American Woman

by Susan Choi

  THEY WERE separated when they were arrested, taken in two cars to their two destinations, Pauline to the Federal Building in downtown San Francisco, trailed by news vans with cameras and speeding cabs full of reporters, Jenny to downtown Oakland, the car she rode in alone and anonymous in the cross-Bay traffic of the late-summer day. She was alone but didn’t feel alone. She was still with Pauline, as if trysting. They might be penning secret letters at night, slipping from cells clad in cloaks or with heads wrapped in scarves. Meeting in the lady’s rest room in some railway station; at some landing dock; at the end of some long, lonely road. They’d be together five hours, five minutes; they’d say good-bye tightly holding each other, and then board two trains going different directions.

  She hadn’t been surprised when Pauline’s lawyer visited her: he had seemed like a messenger she’d been awaiting. He was the youngest member of Pauline’s five-attorney team, someone whose personal style had earned him, not quite accurately, a reputation for being Left-leaning. He had been retained by Pauline’s parents on the advice of Pauline’s trusted cousins, who had felt the family should exhibit some degree of comfort with the political climate in which Pauline had been living, whether or not willingly. The lawyer had the air of someone who felt himself to be hipper than all those around him. He told Jenny he’d been the first person to talk with Pauline. She’d seen her parents, her siblings, some cousins, but these encounters had barely connected. From the family’s side had come tears and unspoken demands; from Pauline’s side, a virtual silence. Pauline was a piece of statuary in the scenarios her lawyer described. Pauline: vivid, annoyed, sloppy, thin, never does the dishes, slaps the floor with her rubber flipflops, buys ugly glasses, and flaunts her flat chest after she and Jenny finally—finally!—finish reading The Second Sex and yet still experiments with curling her hair, decides she likes yogurt but only after they buy every brand that exists and rank them all on a chart on the fridge. Not very much like statuary at all. Pauline seemed so near to her if she was looking indirectly at the absence, the way some very faint stars emerge when you look to one side of them. But then she looked straight at the empty chair—the empty space; there wasn’t even a chair anymore. She thought of the stories of sudden explosions, the man and wife hand in hand on the roof of their townhouse while an unperceived gas leak fills up all the rooms. The gas ignites and the building collapses and buries the man instantly, but the wife rides the rubble down somehow, lands still feeling his hand on her own. Or the family in a waterfront town at the time of the First World War: a father reading the news in the parlor, a daughter playing piano a few feet away, a mother making lunch in the kitchen, a son on his way down the stairs. A munitions ship has caught fire in the harbor and when it explodes the force radiates like machetes, shears some places, skips others, obliterates half of the family’s house, kills mother and daughter but somehow spares father and son. She used to collect these stories like talismans, as if their randomness could inoculate her. Against what? Against the randomness that could turn any well thought out action into a disaster? Against loss, she thought now.

  The lawyer begged her to use his first name. He spoke confidentially to her, as if she and he were the immediate family and Pauline’s parents and siblings and cousins some lesser contingent. “There’s so much accumulated expectation and resentment, misunderstanding and disappointment, piled on from way back,” he explained. “Not just from the start of this business.” He waved one of his long-fingered hands, easily shrinking it all to the size of an episode. “The bonds of blood are such shackles,” he mused. She hadn’t liked him; of course she had not. She hadn’t liked the way he flaunted his access to Pauline, or the oily smugness with which he claimed to have won Pauline’s confidence. But she’d been ready to do what he wanted before he showed up; she’d been ready from the instant the cop pressed his hand on her head. Somehow it had not been the gun or the handcuffs or the neighborhood kids pedaling up frantically on their bikes, the windows and doors flying open the length of their block, the cries of “Get back!” but that firm touch to which she’d submitted, the hand on her head, that had made it all real. Across the roof of the car she had seen Pauline’s head, also clamped by a hand, also next to a car. Then they’d both been pushed down and she was sitting in the backseat alone. Her response, like a policy paper, had presented itself fully formed to her mind, and she’d realized she’d always expected one day they’d be caught. For almost a year she and Pauline had never discussed it, as if superstition could strengthen their luck. But at her core she had come to decisions she’d held in reserve.

  She wrote the statement for Pauline’s bail motion with the lawyer’s assistance, but she could as easily have written it alone. Writing, she almost forgot where she was. Almost forgot she was locked in a cell. Line after line filling the page, laying in the deep shade from which one found the sun. Legal language couldn’t tell what happened to Pauline; she knew its version of a close approximation might be worse than a lie. And so she told lies herself, feeling the needle within herself pointing, unwavering. She wrote that Pauline had always been a captive, and that even she had been one of the captors. She wrote that because of this it must follow that Pauline’s participation in any criminal act was against her free will.

  This second motion for bail also failed. By now Juan and Yvonne had been captured, caught like Jenny and Pauline in the delicate net of acquaintances, the light contacts between Jenny and Sandy and Tom, between Sandy and Tom and Frazer, between Frazer and Juan and Yvonne, that agents had gradually knotted together beginning from Jenny’s newsprint fingerprints. From the prints and her name and her outstanding charges they had gone to William in prison and his visitors’ list; from there to Sandy and Tom; here the path forked, one branch leading to Jenny and Pauline, the other to Frazer, who like Sandy and Tom would escape being charged, after inadvertently leading his surveillers to the apartment in Daly City where he’d helped settle Juan and Yvonne, as well as the loose ramblings on tape and the scrawled notebook pages that were all of the book Juan and Yvonne and Pauline had ever managed to write. On the tape and in the handwritten pages Pauline extensively told of her joy upon having been voted into the cadre, and as compromised as Jenny knew that these documents were, they must have ranged themselves in the mind of the judge alongside Pauline’s shouting “Venceremos!” deeply tanned on TV. Jenny’s statement was dismissed by the judge as a cynical ploy Pauline’s lawyers thought up.

  But even after this she still felt battle-ready: they would win the next one. Then her own lawyer, George Elson, came to see her. She’d just finished expressing her thoughts in a letter to Pauline, her first. Elson brought in a folding chair for himself, and when the matron left them alone balanced carefully on it and tented his fingertips over his knees. She was absorbed in rereading her ending: among other things she had written, of the lies she had told in the bail statement, “Once Juan said, ‘There are things that are facts that in context don’t help make the point.’ Can you believe I am quoting him now? But he would never have influenced you if he hadn’t said things that contained grains of truth.” The letter was almost fifteen pages long. “I don’t have you as my editor now,” she observed. She told Pauline to try not to worry about denial of bail; in denying bail the judge had ordered a psychiatric evaluation, and Jenny thought in the end this would be advantageous. “It doesn’t mean you’re crazy, so don’t get embarrassed and not tell them things they should know.” She signed Love. She pressed the thick sheaf into thirds and started working it into an envelope. Elson cleared his throat. “Jenny,” he said.

  “Can you mail this for me?” she asked him. “She can get mail, right?”

  “Jenny, I don’t want you to say anything in response to what I’m going to tell you. Pauline has named you as an accessory to the murder of a grocery-store owner in Monticello, New York.”

  For a moment, although she’d heard all his words, they seemed to hover awaiting translation. “I don’t believe that,” she s
aid.

  Elson opened his battered briefcase and took out that day’s paper. He leaned forward and set it gingerly on her cot, by the unsealed letter. He’d circled the part about her. Juan and Yvonne were named also, the make of the gun. Staring down at it, she could feel him watching her face. Her face seemed to be glowing, not with a blush of humiliation or shock but with plain, beating, furnace-strength heat, independent of any emotion. She became aware of the oversized letter, bursting out of its cheap envelope.

  “Not another word,” Elson said. “Until and unless you face charges we don’t talk about this again. I will say that I don’t think charges will be brought, at least not soon. They don’t have anything besides Pauline’s say-so, and that won’t be enough. She doesn’t have credibility.”

  After a moment she heard him closing his briefcase, and the squeak as he carefully folded his chair. “Your father’s still waiting to see you,” he said. “I told him what you said about wanting to wait until you’d finished your statement. Please don’t make a liar of me.” Elson knew, as well as she knew herself, that she hadn’t been thinking of her statement any more on the day her father first had appeared than she was thinking of it now. The legal pads Elson had given her, the new box of pens, had been used for Pauline’s bail motion, and now for the letter that lay on her cot. She shook her head, still not looking at Elson, and he was finally calling the guard to get out of her cell.

  THIS DAY always felt like the thunderclap, although later she thought back to that other almost too-quiet day, on the hill with Pauline and the hawk, when she’d chosen to believe that Pauline was in danger—chosen to believe and not simply believed. Chosen a true leap of faith toward a putative rescue, because, she supposed, she hadn’t wanted to be left behind. And had recognized, as perhaps she didn’t recognize anything else, that Pauline did not want to be left behind, either. Pauline had reached for her and she’d taken the hand, knowing now that she’d felt abdication, the relief of giving up, of removing, as Pauline had said, the temptation to escape by removing the option completely; of dropping the insuperable obstacle just at her back. She’d stopped fighting and known, as Pauline must have known when she’d joined with her captors, that any bond is its own great salvation, no matter how damning in all other ways. She’d bound herself then to Pauline, and Pauline’s rushing fate.

  Of course, when George Elson first left her she didn’t think this. When he left she was glad, because his stern, pitying air of knowing better than she did went with him, and she was free to refuse to believe. For as long as she could she simply wouldn’t believe that Pauline had betrayed her, although with every day’s paper Pauline betrayed someone else they had known in their time on the run. Although Juan and Yvonne, from whom Jenny had been sure the information first came, denied being in upstate New York at the time of the murder, and even denied knowing Jenny. Although nothing held up Jenny’s theory that Pauline had been cornered, and left with no choice, and although Jenny’s letter, which she sent anyway, never got a reply.

  Left alone in a cell with her grief was a weird, weightless thing—there were no imperatives of time or of action, of get-over-it-now-and-move-on, there was nothing to do but sit balled at the end of her bed, because lying flat all her guts would fall out. She must have slept, risen, emptied her bowels. Addressed herself to her meals and her lawyer and the other constant and brusque interruptions that ensured she had no privacy. Yet her pain had seemed flawlessly private. She was finally angry, so angry at Pauline, so determined to hold her to account that she longed to see Pauline again just to hurt her, badly. Her letter’s fifteen loving pages now mortified her and she tried to eclipse them with pages of harsh accusation, condemnation, they-were-right-about-you! But whenever she took it that far she was left horror-struck, as if after a frenzy she’d looked down at her own bloody hands. She’d be somehow reminded of Juan’s vitriol on the eulogy tape, giving way to Pauline’s quiet chant. Her own pen would shift in its tone. She admitted her long-ago feeling—tender, jealous, frustrated—that Pauline might bloom under her care, but would always be rooted in some other sphere. Then the tender hiatus would break off again; none of these letters got sent.

  In her dreams of revenge on Pauline, which were really heartbreak—it was possible this was the first true heartbreak of her life—she eventually sensed a kinship to another transformative anger she’d carried for years. It had been overwhelming anger that drove her when she set out to protest the war. She had been enraged by the state of the world, but perhaps even more she’d been enraged by herself, such a ridiculous, small, not-taken-seriously, average American girl. Not the president, or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or the CEO of Dow Chemical. If she withheld her approval, those in power wouldn’t scramble to suit her. The poor wouldn’t be fed, tanks withdrawn. Or apologies made. She had wanted apologies made. She had wanted the powerful men who wreaked such great destruction to feel remorse. It occurred to her now, as she stewed in a pain even worse than she’d felt after William’s arrest—for he hadn’t left her, he’d been taken, and she’d known that she still had his love—that her most carefully rational acts had been shot through with rage. She had always felt she would have done the same things without William as with him; that they were soulmates must mean they would have acted and thought the same way, even if they had lived separate lives. But it was also true that she’d given herself to William, feeling privileged and grateful that he could channel her fury, and transmute it into useful action. Together they’d been such a closed globe; it had been easy to disregard the vast anger that fueled them both. As much as she’d thought she was fighting for justice, perhaps what she’d wanted was less justice than vengeance—because justice wasn’t an eye for an eye, an act of violence to match acts of violence. Even if the violence was planned to occur late at night, when not a janitor roamed the long halls. Even if it was staged as a symbol. She had never believed in violence as a provocation, as a means to incite revolution by inciting the government to repress its own people. And she had certainly never believed in assassination, like some of the comrades she’d known. But nevertheless she’d believed in violence—as the only reliable way to seize people’s attention. As a means toward enlightenment. And, perhaps, as a way to wreak vengeance; she feared this about herself now, as she seethed in her cell.

  She thought of the monk she had seen years ago on the news, immolating himself. It was a sight that had shocked and transformed her perhaps more than anything else in her life. She supposed now that in her time with William it had been that unparalleled shock of the real she had wanted to force onto others, the way she’d felt it forced onto herself, by the monk in his column of flame. She had wanted to force others to see, no matter what it might take, and had felt this was just what the monk had been doing. But perhaps she’d been wrong, and the monk had really meant to convey the horrifying idea that had first crossed her mind seeing him, and that afterwards she’d so urgently tried to refute: that a passion for rightness was never enough, that one’s every attempt would be futile. That in the end the only way to protest was by simply removing oneself from the world.

  Because what other way guaranteed you would never do harm? She and William had taken such pride in their careful actions, but they’d owed more to luck than they would ever have wished to admit. Mere dumb luck, the god she’d so slavishly served in her year with Pauline, all the while believing it was not luck, but righteousness, that preserved them. As she’d believed with William: that it could never have merely been luck that kept the buildings she bombed as empty as she’d meant them to be. Bombing a building that “ought” to be empty was not so different in type, if very different in scale, from bombing a village that “ought” to house only the enemy and not any civilians. And yet there were always civilians; and there never had been an employee returning, past midnight, to Jenny’s targeted building for a left-behind coat. Was this because Jenny was righteous, or was it just her good luck? Good luck that kept her from being a kill
er while she was trying to save and redeem. If so, bad luck that killed Mr. Morton, not Juan’s impure motives, as she’d wanted to think.

  In the past, with William, she’d believed high intentions gave her the right to use violence; the same violence she abhorred in her government, and even among other comrades whose aims weren’t sufficiently pure. But it wasn’t intentions, however lofty or petty, that mattered, but how things turned out. When she shined that harsh light onto all of her acts, her bombings no longer seemed so exalted. Exalted intentions—never fatal results, perhaps just thanks to luck. No salvation, either. Only anger, infectious like fire: Jenny’s anger at her nation’s abuses; the patriotic American’s anger at subversives like her. The anger of the young men who’d risked their lives fighting and come home to be spat on by peers. The anger of the Vietnamese—although it was hard to know, caught up in the rage and confusion at home, if the Vietnamese were most rightly described as “angry.” Hard to know anything concrete about them, these people to whom she’d felt pledged. They had been an abstraction, the way Mr. Morton had been an abstraction, although now Jenny sees him with almost unbearable clarity. She sees him coming out of his store on a bright summer day and calling out to a favorite employee. Pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose, squinting carefully back through the doors. The glasses’ prescription is years out of date; Mr. Morton is trying to stretch things as far as they’ll go. Wearing glasses that reveal a watery, imprecise world, so that when a pretty young blond calls his name and takes hold of his arm, he’s a long time in grasping that what she holds out is a gun.