Andrea Dworkin - The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant

was now both stockpiling and testing them. My father said

that he would have died if not for Hiroshima and Nagasaki,

because he shortly would have been sent to “the war in the

Pacific” as it was cal ed. When Truman used the nuclear bombs,

he saved my father’s life. I thought my father was pretty selfish

to hold his own life to be more important than so many other

lives. I thought it would be a good idea not to have war

anymore. I could feel nuclear winter chilling my bones, even

though the expression did not yet exist, and I had a vivid

picture of people melting. I’ve never got en over it.

44

Cuba 1

There was one day when al my schoolmates and I knew that

we were going to die. According to historians the Cuban

missile crisis lasted thirteen days, but to us it was one day

because we knew we were going to die then, that day. I don’t

know which of the thirteen it was, and I don’t know if I’m

col apsing several days into one, but I remember nothing

before the one day and nothing after. In the back of the school

bus al the girls gathered in a semicircle. We talked about the

sadness of dying virgins, though some of us weren’t. We spoke

with deep regret, like old people looking back on our lives; we

enumerated al that we had not managed to do, the wishes we

had, the dreams that were unfulfilled. No one talked about

get ing mar ied. Children came up in passing.

The Soviets had deployed nuclear missiles in Cuba. The

missiles were pointed at the United States, and the range of

the ICBMs was about from Cuba to the school bus - the

northeast corridor of the United States. For probably the first

time, I kept my Che-loving politics to myself. I don’t think

I even had any politics on that day. I don’t remember

the geopolitical blah-blah or the commie-versus-good-guy

45

Heartbreak

rhetoric - except that it existed - or how the United States was

the white hat standing up for the purity of the Americas. I do

remember television, black-and-white, and the images of stil

photographs, a grainy black-and-white, showing the bombs or

the silos. The United States had been untouchable, and now

it could be touched, and we’d feel our own bones melt and in

the particle of a second see our own cities drowned in fire. I

wasn’t afraid to die, but sitting stil and waiting for it was not

good. I still feel that way. We al , including me, felt a little

sorry for ourselves, because everything we had ever known

had been touched by nuclear war; it was the shadow on every

street, in every house, in every dinnertime conversation, in

every current-events reprise; it was always there as threat, and

now it was going to happen, that day, then, there, to us. The

school bus was bright yellow with black markings on the outside, just the way they are now, but everything was different because we were kids who knew that we were going to be

cremated and killed in the same split second. I could see my

arm withered, the flesh coming off in paper-thin layers, while

my chest was already ash, and there’d be no blood - it would

evaporate before we’d even be dead. Inside the bus the boys

were up front, boisterous, fil ed with bravado. I guess they

expected to pull the missiles out of the air one by one, new

superheroes. The girls were serious and upset. Even those who

didn’t like each other talked quietly and respectful y. There

was one laugh: a joke about the only girl in the school we

46

Cuba 1

were sure was no virgin. She was famous as the school whore,

and she was widely envied though shunned on a normal day,

since she knew the big secret; but on this day, the last day, she

could have been crowned queen, sovereign of the girls. She

represented everything we wanted: she knew how to do it and

how it felt; she knew a lot of boys; she was really pret y and

laughed a lot, even though the other girls would not talk to

her. She had beautiful y curly brown hair and an hourglass

figure, but thin. She was Eve’s true descendant, the symbol of

what it meant to bite the apple. Tomorrow she would go back

to being the local slut, but on the day we were al going to die

she was Cinderel a an hour before midnight. I wished that

I could grow up, but I could not entirely remember why. I

waited with my schoolmates to die.

47

David Smith

He was one of the United States' greatest sculptors, not paid

attention to now but in my high school and college years he

was a giant of an artist. He was especially at ached to

Bennington College, where he had taught and near where he

lived. One night I went to a lecture by art critic Clement

Greenberg, probably the most famous visual arts writer of his

time. Greenberg was a name-dropping guy, and most of his

lecture was about the habits of his bet ers, the artists he

deigned to crown king or prince. At some point during the

lecture, Greenberg said that great sculptors never drew. A

huge man stood up, overshadowing the audience, and in a

deep bass said, “I do. " While Greenberg turned beet red and

apologized, the big guy talked about how important drawing

was, how sensual it was; he gave specifics about how it felt to

draw; he said that drawing taught one how to see and that

drawing was part of a continuous process of making art, like

breathing when you were asleep was part of life. After the

lecture a friend who was a painting student asked if I wanted

to go with her to meet David Smith. “I wouldn't want to

bother him, " I said, not having a clue that the big guy was

48

David Smith

David Smith and he was staying that night in Robert