American Woman: A Novel

by Susan Choi

  One night Juan said, in the middle of dinner, “We’ll resume combat drills tomorrow. We ought to be in good enough condition. If we aren’t we’ll have to get that way, fast.” He didn’t look at anyone particularly when he said this, but the comment seemed directed at Pauline.

  “What about weapons?” Yvonne said.

  “We’ll use the stupid BBs, for something to carry. We need to get our asses in gear. We spend too much time just sitting around.”

  “We’re not just sitting around,” Pauline said.

  “If you think you’ve been having it tough you ain’t seen nothing yet, Princess.”

  “We don’t have enough people anymore for combat drills,” Pauline added.

  “Sure we do. Two-on-one.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “We won’t team against you. It’s more like me and Yvonne play each other, and one of us gets you as a handicap.”

  “Ha, ha.”

  “Don’t pout, Polly,” Yvonne said.

  “Fuck you,” Pauline said. Yvonne laughed.

  “Actually, I was thinking that Jenny could join us,” Juan said, and suddenly Pauline’s face seemed to darken for real. “To even things up,” Juan said, turning to Jenny. “You can team with Pauline.”

  “I don’t really like war games,” she said. She was watching Pauline, as Juan wasn’t. Pauline’s eyes weren’t glistening, her mouth wasn’t trembling, but she was sitting so tensely, her fork suddenly stilled, that it seemed she might shatter if someone disturbed her.

  “You should do it for the exercise, regardless of what you like or don’t like,” Juan was saying, “because the revolution needs your body to be strong. I know you have a good mind, I can tell that—”

  “Why can’t I be with you or Yvonne?” Pauline interrupted.

  “Jenny’ll be a great teammate.”

  “But I’m the least experienced. I should be with one of you.”

  “She’s the least experienced. Compared to her you’re an old pro. You won’t be the rookie. You’ll like that.”

  Jenny interrupted, loudly. “I’d rather not anyway.”

  “You’ll like that,” Juan was repeating. “Won’t you. Hey. I’m talking to you.”

  Pauline was looking at her plate. “Yeah,” she said, after a minute.

  “I’d rather not, anyway,” she repeated, but now Pauline looked at her for the first time.

  “Come on,” Pauline said. “We need someone to even out the teams.”

  “I could team with Juan or Yvonne.”

  “No,” Pauline said. “Team with me.” She was adamant now; she waited for consent almost fiercely, while Juan and Yvonne, sipping beers, forking up their spaghetti, seemed to consider the issue resolved.

  “All right,” she said finally.

  “Great,” Pauline said, in a tone that did not seem sincere; but then Juan looked pleased, and suddenly Pauline also looked pleased, while Yvonne had looked pleased all along.

  THE OBJECT of the game was to make it to the goal without dying. They chose the house’s water cistern for the goal, hiking up to it together through the woods, over and around the huge boulders, sometimes sinking knee-deep into leaves from the previous fall. On the way back down they split into teams and scouted good ambush spots. Pauline chose a large boulder with a crack down its middle, so that from behind it a slice of the forest below could be seen.

  “They’ll give us a five-minute head start. When we head off, split up so that they see we went two different ways. Then we’ll meet here and try to ambush them.”

  “All right,” she said. “Pauline, listen—”

  Pauline turned without another word and began picking her way down the slope.

  When the game started Jenny had trouble finding the split boulder again, and expected Pauline to be waiting impatiently when she arrived, but Pauline wasn’t there. The five minutes had passed. Five more went by, then ten. She was feeling alarmed when Pauline came unsteadily toward her, one tree to the next, and finally dropped down beside her. Pauline was breathing hard, and the blue vein at her temple was jumping. “I led them the wrong way and then lost them,” she whispered.

  “I was starting to think you were hurt.”

  Pauline gulped another few breaths. “I was fine,” she said shortly. “I don’t see why you’d think I was hurt.”

  “It’s not a criticism.”

  “You only got here first because you came directly. I was trying to lead them astray.”

  After a moment Jenny said, “I know you didn’t want to be on the same team. You could have let me tell Juan that I’d rather not play.”

  “I don’t care. It doesn’t make any difference.”

  Pauline’s gaze flicked away. Looking at her so closely, at the dark eyebrows like wings on the fine-featured face, the blue veins at the temples that never appeared in newsprint, Jenny could see that the bruiselike eye circles hadn’t faded away so much as been somewhat obscured by Pauline’s darkened skin. “Are you all right?” she said. “You look tired.”

  “Shh. It’s sloppy to talk. They might hear us.” After a moment Pauline added, “Of course I’m tired. It’s impossible to sleep with all the mice in that house.”

  “I hardly ever see mice anymore.”

  “Just because you don’t see them doesn’t mean they’re not there. They’re more careful, that’s all. Shh!” Pauline sat up suddenly. Jenny sat up, as well. Before Pauline had arrived she’d been listening to a strange little bird perched above her that made a sound like a car’s engine trying to turn over: eh eh eh eh eh eh. Now the bird started again, in a different location. Below was a flicker of movement: the top of Juan’s head, re-eclipsing behind a tree trunk. Then Juan burst from his tree in two long strides, reached another wide tree, disappeared. He was just below them. Pauline slowly stood up, one hand on the boulder. Jenny heard the wind sigh through the canopy, so far above that she couldn’t feel it. The tree trunks creaked softly, like ships. Juan emerged from his shelter and ran, and Pauline leaped out into his path. “Ha!” she yelled. “Bang you’re dead!”

  AT THE END of their first week of training Juan declared that they’d done well enough to take the next day off. That evening he and Yvonne and Pauline made as if to carouse until late. They turned up the radio loud and tuned in a rock station. They opened fresh beers. Jenny took hers onto the porch and sat staring out at the gathering dusk, but she’d only been alone a few minutes when the door opened behind her. To her surprise it was Juan; he stepped out with a chair and sat down next to her. “What’s so riveting out there?” he asked.

  “I’m just looking for the first star.” She expected him to snort with derision, but instead he turned from her face, to the sky, and surveyed it with interest.

  “What’ll it be?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t really follow the skies. I just like to see the first star. Sometimes it’ll be a planet, like Jupiter or Venus. Sometimes it’s just whatever of the really bright stars is in the part of the sky that you’re looking at. I don’t even know which constellations should be out right now. Summer ones, obviously, but I have to see them to know what they are.”

  “That’s still a hell of a lot more than most people know.”

  “It’s a bourgeois indulgence, stargazing,” she said, mostly to tweak him. She guessed it was something he’d say.

  “I didn’t say that. I think it’s cool, that you know all this stuff.”

  “It’s just the fruits of isolation and boredom. See how much trivia you know after living like this for another few years.” As soon as she’d said this she wished that she hadn’t. She knew the fugitive life worked much better when you avoided reference to the future. The twilight had accelerated as they were watching, and suddenly she noticed not just the first star, but three different stars burning hotly in three different parts of the sky. “Shit,” she said, and Juan noticed them too.

  “So much for keen eyes,” he said. They heard the clatter of dishes from the ki
tchen, Yvonne singing along to the radio. “You know, you could be a real leader,” Juan said suddenly. “Quit this ‘I’m in retirement’ attitude. You’ve got the chops. And you’ve got a brown skin.”

  “What does that have to do with it?”

  “You owe your people your leadership. You can’t go denying your race. You don’t just owe the revolution in general, you owe your people in particular.”

  “Human beings are my people.”

  “But that’s denying your race!”

  “Just because I’m a Japanese woman, you can’t define me in terms of just that. And I’m not in retirement. I don’t know what you mean when you say that.”

  “I don’t see you lifting a finger for the revolution.”

  “How about what I’m doing right now, devoting myself to a madman like you?”

  Juan surprised her again; his laughter rang off the porch. She remembered, with odd disconnection, their first few weeks here, the funereal stillness and silence. Now Juan laughed so loudly that although she heard the door open behind them, she didn’t really take notice of it. “All I’m saying,” Juan said, “is your skin is a privilege. Your Third World perspective’s a privilege.”

  “And all I’m saying is, stop saying I’m from the Third World when I’m from California.”

  “You’d make an exceptional leader, that’s all that I’m saying. Hey, Princess,” he added, and she turned and saw Pauline in the darkness behind them. She’d come out when the door creaked, Jenny realized. She’d been listening to them for a while.

  “Pull up a chair,” Juan said. “Where’s Y?”

  “Making pudding.”

  “Take a load off. You’re spooking me, just standing there.”

  “I wouldn’t want to butt in,” Pauline said, and she went back inside.

  Now it was dark, and in the dense spill of stars Jenny couldn’t find the first three she had spotted. “Pauline dislikes me,” she said after a moment, when she was sure Pauline really had gone.

  “She’s just jealous. She likes being the belle of the ball.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “She knows how important she is. The Publicity Princess. But she’s still got to learn that there’s no substitute for a Third World perspective like yours. Brown, yellow, black, red: those are four things that she’ll never be. And she isn’t just white, she’s a filthy rich white. Y and I are from the Midwest, and I’m not saying our town wasn’t racist, or that we don’t have a taint that we’ll never repair. But at least we’re blue-collar. We can relate to working brothers and sisters all over the world. Pauline’s a big step behind us that way, and she’d like to pretend that she isn’t. That’s why you’re a good lesson. She sees your reality and knows that she won’t ever know it. Like I tell her, she can’t kill what she is. She can only atone.”

  “You don’t really say that to her?”

  “Her consciousness is our responsibility. It’s up to us to undo the wrong thinking she’s done all her life.”

  “But it’s wrong to condemn her because of her background! She can’t be faulted for where she comes from. That’s as bad as racism.”

  “You can’t say that I’m racist,” Juan said earnestly. “I’ve always wished I was black. Not just wished it, but willed it. If any black man came to me and said Change places with me—regardless of if he was poor, or in prison, or was suffering in ten different ways, I would do it without thinking twice.”

  “That’s just guilt. And it’s selfish.”

  “Maybe it’s selfish, to want the kind of integrity that you can take for granted.”

  “I don’t have more integrity than you do, just because of my skin. I wish you wouldn’t use me as an example of something I don’t believe.”

  “I could use you as an example of humility, too, but you’re almost too humble. A racial leader should be more prideful. Our leader was humble, but he was also a hard-ass. He was one motherfucker, and in this world that’s just what it takes.”

  Juan fell silent and she could see him tipped back staring up at the sky, perhaps finding his leader immortalized there in the stars. Everything that he’d said rankled her, and yet his belief was total and serene, more serene than any aspect of him she’d encountered so far.

  A FEW DAYS before this she’d heard a commotion after everyone had gone to bed, and returned downstairs to find Pauline tugging her twin mattress through the bedroom door into the front room while Juan and Yvonne, in the double bed, writhed with their heads under pillows. “Polly, stop,” Yvonne said. “They’re just mice. You’re way bigger than them.”

  “They’re not in your bed,” Pauline said, struggling to flip the limp mattress over. “See?” she cried, when it faced downside up. There was a hole in the ticking about as big as a fist. “They were in there!”

  “Get the fuck back to bed!” thundered Juan.

  The furor hadn’t died down until Jenny stuffed the hole with balls of newspaper, difficult enough because half the pages strewn around the room Pauline wanted to save. They’d all been annotated in one way or another. Under a headline that read STANDARD OIL CHIEF MAKES PROJECTIONS the photo of the frowning oil chief had been embellished by a black felt-tip frame and captioned TYPE 1 OFFENDER. Other pages carried articles about the fugitives themselves. “Not that one!” Pauline kept saying. Finally the hole was filled up and Jenny sealed it over with the wide roll of cellophane tape that she used for her letters. Her fingers were stained gray from the newsprint, and the grime got all over the tape. “Do another layer,” Pauline said. “Another piece at the bottom. No, longer. Like that.”

  “Say thank you!” Juan yelled from the bedroom. “She’s not your goddamn maid, Princess!”

  The next day Jenny had set out wooden mousetraps, more from a desire to feel efficient than to catch and kill mice, and then they’d found the first caught mouse squeaking weakly and trying to tear itself free. Amid shrieks of horror she’d scooped it up, run out the back door and thrown mouse and trap into the pond. Belatedly she’d feared the wooden trap would float, prolonging the mouse’s awful death even more. But the injured mouse was heavier; it sank. Coming back to the house, Yvonne gave her a huge mug of wine. Pauline was on the couch, tightly wound in her sheet, with a cigarette burning. “Such a disgusting way to kill them,” Pauline whispered. “And it doesn’t even work!”

  Juan had said, “That’s what Princesses get for complaining so much.”

  The morning after she’d stargazed with Juan on the porch Jenny drove to the hardware store in Monticello, then in Liberty, then simply stayed on the state road and asked in every town that she passed. “I’m looking for something that takes care of mice without hurting them. Or killing them,” she explained. Most of the store owners looked at her blankly, but in the fifth store she tried the owner held a hand up to tell her to wait, and after a few minutes returned with a metal grate box. It had a handle on top, and a dial on the side like an egg timer. “It’s humane,” he explained. “I don’t know if it works. I’ve never actually sold one before.”

  The next day they resumed combat training. When she and Pauline had reconnoitred behind the branches of a fallen pine tree, Jenny said, “I’d like to show you something, later on. It’s a sort of experiment.”

  “Shh,” Pauline said. “You know we’re not supposed to chitchat.”

  “Come upstairs after they’ve gone to sleep.”

  Pauline hesitated, then jumped. Something had snapped in the brush, but it was only a chipmunk. “What kind of experiment?” Pauline said. “Don’t you want to show Juan?”

  “Not really. I just want to show you.”

  She could tell that Pauline didn’t want to appear interested. “Then just say what it is.”

  “Then just come up and see.”

  “I think I see them. Be quiet!” Pauline said.

  That night Jenny stayed awake in the attic room reading as her watch ticked past one, then one-thirty, then two. Finally, feeling strangely stung, she turn
ed off the lamp and lay staring into the dark. She wasn’t sure how much later it was when she heard a soft step on the stair. Pauline knocked, barely making a noise, and she got up and pulled open the door. Pauline slipped in and shut the door behind herself and waited in the dark while Jenny lit the lamp. Then they both stood awkwardly, like the first guests at a very small party.

  “I haven’t been in this room since we came up here to get the other bed,” Pauline offered, after a moment.

  “There’s not much here,” she said, gesturing.

  One of her snapshots of William was propped on the bedside table, and she saw Pauline notice it, and then pretend not to have noticed. She picked up the photo and handed it to her. Pauline took it by the edges, and studied it closely. “So this is him,” she said, as if the two of them had discussed William so often that he had become, in their discourse, simply “him,” when they’d never discussed him—or anything, for that matter—before.