Revolution (7 page)

We couldn't have been very high, looking down on the beach, maybe one or two floors up, but in my memory it seems as if we were very high and I could see a long way.

WONDERFUL TIME

In fact I'd been to El Salvador. When I was six years old, my mother and father took the whole family on a vacation car trip to El Salvador. We drove from Chicago to San Salvador in a station wagon, stopping in Mexico to see my grandmother. We slept in a tent. This was in 1975, just before the trouble started.

I remember driving down the gravel road through the rain forest. I remember the station wagon breaking down over and over (though my mother says it was a Dodge Dart and that it broke down only once), and I remember my brother and me playing in the mud. We took a tiny airplane someplace and then we saw some buildings (my mother says that must have been in Guatemala at Tikal), and then a Native American slept with us in our tent (she says that was a hired guide), and I peed in my sleeping bag. I listened to
Sesame Street
on my tape recorder and then a bad man cut my chin with a knife (my mother says this last one didn't happen). Then we got stuck in a traffic jam and I was sick with a stomachache and I had to hold my head out the window so I could vomit onto the road (my mother says that didn't happen either, or if it did, it was in Mexico City or Texas). I remember the car kept breaking down. Dad was angry all the time and yelling. I wanted to go home.

My mother says it was an adventure. She says we met so many nice people. She says we all had a wonderful time.

GOOD IDEAS

Afternoons on the landing at the brothel I closed my eyes and prayed. What did I pray about? I prayed that everyone on Earth would get what they want. But then I'd think about that and decide that was an awful lot. People want so much. So I prayed for people to get these particular things that I named in my mind, or at least for these particular people that I named to get these particular things—or for them to get them when the time was right or when God wanted them to have them, if He did. If God didn't want them to have the things they wanted, then I didn't want them to have them either, and it was probably wrong to want them, so I prayed for their souls instead.

I prayed for us to not want what we want but to want what He wants, whatever that was. How was I supposed to know what He wanted? I'd never even prayed before that year. I prayed to learn what He wanted somehow—not to have the knowledge of God and the hubris that would come with it, but to see dimly the plan or at least the section of the plan that involved me and the people I knew so that I could pray for the right thing.

Or at least, I prayed, let me pray for the right thing accidentally, by coincidence or mistake.

*   *   *

I was reading the Bible that year. The Sermon on the Mount with its revolutionary spirit, Ecclesiastes with its gloomy complaints. George and I read together, taking turns reading aloud. We read books about theology. We read the ontological and teleological arguments for the existence of God—Saint Anselm, William Paley. We read Kierkegaard and Lessing on human striving. We argued with Hume. We read books on Christology. We talked to the liberation theologians and copied their expressions: “The preferential option for the poor”—does anyone remember that one? Or “institutionalized violence”? Some people must remember these outdated phrases. I recall them all. It was my first specialized vocabulary. I'll never forget it. I'll die dreaming of “applying a Marxist analysis to a God-centered system.”

*   *   *

My faith also had the side benefit of sending my Jewish atheist family into fits of despair. In my house, Judaism referred to an abbreviated Passover and a few jokes about candles around Christmas. Once I announced I was a Christian, my family whipped themselves into shape. They joined a temple and went every week. They enrolled my sister in Hebrew school. They celebrated holidays they didn't like or exactly understand, found the menorah in the garage. They put up a mezuzah, and my mother joined a Jewish study group for women. They made my sister have a traditional bat mitzvah, complete with a great-grandmother's locket and chairs in the air. By that time I had backslid into my atheist upbringing, but they weren't taking any chances.

Yes, those days of faith were fun for the whole family but, bit by bit after the trip, I walked across the dance floor and sat back down with my family, where I remain, like a wallflower, patting my hair, watching the waltzers, admiring the grace of some, the awkwardness of others, but no, I will sit this one out.

Long after I stopped being a Christian and it was clear my brother and sister weren't going to become Christians either, my mother and father went to temple less and less, and finally they left off altogether, and everybody forgot about it. Except my sister. She is the last to forget. She still can't forgive me for Hebrew school. “Three days a week I had to go. While everyone else was having fun. One day you and your God will pay.”

ENGAGED

I found it odd that George wanted to get married.

*   *   *

He'd asked me to marry him on the road to the capital and I'd said yes, so that meant we were engaged now. In the brothel we talked about it, about how our marriage was going to be based on God. We prayed to God and asked if our marriage was okay with Him. And since we didn't hear back exactly, we decided it was okay. We told Him that He shouldn't worry because He was the base of our marriage.

“We're sure not the base,” we said. “You're the base, God.”

*   *   *

One reason to get married was so that we could have sex. We (he) didn't believe in sex before marriage. This, although we had a very sexual relationship. We simulated sex until climax every day, often more than once, in our underwear. This did not seem strange to me. I'd had plenty of sex in high school. Too much. Anyone who has had an eighteen-year-old boyfriend knows what it is to be sick of sex. I was happy to “wait” with George, as long as it meant we could still take off (almost) all our clothes and have lots of (almost) sex. Except at some point you do want the real thing.

“Now that we're engaged,” I told George, as he got on top of me and scooted up my dress, “we can have sex. Being engaged is the same as being married.”

“It's not the same,” said George. He left my undies on.

*   *   *

Still, he had surprised me by bringing up marriage. I was crazy in love with the guy, but eighteen seemed a little young to be getting married, didn't it? He said that depended. We knew we would always love each other—that's what I had said, right? So what was the difference if I was eighteen or thirty-eight? I wanted to trust him. He certainly knew better around any subject than I did. “Relax,” he said. It made me nervous that I was nervous.

*   *   *

He wanted to buy a ring. You would think the ring would be my idea, but it was his. His zeal was of that order. We found the jewelry district in the guidebook, a small block off the plaza, downtown San Salvador, a few dented shops shut up like they were closed except for the signs outside that said
OPEN
. We walked from shop to shop. The National Guard on the sidewalk kept asking to see our papers. We'd shown them our papers, but they wanted to see them again. The shop owners waited in the doorways and watched, did not call to us, did not smile or prop open their doors and wave us inside. We were the only customers. It must have made those shop owners awfully shaky to have two gringos in there. They must have thought we were spies and wondered for which side. They pulled out boxes of rings and let us fool around with them. I made a big show of being choosy. George made a big show of being patient. I made a big show of being happy. The owners and the soldiers watched. We came away with a little ring for a hundred dollars. It had a tiny diamond and two specks of ruby.

Under an awning, out of the way of witnesses, George put it on my finger. “For you to wear every day for the rest of your life,” he said.

*   *   *

He said we should tell our families.

*   *   *

Another reason to get married was so that his family would be my family—every day for the rest of my life. His mother would be my mother. I wished his mother were my mother and I already pretended like she was. She was George's mother after all and I wanted to be close to anything that had George on it. I suppose she was fairly normal for someone who sounded a bit like a crazy person when she spoke, but I'd never known anyone like her before—calm, undemanding, weirdly religious. She listened to what her sons said and approved. She was a Southern belle, faded, blond, washed out but still beautiful, like a doll left out all fall. I daydreamed about saving her from catastrophes, carrying her up from the depths to the surface, traveling to China and bringing her gifts in small ornamented boxes. I wanted her to know we would be married, that I would be her daughter. “I always wanted a daughter,” she told me once. I was ready to be the one.

*   *   *

George called home first. There was no e-mail in 1987, no iPhones or gchat. In those days you could run away and it meant something, by God. You could receive letters from home through the
lista de correos
—an improbable system that somehow worked, whereby the sender would write your name on the envelope and the name of the country you expected to be in, and two months later you'd get off the bus, walk into the post office in the capital, and ask if you had any mail. Or you could call home by going to a phone office, standing in line, and then waiting while they rang up your mother to see if she would pay for the call. You had to pay a small fee either way but you'd have to have a pretty mean mom to say no to a child calling from the middle of a civil war.

George let me go with him into the booth and share the phone receiver. I always did that when he called his mother and I would get hysterical if I couldn't hear her voice.

She was pleased, naturally, that we were getting married. I say “naturally” because that's just how she was all the time: pleased. I never met a nicer woman in my life. She thought maybe we would be getting married in El Salvador.

“No,” I said.

“Nicaragua then?”

“Maybe,” said George. He looked at me.

Then it was my turn. I sat in the booth and didn't invite George in. I closed the glass door between us.

I didn't want to tell my family. I was scared. I was even a little embarrassed. To say I was going to join the revolution, that was one thing. That could mean anything. That showed I'd kept my sense of humor, even if I had gone mad. But to get married, that was really to put a lid on the thing and shovel dirt over it. I didn't know why I felt that way and I was confused and sad. What was wrong with me?

*   *   *

You ask my mother and father what it was like for them when I ran away to join the revolution and they'll say they were traumatized. But to hear them tell it they were already traumatized. They have a whole list: there was my Christian conversion and, before that, my high school boyfriend, there was my brother from the time he was born, my father's not being able to play baseball, the teasing my mother took as a kid. Still, it's kind of a wonder that they didn't hire a bounty hunter to come find me and drag me home. In fact they didn't do much to get me back. They settled on one plan and stuck to it, and it did finally work: if they sent no money, we'd run out and eventually have to come home. A convenient plan for them, thinking about it now. A nonplan, really, a plan of inaction, of least resistance.

Later, from Nicaragua, I called and invited them to come “visit the revolution,” and they said no. Maybe in those days that's simply how parenting worked.

*   *   *

This call went like all our calls, like all our interaction for as long as I could remember. It seemed to me that my father was standing behind a door and each time I opened it he was shouting, so I'd slam it shut and open it a few weeks later, and he'd be shouting again. Was he shouting all the time behind the door? Or did he start the shouting just as I opened it? On this call he said I was irresponsible and intellectually lazy. “Your problem is you don't
think
,” he said. Fair enough, but no different from anything he'd said
before
I'd run off to the revolution. Meanwhile, my mother tried to give me a few updates from home: My sister was taking an avalanche of lessons. Something significant was happening to the bathroom. I wasn't close to my family. I didn't know them and I did everything I could to keep them from knowing me. But still, oddly, when I heard their voices coming over the line, I felt a sudden tug toward them, a little insurrection inside me. Despite everything, I felt allied with them. A deep sense of belonging. I looked at George outside the booth, sitting on the bench. He seemed like a different creature from us. I wondered if he had been born wanting to get married. If he would have proposed to a plant.

I didn't tell them about the engagement. I hung up. We began walking back to the room.

“So what did they say?”

“About what?”

“Our getting married.”

I hunched my shoulders. “Not much.”

“Not much?” He stopped.

“I didn't tell them,” I admitted.

“Oh.”

In that moment I recalled in a slap-to-the-forehead kind of way what, in my amnesia love-fog, I'd forgotten: I was never going to get married. My mother had once told me not to. She'd said: “Never get married,” and it had cemented in my mind. The one piece of advice that made sense.

As a matter of fact, I don't think my mother ever said that. I don't recall her saying it and I can't imagine her saying it. It may have been my mother's sister who said it—my aunt, who'd had a divorce that had seemed to go on for years, so long that I'd believed she'd had many divorces, a new one each year around Christmas. Or it's possible that no one said it. I just heard it without anyone having said it and then it became part of my lore. Who knows how I heard it or why I believed it? All my life, it turns out, the girls I knew dreamed of wedding dresses, cakes, honeymoons, and babies, and I didn't know they did, because I didn't. I assumed they agreed with me, and it was only later that I realized my mistake, when one by one my girlfriends began marrying off, pulling out children, pushing their stuff into houses, while I looked on, askance.