“Hahmm-borrr-gaysa” he’d say to the waiter, childishly drawing out the words and gesturing coarsely as if the waiter were near blind and deaf, “and Coca-Colé!” he’d finish, pairing the silly “olé!” with an insulting bottle-drinking mime. He was condescending to waiters everywhere, big-shot style, but especially here. “This is the only word you need to know,” he told me from across the dark booth. “Hamburguesa.” I tamped down my disgust with obliging laughs, since this show was for me. His gold chain and ring I did not recognize. I watched him carefully, waiting for a time when we’d say real things to each other.
I didn’t tell him I liked my days there, on the beach, alone like a grown-up. But anxious. I knew the untethered feeling I liked was not right for me yet. I would have told him about my days lying on a blue towel, just lying there for hours burning pink in the sun, listening while two teenage Mexican girls talked next to me, oblivious to my eavesdropping, alternating between Spanish and English. They talked about how wonderful it would be to be born a gringa, and what kind of house they’d live in and what their boyfriends would look like and how their daddies would spoil them with cars and clothes and fantastic birthday parties.
Once, he waited for me to wake up and took me to a Mayan ruin. As the tour started, the foreigners drew together automatically to climb the giant steep steps of a pyramid. It was soaking hot, and I felt so young and small. The other tourists seemed to have such trouble climbing. I bounded up the old blocks, turning to the wide mush of treetops below and smiling. Dad was down below. I waved to him but he wasn’t looking. We were herded up for the tour and kids my age and even older were already whining. I couldn’t imagine complaining even half as much as my peers did. It frightened me, the way they said what they wanted. Hungry and tired and thirsty and bored and ugh, Dad, can we go? At the edge of the cenote nearby a tour guide described how the Mayans would sacrifice young women here by tossing them in, “girls about your age,” he said, and pointed at me. The group of tourists around us chuckled uncomfortably but I straightened up.
I rested on a boulder carved into a snake’s head, wearing the only hat I owned as a child, a black-and-neon tropical-print baseball cap I am certain came from a Wendy’s kids’ meal. I remember seeing a photograph taken of this, and I wonder if it still exists somewhere. I remember resting on the snake’s head, and I remember the photograph of myself resting on it. I liked this day, seeing these things that seemed so important, Dad mostly hanging back in the wet shade of the jungle edge, not climbing things. But he had brought me here and I loved it. I felt the secret urge children have to become lost and stay overnight somewhere good like a museum or a mall as a way of being there privately, directly. I circled the pyramid hoping to find a cave where I could curl up, so I could sleep and stay in this old magic and feel like I’d be a good sacrifice, just right for something serious. But it was hot and we had to go. Dad seemed tired, suspicious of it all, not especially interested in learning too much from the guide or in looking too hard at the ruins. I was happy, though, and he was pleased with that, seemed to want to let me have my happiness without necessarily caring to share in it or talk about it.
On the way back, the tour van we were in had to stop for gas. Children my age but much skinnier came to the windows with their hands out, pleading, keeping steady eye contact. Some tourists in the van gave them coins. The kids who received coins immediately pocketed them and stretched their hands out again, empty. I looked at my dad. He laughed dismissively. “They’re just bums. They can work like the rest of us.”
And then, back to the days like before, which now seemed even longer. I grew tired of the pretty beach. The tourists were loud, desperate in their drinking and their little radios. I sat alone in the hotel room. It was yellow and clean and there was a small TV I would flip through endlessly. We are just not . . . friends, I remember thinking. I wondered who was friends with Dad. Mom? That seemed insane. My sister? Yes, her. She’d be good at this, being here with him. She’d be having the time of her life, sucking down a virgin strawberry daiquiri and posing poolside, hamming it up for Dad’s camera. The hallways were tiled brown and cold, and the smell of chlorine from the pool seemed trapped forever in the corridors, night and day. I would walk around the hotel with the $20 bill he had given me for food, not sure what to do with it.
7.
I want to say plainly everything I didn’t know.
I didn’t know Dad gambled. Sports betting mostly, on football, baseball or college basketball, point spreads, totals, money lines, whatever was offered. Bookies, calls to Vegas, two or three TVs at once.
I knew there were little paper slips and crazy phone calls and intense screaming about games—more intense than seemed appropriate—but it only added up to a kind of private tension orbiting him. I didn’t know what it was.
Sports betting is so different from card games or other gambling because the player doesn’t play the game, exactly. His game is the analysis of information—knowing which players might be secretly hurt or sick, which refs favor which teams, the mood of one stadium over another, the combination of one pitcher with a certain kind of weather—and the synthesis of hunches, superstitions, wishes, loyalty. And beyond that there are the odds the bookies are offering, which reflect what everyone else is predicting. Perfect for someone who thinks he’s smarter than everyone else.
Before Detroit built big casinos downtown there was always Windsor Casino across the Canadian border, so there was always blackjack too. But nobody knows much about this—my mom, my sister, his co-workers, his brothers and sisters—no one saw his gambling, no one was invited to come along, or share strategy, or even wish him luck. It was totally private. Perhaps it would not have been so evil if it hadn’t been so hidden. Mom’s experience of his gambling came to her only in cold losses: an empty savings account, the car suddenly gone, bills and debts, threatening phone calls. Sometimes broken ribs, a broken nose. The rare big win must have been wasted immediately in private, on more gambling or something showy and useless like a new watch. Or, of course, on his debts.
Outcomes get shaken out fast in gambling. In real life, big risks take years to reveal themselves, and the pressure of choosing a career, a partner, a home, a family, a whole identity might overwhelm an impatient man, one who values control, not fate. He will either want all the options out of a confused greed, hoarding overlapping partners, shallow hobbies, alternate selves; or he will refuse them all, risking nothing. And really, the first option is the same as the second. Keeping a few girlfriends or wives around effectively dismisses a true relationship with any one of them. Being a good, hardworking dad and a criminal at the same time is a way of choosing to be neither.
Besides, an addict is already faithfully committed to something he prioritizes above all else. Gambling addiction, particularly, is easy to start; it requires no elaborate or illegal activities, no troublesome ingestion of substances, and it programs the body using its own chemicals. I thought at first gambling was about chance, the possibility of making something out of nothing, of multiplying money through pure cleverness. He’d like that. Something from nothing. And that is the first charm. But the ones who get addicted, I think, are looking for certainty, not chance. Outcomes are certain, immediate and clear. In other words, there will be a result to any one bet, a point in time when the risk will be unequivocally resolved, and the skill and foresight of the gambler can be perfectly measured. A shot of adrenaline will issue into the bloodstream, win or lose. It’s not messy, not indefinite or uncontrollable, like love, or people. Gambling absolves its players of uncertainty.
8.
Dad steered Mom through the broad doors of the restaurant at the Hazel Park Raceway for their first date. The old host lit up, welcomed him by name and seated them by the wide windows. The waiters knew him too, and he tipped outrageously. Mom wore a baggy white hippie smock embroidered with lines of tiny red flowers (a dress, she said, like “a loose interpretation of a baseball”), and her wild black curly ha
ir down in a plain cloud. Dad wore a gold-button sports jacket, creased slacks, hard-shined shoes and slick hair; a near Robert De Niro. They’d met while working in a tool and die shop in Romeo, Michigan, in 1977. Mom had been placed there for a few weeks by a temp agency to do packing and shipping.
After only a couple months of dating, Dad took her on an elaborate vacation to South America to see Machu Picchu. He’d first suggested Mexico, but Mom said she didn’t like Mexico. It made her nervous.
The trip was impulsive and strange, something my mom would have loved. And he seemed so rich. He’d told her, I imagine in his shy way, without eye contact, that if he ever were to marry someone, it would be her. Mom felt adored, scooped up in his big gestures, bound by the certainty of them. I have seen some photographs from this trip. They both look so excited and free and wild, in jeans and thin T-shirts, laughing, almost childish against the ancient monuments and green vistas. He directed the trip with sheer confidence, ever-calm, bullying through the language barrier, tossing indulgences to my mom along the way like the king of the parade. She didn’t know he had cashed out a life insurance policy to take her there, and that he was dead broke. Soon after the trip she discovered she was pregnant with my sister.
Mom’s pregnancy started to show at the shop, drawing stronger looks from the bitter receptionist with the beehive hairdo. Mom noticed the looks, and turned to her, straight and direct, like she always did if something needed to be sorted out.
“Darlin’,” the receptionist said before Mom even opened her mouth, “he didn’t tell you he’s married, did he?”
Mom laughed but said nothing. The receptionist just shook her head in pity. Mom didn’t like pity. She would have ignored it. He had told her he’d marry her if he was ever inclined to marry, and it just didn’t seem to her like something someone already married could come up with. It was so sweet. He was so generous, so affectionate.
The idea, though, began to itch. She did think it was odd that she had never been to his house, didn’t have his home phone number and had only been offered vague indications of where he lived. That night she asked him if he was married, and he said no. He acted genuinely confused, suggesting that the receptionist was just a jealous cow because he wouldn’t flirt with her. She felt happy with that. And besides, there was a baby to consider now. She let it go. Soon, she moved into an apartment with him and quit working.
For her first doctor’s visit, Dad gave her his insurance card and the name of the clinic to visit while he was at work. She handed over the card to the receptionist, who pulled a file, opened it and then paused. The receptionist looked at Mom, then at the file, then at Mom again, glancing at the nurses near her to spread her discomfort. An indignant look hardened her face. Mom was puzzled. “Is everything OK?” she finally asked.
“Yes, but . . . I’m sorry, ma’am . . . but you are not Mrs. Brodak.” Mom smiled politely. “Well, not officially yet, but I’m on his insurance now so you have to honor that.”
“No, I mean . . .” The nurses now looked on with worry. “Mrs. Brodak and her daughter are regular patients of this clinic. They were just in last Wednesday. You are not Mrs. Brodak.”
It was then, she told me, that it should have ended. It wasn’t too late. “Everything,” she told me, “could have been avoided if I had just gone back to my parents instead of to him the moment I left that clinic.” I nod, imagining how much better that would have been for her, skipping past the idea that this “everything” she could have avoided would have included me. “It’s like all I could do was make mistakes,” she said.
The moment he stepped through the door that evening she told him the story of the insurance card at the clinic and demanded to know who the real Mrs. Brodak was. He softened his shoulders and toddled gently to her, engulfing her with a hug, caressing her as she cried. His softness and confident denial stunned her into silence, just like it had before. He told her the woman was just a friend he’d allowed to use his card, that he was just doing someone a favor out of kindness, that he was certainly not married. He laughed about it, prodding and rousing her into laughing with him as he smoothed her face.
He could turn you like that. He just wouldn’t let your bad mood win. He’d steal your mad words and twist them funny in repetition, poke at your folded arms until they opened, grin mockingly at your dumb pout until you smiled, as long as it took.
A few days later she called the county clerk’s office to inquire about some marriage records. The clerk on the other end delivered the news plainly, as she probably always did. He’d been married for just a few years. He had a daughter, aged four.
See, this is how my dad starts—stolen from another family.
Mom packed her small suitcases and moved to her parents’ house that same day, and that, again, should’ve been the end of it. She stayed in her room. The road to her parents’ house had not been paved yet, and there were still fields around them, overgrown lilac bushes, honeysuckle and wild rhubarb where now there are neighbors’ neat lawns.
She thought about his tenderness. The honest, steady light in his eyes when he told her he loved her. How he’d suddenly sweep her up for a small dance around the kitchen. All these things he’d practiced with his real wife. She gave birth to my sister, quietly.
But he wouldn’t leave her alone. He found her and would come whenever he could, tossing rocks at her window in the night like a teenager until her father chased him off, leaving bouquets on the doorstep with long love letters. He was unreasonably persistent, beyond what she would’ve expected of any boyfriend, and perhaps it was the insane magnitude of this persistence that convinced her to go back to him. She thought maybe their relationship was worth all of this effort, all of the dozens and dozens of roses, the gifts, the jewelry, the long letters pleading for forgiveness, praising her virtues, promising to leave his wife. “And poetry,” Mom said. “You should have seen the poetry he wrote to me. I almost wish I hadn’t thrown it all away.”
First she wanted to meet the real Mrs. Brodak. Mom looked up their number in the phone book, called to introduce herself and extend an invitation to meet, which Mrs. Brodak accepted stiffly.
It was a muggy summer. Dad’s wife appeared at the screen door and stood without knocking. In a thick blue dress with her waist tied tightly, she said nothing when Mom opened the door. “Would you like to hold the baby?” Mom asked.
My sister was placed in her lap like a bomb. Nothing could be done but politely talk, with hard grief in their chests, softening their voices. The real Mrs. Brodak was scared too. “How did you meet?” Mom asked Dad’s wife.
They had met in high school. After he had returned from Vietnam, they married impulsively. She never had time to think, she said. Baby, work, no time to think. This is how life works: hurrying along through the tough moments, then the hurrying hardens and fossilizes, then that’s the past, that hurrying. She asked Mom what was going to happen now.
“Now,” Mom said, “we leave Joe Brodak. We don’t let our babies know him. He’s not a good person.” She leaned to her, with hands out. They lightly embraced and nodded tearfully. Mom would have wanted to help Mrs. Brodak.
Mom also would have felt a little triumphant somehow. She would have felt like she had won him. Whatever there was to win. She didn’t actually want to quit like that, despite what she said to Mrs. Brodak. She had a baby now, and no real career prospects, having ditched the student teaching she needed to finish her certification, and on top of that her own mental illnesses kept her from self-sufficiency. Her parents looked on with reserved worry. After Dad’s wife left, Mom joined them in the kitchen, where they had been listening to the exchange. They sipped coffee, looking out at the bird feeder. Eventually Mom’s mother urged her to go back to him. “It is better to be married,” she said. “You have to just deal with it.”
She turned back to him, resolved to trust him.
This looks bad, I know. I would not have made this choice, I think. Most people wouldn’t. But what do any of
us know?
In the basement of the Romeo District Court my dad married my mom, with his sister, Helena, as a witness. The dress Mom wore, an off-white peasant dress with low shoulders and small pouf sleeves, I wore when I was ten, as a hippie Halloween costume.
A small dinner party was held at a restaurant on a nearby golf course. Mom met her mother-in-law there, and many other Brodaks, who all regarded her warily. As a homewrecker.
Soon after the wedding, I was born, during a year of relative happiness in their relationship. Perhaps, Mom thought, their rocky start was over, that there would be no more problems. She threw her wild energy into this life: these children, and him, her husband, now. She enacted a vigorous and healthy routine for her family: reading, games, walks to the park, dancing, art and helping the elderly lady upstairs with her housework. She attended to us with pure devotion. She baked homemade bread and wrote folk songs, singing them softly to us with her acoustic Gibson at bedtime. The songs were always minor key, lament-low, about horses and freedom and the ocean. In the dark, I’d cry sometimes in their hold.
Mom isn’t sure exactly when Dad got divorced from his first wife; he kept the details a secret. With her daughter, my half-sister, Mrs. Brodak moved to California, where she died of cancer a few years later.
9.
Mom threw away all of the letters and poetry he’d sent her when she remarried and moved in with her new husband. It stings to think about. I wish I could have read these things, but they were not for me. And I don’t blame her.
But I did see the letters, a long time ago. I saw the shoebox full of them when I was little. Pages and pages of blue-lined notebook paper with Dad’s loopy, fat, cursive writing, or sometimes the harsh, slanted caps he’d use. The words rattled on the pages with some mysterious grown-up intensity that pushed me away from them. I did take something from the box. A thing that made no sense to me.
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