American Woman: A Novel

by Susan Choi

  He’d been working in the greenhouse, sorting through and getting rid of the bulbs—he did it every year in June; if they hadn’t been bought by now, no one was going to buy them, so they’d rot, unless he planted them himself—when his eye was caught by a movement outside on the road. The movement was irregular and slow, not simply swift movement, the cars that streaked past his outpost on the two-lane highway outside town. He thought it might be a customer, idling on the shoulder on the far side of the road while awaiting a chance to turn into his lot, but the crunch of gravel beneath tires didn’t come, and so he peered out between tangles of leaves. To his left, a panel of black plastic in place of a pane sucked in and out like a lung with the slow wind outside. He didn’t usually peer out like a suspicious old woman at the least sound of traffic, but something stirred in him and he remembered, as if under hypnosis, the same utterly mundane occurrence a few days before. A car, seeming to idle a while on the shoulder opposite his house. When he peered out he saw, briefly, a dark nondescript sedan with two men in the front seat, just pulling away. He dropped the bulbs and strode outside, but the car was receding now into the sun.

  The black plastic patch had been on the greenhouse almost precisely the length of time Jenny had been gone. On this bulb-sorting day in June 1975, the length of time was three years and three months. Three years and three months since her boyfriend had been arrested, and she had disappeared, and several shrill articles about her—local girl, only daughter of Shimada of Shimada’s Nursery—had appeared in the Stockton newspaper. He had been in the house at the time, sitting inside with the drapes drawn, the phone cord yanked out of the wall, the CLOSED sign on the door, when he heard the explosion of glass; the margin of the great pane had held on for an infinite instant after the hole was punched in the center before falling away in a second, more delicate crash. When he had finally ventured into the greenhouse he’d seen his plants and trees rippling in the unfamiliar breeze. Great sickleshaped shards of the glass, and then the tiniest flakes, and every size in between had been everywhere. For years to come, repotting a jasmine, or rearranging his shelves, he would keep finding more. The brick had lain on the floor with a note wrapped around it: a hackneyed, almost quaint vandalism except for how much it scared him. Jap commies go home!

  For the next several months he had been under matter-of-fact surveillance, and although the brick and the surveillance weren’t connected, except insofar as they were both linked to Jenny, they felt like two sides of a coin. He had suddenly acquired a new customer, a man from nowhere in the area whose gardening needs, in spite of total gardening ignorance, brought him by the greenhouse every couple of days. But Jenny’s trail had been cold from the start, and soon the fraudulent gardener had stopped coming in. Jim knew of nothing that would have made her trail less cold this summer than it had been for the past thirty-nine months. He decided that the slow-moving car might as easily be his brick-thrower, still frothing after all of these years. When paranoia was a habit, indifference felt fun. He told himself not to worry about it.

  A few days later, he shaved. He was fifty years old and he could still go for days without shaving. His face still only produced sparse patches of hair that never spread into a beard; he still felt, as he had at eighteen, a little foolish and theatrical spreading shaving cream onto his face. Although at that age the lack of facial hair had grieved him, and now he liked it. One less thing to do every day. In every other way the face of himself as a young man was gone. Himself at eighteen: just a kid. He remembered dancing with the girl he liked, flipping her and sliding her between his legs. Though he rarely thought of it in benign terms, Manzanar had been a girl heaven; he’d never before or since had so many girls concentrated around him. Of course he wasn’t thinking of the very beginning, when no one even had solid walls. He was thinking of the brief period of time further in, when camp life had been “ameliorated” to a surreal degree. The girl’s name he needed a long moment, a squinting moment as he shaved, to remember. He’d thought he might marry her then. Camp life had been a strange shot of adrenaline that way: it yanked you out of the world, removed everything, hung you up in a void but for some reason instilled this unbearable urgent desire to grow up as quickly as possible, there where parental authority had been snuffed into nothing. Where parents had been made irrelevant, and children able to govern themselves—though what he hadn’t yet seen was that the disempowerment of his parents had not brought adulthood to him, but childhood to all of them.

  There he was at the dance. It was the same night this particular week as a “family workshop” being held by the absurd, self-important, bespectacled “camp psychologist,” who was really only another kid like Jim but with three years of college and so most of a bachelor’s degree before being interned. In the camp context the kid had translated his aborted education into professional credentials; he was not just psychologist but prophet, explicator, architect of the new and improved Japanese-born American people. Another side to the seeming pan-adulthood the camp’s real panchildhood promoted; by now, they had all been good enough to have been awarded the privilege of self-amusement by their captors. In part this had meant the frantic, overheated mixers; bands competing for fans; foolish hand-painted placards for JOE IKEDA AND HIS SWINGING ALL-STARS; everyone getting the sheet music to the current hits by mail order, seeing no real contradiction in their fervid pursuit of the latest in American wartime fashion from the inside of a jerry-rigged American prison. And, in part, it had meant a self-serious explosion of expertise, the high-mindedness of the “psychologist” masquerading as concern about the future. Jim had very honestly not given a shit for the future. He had been very interested in the girl who could dance, and she had been interested in him, and because they had thought they were instant adults they had embarked on a program of sex and amusement and had ignored the program for self-improvement.

  And because Jim’s peers felt the same way, the psychologist’s patients that Saturday night were as always the camp’s oldest people, who had nowhere better to go. Jim’s mother and father were there, having filed into Mess Hall 16 to get out of their room. They filed in, took their seats sleepily, and were soon being told that he, Jim, was a stranger to them. Jim—who’d turned eighteen in a prison, who wasn’t getting to UCLA after all. Jim, with whom they had never sat shooting the breeze, because they spoke one language, and he spoke another. Jim was a stranger, and this was their fault—they had startled awake with their neighbors and friends, and denounced the young man for his rudeness. And then they’d streamed out of Mess Hall 16, not a fraction as angry as they had behaved. They were enlivened, to have vented frustration and defended themselves. They had gone to the workshop to get out of their rooms, and now it felt just as good to get out of the workshop. They excitedly voiced indignation, they noticed the wonderful breeze. It was warm. It was spring—their first spring in this place. There was an almost-full moon and they could see the ghostly wall of the Sierras standing right above them, glowing as if from within. They could hear insects—that had just happened, they realized. Insects had just, in the past night or two, come to life around them, as if squeezed from the newly warm air.

  Walking unhurriedly away from Mess Hall 16, they splintered as successive blocks were reached, some going left, some right, down the barely distinguishable rows. Gardens were just being planted, rocks arranged near a couple of doorways, but it was more the deep instinct resulting from endless mindless repetition that told each increasingly smaller clutch of old men and women when they had to turn left, turn right, and continue until a next turn or a next. The barracks stretched out for a mile in every direction, black oblong boxes, level beneath the black night. Those who remained had grown quiet. They walked together in increasing distraction. Camp was so large that it was a while before they came within hearing range of the mess hall where the Saturday night dance was held, and they were only a few now whose barrack number had required that they come this way at all. Those who had already turned away into the n
ight might have seen their sons and daughters setting off in this direction earlier that evening, or they might not have; most of them no longer even had dinner together. Their sons and daughters came home to sleep, hopefully. That’s the most they saw of them.

  At least, this was how Jim Shimada imagined it. This was how he imagined his parents, fifteen years after their near-simultaneous deaths and decades after camp, with the facility of empathy he hoped came of being a parent himself. He knew this idea was false; he knew that the fact of his fatherhood didn’t make him any more able to understand his mother or father than Jenny, if she ever had children, if she even emerged from her own fiery youth, would be able to understand him. He knew no more of his parents now than he had at the age of eighteen, but he could imagine. They heard the gay, stubborn music from Mess Hall Number 4, and the music twined itself with the uncomfortable meditations that had been sparked by their long walk through camp. They knew they appeared, to their children and to many outsiders, without thought and perhaps even stupid. This was because, unlike their children, they’d perfected the dissimulating arts. They could even fool themselves into thinking they were without thought, but they were never without it. Every moment of their lives had been the product of pained calculation, of doubt and its opposite, the wild urge to gamble; they thought ceaselessly. The psychologist, of course, had hit home. The truth he’d spoken was one they lived close to but tried to ignore. Yes, their children were strangers. In certain ways they were even unlikable. They loved them, of course. But like them? It wasn’t easy to like their rudeness, their selfcertainty, their callous smugness, their astounding greed, their repulsive capacity for the American sense of entitlement. Even so they still longed for their children, especially now, on the year’s first warm night.

  Standing before Mess Hall 4 they hesitated, then opened the door. They were met by a wall of cacophonous noise and by unpeaceful darkness; the dark seemed to roil and billow like smoke. Within it lights flickered and faded, illuminating their children, who were flipping and swinging each other. Their children were wearing flared skirts and slim loafers and garish sport shirts that they’d ordered from the Sears, Roebuck catalogue. Where had the money come from? It was their parents’ life savings, withdrawn from the banks and sewn into their coats before leaving for camp. They’d feared the government somehow would tap their accounts, that the same force that had unsurprisingly breached storage units and misdirected mortgage payments would also remove their last hope and so assets were made cash and carried, and now the kids had breached the citadel themselves. They’d ordered ankle socks and twin sets and trombones from Sears, Roebuck, which delivered great heaps of American goods to the camp constantly, as if camp were like any small town.

  Jim’s parents, for all their superiority to him in age, in experience, in suffering and forbearance and prudence and cash management, were frightened. They entered the mess hall like the citizens of a subjugated city entering the bonfire-lit camp of the conqueror. They entered like supplicants, and instinctively ranged themselves close to the wall. They blinked in the spangled darkness. Party lights from Sears, Roebuck had completely transformed the dank, unpleasant space, so that now it felt stirringly vast. Their children handled each other with an intimacy and dexterity that were stirring as well, if disturbingly so. They strained their eyes scanning the crowd, seeking their own, only children. Jim’s parents were so static and shadowed and old that they were sure they themselves were not seen, but Jim had seen them instantly from the far side of the hall as he unfurled his girl almost cruelly, felt the joint of her shoulder pull and catch, yanked her back. He had seen his parents and let his own face go stiff like a mask, imagined himself invisible as they imagined themselves invisible, though they were more than visible; they were small weighted shapes, like hanged men. His parents seemed to dangle in death even when they were moving, while he, Jim, was wildly alive. It didn’t surprise him at all they could not recognize him.

  Finished, he squared his shoulders and examined himself in the mirror. An old man, suddenly. His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a car cruising past on the road. Another car seeming somehow furtive; for the next two and a half months, until she was arrested, this would happen a handful of times, and he would never know whether this was really the net closing in, or his old paranoia. The paranoia operating as always, but soon to retrospectively look like clairvoyance. He darted his face close to the halfopen window, felt the air from outside on the traces of lather that still streaked his cheeks. The car passed at a crawl and went out of his sight to the left, but the road was quiet this morning, it wasn’t hard to U-turn, and in a beat he saw the car passing slowly again, from the other direction. If this was an undercover car it was a good one, a customized surfermobile with brown-tinted windows and absurd orange pin stripes. Then it bumped onto the shoulder on the far side of the road and he stiffened, thinking of his other theory, half expecting the window to roll down and the brick to fly out. He would get the goddamn license number this time. And of course he was thinking of Jenny, and then it crossed his mind that this car could be hers. Without wiping his face he ran out of the bathroom, down the hall, out the front door and onto the step, and he could almost see the car start with alarm.

  “Wait!” he shouted.

  But the little car had sped away; and he’d been so stricken, so convinced suddenly it was her, that he’d only tried, futilely, to see through the dark windows. He forgot about the license plate number until the car was a speck, and then gone.

  ON AN AUGUST EVENING a year and a half after Pauline was kidnapped, Jim Shimada saw Pauline’s arrest on the six o’clock news, just like everyone else in the state and perhaps in the country. By the time the cameras had caught up Pauline was being pulled from a squad car in front of San Francisco’s Federal Building. “Say something!” a voice called from the crowd.

  “Venceremos!” Pauline yelled, and was hauled off to cheers.

  It didn’t take much attention to register that the yelling handcuffed girl looked nothing like the remote, wealthy girl whose pictures had dominated the news for so long. This new girl had long wild hair, a deep tan, wore a small pair of wire-rimmed glasses, striped T-shirt, and jeans. Jim barely glanced up from his dinner. It was a sweltering night, all the windows open, rush-hour traffic, such as it was in these parts, hissing past on the road. Jim’s several barely functioning fans feebly stirred the hot air and made a disproportionate noise doing so. The TV volume was all but drowned out. It wasn’t until the next morning, when he opened the paper, that he learned of the other arrest. The other girl rated barely a sentence: there were only the facts that she’d also been wanted, that she’d lived with Pauline, and her name. Jim dropped the paper, hands trembling. Then he closed and locked the greenhouse and the house, and caught a bus into Oakland.

  By the time he arrived she had already met with her court-appointed lawyer, and it was this person Jim spoke to, not her. “She’s fine,” the lawyer said. “Of course, frightened. And not eager to open up to me. I think she wishes we’d all leave her alone, an understandable wish, if imposs—”

  “She doesn’t want to see me,” Jim interrupted, guessing.

  “She asked me to tell you, if you came, to please come back after she contacts you. I think that’s normal in these circumstances. I think in a few days—”

  “Tell her I’m waiting here,” Jim said. He gave the lawyer the number of the motel a few blocks from the jail where he’d taken a room. Before they parted the lawyer asked him if Jenny had any preferences in writing materials. The lawyer was going to ask Jenny to write something for him—not a confession, or a declaration of innocence, or anything that touched on the charges she faced, but a statement of feelings, beliefs. Jim gazed back at the man with distaste. It didn’t seem likely to Jim that Jenny would “open up” to this person, ever. She would find such fastidious gestures as this condescending—preferred writing materials? Jenny was hardly a fetishist when it came to that stuff. She wrote o
n legal pads and with disposable pens, a certain brand that she bought by the box. She hated ballpoints, fat felt-tips, and overpriced fountain pens that needed cartridges. The pens she liked achieved a perfect balance between quality and accessibility. They weren’t high-class—you could get them in a drugstore—but they made a fine line. As for paper, Jim would never have said she thought much about it. She liked legal pads or spiral-bound notebooks, didn’t like fussy notebooks that tried to be pretty, or fancy paper that didn’t have lines. Preferred writing materials? How on earth would he know? And yet he found himself answering, “Yes. Yes, she certainly does.”

  Every day he called the lawyer from his motel room. He learned that Jenny had been pleased with the legal pads and the box of disposable pens. He learned she’d been willing to work on a statement that detailed her feelings and beliefs about things. He learned that she still wasn’t willing to see him, but that she might feel more able when she’d finished her statement. Her statement, though her lawyer did not say so, never seemed to progress. For the rest of that week Jim ate all of his meals at a terrible diner next door to a storefront that said BAIL BONDS. He lay in a motel-room bed, mattress lumpy, sheets scratchy, and stared at the TV. He waited—while his greenhouse stayed shuttered, while his plants gasped for water and sagged in the heat. While bricks, in his insomnial half-awake dreams, exploded through his windows. He knew there was nothing to wait for. As extraordinary as all of this was, it was also just one more stubborn face-off between himself and his daughter. He was staying to show that he’d stayed. At week’s end nothing had changed as he’d known nothing would. He gave the lawyer his number in Stockton, and took the bus home.