by Susan Choi
The farther west they got, the more they traveled by day. They had long ago spent Jenny’s money; now they sowed the stolen bills, one at a time, at great intervals. Each one they spent was a great burden lifted; they grew lighter and lighter. They weren’t in a particular hurry; they zigged north, zagged south. In a motel in Winnemucca, Nevada, Pauline said, “I meant it that day in the rainstorm. If they caught me, I’d never tell them about you. But you, you didn’t have to stay with me. I’d understand if you told about me.” “But I won’t,” Jenny said. “I know that,” Pauline said. “That’s the way that you are. I know that.” Before leaving Nevada they paused again in a town called Stateline, just short of the mountains. “We could try Oregon,” Jenny said. They had also said, “We could try somewhere inland; a small town,” but as they talked about where to touch down, about what would be safest, they sailed closer and closer each minute, so that when the flat green and yellow land of the Valley—with its sprinklers and its rows swinging by in great arcs, and its dusty, tired workers lagging home in the late afternoon down the dusty, tired roads—so that when all this began to thin out, and fall into deep golden folds, and when the road began rising again, for the last time, for its last hurdle, into the coast range, they were thrumming with anticipation, and when they first saw the water, the blue gleam of San Pablo Bay, they shouted. It seemed their decision had been made, long before. There was no question but that they’d go home.
SANDY, POOR SANDY, only recently back from her frightened selfexile to live with her sister in Tucson, opened the door to the place in North Berkeley she shared with Tom Milner and found Jenny there on her porch. Jenny, her shoulder-length hair in a small ponytail and her bangs smoothly combed to her eyebrows. Jenny was wearing a churchgoing white cotton blouse, slightly large, and a pleated blue skirt, also large, looking very much like a teenager from neighboring Virgen de Guadaloupe High School. She even had a Bible in the crook of one arm. She asked, “Have you heard the Good News?” It took Sandy a moment to know who she was.
“Oh, no,” Sandy said. “Oh, don’t tell me, oh no, oh my God!”
They’d gotten their first Bible from a motel room somewhere in Nebraska; they’d just driven off in the morning when Pauline produced it from under her shirt. “I can’t believe you did that,” Jenny said. “Motels always report stolen Bibles. Now we’re transporting it over state lines.” When she’d seen Pauline’s face she said, “Oh, I’m just joking with you.”
“Don’t do that.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t do that!”
Jenny had taken the next Bible herself and by now they had ten piled up in the car. It marked where they’d been in some way, by subtraction, but it also made good camouflage. “Who can prove that we’re not Gideons?” Pauline said. “No one knows what the Gideons look like.”
Now Pauline had stepped onto the porch, in her flowered sundress and flat sandals and straw-colored hair, with her Bible as well. Sandy yanked them inside and Pauline said, “Hi! You and I met, maybe you don’t remember—”
“I remember you,” Sandy said coldly.
TOM MILNER didn’t paint houses full time anymore. He’d tried a succession of other jobs that accommodated his need for freedom and, to a lesser extent, his creativity, and was currently working as a tour manager for a band. But he still pitched in sometimes on large jobs, and the crew, though it had evolved and evolved again over the past two and a half years, taking on and shedding participants, growing and shrinking, had retained the same core: Mike Sorsa, and the truck on which Jenny had once lettered MIKE AND BROS. HOUSEPAINTING on each of the doors. The brothers then had been Mike and Tom Milner and William. It made Jenny feel a weird forsaken joy, to learn that the dilapidated huge-fendered truck with its ding-covered body and cheerful orange sign still went rattling across the Bay Bridge, sprinkling fine motes of rust, cans of turquoise and fuchsia and cream-colored paint hopping wildly around in the back. Forsaken that she and William had been snatched from their lives while that truck trundled on, and yet joyful for the same reason, as if she were a refugee coming back home and someone told her, “Your people are here!” The truck, with its trail of fresh oil left behind on the pavement. Against all odds it still carried its freight of paint cans and young men, and the young men were still rubbing the sleep from their eyes, lying flat in the bed to light cigarettes under the wind. They were still plying their small craft on the surface of the imperfect world to fund plans carried out in its depths. Tom had just done a job on a three-story building in a mostly Mexican neighborhood owned by a man Tom diagnosed as a very nice cheapskate who disliked the work of land-lording. The third floor of the building was empty, and Mr. Minski, the landlord, had asked all the painters to pass on the word to nice friends. A few days after Jenny and Pauline arrived Tom rented the place on behalf of his “sister, and a girlfriend of hers, who were moving out from the East Coast,” and after a reasonable interval Jenny and Pauline moved in, Pauline wearing a vast floppy hat and sunglasses. Tom explained she was extremely sensitive to the sun.
They loved that apartment right away, for its hideous brand-new shag carpet upon which they could leap without sound, for its blazing linoleum kitchen—for all its internal brand-newness and cheapness, which made them feel no one had lived there before, but equally for the true oldness that lay just beneath. They were so glad to be back in a city, which they had agreed was not merely what suited their temperaments, but what suited a fugitive most: to be paradoxically sheltered by the nearness of people, and alone without feeling so lonely. The building rode a crest of San Francisco’s ceaseless waves, and although in the front it had a stack of bay windows, one per apartment, it really faced back; in back there were old wooden stairs that went up the outside and each landing was as large as a porch. From theirs, at the top, where no one ever passed them, they looked onto the rising and falling rooftops, by day white and dense as a hill town in Spain, by night rolling away like a blanket of stars; or they’d watch the fog come, flat and eerie and luminous gray from the lights it had muffled. A Dutch door led from there to the kitchen, so that with the top half of this door always open they could spend all their waking hours here and yet never feel cramped. The front room they neglected; the blinds on the bay window were always pulled down. The bedroom was plain, the light from its one window shadowed by the nearness of the neighboring house. Because of that nearness they also kept the shades drawn in here. Brand-new royal blue shag carpeting, which Mr. Minski had laid just before they’d moved in, lined the floor perfectly and even extended beneath the closet door to line the floor of the closet. In the closet were Jenny’s accordion file, and under the carpet the rest of the bills from the grocery store. Outside, two cot-size mattresses bought from the thrift store and laid directly on the floor with their clothes neatly folded beside them; when they moved in they didn’t have hangers, and then the transformation of the closet into a vault made them not want to use it for anything else. But after all these transient years Jenny oddly enjoyed, in the context of rootedness, the compactness of her personal effects, the square heap on the royal-blue shag of her folded-up jeans and T-shirts, her paired socks, her sneakers, her hat. She was glad there was no ancient maple outside sighing at the slightest touch of wind; that there were no worn, creaking floorboards or tumbling mice. Even the rain, when it fell, sounded different. No trace of life as it had been. There already seemed to be so many intervening eras, so many layers of sediment. Their journey across the country, not one stratum but many, Indiana and Missouri, Wyoming and Nevada, and all the fine striations in between. Their first spooked and euphoric nights here. First contact with Sandy and Tom. Though at night, when the usual dimness of the room—they didn’t mind it; it was cool and cavelike—was transformed into darkness, for Jenny their farmhouse life sometimes rose up. She would startle awake in the night thinking she was still there, and the inarticulate melancholy of that time, her own loneliness at a depth she hadn’t known how to sound, would yawn in
her again. When she heard Pauline’s breathing she would not understand who it was. Then the clock they had bought and that sat on the carpet nearby would tick tick very softly and she would remember, and flood with relief.
They had been living in the apartment for almost a month when Tom came by very early on a Saturday morning with a long duffel bag that had the faded word “Milner” stenciled on in black ink. “From my dad’s army days,” Tom explained. The bag’s canvas was soft and its contents were falling around inside and poking against the fabric in a way that seemed previolent, like the tip of a knife against skin. The drawstring closure wasn’t even closed; Tom was clutching the freight to his chest like a difficult sack of groceries. “Here,” he said hastily, dumping the bag in the kitchen, with a sound like a full set of golf clubs—or a full set of shotguns—coming down on a hard tile floor. He was sweating, though the day was quite cool.
“Careful!” Jenny cried. “Jesus, Tom, what have you brought us?”
But Pauline was already on her knees in front of the bag, drawing forth its contents carefully. Connoisseurially. Her touch denoted recognition and pleasure, not fear. She was like a dealer of precious exotica, welcoming home from a long expedition her own Marco Polo.
“Oh, Tom,” Pauline finally said. “This is great.”
“Yeah?”
“Here’s the M1—it’s the one that I learned on. I can field-strip it. This one is good, too. It’s good for women. It has less recoil, it won’t bruise your shoulder so much. This one they never let me handle. I’ll look it up in that book that you brought.” Pauline turned her face up to him, and it was as if he had finally delivered to her the one thing that would make her complete. That, Jenny thought, was her wonderful, terrible, undiminished, inbred social grace: that her face could say such ringing things—even mean them, short-lived as they were. “Thanks,” Pauline said.
Tom glowed, all the dangers forgotten. “Sure thing,” he said, grinning.
After Tom was gone she watched Pauline a long time without speaking, while Pauline sat cross-legged on the kitchen floor handling the weapons spread out around her. Finally Pauline looked at her. “They’re the guns that we had to leave here, when we went with Frazer.”
“I figured,” she said.
Her cool reaction only made Pauline grin; Pauline had known she’d object if they’d talked about this in advance. “I know you hate guns, but I had an idea: I want to teach other women the things that I learned with the cadre. Not so that we can hurt or kill people, so that we can understand what these things really are. When I learned I felt so—powerful, but that’s beside the point, maybe. The point is, it would be a woman’s approach to firearms. To understanding why men use them, and misuse them. And if you really hate guns, don’t you think you should know about them? Know thy enemy: isn’t that what you say?” Now Pauline was even more cheerful: she knew she was winning. “And: ignorance is the most inexcusable weakness. Don’t you say that too, Jenny?” They both knew that she did.
It helped that they started out with activities that weren’t directly related to shooting the guns: names of parts, principles of ballistics, categories of gun and the job each is most suited for. Jenny had to admit there was pleasure in sitting on the deep pile carpet of the living room floor with Sandy, and Sandy’s younger sister Joanne, and Joanne’s housemate Lena, the five of them dismantling a 12-gauge shotgun, cleaning it with pipe cleaners and household rags, using their hands. A pleasure in framing questions and absorbing the answers, in making lists upon lists of ideas. A pleasure in wonderment, she realized. Learning to learn without being embarrassed. One thing they all agreed on, one thing they realized was true across contexts and even in the best of situations, was that in their relations with men they had subtly but constantly presented themselves as more knowledgeable than they were; all the time, in the wings, playing catch-up. She knew that for her that tension, between the girl she was and the bold, brilliant woman she’d pretended to be, had been central to falling in love—had been love, the thrill of transforming, in secret, into the lover her lover desired. She and the others didn’t think men had known more than them. But, they agreed, men had a culture of already-knowing, so that you could never read Marx, you had already read him. You could never have an orgasm for the first time because you already had one each time you had sex. You could never ask directions when driving—you knew where you were, even if you were lost. With men it was a confidence game, and there was nothing about this that wasn’t seductive, that didn’t make a woman want to play along. But being just among women was something more sweet, the fresh pleasure of coming to things the first time, and of showing their wonder—of not having known, and then knowing.
Of course, Pauline said, there was no substitute for the shooting of guns—for the punch in the shoulder, the noise, for the fleet, pungent curl of smoke—Jenny shot her a stern look of warning, and Pauline concluded it was still valuable just to hold the guns up and pretend. Even that had its dangers, because someone outside might see them, so before they began she and Pauline made drapes for the windows. They hadn’t minded the cheap window shades that came with the apartment, but when the shades were pulled down a thin band of light showed at their edges where they didn’t quite cover the windows. Now they felt their group wouldn’t be safe until this was corrected. All they did was cut long rectangles of fabric and sew deep hems at one end for a dowel to run through, but when they were finished it was another improvement the pleasure of which exceeded the purpose it served. “Our beautiful feminist curtains,” Pauline said. “They might look bourgeois, but they’re not.”
IT WAS ONLY a matter of time before they would have to appeal to fresh resources. They couldn’t rely on Tom and Sandy indefinitely, and now the grocery store money was gone. Jenny asked Tom to contact Mike for her, and one afternoon left Pauline alone and took the bus to Golden Gate Park to meet him. In spite of her hat and her glasses he recognized her immediately; he strode across the grass toward her and without speaking pulled her into his arms. When they stepped apart to look at each other he pressed something into her hand, a doubled-up envelope full of money. It turned out to be five hundred dollars, in twenties and fifties. “Don’t object,” he warned her. “I’m pissed off already you didn’t call me right away. I knew something was up—Milner’s been looking like the cat who just ate the canary. I never dreamed it was you, though. Christ, Jenny. And I hear you’ve made interesting friends.”
They stayed in the park talking for as long as she felt comfortable, and then Mike offered to drive her back home in the truck. “Oh, my God,” she said when she saw it. “Oh God!” She hugged him again, and now she was laughing and crying. “Tom said it still ran but I couldn’t believe it.”
“Believe it, baby. This little truck’s gonna keep you afloat. Brothers’ business is booming. I think it must be the pretty orange sign.”
They drove a few moments in silence. “I don’t know why you’d do this,” she said finally.
“William’s my friend.”
“And so you’d go broke—and risk your neck, by the way—for the girlfriend who should have been locked up with him.”
“You’re having a really hard time seeing me as a noble kind of guy. Would it help if I said that I promised? A long time ago. He once said, if anything happened to him, would I make it my sworn fucking duty to keep you okay. Those were his words. My sworn fucking duty.”
“As if I couldn’t survive without him,” she said irritably.
“No. As if you might one day have legal hassles, which you do, and so need help you wouldn’t need otherwise. Even so you’ve made me wait all this time to keep my promise. Frazer got to be the hero instead. The hotshot beat me to the punch.”
“You never liked him, did you?” she said, smiling.
“I guess I was jealous,” he said, smiling too.
It was only after he’d driven her back that she asked what he’d meant. She had let it drop at the moment, and not felt she would eve
r retrieve it. That had taken her so long to learn: that you could end awkward moments by holding your tongue. Oh, the tongue!—which she so often thought of now that she’d returned. The tongue that had been so shy when it met William Weeks and then so voracious once he’d finished with it. Not just voracious to prosecute wrongs but to change standard vision, to challenge as William would challenge, to hammer on innocent comments, make people think twice, knock away their complacence. And then also voracious for sex. All the regions of flesh he had driven her tongue to make love to. That was a liberation that felt like a discipline. Finding silence at moments like the strange one with Mike was a discipline that felt very much like liberation. And yet as they sat in the truck she couldn’t resist going back to it. This was part of homecoming, she knew; this picking away at old scabs. In the window she saw the drape twitch. Pauline must hear the truck. Pauline would be trying to line up her eye with the fissure between drape and wall. That reeling desire for aloneness to end and the bottomless fear that goes with it. Pauline would know that the truck was Mike bringing her back, but clutched in the animal heart of her mind was the fear that the truck was an agent, the start of an ambush, The End. “I should go in,” Jenny said, but then added, “What did you mean by you guessed you were jealous?”