American Woman

by Susan Choi

  This is when Jenny returns to that day on the hill. With the hawk in the air, and Pauline strangely nervous beside her. A tremor far off, gaining strength. Jenny forgave Pauline’s lie, because she thought it revealed a rare truth about Pauline’s desires. And because, Jenny knew, the true bond with a comrade was what she herself craved most of all. It was what, even now, some submerged stubborn part of her feels she had gained, for a time. A perfect comradeship, unlike the farce that the cadre had lived. Unlike, even, Jenny’s previous life with William, in which she had felt herself struggling to keep his approval, and always amazed at his interest in her. With Pauline she had never felt that, but that their mistakes they at least made together, and their remorse they’d at least get to share. Now she prepared to face all of it newly alone.

  WHILE EACH of Pauline’s pretrial hearings, and the results of her numerous psychiatric exams, and the fluctuations in her family’s optimism about her case’s outcome, continued to be news everywhere, Jenny was mentioned just a handful of times overall, and always fleetingly. Still, the bare appearance of her name registered in a few different places with a few different people, and in the first quiet hum of what became a significant murmur those few people contacted others of similar background to Jenny, if not similar frame of mind. The people who joined in the murmur were mostly those who’d eschewed politics all their lives—they didn’t need the additional trouble. People whom outsiders called “Very quiet—they keep to themselves.” People who never had quite enough money. These people, slowly but steadily, had begun finding their way to George Elson’s small Oakland law office. There they’d sit in the waiting room, waiting to have a word with him. Unsought, unexpected: first one, then five, then a church congregation. They were all Filipino-, or Chinese-, or Korean-, or Japanese-Californian-American. Some were apolitical truck farmers or small-business owners. A very few were politically Left college students. One was a Japanese Unitarian minister. All had concerns and suggestions, in some cases complaints, all insisted on donating money, and now they were calling George Elson around the clock to put in their two cents’ worth about what he should do to help Jenny, and so far Elson’s secretary had received almost nine thousand dollars. Nine thousand dollars had walked in the door uninvited; imagine what was going to happen now, with the left-wing college students and the Unitarian minister organizing a fund-raising campaign! “How do you like that?” Elson asked her one day. “These people act like you’re their sister or granddaughter. They glare daggers at me because I’m not an Asian, but at least they’ll be glad if we win. Unlike you. Have you eaten a thing since the last time I saw you?” Elson nudged her lunch tray with his toe. “Would you mind saying something?”

  “Thanks, George,” she whispered.

  “You look thin,” he said sharply. “Your father’s still waiting to see you. Enough of this, Jenny. Say yes.”

  She knew she ought to write her statement for Elson, and sometimes as she sat on her cot, knees drawn up to her chin, the dull ache in her gut like an illness she’d gotten used to, she would make idle schemes of her life: she’d let it fall into passages, oddshaped blocks of years. Hearing but not really hearing the volleys of voices up and down the hard surfaces of neighboring cells. Jangling keys, heavy doors shrieking open and shut. Sometimes as the project slid out of her mind and she felt blank and empty she glimpsed the solution; for a moment she would see the whole structure, the determinations, the connections, the roads not taken, the junctures at which she’d done things that had later proved crucial. As if her life were a maze that a hand sometimes lifted her out of, but never for long; she would gasp at the vision, trying to take it all in, and be dropped down again.

  She and Pauline were destined to pay different prices. How different it would take a long time for her to see clearly, because it would have so little to do with their charges, their trials, their legally meted out punishments. The prices they paid would not really be reflected by the legal system’s strenuous efforts. Pauline would “get the book thrown at her,” as the papers would crow. She would prove that there were no exceptions, she would be an exemplar, at last, through no acts of her own, of all-persons-created-equal, but she would still emerge somehow restored, made more interesting by her adventure, a reinforcer, in the end, of the privilege she’d once seemed to spurn. More than anything else Pauline would come to symbolize the immutableness of her class. She would seem to have gone through the muck and emerged from it clean. Even being convicted, as she would be, of the bank robbery, reinforced this; she was seen as being purely a victim, finally of her attorneys, who’d done such a bad job. She’d serve less than two years of her sentence before it was commuted, and the stigma of prison would not stick to her. It would be something else she’d endured, without being degraded.

  Jenny, by contrast, would “get off easy”—easier, even, than she wanted to. She would be sentenced to the minimum for her participation in the selective service recruitment center bombings. After a year she would be transferred to a work-release program, as a reward for her good behavior. But she would feel, perhaps indelibly, a new shame, an impulse she’d never before exhibited to scrape and be thankful, an instinct toward obsequious accommodation, as if she were the lucky recipient of some benign power’s unusually good graces; as if she were not simply serving her time but, as the phrase put it, “getting off easy.” Being given fun tasks in the kitchen, being labeled as “good” in a tone of unending surprise. She felt like a token for the first time in her life. “The model minority,” the one extended privileges as an example to the rest of her less worthy kin—she thought of Thomas again, Thomas who was honest and loyal and open and who perhaps all his life, if the world didn’t embitter and ruin him, would be rewarded for being better than expected, for not being a “typical black.” Prison made Jenny feel a member of a despised category, the more so for every time she was praised for behaving so remarkably well. And so the rift she had felt open up between herself and Pauline, which at first seemed entirely intimate, a rift between two individual persons, would come to seem increasingly social, inevitable and ordained. Pauline would “get the book thrown at her” yet somehow be redeemed, or rather shown to require no redemption, while Jenny would “get off easy,” for somebody like her.

  And she and Pauline would be tried, and convicted, and sentenced, only for the acts they had committed before they had met—so that their time together would be further obscured, or rather, never inscribed into the record at all. No one would be charged with Mr. Morton’s murder, and this strange way in which punishments never seemed to coincide with their crimes, in which everything was so out of sync, in which there was such a freight of confusion and pain left hovering and unseen, would make it seem to Jenny, in the least welcome way, that infinite revisions were possible now. Although even at the height of their friendship Jenny somehow might have known she was destined to be so revised, to be described by Pauline as “nicer than most of the people I met—but still a terrorist I lived in fear of.”

  SOMETIMES, though, Jenny didn’t believe any of it. She imagined Pauline, a true captive again, desperately tying her confessions, her namings, her pointings-of-fingers, end to end like bedsheets. Pauline could expel everything that she had, name Mike Sorsa, as she did, name Sandy, Joanne, Lena, Tom, Carol, Frazer, give up all the goods and she’ll never touch ground. She’ll never have made enough rope to effect her escape. Once again she’ll have no choice but to make the best of it. She’ll learn or relearn the harsh rules of her family’s game. She’ll rub the flint tirelessly until new lights of kinship spring up. Jenny had to acknowledge that even Pauline’s stark betrayal of her had its element of cooperativeness, with Jenny. Jenny had lied, and called herself a captor, a cruel prison-keeper, for the sake of Pauline, and Pauline’s response just conformed to that fiction. Even the ax falling, severing them, made a chime of harmonious lies. Pauline knew how to do what it took. She’d survive—she was built to do that, delicate as she seemed.

  Jen
ny knew she’d survive, too. Of course she would, although with certain huge losses. The loss of William pained her most for her awareness that it was she who betrayed him, and not even consciously so much as with inattention. William continued to respond to her letters through her sentencing and her own entrance into prison, he assiduously advised her with the aid of his prison’s law library, wrote her generous words of encouragement, exhortations to courage, admonitions to do this or that, treated her, in other words, as if she were one of his prison comrades, a worthy cause, a noble person brought low by complex circumstance, a pillar of strength who only needed reminders to hold herself up. The one thing she was not was his lover. Selflessly, rationally, always bearing in mind that the work of the struggle is more important than the trials of the heart, William offered her everything he could give from his own prison cell but his previous love. She received the same love he extended to all humankind. He never upbraided her for leaving him, and this rationality of his, whether a put-on or not, was another shocking loss, though she knew it was enormously selfish to want the man that you no longer loved to keep pining for you. He finally, quietly let her go, let three months pass before answering one of her letters. She knew then to stop writing back.

  The loss of her freedom, of these years of her twenties, ended up being nothing next to the loss of her confidence in the choices she’d made. The world hadn’t healed itself in the meantime. If anything she felt it was worse, now that there was no war to focus protest and discussion, no palpably identifiable evil to point fingers at. It was just the same fatal world as always, with its staggering inequities, which she realized now weren’t exceptions to be excised but the rules of the game, the very engine that kept the thing running. She felt more powerless now than she ever did in the years of the war, and not just because the problem had grown so diffuse, but because no solutions remained. It was this ultimate disenchantment that disfigured the largest portion of her, that took up the most space. She’d carry this unsolved problem forward, into the rest of her life. As well as the knowledge—and here the injured party was her pride—that she was no better than Juan or Yvonne. No wiser, no less prone to dumb, selfish acts. In the months leading up to her trial she, too, was interrogated as to what else she knew, and she thought of the lawyer in Peekskill, and his warning to her. He’d said it would be hard not to tell what she knew. It was hard, but not because she was tempted to win herself points. She always knew she wouldn’t be a stool pigeon. She still had her strict moral code. But her act of loyalty to Juan and Yvonne was, in the end, her acknowledgment to them that her moral code had failed her utterly, that she was not morally better than them but the same, flawed, her failure as great.

  CAREFULLY, she tried writing. She wrote that maybe life waxed and waned, like the light, which she missed more than anything else. That maybe the hour before sunset, when a day’s worth of the light’s alterations seem exposed all at once, was the light’s way of knowing itself, in the same way she was trying to know herself now, with her life in a forge. She remembered a book she’d once read, in which the narrator was only three different ages: he was first a child’s age, around twelve, and then for chapters and chapters he remained twenty-two, before finally, suddenly being forty. She thought it made sense for herself; she could only sporadically seize on the course of her life. She could only await the rare glimpse of its change in direction. Decades from now she would remember this time in the most broken-up, episodic, disjointed way, but the great change taking form would be clear, like a superimposition of a cell, dividing and dividing, eventually swallowing all that lay near it. While the change was occurring she’d hang between two far-flung places, as if on a wire. Sitting in her cell, and writing, amazed she could render herself into words.

  There were so many things about herself that she had never told Pauline, lost continents of her life, or simply odd moments, resonances, connections, in which she found herself most fully for the fact that she somehow retained them. Their intimacy, from the moment it really began, had seemed so complete that she supposed it would have been an aspersion, a tremor of doubt, if either had begun to bring forward such artifacts. They spoke intensely and exhaustively within the frame of their short time together, about the kidnapping and the cadre, about Juan and Yvonne and Tom Milner and Sandy and Frazer, about power for women and the rent that they owed and the news in the paper that morning—and even about William—but they never carefully tutored each other in their own histories. There’d been the sense that all that was assumed, that each knew the whole of the other one’s past. To suggest otherwise would have shattered their union somehow.

  And then after they were apart, for a time she had felt in the opposite way: that there was nothing she shouldn’t have said, and that a failure of hers in conveying herself must explain why their friendship had ended. That had still been the tail end of longing; all the self-immolations of heartbreak are their own forms of love. Perhaps this was still why she finally filled up the notepads: for Pauline, not herself. But in the process she slowly recovered; tunneling so long she came back aboveground a vast distance from where she’d last been. She understood now that Pauline had realized her adventure was over. Pauline knew that her place in the world was assured—she need only resolve to accept it. And she had, out of fear, or resignation, or hard pragmatism, or perhaps just because, for them both, youth had come to an end. Old enough to feel rage, young enough to indulge it completely!—they hadn’t had children or aged, ailing parents, none of the minor responsibilities of the heart, so insignificant when compared to the woes of the world. Even if Jenny was wrong about Pauline—even if Pauline had not become wise but had just lost her nerve—Jenny knew that her own youth was done.

  Her trial began a few months after Pauline’s, was short and disregarded by the press. But every day the courtroom was full of the Japanese and Filipino and Korean and Chinese faces, the tight-knit people her father had always avoided. They clustered resolutely around him, invited him to eat in their homes, brought him casseroles when he demurred. They wore buttons that simply said JENNY. It was the tireless support of these people—she did nothing to earn or retain it, she simply received it dumbstruck, as she would any miracle—which the judge cited as his reason for sentencing her to the minimum. Not any unusual worth of her own.

  Toward the end of this time, though she knew it was an awful cliché, Pauline came to her in a dream. In the dream Pauline read Jenny’s notepads—a pen in her mouth, one skinny leg folded beneath her. Jenny had given the notepads to Pauline as if nothing were more natural, and it was only after a long peaceful silence, Pauline reading, Jenny watching her read, that it occurred to her what she had done. She wondered urgently how she could take back the notepads, before Pauline understood that what she was reading was all about her. That Jenny’s unedited thinking of her stomped and thundered across every page. Jenny’s heart pounded, her palms sweated, she saw Pauline calmly reading, turning the page back, turning the next back, every once in a while deftly flipping all the turned-over pages beneath the notepad’s cardboard backing the way she deftly rearranged her lengthening hair when it slipped free of her ears, as it did with a slow regularity. Jenny could just sidle over and slide the whole pile of notepads out from under Pauline, and surely Pauline wouldn’t notice. It was a dream, after all. What had she said: that she loved her? Loathed her? Dreamed of her, even during this moment? That she’d surrendered her whole self somehow, the one thing she’d sworn not to do. And then, as she was expecting realization and anger, Pauline’s face finally turning to her hard with accusation, Pauline looked up and said, mildly puzzled, “Jenny, why do you always say ‘money’? We never called it that, don’t you remember? We always called money ‘bread.’ That’s the word that we used.”

  HOME AGAIN in Berkeley, two years later, she was sometimes surprised to find herself missing the East Coast: its lushness, its quiet. Though she still associated it with a degraded past self, a self that craved irresponsible freedom. She
could be guilty, she knew, of victimizing herself with her own politics—her politics were all she had to justify the wrong turns and lost time, and so she cherished them, even when they made more difficult the justification of herself. Or rather, the justification of her intense, unimportant desires, like the desire to have a nice room. She was afraid to want things for herself. She didn’t think she deserved them.

  But in time, she answered a roommate-wanted ad for a house in Berkeley, and in the house found her room, though it wasn’t yet hers, or even really a room. It was the dining room, a three-sided space off the kitchen with a giant bay window. But she fell hard for that window, with its view of the rosemary plant in the yard, and beyond it, the lime tree. The room they’d meant her to have was a real bedroom, upstairs, with four walls and a door, but it was also dark, under the eaves, and with a view of the roof of the neighboring house. Nothing green. Something in her was determined to have that bay window. Something in her, then, was ready to want things again. Humbly, but distinctly. Already she had been thinking of how she would remember this time of her life. She knew it was a temporary station; every station is, but some convey this feeling powerfully from the start. The members of the house had seen her face, her lingering in the dining room at the bay window, her cursory glance at the bedroom. They liked sitting in that dining room together, drinking tea or wine around the big wooden table. But after she left they had a house meeting and voted—they wanted her in. She had a modest aura of heroism about her she would have tried to snuff out if she’d glimpsed it herself. The members of the house were all younger than her—she was now twenty-nine, and feeling within herself an almost completed transition. She’d been thinking, with bemusement but routinely, of how much she’d like to have a child. Secretly saw herself, now, as a person accumulating the knowledge and ability to be the best of the world to a child. She never thought of romance, or marriage, or family life, only of herself as a companion to a child. Perhaps this wasn’t true leaning toward motherhood—perhaps those other things, those amusingly traditional things, would turn out to be crucial. But she didn’t think so. And so she had the idea, as she chose her place for the moment, that this was mere preparation. She would spend a little more time with herself, and then the child, she had the strange faith, would come. On its own, she imagined.