Bandit (8 page)

I
n photographs of them as children, my sister and my mom are indistinguishable. My sister has Mom’s flawless, almost-olive skin, her dark, shiny thick hair, dainty nose, perfect smile, rich brown eyes, pure symmetry, and feminine balance. My sister once won Miss Photogenic in a teen beauty pageant, which I attended against my will, my own face buried in a library book I had brought for the duration of the spectacle.

I look nothing like my sister. I have Dad’s moony Polish face, pale ruffles of hair, eyes too big and round, like a poor doll, verge-of-tears dark bluegreen and sad. Even at rest, my eyes convey a naturally solemn and far-off expression that perpetually draws “What’s wrong?” from boyfriends and strangers, even when I am happy. You would never think we were sisters.

A
pile of dusty eye shadow shells and tubes of Wet n Wild lipsticks with their pink innards concussed against their clear caps mounded between us as my sister and I sat on the floor, dipping spongy applicators into pods of color or drawing streaks of lipstick on the backs of our fists.

I raised a vivid blue eyeliner pencil to her eyes, warily, holding my breath. Feathering little strokes next to her lash-line, boiling inside over her perfect almond-shaped eyes and perfect nose.

“See, your eye.” I held up a mirror. “
This
is the color you want? It looked better before.” She examined.

“No, retard. This is how it is
supposed
to look,” she said, one dark perfect eye rimmed now with the insane blue, how her eyes were supposed to look.

“Look at your nose. It’s perfect.” I squashed it with my thumb and she shook her head away, peering back into the mirror.

“It’s just normal, I don’t know.”

“Look at mine.” She looked.

“Oh.” She didn’t try to not wince. She had never looked before, I could see.

A fifty-dollar bill drifted between us like a leaf and landed over our pile of cheap makeup. “Ta-dah!”

Dad was standing over us, a cigarette-pack-sized wad of folded bills in his hand. We looked at the fifty, then back up at him, blankly, not sure what this meant. “Split it, girls. Go get more makeup or something. Have a makeup party or something. Right?” He made a Donald Duck laugh.

My sister grabbed the bill and widened her eyes, exhibiting the excitement Dad was looking for, bouncing a little and now waving the bill like a flag. Dad laughed again and shuffled off to his bedroom and closed the door. She stood up and scootched her feet into her flip-flops. “Enough time to walk to the drugstore before stupid Mom gets here to pick you up. Lezz go!” she said, like Dad.

I slumped closer to the makeup pile, idly tossing aside crazed blush pods and tubes of concealer with the writing worn away. “What do you even need?”

She stomped over and grabbed my ponytail, yanking it up until I stood. “COME. ON. Brat. Maybe you can find something to fix your ugly face.”

T
he face of a gorilla blacked out the window in the kitchen door. I squealed and my friends squealed in response.

I undid the dead bolt and threw the door open and the gorilla took his cue. “Haaaaaaaaaappy birthdaytoyou! Happy happy happy! Birthday birthday birthdaaaaayyyyy! To YOUUUUUUU!” The gorilla sang with a fake operatic frog voice and extended a single rose to me with a tiny card attached. It said:

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.

T
hree 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.

M
y 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.