American Woman

by Susan Choi

  Jenny had arrived in the midst of these embers—absurdly built up beforehand, she now learned, because Frazer told grandiose tales about her. And threatening, with her history of exploits that Juan found impressive. And so self-sufficient, with her faraway world that she wrote to, and her lover in prison, her journal. She’d drive off in the loud little car, her neat cap of black hair flying back, her huge sunglasses on—she was always departing. You sensed any time she might just leave for good, an idea Pauline hated, and brooded upon. There was, Pauline supposed, a submerged recognition: once Pauline had had her own car, and she’d driven around with her long clean hair flying behind and her sunglasses on. But mostly she tried not to think of the past. Mostly she thought of how Jenny had altered the present. Pauline’s island existence with Juan and Yvonne had become sharply lonely for her. At first Jenny just made it worse, but soon Pauline realized, with confusion and uncertain pleasure, that Jenny liked her, perhaps even preferred her. And when Jenny resisted their robbery plan, Pauline suddenly saw how a very small lie could be good for them all, in the end. Juan would be happy, which would make Yvonne happy, and they’d both be surprised and impressed with Pauline. And once the robbery proved the resounding success Juan had said it would be, even Jenny would see it was better to stay with the cadre, than be cast out alone.

  IN INDIANA the thick Eastern carpet of cities and roadways and towns had at last grown threadbare. The shorn rows of harvested corn turned past them like great spokes. After the sun set they drove through profound country darkness for hours, afraid they’d be driving all night, when they finally found a motel, spied its lone neon twinkle far off like a bead lost from some cosmic necklace.

  The next day at dawn that distinction was lost. Jenny eased their door open a crack and saw they were camped at a handful of weatherworn boxes the same shade as the gray country road, the gray dirt and the lightless gray sky. In the lot there was one other car that was still misted over with night condensation. Outside the office the neon sign buzzed. She slipped out and loaded the file and duffel back into the trunk, finally started the car after giving herself courage with the thought that in the dreary Indiana dawn it would sound no more foreign than rainfall or crows. A few minutes later, when the car was warmed up, Pauline cracked the door and through the mist-streaked windshield Jenny nodded to her. Pauline pulled the door shut and with rapid steps came to the car and got in and they drove away swiftly, two temperate travelers resuming their journey at dawn.

  They were driving a desolate stretch in Missouri in a blinding rainstorm when the car died on them. They’d pulled onto the shoulder to study their atlas, afraid they were lost, and then the engine wouldn’t restart. “Okay,” Pauline said, lighting a cigarette with a trembling hand. “Okay, let’s just think. Try to think.” She cracked her window to let the smoke out and a slice of hard rain shot sideways through the crack and got them both instantly wet, and snuffed the cigarette out. Pauline quickly rolled up the window again. They turned on the hazards, afraid they’d be hit from behind; and then saw no one for half an hour, in either direction, until a huge truck went rumbling past, smacking their car with a wall of water. Water was standing on the road now, perhaps as much as a foot deep, and they both screamed when the truck’s force struck them; they felt that all that mattered was the integrity of their car, that it remain watertight and protective. Pauline’s newly yellow hair stuck like paint to her cheek. “We’re going to be okay,” she said. “Aren’t we?” “Yes,” Jenny kept repeating. The bright red taillights of the truck, the only parts of it they’d clearly seen, had continued away, but had not disappeared. Jenny squinted through the swift ropes of water; tried the ignition again; tried the wipers. The lights seemed to be frozen just short of the point at which they should have vanished. She couldn’t judge motion or distance; perhaps the truck had slowed down to a crawl, so that its receding was strangely prolonged. Now Pauline saw what she saw, and they both grew silent, their silence outlined by the deafening noise of the rain. The lights winked at them, like twin planets above the horizon. And then from out of the deluge a lone figure came toward them, one arm up to shield his face. “Oh my God,” Pauline said.

  Jenny met the truck driver halfway and stood shouting with him, immediately as wet as if she’d been submerged. She felt her T-shirt sucking against her flesh, knew her bra and breasts clearly showed through it. Her blue jeans were so heavy with water they were pulling themselves off her hips. None of this seemed to matter at all. Her identity, Pauline’s, the consequences if they were discovered; these had seemed to be crises, but the elements swept them away. She felt simplified. They were alive, after all! She shouted to the man that she thought it was the battery, he gestured for her to follow him to his truck. He would back up, and give her a jump. But when they came near the truck they stopped short, while the rain lashed their bodies. Everything seemed illusory—the taillights remaining when they should have vanished, the man’s figure resolving from out of the rain, and now the truck tilting sharply sideways, because the nine wheels on its passenger side were sunk axle-deep in the mud. The driver’s-side door of the cab opened and a woman leaned out, waving frantically. “It’s tipping!” she cried. She came out on the cab’s booster step and jumped up and down, as if this could counter the tilt, and Jenny saw she was massively pregnant. The rain had made the driver misjudge the width of the shoulder, and though the driver’s-side wheels were parked on it, the other side’s had been parked on the dirt that sloped down from the grade of the road. The weight of the truck had made the wheels sink in, and now this tilt and the tilt of the slope added up were enough to tip the giant truck over.

  The man gave a cry—of shock, and disappointment in himself—and without another word ran back to the cab and leaped in. She ran back to their car. “Something happened,” she gasped to Pauline, while Pauline dug around for a towel. They thought that the truck would extract itself soon, and come driving back toward them, but its red taillights only wavered slightly through the downpour. Steam fogged their windows, although they didn’t feel warm; drenched and clammy, Jenny hugged herself tightly. “I don’t think he’s coming,” Pauline whispered.

  “I’m sure he will when he’s out of the ditch.”

  “What if he doesn’t get out?”

  “He will. He’s a trucker. They know how to deal with these things.”

  “But what if . . . ?” Pauline said.

  Then they were silent, adding cigarette smoke to the steam, as the rain drummed on them. The panic of being confined could be a strange, lazy one. Once confinement was truly confirmed they conserved energy. They sat, feeling blank. Jenny tried to get out of her jeans but it was too difficult. Not wanting to flood her blank unfeeling core with frustration she put off retrying the engine as long as she could. Then she had to; she turned the key and stamped the gas while Pauline screwed her eyes shut and balled up her fists. Nothing. “Dammit!” yelled Jenny. Out of nowhere a siren screamed, drowning her voice, and then they saw red lights trailing like comets through their sluicing windshield, as a police car sped by.

  “Jenny!” Pauline said. Another siren screamed past; the rain was so loud they weren’t hearing the sirens until they were practically just alongside. They turned around to look through the rear windshield and saw the procession of lights streaming forth from the gloom. Each siren screamed as it passed them, so that they could not even hear what they screamed at each other; Pauline seemed to be saying, “Oh God no! Oh God!” while Jenny thought she heard herself say, “It’s okay!” They seized frantic hold of each other. Jenny thought, Where would we go? Bursting out of the car to be mired in the flooded green fields? Shots would catch them a last time and lift them up strangely, like hooks, before knocking them down. The last car streaked past and they saw all the cars congregating on the stretch of roadway near the truck, which now seemed incidental, like a piece of wreckage that had been abandoned a long time ago. “Jenny,” Pauline said, and her voice now was somber and urgent. “If they
don’t kill us I swear I won’t tell them a thing about you.”

  “They won’t kill us!”

  “No, listen to me!” Pauline didn’t want reassurance; she squeezed Jenny’s hand furiously. She was seized by a moment of courage and she meant to use it, before it dwindled away. “I’ll never tell anyone you were with us. I’ll never tell that you drove the switch car. I’ll tell them I met you this morning, I was hitching and you picked me up—”

  “I know that. I know you wouldn’t sell me out, I know that—”

  “You didn’t have to,” Pauline said, and now courage left her and she started to cry. “You didn’t have to stay with me . . .”

  One of the cars freed itself from the group and began moving toward them. It was driving backward. It rolled a short distance and then the driver’s door opened and an orange cone emerged and was planted at the center of the road. The door shut and the car rolled backwards perhaps another twenty yards and then the door opened again and another orange cone was expelled. She and Pauline clung to each other in silence, and without pause the car rolled past their car and left another orange cone in the road. When orange cones stretched a fairly long way, cutting off the right lane from the left, the car resumed forward movement and passed them again with no more interest than it had shown the first time. A few minutes later they heard a new siren, and when they looked back a gigantic machine was approaching, yellow and urgent with lights and somewhat like a crane grafted onto a train car. It rumbled past, trailed by one more police car, and they felt the road tremble beneath them.

  A strange calm had begun to descend, although it had little to do with their understanding, finally, that the commotion was not about them. Their capture, if it occurred, would be incidental to the rescue of the truck, but that made it no less catastrophic. And yet Jenny felt something like certainty—not certainty born of the moment, but certainty that came from without and gave the moment its meaning. Finally the rain had begun to subside; it was simply rain now, not an opaque gray torrent. The scene ahead of them came into focus, the police cruisers at angles all over the road, the huge crane, and the truck, the list of which had gotten worse. Men were standing around in long ponchos and wide-brimmed black hats. Jenny thought she caught a glimpse of the trucker, in his heavy plaid workshirt.

  One of the troopers was walking toward them, and their calm, as if it consisted of a cloud of very sensitive insects, rose away slightly but still hovered nearby. The trooper came straight to the driver’s-side window and rapped sharply on it. Jenny rolled down the window.

  “You the girls who caused all this trouble?”Water streamed off the edge of his hat.

  “Yes, sir,” Jenny said.

  “Leave your names and addresses, we’ll send you the bill.” He straightened again and peered off at the roil of lights. There had been nothing gallant about the remark; he was clearly disgusted. The huge crane had started its effort: It strained forward with the shrieking noise of a very large unoiled hinge. The towline caught and the truck seemed to rise very slightly and tremble before falling back. Mud flew up at the impact. “For Christ’s sake,” said the trooper, glancing with distaste at Jenny again. “Tow truck’s coming for you. It’ll take you to town.” With that he strode back toward the action.

  The truck was finally pulled from the mud and discovered to have two bent axles. The crane hauled it away. Then the tow truck came for them like a little tugboat through chaotic waters, and they sailed along with their heads tilted back and their knees in the air, as if Dolly’s car were being launched into space. At the gas station Pauline hid in the bathroom. The station had a combination diner and convenience store attached, and walking inside Jenny heard the trucker before she saw him, hanging on to the corner pay phone as if to a strap on a lurching subway. “Please!” he said. “I can’t pay for it out of my pay, you can’t make me do that!” The pregnant woman was sitting in a booth nearby, crying. When she saw Jenny she sat up suddenly.

  “You,” the woman said, her eyes narrowing. “You!”

  Back outside the car had been jumped. “How much?” Jenny said breathlessly.

  The mechanics were all overcome by the hilariousness of events. “Oh, we ought to pay you. That’s some show. ‘What’s a ninewheeler, boss?’ ‘An eighteen-wheeler driven by somebody stupid.’ Hey, let it charge,” they scolded, when she slammed the hood shut.

  “I’ll charge it while driving. I’m late.”

  “Late for what? Come on, China doll. Where’d the blond go?”

  She pulled around to the side of the building where the bathroom door was, and banged on it. “Pauline,” she hissed. No one answered. “It’s me,” Jenny said. The door opened a crack and one eye, large and hazel, peered out.

  “Are we okay?” Pauline asked.

  The rain had finally stopped and she realized how loud it had been. In the quiet she thought she could hear, from the far side of the wall, the mechanics still laughing, from yet farther within the truck driver still pleading his case, the pregnant woman still crying. A flock of crows cawed overhead. “We’re okay,” she said.

  SOMETIMES fear of capture, like fear of death, seems less and less possible to maintain the more real it becomes. A low-grade fear will weigh on the heart constantly. But sublime, speechless fear—it can bear down so hard you go bouncing away like a small rubber ball. For Pauline it had been that way, after her kidnapping. Her fear of death had been so huge, she told Jenny, her brain just gave up on the job. They’d advised that she not try to struggle, or talk, or do anything “stupid,” and this advice, once she surrendered to it, had revealed itself as applying to everything. There had been something comforting in the idea that the best thing she might do for herself was to opt out completely. Give up the pain of pride injured, the torment of thwarted desires. Give up all the worries of what one should do and not do to be decent in life. She felt that for her, heedless childhood had lasted somewhat longer than it did for most people, and she recognized that this had to do with her family’s wealth. Perhaps that was the reason her young adult life had been so overwhelming and painful. She didn’t want Jenny to think she was saying it mattered, but there had been some conflicts involving her parents and her. Conflicts that seemed life-destroying, because back then the scope of her life had been small. She had disappointed them, and this failure had inspired her to further disappoint them. She had painted herself into corners. There had been inappropriate men. The boarding-school expulsions. And always, warfare over money. Then the kidnapping came, and that world, which had seemed to enclose her, shrank down to a globe that she couldn’t be bothered to grasp. Her hand was too weak; she let go; it rolled off and was lost. Captivity in a way had released her, into an elemental world in which recollection of a few basic facts, like her name and birthday, were great triumphs. The old code of misstep and blame was wiped out, made absurd. It would not be her fault if she’d chosen the wrong boy to love or the wrong college subject to study. It would not be her fault if she died. It was a frame of mind needing extreme disconnection, but this she achieved, as if sinking through fathoms of ocean and at last touching down on the silty black floor.

  But that extreme, like extreme fear, was also short-lived. Perhaps she only touched down before rising again. Although she was tied up alone in a closet, it took hands to tie her, and she started to notice these stringent inspections. Several would come and look in on her; someone would adjust her blindfold, maybe yank a few times on her ropes. Not even the notion of imminent murder can leach contact of all of its charge. She could hear them, as well. Increasingly, they argued over how they might salvage her soul for their cause. It wasn’t in their nature, they felt, to commit a kidnapping purely for money. Wasn’t it ironic that their captive, while living among revolutionaries, enjoyed none of the obvious benefits? She was as ignorant of the ills of capitalism and racism as she’d been on the day they kidnapped her. That she might depart from them as much a bourgeois as when she had arrived seemed to make them feel, in the samene
ss of results, an unwelcome kinship to the social order they opposed, and soon the negative reluctance to resemble the enemy was the positive yen to affect a conversion. They had not anticipated the proselytizing fervor that would overtake them, but it simply felt right—to expound things to her through the locked closet door, when the day’s work was done. She would surface from unconsciousness to the sound of someone dropping down on the floor just outside, striking a match and inhaling, leaning back comfortably on the door frame. Some read aloud, from Fanon or Debray. “Hi, I’m gonna finish that chapter I started last time. I hope you’re awake, because this is the really good part.” Some just rambled about their own lives, about parents they hated or longed to explain themselves to, about things they had done. All spoke of joy at embracing a cause that was just and that made it all clear. She would sniff at the smoke eagerly as it leaked to her under the door. She would try to link voices with names. It was inevitable she’d come to know them, far better than they would know her. At the start she had listened as corpses might listen, without interest or feeling, but inevitably this had changed.

  And she could hear them doing ego reconstruction, though she hadn’t yet known what it was, let alone known all the things she would learn when she did it herself: that it was a game for a group and a discipline testing the self; that it was combat with words and also destructive and passionate love. (Though they never said this; they would say “kill the ego” or “unified well-oiled machine.”) The game drew on reservoirs of inner strength and self-knowledge but didn’t deplete them: it filled them as nothing else will. It wasn’t something you did on your own. In principle, it should have been possible with any group of two or larger, but two seemed like a fight and even three was still awkward and small. Large groups worked the best, to absorb the shockwaves and at the same time to startle with their own innate smallness. The knot tightened, things shrank and grew sweaty and frightening. Even discord, in the large-group context, increased intimacy. Everyone rose together to cure it, or else they took sides and waged civil wars. But alliances constantly shifted, and so you were whispering rekindled love even as your heart broke due to somebody else. There was a sense of singularity, of experiencing something courageous and rare that most people would seek to avoid. It was painful. It was like drugs—no matter how awful an episode was, you still wanted to do it again. You didn’t count up the few times you’d felt loved with the numerous times you’d felt hated. There were eleven of them; not a huge number, but not at all small. Eleven meant no one was ever alone; there were always three or four people asleep in the same room, so near that to snore was to lay yourself bare to them all, and to make love with one was to make love with all in a way. Desire might take root in the uninvolved comrade who acted as if she were sleeping. Eleven also meant that your turn at the game didn’t come every session and might not even come once a week. Sessions were sporadic, of varying lengths, ended peacefully and formally according to some preordained schedule or erupted into shouting disarray. The person whose turn that it was—and there was always dispute about this—stood at the center of a circle of everyone else, except for the person who’d most recently gone, who would serve as the “clock.” The clock would hold the cadre’s alarm clock and watch the second hand closely, and like a sports referee point somewhere in the circle at random, to show the speaker the person with whom they should start. The speaker would turn to that person. Not yet having seen any of this, Pauline then would hear something like: