by Susan Choi
“Dana,” she breathed. “Dana, it’s me.”
Dana’s voice leaped over hers. “I said not to call!”
“But Dana—”
The line went dead.
When she called back Dana snatched up the phone. “Don’t do this,” Dana said.
“Don’t hang up, Dana, don’t, Dana, don’t—”
Dana interrupted harshly. “I got sick. And I saw the doctor. Don’t try to act like you’re surprised.”
It was her turn to pause. She heard the hiss inside the wire again, but it seemed subtly altered, as if an element that was not aural, that she could feel but not hear, had been added to it. She thought of something her father once said. Her father had always been uncannily good with cats; he’d been able to discipline them, to command their respect and control their behavior. “It’s all in the way you go pssst!” he’d said. “There’s two different pssst! sounds to get their attention. One sounds like the wind in the grass, which they love. One sounds like a snake, which they fear.” To her the two pssst!s were exactly alike. Her hands were pouring sweat; she was surprised to see that she was still holding the returned letter tightly. It was stained from her palm. “Is that clinic still there on the corner?”
“I think so, but I can’t go there now.”
“Please go, just for a checkup. It won’t take very long.”
Dana was using the silence to signal her anger, not to make a decision. At last she said, “I’ll be there in about half an hour.”
Their conversation lasted just a fraction of the time Jenny waited for it to begin. “That thing you sent me made me very, very sick,” Dana said. “You can’t imagine what things are like here. There are doctors all over the place. That location, where I left it, there are people working there who’ve been examined maybe five or six times. And then they found me.”
“There’s no way they could have, unless you weren’t careful.”
“You’re blaming me?” Dana seemed to be struggling to control her voice. After a moment she said, “I don’t understand why you got into this.”
“I’m helping them. The way you help me.”
“You’re in no position to help anybody.”
“How did they find you? Did they see you? Did you tell anyone?”
“God! Don’t insult me.”
“Then they’ve only talked to you because there’s a—flu in the area. They’re just talking to people who live there.”
After a long pause Dana said, “Remember how Sandy talked at a memorial service? For those people who died of this illness? The doctors are tracking down everybody who spoke there, and everybody they know. They talked to Sandy about three weeks ago. Now she’s run off to hide with her sister.”
“Did she tell them anything?”
“She must have told them she knew someone in Boulder.” When Jenny didn’t say anything Dana added, “I came back from work and they were sitting on my porch. In dark suits and sunglasses, the whole fucking deal! With your letter right there on my table.”
She couldn’t seem to keep the shake out of her voice. “I’m sorry, Dana.”
“Be sorry for yourself. If Sandy told them about me, then she must have told them about your great admirer. And he knows where you are. He must be how you got into this.”
“You know where I am.”
“Not exactly, and I wish I knew less.”
“I’m sorry,” she said again. She felt sick, as if the unidentifiable element inside their connection hadn’t been a wire tap but a poisonous gas. Their conversation seemed poisoned.
“I’m hanging up now,” Dana said. “We’ve been on for five minutes.”
IT WAS a long time, several shoppers going in and coming out again with their bags hugged to their chests or in ramshackle carts that they pushed to their cars, but then she saw the boy step out the front door and light a cigarette standing in front of the store’s big glass windows, against the placards announcing store specials. He cupped his hands around the cigarette and craned toward it, but with his neck stiffly bent back, as if trying to keep something balanced on the top of his head. She realized he was holding his Afro away from the flame. Somehow the deliberateness of his awkwardness made him look practiced at what he was doing, though she could tell that he wasn’t a smoker. He glanced over his shoulder into the store and then moved sideways, away from the line of sight out the windows. When he’d moved far enough he tilted back against the cinder block wall and surveyed the expanse before him, taking only occasional, very quick drags.
He was a beautiful kid, and the instant she thought it her eyes filled with ridiculous tears. Watching him, she understood exactly the pleasure he felt. He was taking a cigarette break like a man, savoring his aloneness. It was a startling contrast to her own cracked up, desperate condition. After talking to Dana she’d felt she couldn’t bear to be alone, couldn’t bear going back to the farm, couldn’t possibly stay on the road she was driving so badly, and so she’d found herself here, staking out a bag boy. She put her sunglasses on and restarted the engine before he could see her, but at the same time the boy peered forward, and then he flicked the butt away in a long arc and began to walk toward her. “Hey!” he called cheerfully. “Not from Nam! You sure eat. I thought those groceries would last you a year.” Just then a small middle-aged white man, the sort to walk tilted forward as if always looking for something, ventured out the store’s doors and squinted tentatively at the lot.
“Thomas?” he called.
Drawn up short, the boy turned around and waved to the man across the hundred or so feet between them with great sweeps of his arm, as if directing a distant airplane. “Over here, Mr. M.”
“Are you staying or going?”
“I ain’t sure.”
“If you’re going, punch out.” The admonition was distracted and mild. Then the man went back in.
“That’s the boss,” the boy said, arriving at her window. “He’s as blind as a bat.”
“You seemed worried he’d see you were smoking.”
“I don’t worry. Mr. M thinks I’m too young to smoke, but I’m eighteen years old.” This seemed to remind him to unhilt his comb. “You here to shop?” he inquired, as he worked on his hair.
“I’m just driving around.”
“That sounds cool. I’ll drive with you.”
“I think you’re busy,” she laughed, but then she realized he wasn’t kidding at all. He was sprinting back into the store. As soon as he disappeared inside she tried to make herself speed away, but before she could even debate it he was coming back out. “Days like this they don’t need me, but Mr. M lets me stay if I want extra hours,” he panted, climbing into the car. “I just had to punch out.”
Once they were driving she felt calmer and more reasonable. There was no reason to think she was endangering this kid. She hadn’t endangered the Liberty postmistress, or the man who’d sold her the mousetrap, just by talking with them, had she? She followed his directions through the outskirts of town to a lonely brown structure with one slotlike window before she caught wind of what he was doing. “Is this a bar?” she exclaimed. “You don’t look old enough to drink.”
The observation offended him deeply. “Bet I’m older than you. This bar is my regular place, wait and see. They all know me in here.”
Inside the bar felt murkier than it might have at night, when the small lamps and the pinball machine would cast more of a glow. Now they were washed out by the weak sunlight through the slot of a window, and that light didn’t go very far. There were just a few people, two older black men at the bar and an older black woman behind it. As they walked in the bartender gave them a withering look. “Two beers,” the boy said. “Or just give me a Coke,” he complained. “I’m just here with my friend.”
“How old are you?” the bartender asked her.
“Twenty-five.”
“Whoa!” said the boy.
The bartender raised her eyebrows. “Thomas ain’t even sixteen. Don’t bel
ieve what he tells you. Why aren’t you at work?” she demanded. “Don’t make me lie to your mother.”
“I’m off early,” said Thomas, aggrieved.
When they’d slid into the booth farthest from the bar, near the window, she said, “Maybe we shouldn’t stay here.”
“Why, ’cause of how mean she was? Oh, she’s always that way. She likes me. My brother brung me in here all the time.”
“I’m sorry about your brother,” she said after a minute.
“Why? Ain’t no big deal.”
“It is a big deal. He was killed in a terrible war. He should be with you now.”
Thomas looked narrowly at her. “Shit,” he said after a moment. He laughed briefly.
“What?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know your name,” he realized. “My name’s Thomas, did I already say that?”
“I’m Alice.”
“Alice, don’t be mad.” He cast a backwards glance over his shoulder, but the older people at the bar were ignoring them now. He still lowered his voice. “I was just shitting you, Alice. My brother ain’t dead.”
“He’s not?”
“No.”
“Well, I’m glad to hear that,” she said tentatively.
He seemed much less comfortable now. “Where do you live, anyway? I never see you in town.”
She took a sip of her beer, fizzy and cold, and let it burn down her throat while she thought. She didn’t know when she’d last sat in a bar and just let the time pass. “Outside town,” she said finally. “I live with this lady I work for.”
“You’re a maid?”
“Pretty much.”
“Is it just you and her? That sounds lonely.”
“It is,” she said, and for a minute they fell into silence.
Soon her beer bottle was empty and before she could stop him Thomas went to the bar for another. “On the house,” he said, setting it down. “See? It’s my bar, even if I can’t drink.” She waved her thanks at the bartender, who waved her off, shrugging.
“Why’d you tell me your brother was killed?” she asked him, after taking a swig of the beer.
“Just kidding around.”
“Was he drafted?”
“Why?”
“I’m just asking.”
Thomas twisted around in his seat. With another quick glance toward the bar, he fished his cigarettes out of his pocket and gazed down at them. “She’ll rat me out to my mother for sure,” he said irritably. After a while he added, “He was drafted but did not report. Then he ran off and never came back. So it’s like he’s dead. Maybe he is.” His Coke was finished but he poked his straw around in the ice cubes in an exploratory way, as if he might locate more.
“You shouldn’t be ashamed of what he did.”
“It don’t make any difference to me. He can do what he wants.”
“My dad did the same thing. But in World War II, not Vietnam. He was angry that the government put all the Japanese people in prison.”
“Who put all the Japanese people in prison?”
“The government. After Pearl Harbor. Not prison, but a camp that was just like a prison. Even if you were an American citizen, if your parents or grandparents were Japanese you got put into prison because you might be a spy. We were at war with Germany and Italy too, but if you were German or Italian that was fine. It was just the Japanese that got put into camps.”
“I never heard that in school.”
She shrugged. “They never teach it.”
“You’re shitting me, right?”
“No. I’m not.” She threw back another long draught of beer. “How much do they teach you in school about slavery?”
“Right on,” Thomas grinned. “They don’t teach us shit about that. But I hardly go, anyway.”
“Oh, Thomas. That’s bad. You have to go to school.”
“You’re just saying what bullshit it is!”
“You still have to go. That’s what they expect you to do, as a young black man. Not go to school.”
Thomas considered this a while. “What happened to your dad, anyway?”
“He went to prison for a couple of years. Real prison, I mean.” Her heart had gained speed; she couldn’t believe that she’d let herself mention her father. She wrapped her hand tightly around her beer bottle as if the cold could pull her back into line. The bottle was still beaded with chill water from the cooler, but like the last, it was suddenly empty.
“Alice,” Thomas was saying. “Hey, Alice. Don’t cry.”
For a moment she didn’t know why he was calling her that. “God, look at me. I don’t drink much. That beer made me sappy.”
“At least your dad and you see eye-to-eye. My dad’s not around, but if he ever got hold of my brother, my brother would wish he was in Vietnam.”
“What makes you think that we see eye-to-eye?”
“You said that you thought war was bad. So you’re like all the antiwar people. And your dad must have been that way, too.” It was just an observation, a pleased notation of one possible harmonization in a generally discordant world. She looked at him, facing the single small window, his young face slightly dusted with light. Admiring her from that strange manchild zone of fifteen. The comb came out of the pocket again, and he lazily tugged at his hair: afternoon-off contentment. While she faced away from the window, her face near his, yet shadowed. She tried not to stand up too quickly.
“I have to go, Thomas,” she said. “I have to get back to work.”
“Aw, but you’re telling me so much great stuff. You got great stories, Alice. Maybe we can meet up tonight when you’re done with your job.”
“I don’t think tonight.”
“You won’t come by the store for a year. You got too much food last time.”
“I’ll come by anyway.”
“Cool. Shake on it.” He stuck out his hand, and she shook it. “I have a magic touch with older women,” he warned her.
Outside he lit himself a cigarette, in his awkward, amateurish, impressively particular way. She wondered if it was just coincidence, the random crossing of their paths at a time she was desperately lonely, that had made her say so much to him. Or was it something about him, himself? Once William had said, of winning people to the cause of revolution, You have to get them while they’re tender and young. He’d mostly been joking, but for a while afterward she’d imagined an invisible eye on the young, not yet shut, the way that the skull of a child is supposed to be not fully fused—so that being permeable to the world was a physical thing, that no matter how hard you tried not to, you lost as you aged. Thomas declined her offer of a ride to wherever he lived—I dig walking around, he explained. And she was relieved, and disappointed, and it was all she could do to depart casually. She’d broken a rule talking to him, and she knew she wouldn’t let herself see him again.
“Hey,” he said as she started the engine. “Thanks for telling me all of that stuff.”
Driving off she still wasn’t sure why she had. Her father’s attitudes weren’t things she hoped to alter or even fully understand anymore. She’d long given up brooding on his appalled opposition to her political beliefs, in spite of the fact that he should have been more likely than the average person to agree with her. Her father had been so embittered by the internment and his imprisonment for resisting the draft that when they’d moved to Japan, he’d meant to expatriate permanently. He must have thought there he would finally get some respect: he wouldn’t be shunned by white people because of his race, and he wouldn’t be shunned by his race, because he had failed to kowtow to white people. Resisting the draft as her father had done hadn’t ever been a popular or noble position among the interned Japanese. It lumped you in, however unfairly, with the fanatical Emperor-worshippers, the few real America-haters who made everyone else look so bad. And so her father must have hoped the Japanese would embrace him as heartily as the Japanese-Americans had cast him out, but things hadn’t wound up that way. In Japan he’d emer
ged as indelibly and hopelessly American. It had been in his slight advantage in height and his unerasable Los Angeles accent, in his casual dress which in Japan just seemed sloppy, in his inability to master Japanese. While she’d seemed to absorb Japanese in her sleep; leaving California she’d been shattered, but she’d also been nine, and by the time her father decided to move them home again she was fourteen. She remembered sobbing on the plane, all the way back across the Pacific. In Stockton there had been a dutiful visit to a school psychologist with an office in the municipal building, an occasion mostly notable for the perfect, child-high replica of the Statue of Liberty that had sat on a stand in the lobby. She had been transfixed by this, had reacted to it as if it were a challenge and a joke, had circled it and been reprimanded for trying to touch it and had then sat thinking irritably and irresistibly about it all the while that her father, uneasy and surly himself in a new suit and shoes, had sat with one ankle tensely propped on one knee and his hands in a casual pose in his lap, trying to explain the five-year hiatus in her education. “The school system there is superior,” she remembered him saying. And then he’d added, into the arctic silence that had greeted this comment, and in a stammering tone unlike him, “That is, superior compared to other foreign countries. Not compared to American schools.”
There had been tests of the sort she imagined were given to retarded or incorrigible children, flashlights shone in her eyes and then bright wooden puzzles and ink blots and reading aloud. California had looked so astoundingly different to her, not just because she was no longer nine, but fourteen. Not just because she had lived in Japan for five years. Not just because the psychologist had seemed disappointed when she passed all her tests, or because things were smaller, stripped of childhood enchantment, more uncanny the better she’d known them before. There had been something else, an aura of fraudulence in the burnished sunlight and the dense floral yards and in the bland self-absorption of faces. In Vietnam at the start of that summer a monk had immolated himself, and the ghastly flames eating his body had been shown on TV. Now her father was declaring a truce in his one-sided war on the land of his birth, but it was at the same moment she’d started to grasp why he’d waged it. It had been at her school in Japan that she’d learned about the internment. She’d never heard of it in California, where it had happened, or from her father, to whom it had happened, and when she’d asked him about it after school that day he’d just said with annoyance, “Why ask about that? All of that was a long time ago.”