Red Star Tattoo: My Life as a Girl Revolutionary

by Sonja Larsen

  As the Greyhound bus rolled north I thought about what Pat said. Outside the bus, a burned house, an old car, a dog waiting by the side of the road, all passed by. Each thing was in a state of change, a dialectical struggle. Each one had a story. A before and after.

  At the office I heard a lot of before-and-after stories. The man who’d been given a lobotomy when he was eighteen. The ex-con trying to go straight. The married couple with minds like children who came by every day. I tried to help the wife learn to read, and in exchange, they let me go to their rooming house and watch cartoons with them. A pregnant teenager who joined the revolution long enough to name her newborn Che, but who disappeared in the middle of the night, leaving her baby behind. Old people. People who were right on the edge of being all right until they lost their job or their kid got sick.

  Something terrible had happened to nearly everyone who came through our doors. Some of them didn’t even come inside. A homeless man named Shelton camped out on our porch for a month before being coaxed in for a cup of coffee. Another man named Cupcake lived in the abandoned car next to our office, right across from the liquor store. Shelton didn’t talk at all but Cupcake had good stories. He’d been a Hollywood extra, mostly in Westerns where his mixed race meant he always played an Indian. Then a horse fell on his legs and left him in a wheelchair.

  Cupcake seemed to find us interesting too. “I know what you people are, and I’ll tell you right off: when I’m rich, I’m a capitalist, and when I’m poor, I’m a communist. Lucky for you folks I been mostly poor.”

  After I met Cupcake I watched for him whenever I saw an old Western on TV. For the first time it occurred to me that even the crowd in the background of an old movie was made up of real people. The world was full of stories and telling them was probably the closest I could get to being magic. That was still true, even if my mother was a communist and my best friend looked right through me.

  I turned away from the bus window and asked my mother if she thought I could be a writer when I grew up.

  “Absolutely,” she said. She leaned close so no one else on the bus could hear.

  “After the revolution we’ll need writers to tell what really happened.”

  Of all the crazy people that came into the office, my aunt Suzie was the worst. It wasn’t just that she was crazy but that she was bossy too. My mother’s little sister had been sick her whole life, grand mal seizures as a child, schizophrenic as an adult. My grandmother blamed Suzie’s sickness on a brain injury when she was born, badly used forceps that left little dents in the side of the baby Suzie’s head. They were gone now, but they’d left their mark.

  Even when Suzie was on her medication she was a little scary, with her side-effect tics from shock treatments and years of taking antipsychotics, her tongue rolling in her mouth, the way she jiggled her false teeth or waved her king-sized cigarettes around in gestures of anger or excitement. In an afternoon with Suzie a kid could be accidentally spit on, burned or embarrassed half to death by the things she said and the loud voice she said it in. “Don’t ever have a baby,” she said to me one day in the grocery store. “It’s like shitting out a watermelon.”

  Her baby, my cousin Dana, was a year younger than me. The first time I remember spending with her was when I was nine and I visited my mother’s family in Seattle from Live Oak Farm. Suzie took me and Dana to the Space Needle restaurant for Dana’s eighth birthday.

  Dana and I were scared in the Space Needle elevator and amazed at how small the world looked from so high up. But what we were most fascinated by was the bathroom. The soft pearly soap that squirted into our hands, and the big mirrors that reflected our images back at us. Hair that had been combed into girlish submission, hers a glossy straight black, mine, brown, baby fine and wavy. Matching velveteen dresses, hers green, mine pink. Our one point of difference was favourite colour: hers green, mine red. But Suzie had refused to buy me a red dress.

  We could not stop staring at ourselves. We were magnificent, but we were also in trouble. We were hiding out from Suzie who wanted more: more squeals of appreciation, more ladylike behaviour, more love, than either of us had to give. Instead we were giggly, we were bratty, and Aunt Suzie was right: we were ruining everything. But we couldn’t stop.

  Looking in the mirror was like seeing a picture of how it was supposed to be. Two girls who wore matching clothes and went to the same school, where we would be a force to be reckoned with, the smartest in everything but math.

  Instead we lived far apart and only saw each other during her court-ordered summer visits to her mother when Suzie was stable, or on family trips to halfway houses or hospitals when she was not. The two girls and their mirror dreams got further away with every visit. We were never going to star on the set of Zoom or go to the same school. As pen pals we were erratic. And the price for our good times together was always going to be the bad times with Suzie. Because Suzie was not going to get better even though she always promised she would. Each time I saw Dana, I could see how that knowledge had sunk in a little deeper.

  That spring my aunt had moved from Washington and was living in a bachelor apartment not far from the office and occasionally volunteering. My mother had been looking out for Suzie her whole life. In the commune days my mother had brought Suzie to the farm, hopeful that nudity and sunshine and working in the garden would help. And it actually did. But not for long.

  I could feel my mother hoping again, hoping that the revolution would be a better kind of medicine. I was not hopeful. Suzie tried but the more she tried, the more she wanted back in return. I knew I was supposed to remember that my aunt Suzie was sick, remember the dents that had been left on the side of her head, that she couldn’t help her behaviour. But I had been around other sick people. There was a man who visited the commune and talked to ghosts, there were the simple couple and some of the others who came into the office. Even Cupcake, when he was drunk, was nicer than my aunt.

  That spring Suzie’s bachelor apartment had a pool, and she promised Dana that when she came from Seattle to visit in the summer she could go swimming every day. But by the time Dana arrived Suzie’s promise of a swimming pool had turned into another lie. Suzie had given up volunteering and the apartment for a new boyfriend and a two-room residential motel suite on the edge of the town. Instead of a pool, Dana got the bedroom while Suzie and the boyfriend slept on the pullout couch in the living room with the TV and the air conditioning.

  We stayed at my house most days, which was better, even though a dozen people lived there, and I shared a room with my mom. We spent our time walking around town, visiting the office, sometimes getting a ride to a park or a pool. We went to a nature sanctuary where she let a tarantula crawl on her arm but I was too scared and for a day or two afterwards I was mad at her for showing off.

  Towards the end of summer Suzie started insisting Dana stay with her. At the motel Dana and I slept in the bedroom with the door closed, choosing the suffocating heat over the sounds of Suzie and her boyfriend. We woke up in the mornings already damp from sweat, eyes still sticky with sleep, already tired. Tired of being hot, tired of everything. Everything Dana said was wrong with our town—the weather, the crummy mall, no buses—was all true but it still made me mad to hear her say it. When fall came she would get to go back to Seattle where she could spend every day after school in the aisles of books at the Different Drummer, my grandparents’ used bookstore. And what would I have? A school with no friends. A mother who stood on street corners handing out leaflets. But at least she wasn’t Suzie.

  Over the course of the summer, Suzie got crazier and crazier. One morning she came running through the motel bedroom door and at first, I thought she was screaming because of her boyfriend. He’s going to kill her, I thought. I’m going to witness a murder. But when I opened my eyes it wasn’t blood I saw but Suzie’s naked and pale white body bouncing up and down on the bed. Not screaming but laughing. Her boyfriend stood in the doorway, sheet half-wrapped around him, face slac
k with amazement.

  Naked Suzie jumping, jumping as high as she could on the motel bed. The radiant white of her skin and the dark triangle where her skinny legs met. Suzie, her body taut with its crazy joy, and the heavy creaking of the springs as she bounced. That was the Polaroid picture, instant, unchangeable, burned into my mind.

  “Make her stop!” Dana shouted. I didn’t know if she was yelling at me or the boyfriend. “Make her stop.”

  The night my mother burst into my room to ask me if I thought she should get a divorce, my sister drove her out, and slept with me in my bed. She didn’t wait until I asked for help because she knew instinctively what I did not: that if you were older it was your job to protect.

  Make her stop. I yelled at Suzie to get out. Maybe she heard me or maybe she just wanted to play some more, but she ran out of the room and we closed and locked the door. But nothing that followed after, coaxing Dana back onto the bed, pulling the sheet up over her, stroking her thick black hair—those simple things that took all my strength—could undo the betrayal of that minute of stunned silence.

  ——

  At the end of summer Dana went home and I went back to Sequoia Junior High. Zoe had moved on to high school and I didn’t have to watch for her anymore. But by now the thought of going to school at all seemed pointless to me. After a few months in Grade 8 I dropped out, deciding to become cadre to the organization although technically I was being home-schooled. I read a lot and occasionally I wrote reports on subjects that interested me. For science I learned about the language of whales and the adaptability of urban coyotes, and for social studies I read about the evolution of children’s rights. During weekly labour history classes at the organization’s office I learned about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911 that killed 146 workers, the struggle to establish the eight-hour workday and the terrible conditions that farm workers continued to endure in the US. Math was when I added up donations or made change at a bake sale.

  But most of my days were spent in the office, making signs, organizing the free-food cupboard, sorting donations of clothing and books, babysitting the children of volunteers and cadre. There were three other kids, younger than me, whose moms were in the organization at the Redding office, and a few who lived in the Medford and San Francisco offices, but I was the only one who’d chosen to be cadre. Being cadre was more than just volunteering time—it was dedication, putting the organization first in all things. Including my mother and Pat there were eight or nine cadre in the Redding office. Even my mother’s boyfriend, Karl, had been recruited.

  Karl could fix all kinds of things, including the organization’s cars. But Karl, like so many of the others who came through the door, was a little broken. Broken in ways even the others could see. One day he lined up his entire penny collection into a winding, looping trail through the whole house. Some people said he was a genius, so maybe this is just what geniuses did. They had episodes. The revolution had men who could barely write and those like Karl who tried to explain to me just how big a googolplex was. The revolution didn’t judge.

  Even though I was cadre I knew there was an inner circle that I had not been told about because once a week my mother and most of the other full-timers went to a meeting or a class that I was not allowed to attend and that they wouldn’t talk about. I imagined them out in the dark of the countryside, firing rifles together.

  All the West Coast offices in the Bay Area and Los Angeles and Sacramento and Oregon got together to attend regional political education sessions every month or so. New and potential recruits were brought to these sessions where sometimes one of the West Coast leadership would give a class and sometimes we’d listen to tapes of a man we called “our friend out East.”

  My thirteenth birthday fell at the end of a visit by the West Coast leadership. A volunteer named Betty made me a cake and one of the leaders even made me a birthday card, a figure standing on top of the world, holding a gun. Something about the image excited me, made me feel like I was closer to knowing where my mother went during her mysterious night meetings.

  Margaret Ribar, the head of the West Coast wrote: With history on our side, the future is ours. Take it easy but take it!

  My mother wrote: To my comrade in arms, to the future we are building, because we are strong and determined we will win, much love and solidarity in our struggle.

  Twenty-seven signatures on the card.

  You are a guiding light of the revolution.

  To the youngest class conscious comrade in Redding.

  Pat wrote: Keep your eyes on the prize.

  Karl just signed his name. So did Suzie. On paper she looked sane, the neatness of her script a sharp contrast to the messiness of her thinking.

  By then Suzie had moved into a house with her boyfriend, a real house where both their kids could visit. When Dana visited that summer I was given a little time off from the office, but occasionally I just refused to do my assignments because I wanted to spend time with her. Each time I missed a food drive or a shift handing out leaflets and collecting change for the organization, my maturity and commitment were questioned. I considered giving up my cadre status altogether but I knew that the revolution would be there even after Dana was gone. Dana was less interested in the organization than she’d been in Live Oak Farm or some of the feminist causes my mother had been involved in although she agreed that life was hard for poor people and that things ought to be different.

  That summer Dana seemed as unhappy as she always was to find herself in Redding but she seemed calmer, or maybe only distracted. When we were not together she spent her time babysitting the boyfriend’s kids, a boy and a girl, who she said she felt sorry for. I thought it wasn’t fair but she didn’t mind it. There was a boy who liked her in the neighbourhood and he came over a lot. He had family problems, too, and I sometimes teased them that they were pretending to be their own family. She told me there was also someone in Seattle who liked her and I was impressed, but I acted like I wasn’t. I didn’t think anyone had ever had a crush on me. Boys never noticed me, although men sometimes did. But that did not seem like the same thing.

  FIVE

  When the revolution came, everyone would have to take a side. Were they a communist or a capitalist, with us or against us? Karl had chosen our side.

  Comrades, that’s what we were now.

  Sometimes, for months, it was as though we’d both forget about what he’d done. Then opportunity and memory collided. Whenever I looked at Karl it was like I was trying to remember and forget at the same time. That he is not who he pretends to be. That I am not who I thought I was. I’m not smart or brave. I’m stupid or a coward or a liar. One day another girl at the commune, just passing through for a summer, asked if Karl had ever touched me. No, I said, mad at her for guessing my secret. She was gone by the time I realized what I’d done, that she must have had a reason for asking me that.

  But yes. If anyone asks again. Yes.

  The first time he touched me was at the commune, in the morning in my mother’s bed. Why had I slept there? A scary dream, a lonely feeling? Karl’s hands creeping up my thigh woke up a memory of a field trip when I was five or six and going to French school in Montreal. The bus driver put his hand down my pants. Even though I was learning that there was a different word for everything, I didn’t have any words for what happened that day and so I never told anyone.

  I try to tell my mother about the bus driver because if I can tell her this, maybe I can tell her about Karl.

  “Oh, that can’t be right, honey,” she said to me. “If anything like that happened I know you would have said something.”

  Would have could have should have didn’t. And now it was too late.

  The second time was on the couch in the living room at the commune. For some reason it was just us, so it must have been near the end of our commune days, when everyone else had moved away. Tickling he said. Even the real tickling could be scary, the way he could squeeze the tender part just above
my knee, and me, helpless to stop from laughing. Even when he didn’t hide what he did to me, no one can see it. Even in plain view, me laughing until I cried.

  After a while, I squirmed away from him. But Karl still wanted to play. We pretended he was a cow at the rodeo; I tied him up with a rope, and left him there. I went to the tree house at the top of the hill. From my perch, I could see the house, and I waited to see if he would come and try to find me. But he didn’t.

  On the communes I’d lived on, the adults believed in telling children everything. If you walked in on people fucking, they might even ask if you wanted to watch. What if it was okay to have Karl’s hand between my thighs, what if it was like smoking dope or skinny-dipping, something that only the straight world got uptight about?

  Remembering was hard but forgetting was dangerous. So instead I remembered the number. Two times, he’d touched me two times. And the rules I’d learned to keep myself safe.

  No roughhousing alone. Avoid being alone.

  But I knew that was all behind us because we were comrades now.

  Until a group of us, but not my mom, went to visit the Sacramento office for the weekend. The comrade at the Sacramento office thought that Karl was like my dad and put us in the same bed.

  Three is hanging on to my underwear and sleeping on the floor.

  It’s not just my mother who will lose Karl if I tell the truth. It’s the revolution too. Maybe. If anyone believes me. Who would they choose? A grown-up with a savings account who can fix cars, who can fix anything almost. Or me?

  I don’t say anything.

  Four is later that summer when he walked right into my room the night I finally convinced Zoe to come and stay overnight again, four he broke every rule, four she was right in the bunk above me. Four I curled up at her feet crying and tell her about the three times before.