Revolution

by Deb Olin Unferth

  One day I woke on a beach with sand in my hair and thought: I’ll never be who I was then.

  One day I found myself sitting alone at a table of strangers and I thought: I can’t go back into the past and start over. I have to just muddle on from where I am.

  Another day I was sitting in a church, birds screaming in their nests in the columns, and I thought: What am I doing here? I can’t hide here forever, for Christ’s sake.

  I’m bored out of my skull, I thought.

  Each day was like that, small understanding built on small understanding, until one day I thought: It’s time to go home. Build a life in the United States. The longer I stay away, the less there is to go home to. Only fear keeps me gone.

  I saw it as clearly and cleverly as if I’d jumped from an airplane and thought: I should pull this string.

  * * *

  I don’t know how it was for George (who can tell another man’s awakening or disillusionment?), but this is what I wonder: On his way back to Brazil, after leaving Harvard or Yale, did he feel like a failure? Did he feel lost? Did he feel afraid? However grandly it turned out in the end (TV, baby, house in the rain), did his trip back to Brazil feel at that moment not like a determined stomp, but a muddled escape?

  Or did he feel certain—now was the time, he knew at last what he wanted?

  * * *

  The night of the third boat, the sea was the calmest I’ve ever seen it. Like it was holding its breath or sleeping. Or hanging back, pausing in its turmoil (that echoes our own fuss) to watch and wave two boaters to shore. The moon was strong and our paddles looked like they were scooping cups of pale light out of the dark water. We boated over the sea with our moon paddles toward the shore.

  There would still be years of difficulty to get through. And I didn’t even know how much I was going to miss this wet air, this living water, the roosters sounding hoarse and imperfect, the parrots with their warped alien imitations, the falling banana leaves, these voices. I didn’t even know how hard it was going to be for me to do what seemed like just a few simple things—get a job, write a book, write another book, find a kind boyfriend, find a way back to my family—but I’d do them.

  I got out of the boat and said good-bye to my friend. I walked through the pebbled water to the shore, stood at the bus stop, and waited for dawn. Then I took a series of buses to San Jose and flew back to the United States.

  GOOD SPORT

  The very last bus of the trip. George and I got on and headed for Nogales.

  We were riding along through the desert plants, which were green but a muted green, so muted they felt like brown, like a barely hanging-on green. Beyond the not-green green were the mountains, a purple stain on the sky. If you could look into the bus, could zoom in on our positions across all this time and space, if you could see our faces and the way we held our bodies, you would see that one of us was eager and ready to go home, one of us was not. One of us was already alienated but trying to be a good sport about it and would try to be that way for several years more—a good sport—but finally give up. I thought I knew which of us was which for a long time, but it’s unclear to me today.

  * * *

  Did George ever feel at home anywhere again? No, I bet he couldn’t. Wherever he went, wherever he is, part of him feels apart. He had changed and couldn’t fit in at home anymore, even in the uncomfortable wrong-puzzle-piece way that he had in the first place. But he didn’t feel at home anywhere else either. It did eventually get better for him, but the feeling of loneliness never went away, though he finally got used to it.

  You can be a lot of things and be lonely. You can do exciting things and be lonely. You can fall in love and be lonely. You can marry and have children and be lonely. You can be content and be lonely. Once you’ve felt that kind of deep alienation, it changes you permanently. Permanent change means a lack of full recovery. If a man has an accident and limps for the rest of his life, we say he never fully recovered. You can even be lonely and be lonely.

  It’s not that I knew George so well that even after not speaking to him for all these years I think I still know who he is and how he feels. It’s just that I’ve known so many others like him. I could tell dozens of stories like his. These are just common human fates. We hobble along in that damaged state and live all kinds of lives afterward.

  * * *

  The last bus of the trip pulled into the Nogales station. George had slept through the desert, and I had the McDonald’s to look forward to, on the other side of the border. My father and mother and sister were waiting at the station. I could see them out the window. They were waving to me with the awkwardness of strangers.

  * * *

  Back in the States, the hot water felt odd, unfresh at first. I wasn’t used to it and didn’t like it. That first week, I saw a line of women walking toward me and I thought it was a protest—but no, those white squares they had were bags, not signs, I realized. It wasn’t a revolution. It was shopping.

  I stayed with my family for a few weeks and I felt like a visitor in their house. They had moved to Arizona and I had never lived in that state. We all regarded one another with caution. I overheard my sister whispering questions about me to my mother—why did I keep the toothpaste in the shower? I was indignant. I’d always kept my toothpaste in the shower! My father would barely speak to me, except to shout. And I was impossible, had out all my religious craziness on the table and I heaped it on them. I pulled away, constructed a giant barricade they’d have to somehow get over or around if they wanted to see me at all. They sent me back to school and I went down into the college undertow, felt a little less strange each year.

  IN THE MOVIE OF YOUR LIFE

  In fact, there was a fourth boat.

  Once we got back, I stayed in the United States. Didn’t want to go anywhere, not Europe, not Canada, certainly not anywhere south. George wandered off without me.

  When I finally did leave, it was only because my parents talked me into it. They were going on a cruise with some friends and they invited me along. Mexico Sunrise Cruiseline or some such. It was cheap, a group package, practically free. My father had embarked that year on his long campaign to get close to me, although I hadn’t noticed yet—no easy operation on his part, but it did eventually work. How they got me to go on a cruise is a mystery. The worst vacation of my life. My parents’ friends played bingo every night. The lines at the buffet were just creepy. I’d been a Communist, a revolutionary, a Christian for the liberation, and here I was, another thread in the American capitalist carpet—how humiliating. I stood muttering at the ship’s rail for days. My father thought it was so funny. He kept coming up behind me and saying, “In the movie of your life, here you are, pulling into port on this cruise ship, and the caption reads: ‘Five years later.’ ” I had to admit it was a good joke. He got a smile out of me.

  FATHERS

  A few months after George and I came back from fomenting the revolution, George’s father left his mother. The youngest son finished high school and the father chose that moment to go. That’s the kind of man he was, one who did not shirk responsibility, who stood by until the last son sallied forth, who waited until everyone was safe off the premises before he’d make his own move toward the door, to ensure that in the moment of his exit, his wife, after having cared for so many for so long, would be suddenly, absolutely alone. I didn’t find out for several months, and even then I found out by accident or, more accurately, I found out by snooping while pretending to water a dying plant. George didn’t tell me his father was gone. By that time, he and I were somewhat estranged. In our basement apartment George placed piles of books around his desk, so many it looked like he was building a wall. He stayed inside that walled-in space and worked on his thesis on liberation theology. I began going out at night, making new friends, going to dance clubs. George took on a job as a janitor and was gone five nights a week. Then he signed up for a night class in Denver and was gone six. Not much after that, I moved out.

>   * * *

  I still wonder why George’s father disliked George’s mother so much. I never learned anything about that father. No one in the family ever told me a single story about him, except once when George’s mother said to me, “He doesn’t love me. He told me so.” But how could that be? He must have loved her—he married her, after all. And he must have kept loving her to have had baby after baby with her, well beyond the point of extremity.

  He may have stopped loving her bit by bit, as each boy was born, son after son. He seemed to be equally disgusted with all of them. Maybe he thought his sons had turned out to be a bunch of religious pansies—studying philosophy and running around on mountaintops. When they were old enough, they had weird weddings and got fake jobs and talked too much about God. Probably his wife’s fault. He went to work every day without fail. The subject of God was distasteful to him. Life was disappointing.

  Years later, I heard that the father was dying of brain cancer. A year after that, I heard he was dead. The brothers were finally officially fatherless for good. It must have been hard on the brothers. Maybe they were angry. A couple of them must have regretted not knowing how to know him. At least one of them (George?) must have had some stories to tell, memories of real or imagined connection with the man. I wouldn’t know.

  * * *

  My own father did not die. I ignored him with fortitude for years. I first began to notice the change in him the same year I decided I wanted to be a writer. I was twenty-five and living with a boyfriend in Birmingham. One day my father called (this was a man who never called) and said, “I hear you want to be a writer.”

  “Who said that?” I said. I was ready to admit nothing.

  “Every writer needs a fax machine. Let me send you one.”

  (This man never sent me anything.) “I don’t want a fax machine,” I said.

  “Give me your address. I’m sending you a fax machine.”

  He sent me a fax machine and then he called again. “Turn on your fax machine,” he said. “I’m sending you a fax.”

  “I don’t think it works,” I said. I hadn’t gotten it out of the box.

  “Turn it on. Here comes your fax.”

  So I got the fax machine out of the box. He faxed me a letter he’d written to a prisoner. He’d joined a prison reform group and had made good friends inside prison walls. The letter to my surprise was about me, about how we weren’t close and that he felt it was his fault. He was sorry and full of regret. He wished we could be friends. I ignored him, and I kept on that way for another ten years, but he kept on right back, pushing away at me, again and again, until I was finally soft enough to sit next to, proving about both of us that, if nothing else, inner revolution is possible.

  * * *

  The one time I spoke to George—when I tracked him down and called him and he told me about the TV set and the queen—he was back in the States to attend his father’s funeral. The peasant queen and his little son were there in the next room, he said.

  I was saying silly things, how neat his life was, off in the jungle with a TV.

  Finally he interrupted me and said irritably, “It’s not perfect.”

  “Of course it’s perfect,” I said. “How is it not perfect?”

  “It’s just not,” he said.

  I thought I’d mention that.

  PROPOSALS

  George may have proposed to the queen of the peasants, but let’s get this straight: he proposed to me first. It was my one and only marriage proposal, unless you count the four others, which I don’t.

  George wasn’t the first man to propose to me. The first man to propose was declared insane a few days later and committed to a hospital in Chicago. I went to visit him in the special room for visitors. We sat at a white table with our hands in the table rubble—coloring books, paper coffee cups—and he became so distressed that afterward his family asked me not to come back. In any case it was more like a threat than a proposal. He looked at me in a menacing manner and said that I must marry him. After all, he said, he was the father of my child.

  “That doesn’t mean much,” I said, “if there’s no child to show for it.”

  “It’s dead,” he said.

  “It wasn’t a baby yet,” I said. “It’s not a baby if it isn’t before it is.”

  “You killed it.”

  “You can’t kill it if it never was.”

  In fact it wasn’t his. The one whose it was was in jail—thirty days’ time from which he emerged calling it “boring.”

  * * *

  The second man came along a few years after George and I broke up. He and I shared an apartment in a small town full of snow. On the day he proposed, the door to the apartment had a hole in it because I had kicked it in. And the door was new because I had kicked in the first door a week before and the landlord had replaced it. And the TV was new because the man had hurled the old one across the room. But the moment of the proposal was a calm one. He and I were standing at the window, looking out at the parking lot below. He had been married three times already. He had children all over the country—children by women he had been married to and children by women he hadn’t.

  “Isn’t this something you’ve tried before?” I said.

  “It always works,” he said. “It’s fun too.”

  * * *

  I proposed to the third man. I wasn’t involved with him anymore. I had left him after he had left me after I had threatened to leave him. We were sitting alone at my aunt’s kitchen table. My aunt was out of town. I said, “Let’s get married,” because in that moment I saw that somehow everything had gone outlandishly wrong and had stayed that way for a long time, years, and was getting worse, and if I could just marry this nice man here—suitable, quiet, kind—I might be able to set things straight.

  “Half the time I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

  “Half the time all the time?” I said. “Or half the time right now?”

  He thought about it. “Half the time.”

  He left his drink on the table and went outside.

  * * *

  The fourth one I married. Civil war. Nine months later I was back living my normal life, alone.

  THE LAST WE SAW OF GEORGE

  Once, in Panama, during some of our worst times together, George and I wound up with a very tall man from French Guiana. We met him on a bus. The man had no legal visas and he was going to try to make it through all those countries and then on to Texas. There was a heartbreaking story that came along with him and a photo of a pretty wife he would one day send for. I was the bad guy here. George said he wanted to help him. George said, “It’s Christian charity,” and I said, “It’s illegal.” George said, “Obey not the laws of this earth,” and I said, “I am going to vomit if I hear one more word about Jesus and all his sexist pig apostles.”

  The man from French Guiana sat between us and talked on and on, told us about villages he had seen, roads he had walked, his country of sun and mud.

  He and George looked over his passport and papers. He had a Costa Rican visa stamp in blue ink in his passport, but it didn’t look right—who knows where he’d gotten it. They did their best to fix it up.

  At the border the soldiers were suspicious. These days I’m sure that they have computers to keep track of such things, but they had no computers back then. All they had were a couple of wooden shacks. The Panama side stamped us out, no problem, glad to be rid of us. The Costa Rican side kept us there for hours, pulling apart our bags, asking questions. They brought us into the shack one by one and patted us down, gave us cursory strip searches, that is, I kept my underwear on. The soldiers looked at me in my cotton underwear and thought I was pregnant. I was very thin, but I had that smooth, round stomach.

  “¿Estás preñada?” a soldier said.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t know what it is. It could be parasites.”

  “Or worms.”

  “Or malnutrition.”

  “Or you’re pre
gnant.”

  They let us through at last. George was triumphant. He thought we could do this professionally. He tried his hand at doctoring documents for practice. Entering Nicaragua we were caught and he bribed the officer to let us go.

  Later I believe he did do it professionally. He kept a car at my parents’ house in Phoenix. By this time we’d broken up, I’d moved out, he’d left. His car stayed at my parents’. That first year or two he called me now and then. Once on the phone he asked if I would send him my passport. “Since you’re not using it,” he said. He came to get his car sometimes, then he’d bring it back. My parents let him do this. He’d be gone for a month, then he’d show up out of nowhere, get the car, bring it back late that night or the next day. One day he didn’t bring it back and that was the last any of us saw of him.

  PART SIX

  BIG COUNTRY

  PRIVATE EYE

  To find him again was hard. Web searches turned up nothing. I located a brother in California and wrote to him, but he didn’t write back. I guess he wasn’t so eager to put me in touch with George anymore. I was clearly the ex-girlfriend now. I wrote again. I asked for George’s e-mail address, tried to sound a little more professional this time, mentioned I was doing some writing about our trip. That wouldn’t scare George off, right? His ex-girlfriend writes and says she’s still thinking about the relationship more than twenty years later? No, no, a woman like that couldn’t be trouble.