Revolution

by Deb Olin Unferth

“I don’t want to wear a stupid bra,” I said.

  “Would it really kill you?” said George. “Would you drop dead?”

  “Since when are you so interested in bras? Since when do you just follow whatever rule there happens to be? I don’t see you wearing a bra.”

  “She has a lot more to think about than you and your bras.”

  “Apparently she doesn’t,” I said.

  * * *

  Mana was alone out there, apart from the local woman who cleaned. She was guardian of some sixty children, shooting going on outside the wall. She didn’t even have a car on the premises, let alone a couple of buses in case they had to evacuate. And things were bad. The soldiers were suspicious. They had an eye out for rebel activity, they had their orders. The orphanage was strictly evangélico and therefore unpolitical. But every day or two a soldier came to the gate and talked to Mana. She didn’t let the soldiers in and they didn’t make her, but they were coming around. Maybe they thought she had a few guerrilla fighters hiding in there, but I went all over that orphanage and I never saw any guerrillas. And the kids were wrecks. They screamed in their sleep. Several of them, every night, started screaming when they fell asleep. Some screamed most of the night. You could wake them and hug them and be nice to them and tell them stories or sing a song, but when they went back to sleep, they would start screaming again. You had to just let them scream, otherwise they wouldn’t get any sleep and would be tired and cranky the next day. You slept with shooting going on outside and a child next to you screaming.

  Mana was young. She must have been under thirty. She had an education. She could have gone to the States, left that war country. What was she doing there? Was it courage? Loyalty? Hope? It’s possible that I’ve never known any of those, but you’d think I’d at least recognize them.

  * * *

  We had the argument about the bra, and that night I walked into one of the bedrooms and demanded of the girls, “Where in the Bible does it say you have to wear a bra?”

  They looked up, wordless, their faces like searchlights.

  “Who says God says you have to wear a bra?” I said.

  They said nothing. They looked afraid.

  That was it. Mana kicked me out. The paro was over by this time. In fact it had been over and started and over by this time. The weekly man came and drove George and me away from the orphanage. He dropped us off on an empty road and left.

  OH BROTHER

  This might be the place to note that there are fifty-three mountains over fourteen thousand feet in Colorado. I don’t know why fourteen thousand feet in particular is an interesting number, but George and his brothers wanted to climb to the top of them all. The brothers had a rather unoriginal nickname for the mountains. They called them “fourteeners.” Some of the “fourteeners” had never been climbed before or some such—but that can’t be right. How could they know how high a mountain was unless someone had been to the top? But I figured that had to be the case because why else would they want to climb it?

  George had taken me up a few fourteeners. The climb took all day, sometimes two days, and there were blizzards, and we’d run out of water, and we’d pass the tree line and not be able to breathe, and still we’d have hours and hours to go. When we reached the top, we’d leap around the boulders up there until we found a metal tube with a pen and a list of names inside. Gasping and freezing, we added our names and then we hurried back down. So that was why people climbed up these things, to write their names down on the list.

  Later, when someone would ask what kind of a dumb idea that was, going to El Salvador during the civil war—their civil war—I’d think of that.

  ON THE ROAD

  “Well,” I said. “We better figure out how to get out of here.”

  George and I had on our backpacks. The orphanage driver had driven away.

  “How can you be fired from a job that doesn’t pay?” George was marveling at this.

  A rack of low hills. Prairie pulled out of a sack.

  “Which way do you think we should go?” I squinted down the road.

  “Didn’t you do any babysitting in high school?”

  “It wasn’t my fault.”

  “Okay. Whose fault was it then?”

  “I never said I wanted to come here.”

  “Oh, I see.” He was really working himself up. He was throwing his arms out and shouting. “I see. It’s my fault.”

  “That’s it,” I said. “I’m leaving.”

  “Well, we can’t stay here, now can we.” He gestured to here: a bowl of blue, a spill of meadow, a road running over a summit. Nothing. Not a pig scratching around. Not an empty soda sideways in the dust.

  I turned and started walking.

  “Where are you going?” he said.

  “Hey,” he called. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  I yelled across the flat of field. “Away from YOU!”

  “Fine!”

  “I hate you!” I screamed.

  “I hate you too!” he screamed back. He walked off in the other direction.

  I kept walking. I was so upset I could barely see. I hadn’t wanted to go to that stupid orphanage in the first place. It was his idea, always his ideas. I walked on, crying and hiccupping, down one hill and up another. Not even a telephone pole on the horizon. I was angry and ashamed and I hated him with the freshness of wet cement, a new imprint, a hand coming down on my mind and marking it. I shifted my stupid backpack and walked on. Who did he think he was, bringing me to a place like this, the bully? Oh, I’d show him. I imagined myself telling the story to a blurry assemblage of strangers. Defending myself, explaining. “Yes, he just left me there,” I was saying to the strangers. “And that’s when I went off and joined the revolution for real…”

  I turned to send up another shout but I was at the saucepan bottom of a hill. My view was blocked, I couldn’t see him. Tears began tweezing out again. How was I even supposed to get home?

  I kept walking. I came to the top of a hill and looked back. A mat of land. Out along the edge of the sky, a gathering of mountains. Not a town, not a tree in sight. There he was, not moving, a lone coat rack on a hill, the one vertical object. Hot valley air, a windshield’s worth of mosquitoes. He was looking toward me. I kept going, but more slowly now. I increased the distance between us by smaller increments. I looked back again. He was walking in my direction. I slowed more. I strolled past thin white birds standing in the fields. He followed, and in this way we went over the hills. Finally I brushed the dust from my dress and turned to face him. Narrow birds took slim steps along the sidelines. He came closer and closer. He stopped.

  LOVE

  We didn’t use the word “love” with each other. We prided ourselves on it. Not for the usual fairy-tale Communist reasons (love is a capitalist prison) (Communists are always so drearily romantic) but for our own fairy-tale reason: we wouldn’t say it unless we knew our love would last forever (this was my thinking, of course, true love is eternal, and so on), and though we secretly believed that our love would last forever, we were too romantic to say it.

  But after the paro, then the orphanage, then my walking away, and then his not abandoning me in the hills, and now the bus that we waited for to carry us away to the capital and the road that we sat on full of bugs, I had my head on my arms. What a selfish, inadequate revolutionary I was. My first civil war job and I’d screwed it up. I felt discardable, disposable. In fact I’d always felt that way, and now that I’d failed so miserably at the orphanage, I felt even worse. And George, meanwhile, had stood up to Mana on my behalf, had defended my right not to wear a bra, had said, “Does she really need one?” and moved his arm toward my chest, even though he thought I shouldn’t fuss about it—and he was right—and when she made me leave, he hadn’t considered staying on without me, not for a moment. He’d packed up and left with me without a word. And he’d been so gentle with the children, he could sit and play quiet games with them, or loud ones. He seemed to slip
into any situation with ease, had such simple good looks, a humble manner, and he had his wide silences when he would retreat into himself and I couldn’t share where he was, couldn’t even ask him about it. This also seemed admirable to me, since I had no silent space inside me where he couldn’t be.

  Once, back at the university, we had had to go to court and had been sentenced to community service, a string of Saturdays pulling weeds for obstructing a government vehicle. The crime had been an elaborate joke on our part, layers of jokes, private references to characters in books that had led to us lying down in front of a parking ticket truck and refusing to get up. But no one else got the joke—driver, police, judge. It was always like that with us. In my dorm we’d talk to people in a nonsense language and think we were hilarious. We wrote secret messages on the blackboards of the physics tower classrooms, our version of graffiti. We liked to think we were different, special, bonded.

  Pulling weeds was harder than it looked, though. The roots went deep, and if you got only the tops they would grow right back. I know we pulled at least one weed.

  * * *

  The truth is I had (have) a dread of being left.

  * * *

  The year before all this, when I was seventeen and still in high school, my family had left Chicago and moved to the Southwest. The plan was for my mother and little sister to stay with me until I finished high school, but they kept going away for visits that seemed to grow longer and longer. Finally the day I graduated from high school my parents sold the house, drove away in a moving truck, left me alone in Chicago. It was just for a few weeks. I was scheduled to spend a month in a school program in Spain. My grandmother offered to take me in, but I refused, not because I didn’t love her but because I felt angry with the family for more or less leaving me behind. It wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. And it wasn’t the second time either. The fact is I’d been sent off or left behind, ignored, many times over the years. They’d always been that way with me.

  I’m not saying I was a deprived child. My family was tirelessly middle-class. I’d been raised in the city, grew up riding around on the train, ate peas and spaghetti for dinner. When I was thirteen, we moved to a house in the suburbs for the high school. I was shuttled around in a station wagon. I saw the advent of MTV. Still, they did ignore me.

  When my parents moved away, I told them I would stay with friends. The situation made my friends’ parents uncomfortable, I guess. Three different sets of parents, parents of my very best friends I’d had for years, told me I was welcome to stay at their house for one night but then I had to leave. Miriam’s mother said I had to leave first thing in the morning. I don’t know if they all consulted about this or if they independently decided they didn’t want me. I wasn’t a great kid. I’d done some drugs, I’d stayed out late. I didn’t have many run-ins with the law. I didn’t talk back to non-parentals. I didn’t skip school all that much. I was a pretty regular not-great kid.

  The final night I was welcome at a friend’s, I couldn’t sleep. The family all went to bed and I sat on a stool in the kitchen. I listened to my Walkman and felt angry and abandoned. I sang songs to myself about leaving it all behind, about not needing anybody. I wanted to be harder. I was working at it, working at being harder, at not caring, talking myself into it. It’s the first time I can remember determining to be a certain way, setting out to be a certain type of person.

  The next morning my friend drove me to our high school. We’d both graduated the week before. I went in the front door and walked down to the basement. I propped opened one of the basement windows with a small rock. That night I came back, crawled through the damp bushes, and dropped in the window with my bag. I slept in the gym on a pile of mats. The school felt huge around me. The gym was cavernous, three standard-sized gyms connected, one end spotlit over by the badminton net, a chair stack of silver parallel lines, and the rest of the space—the other gyms and the empty spectator seats—spread out in a smooth sea of darkness.

  The second night I dropped down into the basement from the window and came face-to-face with a janitor.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” he said.

  I didn’t know what to say. “This is my school.”

  He pointed at me with his broom. “This is my school,” he said.

  “My parents left.”

  “Oh.” We considered this between us. Also between us: his broom, four squares of tile, a few years, maybe more. He lowered the broom. I lowered my bag. “You can visit anytime you like,” he said. He took the rock I had used to prop open the window and he broke the lock with it. I appreciated that.

  * * *

  I was thinking about all this while George and I sat on the ground, waiting for a bus to take us to the city, the wait looking like it could be a very long time. I was thinking about how George hadn’t left me, hadn’t threatened to, how he’d come after me in the hills, even though I’d been wrong and had deserved to be left. That seemed like a supreme loyalty now. I lifted my head. Conditions, I told him, had changed. And I needed to let him know. The situation, I explained, had come to a point where I could no longer not say that I loved him. I just loved him and there was nothing I could do about it and I was sorry about that. And then I pulled part of my dress over my head. (I used to do that.) And he said, “Come out of there” (he used to say that), and tugged at my dress until I came out. And then he said, “You are the nicest person I’ve ever known,” and then he said, “We should get married,” and I said, “Yes, we should,” and then he said we should get up because he thought a bus was coming, and indeed, as we got to our feet, we could hear it roaring up a hill.

  * * *

  George liked to sing. He used to speak the words more than sing them, shout them. I did whatever he did, so I shouted the words too. We stood on the road and shouted them together.

  * * *

  You can get anything you want at Alice’s restaurant.

  VISITORS

  Once we left the orphanage I more or less had a bad attitude from there on out. I didn’t want any more guns in my face. I didn’t want any more Marshall Law. There was some confusion on this point. Before we went to Central America, George had told me that San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador, was under martial law. He said it several times and it comforted me every time because I thought he was saying Marshall Law and that it referred to a restructuring program that I messily confused in my mind with World War II and the Marshall Plan. Imagine my surprise when we arrived. We got off the bus in San Salvador in the middle of the night and a squad of soldiers came sidling over, clanking with artillery like cowboys.

  “Hey,” they wanted to know, “what are you two doing, standing out on the street like this, violating curfew?”

  Excuse us?

  “Everybody has to be in by dark,” they said, “and here you are, milling around outside with your bags. Let’s see your papers.”

  The other people from the bus got into taxis and cars. I recall the red taillights going down the street and then George and me there alone with the soldiers.

  * * *

  George spoke mediocre Spanish. Later he spoke it so well that he developed a slight accent in English and couldn’t shut the Spanish faucet off even when he wanted to. Spanish just came out with the English. Meanwhile I spoke it beautifully, but later less and less, until today it sounds fake, like seeing glowing stickers instead of stars. But at that point George was having trouble understanding, and I myself couldn’t get my head around this curfew business. It felt like a new language, one that I knew but somehow the meanings of the words had been switched on me. The only curfew I knew of was the one my parents had imposed in high school. For an entire city to have to be in by dark was too strange for me. Around us was a city of iron-vault streets, thousands of hearts beating in the walls.

  * * *

  The soldiers searched our bags. They told us not to be out after dark again and they were not nice about it. They put us into a taxi.<
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  “We’d like to go to a hostel, please,” said George.

  That sounded good to me. We had been in hostels in Guatemala and Mexico, and that’s where I wanted to be just then—among our kind. I wanted a set of good old-fashioned gringo heads lit up in front of me. I wanted to see that tourist smile wiped on a face.

  The taximan frowned into the rearview. “Hostel?”

  “A cheap hotel. Where the people are like us.”

  “What are you like?”

  “We’re from another country,” George explained. “We carry backpacks.”

  The man turned around and took a good look at us. Then he drove us to a brothel and left us there.

  * * *

  We spent a lot of time in that brothel over the next few weeks. We sat on the landing outside our room. The ladies did their washing in the courtyard below. The sky was gray all the time over that building. The place seemed muted of color. We leaned our backs against the wall, stretched our legs out across the walkway. When the ladies came up the steps with their visitors, we got to our feet to let them by. They just stepped over us if we fell asleep. They didn’t speak to us or even look at us, or even look at each other. (This was specific to El Salvador. Later we stayed in a brothel in Honduras, where there were only insurrections, not a civil war, and the ladies were so friendly, they came into our room and told us stories all day and even robbed us, twice.)

  I don’t know where they got these prostitutes, but they didn’t look like any I’d ever seen and even at my age I’d seen a few, and anyway I knew what one was supposed to look like. These prostitutes wore blouses and knee-length skirts. They had neatly combed hair. They looked like the kind of ladies who work as clerks in business offices, or like airline ticket agents or case workers at a social service agency. They looked like the kind of women who type your number into a computer and make you wait a long time and then tell you in a voice at the edge of impatience that they’re sorry, there’s nothing they can do. You’ll have to come back tomorrow. Just to look at them made you feel a Kafkaesque hopelessness.