American Woman: A Novel

by Susan Choi

  After a while Pauline said, “Did Juan ever explain ego reconstruction to you? It’s a game, but a serious game. It’s a trust exercise.

  “I can’t even guess what that means. It builds trust? It can only be played with the people you trust?”

  “It builds trust.”

  “Sounds useful in our situation.” She knew her voice was sarcastic.

  Pauline looked away, fiddling the comb. “I’ll tell you the rules. If it’s only two people, we each time the other. When I tell you to go, you say just what you’re thinking of me, without stopping yourself, like you’re lifting the lid on your mind. When a minute is up I say stop.”

  Jenny lit herself a cigarette; she pushed the ashtray aside and set the cigarette down on the table. A mark started to form underneath the hot ash. “A whole minute?” she said. “A minute can last a long time.”

  “We could each say the one thing that comes to our mind, when the other calls time. So instead of one minute, one thing.”

  She could see that Pauline had a thing that she wanted to say; the game was only a shield, like the dusk in the room. “All right,” Jenny said. “I’ll go first.”

  “So you get it?”

  “There’s not much to get.”

  “Then you’re ready.”

  “I’m ready.”

  Pauline took a breath and said, “Time.” Jenny thought that she saw Pauline wince.

  “I wish you’d say anything to me, as long as it’s true.”

  Pauline hesitated. “Is that all?” she said.

  “Yes, it is. Okay, time,” Jenny said.

  IN THE BEGINNING, Pauline said—not the very beginning, but after she’d been with the cadre a while—the leader raised the question of whether or not they should ask her to join, and asked all the members to vote. The cadre then numbered eleven, including the leader, and Pauline knew there was already talk of how good it would be to have twelve. Twelve could be nicely divided into four groups of three. It was better for combat. Its symmetry seemed powerful. Including the leader nine voted Yes for her, but two—Juan and Yvonne—voted No.

  It wasn’t as if making Pauline a comrade didn’t represent a huge leap of faith. It had been difficult enough to win their trust to the extent that she had—to persuade them to trust her to see all their faces, so they’d take off her blindfold; then to trust her to go to the toilet and take baths alone; then to move around freely, so her atrophied muscles could heal; and finally to sit in on meetings and offer advice, because the month-old ransom talks with her parents were rapidly crumbling. All that trust had been gained only slowly and with great difficulty, and it was nothing compared to the trust she would need to be made a comrade. But Juan and Yvonne were their own unique problem, and their “no” vote was more complicated. Although they’d renounced their marriage vows as bourgeois, within the cadre they still showed a bond that would frequently cause them to clash with the others. Monogamy was disallowed in the cadre, but only Juan and Yvonne constantly pursued sex with their comrades, as if trying to prove something; and when one of them did sleep with someone, inevitably there were terrible fights. They voted with each other no matter the subject; they teamed with each other unless forced apart. They shared secrets; they gave off a conspiring air. Their loyalty to each other clearly trumped their loyalty to their comrades and even their leader, and although they denied this, the way that they did—standing shoulder to shoulder and seeming to yell with one voice—undermined what they said. They had been Pauline’s most scornful captors and had fought every privilege she’d won, but they were themselves constantly on probation. Though the leader had said that Pauline needed everyone’s vote, in the end Juan and Yvonne were overruled, and Pauline was admitted.

  She had hoped this would make it all easier for her, but instead things got worse. It had been her captivity that had left her so weak, but Juan and Yvonne still complained that she couldn’t keep up. They nicknamed her Princess, and Publicity Princess, and they ridiculed the way that she talked. In a more serious vein, they raised the subject of whether, if the cadre were ambushed by pigs, she would fight to the death or surrender in terror; or if God forbid they were taken alive, she would probably rat them all out just to save her own skin. But meanwhile, they were making the tape on which Pauline declared, “I will stay with these comrades forever, because theirs is the only just battle there is.” The tape had gone off like a bomb—the whole world had noticed. Graffiti on the streets, full-text reprints in major newspapers, establishmentarian shock. If the cadre had begun to look like a hapless and self-absorbed group of young people who had badly misplayed their first hand, and who had somehow wound up with less sympathy—even from the far Left—than the pigs they’d declared battle on, with the tape all that suddenly changed. Though Juan and Yvonne couldn’t stand it, Pauline was their Sister, the ultimate prize.

  After they’d robbed the bank, and then fled to Los Angeles, the long-deferred plan to divide the cadre into four groups of three—combat cells, that could act on their own or in concert with others—was finally implemented. Juan and Yvonne and Pauline learned that they’d be a cell. Pauline wanted to cry, but there was no private place where she could. Juan and Yvonne wouldn’t even look at her. They argued with the leader as if she were not in the room, but he wouldn’t be moved. The discord the three of them caused was a danger to everyone, and so the cell was a punishment for them, as well as a test.

  Their first operation together was a basic supply run. A freak cold front had come in off the ocean, and several of their number had caught colds and wanted aspirin, and long-sleeved shirts, and socks. And the cadre had decided that they needed to be ready to leave the city, perhaps take to the woods, to a campground, and so the operation would also involve pricing camping equipment. Juan was given a couple hundred dollars in funds, in case the equipment seemed like a good buy. The house they had rented was in a run-down, mostly Black neighborhood, and the van they had bought and parked out at the curb looked like junk. So they were surprised, emerging gingerly from the house and moving quickly to the van, that they’d gotten a ticket. Juan snatched the ticket off the windshield, crumpled it up, and made to throw it onto the ground. “Don’t,” Yvonne said. He threw it onto the dashboard.

  Juan drove carefully, Yvonne in the passenger seat, Pauline sitting in back, on the floor. All three of them were wearing “straight” clothes: Juan wore a button-up shirt and beige jacket and slacks and loafers, and his beard and moustache had been trimmed. His handgun was tucked in his waistband, concealed by the jacket. Yvonne wore a peasant blouse with pretty stitching at the neck, a full skirt, a small revolver in the pocket of her skirt. Pauline wore culottes and a sleeveless blouse with a Peter Pan collar, cat’s-eye glasses, her thin brown hair, not yet cut and dyed, pulled into a braid. Her converted .30-caliber carbine lay on a doubled-up blanket in the back of the van, alongside a Browning semiautomatic rifle, a Colt .45 pistol, and a sawed-off 12-gauge Ithaca shotgun. If someone approached the van, Pauline would flip the end of the blanket over the weapons, to conceal them. If someone continued to approach the van, perhaps the weapons would be used. Juan and Yvonne wore sunglasses, which did not look strange; it was a bright L.A. day, flat blue sky overhead, although cool. A larger arsenal was stored out of sight in a duffel bag, should they, while out on their mission, be somehow cut off from their comrades and left on their own for a long interval. It was all precaution, but it was also a series of actions drummed into the body, a dance, rehearsed numerous times. If the music began this whole dance would unfold without effort. So far, this hadn’t happened, but Pauline could envision it somehow, like tennis, like driving a car. Movement unspooling, instinctively. She’d been training a lot, though indoors, and with unloaded weapons, and always aware, though she tried not to be, that sooner or later a voice would say “ambush!” In life such surprises were real.

  Juan stopped at a drugstore for the aspirin while Yvonne sat in the driver’s seat with the engine running, and Pauline re
mained in back on the floor. Juan had already bought that day’s Los Angeles Times and Pauline was reading. There was a bulletin about themselves in the A section. Also a long article on the candidates in an upcoming local election, and their efforts to court the Black vote. Juan came back and resumed the driver’s seat and they tooled around for a while in search of a sporting-goods store where they could buy the sweatshirts and socks and maybe the camping equipment. The van swayed back and forth around curves, its floor rattled and jumped. She kept reading. The Vietnam War was over, but it would never be over. So long as . . . “Hey,” Juan said. The van had stopped, though the engine still ran, humming and grumbling to itself. “Look alive, Sister. Yvonne’s coming in with me to check out the equipment. Wait here.”

  “Okay,” Pauline said. They were both being decent to her, and she felt gratified. But when they had gone she felt suddenly dizzy. She put the newspaper down and was struck by the sight of her hand. It wasn’t visibly trembling, except for what the trembling of the van conveyed to it, but looking at it a wave of alarm passed through her. She broke out in a sweat. Crawling carefully to the front of the van, into the light shining down through the windshield, she peered out the driver’s-side window. PACIFIC SPORTS—YOUR OUTDOOR STORE (SURFING-JOGGING-BIKING-HIKING-HUNTING-FISHING-CAMPING-SKIING . . . SKATEBOARDS). She had not remembered to look at her watch when Juan and Yvonne went inside. It was good to know how long things took, she was supposed to make this a habit. She knelt between the two bucket seats. Just a moment ago the back of the van had felt comforting to her, but now she was cringing from it. She rested her head on her arms, on the driver’s seat, keeping out of the window but feeling its breeze. She wasn’t thinking of anything that she could remember later, and that was the strange part—that her mind, so agitated for so long, was at that moment still.

  She must have heard the shouting well before she recognized it had to do with her. If recognition ever came: She remembered terrible slowness and panic, like rising through water, at the end of her breath, toward the faraway surface. She looked out the window again and saw in front of the store Juan grappling with a man in a uniform, and Yvonne struggling to free herself from a second man, not uniformed. Juan, they later explained, had seen an ammunition bandolier in the hunting department he’d felt they should have, but had worried that purchasing it would raise eyebrows. He’d put the bandolier up his sleeve, but someone must have seen. Juan was shouting Pauline’s name—not her real name, but her code name of that time, and then she understood that he had been shouting and shouting it. She threw herself bodily toward the blanket of guns, so that she badly scraped her knee on the floor of the van, and then, in a much less awkward movement that she remembered as a single arc, she swung her gun out the driver’s-side window and sprayed a round in the direction of the store, not remembering to aim, extensively perforating SURFING-JOGGING-BIKING-HIKING-HUNTING-FISHING-CAMPING-SKIING . . . SKATEBOARDS. The uniformed man and the nonuniformed man shrieked, threw their hands up, belatedly threw themselves down. Pauline realized, perhaps from this display, that the uniformed man was not a cop but a security guard. This information emboldened her and she fired again, but the effort of the first time had already exhausted her shoulder; the gun kicked her painfully and its bullets flew wide, she could not have said where. Juan and Yvonne were running toward her and she felt overjoyed; perhaps she was merely relieved they were coming back to her, but against the landscape of her feelings at that time relief had the stature of ecstasy. This was when they lost Juan’s handgun, seized by the security guard in the course of the struggle. The gun had been bought several years earlier, in Juan’s actual name. Juan tore the door open and Pauline flew backwards, slid on her rump through the back of the van and almost hit the rear doors, as they sped from the lot.

  “What took you so long!” Juan was screaming. “What took you so long!”

  At an intersection a few blocks away they leaped from the van with their weapons, leaving the van running in the middle of the street, and commandeered a sedan from a terrified man at the stoplight. This was where they lost the parking ticket, which noted the address of the house at which the van had been parked—the address of their safe house. The ticket was forgotten on the dashboard. A few blocks farther and they left the sedan the same way, commandeered a second car from an equally terrified person Pauline couldn’t even recall as a man or a woman. Procedure dictated that, if jammed up, they lie low and not try to return to the safe house for fear they might lead someone there. They didn’t realize that they already had. Already, the handgun was on its way to the LAPD and very quickly its ownership would be traced and the city would realize that the cadre was there, and not in San Francisco. And the van that they’d left in the road was being combed through by cops, and the ticket uncrumpled.

  They swiped a third car, left its owner in the shade of an overpass. By now they were a long way from where they had started. They got another newspaper, scanned its car ads, bought within the hour and with two hundred fifty dollars cash another old van from a genial teenager. Now several hours had passed since the sporting-goods store. They drove in their new old van farther and farther, looking for a safe-seeming motel, and it was the experience of sitting in this van, so much like the other one, that reminded Juan of the ticket. “Fuck,” he said. “Where’s that ticket?”

  “You threw it away,” Yvonne said, and in all the confusion she might have believed this. Pauline hadn’t seen the transaction, had never even seen the ticket, having stayed inside the house that morning until the van was all ready to go. She didn’t yet understand the debate.

  “You told me not to,” Juan said. “I put it up on the dashboard.”

  “You did not,” Yvonne said. “I don’t think so.”

  “Even if I did, it wouldn’t have the address on it, would it? Do the pigs put addresses on tickets?”

  “Maybe we should go back to the house.”

  “Absolute no, the Code says—”

  It was too late by then, anyway.

  The sun sank, spread the shadows of the billboards and the buildings and the telephone poles and their van across miles of pavement, diffused through the particled air and turned everything orange. They chose a motel near the roar of the freeway. Inside they turned on the TV, and there, on TV, saw their safe house: encircled by barricades, flashing police cars, helmeted armed policemen, crawling snipers, a mob of reporters with hair whipped upright by the wind from the low helicopters. The broadcast was live. Outside their windows, the sun set. Over their safe house, the sun set, and klieg lights came on to illumine the scene for the cameras. How could she describe what they’d felt? Gasping and weeping in that room, pillows held to their faces? They couldn’t make telltale noise. Through the thin walls to their right, they were sure, they heard their comrades’ deaths doubled by the next room’s TV. Pauline locked herself in the bathroom and vomited so violently that she brought up blood. There wasn’t anything else in her stomach.

  Late that night they agreed to make Juan their new leader. There hadn’t been dispute, or even thoughts of dispute. Pauline had only been grateful, to Juan for sifting ashes of disaster in search of some relic of how life had been. To Yvonne, for having banged on the door of the bathroom until Pauline let her in, and let her hold her in her arms. Beneath their stunned grief a purpose had begun to take form, and though it was only to preserve themselves and each other, it had a hardness to it against which all their previous purposes, so multiple and complicated and subject to argument, crumbled. At last they tried to sleep, on the sour-smelling mattress that filled up their room like a huge slice of moldering bread. Curled on her side with eyes open, Pauline saw the imperfect darkness, dyed pink by the light leaking in through the drapes. Eyes closed, she saw fire, and death. Behind her in the bed there was movement. With underwater slowness, Yvonne and Juan tried to make love. Then Yvonne reached an arm out, across the wide bed. “Sister,” she whispered. “You can make love with us if you want to.” They were sole
mnly bound—by having survived, by being pursued, and by something that might be called blood. They were a family now.

  It was a feeling that sustained them through days of crisis—or perhaps crisis had sustained the feeling. The night they’d arrived at the farmhouse with Carol, before Jenny was there, they had done their security tour of the house, and then they’d carried the second twin bed from the upstairs bedroom to the downstairs, which had a double. Pauline had been relieved that it went without saying that they’d all share a room, because by now weeks had passed, an eon, since that night. There had been so many different disruptions, first having to sleep in a car, and then vagabond life in a park, then their tense time with Sandy and Tom. Separate trips crossing the country, to Frazer and Carol’s Manhattan apartment. And Pauline supposed it was all disruption, except for that long night when grief married them—yet that night was the island. She’d found solace there that now seemed to be lying in wait, and they all only needed the chance to reach for it again.

  It lasted a little while longer, but it was already ebbing. That first night at the farm their anxiety and anticipation had left them exhausted, and Juan and Yvonne fell asleep on the high double bed before Frazer arrived. Pauline had been left in the lumpy twin bed, wide awake, feeling suddenly hollow. A few times in those first early days, especially while they were writing the eulogy tape, it had happened again. Never promised or planned; but once they were all in the bedroom alone, Juan might hug her a long time, then slowly undress her. Or Yvonne would smile sleepily up from the covers and say, “Help us warm up this bed.” She’d done things she’d never done in her life, never known you could do. With Yvonne, while Juan watched them or held them, or with Juan inside her while she hungrily sucked Yvonne’s breast. Something in her, whether it had been born during her captivity, or had resided in her all along, seemed to have been waiting for this, for the mute urgent pleasure that wasn’t part of any story she knew, and by day left no traces. And then day extended to night, and the chapter was over. No one ever spoke about it. Juan and Yvonne were as always, conjoined, although no longer cruel to her. Their triumvirate, having begun from the blackest hostilities and passed all the way to the opposite thing, was now just an everyday union with quarrels, and an every night sleeping arrangement of three persons, one room, and two beds. Some nights Pauline woke in her bed and heard them trying to make love, without making noise.