house; her cousins had not come to visit that year. There were only her grandmother, her big cat, so big it looked like two mingled together instead of one, and her mother’s body. Frankie missed Daisy. She thought of her maybe twice a day, first at breakfast and then in the afternoons when the cat jumped over her lap making her entire body shake, so heavy a cat and so fluffy. There was something about the smell in her grandmother’s pans that reminded her of the odor of Daisy’s mouth, and there was something about the softness of the fat in the belly of the blue eyed cat that made her long for her friend’s touch, her hand in hers walking towards the school’s kiosk to get themselves some apple chips.
she and her mom had long walks in the park across from her grandmother’s house. It was full of older people, there were no kids there, at least not when she and her mom walked along its paths. White and yellow flowers bloomed, men and women sat together on rocks and benches. Most of them were parents, Frankie thought. Her mom used to sit too whilst Frankie selected special leaves and clovers, and after a while she called Frankie back, let’s go get you some food, give me your hand.
The first thing Frankie did after returning was invite Daisy over. They didn’t scream with excitement when they saw each other, they just started talking about Pablito’s party, which Daisy didn’t attend but wanted to know everything about so she could tell her mom and ask her to do something better when her birthday come in a month. They talked and watched TV and ate scrambled eggs with rice and ketchup, and after that Frankie got her red candy cup from Pablito’s birthday and they both finished the candy and the chocolates. You girls need to take a bath, Daisy, what is your mother going to say when she sees your clothes tomorrow? Frankie’s mom took them to the bathroom and taught them how to release the water into the tub and where to put the shampoo and the soap afterwards, and let them both alone, naked, in the bathroom. When they yelled announcing they were done, one hour or so later, Frankie’s mom handed them towels and took them to her room, not Frankie’s, so they could see the TV if they wanted. The girls put green polyester gowns on as pajamas. They looked alike, the water of their hair still dropping on their backs and making them tremble. They jumped over the big white bed, higher and higher, playing a game in which one tried to make the other fall to the floor, laughing out loud, louder each time. Daisy fell first. Then Frankie jumped down. She gave her a strong hug and Daisy embraced her too, and they laughed more and kissed each other in the ears, suckling their lobes and laughing. Daisy’s hands ran down Frankie’s back, and Frankie didn’t know what to do next, but she wanted to act as if she knew. She kissed Daisy’s shoulder, but doing this made her think of her mother, and she looked at Daisy and they both stopped, maybe she was thinking of her mom as well. Daisy fixed the green stripe of her shoulder with one hand and with the other held Frankie’s neck, and kissed her in her lips. Frankie’s mom was watching.
Whatever Daisy is doing right now Frankie cannot guess. She is listening to a song in her head. She cannot remember where she has heard it before. It sounds calm and powerful, at times it feels like a heavy rock falling down to the earth, almost angrily, over and over again. Frankie listens to the tune and shuts up all the remaining words in her head. She is listening carefully. She thinks it is a new song, something she has never heard before anywhere else. She repeats it in her head many times, and then she sings it out loud, sitting on her bed, barely moving. Frankie doesn’t want to fall asleep now. Frankie wants to repeat the song so she can easily recall it tomorrow and the days after, she wants to sing the song to people so they can help her to remember if she forgets. Frankie sings louder. She will remember. She uses two syllables to describe the song, “la” and “ra,” and now she decides that she cannot wait until tomorrow, she wants everyone to listen to her right now, the melody bursting out of her body in long strings of sound. Frankie sweetheart, says her mom from her room, I want to sleep. Please don’t sing. Frankie stands up and stops singing, but is still repeating the song in her head. She walks out of her room, trying not to think of anything but her melody, trying to have it mingle with everything else she recalls. She walks down the stairs, towards the entrance door where the mirror used to be, and walks outside the house. In the yard Frankie starts singing again, trying to overcome the intensity of the crickets’ tune and with her eyes she’s looking for the hose, she wants to prepare some mud.
