American Woman

by Susan Choi

  “Nothing,” she says. “But I’m nervous.”

  “I love you,” he says. Waiting sternly until she meets his eyes.

  She hates this pro forma exercise; what she really means, what she really feels, needs, craves, is hardly expressed by these words. These words seem like a fence to her, a little white line of pickets to keep things at bay. A formula to ward off other words, real words, words tightly bound to their meanings. But for William the utterance is like a dangerous thing he was taught to avoid. He says it with jaw jutted, with something like anger—I will possess this fatal weapon and use it!—and, finally, with the need for her to acknowledge the significance of his having chosen her.

  “I love you,” she says.

  And then all of them are eating the chili and drinking the beer, conversing at first uneasily, then with greater fluidity as the sun, and the beer, go down. They gorge themselves, lean back, open fresh beers. Mike Sorsa fills his little silver pipe and passes it around and they get high. It’s a mild, fragrant night; she watches the green lights from the port come on, the lighthouse beating its tempo on Alcatraz Island. It almost feels like any summer night’s roof party. It won’t be fully dark until nine; then Lorraine, somewhat self-importantly, takes the leftover chili downstairs—it was good chili; they’ve all praised her, grinned over it, dunked bread into the pot and licked it off their fingers in stoned primitiveness when they got sick of using their plates—and comes back up with candles and the transistor radio. Jenny is annoyed again by Lorraine’s manner—it is proprietary, braggartly, as if Lorraine is the center of events and not what Jenny feels she is, a dangerous interloper. Lorraine’s easy femininity also seems boastful. Jenny decides she hates these girls who flaunt their casual associations with the marginal while at the same time oddly emphasizing their traditionalness—these girls who always end up acting as caretakers, the ones who stroke the foreheads of the boys overcome by LSD, who gladly whip up omelettes for twenty at four in the morning, who are always to be found, the next day, gliding easily among the prone, pungent bodies on the living room floor, collecting the glasses and plates and wiping up the spills. She is thinking she hates them; though she is more likely to be a caretaker herself than a prone body on the living room floor. All the same she is more and more, perhaps because of the grass, not just irked but frightened by the ramifications of Lorraine’s inclusion in their circle. And also, perhaps because of the grass, she is less able than ever to summon the strength to do something about it. What could she do?

  It is the kind of thing, she thinks, that will lead to disaster someday.

  But hours are passing, have passed. William has gone downstairs also, and returned swinging a full bottle of whiskey by its neck. Nice whiskey. “I think this qualifies as a special occasion,” he says, smiling at her.

  At half-past midnight she shudders suddenly, as if chilled. She’s thoroughly lost track of time. “Shh!” she exclaims, and everyone stares at her. Lorraine looks at her with exaggerated concern, her eyebrows raised questioningly, as if Jenny were an inarticulate child.

  “I just worry we’re loud,” she says, embarrassed. She gestures around, at the indigo night, the palms swaying along the avenue, the lights from the strip, two blocks away, where the deli and grocery are. All is murmurous, as are they, she realizes. They’re not loud, they’re not even the only ones up on a roof, drinking beer, getting high. It’s the season of roof parties.

  “You just worry,” William teases, wrapping himself around her back like a chair. She leans into him, closes her eyes. She can feel his cock hardening against the base of her spine. He feels her feeling him and squeezes humorously; it’s a joke of theirs, his uncontrollable hunger for her body. A fantastic joke she can’t imagine tiring of. A sated drunkenness has overtaken them all. Tom Milner and Lorraine, around the corner of the hutlike structure that houses the entrance to the stairwell, are intensely necking and stroking each other; she can feel the heat washing off them, but with William against her, she doesn’t care anymore. Sorsa, the quiet loner, is crouched near the roof’s edge, cigarette pinched between his fingers, meditative and unmoved, it seems, by the pulse of sex behind him. She feels William work his hand beneath her shirt, under her waistband. When he fingers her she is already so wet he’s sucked in by her flesh. She twitches, gives a jerk, as if her nerves are malfunctioning, and pushes against him anxiously; she hears his ragged breath. He sometimes comes, with sudden and great force, while touching her this way. Not touching himself at all. Then she hears Sorsa say, as if to himself, “One.”

  She looks up, feels Tom Milner and Lorraine break apart. William’s hand, as if caught, slips from her. A long beat, in which nothing happens. Her throat closes.

  Then, across the expanse of cottages, palms, streets crisscrossing, the quiet night in this low-slung, waterside settlement, traffic hardly audible, lights of the port glowing green, lighthouse at Alcatraz pulsing, the toy city of San Francisco not really visible behind the string of the Bay Bridge, downtown Oakland rising like an accident near the water’s edge, as if, midway through its construction, someone had realized San Francisco lay just across the water, and so cancelled the project, the X____ tower, only twenty-two stories, rectangular and graceless, burps a ball of black smoke and orange flame; from the distance the noise is as quick and mundane as, perhaps, a dump truck letting go of its load. Boom. That’s all. Then a streamer of black smoke is angling away, with the wind. She feels as if she’s going to faint, is fainting, she’s tumbling backward, then realizes this is because William, whom she’d been leaning on, has leaped to his feet with a whoop. “Shh!” she says—but they’re all whooping, clutching their chests, pointing, reeling, amazed.

  While she’s started to shake, violently. Not because she did not know, before, the real scope of the thing she would do. She made sure to know, or she wouldn’t have let herself do it. But nothing, no amount of mental preparation, has been equal to what it looks like. William sees her quaking, her teeth chattering, as if it’s the middle of winter, and kneels quickly before her, grabs her hands, her little hands, squeezes them, as if she is a child. “Think of that being dropped onto people,” he hisses. “Balls of fire dropped down onto children. Little children who look just like you.”

  “I know what I did,” she says angrily, snapping out of her trance. “And I know why—you don’t have to coach me.”

  AT ELEVEN they were suddenly upon her. Yvonne’s blue dress was spattered with black blood and gore—Jenny saw her and screamed. “Shut up!” Juan yelled. Yvonne couldn’t speak; her hand, her gun hand, was soaked in blood as if she had plunged the hand into a wound. Juan was bundling her into the Bug like a sack of potatoes. Pauline drove the other car across the empty oncoming lane and the shoulder and bumped down into the high grass in the ditch; the rear bumper sank out of sight. “What happened?” Jenny screamed at them. Pauline came running back across the road to the Bug, her hair flying behind her. Yvonne leaned out the door on her side and threw up and Juan pulled her back in, roughly, but with a palm on the top of her head to keep her from hitting it on the door frame. The way cops always do, Jenny thought. “What happened?” she screamed again.

  “Just drive!” Juan said. But she was already driving.

  She didn’t remember the drive back; not in sequence, or as a sustained length of time. All the miles she’d driven up and down these roads now seemed to have been an accumulation leading up to this drive; she did not see what she did, didn’t tell her hands to guide the wheel as they guided it. She held the memory of this drive in every cell of her body, and later it would seem that even those things that were happening now had already been part of the great mass of detail she knew. Yvonne sobbing hugely. Juan talking and talking, like a thread being pulled from his mouth, no island of silence or emphasis. Clean house pack call Frazer need to cars need to get another car maybe after nightfall go back for that car maybe no one but that one man saw have to travel they’ll think it was local not the kind of thing st
ate police local one-off thing . . .

  Pauline was silent. She sat beside Jenny, her profile motionless, like a ship’s figurehead. Homing in on invisible landmass. Seeing past the horizon—

  They roared and bounced wildly up the dirt track to the house; now that they were on the property Jenny was standing furiously on the gas pedal until they were doing seventy, eighty; they almost shot up in the air when they came to the level. And they almost hit the maple; her eyes were trained on the rear view, on the length of the road you could see when you’d climbed from the valley. Not another car on it.

  “Put it into the barn,” Juan said, pulling Yvonne, limp and blood-spattered and vomit-stained, out of the car. He flipped her over to face the house and swung her arm around his shoulders. “Walk,” he growled. “Come on, baby. Walk.”

  Pauline finally turned to her. “He’s dead,” she burst out.

  “Get my duffel and file. Run!” Pauline heard an order; she ran; she ran across the lawn ahead of Juan and Yvonne as if to hold the door for them, then slipped through; the door slammed shut behind her. A beat later Juan was there with Yvonne. Jenny watched him struggle to reopen the door, then hold it with one outstretched leg while he handled Yvonne. She seemed to have fainted, but then she looked up at him, as if she’d just seen him. Her face collapsed, and he pulled her into his arms.

  “Okay,” he said. “It’s okay. He’s all right. That person was there to help him. Now they’ve gone to the hospital.”

  “I love you,” moaned Yvonne.

  “I love you. I love you.” Juan hitched her arm over his shoulder again. They went in. Jenny started to cry; she tipped her forehead on the wheel and sobbed. The engine was still running. Her body shook as if someone were standing behind her and shaking it. She heard noise at the back door, and her head, like an object obeying physical laws, rolled to one side; she opened her eyes. Through her tears came a melting and wavering form, struggling, pulling something. Her duffel and file. Pauline had the file gripped to her chest and was tugging the enormous duffel through the grass; she dumped them next to the car as if they were an obstacle race she’d completed. “They’re in the bathroom,” Pauline gasped. “Cleaning. Juan says put the car in the barn and hurry!” Jenny swung out of the car and opened its back doors. She kicked the red gun onto the grass. The deposit bag was still sitting on the floorboards; she opened it, pulled out some money, and threw the bag on the grass also, then grabbed for her duffel and file.

  “Get in!” she said to Pauline.

  “What?”

  “Get in! We have to go, now!” She could see Pauline finally flooding from panic, as if the news she’d delivered herself had just registered with her. He’s dead. Pauline blindly turned toward the doomed house and Jenny seized her and manhandled her into the car, the way Juan had manhandled Yvonne, but with even less care. Pauline’s brittle frame gave her a shock, as if she’d taken a gloved hand and felt only bones. Pauline twisted and recoiled and fell roughly on the front seat.

  “Oh, no,” she was sobbing. “Oh, no, no, we can’t, no, we can’t . . .”

  Jenny stamped on the pedal and the Bug squealed in a half-circle and roared down the hill. Inside, above the sound of running water, the noise might have reached Juan, but if he came running out with his sleeves rolled up, hands white with lather, Yvonne’s tears a damp patch on his shirt pocket, she didn’t look back to see him.

  They were down the drive, onto the road, before Pauline had voiced her whole protest. “We can’t leave them!” she screamed.

  “Leave them!” Jenny said.

  But after they’d been driving long enough, turning, turning, turning, changing roads as often as there were roads to change to, Pauline’s sobs winding down to just harsh hopeless scrapes in her throat, the pinhole that had been Jenny’s vision dilated: grew huge. She slowed down. The faint yellow stripe of their road stretched away endlessly.

  “You lied,” she said. “Juan never threatened you. He didn’t make you recruit me. You just did it to please them.”

  Pauline’s wet face was blotched a raw color. “And it did please them, didn’t you see?” she choked forth raggedly. “They were so pleased with me . . .”

  When night fell Jenny found a truck stop and called Frazer, for the last time, from a pay phone. “They’re all done with their book. Come right now.”

  “Oh, fantastic!” said Frazer, surprised. “I’m so sorry, sweetheart, I’m so sorry we fought. See you soon.”

  “See you soon,” she echoed.

  She hung up and ran back to the Bug. Pauline was curled in the back with the duffel. The night had turned cold. Jenny sat up for hours, a knot, holding herself to keep warm, waiting for understanding, but her mind had been bombed; it was only a crater. She closed her eyes against the harsh yellow lights of the lot. The rumbling of the idling trucks around her gave off something like animal comfort. Behind her, a tight ball, Pauline slept. There were many ways, she thought, to disappear. She thought of Juan’s mother, and her beloved dent-with-tree in the field. There would be an oasis.

  Part Three

  Frazer found them, not even in the house or in the barn, but in the woods, and after walking and shouting their names for almost half an hour. They had heard his car and fled, not imagining that it was him. He didn’t think he would ever forget their faces, when they saw that it was. Those expressions erased many things. Right then, they confessed, and he opened his heart in return. The flight of Jenny and Pauline they would barely discuss. “I felt them slipping away . . .” Juan murmured. It wasn’t clear when he had felt this. They all, back in the house again, drank a glass of whiskey each and sat a while, stilling their senses. “One thing I always say is listen to the body,” said Frazer. “If it’s freaked, calm it down. Give it time. We need ours to be calm.” When they felt they were as calm as they could be, they discussed what to do.

  It was very hard to imagine, they all agreed, that the investigation of a robbery and shooting in a town thirty miles away would arrive at this long-vacant farmstead, let alone soon, which meant two things: that they would leave here, to be as prudent as possible, but that they would take their time doing it. They would leave without leaving a trace.

  Frazer went to buy gloves and they set to work, wearing them. The fire pit Frazer and Jenny had built was loaded with wood; they got a strong fire going, and then they burned everything that they could. What would not burn they packed in the car. They did not speak of the book, but Juan retrieved the small package of their efforts from the woods and repacked it carefully with his belongings. When the house was empty of everything they had brought to it, they washed every dish, pot, spoon, cup, still gloved; they washed other movable items. Then, one room at a time, with bowls of soapy water and rags, they wiped down every surface: the windows and sills, the light switches, the bed frames, the chests of drawers, toilets . . . as each room was finished, they closed it. They had to go to sleep at one point, the work took them so long.

  When the house was pristine they moved on to the barn: easier, because with so many fewer smooth surfaces. They took down the targets and burned them, wiped the tools, searched with flashlights for spent shells and casings.

  Doing this strange work was calming. Juan thought it helped Yvonne, appealed to her sense of order. And he liked it too. The history of touch; it was melancholy, it was moving, it was settling, to consider the things one had touched. In the woods, panting for breath during some combat drill, he had often held a smooth, water-washed rock in his palm. Squeezed its cool, ancient form. Water had carved these hills, these rocks, turned them gently out of the soil . . . is that what had happened? His own measure of this life seemed so small. He had wanted so badly to help people. And had felt that the structures and strictures were false—couldn’t one, with a true heart and a strong hand, simply plunge forth, and make right by force? This was what the army had taught him, but their notion of rightness was wrong. Now the temporal struggles of man seemed, at moments, irrelevant. He thought
he understood, as he carefully blotted out every trace of himself in this place, that he was going to die soon, and not as a hero. He had sacrificed that aspiration, in the course of pursuing it. And it was a welcome premonition, his death. But like many such premonitions, it was not going to prove true. Again, he was going forward into peril, and again he would live. He would live, longer than his twenty-three-year-old self—intuiting the constricting, freeing limits of adulthood for what was really the first time—could imagine now. He would have children. He and Yvonne, so bound to each other, would part. For Juan at twenty-three, having loved her for almost seven years, such a thing is unthinkable, but the day will come when his love for Yvonne is a chapter, not the last and largest portion of his life.

  None of this is known to him now. He polishes the hasp on the barn door, thinks of polishing stones. Puts the crosspiece of wood through the door handles. Polishes the bottle of polish stuff he’s been using, lathers it in its own sharp, fake-lemony, naive American smell. Joins Frazer and Yvonne at the car. They feel good, gathered next to the car—or as good as they can. Yvonne has not eaten a crumb since the shooting. She is pale, empty-eyed, silent. Juan thinks of avocados; she loves those. They’re going back to California, and there are lots of avocados there, and he’ll get her to eat them.

  Ready? Frazer says. They nod, and get into the car.

  LATE THAT NIGHT Jenny retraced the route she’d first traveled to get to the farmhouse. It took less than an hour, although when she arrived she overshot the driveway, even by the light of a nearly full moon. She had to double back, losing a couple of minutes. Then she saw the chain slung as usual between its two posts. Unhooking the chain and moving it aside her palms took on powdery rust. She noticed the small sign she’d painted was gone. In its place was a mass-produced one that said PRIVATE, of about the same size.