American Woman: A Novel

by Susan Choi

  “That’s him,” Jenny said.

  When Pauline put the picture down again she walked to the room’s single window and peered out, shielding her eyes from the slight glare the lamp put on the glass. Her gait seemed exaggeratedly casual in a way Jenny hadn’t noticed before—it was in the slouch of Pauline’s shoulders, and the way she shoved her hands deep in her pockets, in the loose-jointed pose that she struck at the window, one hip canted slightly, like a very young hood on a street corner. As always her drab hand-me-down T-shirt and jeans hung obscuringly on her, but Jenny thought she could see a previous manner of holding herself to which Pauline’s swagger was grafted. Pauline’s head still rode with perfect uprightness upon her neck, and her back, for all her shoulder slouching and hip tilting, was still straight as a rail, as if she’d been trained from a very young age and to an extent that she couldn’t undo in ballet, or at least in posture. And she was still beautiful, despite her thinness and her hair, which looked to have been cut with garden shears, and the unyielding dark circles under her eyes.

  “So what’s the experiment?” Pauline asked.

  She’d slid the mousetrap under her bed, and now she got onto her knees and retrieved it. It had a doorway on one side, a very small flap of metal that only opened inward. On the opposite side was a second door, very large, that unlatched from outside and swung outward. Inside simply looked like a box, but when the egg-timer-type dial was wound the box ticked from within, like a clock, or a bomb. Pauline ventured forward to look at it. “It’s a weird metal box.”

  “It’s a mousetrap. A humane mousetrap. It catches them but doesn’t hurt them. They’re supposed to go in on their own. Then you can release them, wherever you want.”

  “Why would they go in?”

  “Supposedly because of curiosity. The directions say mice like to explore. They hear the tick and want to know where it comes from. You might have to wait a while for the first mouse to get trapped, but once it does more and more mice come to see what it’s doing. Then you’ve got a box full of mice.”

  Pauline shuddered. “Ugh. I wouldn’t want to touch them.”

  “You don’t have to. You don’t even have to watch. I can do it myself.”

  “No,” Pauline said, and Jenny noted with interest that something like pride had sprung up in Pauline’s flecked green eyes, like a pair of small flames. “I’ll come watch. I don’t mind.”

  Downstairs Juan’s snoring was penetrating the closed bedroom door. Jenny eased open the door to the kitchen and felt a soft explosion of movement, as if tiny projectiles had launched. Behind her, Pauline cringed. Then the kitchen was still, and the only sound was the soft squeak of the trap, swinging on its handle from her hand. She lit a candle, dripping its wax onto the lid from a can until the candle could stick. Pauline gingerly opened a cupboard, and poured two mugs of wine. When the dial wouldn’t wind any further Jenny let go and a soft, steady ticking emerged. She set the trap on the floor and climbed onto the counter with the candle and her wine. Across the room from her Pauline had climbed onto the table, and tightly wrapped her arms around her knees. The candle guttered, its glow swelling and fading. Soon they’d drained their mugs and refilled them in silence, and the larger silence that had grown up around the fine grain of the ticking seemed inviolate; even Juan’s snores just enclosed and refined it.

  When the mouse came Jenny heard its approach like a whispered, irregular ticking that offset the tick of the trap. She saw Pauline start and sit forward. The mouse trotted out of the baseboard, circled the trap anxiously, angled toward it, and then backed away. She felt her heart beating, as hard as the mouse’s, she thought. Suddenly the mouse crept inside and they heard a soft click and a brief, confused shuffling, as the mouse tried to reverse what had happened. Pauline loudly gasped.

  “Shh,” Jenny said.

  In the dim light they could just faintly see the small whiskered nose at the grating. For long minutes the mouse would click in thoughtful circles, and then all at once it would fling itself wildly around; it would be silent; then it would squeak, anxiously. She was so intent on the trap that she didn’t see the second mouse until it was practically in. And then a third mouse appeared. For the rest of the night, drawn ever more by the ticking or by the sounds of their increasingly numerous comrades—orgiastically gorging on cheese? shredding a fresh, somehow overlooked cushion?—mice trotted, circled, sniffed, and eventually pushed themselves into the trap, until it was full as a nest.

  The candlelight was slowly replaced by a dim, foggy dawn. Jenny slid off the counter and lifted the trap by its handle, shocked a little at the wild explosion of life, the rapid uncontrolled pouring of weight from one side to the other as the mice renewed their efforts to escape. Pauline covered her ears, but Jenny thought she saw a spark in Pauline’s face, in the way she quickly jumped off the table and opened up the back door, holding it for Jenny to carry the trap through. She stepped out into the wet dawn, feeling it like a salve on her eyes and her blooming hangover. In resignation or foreboding the mice grew still again. She shifted the trap from hand to hand as she walked through the long grass, Pauline close behind her. The trap was heavy, like a pail of water. The grass was softly razored on its edges and sopping from presunrise dew. Soon their jeans were soaked, and their sneakers were squishing and burping. Past the barn, past the small lily pond. They reached the first fence line and she set the trap in the grass and clambered over, then held out her arms for the trap. Pauline blanched. “Go on,” she said. “They’re locked in there. They’re not getting out.” She could feel the weak bulb of the sun, edging over the ridge line.

  With a burst of resolve Pauline picked up the trap, and it shook with renewed consternation. She thrust it over the fence at Jenny quickly, as if it had burned her. Jenny took it and Pauline climbed over.

  Just short of the woods Jenny stopped. She was sure that they’d gone far enough, but at the same time she already knew that this act was one she would perform again soon, that this was only the first instance of a new ritual. She set the trap into the grass while Pauline dashed away, as far as she could go while still keeping the trap within view. Jenny stepped as far away as possible herself, then lifted the door and leaped back. At first there was nothing. She kicked the trap lightly and leaped back again. “That way!” she whispered. Absurdly, she shooed with her hands. Then they came pouring out, little silver-gray creatures, and streamed off through the grass toward the trees.

  MOVEMENT FLICKERED outside a window, and her pulse, as it always would, quickened. But it was only Juan, laying a plank across two chairs and picking up his barbell. Then it was Yvonne, snapping open a blanket. And finally it was Pauline, rooting through the kindling pile for a newspaper crossword she’d claimed to be finished with, twice.

  Jenny closed her journal and gazed at the light slanting in through the window. The doors and windows were open, and the thin kitchen drapes billowed up and fell back silently. She was alone in the house. They’d been outside for hours, as they were every day, as they’d once been inside every day, with the windows sealed shut, the drapes drawn, the air thick and stale with smoke.

  She put her journal upstairs in her room and went outside, to join them.

  Juan lay on his plank, his feet braced in the grass, the sound of his effort unobtrusive and rhythmic, like a distant axe falling. Yvonne lay in the grass, unabashedly watching his body. Jenny was starting to be able to imagine what they must have been like when they first fell in love. High school students, Yvonne tall and awkward, at odds with her body, Juan a C student, track runner. Both instinctively solitary, lacking intimate friends. Somehow they discover each other. Yvonne watches Juan at practice—not a boy, but a man, with a man’s burly body, circling the track in his team-issue sweatsuit. His strides are short but inexhaustible, they endlessly repeat, he is carried around and around the track at the same steady rate, lifting a hand to her each time he passes. Later they will make love, as if they are vampires who feed on each other. Later st
ill he’ll be drafted. He won’t die; he’ll live.

  “Do you think it’s a good argument?” Yvonne asked, referring to the book she was reading. “I wish you would read this book, baby. It reminds me of that thing you once said. How we all wear a mask, yet there’s nothing beneath it. Our real selves are a put-on, a mask. Isn’t that what you said . . .”

  Juan answered her between exhalations, his thoughts piecing together, a phrase at a time. Pauline interrupted, “Four letters, a word that means ‘still in dispute.’”

  “You’ve asked me that one twice before,” Juan complained.

  Yvonne had a beer, and she shared it with Jenny. Without words, they passed the can every few sips. Another calm rhythm. It was their last beer, and later on, or tomorrow, Jenny would get in the car and drive to get more beer, more wine, more cigarettes, even more whiskey.

  “Wait,” Jenny suddenly said, and Yvonne’s hand, passing the beer can, was stilled in midair. Juan stopped with his arms extended, the barbell above him. Pauline’s pencil hovered.

  Far below, on the barely used road, was the sound of a motor. They listened, keeping utterly still while it hurtled toward them like a comet. Then it passed, with a sigh.

  “Just a car on the road,” Yvonne said.

  Now the hillside was blue. They could feel the night dew settling out of the air. A firefly drifted past, blinking.

  Juan breathed, “Four hundred,” and let the barbell sink onto his chest. They all shifted, erasing the brief interruption. Soon they’d go in and make dinner.

  3.

  Juan had shut himself into the barn with a secret project and dire warnings to the person or persons who dared interrupt him. That left Pauline and Yvonne doing physical training on the dirt track between the barn and the house. They jogged the two S curves downhill, tagged a mark, jogged back up, tagged again. Soon Pauline was a half lap, then a full lap, then one and a half laps behind. On her next downhill leg she skipped tagging the mark and dropped onto the grass. “You’re not done!” Yvonne called, striding down.

  Pauline stared at the sky. “I feel sick. I haven’t had breakfast.”

  “Who needs breakfast? I’ve stopped eating breakfast. Brothers and sisters all over the world survive on one bowl of rice every day. Not like the kind of pigs you grew up with, gorging themselves on three meals a day and getting so fat that they’re completely apathetic.”

  Jenny couldn’t endure this; she set her book down. “Poor people don’t survive on one bowl of rice because it’s better. Try telling them they shouldn’t have three meals a day.”

  “Sister,” Yvonne said to her, “why make conflict when we’re struggling together? Here we are in this beautiful place, blessed with the time to hone our minds and our bodies before the next test, and you go out of your way to make conflict.”

  When Juan finally emerged from the barn he had a long object under his arm which he threw on the grass when he reached them. It was a toy gun—a toy machine gun—which was made out of wood. Crude and flat, it was still unmistakable, like those black scarecrow silhouettes of a farmer leaning back on a fence Jenny sometimes saw propped up in gardens on the small country roads. “I’m fed up,” Juan said, “of training with no arsenal! From now on we train with a full set of weapons. I want to make handguns, machine guns, and shotguns. That’s all we can do until Frazer shows up with our arsenal.”

  Juan had worked out a system to make a good gun in just three or four hours, and after the first in each style was done he could go even faster, by using the completed guns as patterns. In the barn they all watched him run the stub of a pencil around the tight inside curve of the trigger, along the length of the muzzle. Once the shape was hacked out of the plank with the bandsaw it was just a matter of rounding the corners to make it “3-D,” as Juan said. The gun came out “2-D” in that while it was as thick as the plank it was cut from, it was basically flat. “3-D” meant rounding the slab of the muzzle into something resembling a tube, although not really hollow.

  It was another mania, Jenny thought, like their combat training and perhaps even their eulogy tape. The activity might stem from some clear objective, but soon enough the objective was lost, while the frenzy of action kept going. In no time they’d made full sets of “weapons” and then they kept making more, as if adding to a precious stockpile. Soon the barn floor was covered with Juan’s many false starts, some ruined by unsteady handling against the blade of the saw, at the silhouette-cutting-out stage; some ruined after that, in the making-the-gun-3-D stage. Once the girls had been fully instructed they worked with wood chisels and hammers and pocket knives, and, less serenely, with the bandsaw as a sort of a lathe. This was Yvonne’s innovation. The bandsaw was turned on, so that its shrieking complaint filled the barn, and then the gun-in-progress was held at arm’s length until the wildly vibrating blade just nicked it, sending little chunks of wood like bullets in unpredictable directions. Juan said, “You shouldn’t fuck around with a tool you don’t know how to use,” and, “That’s good, bitch. That fucks up the blade,” but it was clear that Yvonne’s recklessness threatened him in some way. He tried to cut guns out more and more quickly, with a lot of gazing into the distance, so that they came out with wiggles on top of the muzzles, or with no trigger guards, or with very short grips.

  One afternoon when Jenny looked in on them Pauline was sitting cross-legged in a far corner hacking at a crude gun with a chisel she gripped in her fist. She suddenly flung the chisel, with incredible violence, toward the back of the barn. It struck against the wall with a pow and thumped into the hay. “I got a splinter,” she said.

  “Good luck finding that chisel,” Juan said, without looking up. “Move your ass while you remember where it landed.”

  “I got a splinter,” Pauline repeated.

  “Your hands can use some splinters and calluses, woman. That’s a little tiny step to redemption, getting a sliver from doing hard work.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Pauline said.

  Juan put down the gun he was drawing. “Whenever you’re ready,” he said.

  Pauline didn’t move.

  “Move your narrow ass and find that chisel!” Juan yelled. “We only have two fucking chisels!”

  “Make me, Adolf!” Pauline yelled. But she finally got to her feet, very slowly, and spent a long time brushing sawdust off her knees, thighs and backside. Then she started picking her way toward the spot where the chisel had fallen.

  There was no longer any way to pretend, Jenny decided, that they were preparing to work on their book. They weren’t exactly avoiding it. But the book was like “ego reconstruction,” whatever this was: an activity they saw themselves as performing because they had the intention. And yet they never did it by day because they said it was too hot to sit in the house writing, and they never did it by night because by then they were always a little too drunk. Now a heatwave had settled on them. The house had a thermometer by the back door, a novelty one that was glued to a mountain landscape in a cheap metal frame. “A hundred,” Yvonne read one morning, squinting wetly, wearing nothing but cut-offs and a bra. “It’s a hundred!”

  “It’s more than a hundred,” said Juan. “That thing stops at a hundred. Not that the piece of crap works.”

  “It does work!”

  “That’s not mercury in there, that’s food dye.”

  “Last week it said seventy-five.”

  “Then it ain’t never worked. It ain’t never been seventy-five since we’ve been in this dump.”

  “That picture looks like California,” Pauline said. “That picture looks nothing like here.”

  “Ain’t no California I know.”

  “It looks like the Sierras.”

  “Didn’t you have a nice castle in the Sierras?”

  “The Cascades, and shut up.”

  “You shut up!”

  “You shut up!”

  Every day that week Jenny drove into Liberty, partly to get away from them but mostly because she expected a letter. T
ypically weeks felt like months, and she always expected her letter from William too soon. Now a reply wasn’t just due, but well overdue. Finally, though, something lay in the dim little box. She stared at it, her fingertips tingling—then she snatched it and tore open the envelope. The thick square of many-times-folded notepaper within, written over so densely that dark tangles of ink showed through on the reverse, was so familiar to her that for an instant she misrecognized it. But it wasn’t a letter from William, it was her letter, to him. The only other thing in the envelope was a small slip of paper on which Dana had written, Don’t write any more or send anything. I’ve moved. Sorry. Dana.

  She stood a long time holding the various pieces of paper, the tiny bronze eagles repeating in rows all around her. The lobby was silent and empty; she made her way blinking into the daylight and then into the car. Another car pulled into the lot and she drove away quickly. When she arrived at her pay phone there was somebody in it, a traveling-businessman type with an unknotted tie and his jacket slung over his shoulder. She drove up and down like a perturbed animal trying to reclaim territory until he finally left. Then there was no answer at Dana’s. She got back in the car and drove to a small park and waited, her head in her hands. After half an hour she drove back to the phone, but there was no answer again. She was pressed so intently against the handset that the shell of her ear throbbed with pain. She closed her eyes against the sun beating into the booth and suddenly the line opened; she had almost forgotten that it was still ringing. She heard the soft hissing inside the wire, the sound of the void between herself and Colorado, and then to her bounding relief Dana’s voice said, tentatively, “Hello?”