by Sonja Larsen
It was the other waitress on my Saturday shift at the restaurant who first used the word “cult.” She was a poli-sci student at McGill. Maybe that’s how the subject came up.
“Oh no,” I said. “It was political.”
“You should look up the definition of cult,” the poli-sci waitress said. “Because I am telling you, that’s what it sounds like.”
TWENTY-FOUR
I’m sitting in the dark in front of my computer. The lights are off because it is late at night and what I am doing feels secret. My fingers on the keyboard are light and shaky. I hit the return key and there he is.
He is dead.
The first New York Times obituary of Eugenio Perente-Ramos is dated March 20, 1995, and calls him an organizer of migrant and seasonal labourers and a close associate of Cesar Chavez in the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee. The next day, a correction, seven paragraphs long, names him Gerald Doeden, “the leader of a group that has been characterized as a cult.”
I find a website called “The Truth About NATLFED.” There are the obituaries, and a photo of his tombstone. I cry when I see the portrait on it. His thin face, the bandana at his neck. In one of my dreams about the Old Man he looked just like that. In that dream I am crying at his graveside and, gradually, I realize the coffin is surrounded by women, all of us weeping in our black dresses. I could see us as a group for the first time. Me and Jayne and Beth and Linda and Polly and Mary and Susan and Tanya, and others standing just outside of my view. And then the Old Man showed up looking younger and healthier than I’d ever seen him. He was laughing at us. And we were so relieved to see him we didn’t care.
This is the only photo I’ve ever seen of him and even that is a lie.
World class revolutionary fighter
Internationalist soldier
Son of the American working class
Theologian, philosopher, historian
Teacher, writer, broadcaster, machinist
Farm worker, labor and community organizer
Gentleman and friend
Beloved comrade
I wondered if he wrote the epitaph himself, except I don’t think even he would have described himself as a gentleman or a friend. Of all the lies on the stone I find the part about “son of the American working class” the most puzzling, since he often described himself as the son of Mexican wetbacks. Maybe the stone came after the corrected obituary when he’s revealed not to be Mexican at all, but distantly Norwegian, just like me.
For years after the revolution I was either struggling to remember or pretending that none of it ever happened. One of the best places to do either was on the dance floor. There were moments when I was dancing that the beat seemed to break apart everything I knew, and under a strobe light I could see how he used me. Like an X-ray showing me all my broken places.
On the dance floor was where I met my first husband at twenty, and where I mourned our divorce at twenty-four. I loved his easy rhythm, tidy apartment, the easy way he cooked us meals, brought me to orgasm for the very first time. We met because we were the only two dancing to a complicated Smiths song. At the end of the night he asked if I wanted to go home with him. “I’m here with someone,” I said. “But don’t cross me off your list.”
He did not cross me off his list.
Another part of what I loved about him was what a good recruit he’d have been. How hungry he was for all the things the revolution could have given him. He was reading Ayn Rand when we met and so I read her, too, talking him out of every point. I could not really imagine either of us getting old. We moved in together after a month. He said he loved me. He said love should be a rational agreement between people. He said he didn’t believe in happily ever after. We should get married, he said to me. You could get a bigger student loan then. And when I found out my permanent resident status was being reviewed, we set a date.
Walking down the stairs of my father’s house, I know that even though this is the only thing I know how to do, it’s a mistake. A mistake to think I can be given away, or keep a promise that big. I’ve failed before, I’ll fail again.
And of course I do.
After our separation I went to see a therapist but it didn’t last too long. She took too many notes, she sketched a diagram, she wanted it all right from the start. We barely talk about my separation, instead she kept coming back, over and over again, to the hitchhiking trip and after the fourth session I realize that, even with the discount she’s giving me, I can’t afford to answer the questions she’s asking me. So I quit.
The first man I sleep with after my husband is an astrologist. He makes my chart. He gives me an STD and the observation that, from the placement of the moon in my chart, I am the kind of person who understands the world through metaphor.
“No shit,” I say.
At university I kept finding new ways to think and not to think about my life. I thought about the Old Man’s whip during a lecture about Marshall McLuhan and how the medium is the message. When I read Foucault’s ideas about the ways power is created and consolidated through accepted forms of knowledge, it sent a shiver through me. The messages we sent and received without words. How no one, not the bus driver, not Karl not the Old Man, had to tell me to keep a secret. Our shared understanding of the accepted forms of knowledge.
And eventually I follow the advice that the poli-sci waitress gave me. I look it up. I give it that name. Cult. High-demand group.
The sense of urgency. The time table. The secret language. The mythical elements. The sexual control. The lack of sleep. The control, internal and external, over thought and movement. The denial of self.
There was a checklist, and I made a mark by nearly every line.
The naming is both liberating and shameful. It gave me the language to share my experience. And the more I read the more I understood that if the Old Man was a checklist then I was too.
Historian, his gravestone reads. A man like that can take away your history. He can give you a new one, if you let him. If you do not say no. For the first year this is all I do in my dreams: try and tell the Old Man no. After that it is often all I can say, in sporadic recurring nightmares where I return and am trapped again. No. But he never listens.
Historian. And teacher, I can’t deny those titles. In the years I spent with him he taught me not to talk back, not to question anyone but myself. He taught me how to serve him dinner and say the things he wanted me to say. But before he did any of these things, he taught me that I was not too small to hold the gun, that would never be my excuse for whatever happened to me. That was something I needed to learn.
And because I was not only his student but a teacher’s pet, I have that schoolbag of memories: the birthday card, the letters from my mother, my father, Karl and Dana. If he had not asked to see them, they would have stayed locked up with the rest of my things, the journals of my childhood, my teddy bear, my dog. Even if he only showed me how to survive his own fantasies and only gave back a few of the things that he took away, even if he did these things only by accident, by chance, that was still something. That was still more than others got.
More than Dana, whose teacher taught her to hold still for the rifle.
More than Polly, who died of cancer years before the Old Man. I’d heard, third-hand, a story of her sitting at class time with an oxygen mask over her face. That face I’d watched like a compass looking for some direction, a sign it was time to go. How did he feel not being the sickest person in the room, watching her escape right before his very eyes? More than Struggler, who I was told got out but never got free, and died in a fire a few years after she left.
Beloved comrade, the stone says. No one could deny that.
In the darkness I stare at the glowing monitor and let all of his lies and his smooth face shine back on me.
“I know you,” I said the first time I met him. He was forty-six and looked older than he should have. I was sixteen and younger than I knew. That moment I would remember and for
get over and over again in the years to come. That dialectical moment of doubt and certainty, that flickering instant between us in the low light of his office, the two of us with our dyed black hair and our pale Nordic skin. How Gerald Doeden laughed when he said, “Of course you do. You’re sixteen, you think you know everything.” How he looked at me when he said, “I know you too.”
The last time I saw Gerald Doeden I watched him drift off to sleep, his eyes rolling back into his head in a morphine drift. I sat in the dark, drinking my birthday bourbon, listening to him breathe, waiting and wishing for the moment he would stop. I had been in Brooklyn nearly nine hundred days and this was just another one.
And by the next afternoon I was in a Manhattan park, waiting for Western Union money to come through so I could get a ticket back to Montreal. As I lay in the sun, outside for the first time since the raid, I could feel the warmth on my skin, the edges of my body against the grass. After the revolution I’d told myself things would be different, but they weren’t. The revolution had come and gone, and all I knew for certain was that I couldn’t keep waiting anymore, sitting in the corner of a room, moving us from here to there, keeping track of every day and every hour, waiting for something to change. And I didn’t want to be lying on his green velvet couch either. Getting what was mine, wishing myself into his broken landscape, losing track of the difference between day and night. I couldn’t be Control or #25 or that most generic of names, little girl.
“When I’m dead, little girl, you’re going to be sorry you said these things to me,” he told me when I’d accused him of being addicted to sex and pills. “Maybe,” I said. “Probably.” I had waited a long time to find out the answer.
“No,” I say in the darkness. “No,” I say to the real and not real picture of the real and not real man I gave so much of myself to. “I’m not sorry.”
TWENTY-FIVE
We are waiting to cross the border.
Off the side of the highway the sun shines down on the water where it’s broken up into thousands of fragments of light. The road ahead of us is long and lined with idling cars as we wait to cross the border. Kevin sighs. I’m sitting in the passenger seat staring out at the bay. I live in Vancouver now, in the rainy salty climate that will always remind me of Dana and my grandparents. And every time we drive this road I find myself wondering if this is the border where Dale and I crossed over in the bus. So much is lost: Dale’s last name, how I ended up on the road with him, not to mention everything of my life before. I have a memory of water. I think it was here. I’m almost certain.
“I’m sure it’s nothing,” my mother said when she called earlier in the day, her voice small with fear at finding herself in the emergency room. We live two hours apart but in separate countries, which for a woman who sees the world through metaphor seems right. We are allies mostly, but there is a border. There are sides.
As I listen to her on the phone I have a held-breath quiet inside me that is its own memory, repeated and remembered, remembered and repeated. The first time I can remember it might have been the night my mother asked me if she should leave my father. But probably this instinct for stillness was with me long before that.
“It’s just a flu. But I got pretty sick and the dog needs to be walked. It was kinda scary how bad I was feeling. But I think they’re going to let me out this afternoon.”
Soon emotion will flood into this emptiness. Anger, fear, love. In minutes or hours or maybe years this memory of numbness will be one of the things I let in. But not now. Now I am waiting to cross the border.
I put my hand on Kevin’s and thank him for driving me to see my mother. He was the first man I ever held hands with before kissing and I was almost thirty years old when we met. In many ways I could not make this journey without him. Because I have lived with him longer than I ever lived with any of my family and through him learned a loyalty and a tenderness my own family could not teach me. And also because I can’t drive.
Not learning how to drive at the same age as most people is one consequence of my childhood. And maybe never making up for it later is another consequence still. When we were first married Kevin tried to teach me. During the second lesson, in a Home Depot parking lot, he said, “Sometimes you can’t avoid killing something. It isn’t always safe to swerve out of the way. You have to choose.” I asked him if he’d ever killed anything. A squirrel and a cat that he knew of, and once there was something dark and doglike on a country road. And that was the end of the driving lesson.
In every way I am no longer that girl. That girl who thought she could kill things. That girl who said yes. Standing in line at the grocery store or sitting in the passenger seat of the car, I am not the girl who chose to kill Barbara. Most days I know this. We are all different people now. My mother is not the woman she was. The woman who believed she could change the world, the woman who called herself my comrade, my comrade who went AWOL. Time and circumstance and even biology have changed us. Even the cells in our bodies have been transformed, not once but many times.
And yet what to do with these memories? Memories that outlast love and family and faith. Waiting by the side of the road for someone to see me. A remembered craving for certainty, for something true and absolute, addictive as any drug. The sound of the Old Man’s voice saying it would be the kindest thing. Those memories that extend all the way into muscle, into reflexes that are well intentioned but dangerous. Holding my breath and waiting. A difficulty saying no. A way of watching and forgetting all at the same time.
Reflexes and confidence and trust. Those were just a few of the things I was missing and not just behind the wheel. And maybe, like the exact location of a border crossing on a map, they were something I could never quite recover.
When we arrive in Bellingham, my mother is out of the emergency room and already feeling better, although still weak. Her small apartment is neat and clean and the walls are decorated with her carefully carved prints of birds and shoes and musical instruments, her celebration of everyday beauty, she says. I’m seized with an appreciation for her creativity, her orderliness, for the vitamins and supplements she takes, the long list of foods she’s eliminated from her diet to improve her health. She has lived alone for a long time now. Kevin and I walk her dog, make dinner, and buy groceries while she sleeps. When she wakes up she shows me her latest artwork: block prints on old books.
For years I was angry with my mother, and this anger made me unpredictable even to myself. I wanted her to feel this pain I was only beginning to measure. I’m sorry, she said, not once but many times. If I could change it I would. And one day it was like I heard those words for the very first time. Even if I could write the script there was nothing she could say that would change what happened.
Gone is gone as gone can be. This is so plain yet it’s hard to see.
We work hard not to have these conversations anymore. We don’t get drunk, we don’t talk about the past, we don’t ask questions. Instead we try to talk about little things that bring us joy: dogs and art we love and good deals at the thrift store.
It probably helps that I’m happier now too. That my marriage to an engineer and a builder has taught me how happiness is the product of thousands of tiny connections, like nails in wood. How the structure of things should be as simple as it could be, but no simpler. I take his love and all the metaphors he gives me with gratitude.
The three of us sit and drink tea. We pet our dogs. She reminds me that I’ve helped her pick both the dogs she’s had, and both were good choices. She asks about work. I am an accidental youth worker and techie in the community centre of a poor neighbourhood. My work is filled with people who remind me of ones met in soup lines as a child, at the food bank. I don’t think that’s an accident. There must be a reason I’ve worked so long in a place where every day I face some echo of my past. Maybe I need to remember. Maybe I can’t forget. In the end it’s the same thing. Over the years I witness a dozen versions of the girl I was, variations on all the
girls of my family. Dana, my sister, my mother, my aunt. These girls, and all the ways they stand with their arms outstretched for whatever they can reach. These girls so new to the age of reason.
I don’t know how to change the world. I don’t know if it can be changed the way I tried. But people’s worlds change sometimes. I express this belief in the most banal of ways: remembering a name, finding a pencil, asking if everything is okay, even though I know that being asked is not the same as being brave enough to tell. These small inadequate gestures that make up my day and that will probably not be enough. It takes more than this. Maybe most of all it takes luck. That the stranger who picks you up by the side of the road lets you go. That you survive the dangerous men who can spot a girl like you and that Little Red Riding Hood target on your back. I know this. Yet there are days when these little things feel like the only revolutionary work I have ever done.
“It’s not too hard to work around kids?” my mother says in a gentle voice that is almost the only thing she can still do to make me tense with anger. Forget that it’s too late for some things: sympathetic hugs, motherly advice.
“No,” I say. “Sometimes.” I practise the belly breathing I read about in a book on forgiveness and it helps. Slow deep breaths into the abdomen.
A baby was what I really wanted.
We tried. Instead we had early blooms of unexpected blood and grief. And the two ectopic pregnancies, one for each tube. Those were little stones. My body’s formed its own history of the Old Man’s big silver ring, and of reckless nights after the revolution spent looking for something or someone to believe in. Those nights I spent drunk and high trying to drown out the memory of the Old Man’s voice whispering pretty little girl, knowing he was a liar, and wishing again that he wasn’t. The doctor said the causes for these things were hard to pinpoint but I knew that this was my red star tattoo, the scar to remember it all by.
