Stephen Dixon - Frog

“Part of a police report my mother gave. ‘I was in my bank, doing my normal weekly depositing and wanting to withdraw a little cash. Suddenly behind me I hear “Nobody move, everybody get down, this is a robbery.” Really, in that order—“Don’t move, get down.” What did they think we should do? Because if you can get down without moving, you’re really doing something. It was stupid. Unfair too, for someone could get killed not doing the right thing because of these confusing orders. And if you didn’t speak English which a lot of people in this city don’t, or not well enough to understand that hurried garbled gibberish, what then? But that fits my theories about bank robbers. That they’re all stupid. If they were the least bit smarter they wouldn’t be robbing banks, for one thing. For I’m sure, what with bank guards and plainclothesmen and just armed storeowners bringing in their own money, they have more of a chance of getting shot in one than we do with so many of them robbing banks. But you don’t want my theories, so I’ll stick to as close an account as I can give. This man said “Don’t move, get down, robbery. Pull your coats over your heads or just keep your eyes shut and your face flat against the floor.” Finally we knew. We should get down — for how else can you put your face to the floor? — and not keep our coats over our heads standing up. It sometimes takes cunning to be an innocent bystander. And right after that he confirmed our hunches about what to do by shouting “Now down, down, nobody make a move. First one to pick his head up gets it blown off.” By this time I was already getting down to the floor. I didn’t fly to it. I couldn’t. I got down slowly, one knee, then the other, then spread myself flat on my stomach and chest. If I had tried to get down quicker I might have broken a hip. I knew that and hoped the robbers would know why I was getting down so slowly. They must have. For though I was, from what I saw, the last one to get down by almost a minute, they didn’t complain. And since I had no sweater or coat for my head, though they didn’t say sweater, they just said coat, but I’m sure a sweater would have been all right, I put my arms over it and kept my eyes shut tight for the rest of the time till they left. From what the tellers said later, there must have been six to seven of them. For each line had a man or woman with a handgun, they said, and one who could have been either. And there were five lines operating. I remember that, quickly observing which one was the shortest to get on, when I came in. And behind us were two different men’s voices ordering the customers on line and all around to get down and stay there. Though maybe it was just one man with a couple of different voices: high and low, excited and controlled. Anyway, that was all there was to it for me. They told us to stay put on the floor where we were for ten minutes after they left, but most of us got up the second a teller shouted they were gone. All this a bit hard to believe, wouldn’t you say? Happening in the middle of the city, fifty customers or so in the bank and maybe fifteen bank employees, two of them armed guards in uniforms, plus another five thousand people strolling and pushing strollers and selling umbrellas and things in the street right outside and going in and out of the subway entrance in front of the bank. And to top it off, two policemen from a double-parked police car right across Broadway having a snack in a café. They didn’t go through my pocket book or anybody else’s, the robbers. One man, after everybody got up, did stay on the floor weeping, and a whole bunch of us went over to comfort him. It seemed he’d been robbed something like this — guns, get to the floor! — just a few months before, but in that one he also was kicked when he didn’t unzip his jacket pocket fast enough to turn over his wallet. He was afraid they were the same gang and they’d rough him up and maybe even kill him because he recognized them, besides crying because it happened twice in so short a time. We told him not to worry. That this can’t be the only gang in the city robbing banks. And since this one did it differently than his last one — didn’t take our wallets and watches and things, and waved pistols instead of shotguns behind us — it almost had to be a different gang. He said that suppose it happens again? What’s he to think every time he goes to a bank? I told him that if I’ve been going to a bank about once a week for more than sixty years and this was the first time it happened to me, chances of it happening to him a third time in the next year were slight. Someone else said that the first fifty of those sixty years weren’t such violent ones in the city and so shouldn’t count, but anyway what I said seemed to calm the man. Only other thing I can remember now is how one customer started complaining, about ten minutes after the robbers left, if this meant there wasn’t going to be any bank service here for a few hours. No one else of us did. In fact a group of us said that once the police finished questioning us we’ll share a cab to the nearest Chase branch on Broadway and Sixty-third and maybe even have lunch together after to talk about all this.’”

“A photo of his mother. Mother’s photo. Mother photo. Photo of mother. Photo, just ‘Photo’: She’s on a boardwalk, is young, late teens, very early twenties, leaning against a railing, beach and water behind her, in a swimsuit, could be any beach, no cliffs to the side or boulders in the water, flat and endless sea and sky, holding an American flag on her shoulder, doesn’t seem to be cold, big patriotic smile as if it was a nice bright day to be saying ‘I’m proud to hail from the good old USA,’ while the strollers on either side of her have heavy coats and furry hats and caps on and seem to be shivering. He found it in a drawer of photographs in her apartment. Had gone through the drawer to find snapshots of her and his dad and one of them both, small enough to put in his wallet. Wanted to open the picturefold to show people his gorgeous mother and handsome rugged-looking dad, the two lovey-dovey or kittenish together, the era. Showed the photo to her and she couldn’t place it. ‘Maybe it was from my bathing-beauty days, but they were always in August or July. I did a little modeling then too and of course those chorus parts in dancing movies. But I can’t think of a movie or ad where I wasn’t in flapper clothing or skimpy or lavish costumes, some weighing a ton with a ten-foot train picking up spit and stuff from the floor, and I never did a bathing suit ad, if they even had them then. Maybe the models in the photo are the people in warm clothing. You know: being photographed in the summer for the fall or winter lines and they just happened to be walking on the boardwalk to their shoot when my photographer snapped me. But that wouldn’t account for their frozen appearances. But look at me there. I’m a hideous old hag now but I think you can say then, despite my funny plastered-down hair and overluxurious lipstick and rouge and the unflattering bathing costume that also fattens my thighs, that I might be considered beautiful. Men clamored after me, photographers were always stopping me on the street or at the beach asking me to pose, and I was forever getting pinched, propositioned and whistled at. And though I was only a chorus dancer I still got more love letters and hot poems and flowers and candies and cheap jewelry and other junk than the stars did and I had to devise all kinds of ways to avoid those lechers after the show. Most of them thought I was an ignorant city kid turned promiscuous hoofer and just wanted to butter me up before taking me to bed. But I was impossible to get as your father liked to attest. The hardest he ever met, which I think is why he married me. He could have had as a wife a number of well-to-do fairly good-looking women with not half bad bodies and from much finer families. But he invested so much money and effort into our courtship that he wanted to get some returns. I think he got the best of the deal. I’m sure he continued to play around now and then. He practically ruined us with his reckless investments and avoidable run-ins with the law. For the first dozen years of our marriage he saw a lot more of his mother and sister and cronies than he did me. And he was hardly there for you kids ever and with his indifferent to painful dental care to you all and refusal to let me send any of you to another dentist, helped deplete most of your teeth. While I was a virgin when I married him. Always stayed faithful and available. Never argued with his tyrannical momma or demanded more than the most necessary domestic things. Did what I could to clean up the messes he left and quarrels he started over money with shopkeepers and such and never got a nod of thanks for it. Threatened to leave him I don’t know how often. And even though he never said a word or slipped up a sign to suggest he’d mind much if I went, I never even stayed away a day. And then, while I was also playing nurse and nurse’s aide to your sister till she died, I took care of him as if he were an infant for the last ten years of his sick old age.’”