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  No monkeying around—it’s your birthday! Happy 13th Molly!

  Love,

  Dad

  We cracked up—embarrassed, delighted. Applauded when the song was over. The man in the gorilla suit shifted his weight around neurotically, hyped up, looking at us girls. He tugged at his giant red bowtie and shook the gorilla head mask loosely. His real voice was scratchy and high. “Hey what you girls doing tonight, huh? Having a party? Party time?” We laughed in that pitying way girls do when they don’t like you. The man in the gorilla suit from the singing telegram service Dad had hired pried at his eyeholes to wipe the sweat around his eyes with his nasty furry finger. This was the kind of birthday gift Dad would give me—distant, hands-off—but I was delighted to get anything at all. The gorilla suit was close to me now and it smelled like closets and cigarettes. “You girls wanna party?”

  “Ummm, haha. My mom’s coming to pick us up soon. Thanks for the song.” I opened the door.

  “OK, ladies, OK. Hey, happy birthday, baby girl. Yeah, girl. Can I get a hug? Birthday huuuuggg??” The gorilla opened his gross arms. My friends tittered nervously.

  I hugged the gorilla, laughing.

  29

  Three months later, Dad was arrested. My sister was fifteen that summer. She was there when it happened—I wasn’t. It was something I was told about. Told by Mom, told by cops, told by reporters just like everyone else watching the news was told.

  A story. A story like a dark new house we had to move to.

  Mom and I now lived in a condo her parents had helped her buy in a humble complex on Ironwood Street in Rochester, where we’d stay for four years—my longest tenure anywhere. I’d go all the way through high school without having to move, because, I realized later, Dad, the disrupting factor in our lives, would be in prison after this summer.

  It was nearing the end of the summer and my mom and I had just come home from a vacation—although at the time, as a preteen, camping was not “vacation” but pointless traveling drudgery. We were tired from the drive back from Canada and dirty from the weeklong camping and hiking trip along the coast of Georgian Bay in Lake Huron, swimming briefly in the icy water or taking glass-bottomed boat tours of old shipwrecks. Mom pressed the blinking button on the answering machine and I dragged my bag upstairs to unpack. In my small room I dumped my stinky clothes out and just sat for a moment, listening to the muffled sound of Mom on the phone downstairs. Then I started listening to it. Her voice was getting louder and sharper. I had already moved back toward the stairs when she called my name.

  She sat at the kitchen table, the extra-long curly phone cord stretched to her as she held the receiver with her thumb on its button. Her voice was keyed high with exasperation. “That was Grandpa. Your father has been arrested and your sister is staying with them.”

  I paused for a while, staring calmly. “What did he do?”

  “Robbed banks.” She looked at me and we didn’t say anything. She hadn’t tensed up or pinched her face in anger. In fact, her face cleared out flat, like the look of someone who’s just remembered something.

  “Robbed banks?” I finally said.

  “Robbed banks,” she repeated dreamily. “Bank robbery. Huh. You don’t say,” she murmured to herself, nodding blankly.

  It didn’t feel like some kind of mistake, like it sometimes feels when you don’t want to believe what’s happened. It was horrible how easy it was to accept. Almost funny. In the pressurized silence the beginnings of a laugh could have crept over me, but I fought it.

  The room felt as dark and solid as iron. I didn’t cry or scream. I remember standing still for a while in the kitchen, looking at the linoleum floor and saying nothing, feeling like I was waiting for instructions. In some ways I felt this was good. I probably felt some relief. He’d be removed from our lives in an official and secure way. It solved him in a way none of us could. He was exposed, finally, made into something specific: a bank robber. It was terrifying, for sure, but satisfying in how pinned down Dad suddenly was in this moment.

  I wasn’t scared or shocked. I think partly because I was a thirteen-year-old girl and I already hated the world and felt like it hated me, so there was nothing it could do to surprise me. Dad especially could not surprise me. Any story could’ve fit him. In fact, Mom and I were waiting for his story, and here one was. In the moment, I would say we were both very pleased with it.

  We didn’t say much. We both knew it was a big moment. Everything would soon be different for us, but for now we just sat with the last of our old reality. I stared out of the window in the kitchen, into the normal day outside. Eventually Mom went upstairs to take a shower and shut herself in her bedroom.

  Helpless, I plopped in front of the TV and turned it on. The first of the evening news was just coming on, something I would normally turn away from, but I froze when I saw his face. My dad’s mug shot floating in the corner next to the familiar Local 4 reporter, a reporter who was talking about him, saying his last name, my last name, a breaking story, but I couldn’t hear, the sound disappeared. I could only see his face, sad face, baggy eyes, deep frown, Dad.

  30

  My sister had been dropped off by her friend that evening, around dinnertime, after Dad failed to respond to her pages. There were cop cars in the parking lot of their condo complex. The door was wide open. She walked straight in and said hello.

  People in black jackets and black FBI hats swarmed her, wanted to know who she was, what she knew, if she knew of any money anywhere, any guns. She was alone, fifteen years old. They were the ones to tell her what happened. They kept her in the dining room, away from the rest of the condo, which they were ripping apart.

  They showed her photos of him from the bank security cameras. At first she didn’t recognize him. The photos were grainy and he had on sunglasses and a moustache. “Is this your dad?”

  She looked, carefully. They flipped through more photos. At the sight of one, she sighed.

  “That’s my hat. My U of M hat. I was wondering where that was.” She slumped in the chair, crying, now certain. A dad wearing his daughter’s hat during a bank robbery: a photo of this happening. My sister felt some relief too in that moment, seeing the photo, knowing something about him for certain.

  The agent told her to call someone and pack a bag.

  Mom and I weren’t there. She didn’t know we’d gone camping. She kept calling and hanging up, the clicks recorded on our answering machine for us to find later.

  Eventually she called Grandpa, and he came to get her. As soon as they got back to Grandpa’s house, Dad called.

  I asked her about this call recently. What did he possibly have to say for himself in that phone call?

  “He wanted to know what happened. Not to me, but to his stuff. He kept asking if they went through his stuff, if they looked in his room. I said yes, obviously, Dad. He was annoyed with that only, said they had no right to do that or that it was illegal or something. I asked him if he did this, what they said he did, the robberies. He said no. Mistaken identity. I said, ‘I saw the photo of you, Dad, wearing my hat while robbing a bank.’ Not me, he said. He was totally calm on the phone. He dismissed it all in a funny way, like it was all a big joke,” she told me.

  Mom drove us to Grandma and Grandpa’s house while I asked questions. She said she knew he’d lost his job at GM a few months earlier and she’d been wondering where he’d been getting his money. He’d lost his job over a car. Dad gave my sister a red Corvette in the spring as an early fifteenth-birthday present. She’d been driving it to school on her learner’s permit and was pulled over on a trip home. They didn’t tell her why, just put her in the back of the cop car and took her to the station. They called Mom to explain: the car was stolen, come pick up your daughter.

  It was a company car; Dad took it off the lot at the Tech Center without permission. It was reported stolen and Dad was fired. He’d been attempting to appear busy for two months.

  My sister said she noticed he
was around a lot. He’d pick her up from school unexpectedly. Take her out to eat almost every night. He bought a cell phone for himself. He bought a new watch for himself. No job, but looser with money than ever before. And now that the ill-gotten Corvette was gone, he bought her a car: a used blue Pontiac Firebird. He’d just dropped it off to have the windows tinted.

  That night we sat with my grandparents and just talked, asked each other questions until there was nothing else to say. In the dark living room it would go quiet for a while, and Grandpa would ask, “But why would he do this?” and Mom would say, “Because he needed money!” and the room would go quiet again. Then Grandpa would ask the question again.

  My sister sat quietly. She didn’t look stunned. She looked angry. She chewed her fingernails and said nothing, just boiled, apart from us.

  We found out more when the story was reported on the late news. They said he had robbed banks all summer, eleven in all, and the FBI had been tracking him for a while, staking out banks, hoping to catch him at one.

  First he’d rent a car. Then drive to a hotel. He’d take the license plate off the rental, and switch it with any nicer-looking car in the hotel lot. He’d drive to a bank, wait a bit in the car, watching the bank, looking for a calm moment.

  After the robbery he’d switch the license plates back, then go out for a meal or round of golf.

  I saw grainy gray photos of him from the security cameras of a bank. He had on a hat and glasses and a large fake moustache, but I could see his mouth and chin and I knew it was him. He looked like he does when he is certain of himself. An iron calm. He had no gun. Tellers reported that he pointed something at them from inside the pocket of his jacket, probably his finger or a toy gun. He’d wait in line, and calmly slide a withdrawal slip under the window onto which he’d written ACT NORMAL. This is a robbery, give me all the bills in your drawer. The tellers passed him money, and he left, acting normal, just as he wanted it to be. The customers around him went about their business, oblivious. It just looked like a withdrawal to the other customers in line.

  When he was caught after the last robbery, one newspaper article reported that he said he was relieved to be caught. Would he really have said that? I doubted a lot of the facts in the flurry of articles about him; many were wrong. In his pockets were chips from Windsor Casino and betting slips from the Hazel Park Raceway, where he’d brought my mom on their very first date, and where he later brought my sister on weekend nights as a treat.

  My sister faithfully clipped every newspaper article she could find about him and kept them in a scrapbook. At the time I honestly couldn’t tell if she was proud or disgusted. I asked her recently if she still had the clippings, but she said no, said she threw away everything of his.

  I had kept one clipping, only because I thought it was funny that there were so many errors about us in it—that we were eight and nine, and it had our names wrong. I had stuck it into my scrapbook, among goofy snapshots of me and my friends in middle school. It was just there, out of place.

  31

  “It’s ‘game over’ for the Super Mario Brothers Bandit, the Rochester man charged with allegedly robbing ten banks in Macomb and Oakland Counties since June 22 …”

  Dad’s face hung on the TV screen over the shoulder of the newscaster. For weeks after his arrest the media followed the story, updating us on his charges—both state and federal. I wonder if they would have followed up at all if it hadn’t been for his goofy nickname.

  Someone on his case at the FBI thought he looked like Mario, with the bushy fake moustache and suspenders under his jacket and the flat newsboy cap he’d sometimes wear to the robberies. Mario, from my game. Super Mario Bros. 3 was my favorite game at the very time he was arrested; I played it almost every day on my Nintendo after school.

  I switched from the news to my Nintendo. I played it even more after his arrest. It was the best one of the Mario Bros., the one with the raccoon tail, the frog suit, the vivid blue skies, and faces on all the clouds and trees—the cheeriest installment of the series. Unlikely that I was looking for him; more likely that I simply wanted to withdraw even further from my few friends. Still, there he was, in the game, every time I turned it on.

  There was the seriousness of what he did against the silliness of this detail, and how this nickname came to represent him in the media and among strangers as a clownish criminal. I wanted to join in this rousing dismissal of him too. I didn’t join in anywhere, though, not all the way. My sister remained on his side, hoping, somehow, that it would all turn out to be some kind of mistake like he said it was. Mom never was on his side, and seemed to feel comfortable with his dismissal. I just kept quiet.

  Often I leave that detail about his nickname out of the story now when I tell people. Tonally, the story becomes confusing if I mention his nickname. I start to smile and laugh sometimes, and the listener feels confused in what emotion to present. I might have to explain how it was not just any video-game character they assigned to my father, but my favorite one, the main one in my world—what a coincidence. How could my dad’s arrest be both awful and hilarious at the same time? Two opposing sharp points, irreconcilable. It hurt. But it was absurd, so I could laugh.

  32

  The face of Mr. Blue, West Middle School’s choir teacher, was turning purple with rage, as usual. The altos were talking and it was now the eighth time we’d gone over this section of Chicago’s “You’re the Inspiration.” He wanted us to sing the notes straight, without bending them like the singer does in the recorded version we all knew. In the soprano section I was watching the clock; soon I’d be saved from this.

  “Molly?” It was Mrs. B, school counselor, come to retrieve me for my weekly session. In 1993 my seventh-grade year was launched with a hush around school I could feel—people talking, but not talking to me. The only person who approached me directly—had to, I suppose—was the counselor. I was relieved to get out of choir and walk with her through the quiet halls to her office.

  “Jeez. You have so much stuff in your pockets!” She looked at the huge pockets on the baggy men’s corduroy pants I was wearing, straight from Value Village, packed with stuff. “What’s in there,” she said more seriously.

  “Oh, just … lipstick, pens, compact, gum, sunglasses …” How strange to hold the attention of an adult! But now, only out of suspicion. I was embarrassed.

  In her office I was supposed to be a wreck, have a breakdown, or at least cry. “What Cold Pricklies have been visiting you this week?” she asked, handing me a navy blue plastic shape with points protruding from it and googly eyes glued to its center. This was the Cold Prickly. In her lap, the Warm Fuzzy, a pink furry ball with similar eyes glued to it, waited.

  “I didn’t … meet any … Cold Pricklies this week,” I responded quietly. She looked blankly at me, holding a smile, as if I had not said anything yet. I looked at the photos of her kids hung on the walls, the bowl of autumnal potpourri below, the small teddy bears. She’d always wait as long as it took until I said what she wanted to hear, I knew. Eventually I’d just offer the narrative she was looking for so I could end these sessions. But this time, I held out.

  “I can’t give you a Warm Fuzzy if you don’t let go of a Cold Prickly first!” she explained cheerily. I looked at the clock. Maybe this wasn’t better than the purple face of Mr. Blue.

  “OK, um. Let’s see. I feel lonely.”

  “Lonely! You aren’t lonely. You have friends! Your friend Lindsey. And your mom and your sister, and me, I’m your friend! Now, see, doesn’t the thought of all your friends around you give you a Warm Fuzzy?” She moved the pink creature from her lap and placed it in mine while I perfunctorily offered the Cold Prickly back.

  “Do you know what alienated means?” I looked at the clock. “It means you feel separated from your world. And your dad, well, I imagine how upsetting it must be to learn he committed such an out-of-character crime. You are feeling alienated from him right now, your own father, the person you tru
sted the most—snapped!”

  And that was the story. She, along with everyone else, swallowed it whole. He was presented in the news, in court, and in conversation as a meek, diligent autoworker with no record who must have just suddenly snapped. They turned over reasons why such a normal man might choose to commit such an out-of-character crime: gambling addiction, his hours at the plant being cut, post-traumatic stress disorder from the Vietnam War, Detroit itself. At first I wondered if they knew something I didn’t.

  “No,” I said.

  “No?”

  “No. That isn’t how I feel. And that’s not my dad’s story. And I know enough about therapy to know that you’re not supposed to tell me how I feel or don’t feel. My mom is a therapist, you know. I’ve been in therapy since I was six. I know the deal.”

  Mrs. B squinted at me and smiled. I tossed the Warm Fuzzy from one hand to the other, waiting.

  “You’re a smart cookie, Molly. But you don’t know the deal.”

  The bell rang and a flood of students shuffled through the halls. I returned Mrs. B’s Warm Fuzzy to her and thanked her, joining the moving crowd.

  I didn’t know the deal. I didn’t know anything. But I knew that the official story everyone else had bought about my dad wasn’t right. I thought about it through algebra, through chemistry. How does one do anything “out of character”? Character, I reasoned, is action. It is exactly defined by the actions one takes—especially in crisis. Dad had been fired. He was out of money. Bookies were calling in his debts—I tried to imagine the pressure, the fear. He could have asked for help. Right? That’s what you’re supposed to do when you’re in trouble—go to your brothers and sisters, your partners, your friends. I tried to imagine Dad humbling himself before anyone in his life and I couldn’t. This is his character, I thought. There it is, plain as day.

  At lunch I headed for the library, set in the center of the school. I walked through the stacks, looking for something new. If character is action, what does it say about us that we needed to construct this digestible story about him—mild man, suddenly snapped? My fingers ran along the spines of young adult fiction. The story means we are storytellers, that’s all.