American Woman: A Novel

by Susan Choi

  But to her it had seemed like a key: to understanding him, to knowing him, perhaps even to being his daughter. Her discovery of what he’d endured was the beginning of her discovery of history and politics, of power and oppression, of brotherhood and racism, and finally, of radicalism; but it only drove them to fight with each other. As she grew increasingly involved in the antiwar movement she and her father fought with increasing fury, but not increasing complexity—never about issues, never about the war itself, only about her arrogance, or perhaps it was her stupidity, or her naivete, in daring to oppose it. What do you know? he would shout. She moved at eighteen to Berkeley without finishing high school; in spite of how well she had done on the tests, the Stockton psychologist had put her back three grades, perhaps to make a point about the superiority of American versus Japanese schools. In Berkeley she enrolled in a night class on modern political science at a local community center, with the idea she might eventually transfer to a college that didn’t require a high school diploma. Her teacher was a clean-shaven senior at Berkeley, who’d just been thrown out for taking over the dean’s office a few credits shy of his B.A. degree. By the end of the term they’d become lovers. This was the calm way in which William denoted what for her was an unprecedented development. She had never before had a lover. Until him, she’d never even been kissed. If the connection she felt to her father had already been tenuous, her involvement with William destroyed it completely. There had been one catastrophic visit from her father to the apartment she and William were sharing. The fight that erupted, in which her father and William began trading astonishing insults, had been even worse than she’d feared, and her worst fears had been suitably dire. After that she and her father, in what was the least hostile position they both could arrive at, simply broke off their contact. William became her world, his language her language. She remembered thinking to herself, and sometimes even daring to utter aloud that They Had Become Lovers. And she remembered the joy she’d felt being propelled, by a manner of speech she would never have used, toward a life she had never imagined.

  Now that life was entirely gone; Dana had cut the last thread, all because Jenny had stuck her neck out for a trio of “comrades” who would never have done that for her, she would bet, and who still hadn’t written a word of their book. She was furious by the time she was driving the last few steep yards up the hill. She slammed the Bug’s door and strode toward the pond; they were skinny-dipping, something she’d been able to deduce before even reaching the house from the gay trail of clothes scattered over the grass. As she came level with the tea-colored, peat-stinking pool, she saw Yvonne waving to her and Pauline sitting carefully sunk to her shoulders, hair still dry. “I need to talk to you,” Jenny announced, surprised at how calm her voice sounded. Juan splashed up to Pauline from behind and plunged her under the surface. Pauline came up, screaming and sputtering.

  “Motherfucker!” Pauline cried.

  Pauline and Juan thrashed and churned in the murky water while Yvonne waded out, splashing mud off her knees and her thighs, and then turned back to watch them benignly. “Take a dip, Sister,” Yvonne said.

  “Some other time. I need to talk to you. All of you.”

  “What about?” Water dripped off Yvonne’s breasts and from her jumble of pubic hair. “Jenny wants to talk, comrades,” she called.

  Pauline and Juan paddled away from each other. Juan tilted back and submerged his head under the water, as if being baptized, and when he came up again his hair lay plastered darkly on his skull. “You look hot, Sister. Take your clothes off. Let us all see your natural skin.”

  “Goddammit, I need to talk to you!”

  “Nakedness ain’t no big thing. That don’t hang you up, do it?”

  “I’ll be in the house. Don’t keep me waiting.” She saw Pauline, sunk to her neck, look alarmed as she turned on her heel and left them.

  And she was glad to observe that all three of them seemed apprehensive when they ventured in the back door, their clothes sticking wetly to them, their hair dripping in ropes. She’d emptied their writing box onto the table. “Hey,” Juan said. “Get out of there.”

  “Have you done anything? Anything?”

  “That’s none of your business. Like I told you, we do it at our pace, not yours.”

  “Frazer’s coming back next week to see what you’ve done.”

  “We’re going to write it,” Juan said stubbornly.

  “When? Outside of this place the world’s still going on like before. They’re still looking for you. There’s no reason to think they won’t figure this out, pretty soon.”

  “Oh, my God,” Pauline murmured, twisting her hair.

  Juan said, “I never underestimate pigs, and pigs should never underestimate me. Let them come here. I’ll cook them for breakfast!”

  She didn’t leave the house again until they were actually in the front room rolling a blank sheet into the typewriter. “This won’t take long,” Juan said. “It’s pent up in our minds. It’ll feel good to spit it all out.” Outside she followed the slender aluminum pipe that came from the back of the house and traveled up the hill, lying almost out of sight in the grass. Even after it entered the trees the climb was steady, as the pipe angled in joints around boulders, or slipped through a crevice between. It seemed not to have rained in a while, but the cistern was full. Without pausing she stripped and sank into it.

  The cold felt unbearable but she stayed in, and washed herself with numb hands and raked her puckered fingers through her hair. Her limbs and torso and even her breasts gradually lost all feeling, until she was only aware of a pain in her bones. She still didn’t get out; the loss of all sensation felt good, the most aware of her body she’d been in a while. Like a backpacker or a pilgrim or every other kind of nomad she’d been without real privacy for so long that it seemed as if her body had vanished. Now it was just a vehicle, a shield, a tool. That it had ever housed beauty or pleasure seemed very unlikely. She closed her eyes, and saw William; the oval of sweat that would dampen his sternum. Sometimes she could arch up and transfer this sweat to herself. Past the door of the bedroom, their home: they were finally living alone. In the dark space defined by these things is her pleasure, opening like a stain. The first time it had happened to her she’d been so dazed already by pleasure that when she’d heard a strange noise, like an animal’s wail, she hadn’t realized it was coming from her.

  William Weeks. Later, she had tried to see him as the world had, studying his arrest photo in the newspapers. His full mouth was there but his eyes were opaque, not the eyes that she knew. His eyes as she knew them were bedroom eyes, superficially sated, but with a subtext of starvation in them. Eyes linked to the way he would fuck her, with reproachful frantic whimperings, as if he’d been deprived. He often, in the full light of day, had a sexually calculating, restless, predatory expression on his face, the same expression she sometimes saw when he was on her and arching to push farther in—a decadent look, as if sex with her were as ruinous as a drug addiction. Of course none of this was conveyed in the photo. There he looked like a former teen idol, corrupted by nothing much worse than old flannel workshirts and long hair. His prettiness had made him the sort of boy young girls fall in love with because they haven’t yet stopped loving girls, but he had also been the sort of man a certain type of woman particularly desires. After they had been together for more than two years she had understood that she wasn’t the only one, even once they were sharing a home. But she had been the central one, somehow unrivaled. She could not fathom why.

  Now she was distorted and blue in the cistern’s deep water. She reached for herself, pressing a hand between her legs, but no sooner had it flared than the impulse was gone. She looked up, at the cathedral-like structure of trees. Although the canopy was dense she could sense where the sun was; it had sunk a good way since she’d been here. She had to flop and flounder to get out of the cistern because now her whole body was numb. While she was sitting on the cistern’s
edge with rattling teeth and gooseflesh, waiting to dry off, she noticed that the hugest of the boulders had skidmarks behind them, as if they were traveling, more quickly than most geology travels, downhill toward the house.

  That night she was plunged into feverish dreams. She stood on shipboard with her father in the port of Hawaii, but this Hawaii was a Technicolor afterlife, as if the terrestrial one were mere shadows. These mountains rose in untouched velvet folds to the darkness of space; this sea was the color of fountain-pen ink. Floral scents were so strong she could taste them like soap in her mouth. Far offshore a huge waterspout stood, like a glass pedestal. “I’m swimming out there,” she said. “Don’t do that,” her father said. “Jenny.” She awoke strangely clutched with emotion. In the kitchen she encountered Yvonne, brewing coffee. “We’re getting to work,” Yvonne chirped, as if Jenny were a hallway proctor in high school. “I’m going for a long walk,” Jenny told her. But only a short way up the hill the surge crested and dribbled away. She had been impelled out of bed by the strong sense that someone expected her, and now she knew this was false. Slowly, she walked back to the house. The front room door was closed. With what seemed to be her last strength she crept back up the stairs and lay gingerly down on her bed.

  Some time later she was startled awake by the door to the front room banging open. “It’s too hot,” Yvonne said, from the foot of the stairs.

  “If we leave that door open, and the bedroom door open, the air’ll move better,” Juan said.

  “Where’s Jenny?”

  “She went out. For a walk.”

  The kitchen tap came on with a squeak, and a water glass filled. The refrigerator door sucked open and thumped shut again. Jenny closed her eyes. Some time after this, or perhaps immediately after this, Juan yelled, “Don’t waste tape if you’re only rehearsing. Goddammit! We don’t even know if you’re done with it yet.”

  “I made all those changes,” Pauline said.

  “I haven’t heard any changes. It goes on the tape when it’s done, and it’s done when I say.” After a pause he said, “So read.”

  “Okay,” Pauline said. Then came another pause, as if she were preparing herself; perhaps pushing her ragged hair behind her ears with several small nervous movements; or biting down quickly and hard on the corner of her thumb, as if trying to get a good chunk off before being caught. Pauline had scores of twitchy little tics that Jenny had absorbed without being aware, so that lying there, with her eyes closed, she was surprised by how detailed her imagining was. The corner of Pauline’s thumb—the inner corner, on her right hand—was flattened from gnawing and healing, as if the flesh had been neatly sliced off. “. . . New ideas, real ideas, were in the air all around me. But it wasn’t until I fell ill, from purely natural causes, that I truly began understanding the travesty of my life until then, and the rightness of my future comrades’ beliefs. I was so ill that I lay down all day. I heard a voice that was so sweet I thought I was dreaming. But I wasn’t dreaming. The voice belonged to the comrade who was caring for me. Not content just to be a good nurse, he was reading aloud to me, for hours on end. Later I would learn that the stirring words I was hearing were from Capital, by Karl Marx, and Soul on Ice, by Eldridge Cleaver, and Blood in My Eye, by George Jackson. Of course I’d heard of these books, but in my blighted old life I hadn’t thought them important. More and more I longed to see the face of this kind and wise person, this brother who was trying to teach me. I begged him to take off my blindfold. ‘Can’t I just see you?’ I said. ‘The words matter, not me,’ he explained.”

  Juan interrupted. “No blindfold.”

  “No blindfold?”

  “I already said to get rid of the blindfold.”

  “You already said I can’t be in the closet.”

  “For the last fucking time, you were not in a closet.”

  “Was it a pantry?”

  “It was a room. Maybe not like the nice rooms you’re used to.”

  “Well, what do I know,” Pauline said, “I was wearing a blindfold the whole fucking time.”

  “She has to explain why she couldn’t see him,” Yvonne said, in a peacemaking tone. “It’s sweet. She fell in love with his voice.”

  “I don’t care if she fell in love with his voice or his dick or whatever.”

  “Don’t talk about him like that,” Pauline said.

  “You hardly knew him, Princess. I might not have fucked him, but I actually knew him. Get rid of the blindfold. It’s bullshit.”

  “It’s true.”

  “It’s not true to the point of the story. There’s things that are facts that in context don’t help make the point.”

  “Then why can’t I see him?”

  “You can see him! Why the fuck do you have to not see him?”

  “Because,” Pauline said. At last she said, “It just mattered more when I couldn’t see him, and then I did finally see him.”

  “Figure out some other way to do it.”

  Pauline’s expression must have spoken for her because Juan added, “No one said it was gonna be easy. This is the real fucking deal. This is our book—” In frustration he kicked something, the tape recorder or typewriter, so that it left the coffee table and came down with a crash on the floor, and although it was far from an unfamiliar noise, Jenny jerked upright. Her back was not just damp, but streaming with sweat. The room seemed to react to her movement. It quivered, then fell still again.

  “What was that?” Yvonne said.

  She reeled from her bedroom and onto the landing. The three of them had emerged from the front room to look up the stairs. After a moment Yvonne said, “I thought you went walking.”

  “I started but I felt . . .” She let a vague gesture name her condition, and with that she realized she was sick.

  “Did we wake you?” Pauline asked.

  “I woke up on my own. I was thirsty.”

  She thought she felt a tense line of inquiry, connecting the three of them to her; but if she had, it fell slack and dissolved. They were drifting away to the kitchen. She followed, one hand tight on the railing to get down the stairs. It struck her that their actions were overly natural. She could remember other moments of terrifying acuteness endured during fevers, although for some reason she never recalled all the things she’d discerned. “Is that true?” she demanded abruptly. She felt the fever’s mingled weakness and weightlessness moving her forward. “You kept Pauline locked in a closet and wearing a blindfold?”

  They all turned back to her. She thought she saw Pauline redden.

  “I heard you,” she added. “I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but I did.”

  “Sister,” Yvonne said with amazement. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “In those communiques you used to send out, you said you were treating her better than prescribed in the Geneva Conventions. You said you let her exercise and read the papers and eat with you. ‘We knew we’d never prevail by punishing her. We always let her see that we’re true friends of liberty.’”

  After a moment Juan said, “All that’s true. But she had to be blindfolded in the beginning, so she couldn’t ID us. That’s standard, for her own protection. You know that, Jenny.”

  “What about the closet?”

  Juan grinned helplessly at the ceiling. “Ah, Christ. So you overheard that old debate.”

  “Pauline,” she said. “Why don’t you say something?”

  “Sister!” Yvonne said. “You can see for yourself that Pauline’s not some helpless prisoner.”

  “I could get in that car and drive off any time that I want,” Pauline said suddenly. “I’m more committed than you are.”

  “Don’t talk to her that way,” warned Juan.

  “Oh, she’s so great. I’m sick of it! Everything I do is wrong, and everything she does is right!”

  “That’s not true,” Jenny said.

  “Let’s see you accomplish one fourth of what Jenny accomplished. Let’s see you come from a nonwhite-skin background—
”

  “Oh God,” Jenny said. “Don’t.” The staircase was buckling beneath her. They were still arguing as she crawled upstairs, clutching the banister. Back on her bed, time slowed down to a crawl. Her bedsheets were drenched with her sweat but she was shaking from cold. She kept rising and closing the window and later realizing she still hadn’t closed it. Noises, the noises of dogs yapping, although there weren’t dogs, and of traffic, although there wasn’t traffic, filtered to her from outside. She didn’t know if it was then, or later, that she thought of the call of the soup man. This was a noise that she’d once tried to memorize and instead she’d forgotten, and even forgotten her attempt to remember. Now it sounded with force in her mind. It had only ever come on summer nights, when it was too hot to sleep soundly and yet so late that everyone had gone inside to try, and the streets were left utterly still, the air beneath the street lights showing yellow and viscous from the unmoving haze and the peculiarly Egyptian-seeming leaves of the ginkgo tree drooping like pendants—the keening seemed to come to them from miles away, carried somehow through the air on no breeze, sounding like the last cry of a mortally wounded coyote. It always pierced whatever depth of sleep and she would come conscious with her heart pounding and her hair standing straight up on end. Street light filtering in through the windows, the steady guttering sound of their fans, the underwater movements of her insomniac father like a deep sea fish, passive and depressive. All that seemed to gel, as if time were too thick to move forward. As if she were hovering over a bottomless well. Even the actions they took would seem shrouded in stillness. Her father was always wearing a robe belted over his pajamas, and a pair of thin slippers like footprints of cardboard with a dirty cloth band running over the knuckles. She would be wearing her nightgown, no slippers. Hand in hand they would pad down the dank, pungent stairwell five floors to the street. Looking back up she might see their window, in the top of the ginkgo, a lone square of light broken up by the leaves. Perhaps there was just one night like this, but she remembered it somehow as ceremony, exemption, deep sadness, the depth of the well of their life in Japan. The soup man would have seen their lone light, or perhaps he’d been waved at, to wait, by her father. When they emerged onto the sidewalk he would be standing next to his cart. His instrument, in her memory like a kazoo with a twist in the middle, which she linked to its uncanny cry, would lie mute in his hand. A small object that had somehow taken the sound of the soup man’s loneliness and cast it like a line across miles. Of course now the memory was marred by illogic. Why was he peddling his soup in the dead of the night? Why were she and her father the only two people who bought? Of some things she was sure: that the man’s cart was square and had two wheels and a long handle; when he wanted to move it he had to both lift up and push. There was a trap door on top and when the man opened it she heard liquid slapping within, like seawater restlessly trapped in the hold of a ship. She understood that in that country, hot things on hot nights could be cooling. It was an axiom that seemed to be bound to the natural laws of that country alone. The soup she didn’t really remember. Were there noodles? There must have been. And rich broth full of salt. They ate silently there on the street, gave the man back his bowls, climbed back up the stairs. Sweat pearled deliciously from every pore of her body beneath the long nightgown and she would feel cool, and then sleep as if drugged. One night like this, after the strange pilgrimage to the street in the dark in her nightgown, and the soup, and her own cool sweat, there was an earthquake near dawn, which she slept through.