Revolution by Deb Olin Unferth Page B

both directions as far as we could see. What the hell? My suit itched under my dress. We walked on the beach, poked at black clumps of seaweed with our shoes. We were the only people around. We walked back up the sand. We asked a man in a hotel why it looked like that. He took us upstairs. We looked down at the water. You could see the heavy streaks across the water, running out into the sea. The man told us the water wasn’t really brown. It looked like that because of algae. It would be gone soon, we should wait a few days, he said.
    I’d never seen the Pacific Ocean look like that.
    It must be a terrible war to make the water look like that, I thought.
    I looked over at George. I wondered if I should be marrying someone who took me to places like this.
    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