American Woman: A Novel

by Susan Choi

  “I don’t know,” she said after a moment. “I don’t know what they’re doing.”

  “Don’t be angry, Jenny. Juan’s in command. He has to tell you himself what he’s doing. Don’t leave!” Pauline cried.

  “But you won’t tell me what’s going on!”

  “You can still stay. Don’t leave me alone. Find some music.” Pauline thrust the radio at her. “Do the crossword with me. I found an empty one. I’ve been saving it.”

  Juan and Yvonne were gone for almost two hours. When she and Pauline heard the Bug on the hill again they both leaped up; Jenny rushed out the back door and stopped short in her tracks. Yvonne was made up and coiffed, legs shaved, in a powder blue dress, but it was Juan’s transformation that stunned her. Juan’s guerrilla beard was gone, exposing round cheeks and a cleft in his chin. And his hair was cut off—it fell neatly above his ears, and the ears, exposed, stood out alertly. His shirt was tucked in, trousers belted. He looked like a midwestern college kid studying crop yield. She might not have recognized him had they passed in the street.

  “Not bad, huh?” Juan said, walking past her. “We clean up pretty well.”

  Yvonne was stepping out of a pair of sandals. “Those are awful,” she said, walking barefoot the rest of the way to the door.

  “Where have you been?”

  “Town,” Juan said shortly. “Hey, Princess. Don’t look so freaked out.” Pauline threw her arms around him; Yvonne came and smiled gaily and Pauline rushed to hug her as well.

  “Give me the keys,” Jenny said to Juan quietly.

  “Later,” Juan said. When he saw her face he said, “Come on. We just went for a nice country drive.”

  Behind her, Yvonne was still hugging Pauline. “I wish you could have seen the sights with us, Sister. I brought you a treat.” It was a copy of Newsweek, with Pauline on the cover. Beneath her face the word WANTED had been crossed out and replaced with MISSING. “Isn’t that wild?” Yvonne squealed, as Pauline held it and stared.

  THAT NIGHT after dinner Juan called a council. “The reward offered for us is more than he’d get for a book, I would bet you,” Juan said. “And he wouldn’t have to split it up. He could keep the whole thing.”

  “He wouldn’t do that,” Jenny said, at the same time as Yvonne said, “He’d get busted for harboring,” though this hadn’t been what Jenny meant.

  “Bullshit,” Juan said. “Harboring’s hard to prove, and he’s smart. He’d make a nice deal for himself. It ought to be tempting for him.” All through dinner the little radio had been tuned to the A.M. news station to the extent it could be tuned to anything, and in the silence after Juan finished speaking its whining and hissing seemed to scrape on the bones of Jenny’s skull. “Anyway, let’s start this fucking council,” Juan said. Jenny rubbed her thumbs over her eyebrows and snapped off the radio irritably. Looking up she felt everyone’s gaze on her.

  “Sorry,” she said. “It was bugging me.”

  After a moment Juan said, “You see, we’re starting our council.”

  “I heard you.”

  “You need to leave,” Juan clarified.

  Between hearing his words and understanding them she experienced a very slight delay. “Right,” she said, standing up stupidly.

  She slept badly that night. The next morning she was still tangled up in her sheets, trying to block out the light, when Pauline came and lightly knocked on her door. Pauline looked oddly happy. “Come down,” she said, smiling.

  Downstairs Juan looked as if he hadn’t slept either. His eyes were bright with manic calculation. He was unfolding a wad of notepaper. “Jenny,” he said. “There’s coffee. You want coffee? So, you know, we had to hold council, we had to vote, but it turned out good for you, we all voted for you. I know you hated us making you leave.” Gripping both ends of the notepaper he scrubbed the sheets against the door frame to flatten them.

  “I didn’t hate it,” she said. “I just want the car keys.”

  “But in our situation, it’s not that we would ever have secrets from you so much as we feel responsible to you,” Juan went on, ignoring her interruption. “We couldn’t lay our plans on you until they were formed, and I had it all firm in my mind how and why things would go. Now I do, and I can answer your questions and deal with your objections, because I know that you’ll have them. Day after tomorrow is Sunday, and we’re going to hit that kid Thomas’s store. Not with him, don’t bugeye like that. He doesn’t have any idea, it won’t touch him at all. His boss makes the deposit into the drop safe at the bank on Main Street. He does it alone, and he’s a very small guy—Y and I checked him out yesterday. We’ll approach, boss’ll hand it right over, and then we’ll be able to get out of here.”

  It took her a moment to find her voice. “No!” she said.

  “Just listen before you say no.”

  “No! This is your wonderful plan? Are you out of your mind?”

  “I know it’s not the kind of thing you like to do,” Juan went on, seeming unsurprised by her objections. “You like to blow things up that belong to someone who can always replace them, like the federal government. You like to do things that make you feel morally superior but don’t make any difference, except getting your lover’s ass thrown in prison.”

  “Don’t be an asshole.”

  “I’m just saying, Jenny, that you have to leave the moral high ground sometimes. Our high purpose now is survival. We don’t have the good options. And we don’t have your stash of cash, either.”

  She felt herself color; at the edge of her vision she saw Pauline’s eyes widen slightly. She wondered if Pauline was surprised at the invasion of her privacy, or if she’d been part of it too, and was merely surprised Juan had told.

  “Your two hundred thirty-two dollars and, uh, what.” Juan consulted his sheets of paper. “Some small change. Don’t be mad at us, Jenny. We went through your shit. It was ages ago. We just needed to know who you were.”

  “Fuck you, Juan!”

  “Jenny.” Juan stretched and looked at her perplexedly. “We made this plan with room in it for you. We want to make it up to you, that you’ll never get your cut from the book. I know that’s why you’re here. I don’t hold it against you—you’ve got to survive just like we do. The three of us agreed last night to give you a full fourth of the take, though we’re doing all of the planning. It won’t be the big bucks a book might have made, but it’ll carry us all for a while.”

  Pauline, like Yvonne, was watching her with less suspense than confidence; they actually seemed to expect she’d relent, and not just relent, but become infected by their enthusiasm, which they’d caught from Juan—or perhaps the idea, like everything that they did, was a product of bad alchemy, a miniature collective insanity none of them could have sustained on their own. “No,” she said. “No, I will not commit stupid armed robbery, Juan.” When she looked at Pauline and Yvonne, they seemed truly surprised.

  “Then you go,” Juan said, suddenly brusque.

  “Oh, Juan,” Yvonne said. “That’s so harsh.”

  “If she does the thing with us she stays, if she doesn’t, she goes! You think we should keep her around as a witness?”

  “I’ll go gladly,” she heard herself say. “I’ll go now.”

  Juan only hesitated a moment, and then threw the keys at her. She raised a hand and felt them smack into her palm. Juan’s and Yvonne’s and Pauline’s six-eyed gaze, suddenly strangely opaque, tracked her out of the room, and then she was striding past the foot of the stairs and through the kitchen with its warm pot of coffee and out the back door. Juan had thrown her the keys in a fit of his idiot temper, and even now he’d be realizing what he had done. He’d come storming out, red-faced and thwarted. She only needed to drive into town and call Frazer. This was his problem, now. She was aware of feeling more than a little bit pleased that everything was backfiring for him. Crossing the grass toward the car she heard the back door open and shut, a strangely leisurely sound. She dropped into the B
ug’s driver’s seat and turned the key in the ignition. There was nothing, not even a cough. She gave the gas a few pumps; still nothing. All three of them had filed out the back door and now they stood at wide intervals, watching: Pauline on the back step, Yvonne several paces closer, eyeing Jenny with stern disapproval, but still a fair distance away; Yvonne seemed to sense that this moment was a crisis in Juan’s leadership he desired to resolve on his own. Juan had come up to the driver’s side window; he stood there observing as she turned the key and stamped furiously on the gas a last time. “Excuse me,” she said to him coldly.

  He stepped aside with what was almost great politeness, and she shoved the door open and got out again. At the back of the Bug she yanked open the deck lid and stared at the engine. Juan came and studied it also. One of the spark plug wires was missing. “I only took it on the long, long-shot chance you’d say no to our plan,” Juan remarked thoughtfully. “You can hot-wire a car, can’t you, Jenny? Of course you can. You can do everything. I couldn’t let you try jamming the works, once we’d let you in on it. But I really didn’t think you’d say no. I’m surprised and I’ll even admit that I’m kind of upset. It’s not just that my plan’ll work best with four people. We can do it with three: it’s less elegant, sure, but we’ll do it. I’m upset that you seem to have more sympathy for a store-owning pig than for the people we’re trying to help. The People! Your People, Third World People—”

  “When can I actually leave?” she interrupted impatiently. Juan’s encouraging, comradely aura snapped off like a lamp.

  “When you can’t interfere with our plan.”

  “And when’s that?”

  “When I say! I guess we’ll finish the job and take off, and you’ll walk into town. Find a bus stop or something.”

  “I could walk to town now.”

  “But I’d stop you,” Juan said. His tone was so simple it took her a moment to realize he was threatening her. He was wearing the gun in its holster. It was so much a part of him now that she sometimes forgot it was there. Her eyes fell to it and Juan smiled, seeing what she was seeing, and knowing what she had realized. “Just sleep on it, Jen,” he suggested.

  “I don’t need to,” she murmured.

  “Who knows? Maybe you do. Because this—” and he gestured, at the shimmering maple above them, at the steep hill beyond, at the barn, and the woods, and the shriveled-up patch of the pond, and the summer, she realized. “This is over,” he said.

  SHE WAS SITTING on the floor of her room going through William’s letters when she heard the Bug’s engine start up. She went to the window in time to see Juan and Yvonne drive away, both in sunglasses, smoking, their windows rolled down, Juan’s left elbow protruding, Yvonne’s right, as if they and the car comprised one entity that had always been self-sufficient.

  She went back to the letters but couldn’t stand to look at them. She had meant to find a way to compress them, but going page by page through the thick bundle she couldn’t find anything to cull but the occasional white envelope with her old alias and old post office box printed on it in Dana’s neat hand, and even these she could not throw away. Most of them she’d discarded long ago, and the few that remained seemed like rare artifacts and their absence would not have diminished the bulk anyway. She removed them, replaced them, retied the bundle and stared at the wall. She heard Pauline coming upstairs.

  “Packing,” Pauline said when she reached the doorway. She said it as if she’d found Jenny slaughtering a chicken, or performing some other blood-curdling and difficult task.

  “Just thinking about it. Don’t worry, I’ll pack soon enough.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing.” She didn’t feel like arguing. She wound the leftover tail of twine around and around the letters. She’d been trying to imagine herself on a bus, her duffel on the rack above her, the accordion file on her lap, but she could only see it from the outside, like a scene from a movie. Her head dark and vague through the grit-coated window.

  Pauline didn’t move from the doorway. The cigarette that she held stayed unlit. She seemed irresolute, as if she might turn on her heel and leave. “You’re making a mistake,” she said finally.

  “Let’s not talk about it.”

  “You don’t have anywhere to go. It’s like Juan said: You’re just making a self-righteous stand. What are you going to do? Who can you turn to? You’ve decided robbery is wrong on principle, but it won’t hurt that man, and it’ll help all of us. It’s not his money, anyway. All his business comes from the black people of that neighborhood who don’t have any other store to shop in. They can’t get loans to start their own stores because the banks are so racist. So stealing from him isn’t stealing. He profits from racism.”

  Jenny wondered how it was that Juan, whose analysis this obviously was, managed to take very plausible statements and make them sound trite. “I think that’s probably true,” she allowed. “It doesn’t mean I’ll add armed robbery to my rap sheet.”

  “Why was it justifiable for you to blow up a building the government owned? That’s against the law, too. That’s destruction of property.”

  “That was different.”

  “Why?”

  “That was to try to end a war. These things aren’t all on the same scale, Pauline. The lives of millions of Vietnamese, and thousands of young American men, aren’t quite the same as the wellbeing of a bunch of lunatics.”

  “And that’s what we are?”

  “I don’t know,” she said after a minute.

  “Because if that’s what we are, that’s what you are! You think you’re a saint. Maybe you’re just a little too proud of yourself.” Jenny had heard this one, too; she could not remember quite where or when. But she didn’t have the chance to say so; Pauline had slammed her door hard and gone back downstairs.

  SHE KNEW it had been an unthinking insult, seized upon and fired off randomly, but for the rest of the morning Pauline’s saying that she might be a little too proud nettled her. Her father had always been maddened by what he called her moral absolutism. And once when she’d criticized Frazer’s self-promotion in the guise of political action, he’d dismantled her in return. “At least I’m not deluded about my desires,” he’d said. “At least I know that I’m selfless and selfish. We all are, sweetheart. We’re just human.” One of the first things she’d loved about William was his tireless perfectionism; he never chose a target for an action without researching exhaustively first, without being able to demolish its potential defenders with chapter and verse, without knowing its board of directors or slate of officials, its funding, the whole range of its acts, bad and good, in the world—but had this rigor been vanity, too? If so, she’d been equally vain. She’d never wanted some ill-defined public glory, like Frazer. Even in their intimate circle of comrades she’d been relieved to let William take most of the credit. Yet she knew, in a way that now made her feel oddly abashed, that she’d longed to be morally perfect. That was either self-denying, or vain, or perhaps it was both.

  She still felt sure that none of this touched on armed robbery. Armed robbery simply was wrong, and saying so wasn’t endorsing the capitalist system, no matter what Juan might insist. For one thing, it did nothing to alter that system. For another—but Juan wasn’t interested in arguments. “This ain’t theory, this is practice,” he said, brushing past her. He and Yvonne had overshot the Bug’s usual spot when they came back from wherever they’d gone, and instead parked in back of the barn. By the time she was climbing toward them they were on their way down and the spark plug wire, she knew, had been plucked from the engine again and concealed somewhere. That afternoon Juan and Yvonne and Pauline went into the barn to rehearse. As soon as the barn doors swung shut she began on the house: she searched underneath the back steps, in the toilet tank, under the mattresses of their ripe, rumpled beds. When she lifted up Pauline’s mattress she saw the patch that she’d made on the underside, eons ago. She ripped the lid off the coffee can a
nd dug through the grounds. When she heard target practice and knew they couldn’t hear her she walked up to the Bug and examined its engine again. She felt along the insides of the fenders and wheel wells and door panels, but she was more and more sure the wire was simply on Juan. Like the gun, it now went with him everywhere.

  She thought of Frazer, probably stretched on his couch in New York, his glare drilling holes in the unringing phone. He hoped to be called and apologized to; he expected to always be needed. She willed him to realize that he was expendable—to grit his teeth, rehearse a smile of defeat, and drive back up the hill. But he was also too proud; too proud to imagine his fugitives could hatch a scheme of their own, not in spite of his help but because of it. This was a great part of their happy activity, she knew: the rediscovered pleasure of calling the shots. Of course they were too proud to have stayed Frazer’s wards forever. She’d felt the same way when she’d left Dick and Helen: disgusted with them and afraid Frazer might compromise her, but beyond all that, fed up with being dependent. She’d hated being dependent, and Juan and Yvonne and Pauline hated it just as much. If their plan was to remake the world, then they had to be able to remake themselves. She understood that very well; at least that was one thing she could still sympathize with.

  That night at dinner they were loudly optimistic. Juan said, “It’s so obvious to me we could rebuild our cadre right here. The one mistake I’ve made is I took so long realizing that. Take that kid, Thomas. That kid’s never heard of Black Power, he’s like a powder keg ready to blow.”