American Woman: A Novel

by Susan Choi

  Perhaps she didn’t remember this during her fever; perhaps it was there in her body but not found by her mind until later. Perhaps, after her fever had broken, and she saw Pauline in her doorway, the memory of the soup man came for the first time and tinged all the hours before. Pauline was watching her tentatively—she was holding a bowl of soup. “Jenny,” she said. “You’ve been sick. You’ve been—talking. Sometimes you would seem to wake up and talk to us, but then what you said wouldn’t make any sense. We didn’t know what we would do if you didn’t get better. We can’t call a doctor. What would we have done?”

  “You were here?” she said, sitting up weakly.

  Pauline nodded. “All of us were.”

  “It’s just you now.”

  “They’re sleeping. It’s late. It’s past three in the morning.”

  “You should be sleeping, too.”

  “I couldn’t,” Pauline said. “Do you want this soup? It’s cooled off, but I can go and reheat it.”

  She nodded, mutely. A few minutes later Pauline was back, with the soup now steaming. A slight smell of char wafted off it. “I think I burned it,” Pauline said. And then, with frustration, “I know how to cook. I used to cook complete meals. I was good at it.”

  “That’s okay,” Jenny said. She lowered her face to the soup, and took a careful spoonful. To her surprise her stomach growled with desire; she began eating quickly.

  “I’m sorry I said that to you,” Pauline said, watching her. “About how you do everything right and I’m sick of it. I didn’t mean it.”

  She felt newly focused, as if the soup were fresh blood that had gone to her head. “I heard you arguing with Juan about a closet,” she said. “And a blindfold.”

  “I know, but you don’t know the context. Those points aren’t important.”

  “You seemed to feel they were important.”

  “You don’t know the context,” Pauline said again. “I don’t want to explain.”

  Jenny thought of Juan’s words: There’s things that are facts that in context don’t help make the point. “Before I’d met any of you, I asked Frazer if he was sure you were staying with them out of choice.”

  Pauline was suddenly hard-eyed and silent, and Jenny remembered her at the beginning—before combat training, before summer sun, before food. A pale blue wraith made of stone. “Jenny, we were all really scared when you were having your fever. And I really did want to apologize. But you don’t know what you’re talking about, okay? You don’t really know me.”

  “Okay,” she said, after a moment.

  Now Pauline seemed less certain. “Can I show you something?” she asked. “If you’re not really tired.”

  “I’ve been sleeping all day.”

  Pauline went downstairs and came back a few minutes later with a brown document envelope addressed to Frazer. Its flap had been torn open but the metal brad and its matching hole were still intact, and with the brad the envelope had been neatly reshut. “Not the envelope,” Pauline said. “I just took it from Frazer’s to organize things, when we were still in New York. Look inside.”

  Inside was a slim pile of clippings. Most had been torn out rather than clipped, although torn with great care. There were pages from Newsweek and Time with six holes down the center where the staples had been. Leafing through the pile Jenny looked for the black-felt-tip underlining she’d come to recognize as Pauline’s signature, but these pages were largely unmarked. In some places a light vertical line in the margin indicated that something of note lay nearby. She remembered the features from Newsweek and Time, sweeping overviews of Pauline’s case that had been rich with pictures but poor in detail. Just a few lines had merited notice from the subject herself: an expulsion from school and the loss of a job, each mention as slight as the inked lines with which she had marked them. The newspaper clippings were meatier. They were from Bay Area tabloids that Jenny hadn’t seen in over two years; they weren’t the kinds of things subscribed to by the Rhinebeck library. Subtleties she never would have noticed without the long absence now seemed sharply familiar: the quality of the paper, the typeface. On the backs, parts of ads like old landmarks. The most recent clipping bore a date from just after the shootout. IN THE END, read the title, COPS, AGENTS MAKE NO DISTINCTION BETWEEN “VICTIM” AND CAPTORS.

  Going back through the earlier clippings, she saw they were all on this theme. NEW NAME, BUT OLD ROLE: AS THE FAMILY REBEL. And, KIDNAPPED HEIRESS MAY HAVE HAD MORE IN COMMON WITH CAPTORS THAN INITIALLY THOUGHT. The expulsion, from a girls’ convent boarding school, had been for sneaking out and talking back to a nun. The job loss had been from a restaurant: she had taken a job as a hostess, though she didn’t need money, and had later been fired for supporting the bus boys when they tried to get their pay raised to minimum wage. The idea that Pauline had always been some sort of antiestablishment rebel had been explored by the scandal-minded media even before she’d announced that she’d come to see her captors as comrades. But it had always been minor, not much more convincing than the contrasting portrait of her as intensely devoted to tennis. “You don’t have to read them all,” Pauline said.

  She put down the clippings and fingered the bedsheet, worn and pilled and now damp with her sweat; the night breeze pulsed in through the still-open window, but it no longer chilled her. She watched Pauline watching her: with satisfaction? with hope? She finally said, as if treading on glass, “You must be glad to have finally found comrades who share your same views.”

  She thought she saw some small portion collapse; as if, within the full bird’s-eye sweep of a complex, unknowable city, one building had fallen. “Yes,” Pauline said, quickly putting the clippings away. Something had not been said that she’d wanted to hear; or something had been said that she hadn’t expected; Jenny watched helplessly, as Pauline closed the envelope, carefully pressed flat the small metal brad, then took up the used bowl and spoon. And there, for a moment, Pauline seemed at peace—as if the small gesture of tending to something unhooked her from whatever she felt. “It’s almost morning,” she said. “We should sleep.” She went back downstairs before Jenny could answer.

  Jenny turned off her lamp. When her eyes adjusted she saw dawn had already begun. The few forms in the room slowly gathered themselves into view. Downstairs a lamp was still on; she listened intently, and heard the soft rustling of paper. That sound, and the faint lamplight sifting upstairs, felt like safety to her, though she knew they were not. They reminded her of the last stage of sickness in childhood, when no longer sick, but still treated with care. That exceptional feeling of safety, and freedom. Downstairs, in the bedroom-cum-office, with its overflowing desk of business papers and its collection of particularly cherished and difficult plants crowding all of the sills, her father would have fallen asleep in his chair with the light on. If she stole down for a glass of orange juice and his door was ajar, she would hear his restrained, haughty snoring. She’d have his thin ray of light to see by. This would have been early childhood, Stockton, before they moved to Japan. She didn’t know why she thought fondly of that house when it had been so uncomfortable to her. It had always been too small and too crowded with junk, like a garage or an attic. The boundary between private house and open-to-the-public greenhouse had never quite been determined. There was the sideline in appliance repair; half-deconstructed mechanisms would be gathering dust on the tables, on old sheets of newspaper. Her father’s indifferent bookkeeping would have strewn sales slips everywhere. In the huge handmade urn near the door was their massive jade plant, like some vegetal form of an elephant, all winding coarse trunks and great rubbery ears; the dim light would reflect off the leaves. They never dusted or vacuumed or swept, but her father did wipe every leaf of that tree with a damp cotton cloth once a week.

  She remembered lecturing him in that house every year on her birthday, detailing why her new age was the best age to be. Six was the first year of school, when it would be novel but not yet a grind. Seven was the quintessence of luc
ky, the most lucky she’d be all her life. At eight she was still young enough to have fun, but old enough to appreciate it. He would listen to her without comment, continuing some household task. Sometimes he might close the discussion by saying, “I’m sure that you’re right about that.” Now it seemed like a melancholy exercise, these proofs that the future would never match up to the present, but at the time she’d felt so optimistic. Each year trumped the last and advanced closer to the ideal. And she remembered, years later, believing with the force that was thousands who believed just like her, that her generation was surely the luckiest, best, and most blessed. Her father’s generation had been the good Germans and the humiliated interned Japanese and the racist white sheriffs and the callous corrupt government, while hers had just grown more enlightened on each of their parents’ mistakes. They had tasted their century’s horrors before they themselves gelled into cowards or bigots. Young enough to have fun, old enough to appreciate it! Unsurpassedly lucky! That kind of moral certainty carried with it a joy that couldn’t be reconstructed in memory, once it was lost.

  It was suddenly almost sunrise. Moving by inches, she got out of bed and went to the window; but gingerly as she had moved, the old floorboards still creaked. The downstairs lamp quickly snapped off; its faint glow vanished out of the stairwell. She heard Pauline rise from the couch, with the same pointless stealth, as if in this house they could hide from each other. Pauline slipped back into her bedroom, and pulled the door shut.

  4.

  The night before Frazer’s arrival they packed up the writing box and hid it under Juan and Yvonne’s bed. They had obviously learned not to leave the evidence, or lack of evidence, of their progress lying out in plain view. When Frazer arrived the next day they held council with him underneath the big maple. Jenny watched from high up on the hill, pretending to be reading. The conference looked friendly and calm. It ended with everyone rising and the two girls and Juan sauntering toward the house. She began to walk down and when Frazer saw her he walked up to meet her. His expression, while not overtly angry, was sardonic. One corner of his mouth was pinched upward.

  “So,” he said, reaching her. “They’ve done nothing.”

  “They’re doing something, Rob. They finally seem committed to it. They talk about how great it’ll be, to have the chance to explain how they feel.”

  “Do they talk about how great it’ll be, to have the chance to make back all my money?” As soon as he said this he seemed to regret it. “Juan tells me they’ve been putting the whole thing on tape. He won’t let me hear the tapes, or even look at them. He says he doesn’t want confusing input until they’re all finished. Is this a crock of bullshit?”

  “They are taping. I’ve heard them.”

  “Then what are they saying? Give me something to go on, Jenny. I just want some goddamn reassurance.”

  She hesitated. “I don’t hear individual words. They always keep the door closed. They can’t write with me eavesdropping on them.”

  Frazer glared, disappointed. Then he laughed. “You’re so generous, sweetheart. Maybe we’re two of a kind. I brought them the gun that they wanted. I kept up my end of the bargain.” Below them the back door swung open and Yvonne leaned out.

  “What do you want?” Yvonne yelled. “Tuna fish sandwich, or cheese?”

  When they had shouted back and forth about lunch and the door slammed shut again she said, “Just one?”

  “Don’t tell me they’ve turned you into a gun lover.”

  “No. I’m just afraid they were expecting something more.”

  “I’m afraid I was expecting something more.”

  She couldn’t say anything to this. She watched him as he cast a hard gaze at the opposite hills, the vein at his temple jumping, the smooth dome of his head bright with sweat. Frazer’s strange, prominent skull featured a shelf of bone just above the eyebrows that could make him resemble Neanderthal man or a glowering genius, depending on his general expression. She couldn’t decide which he favored right now; his jaw was jutted forward, restlessly working, another tic that betrayed deep anxiety. She could feel her own pulse speeding; she’d been hoping for something like the right moment, but she’d known beforehand that a moment like that wouldn’t come. The book she was holding was only a ruse, to conceal her letter. She had written to William all over again, though she’d been no more free than before to explain where she was. And now she’d had to explain what he would feel as long silence, as well. At least she’d had a stroke of brilliance and borrowed the typewriter from them, to type it. She wouldn’t have to ask Frazer to rewrite her love letter. That was one humiliation she still could avoid.

  As if he somehow sensed the drift of her thoughts, her effort to find the small upside, Frazer said, “At least it’s a beautiful place.” He sighed, looking off at the warm, buzzing hills.

  “Rob,” she said. “I have something to tell you. And a favor to ask.”

  TEN MINUTES LATER she was standing in the kitchen with Juan and Yvonne and Pauline, as Frazer’s car roared down the hill. “Doesn’t he want his sandwich?” Yvonne asked.

  “No,” she said.

  “Good. Fuck him,” said Juan. “I’ll eat his goddamn fucking sandwich, fucking dishonest fuck.”

  She chewed her own sandwich without appetite. Frazer had blown up when she told him what happened with Dana. In the days since that phone call she’d felt more and more certain that Sandy had given up Dana’s name to throw the cops off the trail; not knowing that Jenny had mailed Dana the tape, she would have thought Dana still was the cleanest of all of their friends. Sandy never would have named Frazer no matter how scared she was; she’d introduced Juan and Yvonne and Pauline to Frazer herself. But Frazer just said, “I still can’t believe you sent out their damn tape! If they’d just had the patience to wait, that could have been chapter one of the book. That could have been our exclusive, I could have called up that editor weeks ago . . .”

  Handing him the letter at this moment was even worse than she’d thought it would be, but there were no moments left. “You know people everywhere,” she was saying. “If you mailed it to someone in Mexico, maybe, and they mailed it on—”

  Frazer was turning it over and over in his hands, as if trying to see into it. “Thick,” he murmured. “Didn’t Dana recopy these for you?”

  “I typed it.”

  “Oh, wonderful. Can I guess whose typewriter you used?” He closed his eyes and stood still a long moment, as if hearing something that she couldn’t hear. She could see his jaw working, his pulse hammering in his neck. “I’ll do my best,” he said finally. “But it’s not really the first of my worries.”

  Her face burned. “I didn’t ask to be the first of your worries. If I had my way I wouldn’t have asked you to do this at all.”

  “I know you wouldn’t.” Frazer got in his car, slammed the door hard and started the engine, but his window was down and she came to it and looked at the letter, which he’d tossed on the passenger seat. “I’ll take care of it, Jenny!” he said.

  The car’s vibrations shifted the letter, and a wind had risen that seemed the forerunner of rain. “It’ll fly out the window,” she said.

  Frazer opened the glove compartment, threw the letter inside with his jumble of maps, and slammed it shut again, hard. “How’s that?” he yelled.

  “One fucking gun,” Juan was saying. “‘That’s not exactly what we agreed on.’ ‘Well, it looks like we’re all just a little behind.’” Juan minced and sneered when he did Frazer’s line. Then he said, “Clear the table. Let’s take a look at this thing.”

  The gun was a Smith & Wesson snub-nosed revolver, with its own cop-style holster; Juan explained all this as he cleaned it, and buffed its outside with a T-shirt, and lay it down, darkly gleaming, on the table. He was already wearing the holster. Alone at the center of all their attention, the gun seemed to have an aura of intelligence, as if its coiled stillness was deliberate, and its potential lunges also matters that it would
decide. It didn’t seem at all related to the BB guns, with their faux wood grain and their slender black snouts and the gentle pew pew sound they made. Compared to this the BB guns were like fireplace tools. This gun stared back, through tiny, bright, metallic eyes.