The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2016

by Rachel Kushner

  A small, square, black-and-white photo of him he had sent her. The background is pure white and the whiteness of his knit polo shirt disappears into it so his head appears to be floating in whiteness, rooted only by the wide, heathered gray collar of his shirt. He is young and smiling broadly, open-mouthed, joy in his eyes, like he was just laughing, really laughing. He’s smiling honestly, more honestly than I have ever seen.

  On the back of the photo is his loopy cursive in blue pen. When I read it I began to cry instantly, in gusting sheets of tears. I took it because it was the first object that made me cry. I couldn’t understand how. I’m crying now, reading it again.

  Nora,

  My first real, true love. You changed my life with your “crazy” love.

  I love you,

  J.B.

  10.

  After I was born Dad came across an ad for an attorney who was hiring women to be surrogate mothers. He became convinced that this would solve their financial problems. Nowadays paid surrogacy is common, but in the early eighties the process was new, and still somewhat risky. He pressed my mother, and she started to warm to the idea; after all, she loved being a mother and felt good about the idea of helping a couple have a baby. It seemed kind and smart and wonderful. She said the couple met her in a restaurant, and she brought me and my sister along, “you know, to show you off, so they could see how healthy and happy you were,” she told me. We squirmed and smiled in the booth like the best roly-poly babies possible, and Mom beamed while the couple fell for her.

  They lived in Long Island, so Mom was flown out to New York to do the insemination there. It didn’t work. She was flown out again. It didn’t work.

  Meanwhile, Dad’s gambling debts were secretly starting to accumulate. He was thinking about the $10,000 they were set to receive as soon as the baby was born, and had started spending recklessly. Mom started noticing odd things. Some men had asked the neighbors where the Brodak girls went to school. The phone rang off the hook. Only once did she respond, finding a strange man on the line. He told her he was calling from Vegas. “Your husband,” the man said, “is a scumbag. A fucking deadbeat. Did you know that?” She unplugged the phone. That night, the living-room windows were shot out.

  Dad told her they needed to move. And why not to Long Island, to be closer to the couple? To him it was the perfect out.

  We moved to a cramped basement apartment on Long Island. In photos of us from this era, on a cheap swing set or feeding ducks by a weak pond, there is a kind of stressy child anger in our eyes. Mom kept up her focus on us. Free from his debts back in Michigan, Dad returned to gambling. She never knew how bad things were until something went missing.

  Mom was cleaning us up from breakfast one day when Dad was leaving for work. He came back through the door after a minute. “Forget something?” Mom asked absently.

  “No, uh, my car . . .”

  Mom looked out the window. It was gone, had disappeared overnight. “Where’s your car?”

  “Oh . . . I let a buddy of mine borrow it.”

  “He just came in the night and took your car? He had a key to your car?”

  “Yeah, it was an emergency, no big deal. I’m gonna borrow yours today, OK?” He grabbed her keys and left.

  How could he resolve this one? Weeks went by and his “buddy”’ didn’t return the car. Eventually he just came home with a new one, an old beater with green upholstery smelling of dogs. He told Mom he’d decided to sell his buddy the car, but she’d already seen the repo notice. She wasn’t surprised anymore. She shuffled her rage into resignation, and focused on us.

  The insemination attempts continued. One night, after returning from a long trip, drunk and tired, Dad forced himself on her. Mom said she screamed and fought him. But he was strong. Sex was against the contract they had with the couple, for obvious reasons.

  On a hunch, she took a test a few weeks later and discovered she was pregnant. Now, though, she wasn’t sure whose baby it was.

  She took us to stay with her aunt in Baltimore for a few weeks. And there, without telling anyone, she decided to abort the fetus. She hadn’t spoken to Dad for weeks, nor did she return the calls from the couple. Eventually she returned home, with us in tow, to find Dad having just returned too, from Atlantic City. He had gambled away everything. Their savings, his car, his wedding ring, every penny he could find. She packed our clothes and whatever small things would fit into her powder-blue Caprice Classic and took us back to Michigan that same day. She filed for divorce and moved back in with her parents. It was here, living with my grandparents, that I first started to know my life. I remember Goodison Preschool. A salt-dough Christmas ornament I made and tried to eat. Playing Red Rover in the sun. My bossy sister teasing me, and stress around us all.

  Eventually she was going to have to call the couple to tell them what happened. She says she still remembers that phone call, their voices on the other line, warm, but quiet and shocked. They were crushed. They said they would have taken the baby either way, and loved it completely. They had come to trust and care for her, and she failed them in the worst possible way. Listening to my mom reveal this story crumples me inside.

  She was about my age when this happened, and I imagine her next to me, as a friend. I would have helped her out of this.

  I would have shaken her bony shoulders and said no no no no until the stupid false hope in her eyes was gone and all of Dad’s tricks fell away.

  11.

  Such a short part of their lives, really, this marriage and this family. Just a few years.

  Dad moved back to Michigan too, following us a few weeks later. He was living in a hotel room in Center Line, near the GM Tech Center where he worked.

  We’d be dropped off there, and walk the AstroTurf-lined walkways to the room while teenagers screamed and splashed in the pool. Mexican music blared and faded in the rooms we passed, some with open doors, some with eyes following. But it was a break from the attentive care children can get sick of. It seemed like a party. He bought us huge bags of candy—Skittles for my sister and Raisinets for me. There were always cold cuts and a shrimp ring in the fridge. During the day he’d often leave us alone, and we were OK, watching movies, eating candy, puffy-painting giant cheap sweatshirts and playing Nintendo. I didn’t really miss him when he was gone, and I knew that couldn’t be right.

  My sister took care of me when we were alone. She directed me to eat the crackers and ham she’d arranged and have a glass of milk while I was absorbed in Mega Man. She knew how to pull out the sofa bed when we were getting tired. I’d watch her tiny body rip the creaky metal frame out of the nubby brown couch. She’d straighten the sheets around the lumpy mattress and drag the comforter from Dad’s bed onto ours, nestling me into the uncomfortable mess wordlessly.

  She’d check to make sure the door was deadbolted, then flip the lights off and tuck us in. The puffy paints and bags of candy and the half-consumed glasses of milk and the ham plates would be scattered on the floor around the sofa bed, and we’d just lie there, listening. The rush of 12 Mile Road below and the garbled living sounds from the other residents would lull us to sleep. We imagined different versions of where Dad was. A cool movie, on a date with a hot lady, at a nightclub, at a concert. Sometimes we’d compare ideas, sometimes we’d just let them play out in our heads as we fell asleep.

  During the day I’d poke around his stuff. Shoved under towels in the linen closet: Playboys and baggies of green and white drugs. Sometimes money. Under the bed, in a shoebox: a heavy, greasy-looking gun.

  I wanted to have the fun he wanted us to have. He’d take us to things, kid things, like water parks or Chuck E. Cheese’s, places Mom would never take us because she insisted on productive activities like hikes or art museums. He’d take us to a golf dome with a bar and a dark arcade attached, then hand us both a roll of quarters to spend in the arcade while he was in the bar. For hours we’d feed the machines, Mortal Kombat and Rampage and Gauntlet. When our quarters were gone
we’d gingerly shuffle through the bar and find him alone, glued to a sports game. He’d hand us more quarters or say it was time to go. It was fun but, I don’t know, thin fun. He’d put something in front of us: a sports game or play place or movie or toy and he was always on the other side of it, far on the other side of it. I kept it that way too, I know. I didn’t like to go with him, I didn’t like to have to answer his perfunctory questions about school or interests, I didn’t even like to hug him. I feel awful remembering this.

  And, once again, he pursued Mom relentlessly, but I never saw it happen and didn’t know this until later, when Mom told me. I often wonder why he did it. He could have easily walked away from us, and perhaps he didn’t only because that was the more obvious thing to do. The only thing that makes sense is that he wanted to be with us. Or that he felt like he was supposed to be with us, an obligation he couldn’t shake.

  I should be able to feel my way through that question, to be able to know, in my gut, if he really wanted to be a dad and husband. But I can’t feel it. Nothing really matches up. There are fragments of a criminal alongside fragments of a dad, and nothing overlaps, nothing eclipses the other, they’re just there, next to each other. No narrative fits.

  12.

  No, I did see it, once. On a softball field in the evening when the sky was getting dark pink. Mom had brought me to see my sister’s softball team play, a team that my dad coached. I had wandered away to sit in the grass, probably looking for interesting insects or rocks, and from some distance I saw my dad approach my mom at the edge of the bleachers where she stood. The sun was behind them but I could see their gray shapes in the nook of the gleaming silver bleachers and the matching fence. Perhaps the game was over. He was talking closely to her face and she was looking away at first, arms crossed. I edged to the other side of the bleachers to hear. He had his hand on her shoulder; she was starting to smile. I could hear him say, “I need you. I need you,” in a steady pleading voice I can still hear in my head. I was surprised at this sound, and memorized it. Then he lifted his knee and softly and childishly kneed her thigh, still saying, “I need you” and now drawing it out lightly and funnily with each jab—“I kneed you. I kneed you!’—and she was really smiling now, looking down sweetly and smiling.

  13.

  My dad was born August 19, 1945, in a displaced persons’ camp. This is how he first lived: being carried by his mother, in secret, while she worked silently in the camp.

  The previous year his mother and father and five siblings had been moved out of their homes in Szwajcaria, Poland, by the Nazis and forced to board a train. My Aunt Helena, a few years older than my dad, told me she remembers it. She remembers their mom, Stanislawa, hopping off the train when it stopped to hunt for wood to start a cooking fire. Stanislawa’s parents and three of her siblings had died a few years before in Siberia, having been shipped there to cut trees for the Russian supply. “The trees would shatter if they hit the ground because it was so cold. No one had enough clothes or food, so most people died there,” my aunt told me in a letter. She has memories of their life during the war, “but they don’t seem real,” she wrote. She remembers the mood of the train: the animal-like panic any time the train stopped, the worry of the adults, and her worry when her mother would disappear. They were taken to Dachau, where my grandfather was beaten and interrogated daily because the Nazis suspected him of being a partisan, like his brothers.

  My grandfather was separated from the family. The rest of them lived and worked together, hoping he’d be returned. Nothing useful came out of the interrogations.

  After a few months they were reunited, and all transferred to a sub-camp in Kempten, Germany, where they worked as slaves, mostly farming. This is where my grandmother became pregnant with my father. She hid her pregnancy because she was afraid she’d be forced to abort it. She had to work to be fed like everyone else, even the children, the sick, everyone. My aunt remembers a little of this but won’t say much. “There were horrors every day,” she says, and I don’t press her. The war was over in April and my dad was born in August.

  After the war, my grandfather felt strongly that they should move to Australia, since he liked the idea of working a homestead and living freely as a farmer. But a few months before they were to leave, he died, and Australia no longer welcomed them—a widow with five children. Through a Catholic sponsorship program a passage to America was offered, and they took it. My dad’s first memories were of this ship: troop transport, cold and gray all around, the sea and metal smell.

  14.

  They arrived at Ellis Island on December 4, 1951, and Dad’s name was changed from Jozef to Joseph. They took a train to Detroit. Their sponsor took them to St. Albertus Church, on the corner of St. Aubin and Canfield, an area that used to be called Poletown. They lived on the top floor of the adjacent school, built in 1916, until my grandma found work in the cafeteria of the Detroit News and rented an apartment for them. St. Albertus closed as a parish in 1990, and now stands in urban prairie among other abandoned buildings.

  I wanted to see it for myself. One family visit in December I snuck away for the day and drove myself there. There are a lot of death holes in Detroit. Not poor neighborhoods but something beyond that: nothingnesses, forsaken places. Scattered plots, some whole blocks, whole streets, sets of streets, in the middle of the city. The place where my dad grew up is dead.

  This area, around Mack and Chene, is one of the emptiest in Detroit. It is not the most dangerous; there just aren’t many people here at all. Only a few structures stand on each block, and rarely are those structures occupied. Sometimes you can’t really tell. Most houses are in different states of decay, some just piles of charred wood and ash. These are not the most picturesque ruins. They’re not the famous ones, like the Packard Plant or the huge train depot, or the ornately ruined Michigan Theater. They’re not the pretty castles of Brush Park, derelict and looted, the cool tall office buildings downtown with wild trees growing on them, the broken buildings out-of-town journalists and photographers come to document and vaguely lament. These were plain poor houses to start with.

  St. Albertus sits next to homes like these, and plots of empty grassland. Across the street is one occupied house, and a heavily gated new-but-cheap apartment complex, where a convent and girls’ orphanage used to be. Behind the church is the school, a sturdy three-story brick building with a stone facade, st albertvs carved across a neoclassical frieze above four faceted pilasters between the doors. The school is a ruin—windows are broken or boarded up, graffiti covers the building man-high around the dark brick and the yard is grown over, with dumped TVs and furniture in the grass. I looked at it for a long time. This is where my family first lived in America. This is where my dad learned English. A ruin, like any other. I watched a solidly fat black squirrel climb the brick effortlessly, pause to eat a small thing on the windowsill, then disappear inside.

  On the front steps I pulled shyly at the boards over the three doors, but they were nailed tight. It would have been easy enough to climb up to any of the glassless first-floor windows, but I was alone and it seemed unwise. I took some photos with my phone. A rind of green copper wound weakly around the roof, the rest of it having been pulled off by scavengers. I had explored abandoned structures before, but not alone. Still, here I was. I had come this far. I looked up and down the street, but there was not a soul around. I walked quickly to an inner corner and hoisted myself up on the ledge, then to the same glassless window into which the black squirrel had disappeared.

  Broken glass and soft piles of crumbled plaster. Cold dark. The smell of old wet wood and dead animals. I dropped down into a classroom with gritty gray floors. But there had been some maintenance here by church people; I could tell the floor had been swept occasionally. I walked like I was stepping on someone. The boards shivered and a steady wind hushed me.

  A dark wood door lead to the hall, lined with more classrooms. All of the doorknobs removed, stolen. The next room was pa
inted a sweet sky blue, peeling at the top, with a chalkboard but no furniture. A red fire-alarm box. Very nice wood, rotting. Powdery plaster making the ground soft. Every surface peeling. The next room was pale acid green. A patch of exposed cinder blocks where the chalkboard had been. It’s hard to imagine my father as a boy. He was a star athlete, he’d told me. Captain of the football team in high school. He would’ve been fun. Quiet but brave and strong, like me. I kicked lightly at some planks on the ground, and the sound of scurrying claws in the walls moved away from me.

  I went slowly down the hall, feeling ridiculous for using the flashlight feature on my expensive phone but glad to have it, since the floorboards were warped, with odd piles of glass and nails and wood shards. The bare rooms felt heavy and full, and I can’t explain this. I came to a stairwell. Plaster dust had been swept into loose mounds against the wall, and footprints marked a path up the steps.

  On the top floor, the hall opened into the auditorium. The windows were not boarded up here, and the room was bright and open and cold. I stood astounded: at one end a gaping black stage was framed with pale peach and jaunty blue leaf patterns, deco style, and flanked by two doors topped with Greek urns and vines of plaster. A very small gold-fringed pale blue curtain hung straight across the stage, painted with mounds of red and orange flowers with wispy grass behind.

  My mouth hung dumbly and I started to cry. The peeling colors and the light of the room, the flowered curtain and the darkness, the piles of powder, the good wood, the hidden air. It was beautiful in a way I recognized in the oldest part of me. I felt like I was seeing something true. I walked the thin boards of the floor to the center of the room, past a large blue a painted inside of a circle, like a tidy anarchy symbol. Bird shit covered the floor, concentrating under grates. The cooing and wheezing and clawing of pigeons echoed blindly. Above the center of the room, on the high ceiling arching like a coffin top, was a trinity of large pale blue medallions, the center one probably once surrounding a light fixture that was now gone. My family slept on cots in this room for months. They looked up at this. As a child, my dad, packed in with the other refugees, looked up at this ceiling and thought about the future, this future I am in now. It was hard not to feel grateful for this useless beauty. It was there for them, this silent, mindless pattern, how it looked like love over the empty room.