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.
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
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
