this is the answer they come up with. I said I thought m y ear
drums would probably burn with the rest o f me so I got
punished more. I kept waiting to see them wink or smile or
laugh or something even just among themselves even though
it w ouldn’t be nice to show they knew it was crap but they
acted serious like they meant it. They kept telling you that you
were supposed to respect them but you would have had to take
stupid pills. I kept thinking about what it meant that this was
m y life and I was going to die and I thought I could say asshole
i f I wanted and face whatever w ay I wanted and I didn’t
understand w hy I couldn’t take a walk in the fucking spring air
if I wanted but I knew i f I tried they would hurt me by making
me into a juvenile delinquent which was a trick they had if you
did things they didn’t like. I kept reading Buber and tried to
say I-Thou but they were I-It material no matter how hard I
tried. I thought maybe he had never encountered anything like
them where he lived. I kept writing papers for English on
Buber’s philosophy so I could keep in touch with I-Thou even
though I was surrounded by I-It. I tried to reason it out but I
couldn’t. I mean, they were going to die too and all they could
think o f was keeping you in line and stopping you from
whispering and making you stare at a wall. I kept thinking
they were ghosts already, just dead already. Sometimes I
thought that was the answer— adults were dead people in
bodies giving stupid orders. They thought I was fresh but it
was nothing like what I felt inside. Outside I was calm. Inside I
kept screaming in m y brain: are you alive, are you zombies,
the bomb is coming, assholes. Why do we have to stand in
line? W hy aren’t we allowed to talk? Can I kiss Paul S. now?
Before I die; fast; one time? In your last fucking minute on
earth can’t you do one fucking human thing like do something
or say something or believe something or show something or
cry or laugh or teach us how to fight the Goddamn Russians or
anything, anything, and not just make us stand here and be
quiet like assholes? I wanted to scream and in m y brain I
screamed, it was a real voice screaming like something so loud
it could make your head explode but I was too smart to scream
in real life so I asked quietly and intelligently w hy we couldn’t
talk and they said we might miss important instructions. I
mean: important instructions; do you grasp it? I didn’t scream
because I knew there might be a tom orrow but one day there
wouldn’t and I would be as big an asshole as the teachers not to
have screamed, a shithead hypocrite because I didn’t believe
tom orrow was coming, one day it wouldn’t come, but I
would die pretending like them, acting nice, not screaming. I
wanted to scream at them and make them tell me the truth—
would there be a tomorrow or not? When I was a child they
made us hide under our desks, crawl under them on our knees
and keep our heads down and cover our ears with our elbows
and keep our hands clasped behind our heads. I use to pray to
God not to have it hurt when the bomb came. They said it was
practice for when the Russians bombed us so we would live
after it and I was as scared as anyone else and I did what they
said, although I wondered why the Russians hated us so much
and I was thinking there must be a Russian child like me,
scared to die. You can’t help being scared when you are so
little and all the adults say the same thing. Y ou have to believe
them. You had to stay there for a long time and be quiet and
your shoulders would hurt because you had to stay under your
desk which was tiny even compared to how little you were
and you didn’t know what the bomb was yet so you thought
they were telling the truth and the Russians wanted to hurt
you but if you stayed absolutely still and quiet on your knees
and covered your ears underneath your desk the Russians
couldn’t. I wondered if your skin just burned o ff but you
stayed on your knees, dead. Everyone had nightmares but the
adults didn’t care because it kept you obedient and that was
what they wanted; they liked keeping you scared and making
you hide all the time from the bomb under your desk. Adults
told terrible lies, not regular lies; ridiculous, stupid lies that
made you have to hate them. They would say anything to
make you do what they wanted and they would make you
afraid o f anything. N o one ever told so many lies before,
probably. When the Bay o f Pigs came, all the girls at school
talked together in the halls and in the lunchrooms and said the
same thing: we didn’t want to die virgins. N o one said anyone
else was lying because we thought we were all probably going
to die that day and there w asn’t any point in saying someone
wasn’t a virgin and you couldn’t know , really, because boys
talked dirty, and no one said they w eren’t because then you
would be low-life, a dirty girl, and no one would talk to you
again and you would have to die alone and if the bomb didn’t
come you might as well be dead. Girls were on the verge o f
saying it but no one dared. O f course now the adults were
saying everything was fine and no bomb was com ing and
there was no danger; we didn’t have to stand in the halls, not
that day, the one day it was clear atomic death was right there,
in N ew Jersey. But we knew and everyone thought the same
thing and said the same thing and it was the only thought we
had to say how sad we were to die and everyone giggled and
was almost afraid to say it but everyone had been thinking the
same thing all night and wanted to say it in the morning before
we died. It was like a record we were making for ourselves, a
history o f us, how we had lived and been cheated because we
had to die virgins. We said to each other that it’s not fair we
have to die now, today; we didn’t get to do anything. We said
it to each other and everyone knew it was true and then when
we lived and the bomb didn’t come we never said anything
about it again but everyone hurried. We hurried like no one
had ever hurried in the history o f the world. O ur mothers
lived in dream time; no bomb; old age; do it the first time after
marriage, one man or yo u ’ll be cheap; time for them droned
on. B ay o f Pigs meant no more time. They don’t care about
w hy girls do things but we know things and we do things;
w e’re not just animals who don’t mind dying. The houses
where I lived were brick; the streets were cement, gray; and I