American Woman: A Novel

by Susan Choi

  “I’ve got to survive.”

  “So do they. That’s my point.”

  “Then why aren’t you yelling at them.”

  He stared helplessly at her a moment, as if about to say something else; then he yanked open her door and went back down the stairs. She could hear Juan and Yvonne and Pauline coming through the back door, dropping things on the table. She lingered at the top of the stairs, but he didn’t come back. When she went down he was unpacking grocery bags into the fridge, with the three of them watching him mutely. The surprise was a feast: thick steaks, potatoes, a bucket of chocolate ice cream that was soft from its ride in the car, vegetables for a salad, a bottle of whiskey and two of red wine. “I know nobody’s vegetarian, because you ate burgers at Sandy’s,” Frazer was saying. “Pauline likes a plain burger, right? I bet that means plain steak, too. For the rest of us there’s A-1 sauce”—with a flourish—“and a shitload of stuff for potatoes. The oven works, I made sure of all that when we rented this place. There’s more in the trunk, but don’t peek—save some stuff for tomorrow.”

  “What’s all this for?” Juan managed weakly.

  Frazer laughed—a fake-sounding laugh, she thought angrily. “I’ve really confused things by coming up early. This weekend I was going to pick up your writing, remember? I jumped the gun a little—I’m sorry. I’ll get a couple days less of your writing, but that’s only fair. We’ll still celebrate. That’s what all this is for.”

  All three of them seemed confounded—by Frazer’s appearance, by the food, by the mention of writing. But at the word celebrate Yvonne seemed to home in; her gaze narrowed on Frazer as if he’d just said the one thing in the world that she found most distasteful. “I know that you’re just being nice,” she told him, “but we’re struggling for our brothers and sisters who’ve never had what we all got at birth, just for being born white. In terms of all that this is so self-indulgent.”

  “It’s not self-indulgent to celebrate when you have a good reason.”

  “Well, we don’t!” Yvonne said. “We can’t celebrate while our comrades’ ashes are still blowing into those shacks our black brothers and sisters in L.A. have to live in. Who’ll never afford to eat steak in their whole fucking lives.”

  “Sometimes you’re too much of a saint,” Juan told her suddenly. “Don’t be so proud of yourself.”

  Yvonne stared at Juan, silenced.

  “Look, my fault,” Frazer said. “I went overboard. Let’s just not waste this stuff, okay? It won’t happen again.”

  Yvonne had flushed deeply; she seemed to be containing a huge conflagration just under her skin. Pauline was watching her with what Jenny felt she recognized now as anxiety, but if Yvonne’s emotions were as obvious as weather, Pauline’s were indoors and shuttered and draped. “I guess we’ll see you in the morning,” Yvonne said, and turned on her heel and walked out. Pauline followed her quickly. The bedroom door slammed.

  Juan hadn’t moved since he’d admonished Yvonne; he was propped up against the door frame. He seemed on the verge of saying something in summation, but then he only said, “Good night, man.” He left the room and the bedroom door opened and slammed shut again.

  Now she and Frazer were alone. For a moment she pretended to be absorbed in listening for noises of argument or reconciliation from the downstairs bedroom, but there was only silence. She felt Frazer watching her. “Jenny,” he said.

  “I’m tired, too. I’ll see you in the morning.” She started upstairs, and he snapped off the kitchen light and followed. “Rob,” she said warningly.

  “Just to talk.”

  On the stairs there wasn’t even the faint sifting of moon- and starlight through the windows; she couldn’t see him at all, but she could smell him, the always surprisingly sweet scent of his skin, strangely familiar though he had never been her lover, or rather, though he’d just been her lover that once. She knew how near he stood from his heat and his breath. “Then talk here,” she said, sitting down on a step.

  “What if they come out?”

  “We’ll hear them.”

  He hesitated, but not as long as she thought that he might, and not petulantly. Finally she felt him sit down on the step just below her. He found her hand and she let him hold it; he held it gently, as a friend might. He didn’t clutch it or stroke it. “I’m sorry I yelled,” Frazer whispered.

  “It’s okay,” she said. She felt suddenly so comforted to be allied with someone, even if it was Frazer. After a moment she said, though she’d been afraid to, “They haven’t started their book.”

  “I figured. I’ll get them in gear.”

  “How?”

  “Would you stop worrying? If you want to keep worrying I’ll have to leave, or I’ll solve all your problems.”

  She laughed. “You’re the same asshole, Rob.”

  “And you’re the same.” He stopped talking and reached for her.

  “No,” she said, pressing him back.

  For a moment she just heard his breathing. Then, “You can’t blame me for trying,” he joked.

  She found his head in the dark, kissed its crown quickly, and stood. “Good night, Rob,” she said, finding the banister.

  “Good night, sweetheart.” And then he stood also, and made his way down.

  THE NEXT DAY was tall and dark blue and much cooler than the few days before it. She and Frazer dug a fire pit in back of the house and lined it with flat stones that they found up and down the hillside. Juan dragged dead branches out of the woods and threw them carelessly into a pile. Inside Pauline and Yvonne cut vegetables for a salad. They had tuned the radio to music and set it up in the window, so the music moved out on the breeze. But a pall still hung over the day, deepening by the hour. The three fugitives seemed to have repaired their rift of the night before by turning a blank, sullen face to Frazer. When they sat down to eat in the late afternoon Juan and Yvonne and Pauline only picked at their food. None of them spoke; she and Frazer were left talking to each other, like nervous hosts trying to keep a bad party afloat. She was growing angry with them—for shoring up their unity by snubbing Frazer, for behaving like children about the good meal, which she wanted to relish but now somehow could not—when Frazer finally shoved his plate aside, and everyone else set aside theirs as well, although they were crowded with uneaten food. “Did I say I had another surprise?” Frazer said with a show of great cheer. “And you guys, don’t keep me waiting anymore! Why don’t you bring out the pages you’ve got and let me take a look at them.” She caught Frazer’s eye but he only smiled at her.

  After a moment Juan said, “You first, man.”

  Frazer strode off and they heard his trunk open and boom shut again. When he reemerged from the side of the house he had a long, slender gun in each hand. He stopped a short distance from where they were sitting and propped the guns against the trunk of a tree. “How about a trade?” he suggested.

  Juan, Yvonne, and Pauline were all staring at the guns. “A trade?” Juan said.

  “A trade. Or maybe I should hold on to these until you’ve kept up your end of the bargain? Because I have the weirdest feeling, I don’t know why, that you haven’t even started to work on the book. Maybe it’s the way you’ve been acting like you don’t understand why I’m here. Maybe it’s that I slept on the front room couch last night, and when I woke up I noticed the big box of paper and shit that I gave you, and everything in it is your eulogy tape written five hundred ways, and not a page of the thing we discussed. Am I right about this? There’s no harm done so far, but I’d like you to be open with me.”

  Yvonne and Pauline had turned pale; Juan was gaping at Frazer as if he were choking on something. “And you’ll hold on to those until we’ve kept up our end of the bargain?” Juan said. “Those aren’t even real guns! What do you think we are, man? What are you trying to do to us?”

  The two girls looked wildly from Frazer to Juan. “Not real guns?” said Yvonne.

  “They’re rifles,” said Frazer.
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  “Air rifles,” Juan said. “BB guns. Did you think that I can’t tell the difference?”

  “You said you would help us!” Pauline said. “And you made us all give up our guns and you said you’d replace them.”

  “I am replacing them.”

  “With those?” Juan exclaimed.

  “Not even with these unless you show me you’ve made a real start!” The trio was suddenly silent. “I am helping you,” Frazer went on, in a quieter voice. “But you, you’ve got to pull yourselves together. I know you’re in pain but you have to get moving. People look up to you, did you know that? Did you know there’s graffiti about you on the walls of the college I got fired from? I walked past it yesterday. It says how much they love you, and that their hearts are with you. That made me feel good, to know that you’re here, and safe, and that I had a little to do with that. I am helping you. But you have to fucking help yourselves, too.”

  “Don’t tell us what to do, man,” Juan said, but Jenny saw his eyes glitter, and she thought he might cry right in front of them.

  “I’m not,” Frazer said. “I’m not telling, I’m asking. I’m asking.”

  For a long time they all stared at their gore-covered plates. The wind picked up and Jenny felt goosepimples prickling her skin. “These play guns are pretty ridiculous,” Juan finally said. He got up slowly, unkinking his knees, and then he crossed the grass to where Frazer had put them and picked the guns up to look at them.

  “I know,” Frazer said, “but I’ve had delays and these came to hand, so I wanted to get them to you. At least you can do target practice.”

  “We’ve had delays, too, but we’ll get it together,” Juan sighed. “We’ll keep up our end of the bargain. Am I saying the right thing?” he demanded.

  “Yes, baby,” Yvonne said. She went and put her arms around his waist. They made a strange tableau, Juan standing with arms extended, a long gun in each hand, and Yvonne softly wrapped around him.

  Frazer stayed, talking easily, pouring whiskey and wine, as the western light slanted more steeply, and their shadows grew long, and the campfire fell into embers. By the time he was standing to leave, as sunset began, he had brought them around. They were all laughing, even Pauline; they were lazily sprawled on the grass in the quickening wind. They had finished their steaks. Frazer told the story of one of his firings, imitating the pop-eyed indignation of his strait-laced colleagues, the sangfroid of the black kids he’d coached, his own half-goofy, half-swaggering triumphs, and she lay in the grass being warmed by the whiskey, and watching. When he really was leaving—he didn’t want to, he didn’t! . . . but he had to get back to the city—Yvonne abruptly embraced him, a belated apology, and then Juan and Pauline did as well. “You too, Jenny,” said Frazer. She stood lazily out of the grass and went toward him, the pleasant haze of the whiskey around her, and let herself be enfolded. “See?” he whispered, his breath in her ear.

  “Venceremos,” Frazer called out to them, as he started his car.

  EARLY THE NEXT MORNING she was sitting high on the hillside above the house with a mug of coffee and a book when she heard the back door, and looking down saw the three of them slowly emerge. They didn’t see her, mixed in as she was from their vantage with the forest behind her. Juan put his hands on his hips and looked assessingly at the long open slope the house sat on. Then, after an awkward transition, as if he were throwing himself in cold water, he started to run.

  Once he was actually moving he moved with surprising ease. Yvonne and Pauline followed, Yvonne readily, Pauline less so. Pauline wasn’t clumsy, but she seemed to require more mediation between herself and the earth. Jenny could imagine her erect on the back of a horse, or slicing through the water with an elegant crawl, but jogging seemed wrong for her. Still, Pauline jogged after Juan and Yvonne with unsure, choppy strides, and vanished as they had behind the far side of the house. Juan and Yvonne reemerged a beat later, abreast. When Pauline reappeared she was already a half lap behind. By the end of the exertion, which did not go on long, Juan and Yvonne might have circled the small house ten or twelve times, while Pauline’s orbit had grown so slow, and so far out of sync, that Jenny couldn’t count any of them correctly. Pauline sank down on the back step and put her head on her knees while Juan and Yvonne did a series of toe touches, and then Juan shook Pauline by the shoulder, she rose, and all three went back into the house.

  The brief spectacle weirdly thrilled her; she had to set her book down and stare over her coffee at the hills growing haloes of gold in the strengthening light before she understood why. When she was a child she and her father had lived for a while in Japan. Seeing Juan and Yvonne and Pauline run like that, in their tight little circuit, had made her think of gym class at her Japanese school. All the boys and girls wearing identical brilliant white trousers and shirts and soft caps and thin sneakers; sometimes they’d played team games, with balls, and when they all grew too hot they would thoughtlessly take off their shirts, boys and girls, even when they were twelve and thirteen. But mostly they’d jogged. All of them, paired, in a winding defile in their blinding white clothes with their footfalls in perfect accord. Singing, they’d jogged through the streets of their cramped little town, while the old people waved. Singing, they’d risen out of town on the gravel-paved road that soon turned into dirt. Her first few times, gasping and blistered, she had fallen farther and farther behind, and perhaps she’d been taken back down by an older classmate. But soon, as with the language, as with dress and regime and friendship, she grew able to do it. They had jogged, a great body of children, as if they were going to war. Past the wet scrolled eaves of the frail ancient houses, and the eaves of the temples with their banners of prayers. She remembered the road out of town, the stones denting her thin canvas sneakers, but sprinting past tiredness and pain to a fleet-footed joy. They would jog endless miles, the whole day, though this couldn’t be true. It was school, after all, and they had all the usual subjects. But it was jogging en masse she remembered, the small wooden shrines on the roadside far out in the country, the long-distance walkers bent over their sticks, the road level between the drenched fields, distant hills rising round from the green, level ground. Their town miles forgotten. She tried now, but she couldn’t remember a single adult.

  She found them in the kitchen, red-faced and a little bit trembly, all smoking in silence. “You jogged,” she said, and they looked furtive, even embarrassed. “There’s better places to jog than just in rings around the house,” she went on. “There are all sorts of fields, when you go left from the barn. I think this place was a dairy farm once. Most of it’s hilly, but some of the fields are level. There are pastures back there. And you can’t see them at all from the road.”

  As she’d thought they would, they seemed a little resentful that she was suggesting anything to them, but they also seemed, though reluctantly, curious. “Security,” Juan said shortly. “In the house, behind the house, and right near the house are secure.”

  “What about the pond?” Yvonne asked him.

  “What about it?”

  “We could go swimming in it.”

  Juan looked at Yvonne witheringly, and Yvonne sighed and shrugged, but after that Jenny felt more encouraged. She could tell that they longed to be outside; they longed to do something. Frazer had put them at ease, and she was starting to think that the secret was just taking action. You couldn’t leave them to transform themselves.

  Over the next few days, while they were slumped on the couch drinking wine, or perhaps more adventurously clumped outside around the fire pit drinking whiskey, she started to inquire about the things they’d done before. When their comrades were all still alive, had there been—exercise?

  “There was physical training and war games,” Juan said. “Always limited, obviously, by our urban setting, and the importance of staying low-profile.”

  “Right,” she said.

  Another morning she remembered Frazer’s mention of target practice. “So, you used to
do target practice?”

  “More than that.” Juan seemed amazed by her ignorance. Hadn’t he told her about combat training? Though it was true that once Pauline was with them, the cadre hadn’t been able to go outside anymore. “We stayed sharp,” Juan explained. They’d practiced search-and-rescue, ambush, self-defense, although it had been hard in a three-bedroom railroad apartment. Tripping over electrical cords, freaking out downstairs neighbors.

  “Of course!” she agreed.

  Finally, one morning Juan handed her a supply list as she was preparing to go buy the papers:

  wine

  beer

  cigarettes

  whiskey

  one (1) bag approx 5 lbs unmixed cement

  one (1) lg bag sand or gravel

  The cement turned out to be for old flower pots and paint cans Juan had found in the barn; filled with it, they were stuck onto short lengths of broomstick, to serve as barbells. The sand was for filling up socks, which were tied off with twine and then made into loops, to be ankle and wrist weights. The barn had also yielded a few stacks of shaky sawhorses and these were set up in one field for an obstacle course. In another Juan paced out a half-mile loop, and soon the weeds there were flat from the number of times he and Pauline and Yvonne had run over it. The wrist and ankle weights were a process of trial and error; Pauline’s ankle ones were too large and kept flying off her feet, so she was always looking for them in the grass, and her wrist ones chafed her from the twine. But Juan sat squinting beneath the front-room lamp for hours one night with a needle and thread, and modified them with a T-shirt he tore into strips. He made a schedule:

  8 A.M. rise

  8–8:30 washing, eating

  8:30–11:30 field training: physical strength/readiness, combat strategy, weapons (when weapons arrive)

  11:30–12 ego reconstruction

  12:00 lunch

  “What’s ego reconstruction?” Jenny asked.

  “Cadre stuff, can’t discuss that,” Juan said.

  Once Juan and Yvonne and Pauline had worked out a routine she constantly saw them jogging, through the overgrown pasture uphill from the house, or up the dirt track that made a long S from the house to the barn. They were usually so far away they were just jerky movement against the landscape, but even then she could almost immediately tell them apart. On his stout piston legs Juan moved squarely, with almost no bounce, like a human bull-dozer. Yvonne bounced and bounded in arcs like a deer or a colt. Pauline was the slight form that always lagged badly behind. They ate now, and stayed awake in the daytime, and asleep in the night; she wasn’t startled by their unsteady movements at dawn anymore. They went red, and then brown, from the sun. Even Pauline slowly took on a healthier tinge, and the dark circles under her eyes correspondingly faded. Sometimes they fought, but with rediscovered and intense energy, as if fighting were a heady relief after weeks of grim union. The sawhorse hurdles were too tall for Pauline, and when the wind blew the right way Jenny heard passionate disputations; Pauline once came running full tilt toward the house with a red-faced Juan chasing her. And yet at the end of the day they would lie in the grass drinking beer—even their drinking seemed somehow more wholesome—and going over the progress of the day with earnest absorption, talking over goals met and goals still fallen short of, race times, numbers of repetitions. They’d found tools in the barn, an electric bandsaw and a lathe and a handsaw and drill and all sorts of other surprising and functional things, and Juan finally took the handsaw, Pauline watching, and shortened the hurdles.