by Molly Brodak
And then I missed her saying it. I said it to myself sometimes. I didn’t believe in God exactly, so it became more of a no one works in mysterious ways; no one works in no ways after a barf or a pain. It was kind of a constructive fuck you. Especially to knowing, which had enormously left me. Whereas before I lived in absolute horror of the thing, of the pain, of the meaningless cellular malfunction my brain was bashing against, then it was not the pain or the horror or the malfunction that stopped existing, but my higherorder brain, the very instigator of rotten interpretations of meaningless things.
I started walking. I went outdoors even. My boyfriend helped me outside onto the sad patio. He bought me a lime slush and I sat in the fresh summer afternoon, feeling clean air finally on my gross skin, watching sparrows picking at crumbs, feeling a throb growing in my head.
I almost always dreamed about wading waist-high in Lake Superior until I came to a river of darker water. On the other side of the river was another lake, just as transparent and deep as my lake. From a slant I could see shipwrecks at the bottom of the other lake. I’d stand before the river border between the two lakes, looking but not crossing.
51
I was released from the hospital without a cellular malfunction and with instructions to check regularly under my nose for any clear watery fluid and return immediately if any was detected. “It would be your spinal fluid leaking out of your nose,” the nurse said flatly. Because of the stitching in my sinuses I would not be able to bite or chew much, nor lie flat in bed, nor tilt my head forward farther than a few degrees. I was told to not blow my nose for at least six months. I was told that if I sneezed I should return immediately to the hospital.
Mom came to stay. She slept on an air mattress in my office. She spent her time making soft food for me, going for walks in the lovely hills around our house, or talking to me. I felt guilty for her efforts, as much as ever, how I had hated to be picked up or carried as a child, even for fun, because of the strain I felt in her body and how burdensome it made me feel, how being carried made me feel worthless.
Sewn back on now, my head rethroned itself as tyrant. I remained in bed, mostly watching TV with vague interest. I was too tired and distracted to read, and besides I couldn’t hold my arms up very long at the angle I needed to in order to read a book, perfectly level to my exhausting head. If I looked down I felt a flood of hot pain behind my eyes. My head wanted and complained and schemed and envied and nagged and hurt and hurt and hurt. My body went silent. My boyfriend washed me in the tub like a baby. The summer went on like this.
Feeling much as I did after my return from the Amish farm, I soberly rejoined my old life with some resistance. I don’t want to seem ungrateful for having to return to “normal” after surviving brain surgery unscathed, or as if I liked being sick because of the attention and care it drew—no, no. Rather, being so thoroughly removed from my life in these safe ways—the farm, the hospital—afforded me a rare chance to reunite with it clear eyed and rejoin it with more compassion for myself and more warmth toward my family. But I failed to stop being a fool, given the chance. I knew the opportunity to reposition myself was wasted on me.
My sister called at the end of the recovery period to check up on me. “Dad’s coming to see you,” she said.
“No. No thanks. Tell him no. I’m OK.”
“Well, he left yesterday. Sorry.”
Later that day he walked into the bedroom holding a half-melted cup of chocolate ice cream out in front of him like a torch. I ate some of it for him. I put the stuff into my head. My head knew the routine. It could smile now and talk pleasantly, pretend to be fine, even better than before.
Dad pulled up the chair, but not too close, chatting a bit about things, being funny and light, gentle, teasing me about the shaved spots on my head. His girlfriend said hello but hung even farther back. He was uncomfortable, I could tell. He was quieter, paused with uncertainty, looked away from me. But he seemed to be honestly trying. My head saw him feeling bad and knew that I must have looked bad. Gross and sick. I wanted to cut my head off.
They stayed about twenty minutes and left, driving the seven hours immediately back to Michigan. I cried some, for my ugly head, knowing itself, and slept like that, with wet face bandages, swollen and sweaty, propped up straight in bed. That was the last time I saw him before he was arrested again.
52
Once, I should admit, once there was one poem I wrote directly about him. In a push of sudden clarity through the dream nonsense I was writing during the first year of my MFA, I wrote a breathless litany of dark facts about Dad, and Mom, and me, bubbling out like confessional foam on three pages or more. I brought the thing to workshop, just, I think, as a test.
The woman with long gray hair who wore hippie batikprint fabric from her wide waist to the ground, and who never forgave me for calling her out on implanting a totally wrong breed of tree frog in her poem about Michigan, was eager to start. “I just don’t like this,” she said with palms upturned, pleading sort of, her head turning in sweeps across our huge table for support. Stiff comments about tone or believability trickled in, punctuated with nods and directive questions from our professor, a poet who knew me well. I sunk down, unusually tense in the shy and flat workshop routine of first-semester grad students.
The wrong-tree-frog woman finally burst. “Even if it were plausible, so what? This poem is just poor poor me, my poor sad life, blah, blah—”
Our professor tried to jump in, “Well, let’s not—”
“I mean, come on,” she said, shaking her head at me, “It’s a pity party.”
53
Pity party, I’d say to myself, if I ever felt that bubbling again. Pity party, pity party! I hear it now.
54
My sister and my dad lived together for seven years after he was released. Seven years in prison, then seven years with her. Their yard had huge cottonwood trees that blew blankets of puffs over everything in the spring. On weekends, dad would shoot squirrels with a pellet gun he kept in the garage. He said he didn’t like the nests the squirrels built in his trees, said the ugly clumps ruined the way the trees looked. The nests were too far up to remove so this was the only solution. One evening I walked alone around the perimeter of the yard, just to feel grass under my feet, and found a large pile of small dark bones in his leaf-burning pit.
55
In the last house we lived in together as a family, Dad kept a small chalkboard by the back door. It had pegs bent into crooks for unused keys, and one curved groove on the ledge to keep chalk.
It was Dad’s board, not Mom’s. He wrote dates on it and other notes or figures that I never understood. They were probably dates of games to watch or plans for ideal times to bet. The chalk was rich and thick, or the board was cheap, so it never erased well. He’d just smear the words and numbers so they looked far away, or underneath black water. Ghost marks would build behind new ones, coding new numbers and words in garble. Some months later it would get washed with a wet towel finally, and it’d look crystal-clear black, like a space instead of a surface.
A blackboard is a chance to say something, make yourself known. It is blankness, like an open door. My dad had a chalkboard. Later, I’d find the Amish dad had one too, and the only chalk for it was kept in his breast pocket. A chalkboard was a space that heard only the voices of the powerful, I learned.
When I was alone I’d choose a nub of chalk and draw a bony flower in the corner of the board, or write “hi!”
Later I’d rush back to erase it, worried that Dad had seen it or worried that he hadn’t seen it, I couldn’t decide. I’d smear it with my finger, fogging the powder marks down into the black.
Now most of the college classrooms I teach in are outfitted in whiteboards. They feel greasy, shiny, and depthless, like cheap toys, sharp with the stink of markers. I had imagined touching chalkboards with my powdery fingers as a key element in the privilege of teaching.
As a kid in school I’d squin
t my eyes at the blackboards and imagine them as deep black or green holes, the chalk words floating as if across a tunnel. I’d snap to attention if the teacher called for someone to write an answer or solve a problem on the board.
Up close the board absorbed me. I’d watch its touch point intimately, the chalk on the board wisping off a ground white dust as it went that’d catch on my sweater sleeve, affectionately, I believed. Once in a sleepy, first-hour math class I caught my own reflection in the early black of the low windows and froze. It was me writing on the board. I didn’t recognize my own handwriting on the board when I sat back down. But I had seen myself with the chalk in my hand, all new.
56
I finished my MFA and took a job teaching in Augusta, Georgia—the farthest-from-Michigan job I was offered. But family never quite leaves you, even, or maybe especially, especially if you leave them.
My sister called me one night in January of 2009. “Are you sitting down?” I knew what it was right away.
“Just tell me,” I said. I did go and sit down, on the edge of the bed, to listen to her tell me that Dad had been arrested for bank robbery again. All I could think about was her. All of that difficult forgiveness, for nothing. Her anger utterly transformed her.
At that moment, listening to my sister unfold this new story of pain, her voice hard and burning with pure hurt, I remembered the way she looked as a fifteen-year-old the first time she went through this: sitting, so small in the overstuffed chair at Grandma’s house, silent, burning in the dark, chewing her nails. Listening to her, I could have killed him that night. I could have shot him dead. I could have stared straight into his eyes and stabbed him in the gut.
I could have. A thousand miles from him all I had was my own skin to tear at. I didn’t sleep that night, just sat up and stared and churned. In the morning I cleaned curls of skin and threads of dried blood out from under my fingernails.
It was one of the banks he had robbed before. He was described in the newspaper as wearing a trench coat, a tan fishing cap, dark glasses, a blue scarf, a black fanny pack, and Band-Aids on his fingertips. He waited in line. He walked up to the counter and pushed a slip toward the teller on which he had written in marker “I have a gun. All of your 10s, 20s, 50s, and 100s. No dye pack.” He pulled a handgun out of his waistband and flashed it at her, saying, “No sudden moves.” She placed $1,083 on the counter, including a pack of bait money. As he walked past the other people in line the dye pack burst early and red smoke seeped from the bag. He hurried out.
A man waiting outside, a heating-and-cooling technician on temporary disability with thyroid cancer, there to help his seventeen-year-old daughter set up a bank account for the first time, saw my dad rush by, cradling something “like a football,” he said, but leaking red smoke, and knew it was a robbery. The man called to his daughter and her boyfriend to get back in the car fast and he chased my dad’s old SUV, red smoke fluming from its window, the man on the phone with the police, updating them on his position. Nearby cop cars soon joined the pursuit. Dad pulled into a party store parking lot and lifted his hands off the steering wheel, raised them, and waited.
When the cops pulled up in a flurry of noise he refused to get out of the car. They dragged him out and forced him to the ground. The indictment states he was noncompliant. They Tasered him twice.
The local newspapers reported this story as “Hero Helps Police Nab Robber,” etc, and the man received a commendation from the mayor and the police chief. “I was taught by my parents to always do the right thing,” said the man at the press conference.
I have seen the photo of the man holding a plaque at this press conference, this good dad, a long dark scar across his neck where it had been slit open for his thyroid surgery, him and the police chief gesturing to a poster board with enlarged photos of my dad’s gun, the note he used, his mug shot, the money spread out for display, and a dramatic close-up of my dad’s red-stained hands zip-tied behind his back. Across the top of the poster board it says “Super Mario Bandit,” flanked by two police shields.
“It was pretty cool,” said the hero citizen about the final moments. “They had that big sawed-off shotgun pointed at his head. It was like watching a cop show live, right in front of us.”
57
This gun, maybe the gun I saw under his bed as a kid. Maybe his girlfriend’s. Anyway it wasn’t loaded.
They charged him with three other local robberies but dropped two of them due to lack of evidence. It seems very likely he did these robberies too, but they couldn’t prove it. He took a plea deal, and was sentenced to only ten years, well below the recommended twenty-five for armed robbery by a career criminal. He was ordered to pay $4,164 in restitution when he is released. He will be seventy-five years old.
And again, he dragged the proceedings out to two years, stalling on technicalities, this time so he could continue getting his pension and social security checks before he’d be sentenced. My sister was still trying to help him sort out his mess, still insisting on believing he loved her, or at least owed her, and he’d granted her power of attorney to manage his affairs and his money. But instead of paying my sister back what he’d stolen from her, he demanded that she use the last of his money to hire him a better lawyer. She said no.
“‘It was so insane,’ I told him. ‘You don’t need a better lawyer, Dad, it would just be a waste! They caught you literally red handed.’ I begged him, I said, ‘Please, for God’s sake, just plead guilty, and be done with this,’” she told me. Then he wrote her one last letter, telling her he was turning his power of attorney over to his girlfriend and that she’d never hear from him again. He called her selfish and heartless, a bad daughter. And that was the last thing he said to her.
The psychiatrist who interviewed him during the trial was the same doctor who had assessed his mental health for the first trial, coincidentally. I read this report in the online court records. Dad describes his life as full of pain and anxiety. He suffered from incredible PTSD after his thirteen-month tour in Vietnam, where he served as a cannoneer/forward observer. He describes personally killing several Viet Cong. He was awarded a Bronze Star for bravery after leading a gun battle while on patrol with his platoon.
In the years after being honorably discharged from the Army, he describes the anxiety, depression, and addiction that led him into reckless speeding, cheating on his wives, drinking to oblivion, wasting money as fast as he could. He described mood swings that sounded a lot like bipolar depression to me, the same disease my mother has and one that I saw firsthand, daily. That especially killed me—him stealing her disease.
Eventually he describes hearing voices. “A military-type voice,” egging him on to “Do it,” rob a bank, taunting him during his severe depressive episodes. The psychiatrist does advise, with the dual-diagnosis of PTSD and gambling addiction, that dad was in fact suffering from a “substantially reduced mental capacity at the time of committing the offenses.” Not, as my dad hoped, though, certifiably insane. He was aware of his actions. He was described as “pleasant and polite” during the interviews.
This is Dad lying at his best. When I see how his manipulations work, really look at them, I see the truth. A great con starts with the truth. I think people can smell that, down there, under the elaborate scaffolding of lies, there is a truth, and this is why they’re willing to buy the rest of it. More importantly, that mote of truth is what he himself must cling to. Some of that pain from the war and the incessant hurt of addiction is very real. After all, he had to convince himself first. I know that process. And I have no doubt he comes to believe his lies once they are built. They are well-designed. They organize the world.
Dad was always organized. Controlled and organized, he knew well enough to seem like a mess for the psychiatrist. But really, he was neat. He was a machinist, good with tools, precise even with repetition.
After again firing several public defenders, each one advising that he take a plea, he finally broke down. He did take a
plea. He wouldn’t, though, admit guilt.
The truth of the act, the plain cold insanity of the act, would be harder to accept, and he knew that. He gave whoever would listen a clean explanation and of course they clung to it. He was old, he was sick with kidney disease, he was a war veteran, he had an untreated gambling addiction, untreated PTSD from Vietnam, and he had three letters of support for leniency in his sentencing: one from his girlfriend, one from his sister, and one from me. I read these letters when I opened the public records from this trial.
His sister’s letter describes her honest astonishment. This is not the man she knows; this is not her little brother. To her, he is a good man who made bad choices, for the only reasons that can be blamed—the war, the trauma. She is a kind, generous, honest woman, praising his work ethic, his generosity and dedication to his daughters, to whom “he gave everything.” Her support for my dad has been unwavering. She was the one who recounted for me her childhood in a Nazi concentration camp. In her I see a familial dedication that my dad espoused but usually failed to actualize. Because in the end, it was almost nothing but us—his family, and our normalcy—that he compromised in the pursuit of his goals.
The letter from his girlfriend describes his tortured struggles with PTSD and flashbacks to a degree unrecognizable to me. She is a sweet woman, obedient to him, incredibly so, even after his serious deceits had been revealed to her.
