American Woman: A Novel

by Susan Choi

  Doing the very best that he could seemed to involve, in the end, compliance with some of the least advisable of the cadre’s demands, and disregard of many of the others. With the dispatch of exceptional wealth the girl’s family set up a food-distribution command center and rented a flotilla of refrigerated trucks. And then, pointing out that the cadre had insisted they do so, they hired to distribute the food only welfare recipients, paroled criminals, and other often-unemployed individuals. There was a predictable range of results. A few ex-cons told the papers they were grateful for the second chance in life. One truckful was hijacked at gunpoint. Others vanished in more subtle ways. Where the trucks did arrive unmolested, workers hurled the food hand over fist out of the back, while crowds trampled each other. An eight-year-old boy was knocked out by a frozen whole chicken.

  Jenny knew she shouldn’t have found it surprising how skillfully the family was able to present itself as the beleaguered party, doing its best to accommodate, but outflanked on all sides by plain greed. Public sympathy for them kept increasing; they were the quintessence of noblesse oblige, they were doing the best that they could, and who doesn’t prefer the rich who give a crumb of their wealth, to the poor who rush forward to take it? This was where the Left lost its last shred of patience. Only this band of irresponsible adventurers, they complained, could have made the rich so sympathetic. The one observer of the spiraling affair who seemed displeased with the family was the victim herself. The food program debacle unfolded, and like a missile the third tape arced out of the sky. “It seems to me you’re not doing your very best at all, Dad,” the girl said, and now she was starting to sound really angry. “It looks like that food program was a complete total sham. I know it’s a tax write-off anyway. Isn’t it, Dad? And I just have to wonder, I feel like if you or Mom, or Alexa or Katie was kidnapped I would just do whatever it took. Which is not what you’re doing!” She didn’t seem to be reading a script at all anymore—or perhaps her kidnappers had started to know how she spoke, how she tended to phrase things. Perhaps their new scripts showed a talent for slickness they seemed to lack everywhere else.

  When March came to an end Jenny drove to Buell’s for wood stripper, paint, new dropcloths, and a safer stepladder. It was warm enough to work with open windows again and she could start the restaining job in the upstairs conservatory; soon enough it would be hot and humid, and the stain would goo up like molasses and never get dry. In the course of the winter opaque bumpy ice had closed over the river, but now they heard the ice groaning and cracking at intervals all through the day. Sometimes it went pop! with a suddenness, like a shotgun. As she drove back to Wildmoor with the ladder sticking out the back window, the newly mild wind filled the car; spring still had the power to move her, to make her feel burgeoning change. It was always a short, vivid, heartrending spring in this place. White filigree cherry tree blooms, the hot pink apple blossoms; crocus and daffodil and narcissus spearing out of the ground. This was her second spring here. The autumn would be her third autumn. When she thought about this her enjoyment evaporated and instead she felt something—despair, more credible each time it came. She shrugged it off harshly, as if despair were an irritating though well-meaning person with a hand on her shoulder. Turning south between fallow gold fields, parallel to the river, she could smell the sea brine on the air. Sometimes, driving this road in a deep reverie, she would feel as if snatched from the car by a hand and raised high in the air. She would see the Atlantic tide pushing kelp miles up the river, and the Atlantic itself, spreading out from the foot of Manhattan. And Manhattan’s wild spires casting shadows halfway to Ohio, and then the vast carpet of grass racing toward California. Her life there, and her shadow life here. She would see all of that and herself seated in Dolly’s car—and then it would end and she was in the car, driving again. She pushed in the car’s cigarette lighter, and turned up the radio loud when she heard a voice say another tape had arrived from the cadre. She pulled over to the side of the road and lit her cigarette there; she’d never mastered using lighters while driving. She was always afraid she would weave and be stopped by a cop. The tape, like the three before it, was broadcast after assurances from the newscaster that it had not been at all shortened or altered. The girl’s voice sounded hollow again, as it had at the start, almost two months before. “Today is April 3, 1974. I have been given the following choice: to be liberated to rejoin my family, or to join these comrades in their battle. My decision is made: I will stay with these comrades forever, because theirs is the only just battle there is. They are my family. My old family did not care for me; this new family does. My old family did not care for the poor; this new family does.” To go with her new life the girl had taken a new name: Pauline. Jenny felt her gaze space out, refocus. She realized irrelevantly that the windshield was spattered with bugs: it had gotten that warm. Sitting there on the mill road from Red Hook, with the old fields stretching away. All the old fields going to seed and the old stone wall crumbled in places and bristling with weeds. She felt an odd tremor, from what source she could not have said. There had never been a Watergate amnesty; there had not been a window. Still, she felt something slide quietly shut. She tried to restart the car and it let out a horrible shriek, because it was already running. The post-tape commentary began, and even the newsmen made no effort to hide their revulsion. It made you disgusted, one said, to imagine the tortures the poor girl had endured, to say something like that.

  Getting back to the house she was surprised to see that even Dolly had the television on. “Brainwashed,” Dolly said from her chair, as the newscasters droned.

  “How do you know?” Jenny said. “How do you know that she doesn’t agree with them?”

  “Oh, please,” Dolly said, with a voice full of scorn for the people that would have to be agreed with. “Not a girl from a family like that. Not a girl like her.”

  TWO WEEKS LATER the cadre held up a bank and made off with fifteen thousand dollars, “Pauline” clearly visible on the security tapes, looking either brainwashed or eerily calm, depending on your view. The money would fund The People’s Liberation. The bank happened to belong to a prominent business partner of Pauline’s father. Then the cadre disappeared; they seemed to have slipped through the dragnet with remarkable ease. Over the protests of her family the attorney general declared Pauline a criminal, no longer a crime victim, and issued a Wanted poster with her face. The Left-leaning press scolded those of its own who stole Pauline’s poster to decorate their apartments. They were equally displeased with the people who were spray-painting things like WE LOVE YOU, PAULINE! onto buildings. Jenny floated in clouds of wood stripper, lightheaded and vague, as the radio droned and the languid breeze failed to siphon enough of the fumes. Unthinking and wood stripper—stoned. Unmolested by Dolly or anyone else. In the late afternoons when the teatime approached she would lurch from the house for a walk, and drink in the fresh air. The house, still a shaggy King Lear despite all of her efforts. For more than half of the mile-long slope that led down to the water it stayed visible at the top of the hill, though it sank by degrees. Lines of trees began to appear as the slope grew more steep; the trees seemed to form doorways through which, as you looked riverward, the water loomed larger and larger. There was the gazebo just past the first line, giving a view of the water in front and of the uppermost point of the house, its ridiculous tower, behind. Then at last the house sank out of sight. The grounds had been laid out a century before to look carefully wild, like an English farm going to seed, but now the effect was much more natural. The screens of trees had widened with decades of new growth, and grown gaps where some old trees had died. And the fields were truly overgrown with weeds now, not made to appear that way. There really were moors, and a sense of forsaken remoteness, though once you reached the last vista before the drop-off you saw the railroad tracks just by the water, and the electric lines just beside them.

  Coming back to the house she sometimes felt such pleasure in the progressive unfurli
ng of the landscape, such a sense of poignant recognition as the battered old house rose again from the grass into view, that she would forget how unlike her it was to pretend this was hers. Forget her deepening shock, the first time she’d gone walking and realized the property went on for miles. The days grew longer, and if Dolly was ensconced with a tea visitor she could slip back in through the side door, and go up to the second-floor ballroom, where the gold light that bounced off the river poured in through the giant windows. She could move with her crisp shadow over the boards through the turning dust motes, as the air started losing its heat. She had bought painters’ lights to offset the dramatic shadows of the late afternoon, but this also meant she could work late at night, after Dolly was sleeping. That was its own lonely pleasure, working at night when it grew really cold in the room, and the velvety darkness outside sometimes echoed with owls, and she knew that her bright yellow light could be seen miles away, from the river’s far side.

  And always the radio on, somehow underscoring her loneliness more than relieving it. She had plenty of distance from Dolly but still, late at night, she would turn down the radio low. In the vast nighttime hush she could play it quite softly and hear. The contrast of her life with the world outside sometimes felt too great on these nights. The radio was like a tiny porthole in her drifting balloon. One night in the middle of May her evening music broadcast was interrupted by the news that the cadre had finally been traced to a house in a Black neighborhood in Los Angeles. They were surrounded by FBI agents and local police and SWAT teams. All twelve members, including Pauline, were presumed to be there. Calls for surrender had been answered by gunfire. “We take you live to Los Angeles,” the newscaster declared, and then a maelstrom erupted in the small radio such as she wouldn’t have thought it could hold. A badly stammering reporter who could barely be heard. Such a roar of gunfire she thought it was war. Smoke, the reporter was saying, rising out of the house, a smoke bomb—no, orange flames could be seen. No, that’s fire, he said. We’re told that these are . . . the rules of engagement . . . they say that they’ll call for surrender again. I’m up here on a neighboring roof. Oh, my God. That’s a real, that’s a very hot fire. Those deafening booms that you hear, we’re told that’s ammunition they had in the house, blowing up from the heat. Through the smoke a lone person was seen, crawling out the back door, and was quickly picked off by the SWAT team. Jenny had stopped in mid-stride with a big can of wood varnish hanging from her hand, her breath frozen inside her, the weight of the can almost pulling her over. It wasn’t until it had ended—fifteen minutes? an hour?—that she found herself standing this way. Slowly, she set down the can, her right arm muscles wildly trembling. And then turned the radio off. Never imagining that in the twilight beyond what she’d heard, the three fugitives somehow spared death were driving north on 1-5, being bundled into an apartment. That on the opposite coast, in New York, Frazer’s telephone was ringing, in the middle of the night.

  Part Two

  1.

  They had been driving for more than an hour on a succession of small rural roads, creeping along at just under the speed limit although it was near five o’clock in the morning. A waxing moon hung fuzzy and huge just above the horizon. The damp of the summer night strangely translated the moon’s weak gold light through the air, so that though it was dark you could see a great deal—shadowy forms of dense woods, lone trees, smooth dark hills reaching to the horizon. She had been staring out the window a long time. “Rob,” she said. “When Pauline joined the cadre—are you sure it was truly her choice?”

  “I had doubts too until I met them.” Frazer paused. When he spoke again his voice was so certain it almost sounded grim. “She’s riding with them, for sure. You’ll see what I mean.”

  The stars were just starting to fade when they found it, a faint dirt track climbing a long grassy slope from the road. The car shuddered on the uneven ground. They were almost at the top before they saw the house, small and dark, with the dark woods behind it. From here you’d have warning long in advance of anybody heading toward you from the road. As if to prove this she saw Carol standing outside, waiting for them. Carol was wearing shorts and a large sweater and was hugging herself against the dawn cold. Frazer touched Jenny suddenly, seized her hand—he hadn’t even tried to touch her when she’d shown up at his motel room door, when she’d sat in the doorway with him for hours, smoking, arguing, settling what she would do, what she wouldn’t. His hands had stayed carefully far. Now he seized her hand just as their long ride alone was over; she no sooner felt it than he let go again and they’d come to a stop. Frazer rolled down his window and Carol ran over and said, “Pull around back where the other car is,” and turned to lead them to the rear of the house.

  When they had parked he sat a beat without moving, and she thought he was going to speak. Then he simply got out of the car, and so she got out, too.

  “Hi, Jen,” Carol said. “We were worried about you.” Belatedly they jerked forward and hugged. In the brief moment of the embrace she looked up and saw Frazer watching. He looked away quickly.

  Carol detached herself and said to Frazer, “I need to get back to the city for work. I’ve been waiting all night for you guys. What the hell took so long?”

  “Where are they?”

  “Sleeping. Finally. After marching all over the house like crazies, doing ‘security checks’ and complaining about every goddamn—”

  “Carol,” Frazer said.

  “I’ll go in,” Jenny said, quickly pulling her things from the car.

  The back door was a rickety screen in an old wooden frame; it whined as she eased it open. She heard a sound like small rubber balls tumbling: mice. Inside she set her things down and waited for her eyes to adjust. She was in a small kitchen: all the usual things plus a table and chairs, and several full-looking grocery bags on the table. She trailed her fingers on the wall, turned through a doorway to a small vestibule at the foot of a short flight of stairs. Through a second doorway was a room growing gray with the dawn. A few curtained windows, another door at the far side that was closed, the dark shape of a couch. She didn’t know where the fugitives were, she realized. Whether they were upstairs, or downstairs, or behind the closed door. She heard the screen door squeak open and then Frazer was in the room with her. “Jen,” he whispered. She heard an engine cough, start. “Carol’s tapped out and she wants to get back to the city. So I’m running her back, because we’re leaving the other car here for you. You’ll need money. Shit. This is—shit. I have forty. Okay? Next time I come I’ll give you enough for a month. But write that down, so I don’t forget. Jenny? Write down what I gave you and keep track so I know what I’ve spent. Get a notebook or something.”

  “Okay,” she said. Her heart was banging, the way it had banged at the station in Rhinecliff when she had walked out and seen him and not known where she was, who she was, anything. The car, the car that she and Frazer had arrived in, was pulling around to the front of the house with Carol at the wheel. She followed Frazer to the door. Carol did not look over at them.

  “I’ll be back soon,” Frazer said. “I’ve been away from home for weeks dealing with this, so I have a whole lot to catch up on. But you can handle it until I get back. Keep cool,” he added, as he strode away quickly and climbed into the passenger seat. Frazer and Carol drove off without waving good-bye.

  BY EIGHT in the morning the heat was rising, along with the noises of insects. Deafening chirrs, rattles, buzzes; so many variations of drone from invisible sources, each a note she parsed out with her ear but the whole somehow unified also, in a rhythm like waves. She sat at the kitchen table, paralyzed, waiting for some sign or noise from somewhere. Finally she went outside and tried to find a place of repose there, in the overgrown grass, but the soft patches it promised from a few feet away were all equally prickly and crawling with bugs when she got to them. Even from a few yards off the house shrank drastically. It seemed to be capsizing in its ocean of grass. She stood
looking up the hill to where the dark woods began and climbed up to the ridge, and down to where she knew the road lay, out of sight. She crossed her arms tightly over her breasts; she felt cold although it was hot. Nothing about the house and the long golden hillside it sat on didn’t feel abandoned, as if it was all an old luckless homestead that the owners had fled. Up an S-shaped pair of ruts from the house was a barn and an almost dry pond. She waded slowly through the grass to the barn and pulled its heavy doors open, belatedly starting with fright, as if the three fugitives were inside. But it was only a flock of pigeons exploding above her, in the dim space of crisscrossing rafters; she watched them arc through the pale beams of light falling in through the roof. The barn was full of dark shapes, smelled of moldering hay. She backed out and latched the doors shut again.

  The house was still eerily silent when she returned to it; nothing had changed except that there was more light, and more heat. She eased one of the kitchen windows open and right away the screen door began to slap in its frame from the breeze; she rushed to latch it, but she still didn’t hear a roused cough or a footfall. In the front room motes of dust turned in the light coming in through the drapes. She carefully opened a window here, too. The door off the front room that had been closed before was still closed. A second door that stood ajar revealed the bathroom, an old toilet with a pull-chain, an old tub with a green copper streak where the faucet was leaking. Leaving the bathroom and going to the foot of the short flight of stairs she could see a patch of sunlight at the top: a door upstairs was open. She climbed up, creaking no matter how slowly she went, and at the top found the open door, the only door there was, leading into a little low-pitched attic room with a single low window. That was all; now she had seen every room in the house but the closed room downstairs. There wasn’t even a cellar. The attic room was bare except for a single narrow bed against one wall, a frail-looking table, a lamp and a frail-looking chair. Along the opposite wall was a thick rectangle of dust on the floor. It was about the same size as the bed, as if it had been moved in one piece from beneath it, or rather, she realized, as if another bed had been moved from above it. She got down on her knees beside the bed and flipped up the threadbare coverlet it was made up with, to look underneath. There was a thick pad of dust down there, too. So they really were here. They had taken a bed from upstairs, and moved it downstairs, behind the closed door. Somehow this small confirmation that she wasn’t alone was less reassuring than startling, like the footprint on the sand in Robinson Crusoe.