American Woman: A Novel

by Susan Choi

  Pauline and Yvonne had backed out of the car. “We have to get our tape out there,” Yvonne said, as if Jenny were dense.

  “But that eulogy was supposed to be for you, to help you—to heal you and help you move on. You can’t take it to a radio station.” None of them seemed to hear her. Juan was shrugging off his work shirt, then winding it in a loose mitt around one hand, and with that hand grabbing the package. “Okay,” she said. “That’s good, you don’t want to get prints on the tape. And your precautions last night, about background noise—I understand all that now. I hope I didn’t compromise things. You wouldn’t want to undo all that effort by driving into town in broad daylight to a radio station, when no one even knows that you’re on the East Coast.”

  “You can quit with your protocol lecture,” Juan said.

  Now she’d run out of patience. “You can’t just get in a car and deliver a tape! Have you forgotten that there are people out there who’d be happy to kill you?”

  “I’ll kill them! Come and watch me.”

  “Give me the keys, Juan.”

  “Don’t tell him what to do,” Yvonne exclaimed. “He’s in command here, not you.”

  “Every day that we’re silent’s a crime on our comrades,” Pauline piped up hoarsely.

  She tried to ignore them and win over Juan, the commander. “Give me the keys, Juan,” she said in a comradely tone. “Even if you’re not seen, if you leave that tape at a station around here we’ll get agents all over the place.”

  “We’re not going to leave it at a station,” Juan said with disgust, getting into the car. “We’re going to mail it to one.”

  “There’ll be the postmark.”

  “We’ll mail it to someone who’ll mail it for us.”

  “Who? Everyone you’ve ever known is under surveillance!”

  “You told us to do this!” Juan roared, jerking out of the car again—he wanted to lunge, but he couldn’t get far without letting go of the wheel. “We want this tape on the radio now, we’re gonna swear vengeance now—”

  “You said so yourself!” Yvonne said.

  “I meant you should do it for you, not to broadcast all over the world!”

  Juan got back in the car, slammed the door shut and started the engine. The car jerked and belched as he stomped on the gas. “Come on, Y. Not you,” to Pauline.

  “But what if you’re caught?” Pauline cried.

  It still seemed possible this was a ruse, a game of chicken, but Juan shoved the Bug into gear. It hopped forward and then stopped again. Pauline, suddenly sobbing, was struggling with the passenger-door handle. “Polly,” Yvonne admonished. Yvonne had both her palms pressed down over the door lock so Pauline couldn’t lift it. “We’ll be back, Sister, stop. Sister, stop it!”

  “Goddammit, I’ll go!” she said finally, running up to Juan’s side of the car. “I’ll do it, I’ll do it right, just get out of the car. If you’re caught it’s the end of me, too.”

  “When the pigs took your old man, did you just shrug and say That’s okay? Go ahead Nazis, take my old man?” Juan yelled wildly. “Did you?”

  At last Juan had turned off the engine and handed over the keys. Going inside she felt their three gazes suspiciously tracking her progress. From her room she got her letter to William and her postal supplies, so that once she was out of their sight she could repack the tape. Before going back down she glanced out the window. They were there, clumped together just next to the car. They knew they had to let her do this, though they weren’t yet sure if they could trust her. She wasn’t sure, either. Her first thought when she was finally driving away was of burying the tape miles off, where it would never be found. But she knew that she wouldn’t. She’d been thinking again about death. The first year after William’s arrest she’d never slept well, never through the whole night, and she still woke sometimes with a shock, as if William were dead. Yet his death was impossible to her; she knew this, because she couldn’t be grateful for his life as it was. Did death seem more likely when someone had actually died? She thought the reverse must be true. Which was why mourning had to be done, vengeful eulogies written and broadcast. Maybe they were all trying to believe in death, the three of them to grieve properly, she to grieve less—she glanced back and saw them small in her rearview as the hillside rose up. Then they dropped out of sight.

  2.

  Four days later she was at the phone booth beside the boarded-up diner on the outskirts of Liberty again. By now it was so familiar she entered it hardly noticing what was around her, and reflexively yanked the door shut. She dropped the battered plastic bag in which she hoarded small change on the booth’s metal shelf, and began to sift through it for dimes. The bag was also full of lint and dust and other particles that weren’t currency. In the heat that quickly built up in the tightly closed space she could smell the sweaty metal of the coins, and the less identifiable fragrance they’d picked up on their thousands of journeys. She sometimes gained a delicate feeling of comfort from a telephone booth. Feeling less displaced than placeless, and kept company by her fistfuls of captured but transient coins. Although her daily visits to this booth, since she’d mailed the tape, had been so brief as to be almost instant. That was as per her and Dana’s traditional system: she would feed the phone coins, hear the line open, hear her loud heart. When Dana answered she’d say, “Did you get something?” When Dana said No, they’d hang up.

  Today Dana said, “Yes. And I want you to tell me right now what this is.”

  “I can’t. You’ll understand why later on. When you take it out of the envelope, wear dishwashing gloves. There’s a second envelope inside. Don’t touch it at all. That’s the part to deliver.”

  “I’ve already done that. I already opened up the outer envelope with gloves, and got out the inner envelope, with gloves, but it isn’t just paper.” Dana’s voice was thin. “I can hear something rattling in there.”

  “Don’t shake it. Just deliver it like I told you.”

  “Fuck, Jen. What did you send me? Did you send me one of those things that the roadrunner sends the coyote?”

  “No! How can you think—” She tried to put the cradle of the phone between her shoulder and ear and dropped it instead, so it banged on the glass of the phone booth. She grabbed it again. “How can you think I would do that?”

  “Then tell me what it is.”

  “Listen to the radio after you drop it, and you’ll know what it was. Then you’ll see why I can’t tell you now. But it’s safe for you, Dana, I swear.”

  “I can’t believe that you’re doing this to me!” Dana said, hanging up.

  The next morning they were all up by six, tripping over each other in the kitchen and knocking the coffee out of each other’s cups. The radio was already tuned to their A.M. news station, and Yvonne sat at the table with a notepad and pen poised in front of her, white-lipped and tense. “We need to take notes on how they present us,” she said. “They’ll do an update of the case, but they’ll also convey attitude. What the sentiment is.” Juan had set the tape recorder next to the radio for the same purpose, but this made the radio scream and distort even more. “Piece of crap!” Juan exclaimed. Pauline carefully shifted the dial a hair and Juan said, “Don’t you touch that again! Do you want us to miss it completely?”

  At eight Juan dropped down to the floor and did push-ups while whistling. After a few he collapsed on his stomach, rolled onto his back. He lit a cigarette and smoked, staring upward.

  By ten their vigil had disintegrated. Every day before this they had felt it might play any time, and so their anticipation had been diffuse, and immune to final disappointment. Now they all knew that the tape should play some time this morning. The chance that it wouldn’t drove them away from the radio, and toward it again. They jittered past each other, pretending to be doing other things.

  At a quarter to noon she pointed out, “It’s just nine forty-five in the morning there. Stations open up late, especially college ones.”
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br />   “But they broadcast all night,” Yvonne said.

  “The graveyard DJ, but they’re in the sound booth, not the office. They don’t go in and out the front door.”

  “How do you know?” Yvonne said.

  At twelve-thirty Pauline was overcome. “Change the station!” she said.

  “This is the news station. If they’re going to play it anywhere around here, it’ll be on this station.”

  “I’m going to listen to the car radio,” Pauline said, grabbing the keys. “I’m going to find a better station.”

  “Get back in here,” Juan shouted. And then—

  “Polly,” Yvonne screamed. “Polly! Come back, come in, now!”

  She was back in the room instantly, and then they were all clustered around the tiny radio, as the announcer interrupted the regular programming to join station K____ in Boulder. Without further warning Yvonne’s voice burst out of the speaker. Yvonne flushed slightly and adjusted her posture; a flowering of her sense of self-importance, yet there was something uncertain about it. Yvonne was not taking notes, but anxiously watching Juan for his reaction. Juan was gazing hard into the distance, ignoring Yvonne. Yvonne’s section was a meticulous cascade of facts: of time, date, duration, snipers, ’copters, rifles, riot-gas canisters, injured black bystanders, corpses, and cost to the taxpayer. The facts on the ground, the particulars; then Juan seized them up and charged toward universals. Juan must have been waiting for his cue as tensely as if he had to deliver the speech now, on a stage. From on high he found murder and greed; he could see Vietnam; he indicted, convicted, condemned. The kitchen looked suddenly strange, as if it had just dropped around them. Midday sunlight, a heap of filthy cups and plates. Pauline was motionless in her chair, her eyes dark and opaque, her lurid hair standing out in a shock from her head. Juan was saying, “But the pig did not put out his fire until every warrior was cut down in the act of unleashing a last shot of defiance. And the pig did not put out his fire until each body was charred and the skin drifted upward like paper. And the pig did not put out his fire until only the bones were left over, and then even the bones crumbled up. The pig’s greed is always his undoing. When he finally put out his fire, he assumed he’d destroyed all twelve comrades, because there was no way to know any better. Now he knows he was wrong.

  “What happened? How did three warriors fly from Los Angeles? They knew vengeance would have to be theirs. How did they sleep on the ground in the shelter of trees, right under the FBI’s nose, like a pack of wild dogs with no fear? They were not afraid to eat the garbage scraps of the citizen-pigs who waste food endlessly. They were not afraid to pull your pizza scraps right from the trash, pig, they know how to live like the man with no home, the poor man who’s their brother. We were there on the bench in the park with the crust of your sandwich. Our clothes didn’t smell so good and our manners weren’t nice. Did you see us and turn a blind eye? We were there right in front of your face. And when our friends came to mourn us and swear vengeance for us, we were there too. We came forward and said, Do not cry.

  “We understand that the Chief of Police of Los Angeles had some awe for the weapons we use. According to the Los Angeles Times, after slaughtering our comrades in a battle that was more than a hundred to one, almost a thousand pig bullets per warrior, the Chief picked a number of our warriors’ shotgun shells out of the rubble because he admired their size. He had them made into gift lapel pins for his underlings. Did you desire a souvenir, pig? We’ve got something for you that’s much better, but don’t hold your breath. It’ll come when you’re least prepared for it.

  “To our friends: Don’t think we are cold. It was horrible watching our comrades get burned to their deaths. But we live for the struggle, and die for the struggle. We don’t fear our deaths anymore.”

  The tape seemed to go on forever. The words now seemed ancient to her, not elegy so much as things that should themselves be elegized, artifacts from the deep past. All over the country, at that instant, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, were listening to this. Did the three of them realize, themselves? They had never heard themselves as she had, driving down a country road with the radio blaring and paralyzed suddenly by their crazed, keening screed. It was possible that their own voices were an echo chamber around them, beyond which they grasped nothing. There was something so lonely about it, the three of them standing and sitting, and hearing themselves as they’d been just a few days before. And then, as if the storm’s fireworks had ended, leaving only a slow, steady rain, Pauline’s section began. Jenny thought she saw Pauline stiffen, though her face didn’t change.

  “A ____, that scarf never left your hair, did it? It was a gift from your father, and you loved him so much, though he scorned your beliefs. You never stopped hoping you’d reach understanding with him. And B ____. You had trouble at first with your rifle, but you just worked harder. You never complained. That’s how you were all your life, so determined and quiet. C ____. You alwaysstood with your arms crossed and your blue eyes on fire, so mad when we weren’t being serious! Then you would laugh too. Perfect friend in good times, perfect soldier. I know you fought hard . . .” Behind Pauline’s staticky voice the kitchen was still. “And Evan,” Pauline said. Then she paused. When she resumed she was less audible. “I never had a brother, but when I met you I thought you were my brother. We both grew up like birds in gold cages. Always being admired. Afraid that if we escaped we would never survive. We had so much more to overcome than the rest of our comrades. Yet you changed, and you promised I’d change.” Listening to herself, Pauline seemed to grow more and more stiff; now the stiffness dissolved and she crumpled, and started to cry.

  “I can’t listen to this!” she said. She shoved her chair back and ran from the room. Yvonne dropped her pen and stood up.

  “Don’t,” Juan said. “Let her go.”

  “What if you’d died and left me alone?”

  “I’d expect you to save your tears. Do you fear death? I don’t. My death will be righteous. Our comrades’ deaths were righteous.”

  “God, you’re a fucker. Are you happy they’re dead?”

  “No, I’m not happy they’re dead. You’re a moron. What I’m saying is your tears are an insult to them.” Juan sounded as if he had tears of his own, but since he couldn’t cry without contradicting himself, they seemed to be boiling off him through his pores. “Would you shut up?” he screeched at Yvonne. “I’m still trying to listen!”

  At last the tape ended, and as Yvonne had predicted it was followed by a tumult of update: three still at large, field agents, new focus on Boulder. Jenny felt a wash of heat slide down her skin. “Oh my God,” she said, thinking of Dana. But Juan had seen Yvonne clearly at last, and Yvonne had fallen into his arms, and Pauline was still locked in the bathroom, and so no one responded.

  LATE THAT NIGHT the door of her bedroom flew open. Pauline cried, “Someone’s coming!”

  Jenny flew downstairs into the front room and in the dimness saw Juan pressed against the side wall, hopping into his blue jeans, and Yvonne rushing past toward the kitchen. “No lights,” Yvonne hissed. In the kitchen Pauline dropped to her knees beside Yvonne at the front-facing window, pressing her face near the sill. The window was open, and Jenny heard the sound more distinctly—a car engine, straining in its highest gear and seeming to stutter from very slight taps to the gas. It came slowly; there was no sign of lights. Juan sprinted out the back door and returned with a rake in one hand.

  “We don’t have anything,” he panted. “Not the first fucking means of defense—”

  At last the shape of a car emerged out of the darkness, and felt its remaining way toward them. The car halted somewhere near the big maple and a silhouette emerged, its gait familiar, traveling swiftly. “It’s Frazer,” Jenny said, still frightened in spite of herself. The back door opened and Frazer made a strangled noise, seeing their four dark shapes. “Ah—” he cried.

  Juan flipped on the light. “What are you doing? Why
the fuck were you trying to scare us?”

  “I wasn’t trying to scare you, I was trying not to wake you.”

  In the harsh sudden light from the bulb they all stared at each other. “I thought,” Jenny said after a moment, “you were coming next weekend.”

  “I felt like coming early. To see how it’s going.” He glanced around at Juan and Yvonne and Pauline. “I have a surprise for you,” he told them. “It’s out in the car. The backseat. You want to go bring it in?”

  After a long moment the three of them filed out the back door. “Not you,” Frazer murmured to her. They heard car doors open, and Frazer pulled her upstairs.

  Once in her bedroom he turned on her. “Are you crazy?” he said. “What’s the matter with you? I’ve left you with them for ten days. You’re supposed to be handling them!” All his edgy tics were going full throttle—pulsing eyelid, beads of sweat on the brow, one hand opening and closing as if it were squeezing a ball. He hadn’t been driving without lights not to wake them, he’d been driving without lights not to be seen by his unknown pursuers.

  “I am, Rob,” she began, annoyed by her instinct to mollify first, before showing her anger at him. Who was he, to be lecturing her? “It’s not easy—”

  “I guess not! I guess it’s not easy helping them get their promise-of-apocalyptic-vengeance manifesto on the radio.”

  “Is that why you’re here?”

  “I would have come the minute I heard but I’m trying to use some precaution, unlike the rest of you. Can I guess whose tape recorder they used? And whose tapes? Dana called this afternoon. She’s extremely unhappy.”

  “They tried to take the car and mail it themselves!”

  “You’re supposed to control them, Jen. You’re supposed to keep these lunatics alive!”

  “Until you have your book and your money?”

  He seemed stung. “It’s not just about money. Though I seem to remember you’re in for a share of it, too.”