Bandit (6 page)

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.

R
obins—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.

“D
ad?”

“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 leaned 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.”

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.

It manifests in little habits for everyone, just small bad ways of being. Because things are Bad, and it soaks into everything and everyone. Would Dad have stolen if things were good? It’s a big question, I know. Dad stole car things. He stole parts and materials from work; he eventually stole a whole car. The bank robberies could be traced back to, perhaps set off by, that car. A red Corvette convertible. A present for my sister.

We pulled up behind a small auto shop one evening when I was little, maybe six years old. I watched my dad get out of the car, climb a tall fence, and hop down into a pen of tires. He hauled one tire over the fence, then another, and put them in the trunk. When he came back to sit in the driver’s seat he said, “They were fixing my tires. Didn’t know they’d be closed so early.” Watching him steal the tires, I was watching a secret. I felt more shock at hearing him acknowledge the action out loud, even with a lie, than at watching the act itself. I felt frozen and old. But his confidence, in this smooth, calm act of stealing—without hesitation, doubt, guilt, or whatever it is that would stop a person from stealing in front of his daughter—was almost a comfort.

I
n 2013 Detroit declared bankruptcy—the largest municipal bankruptcy in all of American history. People wanted to know how it happened. It frightened them. And it was weird and painful to hear people talk about it, especially at this distance. News analysts and reporters and politicians were wagging fingers with smug charges of everything from poor city planning to ruinous liberal unions to plain laziness. The story of Detroit’s decline is trotted out as a cautionary tale, a story that flattens over what it’s like to love Detroit as a home, an impossible home, one called the “Paris of the West” in the late forties. Yes, Detroit has been half-emptied by a long churn of riots, corruption, and the death of American auto manufacturing. The promised renaissance is always just around the corner, always coming but never arriving. My relatives and friends now live on the outskirts, places orbiting a black
hole. And I abandoned it and all the rest of my family there, for Atlanta, a city that really did rise again after being burned to the ground during the Civil War, a city whose seal I see imprinted on the trash bins I pass on my morning run, a seal that lays bare a phoenix face on, rising from a bank of flames toward the word
RESURGENS
above.

A
year or two after my trip to Cancun with my dad, when I was eleven, I was sent to an Amish farm in Pennsylvania for the summer. It was sort of a camp, with other kids and preteens there too, about twenty-five of us in all, ranging in age from seven to twelve. It seemed clear from the way it was presented that it was a place for troubled kids. Since I knew I didn’t
cause
trouble to anyone, I supposed, then, that I
was
the trouble that needed to be removed. After the second divorce, I was back at my grandparents’ house with Mom and no sense of what might come next. I’m sure I seemed depressed and withdrawn at age eleven. I imagine Mom was eager for a chance to set me down into any wholesome world for a while. Certainly it was a respite. But I was not prepared for the virtue of that environment to illuminate my social dysfunctions so starkly.

It was sort of expensive—Mom told me that Grandma and Grandpa paid for it—so the kinds of kids there were mostly bratty rich kids whose parents wanted them to get to know something genuine, to experience hard physical work, and to appreciate “honest” living. There was a mom and a dad whom we were supposed to call The Mom and The Dad, but I refused. There were also several teenage children on the farm, along with pigs, goats, chickens, a few horses, a lot of cats and dogs, other small utility animals, and some scattered peacocks that seemed to have no purpose.

Upon arrival we were all issued straw hats and then handed newspapers and small buckets of diluted vinegar and told to wash the house windows. It was supposed to be some kind of brutal initiation but I was happy to have a task right away. I left my mom without hugging her, strongly reiterating my request for her to have Sun Chips with her when she returned to pick me up, and Guns N’ Roses’
Appetite for Destruction
in the tape deck.

I loved the farm. It was set upon a hill and had wide views in every direction of pasture or farmland, and it was so quiet. Nights were windy and thick black on the hill. We slept in hard bunks, took cold military-style showers, and met in the barn before dawn to plan our work schedule for the day. A huge chalkboard stood near the mouth of the barn door, and The Dad would list the chores to be done that day, for which we had to volunteer. The chalkboard seemed as giant as a billboard and just as out of place in a barn. The Dad kept his one piece of chalk in his shirt pocket; I noticed only because I
wanted the chalk so bad so I could write on the board. Without paper or pencils for weeks—even they had been confiscated on arrival—I ached to draw or write. In the downtime I’d sometimes sneak into the barn and trace words in cursive on the board with just my fingertip through the dust buildup. My favorite word to write in cursive was
eggs.
I loved the symmetry of the loops, and would trace it over and over, making each loop knot more perfect. Even now I catch myself repeating it in tiny cursive on grocery lists:
eggs eggs eggs.

I always chose the hardest or most solitary work: grinding corn, milking goats, moving hay, tilling, chopping firewood. Most of the girls and the younger kids would choose the easiest stuff first—feeding animals, cooking, or cleaning indoors. I knew very well this was supposed to all be a kind of suffering for us. Work-wise, I could not be broken; there was nothing to break. I attached to my labor with a kind of mindless and helpless dedication children have when they throw themselves into something because there is simply nothing to lose.

After lunch we had “siesta time” for two hours. Most kids slept, out of real exhaustion, but I liked to do small private things I didn’t have time for during working hours. My first choice was to collect eggs—not a real chore unto itself because the eggs came intermittently. I learned to distract the hen with a piece of hay while my other hand dove for her egg. I liked that the hens fought me and made an angry whine when I entered the henhouse. The back of my hand slid under their smooth bellies and I’d grab the egg carefully, sometimes accidentally clasping their horrible bony legs. Sometimes hens
would bury their eggs in the hay troughs in the cool, dark goat barn. I’d dig through gingerly and find them, taking the discoveries to the house to The Mom, who was eternally busy with cooking or directing older girls as they cleaned.

Sometimes I’d just go into the granary shed and grind extra corn by myself. The roof was corrugated green plastic so everything inside was lit hot-grass green. The dried corn powder smelled warm and sweet as I cranked the grinder without thinking, in a thick fog of feeling. Work felt pure and right. I let it overtake every secret or lazy recess in my body. I wanted to see how good it could make me so I followed it all the way. It offered what I had been missing at home: structure, expectations, trust. The chance to
show myself
as a useful person. I discovered I loved to work. I wanted to be alone, so I wouldn’t have to talk and break the feeling, or pretend to not feel it in front of others.

My challenge was not the work. At night, after all the work, dinner, and cleaning was completed, we had a little free time again before bedtime, in the living room. Free time, compared to work, became painful for me. In this restful and idyllic place, there was a fire, and a basket full of wooden toys, marbles, and puzzles. There was the Bible, or stacks of the Amish newspaper we could read by the oil lamps. And worst of all, there was The Dad, in his rocking chair, talking or reading a story. The littler kids clustered around him on the plain braided rug in different stages of exhaustion and stupor. The Dad was tall and wiry, with a neat beard and a straw hat—exactly as you are imagining.

Not having many friends in my life, I hadn’t known other kids’ dads. So after dinner, I’d sit by myself playing Shoot the Moon or completing a puzzle, and watch The Dad occasionally. The other kids grouped up into friendships and cliques, chatting about TV, music, or school—things I had instantly forgotten about upon arrival at camp. They weren’t afraid to ask The Dad questions. I wanted to ask him questions but not in front of the other kids. And he was never alone. Mostly I just wanted to talk to The Dad, to have him hear me and to listen to him say what I imagined would be intensely wise things. I could see that this was what dads were for. The other kids seemed to know this, naturally. But I stayed where I was, watching the kids talk to him and feeling both jealous and annoyed with what they said; often they’d make jokes, asking him if he had heard of MTV or ever eaten at Burger King, never done being delighted with shock that The Dad had never experienced any of the dumb things central to their limited lives. He played along, and let the small kids crawl into his lap. Here was my chance to interact with a real dad, and all I could do was sit and stare.

Back on the first day we’d arrived, The Dad told us there would be two events we had to look forward to: the animal auction and the creek walk. It was nearing the midpoint of summer and the auction was approaching. Kids craved a break from the work routines and chattered about the upcoming auction at night. Then one morning, gathered in the barn, The Dad led us off the farm for the first time, walking together on a scorching, dusty dirt road to the livestock auction house. It was far and
the walking was tiresome. High road cuts through the old hills, revealing roots and striations of mud, and some horses or cows near their fences were the only things to notice. Occasionally a horse and buggy came by, and even less frequently a car, for which The Dad would cover his mouth and nose to block the dust cloud it raised as it passed. This gesture also looked like a sign of disgust, and most of the kids copied the move, so it looked like the group was choking back puke or blocking a sick smell. I was up ahead a little bit and looked back to see them like that, The Dad and all the little kids like a gaggle of geese, and felt for the first time like there was something cultish about family, something dangerous. Somehow it could reduce you. I felt myself giving up a little then. I hadn’t bonded with them or The Dad or anyone, as much as I wanted to. I was old enough then to start to wonder if there was something wrong with me.

We shuffled through the auction hall quickly, staying only a few minutes in the main auction arena, winding through the halls lined with animals in cages, then we turned to walk back to the farm.

At least the evening was cool in shadows and dusk light. I kept myself with the group this time. They started to sing, and I sang with them, looking down or straight ahead. The sky turned violet and pink and our voices seemed too loud among the empty hills. I imagined splitting from the group and running away for good. Then I thought about my mom.
Why can’t I just join along and be happy,
I wondered.

The rest of the summer on the farm went on slow and weird. I wanted the work to be difficult for me, but it wasn’t.
It was the other thing, the single point of comfort the other children clung to—The Mom and The Dad and each other—I couldn’t manage. It had become clear to me I was broken. And then, about a month and a half into the summer, I got my period.

It wasn’t the first one, actually; I had gotten my first period just before coming to the farm, uneventfully in the bathroom of a Red Lobster, but afterward I forgot all about it and didn’t prepare myself at all for the idea that it would come back. I hadn’t even told my mom the first time—just taken some of her pads in private and managed it myself so as to not bother her.

In the outhouse by the barn I stuffed my underwear with toilet paper and returned to my chore, chopping kindling. I could feel my toilet paper padding getting soggy. My stomach knotted.

I hurried into the house and found The Mom in the kitchen. She was standing on a chair, taking down a strip of stinking insect-studded flypaper to replace with a new one. “Ma’am? I got my period.”

She stood on the chair, towering above me, her plump stomach bulging at the waistband of her long skirt, holding the long tongue of yellowed flypaper at my eye level. Her stern, unchanging face suddenly softened, and she seemed totally different. “Good, Molly, good for you.”

She took me to her private bathroom upstairs and handed me a stack of pads. Not some kind of special homemade Amish pads, as I was sort of expecting, just normal Kotex Maxi
Pads. The overnight kind, thick as a diaper. I took them to my bunk bed and stuffed them into my pillow quickly before anyone could see me. I didn’t want to be bothered with this new hindrance. I went back to work, feeling self-conscious about the pad’s bulge and its awkward contact. I wanted to stop thinking about it and do my work like before, but I couldn’t.

The next day, as we walked from the house to the barn in the cold dark morning, The Mom called after me. It seemed like she was unable to leave the house, only calling out for people if she needed something. I went back. I thought maybe she was going to check up on me, maybe give me some advice. “You will stay here and work with me now,” she said, grasping my shoulders and smiling fakely. I nodded, and followed her to the first chore.

Then everything changed. I could do only housework with The Mom and the teen sisters, and the joy I’d just discovered in work was stripped from my days. Instead of going to the barn in the dark morning I washed dishes in the lamp-lit kitchen, soaked with the smell of flypaper and vinegar. I washed clothes on a metal washboard, scrubbing the shirts and socks of the Family as hard as I could. Then back to the kitchen for lunch preparation with The Mom and the sisters, who said nothing as they worked. At least there was silence. Sometimes a small kid would come to the kitchen with an egg or two she’d found in the goat barn and I really felt sad, holding the warm egg, locked inside.

After more dishes and cleaning, I’d iron with The Mom. Without electricity, of course, the iron had to be set onto the
hot stove and then transferred quickly to The Dad’s shirt on the board; his shirts were the only articles of clothing we ironed. He had a dozen plain white button-down shirts, which he wore no matter what kind of work he was doing on the farm. The iron had a wooden handle with two metal posts at the ends that would get hot and burn my hand if it wasn’t held precisely in the middle. The iron was enormously heavy and had an evil presence. I hated ironing and I hated the The Dad’s shirts. The first time I was assigned to iron it became apparent to The Mom that I had never ironed before and she showed her sharp disgust with me by frowning hard and drawing her eyebrows together but saying nothing as I struggled.

Now when I saw The Dad, I thought about smoothing his hot, clean shirt with my small hand after ironing it, and the weight of the iron, and the burns on my knuckles and palms, and the perfect flat brightness of his white shirt in the sun, chalk in pocket.

By the time the last event of summer came, the creek walk, I was too thin and fogged over in dreaminess to care about it. Being kept in the house made me feel sealed up, distant from the focus pure labor had first given me. It was hot and numbing in the house and the work didn’t reach into me. Unlike The Dad, who left us to do our chores, The Mom watched me carefully in everything I did, ruining my private feelings most of the time. She couldn’t catch me messing up or cutting corners because I didn’t, not even when alone. I came to hate The Mom and The Dad’s steadiness, the hardworking and loyal kids, even the obedient animals, all good
cogs in the family machine—my simple childish jealousy of a healthy family crystallized into resentment.

And suddenly it was over. The last day on the farm we ate our breakfast of eggs and toast and apples in the cold dark with more silence than usual. We didn’t have to work that day; we only had to pack and wait with The Dad on the lawn for our parents to arrive while the rest of the Family went on with the chores. Cars pulled into the driveway, and kids ran to them on sight one by one. My mom pulled up in her powder blue Caprice Classic and I ran to it too, saying goodbye to no one. I didn’t look back, didn’t want to see The Dad one last time. In the car, Mom hugged me hard and petted my hair, looking with some concern at my deeply tanned face and wild limbs. She pulled a bag of Sun Chips from the back and showed me the Guns N’ Roses tape I had requested. I tore into the bag and slid the tape in. The chips tasted insanely potent, frightening, and the music sounded mean compared to the quietude of the farm. I turned it way down and smiled for her.