Authors: Molly Brodak
Bandit
A DAUGHTER’S
MEMOIR
MOLLY
BRODAK
Black Cat
New York
Copyright © 2016 by Molly Brodak
Cover design by Nicole Caputo
Portions of this book originally appeared in
LIT,
the
Fanzine,
and
Granta.
The epigraph to this book is an excerpt from “XVII. Sometimes above the gross and palpable things of this diurnal sphere wrote Keats (Not a doctor but he danced as an apothecary) who also recommended strengthening the intellect by making up one’s mind about nothing” from
The Beauty of the Husband
by Anne Carson, copyright © 2001 by Anne Carson. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
The Friedrich Nietzsche quote that appears on page 168 is an excerpt from
Ecce Homo
by Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by R. J. Hollingdale, translation copyright © R. J. Hollingdale, 1979. Used by permission of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
The Walter Benjamin quote that appears on page 260 is an excerpt from “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” from
Illuminations
by Walter Benjamin, translated by Harry Zohn, English translation copyright © 1968 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or
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.
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
FIRST EDITION
First published by Grove Atlantic, October 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2563-7
eISBN: 978-0-8021-8961-5
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.
Black Cat
an imprint of Grove Atlantic
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West
16 17 18 19 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Boo
Fiction forms what streams in us.
Naturally it is suspect.
—Anne Carson,
The Beauty of the Husband
I
was with my dad the first time I stole something.
It was a little booklet of baby names. I was seven and I devoured word lists: dictionaries, vocabulary sheets, menus. The appeal of this string of names, their pleasing shapes and neat order, felt like a puzzle impossible to solve. I couldn’t ask for it but I couldn’t leave it. I pressed it to my chest as we walked out of Kroger. It was pale blue with the word
BABY
spelled out in pastel blocks above a stock photo of a smiling white baby in a white diaper. I stood next to Dad, absorbed in page one, as he put the bags in the trunk of his crappy gold Chevette, and he stopped when he saw it. At first he said nothing. He avoided my eyes. He just pressed hard into my back and marched me back into the store, to the lane we’d left, plucked the stupid booklet out of my hand, and presented it to the cashier.
“My daughter stole this. I apologize for her.” He beamed a righteous look over a sweep of people nearby. The droopy cashier winced and muttered that it was OK, chuckling mildly. Then stooping over me he shouted, “Now you apologize. You will never do this again.” The cold anger in his face was edged with some kind of glint I didn’t recognize. As he gripped my shoulders he was almost smiling. I remember his shining eyes above me and the high ceiling of the gigantic store and the brightness of it. I am sure I cried but I don’t remember. I do remember an acidic boiling in my chest and a rinse of sweaty cold on my skin, disgusted with my own desire and what it did, how awful all of us felt now because of me. I didn’t steal again until I was a teenager, when he was in prison.
D
ad robbed banks one summer.
He robbed the Community Choice Credit Union on 13 Mile Road in Warren.
He robbed the Warren Bank on 19 Mile Road.
He robbed the NBD Bank in Madison Heights.
He robbed the NBD Bank in Utica.
He robbed the TCF Bank on 10 Mile Road in Warren.
He robbed the TCF Bank on 14 Mile Road in Clawson, where I would open my first checking account when I turned seventeen. That’s the one with the little baskets of Dum-Dums at each window and the sour herb smell from the health food store next door.
He robbed the Credit Union One on 15 Mile Road in Sterling Heights.
He robbed the Michigan First Credit Union on Gratiot in Eastpointe.
He robbed the Comerica Bank on 8 Mile and Mound. That was as close as he got to the Detroit neighborhood he grew up in, Poletown East, about ten miles south.
He robbed the Comerica Bank inside a Kroger on 12 Mile and Dequindre. All of the shoppers gliding by as Dad passed a note to the teller in silence: “This is a robbery, I have a gun.”
He robbed the Citizens State Bank on Hayes Road in Shelby Township. Afterward the cops caught up with him finally, at Tee-J’s Golf Course on 23 Mile Road. They peeked into his parked car: a bag of money and his disguise in the backseat, plain as day. He was sitting at the bar, drinking a beer and eating a hot ham sandwich.
I was thirteen that summer. He went to prison for seven years after a lengthy trial, delayed by constant objections and rounds of him firing his public defenders. After his release he lived a normal life for seven years, and then robbed banks again.
T
here: see? Done with the facts already. The facts are easy to say; I say them all the time. They leave me out. They cover over the trouble like a lid. This isn’t about them.
This is about whatever is cut from the frame of narrative. The fat remnants, broke bones, gristle, untender bits. Me, and Mom, and my sister, and him, the actual him beyond the Bandit version on the evening news.
I see my little self there, under the stories. It’s 1987 and I am set between my parents like a tape recorder: Dad on the couch, fixed to the TV, Mom leaning in from the kitchen, me in between on the clumpy beige carpet with spelling worksheets. I am writing out the word
people,
watching the word slip off of my pencil lead, but then I start listening so carefully that I cease to see what I’m doing. Mom is grumbling
what do I know
and
what is wrong with you
again and again and Dad is talking over
her steadily and laughing in a friendly way without taking his eyes off the game. More words are forming under my hand in an uneasy cursive. My sister, age nine, stomps through the scene and out the back door, slamming it for all of us. Mom and Dad’s voices rise but are cut off at a strange cracking sound. We all turn to the picture window to see my sister smashing walnut-sized white decorative rocks from the neighbor’s garden with a hammer on the concrete patio. She pulls the hammer as far above her shoulder as she can and brings it down on a rock, splitting it into dust and flying shards. Dad looks back to the TV. Mom rushes out the door and now my sister hugs the weapon to her chest; Mom appears and rips it away from her. I am recording this so carefully that I don’t see it while it is happening.
Where am I when I am listening and watching so carefully?
At the dinner table I am watching my parents’ simmering volley crescendo from pissy fork drops to plate slams to stomps off and squeals away, my sister biting into the cruel talk just to feel included, me just watching as if on the living room side of a television screen: I could see them but they could definitely not see me. I squashed my wet veggies around on my plate, eyes fixed to their drama, exactly as I’d do in front of
Scooby Doo
or
G.I. Joe.
I could sleep, I could squirm off, I could hum, dance, or even talk, safe in their blind spot. I could write, I discovered, and no one could hear me.
One survival technique is to
get small.
When resources are thin and you must stay where you are, as you must as a
child, it helps to stay invisible. This family, collected together occasionally in one house, or more often, in various split combinations of children and adults, netted around me like a loose constellation of problems. On my small ground, as if in another country, I was not a problem. I kept quiet, was good and smart and secret and neat, reading and playing alone, catching bugs, collecting rocks, reading and drawing. And I wanted to become even less, a nothing, because I thought they could all at least have that, this one non-problem in the house, to not yell and not cry, to sweep the kitchen and pick up the thrown things and secretly restore order to whole fought-apart rooms and even to sometimes sing softly, happily, maybe for them to hear. I have kept quiet about all this my whole life.
S
uddenly one day, like a membrane breached: before, Dad was like all other dads and then not. We sat together in a booth at the Big Boy, the winter-black windows reflecting back a weak pair of us, and I idly asked him what recording studios are like and how they work. I was something like eleven, and I had a cloudy notion that it would be exciting and romantic to work in a recording studio, to help create music but not have to play it. He fluttered his eyes upward, as he often did, and answered without hesitation.
He told me about the equipment, and how bands work with producers, how much money sound engineers make, and what their schedules are like. Details, I started to realize, he could not possibly know. Some giant drum began turning behind my eyes.
I could see he was lying. Something changed around his eyes when he spoke, a kind of haze or color shift, and I could always see it from then on.
As he talked, I felt my belief, something I didn’t know was there until I felt it moving, turn away from him until it was gone, and I was just alone, nodding and smiling. But what a marvel to watch him construct bullshit and to finally see it right. He stopped in the middle of a sentence about groupies.
“Finish your chicken,” he said. I stared at him in silence. His face went blank as a wall.
“I’m full thank you,” I said cheerily, trying to hide my thoughts. I watched the new man in his seat. He withdrew money from his wallet for the bill and watched me back. A barrier of pressure between us he would not cross. He’d lost his mark.