Bandit Page 5

  There is a photo of my sister and I sitting on the front steps of this duplex. We hold new kittens. My sister is looking right at the camera, delighted, and I am looking away. The kittens, Max and Shema, held some promise of normalcy. Surely we were home now; after all, we had kittens, and kittens required stability. But I am wincing, and somehow look already defeated. Like a nonbeliever already, at six years old. On the sidewalk in front of this house there is a ghost of me learning to ride my bike, Dad running alongside patiently, holding the handlebars and keeping me steady until I can balance. From then on, my bike was everything to me—my instrument of freedom and privacy. Then, there was the Bike Disaster, as Mom called it.

  My sister was riding her bike and I was set upon Dad’s handlebars because my bike had a flat tire. We were just going around the block. “Keep your feet real open,” Dad had told me. My bare feet hovered away from either side of the whirring front wheel. It felt good to be charged with such a challenge. I was strong and I could do it, easily even. Dad sped up down the long block, and I looked back to see my sister charging fiercely to catch up, smiling and bright faced. Dad leaned into a corner and in went my foot. My ankle hit the blur of spokes and was chewed: Dad skidded to a stop, grabbing my body back to him, holding me up and away from the bike and bloody wheel. I did not scream at first, but marveled at the foamy spray of blood up my legs, confused.

  Dad screamed. Someone from inside a house rushed out, an ambulance was called, a hospital was visited, and a cast was applied. I started the first grade with this cast on my leg, dirty after only a couple of days because I would not stay indoors. “My dad,” I told anyone who asked how I ended up in the cast. I hardly understood what that implied.

  Because the landlord intended to raise our rent the following year, my parents got married. Dad wanted to buy a house, but Mom wouldn’t agree to it unless her name was on it too, so they got married, as a “business arrangement,” Mom said. This house, on Bonnieview, the only real house I have ever lived in with my parents, was the “bad” house. Our family dissolved for good in that house.

  My parents got married at the courthouse and had a reception in the basement. I remember them cutting a flat white cake together, both their hands on the knife. I remember Mom wore a vivid blue sweater tucked into a long, dark paisley skirt. Dad had a moustache then, and those big, square wire glasses mild office men wore in the eighties. I didn’t understand why they were getting married.

  In a Polaroid my mom sent me from the ceremony at the courthouse, the four of us are standing in front of a small group of trees. Mom is wearing a white jacket and a white skirt with a huge flower pinned to her shoulder. She has on an odd white hat and her big glasses, tinted pink at the top. My sister and I are glued together in front, huddled almost, in white frocks and squinty grins. Dad stands behind in a black suit. A real suit. Mom and sister and I form a kind of white pyramid against Dad’s blackness. I stare hard at this photo. I have no memory of this event.

  I loved the new house at first. It was the first proper house I had lived in with my family, and it was really ours, and we were really a family now. I had my own room, an incredible canopy bed with rainbow ruffles hanging down, and my own small, pink radio that I would hug like a doll as I fell asleep.

  This was the time we were a normal family, for just a few years. Normal school, birthday parties, forts in the living room, our sweet cats, dinners together. Dad and Mom were putting on their “We’re OK” hats and we girls did, too. I figured this was it: this was normal. For three years we all lived together. It seems absurd to imagine now, the four of us living together, like an impossible mirage.

  I had no idea how not normal things were. But that’s the thing about normalcy—it’s only a frame of reference, not absolute.

  Mom’s hands shook while she washed the dishes, rattling silverware and splashing water onto the counter and up her arms. Some days she didn’t leave her bedroom. The door would stay dark and silent all day, until I went to bed. Other days she’d take up some monumental project and leave it midway through, like the time I woke up on a Sunday to find one of my bedroom walls frantically half-painted dark blue, never to be finished. I didn’t mention it. I just tried to be gentle around her, and began to realize that something was wrong with her.

  I don’t remember any childhood friends from this time, or any time really until I got to sixth grade. I wasn’t interested in making friends. I didn’t know what the point of friendship was, couldn’t see any real value in it because I just wanted to be alone. And girls didn’t seem to like me very much. I was confused by their interest in craftsy friendship bracelets and gymnastics and stickers and Lisa Frank junk. I wolfed down my lunches alone, then hurried to the library to avoid them. During recess I sat near the recess monitors, watching the kids on the playground with the same distant interest as the adults did. Or I’d find a tree to sit under alone. I loved one crabapple tree high up on a grassy slope that became a snow-packed and dirty sledding hill in the winter. The sweet-rot vinegar smell of the fallen apples kept the other kids away, and attracted bees, which I loved to let crawl on my arms.

  It didn’t seem wise to get attached to anyone.

  At home I mostly spent time alone outdoors. If she wasn’t busy, Mom would sometimes join me, sunk into a squat lawn chair in the sun patch of our small backyard, eyes shut, a Bartles & Jaymes wine cooler in hand, her bathing suit straps down around her shoulders, exposing the smudgy, pastel star-and-moon tattoos on her chest. We didn’t make small talk when we were together. We just rested.

  I liked to dig. I wanted so badly to find something good. My sister’s habit of pointlessly pulverizing rocks with a hammer into dust became a cleanup job for me. I’d found an old glass Coke bottle in the garage that I would fill with the dust. then sprinkle it out onto the things I cared about, my violets or the ladybugs I’d caught and kept in a small screen-and-pinewood box labeled THE BUG HUT.

  I felt insignificant. I sought abstract things to confirm my insignificance, and still do: dirt, bugs, dust, geology, cells, the vastness of space, unpopulated places. Wherever no one was, I went.

  All the way up to the roof. There was a small antenna tower right next to the house, touching it, hidden in the trees on the shady side of the house. It blocked the view from one of the windows in my room. It emerged from the dirt near where my private patch of violets grew and I toyed with climbing it one day. It was a Sunday and my sister was away playing with friends, my mom was resting, and Dad was gone. The tower was a little flimsy, didn’t seem like it was meant to be climbed, but I decided it would hold me until I reached the roof. I made it to the warm black roof and sat, a little scared, the sharp sweet-and-salty smell of tar and sunshine all mine. I grew calm. I watched the other kids walking around the streets or in the adjacent backyards and I thought about the people in their cars and where they were going. I crept to the chimney and hugged it. I peered down into it: nothing to see but powdery black. A low weak whistle and a cool current of air jetted steadily upward from it. The treetops roiled in the wind. No one saw me.

  After that I climbed onto the roof whenever no one was looking and stayed as long as I could, into night even. Sometimes I’d even see Mom come out and yell absently for me, toward the streets, not imagining I was above her. I liked to see her, and the whole world, small like that.

  Toward the end of this three-year period, I started to notice how much Dad yelled at the TV. It woke me up. After bedtime I’d sneak down the hall to look at him in the living room, watching a basketball game in the dark blue light, sometimes two TVs set up side-by-side with different games during the playoffs, him yelling, holding papers, pencils, making calls. I had no clue he was gambling, or any notion at all that this was what gambling looked like. The yelling just seemed rude. And the louder he became the quieter I became. Some nights I’d creep out of my room to see about the yelling; once I cut my foot on a loose nail in the hallway and tracked blood back to my room but didn’t tell anyone. In th
e morning, Dad was furious about the blood prints on the floor, and I knew his anger was not over the mess but the fact that someone had been watching him.

  Soon there was constant fighting. The more they fought, the more the house faded. The fighting became the new house. I could feel the anger in my gut, even when there was silence, like a black hand threaded through me.

  Then the old house seemed stupid, there in the background, like an obnoxious cartoon come on at the wrong moment. I used to love it. The wide flat sectional in the living room and its huge, flat-striped pillow my sister and dad would share watching the Lions on Monday nights, the brass-and-glass coffee table where I first saw Dad’s squashed feet propped up (he told me he wore shoes that were too small as a child), the big TV, the dinette set with lacy woven cane seats that printed octagons on our thighs in the summer, and all of the rest: the cracked patio, the garage, the grass, the elms with white-painted bottoms like tube socks on big legs. It made me mad, how nice all of it was. It didn’t seem to matter anymore; it wasn’t us anymore.

  One dim summer evening I found my mom crying alone on the front patio. I sat beside her on the concrete step and hugged my knees, just like she was doing. I didn’t want to look at her. She just cried, straight ahead, into the cool night. She tilted and hugged me. I said, “It’s OK, Mom, things are going to be OK, really …” which made her cry harder, waves of full body sobs. I decided not to cry, and in not crying, I felt old for the first time. I pushed myself down, out of love. The pushing created a pit, a blank resolve, to never make more pain for anyone. That resolve is still there somewhere.

  Now I was eight years old. At the start of the new school year Mom insisted I go to a counselor at my school for an hour a week. The counselor told me what to do when my parents fought: go to your bedroom, put a pillow over your head or crank up your music and try to ignore it. This was the exact opposite of what I would do when they fought. Her suggestions seemed bizarre and sad. When my parents fought I would sneak toward the fight, hiding close to it so that I could hear what was being said. Most of it made no sense. I couldn’t make out the words; it was as if it wasn’t even English. There were yelps and repeated syllables and gravelly swear words and the most horrifying element of all: Dad’s laughter, attempting to lighten the mood. I went toward it because I wanted to know what was happening, and because I wanted to hear my parents talking to each other.

  I told the counselor that I cranked up my music when they fought. I’m certain I never told the counselor anything real about my life. She was warm and patient with me, and seemed genuinely interested in helping, which made me distrust her more fiercely than any adult I had met before. When asked to draw a picture of a favorite family memory, I drew all of us caroling in the snow at Christmastime, which she cooed over and urged me to cherish as a sacred memory I could access whenever I was sad. Nothing even remotely close to this ever actually happened. I had never been caroling, only seen it on TV. I just wanted her to leave me alone.

  I remember clearly how it felt to be treated like a child. It made me feel deficient, like there was some weakness about me that forced adults to hide most honest or real things from me for fear of their effects. I didn’t want that. I didn’t want to be a child. It’s underappreciated, I think, how quickly children can come to understand how to deal with adults in order to survive. I could see my parents’ self-absorption. I knew they were hiding huge portions of their lives from me and all it did for me was to teach me not to trust them. And it ended our family. Never again would we live together in one house. I can’t even recall a time since then when we all stood together in the same room, even for a moment.

  One afternoon, my sister and I were playing separately, her making shooting noises with her G.I. Joes and me building Lego homes for my two precious My Little Ponys. My parents asked us to come have a talk in their bedroom. The room was electrified with tension. My sister and I sank into the puffy white comforter on the edge of their bed, sick-feeling, both of us, our faces mirroring each other.

  They stood above us. “We are getting a divorce,” Dad said.

  Mom gave us a worried look. “I’m so sorry, girls. You know we love you very much and this is not your fault in any way.” But we were too old for that line. Of course we knew it was not our fault; we had never considered such an insane suggestion until she’d said it. The idea of a divorce seemed fine, right even. I almost said “good” but held my tongue.

  “Your mother cheated on me. Do you know what that means?” He spoke slowly and loudly, as if he wanted to hurt us with the words: “It means she let another man stick his penis inside of her.”

  I slumped as if cowering, went hot with tears. I felt sick from these people, how they acted and talked, the things they wanted, their stupid bitterness and coarse desires, how we had to be carried around recklessly by them.

  “God fucking damn it Joe!” Mom screamed and he made an evil laugh. Mom began to cry and he just folded his arms. They began arguing blindly and we ran off, my sister to her room, and me to the little weedy plot on the side of the house, my garden, where I would talk to the wild violets as if they were my students. But that evening I stayed quiet, plucking the little rolled-up petals out of clover flowers and biting the tender white ends off, sometimes tasting the drops of nectar they were filled with, unless something had gotten there first.

  18

  Robins—the aimless tangled notes of robins in the morning—I awake to for years after their announcement. I can still hear my parents’ voices. The sound of robins reminds me of somewhere we must have lived. I try hard to remember where. It must have been somewhere quiet—maybe when we went to live with my grandparents until I was about twelve. My space, the adjacent emptiness, a plot of harsh grass and Queen Anne’s Lace, where I buried a time capsule I wanted to send to the future, filled, I don’t know why, with broken mirrors and plates.

  I can’t place it. It’s a spring feeling, one that can come too early, in January even, now that I live in the South. I spread flat the whole past and I’m not there. I see her, that little clueless me, but it isn’t me. I don’t feel scared or wistful looking back across this break in self, just grateful, honestly.

  But aloneness is a thick curtain that gets harder to part. Far from my family, living alone, as I had always wanted I suppose, I would find it very silent in my small apartment most of the time.

  19

  “Dad?”

  “Hey! Kiddo!” His whole self shook upward a little, startled. I walked too quietly and would just surface like that out of his blind spot.

  “What is that?” I asked, and pointed to an embroidered patch tacked to the wall of the garage at the Bonnieview house, the bad one, the last one. Stitched in red thread against a black and yellow background were the words “I Know I’m Going to Heaven” (then some long chunky lump I couldn’t recognize) “Because I Already Been to Hell” (then some abbreviations and numbers). The patch was telling me something about my dad so I studied it: it said that Dad had been to Hell, this scythe-shaped country outlined in red. It hung there as the only weird thing in the garage, like a crazy artificial flower above rows and boxes and drawers of tools laid straight and boring gray, functional items categorized by shape and size.

  He laughed shortly, in a mean spirit, and set down the small parts he’d been messing with. “It’s a patch from my old jacket,” he said in his dumb kid voice, which was different from his adult voice, and I hated it for that reason. “After high school I got drafted, to the Army,” then his voice turned brighter, “I had to go kill the yellow man,” he said with an extra breathy rush of air.

  “The yellow man?”

  I took this to mean they wore yellow uniforms, like you’d call “shirts” the kids on the team wearing shirts and “skins” the half-naked ones. I imagined a whole army of men wearing yellow jumpsuits, and with no other useful information to construct their appearance, they all wore my dad’s face.

  “Yeah, chinks, you know,” and he lean
ed down to me and pulled the corners of his eyes back with each pointer finger and made a comic grin. I smiled and pretended that this inscrutable gesture cleared things up, nodding. “See that too?” he continued.

  Under the patch, propped straight into the corner of the garage where I had not looked before, was a long and narrow dagger.

  “My bayonet! If you were real close you’d just ram it right into the little yellow men,” he said, smiling and miming a jab. I couldn’t tell if he was kidding. I watched his eyes. He was being funny, but with a bright hardness that was beyond me. I wanted to laugh but I didn’t know why.

  “Oh, cool.”

  20

  I didn’t know that the rest of the world didn’t live intensely bound in a symbiotic net of relations with cars until I moved away from Detroit. Cars seemed as important as food, and my dad and all the other kids’ dads were farmers. When he didn’t work at GM he worked at a tool-and-die shop making auto parts, along with my mom. And if you didn’t make car parts or assemble them you worked as a waitress near a plant, as I did as a teenager, serving workers on their lunch breaks. Ford, GM, Chrysler: God, Holy Spirit, Christ. We lived at their feet. That world, a web with the auto industry at its center, had been falling apart, and my family still lived in this falling-apart world. I grew up in a place that bled jobs and promises and no one really believed the bleeding would stop.

  Desperation is not any one kind of thing—except maybe a mood. It’s a mood people live in, and if you live in a Nice Place, with clean parks and working streetlights and no hunger on your street, you only know this mood when you drive through the part of town you wish you could avoid.