10. Frankie
TEN
frankie
“I think you girls were onto something,” Frankie says, peering in the window of the empty storefront in downtown Stardust Beach as she and Jo stand there together. Jo is wearing a simple dress and low-heeled shoes, and her hair and lipstick are neat and tidy.
Frankie, on the other hand, has swept her hair up into a haphazard bun, and is out of the house wearing just a swipe of light pink lipstick and a pair of oversized gold hoops with a belted shirtdress. With Ed gone, she’s fallen easily into a less “done” version of herself, and has been entirely enjoying her evening glass of wine with her parents, as well as sleeping in later and waking up to the fresh coffee that her mother has brewed, which they sip out on the back patio together. Everything feels light and easy, and while she misses Ed terribly, it feels like she’s breathing inside her own little pocket of air with him gone and her parents running things. It’s taken a lot off of Frankie’s plate, and she’s soaking up the freedom and letting her mind run free while someone else worries about what’s for dinner or whether the car needs to be gassed up.
“Do you really think I could run a dance studio?” Frankie asks Jo now, turning to face her.
Jo, who is watching Frankie with curiosity, nods and laces her fingers together in front of her stomach, the handle of her purse looped over one wrist. “Sure, Frankie. I think you can do anything,” she says loyally.
But Frankie knows that Jo actually means it. Since the day they’d met, Frankie has understood that Jo looks up to her; that she finds Frankie more glamorous and worldly than she thinks herself to be, and that she believes Frankie’s life has been all glitter and fairy dust. It wasn’t until their walk when Frankie had unboxed just the barest details of her past that Jo had begun to understand her friend—to really know her. She’d been worried that Jo’s opinions of her might change, but, much to Frankie’s surprise, it hasn’t rattled their friendship at all.
“Thanks, Joey-girl,” Frankie says, turning back to the window with stars in her eyes. “I think I’d like to try.”
Just then, Mrs. Chatelaine, the only real estate agent in Stardust Beach, parks her long, yellow convertible Cadillac at the curb and steps out.
“Mrs. Maxwell?” she asks, looking back and forth between Frankie and Jo.
“I’m Francesca Maxwell,” Frankie says, holding up a hand in greeting. “But please, just call me Frankie.”
Mrs. Chatelaine, a plump woman of about fifty, steps onto the curb. She’s wearing white, wrist-length gloves on her hands, and her hair is styled into a firm flip that’s been sprayed to within an inch of its life. “Pleased to meet you.” She turns to Jo and smiles at her.
“This is my friend Josephine,” Frankie says, making the introduction hastily. Her excitement is nearly palpable. “We’d really like to go inside and see the space, if we can.”
“Of course, of course,” Mrs. Chatelaine says, waddling over to the door and pulling out a ring of keys. She tries one in the lock as she mutters to herself and then finds the right one, jiggling it until it gives way. “Here we are,” she says, opening the door wide so that they can enter.
The space is stuffy and airless, but Frankie doesn’t even notice. She walks straight into the big, open room and stands in the center, arms outstretched as she turns in circles, surveying the whole area.
“This mirror is perfect,” she says, walking across the wood floors to the mirror that runs the entire length of one wall. “I could get a barre installed, and then over there,” she says, pointing with the hand that holds her clutch purse, “I could get a piano.”
Jo is nodding and squinting as she tries to imagine her friend’s vision. “Do you really think it could work, Jo? I mean, beyond all of you girls bringing your kids for dance lessons, do you think I could make a go of this?”
Mrs. Chatelaine is watching Frankie with interest and a touch of amusement. “What is it you’re trying to do here, Mrs. Maxwell?”
Frankie snaps back to reality, turning to the real estate agent, who she’s very nearly forgotten is in the room. “I’m looking to open a dance studio here. I think. I want to, that is.”
Mrs. Chatelaine looks around the room and gives Frankie a nod. “Well, first of all, you need to say it with confidence. Tell people, ‘I am opening a dance studio here.’ And then, secondly, you need to have a vision. What is your vision?”
Frankie closes her eyes as a balmy winter breeze blows through the open door. When she opens them, she feels a certainty in her bones that she hasn’t felt about many things lately. “My vision is me, standing up there at the barre.” She points to the mirror and to where she’ll be stationed. “And a class full of young girls—even boys—in flat dance shoes, ready to learn how to move and feel the music. Some will want to perform, and others will just be here because their parents want them to learn rhythm or to be active. Every year, I’ll put on recitals, and parents will come to see their little ones in a ballet or a variety show.”
Jo has her head cocked to one side as she watches Frankie, listening to her plan. Mrs. Chatelaine nods. Her hands are still laced together in front of her, though she’s slipped off her gloves and tucked them into her purse.
“Well,” Mrs. Chatelaine says. “We don’t have anything like that in Stardust Beach at the moment, so I think it’s really something you could do, Mrs. Maxwell.”
“Frankie,” Frankie corrects her. Her forehead creases ever so slightly. “But how much is the rent on a place like this?” She walks over to a doorway which leads to a short hallway. Off the hall is a small office space, which she flips on the light to examine, and two closet-sized restrooms. She turns back to Mrs. Chatelaine.
Mrs. Chatelaine has pulled a pad of paper from her handbag and is consulting her handwritten notes. “This building is owned by a company out of Orlando, and they’re asking fifty-eight dollars a month. With utilities and insurance that comes to about seventy dollars a month.”
Ed will have questions, certainly, but she can easily make seventy dollars a month teaching classes to children. And even if all she does is break even, then that’s okay. She’s not earning an income at the moment anyway, so who cares if she essentially teaches for free? She thinks Ed will agree that doing something like this is actually good for her--good enough that just breaking even will be satisfactory for the time being.
Frankie nods thoughtfully, walking over to the mirror as she eyes her own reflection. The woman she sees is possibly a bit thinner than she has been in the past; her dancing muscles have softened a bit, and her appetite has waned. Frankie puts a hand to her own cheek, still watching the reverse image as it looks back at her. To dance again …she thinks. To dance would be to forget, to take back the things she’d lost when Whit Evans had stripped her of her sense of self.
As Mrs. Chatelaine and Jo wander down the hall together, their voices muffled as Mrs. Chatelaine talks to Jo about the tiny office, the phone connection, the monthly cost of things, Frankie continues to stare at herself. As she does, she enters a place where she’s disconnected from her surroundings; she’s left everything behind for the moment, and the Frankie she sees in the mirror is not the one who is trying her best to find her way in her life and in her marriage, but instead the Frankie who had woken up in a puddle of her own blood in the bathtub of Whit Evans’s penthouse apartment.
“Get up,” he said, standing over Frankie’s naked and shivering body. “You need to get some clothes on and get out of here.”
Frankie pushed herself up to a sitting position in the cold porcelain tub. Her stomach and thighs were coated in dried blood, and her head pounded like her brain was too large for her skull.
“What happened?” she asked, looking around.
Whit tossed a white towel at her, turning to the mirror. He looked at himself, smoothing both sides of his hair against his head. “Nothing that you didn’t want to happen.”
Frankie looked at the terry cloth towel against her skin, which had gone so pale that it appeared nearly translucent. She wrapped it around her body and stood up shakily. “Why am I bleeding?”
Whit leaned into the mirror and picked at his teeth with a fingernail. “There was a bit of a struggle.”
Frankie placed one hand against the wall and stepped over the side of the tub and onto the tile floor. “A struggle for what?”
Whit turned back to her. “You weren’t being a very cooperative young lady.”
Because she was shocked, because she was scared, because there was blood—Frankie started to cry. “But why did you do this to me?” she asked, shaking like a leaf even though the towel covered her.
Whit folded his arms and looked at her through narrowed eyes. “Francesca. There are two kinds of people in life: there are the people who control things. They are the takers, the achievers, the ones who make gains and find success. Then there’s everyone else. You’re everyone else.” He stared at her and let this sink in. “If you want to have even the most minor achievements in life, you will end up acquiescing to the people who can help you to make that happen. That’s me: I’m a person who can help you make things happen.”
Frankie was still crying, and she leaned against a wall, staring at her bare feet as his words fell over her like a cold, hard rain.
“You want to be on Broadway? I control Broadway. But if you want me to help you get there, you have to give me what I want. And, in turn, you have to give my friends what they want.”
Frankie looked up at him with startled eyes; the night before was coming back to her in fits and starts. There had been other men—two other men, if she remembered correctly. And she’d fought them. Begged for them to leave her alone. But her limbs had felt heavy, and she wasn’t able to push them off her.
“I don’t want it that badly,” she said, nearly spitting her words. She tried to stand up straighter, but her lower ribs hurt and she winced.
Whit laughed. “Yes you do,” he said, looking mildly bored. “Now, take a shower and get dressed.” He pointed at a stack of folded clothing on the bathroom counter. “Put these on, and I’ll get you home. If you ever want to dance at Radio City again, you’ll do well to not talk about anything that happened here. And if you want to find your way to Broadway, you’ll answer the phone when I call, you’ll get into the car when I send one for you, and you’ll do as I ask.”
Whit walked out of the bathroom then, closing the door behind him with a soft click. Frankie stood there, kneecaps quaking and teeth chattering. She was cold on the outside, but it was her insides that felt like a block of ice.
Because she could no longer stand the blood on her skin or the ice in her veins, she turned on the shower as hot as it would go.
“Well, the space looks perfect,” Jo says now, breaking into Frankie’s memory. Her eyes skitter across the mirror in front of her in the empty business space in Stardust Beach, and the memory of Whit’s expensive apartment in Manhattan falls away. Her gaze meets Jo’s in the mirror. “I think it would make an amazing dance studio.”
Frankie turns around to look at her directly. “So do I.” She moves to the center of the room again, taking it all in. “I’d love to teach these kids how to be free and really feel the music. When you turn like this,” she says, putting her arms out and executing a flawless, even pirouette, “the world spins around you. And when you really feel the beat of a song in here,” Frankie says, patting her own chest, “you start to become one with the music.” The room is absent any sort of music, but still, Frankie sweeps across the room, catching a glimpse of her smooth movements in the mirror. “And then—“ She’s just started to turn again, her skirt swirling around her thighs, hands flung gracefully overhead when she falters, stopping mid-spin. “Oh!” she says.
Mrs. Chatelaine, who has been watching in wonder from the side of the room, follows Frankie’s gaze, as does Jo. There is a dark-haired man standing there in the open doorway, watching Frankie dance with an amused half-smile on his face.
“No, please—don’t let me stop you,” the man says, holding up a hand. He’s dressed in a suit and tie, and he takes a step back, realizing that he’s intruded. “I was just going into the sandwich shop next door and I saw you in here dancing. It was beautiful. You should keep dancing.”
Mrs. Chatelaine stands up straighter and crosses the room with one hand extended. “Paulina Chatelaine,” she says, shaking the man’s hand. “Real estate agent to all of Stardust Beach. Are you local?”
Mrs. Chatelaine walks him out onto the sidewalk as she’s talking and pulling a business card from her handbag.
“Wow,” Jo says once it’s just the two of them. “You’re amazing, Frankie. I bet if you had the right music, you could put on a real show.”
Frankie is still staring at the doorway. Her heart thumps loudly in her chest and she puts the tips of her fingers to the spot on her neck where her pulse is beating. “He scared me.”
“Who, that business guy?” Jo glances back at where Mrs. Chatelaine is waving at the man, who is already on his merry way to the sandwich shop. “He meant no harm.”
Frankie nods as she feels herself coming down from the surprise of seeing a man watch her appraisingly. “You’re right,” she says, forcing a smile. “Of course—he just stopped to see what was going on.” Frankie picks up her clutch from where she’s laid it on a table and holds it to her chest. “I’m really thinking about renting this place.”
She follows Jo out onto the street so that they can thank Mrs. Chatelaine for showing them the space, and as they climb into Frankie’s car together, she casts one last glance over her shoulder at the now darkened window of what she hopes will soon be her dance studio. She hasn’t felt that jolt of fear in a long time, and it’s rattled her a bit that a man innocently watching her and telling her to dance more could have thrown her for such a loop. After all, that had been her job: to dance on stage, to keep dancing, to keep entertaining, to make people beg for more. So to feel so put off by someone giving her that very response is foreign to Frankie.
With a smile at Jo, she pulls out into traffic and drives away, the image of Whit Evans’s cold, evil smile superimposed over the face of the harmless businessman in her mind’s eye.