American Woman (20 page)

Juan had said, “That's what Princesses get for complaining so much.”

The morning after she'd stargazed with Juan on the porch Jenny drove to the hardware store in Monticello, then in Liberty, then simply stayed on the state road and asked in every town that she passed. “I'm looking for something that takes care of mice without hurting them. Or killing them,” she explained. Most of the store owners looked at her blankly, but in the fifth store she tried the owner held a hand up to tell her to wait, and after a few minutes returned with a metal grate box. It had a handle on top, and a dial on the side like an egg timer. “It's humane,” he explained. “I don't know if it works. I've never actually sold one before.”

The next day they resumed combat training. When she and Pauline had reconnoitred behind the branches of a fallen pine tree, Jenny said, “I'd like to show you something, later on. It's a sort of experiment.”

“Shh,” Pauline said. “You know we're not supposed to chitchat.”

“Come upstairs after they've gone to sleep.”

Pauline hesitated, then jumped. Something had snapped in the brush, but it was only a chipmunk. “What kind of experiment?” Pauline said. “Don't you want to show Juan?”

“Not really. I just want to show you.”

She could tell that Pauline didn't want to appear interested. “Then just say what it is.”

“Then just come up and see.”

“I think I see them. Be quiet!” Pauline said.

That night Jenny stayed awake in the attic room reading as her watch ticked past one, then one-thirty, then two. Finally, feeling strangely stung, she turned off the lamp and lay staring into the dark. She wasn't sure how much later it was when she heard a soft step on the stair. Pauline knocked, barely making a noise, and she got up and pulled open the door. Pauline slipped in and shut the door behind herself and waited in the dark while Jenny lit the lamp. Then they both stood awkwardly, like the first guests at a very small party.

“I haven't been in this room since we came up here to get the other bed,” Pauline offered, after a moment.

“There's not much here,” she said, gesturing.

One of her snapshots of William was propped on the bedside table, and she saw Pauline notice it, and then pretend not to have noticed. She picked up the photo and handed it to her. Pauline took it by the edges, and studied it closely. “So this is him,” she said, as if the two of them had discussed William so often that he had become, in their discourse, simply “him,” when they'd never discussed him—or anything, for that matter—before.

“That's him,” Jenny said.

When Pauline put the picture down again she walked to the room's single window and peered out, shielding her eyes from the slight glare the lamp put on the glass. Her gait seemed exaggeratedly casual in a way Jenny hadn't noticed before—it was in the slouch of Pauline's shoulders, and the way she shoved her hands deep in her pockets, in the loose-jointed pose that she struck at the window, one hip canted slightly, like a very young hood on a street corner. As always her drab hand-me-down T-shirt and jeans hung obscuringly on her, but Jenny thought she could see a previous manner of holding herself to which Pauline's swagger was grafted. Pauline's head still rode with perfect uprightness upon her neck, and her back, for all her shoulder slouching and hip tilting, was still straight as a rail, as if she'd been trained from a very young age and to an extent that she couldn't undo in ballet, or at least in posture. And she was still beautiful, despite her thinness and her hair, which looked to have been cut with garden shears, and the unyielding dark circles under her eyes.

“So what's the experiment?” Pauline asked.

She'd slid the mousetrap under her bed, and now she got onto her knees and retrieved it. It had a doorway on one side, a very small flap of metal that only opened inward. On the opposite side was a second door, very large, that unlatched from outside and swung outward. Inside simply looked like a box, but when the egg-timer-type dial was wound the box ticked from within, like a clock, or a bomb. Pauline ventured forward to look at it. “It's a weird metal box.”

“It's a mousetrap. A humane mousetrap. It catches them but doesn't hurt them. They're supposed to go in on their own. Then you can release them, wherever you want.”

“Why would they go in?”

“Supposedly because of curiosity. The directions say mice like to explore. They hear the tick and want to know where it comes from. You might have to wait a while for the first mouse to get trapped, but once it does more and more mice come to see what it's doing. Then you've got a box full of mice.”

Pauline shuddered. “Ugh. I wouldn't want to touch them.”

“You don't have to. You don't even have to watch. I can do it myself.”

“No,” Pauline said, and Jenny noted with interest that something like pride had sprung up in Pauline's flecked green eyes, like a pair of small flames. “I'll come watch. I don't mind.”

Downstairs Juan's snoring was penetrating the closed bedroom door. Jenny eased open the door to the kitchen and felt a soft explosion of movement, as if tiny projectiles had launched. Behind her, Pauline cringed. Then the kitchen was still, and the only sound was the soft squeak of the trap, swinging on its handle from her hand. She lit a candle, dripping its wax onto the lid from a can until the candle could stick. Pauline gingerly opened a cupboard, and poured two mugs of wine. When the dial wouldn't wind any further Jenny let go and a soft, steady ticking emerged. She set the trap on the floor and climbed onto the counter with the candle and her wine. Across the room from her Pauline had climbed onto the table, and tightly wrapped her arms around her knees. The candle guttered, its glow swelling and fading. Soon they'd drained their mugs and refilled them in silence, and the larger silence that had grown up around the fine grain of the ticking seemed inviolate; even Juan's snores just enclosed and refined it.

When the mouse came Jenny heard its approach like a whispered, irregular ticking that offset the tick of the trap. She saw Pauline start and sit forward. The mouse trotted out of the baseboard, circled the trap anxiously, angled toward it, and then backed away. She felt her heart beating, as hard as the mouse's, she thought. Suddenly the mouse crept inside and they heard a soft click and a brief, confused shuffling, as the mouse tried to reverse what had happened. Pauline loudly gasped.

“Shh,” Jenny said.

In the dim light they could just faintly see the small whiskered nose at the grating. For long minutes the mouse would click in thoughtful circles, and then all at once it would fling itself wildly around; it would be silent; then it would squeak, anxiously. She was so intent on the trap that she didn't see the second mouse until it was practically in. And then a third mouse appeared. For the rest of the night, drawn ever more by the ticking or by the sounds of their increasingly numerous comrades—orgiastically gorging on cheese? shredding a fresh, somehow overlooked cushion?—mice trotted, circled, sniffed, and eventually pushed themselves into the trap, until it was full as a nest.

The candlelight was slowly replaced by a dim, foggy dawn. Jenny slid off the counter and lifted the trap by its handle, shocked a little at the wild explosion of life, the rapid uncontrolled pouring of weight from one side to the other as the mice renewed their efforts to escape. Pauline covered her ears, but Jenny thought she saw a spark in Pauline's face, in the way she quickly jumped off the table and opened up the back door, holding it for Jenny to carry the trap through. She stepped out into the wet dawn, feeling it like a salve on her eyes and her blooming hangover. In resignation or foreboding the mice grew still again. She shifted the trap from hand to hand as she walked through the long grass, Pauline close behind her. The trap was heavy, like a pail of water. The grass was softly razored on its edges and sopping from presunrise dew. Soon their jeans were soaked, and their sneakers were squishing and burping. Past the barn, past the small lily pond. They reached the first fence line and she set the trap in the grass and clambered over, then held out her arms for the trap. Pauline blanched. “Go on,” she said. “They're locked in there. They're not getting out.” She could feel the weak bulb of the sun, edging over the ridge line.

With a burst of resolve Pauline picked up the trap, and it shook with renewed consternation. She thrust it over the fence at Jenny quickly, as if it had burned her. Jenny took it and Pauline climbed over.

Just short of the woods Jenny stopped. She was sure that they'd gone far enough, but at the same time she already knew that this act was one she would perform again soon, that this was only the first instance of a new ritual. She set the trap into the grass while Pauline dashed away, as far as she could go while still keeping the trap within view. Jenny stepped as far away as possible herself, then lifted the door and leaped back. At first there was nothing. She kicked the trap lightly and leaped back again. “That way!” she whispered. Absurdly, she shooed with her hands. Then they came pouring out, little silver-gray creatures, and streamed off through the grass toward the trees.

M
OVEMENT FLICKERED
outside a window, and her pulse, as it always would, quickened. But it was only Juan, laying a plank across two chairs and picking up his barbell. Then it was Yvonne, snapping open a blanket. And finally it was Pauline, rooting through the kindling pile for a newspaper crossword she'd claimed to be finished with, twice.

Jenny closed her journal and gazed at the light slanting in through the window. The doors and windows were open, and the thin kitchen drapes billowed up and fell back silently. She was alone in the house. They'd been outside for hours, as they were every day, as they'd once been inside every day, with the windows sealed shut, the drapes drawn, the air thick and stale with smoke.

She put her journal upstairs in her room and went outside, to join them.

Juan lay on his plank, his feet braced in the grass, the sound of his effort unobtrusive and rhythmic, like a distant axe falling. Yvonne lay in the grass, unabashedly watching his body. Jenny was starting to be able to imagine what they must have been like when they first fell in love. High school students, Yvonne tall and awkward, at odds with her body, Juan a C student, track runner. Both instinctively solitary, lacking intimate friends. Somehow they discover each other. Yvonne watches Juan at practice—not a boy, but a
man
, with a man's burly body, circling the track in his team-issue sweatsuit. His strides are short but inexhaustible, they endlessly repeat, he is carried around and around the track at the same steady rate, lifting a hand to her each time he passes. Later they will make love, as if they are vampires who feed on each other. Later still he'll be drafted. He won't die; he'll live.

“Do you think it's a good argument?” Yvonne asked, referring to the book she was reading. “I wish you would read this book, baby. It reminds me of that thing you once said. How we all wear a mask, yet there's nothing beneath it. Our real selves are a put-on, a mask. Isn't that what you said . . .”

Juan answered her between exhalations, his thoughts piecing together, a phrase at a time. Pauline interrupted, “Four letters, a word that means ‘still in dispute.'”

“You've asked me that one twice before,” Juan complained.

Yvonne had a beer, and she shared it with Jenny. Without words, they passed the can every few sips. Another calm rhythm. It was their last beer, and later on, or tomorrow, Jenny would get in the car and drive to get more beer, more wine, more cigarettes, even more whiskey.

“Wait,” Jenny suddenly said, and Yvonne's hand, passing the beer can, was stilled in midair. Juan stopped with his arms extended, the barbell above him. Pauline's pencil hovered.

Far below, on the barely used road, was the sound of a motor. They listened, keeping utterly still while it hurtled toward them like a comet. Then it passed, with a sigh.

“Just a car on the road,” Yvonne said.

Now the hillside was blue. They could feel the night dew settling out of the air. A firefly drifted past, blinking.

Juan breathed, “Four hundred,” and let the barbell sink onto his chest. They all shifted, erasing the brief interruption. Soon they'd go in and make dinner.

3.

J
uan had shut himself into the barn with a secret project and dire warnings to the person or persons who dared interrupt him. That left Pauline and Yvonne doing physical training on the dirt track between the barn and the house. They jogged the two S curves downhill, tagged a mark, jogged back up, tagged again. Soon Pauline was a half lap, then a full lap, then one and a half laps behind. On her next downhill leg she skipped tagging the mark and dropped onto the grass. “You're not done!” Yvonne called, striding down.

Pauline stared at the sky. “I feel sick. I haven't had breakfast.”

“Who needs breakfast? I've stopped eating breakfast. Brothers and sisters all over the world survive on one bowl of rice every day. Not like the kind of pigs you grew up with, gorging themselves on three meals a day and getting so fat that they're completely apathetic.”

Jenny couldn't endure this; she set her book down. “Poor people don't survive on one bowl of rice because it's
better
. Try telling them they shouldn't have three meals a day.”

“Sister,” Yvonne said to her, “why make conflict when we're struggling together? Here we are in this beautiful place, blessed with the time to hone our minds and our bodies before the next test, and you go out of your way to make conflict.”

When Juan finally emerged from the barn he had a long object under his arm which he threw on the grass when he reached them. It was a toy gun—a toy machine gun—which was made out of wood. Crude and flat, it was still unmistakable, like those black scarecrow silhouettes of a farmer leaning back on a fence Jenny sometimes saw propped up in gardens on the small country roads. “I'm fed up,” Juan said, “of training with no arsenal! From now on we train with a full set of weapons. I want to make handguns, machine guns, and shotguns. That's all we can do until Frazer shows up with our arsenal.”