American Woman

by Susan Choi

  Going into tough bars with William had been a part of what she thought of as the testing period of their love affair, though she supposed you could also have termed it a hazing. He hadn’t begun to include her in his political activities until she’d proved she was really the woman—the woman who could swagger down barrio streets at his side, as if they’d been born there. The woman who could drink beer, as he did, in bars where students were met with contempt, if not violence. William had possessed a sort of reverse entitlement, it occurred to her now—he had seemed to assume that because he dignified them with his efforts, he deserved a particularly hearty reception in the realms of the poor and the marginalized. Not that this bar was anything like those had been. Two thirds of the way through her beer she knew her senses had calmed and her perceptions were more accurate. The bar was not a small dark arena in which people would joust with each other. She and Pauline had been given the label of traveler by all of these people; their appearance was something infrequent, but far from amazingly rare. The bartender was at the far end of the bar, one foot propped up, talking to people. “Why’d you get beer?” she asked Pauline.

  “I like it,” Pauline said. She was drinking the beer in quick grimacing sips, as if it were medicine.

  “You do not,” Jenny said.

  The bartender came down to them. “Another?” he asked.

  “I’ll take a whiskey,” Pauline said.

  “Rocks?”

  “Neat. With a little splash of water.” She straightened up, watching. “No, a little more. That’s good.”

  “Fancy,” said Jenny when the bartender had left them again.

  “Shut up,” said Pauline.

  “I’m just glad you’re not driving. Did I ever tell you what Frazer would say?” They edged their stools a little closer together. “He’d say, The handbook for fugitives has just three simple rules. Don’t drive.”

  “Uh oh,” Pauline said.

  “Don’t get drunk.”

  “Well, we barely do that.”

  “And don’t sleep with people who don’t know who you are. In case you tell them, in a moment of passion.”

  “Oh.” Pauline widened her eyes. She covertly examined the room. “At least we won’t break number three,” she concluded. They broke into hilarious giggles.

  With their third drink their probationary term seemed to end. “This one’s on me,” said the bartender, rapping the bar with his knuckles. A man had come up from the pool table to stand right beside them.

  “So what are you?” the man demanded of Jenny, leaning hard on his cue. “If you don’t mind my asking.”

  “She’s a person,” Pauline said.

  “You guess,” Jenny said.

  “Crow Indian. No, Eskimo.”

  “Wrong, wrong,” Jenny said.

  “She’s Californian,” Pauline said, frowning when Jenny kicked her. “How come you don’t ask what I am? Just because—” Jenny kicked her again.

  “I know what you are. You’re the girl called Trouble with a capital T,” the man said, with nostalgia.

  Later the bartender came to talk to them. “To New York, huh?” he said when Jenny named this as their destination. For a moment she wanted to stand up and dance, she was so thrilled by the impulse she’d had to tell him they were headed back east. It was like having erased all their tracks! When he asked where they planned to stay that night she said Casper, remembering the last big town they’d seen.

  “Not a hell of a lot in between here and there, that’s for sure. I don’t care for Casper, I guess I’m just a country boy at heart. Now New York, you’d have to bound me and gag me and carry me, to get me out there. I don’t know how they live in that way.”

  “You can’t do it if you’re used to a wide-open space,” Pauline told him intensely. “When I was little my family had this big place, but not ranch land like this. It was in the—mountains—”

  “I live for the fishing myself. If you asked me I’d say turn back, take a good look at Jackson. Let me guess—you don’t fish—”

  “We were coming from, um, Seattle. Which road? Little ones . . . not the interstate highways . . .”

  “We like the back roads.”

  “I do, too: you find interesting things on the way. You found the Outlaw Inn, didn’t you? Pardon me, ladies.” A thirsty group at the bar’s other end had been waving to him.

  After he’d left them alone Pauline said, “Did he say that’s the name of this place?”

  For the first time they noticed, like a frieze above the bar, a wallpaper stripe of posters: edge to edge, taped or tacked up, spanning the bar and then spreading out over the walls. Twisting on her stool Jenny saw, through striated layers of cigarette smoke, posters papering the bar’s farther walls; posters on top of posters, a few posters defaced with moustaches or dialogue bubbles or corners torn off. Some were novelty reproductions, in old-fashioned sepia tones, with unlikely pictures of their subjects in defiant postures, waving guns. WANTED: THE OUTLAW JESSE JAMES. WANTED: BILLY THE KID. WANTED: FOR CATTLE RUSTLING IN THE COUNTY OF JOHNSON. But most of the posters were real. They seemed to span decades, and Jenny wondered if they represented the length of time that the Inn had been open, or the length of time since the owner—the man tending bar?—had been inspired to begin his collection.

  “There I am,” Pauline whispered.

  There she was, above the bar and the bartender’s head, just below the low ceiling. It was the familiar three-quarters view portrait, with the set brunette hair, and the pearls. The poster had been hung with four tacks, over somebody else, and it was crisp at its edges, unfaded, and free of graffiti. She gazed at the picture a long time, and then looked at Pauline. Pauline was more precisely drawn, somehow. Her eyewells deeper, cheekbones more prominent. And her pale yellow hair, obviously bleached, tinged her whole being. It repositioned her slightly. It made her look cheap, Jenny realized. A little bit hungry, and hard.

  Pauline slid her free hand into Jenny’s, and threw back the rest of her drink.

  “Well, we’re headed to Casper,” Jenny called, as they slid off their stools. “Thanks a lot for the drink.”

  “So long, girls. They’re off to New York,” he announced to the bar.

  “Youth is for big mistakes,” someone said.

  ONE NIGHT in a roadside motel Pauline asks, “Did you ever do that?—go to bed, with a woman.” Jenny’s not sure where they are: if there are mountains out the window or salt flats, if it’s the piney chasm of the Sierras, or the Valley, with its sticky airborne floss, and its turning windmills, and its heat. They’ve driven all night. Now it’s day, and the sun is blocked out by the drapes. They’re in bed, on their separate pillows. The TV is flickering in perpetual unrest. Neither of them can sleep.

  “. . . no,” she says, after a while.

  “Did you ever want to?”

  “I don’t know. If I did, I might not have realized.”

  “Your conditioning might have repressed it. You might have had the feeling, but it was somehow disguised.”

  In sleep their bodies twine together at the center of the bed. There have already been nights with frost but even when it’s not cold they still wake up touching, sometimes tightly spooned. Pauline’s small breasts crushed to her back, Pauline’s arm on her waist, their bare thighs front to back, their cold feet, their old T-shirts and panties. A scent like warm bread from their groins. That’s all there is: in spite of the one conversation, or perhaps because of it, there is only this edging against the idea, in the same way their bodies edge up to each other in the guise of blind sleep. Later, when they have an apartment, they will assume a conventional distance apart—one room but two beds, one bathroom but no rush to get back on the road, so they will no longer shower together. Then it will only be late nights when they’ve possibly drunk too much wine, the kinds of nights that they fight, and Pauline almost phones up her mother, and Jenny her father, and each hates the other for seeing her armor break down—it will only be then that they’
ll crave some explicitly sexual battle. Possession of the other and erasure of the self. They’ll want to fuck, a slick tangle of limbs, and come pressed to each other. They’ll dream back to the floating motel rooms, the one mushy bed, and yet while they are there they do nothing. They wake up, feeling drugged from the long-deferred sleep. For a long moment they don’t remember their childhood homes, what their parents look like. Prior history all seems unreal. They don’t remember that they are two girls, fabulous prey, on the run from the law everywhere. In this sticky cocoon it’s surprising, perhaps, that they never make love to each other. It isn’t a secret they have to discover. Pauline has descended, under cover of dark, felt her heart race with confusion and dread. She’s slid her tongue cautiously into a woman, recoiled, pushed forward again. She’s done it, at the outset always more obediently than with desire, then abruptly overshooting desire for something narcotic and unprecedented. Yet now it is barely remembered; it is the way, though they don’t realize yet, this time also will be. In the near future this will be the half-grasped fever dream. Perhaps that they don’t make love isn’t surprising; their haze is too dense to be roused into lust. At seven P.M. it’s almost time for Jenny to creep forth and look for their dinner. She waits for the last of the sunshine to fade. There’s a bright thread of light where the curtain falls short of the sill. Pauline shifts, stares at the TV, starts when she sees her own face. “Turn it up,” she tells Jenny. But though Jenny imagines herself getting up she does not. They are somehow no longer so moved by the sight of Pauline, floating over the news anchor’s shoulder like an oversized cameo brooch. That portrait again, from the three-quarters angle, the brown lustrous hair carefully set. The usual thick rope of pearls. Below this arbitrary demarcation the image fades out before fully defining her shoulders. The short update, whatever it consisted of, ends, and Pauline is replaced by a map of some faraway part of the world.

  All this time, she thinks later, perhaps they actually courted the fatal encounter: at Dolly’s, and in the rainstorm with the truck and the troopers, and at the auto junkyard, at the bar. They could only be careful so long before taking some idiot risk. They drove at night and then went into bars. They changed their disguises but kept the same car. They behaved as if they meant to be prudent but in truth there was some awful impulse to endanger themselves. They feared capture completely, and at the same time they longed to be caught through no fault of their own. Perhaps it wasn’t paradoxical at all: they just wanted a verdict. They knew they were failing to fully face up to their crime. They tried; but all their feelings were too full of self-regard. They were afraid for themselves, horrified at themselves. Of course their bids for innocence were concerned with themselves. Their feelings piled up like strata; at the outermost, fear and remorse; beneath this, the sinful suspicion that perhaps they were less culpable. Perhaps they were victims of Juan and Yvonne. Thinking this made them ashamed. Of just Juan, then; Yvonne was a victim as well. Perhaps they were all, even Juan, victims of bad circumstances: they were all four of them victims of Frazer. But in a larger, “truer” sense, Frazer along with the four of them was a victim of unjust government. Frazer only had wanted to help them, and why had they needed help? Government persecution. They took it to a higher, a deeper, a broader level again. Frazer, they mused, framed salvation in terms of more money, and then they did as well. In the end, it was capitalism that caused all these problems. Their lives had been compromised from the start by a legacy of imperial violence they could either have condoned through inaction, thus enabling violence itself, or resisted, thus consigning themselves to a marginal place with regard to the sullied mainstream. This marginality, morally right as it was, had bred moral wrong. But why should they be marginal? It was their duty, now more than ever, to devote themselves to revolution. But who were they to lead the good fight, compromised as they were? (Though not quite . . . they had not pulled the trigger.)

  At the hot core, beneath all these strata, was a feeling they didn’t yet know how to name. They might never name it while they were together. So long as each remained within view of the other a reality pertained between them, and the core feeling didn’t intrude. It was amazing, Jenny thought, how a death could remain so abstract, but it was also not surprising at all. She had first known Pauline in the shadow of nine unjust deaths, but Pauline had never known those deaths truly. She couldn’t bear to. And this death, number ten, they would also not bear. Mr. Morton: an honorific and a pallid last name. They came to feel they knew him well, but some day they would have to admit that they only did so in the service of their own punishment and redemption. It would take a long time for Mr. Morton to make himself heard above that.

  And so they might have longed to be caught through no fault of their own, but at the same time they hoped to be spared, as a sign from the gods. (Surrender wasn’t an option. Radicalism, Jenny thought sometimes, was like Catholicism, with its extreme self-referentiality, its strict liturgy, its all-explaining view of the world, its absolute Satan, and its deadly sins, of which surrender was one—the very worst, arguably.) It wouldn’t just mean they were lucky—or rather, luck wasn’t without deeper meaning. She knew that sheer, dumb luck shouldn’t have been of the slightest significance. It wasn’t embraced by a reasoned and just worldview. It failed to jibe with all humans created equal. It had no place in a liberation movement nor in a radical’s ethical code, yet anyone who had committed the magical act of “going underground,” of dropping into a rabbits’ warren of the imagination where reinvention of the self was possible, believed in it. Anyone who had ever acted on the premise that she could escape the clutches of an unjust law indefinitely was likely to be a subscriber to the doctrine of luck just as much as the doctrine of racial equality. Outlaws live on luck, and they were outlaws as well as soldiers. In the end the verdict seemed very clear; they made it to the other side not merely unscathed but anointed by one enemy after another, who had looked them in the eye and not seen them, and so added more force to their state of enchantment.

  They might have driven for almost two weeks; later on, Jenny couldn’t remember how long the trip was. It wasn’t possible to judge by dividing the most efficient route by the most comfortable number of hours to drive every day. They hadn’t taken the efficient route, or driven the comfortable hours. They hadn’t even maintained one direction; they would wend north, then south, pursuing and fleeing vague instincts of where they felt safe, where they felt vulnerable. If she had to put a shape on the journey, she would say that in the end they’d been struggling west all along. But no journey can fit in the mind as it happens through distance and time. There’s no way to record it as you might the repetitions of your heart with a vibration-sensitive needlelike pen on a very long roll of paper. Looking back it does not unscroll smoothly. Moments stood out because something had happened, others because nothing had happened but sublime coexistence between the whipped hair of the woman beside her, and the glimpse of her own eyes in the rear view staring back like a critical stranger’s. The lurid sunset, the wind suddenly cold though the day had been hot. An emblematic moment, neither resolved nor contented nor perhaps even hers. Perhaps the persnickety car, bought from a little old lady who kept it garaged since 1961—perhaps this car has carried them across an invisible border into somebody’s movie. That would be why the wind and the hair and the critical eyes seem so strangely familiar. Other moments stood out for no reason, they were neither eventful nor emblematic, they were as randomly snatched as the insects that stuck to the grill.

  As they crossed the Great Plains Pauline told her, “I can’t believe all this space. It’s so huge. God, I’ve never seen anything like this.” Propping her head on the window frame, gazing; but Jenny knew Pauline had been here before. She’d been one of those girls in a calico dress, lace-up shoes, sun-strain pinching her eyes, thin long hair always tangled and wild and not in proper braids. One day, the Crow Indians come along and attack her parents’ farmstead, scalp her parents, burn the house to the ground, abdu
ct her thrown over their shoulders, her lace-up boots kicking. And the next thing you know, she’s tearing around on a horse, wearing paint, giving the Crows who’ve adopted her hell . . . Jenny could see it in Pauline’s deep eyes, if not in her time-refined features. She might have grown up rich, but where had that money come from? From people who’d gotten here first, that was all, when this land was lawless and even more vast. People who’d stuck it out. Killed enough, grabbed enough. Never looked back.