by Susan Choi
“You’d better leave him alone,” Jenny said.
“I’ve gotten to like rural life,” Juan continued, ignoring her. “I can imagine a headquarters here.”
“‘For Rent, Fishing Camp, on the Delaware River,’” Yvonne read, as they ate. “Fishing Camp—that’s right on. We could catch our own food.” Then she looked up at Jenny. “What about you, Sister? Wouldn’t you like that? You love being in nature so much.”
Only Pauline said nothing, and kept her eyes trained on her plate. After dinner Jenny sat in her room at the window, reexamining the things she’d lined up on her sill over the course of the summer. Things she’d found on her walks and felt compelled to slip into a pocket, which had always looked diminished when she found them again, slightly crushed, or dusted over with lint. The spiny rind of a chestnut; a smooth white bracket mold, like a tongue of spilled cream. The one thing that hadn’t been damaged in transit was a robin’s-egg shell that she’d cupped in her palm all the way down the hill. Someone, between dinner and her mounting the stairs to go to bed, had hung one of the size-four dresses, the pink one, on her doorknob. Compared to the blue of the egg the pink shade was a vile one, tainted with orange. The effort, whoever had made it, to tempt her with the dress, then the whole costume drama-in-progress, with its earnest makeup and its script and the greatness of its imagined results, almost made her laugh, it was all so absurd. Then she thought she might cry. Downstairs was shrill laughter and footsteps; they must be getting drunk. Their bedroom door slammed but then she heard someone mounting the stairs. Pauline appeared in the doorway. “You’re still awake,” Pauline said.
“So are you. I thought you’d gone to bed.”
“They did. I wanted to talk to you.”
Pauline looked much more resolute now. Jenny thought of Pauline’s shooting stance, the wide legs, shoulders shrugged to her ears. “Pauline, my mind is made up.”
“There was just something I thought of I wanted to tell you. Our old leader—before our comrades died our old leader once said when you’re weak, you have to fight to get strong. But you can help yourself out by removing temptation. Like the temptation to go back to a life that’s complacent and selfish. I had that temptation. My comrades needed money to keep doing actions, and I needed to remove the temptation. So I robbed a bank with them.”
After a moment Jenny said, “You shouldn’t tell me about crimes you’ve committed.”
“But there’s more. There’s something else that I wanted to say: It helps us help them. Help the People. Because without it we just can’t continue. Of course it isn’t an ideal situation. Money is evil, there’s no good way to get it. But it’s a necessary evil, until the revolution changes everything. Until then, we need money. There’s no good way to get it, and there’s no bad way to get it. You just have to get it, that’s all.”
“That sounds like something Juan would say.”
“Why can’t I make you understand?”
“It’s not your job to.”
“Yes it is. Yes it is.” Pauline sat on the floor suddenly, leaning onto the door frame.
When Jenny had come upstairs the room had been cool; now the chill night air was making her shiver. Pauline was biting her thumbnail, intense, but turned inward again. Jenny got up and closed the window, and realized it was the first time she’d closed it since they had arrived. She knew that she’d never imagined the four of them still in this place, as the leaves on the maples turned red, and the larches turned yellow, and magnificent weather refilled the small pond and then gave it a clear skin of ice. They were always supposed to be gone by the end of the summer. Autumn was coming, and none of them even owned socks. They had turned all their socks into wrist weights.
She lit a cigarette and held it out silently to Pauline, and Pauline took it and inhaled hungrily, without comment, and in that instance the undeniable nonaloneness of the past several months overwhelmed her. Of course she would only taste it when it came to an end.
“I’ll stop bothering you,” Pauline said, and she went back downstairs.
THE NEXT DAY she’d finally packed all her things—her blue jeans and T-shirts and the old leather jacket for when it got cold, her underpants and her modest collection of paperback books, the tools she’d accumulated that were too valuable to give up, like the big crescent wrench and the drill from Wildmoor that an ancient worker had abandoned; and the notebooks of her journal of more than two years, and her letters from William—when she realized her duffel and accordion file were too much to carry. She hefted one and then tried for the other and almost fell over. It would have been different if the duffel was something else, like a backpack, or if the file had a handle. She finally got the duffel hung over one shoulder, and took a tentative step. Once she got used to this she could try the accordion file under an arm. Juan came jogging up the stairs and eyed her coldly from her doorway. So far today he had been treating her not with goading argumentation or comradely persuasion or ostentatious indifference, but a sort of hostile minimality: she had spurned his great offer, and now he was finished with her. “We’d like to rehearse, and we’d rather not go to the barn just so you can kick back in the house.”
“Then I’ll leave.”
“And put the bag down. You’re not free to go yet.”
“I’m just seeing how well I can carry it.”
“Bullshit. Put it down.”
“I’m not trying to sneak off, Juan,” she snapped.
“Put it down.”
She let the duffel bag fall to the floor; its impact shook the room. “You’re a prick,” she said, shouldering past him to get out the door. She felt her eyes welling up suddenly.
Outside was a late summer day, clear and warm but alive with cool breezes. The sky seemed huge for the mammoth clouds traveling through it. She walked the steepest and fastest way up to the woods but once in the dense mix of boulders and trunks she was forced to slow down. She picked her way through obstacles. She was near the split-boulder reconnaissance point that Pauline had picked out long ago, or at least thought she was. Now she couldn’t locate it. She kept moving, not climbing or descending but just steadily crossing the flank of the hill. Then she reemerged in the open, in the uppermost pasture. From here the house looked like a toy left behind in the grass. The hillside was ragged with milkweed and goldenrod and other hardy things she didn’t know the names of, the kinds of things that drift and root everywhere and don’t need a particular place. She thought of her father, always trying to teach her to build chairs from scrap wood or grow food from seeds. Maybe that had been his way of describing internment to her. He’d always brushed off her questions about it, but maybe he’d been telling her things all her life. This is how you make a horse stable into a home, and a burlap sack into a bed. This is how you pack one little bag, though you’re going so far for so long . . . She thought of her duffel and accordion file, waiting for her like a pair of old dogs. They seemed like so little and they still were too much. She hadn’t learned very well. And her eyes, spilling tears that she chose to ignore, also burned from how badly she’d slept. She hadn’t learned that, either. Her father had expected her to sleep well anywhere and under all circumstances. On the ground, in the back of the car. Across chairs in the bus station waiting room.
She closed her eyes and lay carefully back in the bug-teeming grass. After a while she had finally stopped crying. She knew the sun alternated with clouds from the shifting of warmth on her face. Some time later she heard the back door slam, the noise carried to her on the wind. When she sat up she saw the tiny figures of Juan and Yvonne moving over the grass. Halfway to the barn they paused for a moment, then parted. Yvonne dropped to the ground and began doing sit-ups. Lately she did them by the hundreds, bobbing and gasping with calm fixity, like a yogi. Yvonne had decided that they were too decadent with their meals, and begun halving hers; now she even tore her sticks of gum in half. Juan went on to the barn. A few moments later Jenny heard the POP, POP of the gun.
The next time she opened her eyes she must have been responding to the strange length of time that her face had been covered by shadow. Pauline stood over her. She sat up on her elbows and Pauline said, “I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“That’s okay.”
Pauline just stood there, not saying anything else. “Want a cigarette?” Jenny asked, to break the silence. Pauline accepted, sat down, leaned forward to take a light, began to smoke, without speaking.
There was a hawk turning slowly above them; Jenny watched it, feeling the way she might have on a boat, watching the horizon to keep from throwing up as the boat pitched and rolled. Clinging to belief in the tranquil apartness of that faraway point, from the tumult she found herself in. When Pauline finished her cigarette she ground it out at great length on the bottom of her sneaker. Pauline’s old beet-colored dye job had grown out so much that an inch of brown showed at her scalp, strange and vulnerable-looking, like the fur of some blind newborn mammal. Then the wind picked her hair up and the pale brown roots were obscured. Pauline dug in her pockets and brought out her own cigarettes and a book of the matches that Jenny had brought back to the house when they’d first gotten here, from a gas station outside Ferndale. She had swiped a whole big box of the individual cardboard books of matches from the gas station’s office while the attendant was under a car, because they went through their matches so quickly. They’d needed them to light the stove, and cigarettes, and since they were always lighting cigarettes outside, and there was often wind, they always used up many matches on just one cigarette; except for Juan, who had a trick for lighting a match with one hand, without tearing it out of the book. He’d bend the match backwards and then by some swift movement of his thumb make it ignite with particular violence. She’d once seen Pauline alone in the kitchen trying to duplicate Juan’s trick with match after match until a whole book was splayed like a badly bent fork and the sulfur heads were all crumbled and Pauline’s thumb, she imagined, was sore. Pauline didn’t try to do the trick now; her hands were suddenly trembling as she handed Jenny a reciprocal cigarette and tore a match from the book to try to light them both. But she couldn’t; Jenny took the matches from her. “Pauline,” she said. “What is it?” The breeze had gained strength, and on it she thought she heard the POP, POP of the gun again, just for an instant.
“Please do this thing with us,” Pauline said. “Do you remember the other night when I told you about what I did to remove the temptation? That was only to make sure I couldn’t go back. It didn’t let me go forward. It didn’t prove to them I can be good, and not just a beginner.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s my job to persuade you to stay. To recruit you. You didn’t think we’d be an army of three forever?” Pauline paused, watching her searchingly. “It’s the first thing I’ve been given to do on my own. I don’t get any help. And they know I won’t let myself fail.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean they know I won’t let myself fail. He could probably kill me.” Pauline was flushed, oddly triumphant from the terrible confession. “I wasn’t supposed to tell you that. You know I wasn’t supposed to tell you that. But you won’t ever tell them.”
“No,” she said. She was suddenly sweating, she realized. Profusely. She thought of the bright red handprint, Pauline screaming at her in the barn. She saw the hawk drop like a meteor into the grass. For a moment the hillside looked just as it had. Then the hawk rose again, without anything.
“He only wants you to drive the switch car,” Pauline added.
Jenny was still staring at the blank patch of grass where the hawk had dropped down. What did it mean when people said, “I’ve decided . . . ?” Did anyone ever truly decide? A brand-new white purse set in place, her quick footsteps away; that had been a decision. And yet she couldn’t recall when and where she’d decided to do that. “I drive the switch car, and Juan leaves you alone.” It came out as a statement, though it was meant as a question. Her own voice sounded distant to her. “And then what?” she belatedly asked, but Pauline had stood up.
“He’s in the barn. He’ll want to know we can go with Plan A.”
Jenny followed Pauline down the hill. Pauline moved hastily, almost eagerly. In the barn Juan was taking a break to reload. He was handling the gun with grave earnestness; seeing him like that, imitating the pure absorption of a child as his minion approached him, made her feel hatred for him like a rash of small spines bursting out of her skin. He looked up at Pauline without anything in his face but the fact that she’d roused him from deep meditation. “Jenny does want in,” Pauline announced. “I’ve been talking to her about it.”
Juan looked startled; he must have assumed and perhaps even hoped Pauline wouldn’t succeed. But then he remembered to safeguard his pride; he turned to Jenny magnanimously. “It’s a good thing I don’t take back my offers,” he said. “You’re gonna have to catch up. We’ll rehearse before dinner.”
She stalked out of the barn tasting bile in her throat. When Pauline emerged a few moments after she pulled her aside, as Juan’s shooting resumed.
“When this is over, you have to leave them.” She wished there were proof of the moment, a receipt or a bell, to mark Pauline’s decision.
Pauline seemed to hesitate slightly. “Okay,” she finally said.
“HI, MR. MORTON,” Yvonne called.
Then she would hurry to him, in a powder-blue dress from Margot’s Modern Fashions, a light coat from the same on her arm. “Hi! Don’t you remember me? Sandra. I’m back home for a visit.” She would put her coat arm partway around him, take his arm with her free hand.
He would say, “Sandra?” his small, creased eyes blinking at her. He would feel the hard thing in his back.
Yvonne urges him gently. “Keep walking. Sandra Smith, remember? From check-out. Now I’m engaged.”
“I don’t remember . . .” he says, in a strangled voice. Fear, not resistance.
“It’s a gun,” Yvonne says. “I won’t use it if you’ll just walk with me. Let’s turn here, okay?”
They leave Main Street, the bank still a half block beyond them, and turn down a side street that leads to a rear parking lot. The side street is blank, no windows, just some side doors to businesses closed on Sundays. Juan is there. “This is my fiancé,” Yvonne says. “Why don’t you give him the bag.”
Juan holds out his hand, warmly smiles. In rehearsal this takes barely a minute. A car pulls itself free of the cars in the lot and comes toward them, Pauline at the wheel. A few miles away, in a second car, Jenny is waiting.
“Good!” Juan said. “Now we’re driving, we’re calm . . .”
Past four in the morning Yvonne and Juan drove to Ferndale and hot-wired a nondescript four-door sedan. The two cars came rumbling back up the hill before dawn. Pauline sat in the driver’s seat of the sedan and gripped the wheel so tightly her knuckles turned blue. “Drive up to the barn and come back and don’t turn off the engine,” Juan said. The car rolled away, picked up speed. “California girl,” Juan observed of her. “She said she wasn’t sure she could still drive. Like she’d ever forget.”
At ten o’clock Jenny was sitting in the Bug at an overgrown fishing access to a river so dry that she only saw piles of rocks, round and pale, and then sometimes a glint of reflection from deep between them when the sun left the clouds. Through the trees she could see the boat launch, a cracked, crumbling ramp of concrete. She was wearing her own jeans and T-shirt and sneakers; she’d refused to put on the pink dress. It was a grim day, intermittently raining: all the better for Sunday on Main Street. “Hi, Mr. Morton,” Yvonne calls. It had occurred to them, belatedly, that Mr. Morton did not seem to have white employees. Did this mean he had never had white employees? She hurries to him, in the dress, with the coat, puts her coat arm partway around him.
Jenny thought of the white purse, the green dress. On that years-ago day that is somehow more real than this one, she looks like a girl who has just been to chur
ch, in a dainty green dress with white piping, white shoes, clean white gloves, the white purse to match. In the middle of the bright business day, waiting calmly at the elevator bank in the lobby, later going back out the same way she went in. Perhaps the guard senses a ripple, in a distant recess of his mind; she does not have the purse anymore but the lobby is crowded, twenty people pass by every minute, he doesn’t know what he has noticed and may not even know that he’s noticed at all. She takes the bus home as if sleepwalking, as if levitated, or drugged. Seeing nothing. Trying to shake herself free of the trance, for the sake of safety, but she can’t. Floating into Tom Milner’s apartment, where they’ve arranged to regroup and observe, she finds not just William and Tom but Mike Sorsa, and Tom’s practically brand-new girlfriend—she’s still really a date—Lorraine, gathered there, waiting for her. One look at her face and William knows she’s done it right; and of course the bag is gone. Before anyone can say anything, while they’re still staring, stunned, she and William walk straight to each other and lock mouths desperately, and the tension, though it doesn’t break, quavers briefly with keyed-up laughter and admonitions: “Aw, come on. Save the pornography.”
Tom Milner’s brand-new girlfriend—he won’t meet shy, loyal, nervous, impassioned Sandy until more than a year from this time—reveals she has made them a party: vegetarian chili heating up on the stove, a bowl of salad in the fridge, she’s instructing various of them to get out paper plates, forks, napkins, she leads them onto the roof, the reason they’re using Tom’s—it has a view of the building—and there are lawn chairs set up here, as if it’s a day at the beach, and a cooler of beer. It’s only now that she registers how disturbed—not just disturbed, angry—she is that this girl, Lorraine, is here. William wraps his arms around her from behind and she shrugs him off; she can’t scold Tom, or even reveal her irritation, and so she’s left with being angry at William. “What?” he whispers, with the hint of a warning: don’t ruin our night.