Apples & Oranges

by Jan Clausen

  “It’s interesting not to be in love w/ anybody,” I noted in July 1986, the anniversary of the Luz debacle. Not being in love was good for my work; it let me concentrate. I’d begun a new novel, and was enjoying a slow infusion of recognition from Sinking, Stealing’s publication the year before. I was still earning my keep at Enoch Rivers, while Leslie did freelance work for the Board of Education. We continued to be involved politically with what we called our respective “spheres of noninfluence,” the Middle East and Central America.

  Brooklyn CISPES had fizzled, and I’d joined the newly formed Brooklyn Nicaragua Sister City Project, part of a nationwide network of efforts to link specific localities north and south in a people-to-people approach to solidarity. We were starting to raise money for a potable water system for our tiny sibling, San Juan del Río Coco, an effort that the San Juaneños had prioritized since their contaminated drinking supply led to high rates of illness and infant mortality. We asked Community Board 6 in downtown Brooklyn to recognize the sister city relationship. Although the board turned us down, the campaign for recognition allowed us to publicize our support for a Central American revolution. So did the noisy parade we held on July 19, the anniversary of the Sandinista Triumph. (“Clean water in Nicaragua!” a bystander sneered, “what about in Brooklyn?” Our point exactly; solidarity meant seeing how ordinary people in both locations could change the world for the better.)

  In May, Les had spent an introspective week in Maine, writing and walking on the beach. During this time she mulled over a childhood memory of having been sexually abused by an adult acquaintance. While she’d never entirely wiped it from her mind, she’d also never acknowledged the deep significance such an event might have. Now she talked it over with her friend Mariah, a sober, AA-going alcoholic. Les, who herself never touched alcohol, began to identify her own chaotic, painful state of mind with Mariah’s descriptions of what it meant to be “in recovery.” The life of a dedicated activist, a woman who’d once worried that a week’s vacation in the woods might be more free time than she could handle, now took a decidedly contemplative turn.

  In the months to come, we’d develop vocabulary for an eerie remoteness that came over her in spells. I could detect it at a glance in the grim set of her features, hear it in the coldness with which she responded to routine efforts at communication. “You’re not here,” I’d say, and she’d agree, “No, I can’t be there right now. I guess I need to be by myself tonight.”

  I felt that I should welcome her embrace of the tenets, if not the form (for she never actually joined a twelve-step program), of the recovery movement. I knew she needed to get a purchase on the pain that lurked beneath the crust of her efficient, rational manner, and I couldn’t claim I knew how best to do that. Maybe it required putting everything else on hold, diving headfirst into the facts of injury. But “recovering” wasn’t simply a new language, it was a whole new identity, and one, as I’ve said, that made me profoundly uneasy, not least because of its potential to reduce the wide perplexities of grief to a narrow formula. Even as I tried to be supportive, I felt that I had two choices: to accompany her into this new experience, immersing myself, albeit vicariously, in the recovery culture, or to stay put and watch her drift away.

  Except that of course I myself wasn’t exactly standing still, what with all that ambivalent travel I’d been up to.

  In August we spent our customary weeks in Vermont, and as usual life seemed easier amid the flatly uncommercial beauty of our cow-scented refuge. We worked in the mornings, drove to town in the afternoons, ran miles on unpaved roads where we met no traffic but farm equipment. After dinner I would sometimes venture out to the weedy pond, my arrival heralded by the mighty splashing of many frogs taking cover. I’d sit on the rotting dock as darkness fell, watching swallows dive and dart in the air above. On the night of a nearly full moon I headed out without a flashlight, following a tractor route through the uncut hay. From the crest of the hill I could see our huddled house, its blunt two stories sheltered by old trees and pierced by the simple geometric forms of a couple of lighted windows. At a distance stood the skeletons of barns, unused except for storage. Moonglow covered the pond like the skin on top of pudding.

  These summer sojourns in lightly cultivated country always seemed to me like partial compensation for my exile from the forests of the west. They soothed me from the rigors of the city, yet felt painfully elegaic. I couldn’t, can’t, distinguish love from mourning, knowing that Earth’s body is besieged, pocked with the lesions of production and consumption run amok.

  Much as I treasured our escapes from Brooklyn, I knew I didn’t want to move. I found it ironic that Les, who’d sung the praises of Park Slope, who’d taught me the gritty charms of the Lower East Side, now hated the city. More and more she gravitated to Albany, where living costs were low, the pace more manageable, the country close at hand. She’d be near friends, including Mariah. I was not impressed by our state capital, with its hideous array of obsidian monoliths in place of a city center. Brooklyn, with all its noisy faults, was mine; my friends and work were there, or in Manhattan. I’d put too much effort into the Big Apple to give it up for horrifying winters, swarms of political hacks, and ethnic restaurants that specialized in either baked ziti or chop suey.

  We talked about a commuting relationship. I didn’t like the thought of our not having a shared home, but increasingly I found that I couldn’t visualize what sort of home we’d have post-Emma, anyway. She was now a high school junior, would be off to college soon, and I dreaded the prospect of being alone with Les when the bleakness descended on her.

  There were moments in which I perceived very clearly that we were leaving each other. Yet as people often do on the brink of disturbing change, I engaged in a sort of emotional double-bookkeeping, taking comfort in routine as though it guaranteed duration. We’d been through thin and thin together, and by now our long companionship was simply monumental, like a great old dying tree that towers over sturdier saplings. Perhaps it ought to come down, but not today.

  I couldn’t decide to leave her. I’d require an act of God of the emotions, an erotic tornado, typhoon, or hurricane, to pick me up and whirl me through the air and set me down in another place.

  We spent a grim winter, full of Les’s depression and a struggle with our landlord, Mr. Murray, over heat. The boiler crashed directly after New Year’s. It had happened before, but now, as days went by and the radiators slumbered, it dawned on us that Murray, who lived on the floor beneath us, was flat broke and couldn’t afford repairs. “Her moods, the weather, the lack of heat, space—it all blurs together,” I recorded. “I am so angry sometimes at circumstances, at the claustrophobic family milieu.” The poorly insulated front rooms, including my bedroom-study, took on a Siberian aspect and had to be sealed off. We fought the chill in the rest of the apartment by running the oven and plugging in space heaters that taxed the feeble wiring to the limit. We summoned building inspectors, took turns yelling at Mr. Murray. In injured tones, he informed us that he was just as cold as we were.

  Heat finally returned at the start of February. As spring approached, Les’s spirits seemed to lift. By the end of March I noted the great relief of her “resurgence.” In May she rented a cheap one-bedroom apartment in Albany. We’d agreed that she’d spend regular time upstate but would still be based in Brooklyn until Emma finished high school. A year from now, we’d figure out the next step.

  In mid-June we celebrated our twelfth anniversary. I recorded that Les was upbeat about her work and the Albany place and I was feeling a “wonderful sense of completion . . . that we’ve weathered the recent storms & are still crazy about each other.”

  Weeks later, I’d fly to a war zone and back. I’d lie on my bed in Brooklyn in stupefying heat, Benjamin beaming at me through the shadows, moving in me, inquiring so naively, “Are you as happy right now as I am?”

  My second trip to Nicaragua differed markedly from the first, both because it had m
ore specific political goals and because by the summer of 1987 the country’s situation was far grimmer than it had been three years earlier. While North Americans’ involvement in revolutionary politics there continued to be laced with the contradictions of our “chele” or gringo status, any aura of radical chic had effectively been dispelled by the exhaustion of prolonged violence and the devastating effects of a U.S. trade embargo on an already fragile Third World economy. Though a revolution on the ropes doesn’t cease to be heroic, it certainly isn’t very glamorous. As poet Ernesto Cardenal observed, empty shelves in the markets had become the emblem of Sandinista fortitude.

  This time I traveled with a Brooklyn Sister City Project group, the first to visit San Juan, whose location a scant twelve miles from the Honduran border put it deep within the war zone. I’d been working with the project’s Women’s Committee, which designated me as its representative on the trip. I was to carry messages of support from Brooklyn women and bring back information on the campesinas’ daily lives to help us in our educational work and in the planning of material aid projects specifically geared to rural women’s needs. Of course I’d also be involved in the delegation’s overall objectives: laying the foundations of what we hoped would be lasting friendship and conferring about progress on the clean water system for which we’d been doing the bulk of our fund-raising. Thus we hoped to move reality an inch or two closer to our optimistic slogan: “Brooklyn: A City at Peace with Nicaragua.”

  Our group of eleven was met in Managua by a former New Yorker who worked for the Ministry of Agrarian Reform in the San Juan area. Karen was one of those intense young North Americans who poured everything they had into support for Sandinismo. Her talk was of the latest mortar attacks and of her concern for Patio Grande, a tiny settlement just outside San Juan that had been brutalized by contras back in April. She reassured us that the ESLN, the Sandinista army, had excellent knowledge of the enemy’s whereabouts and wouldn’t let us proceed beyond the northern city of Estelí if they thought the risk excessive. Assuming we in fact made it as far as San Juan, our stay would be brief, in part because of safety considerations, but also to minimize the strain of hospitality on the local people who’d have to feed and house us. We’d spend the balance of our ten-day trip traveling.

  During our brief initial stay in Managua, it became clear to me that Benjamin, a taciturn lawyer originally from Grenada, and Ollie, a blue-eyed, bearded college teacher, were my favorites among the delegation members. I liked their commitment to acknowledging complications, their cultivation of a sense of irony to put starch in their ideals. In short, they were radical grown-ups, immune to the sentimental boosterism that I’d rebelled against in women-only groups and was now encountering in different forms all over the “mixed” left. It amused me to find myself in the unusual situation of seeking out the company of men.

  I couldn’t help but be aware how solidarity was haunted by the deep historical inequalities that we were trying to put an end to, and I wondered how Benjamin viewed our enterprise. Apart from him and one other Black man, the delegation was all white. He came from a tiny, exploited country that had recently suffered a U.S. invasion, and while I didn’t yet know how personally devastated he’d been by the bloody collapse of the Grenadian revolution, I imagined he might feel more directly implicated than other members of our group in the events we were witnessing. As a lesbian among straights, I too felt marginal, and began to sense a nameless—and, I assumed, transitory—affinity stemming from our so very different differences.

  As the time approached to head up to San Juan, the atmosphere grew tense. We were all affected not only by the prospect of traveling to an area where contra ambushes were common, but by our awareness of the tasks that lay ahead—not least the feat of bonding instantly with people whose customs we didn’t know, whose language we barely spoke, and who were in constant danger of torture and death because of our government’s actions. After hours of traveling in an open truck over rough, rutted roads, we arrived in the green, hilly town where red-scarved children from the Sandinista youth organization welcomed us with a simple ceremony. We were immediately enveloped in campesino hospitality and the San Juaneños’ disarming willingness to accept us as friends and allies.

  Later, exhausted and giddy with relief at having made it this far, we attended a makeshift disco at the local school. There I danced a slow number with Benjamin and noted for the first time on this trip the symptoms of “desire under pressure,” which I dismissed as some sort of erotic hallucination, possibly an effect of raging hormones combined with the volatile emotions of the day. I couldn’t possibly be really attracted to a man. The very idea was so far-fetched that I felt safe in fantasizing, sure that it couldn’t lead to anything. And yet the dreamlike sensation of bodily recognition that I’d experienced as we briefly held each other, our small frames nearly identical in size, seemed perfectly in tune with the surreal experience of finding myself in the Nicaraguan campo, dancing in the middle of a war.

  That night I was billeted with another delegation member in the home of a local matron, a Sandinista grandmother who proudly showed us her party identification and told stories of her role in the insurrection against Somoza, the ins and outs of which taxed my Spanish comprehension. On the following day, we trucked up to Patio Grande.

  We spent two nights in the tiny community, an “asentamiento” (resettlement center) for rural families, some of whom had left even more dangerous areas of the war zone. The mountainous land was excellent for coffee cultivation, but the people were traumatized. In the contra attack, which we heard about from survivors, a teacher had been killed while firing on the invaders from the health center. An agricultural technician told how he’d hidden in the rafters of a building used for child care. He’d breathed through bullet holes in the zinc roof to avoid asphyxiation as the “freedom fighters” burned the co-op’s pride and joy, a brand-new supply truck. They danced around for a time shooting celebratory rounds and calling on the farmers to surrender. After gorging on jam discovered in a storeroom, they melted into the lush greenery, leaving the survivors to collect their dead and wounded.

  As affected as I was by the stories of heroism and the loss of young lives (the teacher’s death was not unusual, for the contra often targeted educators and health care workers), I was even more struck by certain minor incidents. How the youngsters went wild over unaccustomed luxuries (a bright balloon, a snapshot from an instant camera) that no U.S. kid, however poor, would have given a second glance; how their parents, who sometimes appeared to be in shock, cheered up when they envisioned farming this rich land in peacetime; how a community worker held up the scrapbook I’d presented as a gift from the Brooklyn Women’s Committee and read aloud our basic Spanish greetings to young mothers who’d fallen through the cracks of the revolution’s ambitious literacy campaign. Our hosts beseeched us to pass on their stories: “If the U.S. people know what’s going on in Nicaragua, then they will stop the war!”

  What moved me in Patio Grande was how hard people try. To stay alive. To really live. How the lavishly funded project of eradicating hope keeps being sabotaged by undernourished volunteers. “Hay que ponerse las pilas,” the Sandinistas said. Put in your batteries. Get cracking.

  It wasn’t that politics were any more straightforward there. Making change is never easy, and there are those who now think that agrarian policy was the Achilles’ heel of the Nicaraguan revolution. It’s just that in Patio Grande you could see: people want to stay alive. They want their kids to read and write. And for a moment you lost your grip on all the tricky ironies, all the reasons why simple justice has to be so complicated.

  During our two nights in Patio Grande, as I lay on a shared cot listening to desultory gunfire (perfectly harmless, my host family said, just “undisciplined compañeros” discharging their AK-47s), I found my thoughts returning to that dance with Benjamin. During the days I was much too busy to examine the prickly self-consciousness I felt in his vicinity. But in
a group photograph posed in front of the wrecked supply truck, I appear planted possessively beside him.

  On the ride back down from San Juan to Estelí, we stood together in the open truck bed making awkward conversation. I bristled at his questions about my writing, as I often did when straights politely inquired what my books were about. I was sure they didn’t really want to hear about my lesbian themes and characters.

  Once we were out of the war zone and checked into a hotel—how luxurious! a bed for every sleeper!—he sought me out and nervously suggested that we might take a walk. We dawdled along the poorly paved and dimly lighted streets of a “city” that was really just a stubborn little cow-and-coffee town—Estelí heroico, bombed by Somoza, now the rearguard of the front line in a very dirty war. Benjamin said that he was attracted to me. He hoped I wouldn’t be angry, he knew I was with a woman. I admitted that I’d been surprised by my feelings at the dance, but said I could never be involved with him. Leslie would never forgive my making love with a man, I said. It was, I’m sure, the only hesitation I felt, the only fact of my regular life that still computed amid the intimate Spanish of a few pedestrians returning from work, of women sitting out in front of ancient attached houses with thick walls, tiny windows, and great doors like the mouths of caves.

  Later, dodging the rest of the delegation, we adjourned to the empty hotel restaurant, which, thanks to the ubiquitous shortages, served almost no food and raised its prices constantly to keep pace with horrifying, Weimar-style inflation. But there was still beer from the national brewery. Feeling decadent, we ordered two bottles.

  All sisterly good advice, I suggested to Benjamin, who confessed he thought he was falling in love with me, that this attraction probably meant he was ready for intimacy and might arrange to have that sort of feeling for someone more available.