Red Star Tattoo: My Life as a Girl Revolutionary

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Red Star Tattoo: My Life as a Girl Revolutionary Page 5

by Sonja Larsen


  I had spent so long trying to get her to talk to me again. Letters and phone calls and finally, now that we did not go to the same school anymore, she had agreed to see me. It was a start. A start and an end. In the morning we rode our bikes to the hardware store and bought a lock for my door. We didn’t talk about the night before. I knew the lock, and the easy way she installed it, lining it all up just right, was the best and last thing she would ever do for me.

  “What if there’s a fire?” my mother shouted, rattling at the bolted door. “This isn’t safe!”

  SIX

  “Don’t get too cynical,” my mother said when she hugged me goodbye at the airport. A cynic and an intellectual, those were the two worst things you could be, and my father was both. I didn’t know exactly what those words meant, but I knew what my mother was referring to: that not-too-serious way he had about him that might hide anything. What did he believe in? What did he want? Was he happy or sad? I could have told you any of these things about my mother.

  My mother had a vocabulary for what she feared for me, bourgeois, intellectual, cynic, but my father just had a look, a sigh. I could see it in the mirror and in his face that I could not help but be my mother’s daughter in my father’s house, idealistic and argumentative, striving. After I moved to Montreal I realized I was on the other side, in another country, maybe even in another social class. After years of living in apartments my father had rented a two-storey house with stained glass and hardwood on a tree-lined street.

  I had my own room, which my father’s girlfriend helped me paint hot pink. It even had a backyard for my dog, Gemini, a young Doberman shepherd mix I’d gotten not long before I left California, and who for a little while seemed like the answer to all my problems: a new best friend, someone to talk to. Instead her care became another thing my mother and I fought over.

  My mother had been sad but also relieved to see us go. Welfare was investigating her for fraud. I’d run away from home with the dog once already after a fight. It was better for everyone for us to live with my dad.

  On the outside, my dad’s life looked more respectable but it was filled with almost as many secrets as my mother’s. He had a job teaching English as a second language but most of his income came from being a supplier to small-scale dealers, marijuana mostly, with a little coke on the side. Once, while babysitting for one of his friends, I’d been given an envelope of two thousand dollars to deliver back to my dad. Another time, when I’d been picked up for trespassing at the country club pool behind our house, I’d seen the relief on my father’s face when he realized the police were only there to deliver me home.

  I was reluctant to admit it in the occasional and emotional long-distance phone calls to my mother, but I loved my new life. Despite my dad’s line of work, the small hum of fear that had followed me everywhere in California was gone. Wasps, rattlesnakes, men in pickup trucks, school bullies, truancy officers, Karl’s hands—I’d left all those things behind. And the things I should have been afraid of in Montreal—getting lost in such a large city, not being understood, even my dad getting busted—hardly even crossed my mind.

  I loved my school too. My new friends. The math teacher who didn’t laugh at me for being so far behind and the lady woodworking teacher and the way the school was half-English and half-French, all of it located in downtown Montreal. Best of all was my language arts teacher, with the real English accent who never told me to stick to books for children my own age, but instead gave me suggestions, and wrote things like perceptive and you’ve done it again! in elegant handwriting at the bottom of my work.

  He gave the class an assignment to retell a fairy tale. The fairy tale I kept thinking about was Little Red Riding Hood. How she was fooled for the briefest of moments into thinking the wolf was someone on her side, someone she knows, someone who could be trusted. How that red hood was almost like a target on her back. And the intimate way she knew the wolf, the smell of his breath, the moment of revelation from beneath his disguise.

  The bus driver.

  Karl and the one two three four times.

  And what I wrote instead of a story was a poem.

  They see the smile

  But I see the teeth

  You’re a stranger

  But I know you best.

  That poem felt like a discovery, the way in dreams you discovered you could fly or speak a language you never knew. I sent it to Karl and then about a week later, to my mother. I told her about the four times.

  Karl replied, writing that he only wanted us to be friends. Despite myself I remembered the treasure hunt he made for me on a camping trip one summer, how every clue rhymed and at the end there were candy bars. I wanted to hate him but I didn’t know how to be angry, only sad. In his response to me he’d included a growth chart he’d made, gluing together sheets of paper and copying out the height marks he’d made in the doorway of his old house. How tall are you now? he wrote.

  My mother’s letter came next and when I read it I got the feeling I always did when I was moving away. Like the click of a door closing on a place I didn’t live anymore. Like feeling anything was pointless. Karl and I are comrades now, nothing more. I read it once and put it away with Karl’s letters, souvenirs of things I wanted to forget.

  And I do forget. I forget the first paragraph that reads I knew about that time in Sacramento … I’ll fold that truth up and keep those words hidden away even from myself until one day when I am much older and my mother will give me a box of our correspondence. Inside I will find a copy of this letter and proof of broken trust not only with my mother but with memory itself—how even within a single page some things could not be erased while others remained. Also in the box is my response in my big blocky print. You knew why didn’t you tell me. Where is the memory of writing this letter? Where is the question mark? Maybe the answer was another thing I didn’t really want to know.

  Montreal was my home, not only because I loved it but because I no longer had anyplace else to go. One thing my mother’s letter had decided for me was that I had no reason to go back to Redding.

  No reason except Dana.

  I didn’t tell anyone why I’d chosen to live with my father but I sometimes wondered if Dana suspected. In one letter she asked me twice if I had any secrets to tell her. Was it an innocent question about crushes? Or did she have her own secret she was waiting to share?

  Dana was always the better pen pal, her letters longer and more frequent, and prettier too, with doodles and a flowing practiced handwriting I could not help but envy.

  I’m not in seventh heaven, she wrote when Suzie announced she was pregnant and planned on keeping the baby. Next came the letter about Suzie getting beat up by her now husband and after that another. Mom’s a bit better—but I didn’t know if she meant from the beating or from being back on her medication—and I’m coping quite well. I didn’t know what that meant either.

  PS Write as soon as you can, so you can tell me what’s going to happen during the summer. PPS I wasn’t trying to sound like a whiny brat (during the letter). It just turned out that way!! PPPS Make your next letter brighter than this one was. That shouldn’t be too awfully hard.

  But it was hard because my next letter was the one that told her I wasn’t coming, that this year she’d have to face Redding and her mother without me. I knew Dana needed me to protect her. But knowing didn’t make me good at it. Knowing didn’t make me brave enough to go that summer, just like her asking for my secrets didn’t make me tell.

  Instead I spent the summer immersed in the world of my older friends. The baby of the group, I was the one that had to be taught how to flash her fake ID at the bar and put on mascara.

  Don’t open your mouth or they’ll see your braces.

  Wear these heels, they make your ass look good.

  Don’t forget to tip the waitress.

  Through circumstance and what seemed like fate, these friends were the children from the Oakland House and Live Oak Farm and other pe
ople my parents met during the start of the commune years. None of our parents were really friends anymore, and they never talked about that life they shared except sometimes with a laugh and a shake of the head. The seventies. It seemed both incredible and normal that years later Molly and I would be standing together in a bar, waiting for the pills we bought in the alley to kick in.

  Dana wrote once or twice, her letters short and polite. I wrote suggesting she could come to Montreal. She did not sound optimistic.

  By the next summer I’d decided to go to Redding, ready to rescue Dana in my new-found big city armour, spike heels and black eyeliner, the look of a girl who could not be anything but a visitor. While I waited for Dana to arrive in Redding I raided the free-clothing donations and thrift store for costume jewellery and retro clothing. My mother and I stayed in a trailer park with a volunteer and, although it was not mentioned, it was clear that the entire office conspired to keep me and Karl from being in the same room together.

  But Dana never arrived. She’d gone on a summer road trip with her neighbours and their young child and she’d refused to come back. And even though that was everything I’d wanted for Dana—a way out of her mother’s life, a choice she could finally call her own—when my mother told me that Dana missed her flight home, and no one knew exactly where she was, I could not stop myself from crying because I knew I was never going to see her again.

  Over the next year she sent letters, angry, denouncing, to her mother and father, her grandparents, but she never wrote to me again. Sometimes in my bedroom in Montreal I composed long letters in my head and sometimes I even wrote them down. But by then even her dad had lost track of her address. When you left a place, it was better not to look back. I knew that. That was the only way to choose, to let it be the only thing you wanted. Now Dana was learning that too.

  My mother told me that when the revolution came everyone would have to choose a side. In 1981 Montreal we were also being asked to pick a side. There was “oui” and there was “non.” “Yes” to a separate Quebec or “no.” Yes was a new beginning, a recognition that it was different here, not like anywhere else. The francophone students and even the teachers at École Secondaire Saint-Luc wore their “oui” buttons proudly, sometimes more than one. Part of me wanted to say “yes” too. I had chosen to attend French high school, rediscover the bilingual girl I had been years ago. I was delighted when my accent fooled people even for a minute into thinking I was Québécoise. But what about the other immigrant kids at my school? What about the people whose skin gave them away, even if their accent didn’t? In a basement classroom I get to know the kids from Accueil, the welcoming program for non-French speakers. Chilean teenagers fleeing the Pinochet regime, refugees from Vietnam, countries in Africa I had never even heard of. Would this new nation be for them too? My math teacher called the Vietnamese students in our class “Chang One” and “Chang Two” when he spoke to them at all. I didn’t wear any button and when the referendum answer was “non,” I felt disappointed and relieved at the same time.

  In phone calls and letters my mother said it was going to happen soon, and I knew she meant the revolution. She said that we might lose contact for a while. She didn’t know how long.

  Your sacrifice right now is your mother’s company … Someday, I don’t know when, I may be underground and you might not even know where I am, whether I am alive or dead …

  Sometimes I could not think of my mother as more than the revolution itself. She was not Mommy or Pat or Jesse but a woman in a history book, someone who was already gone. But sometimes a memory might pop into my head. Going through the drive-thru on the way home from school. Shopping for school supplies, the sound of her banjo from the other side of the bookcase that divided our room. Such ordinary moments. I couldn’t understand why they were so stuck in my mind.

  But it seemed like the world was probably ending anyway. Nuclear war might take us all before her revolution ever happened. And this thought, which should have made me sad, made me feel like dancing instead. In gay discos and tiny dance clubs I nursed bottles of beer, was called la petite Américaine and tried to pretend that all that mattered was keeping time, dancing in my borrowed shoes, following a rhythm that seemed laid out for me like a gift.

  SEVEN

  I was surprised but pleased to see my father pull up in front of my music teacher’s house, driving his big green sedan we joked was like a narc car. I hadn’t been playing long, but I envisioned myself exquisite up on a stage, the spotlight on my gold saxophone—but actually learning how to play was proving to be tedious and disappointing and even carrying the instrument around was harder than I imagined it would be.

  But the minute I get in the car, I know he’s not there to do me a favour. He’s not smiling and the radio’s not on. At first I think he’s found out I’ve been going to bars again. Then he takes a deep breath and sighs and I know he isn’t even mad, and that’s worse.

  “I have to tell you something. It’s about your cousin Dana.”

  He looks at the steering wheel and I look at the dashboard, the pebbly green surface of the plastic and think if I get out of this car right now I don’t have to know. He won’t have to tell me. We will both be happier. But I don’t move and my father keeps talking.

  “Something happened with that family. They were found in a motel room. She died. They all did. It’s confusing.”

  My father sounds almost angry now.

  And then I don’t hear him anymore, only the sound of my own voice, crying. It’s my fault. For abandoning her. For being happy to see my dad’s car. If I hadn’t gotten in then she didn’t have to be dead, she could just be gone. I already knew that Dana was gone. I’d known when Dana didn’t show up in Redding that I was probably never going to see her again.

  But the difference between gone and dead is enormous, a shock as physical as a bully’s punch to the face. Simply knowing her breath occupied some small space in a shared universe, how could that matter so much? But it did. Every morning when I woke up and every night when I went to sleep. It would not stop mattering.

  ——

  The headline read “Seattle Girl Among 5 Who Died in Motel.”

  The Frontier motel. I imagined the desert of Arizona, and the Frontier Motel itself. The lights blinking along a motel strip on the north side of town. Vacancy. Free Air Conditioning. And the room. The cheap flowered bedspreads, the plastic on the lampshades. Two rooms they said, so a suite of some kind. I imagined Dana’s face, her hair spilled out on the polyester pillow as she lay down one last time. Mostly she had that fierce look, that hungry face she’d gotten in the last summer I saw her. But sometimes she looked happy.

  Dana was the fifth victim, identified as a “fifteen-year-old Seattle girl among five who died in motel. Also dead are a family of four: man, woman, a three-year-old girl and a one-year-old boy.” When she’d left with them, the youngest hadn’t even been born yet. They’d named the baby Marc Dana.

  Arizona. Did she ever learn to like the heat? Did she think they were going there for a fresh start or did she know all along? Sometimes I thought about what it must have been like to find them. The violence and the stillness in the room. For some reason I thought a lot about the room. I thought about a wood-veneer nightstand with a nearly new Bible in the top drawer. I imagined a Formica counter with a coffee pot and a hot plate. The stuccoed walls, the texture and surface of the objects inside this motel room. The things that no amount of bleach could ever get quite clean. When did she know she was never going to leave? At some point she agreed. That much was stated in the letter.

  The wife was the last one to be seen alive, walking near the motel the day before. She must have known that she was going to die, that her children were going to die. Probably they had already written the letter, worked out the details. Still she took a walk. Still she went back.

  The letter said all of those “within the age of reason” had agreed to take their own lives. It claimed they were tired of running f
rom the law, although later it turned out there were only a few warrants against the husband, minor offences. Later we learned he had tried this before, with his first wife and pills.

  When the police arrived they assumed that the two people on the bed were a husband and wife, and that the body on the floor was Dana. An officer tells a news conference that the “the last one to pull the trigger is the fifteen-year-old.” Then they did the autopsy. The woman on the floor was not Dana. Dana did not shoot them all. Someone tells me her arms were too short to hold the rifle. And the new headline read, “Police Now Say Girl, 15, Was Victim, Not Killer.”

  Memories of Dana came to me like the station of a radio I could not turn off. All the music we had ever listened to together: Cat Stevens, David Bowie, Gary Numan, Patti Smith. Everything we had ever done together and everything we had ever planned to do.

  I remembered the summer Dana and Suzie came to visit us at the commune and although fifteen or more people lived on the farm, they were the only two with me when fire broke out along the railroad tracks across the road. For weeks wildfires had been burning throughout the county. I called a neighbour on the party line since I didn’t know how to call the fire department. Then we got my guinea pigs in their cages and headed for the nearly dried-up duck pond. Dana cried as she walked barefoot along the hot dirt road but I said we had no time to go back for her shoes. I don’t remember what Suzie did as Dana and I stood in the duck pond waiting for the fire trucks. The trucks came and there was a water bomber plane, too, and within minutes the fire was out. As we walked muddy-footed back to the house, I realized that my plan had made no real sense. But if Dana thought so, she never said anything.

  I remembered the day she got her period, and I was jealous, because I was older but didn’t have mine yet, and yet I tried to be the expert, pushing her to get Tampax when she said she wanted Kotex pads. In all my memories I was both bossy and helpless.

 

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