American Woman (26 page)

“Pauline,” she said, trembling. “Pauline.”

“Why do I have to choose?” Pauline screamed at her. “Don't make me choose!”

“Hey, baby sister, hey, come on,” Juan was saying, behind them.

“Leave her alone,” Jenny said, but Juan strode in and took hold of Pauline and she scrabbled at him frantically, not to escape but to keep him.

Yvonne had come in as well. “Oh, Polly,” she said.

“Don't make me choose,” Pauline sobbed.

“Of course not. Choose what? What the fuck did you say to her, Jenny?”

“Nothing,” Jenny said. She could not make her mouth utter anything else. She could only watch dumbly as the three of them, fused to each other, as if tied together to run a strange race, hobbled out of the barn.

“W
HAT
I
REALLY
ought to do is build a block first and then mount the gun to it,” Juan said the next evening at dinner. “You and Y both learned to shoot on shotguns, and a handgun's a whole different creature.” He explained to Pauline patiently, “You're small, but you can brace yourself against a shotgun so the kick doesn't throw you, remember? With this gun it's more like,” and Juan mimed shooting the gun with his arm extended, and his hand flying back from the force. “It's going to be hard for you to have the accuracy you've achieved with the shotgun. You're going to get frustrated.”

“I could hold it with both hands,” Pauline said, reaching out toward the gun. Juan barred her from it and Jenny saw her face spark with annoyance.

“That's fine on the shooting range,” Juan said, “but not on the fly.”

At last, Juan relented; they could shoot without the block for a few rounds and see how it went. Jenny followed them into the barn and stood in the barn door, watching. Was it an act, Pauline's seeming eagerness to handle the gun? Was it apology, for whatever she had done to incur Juan's wrath the previous night? Before leaving the house Pauline had briefly disappeared into the bathroom while Juan dug in the trash for their empty soup cans. Now the cans filled the barn with a strong stench of old coffee grounds, sour wine and wet cigarette butts. “Joining us?” Juan said to Jenny genially. “You must be a good shot. Oriental people always have exceptional aim. They're inherently good marksmen, they're good at precision sports like pool and golf, they're good archers—”

“I've never touched a gun in my life,” she said coldly.

“Oh, I don't believe that,” Juan said. One by one, Juan balanced the cans on the spine of a sawhorse. “Just say the word if you want to take a shot at it. Get it? Take a shot at it?” Yvonne, always his best audience, dissolved, giggling.

But when Yvonne got the gun she became serious, even grim. Her chin crinkled and her lower lip jutted out slightly, while the rest of her body seemed fused to itself and the floor. The mass of muscle above her kneecaps tensed and shifted. Yvonne punctured the back wall of the barn several times and then, with her very last shot, a can flew in the air with a
pang
. The rest of the cans tumbled onto the floor from the movement.

“Good!” Juan yelled. Yvonne grinned.

When Pauline's turn came she brought a wad of toilet paper out of her pocket and began twisting it into small balls. Juan went into paroxysms.

“What are you
doing
?” he said. “What's the Kleenex for?”

“Earplugs.”

“Oh my God—wake me up, Yvonne. Earplugs.”

“You know that my ears are fucked up! I still hear that ringing sometimes—”

“‘The pigs are at the door!'” Juan enacted. “‘Okay, I'll just put in my
earplugs
.'”

Pauline threw the balls of tissue angrily onto the floor and wrapped her small hands around the gun's grip. Her stance seemed overdone; her feet were planted very wide. Her narrow shoulders shrugged up toward her ears.

“Wait,” said Juan seriously, stepping up behind her. “Get your shoulders down. You've got to compensate for the weak one. Push your arms good and firm in their sockets.”

Pauline wasn't disastrous, but she was badly thrown by the recoil, and only sheer stubbornness seemed to keep her arms stiffly extended. From her first shot they trembled with effort. Unexpectedly she tried shooting one-handed and her shot flew to the ceiling; there would have been an eruption of terrified doves if the doves hadn't all fled already. “Whoa!” Juan said, hitting the floor. “Holy Jesus! Hand over that thing!”

Jenny finally left them and went back to the house; from her bed she could hear the
POP, POP
of the gun; in the end she must have fallen asleep to it. The next morning she found them all in the kitchen, writing little notes back and forth to Pauline on a notepad. “She's
deaf
?” Jenny said, looking at her in horror. Pauline looked back and frowned. She took the pen and wrote,
You have to
write,
Jenny
.

“Oh, my God,” Jenny said.

“It'll pass,” Juan said, shrugging. “She has sensitive ears. It happened before, and it passed.” Pauline was watching him with impatience; he looked at her and she pointed sternly at the notepad. “Oh, I'm sorry, Princess,” Juan laughed. He took the sheet and wrote,
Talking about what a sensitive Princess you are
. Pauline whacked him, but she was smiling; if she was frightened by her sudden deafness—and Jenny was sure she saw, at the back of the green-flecked eyes, fear—her fear was outweighed by her obvious pleasure in being pampered by her comrades. For the rest of that day Juan and Yvonne and Pauline passed little notes back and forth, giggling and hitting each other, or reading and tearing to shreds with a show of annoyance. Jenny could almost have thought they had deafened Pauline deliberately, so that they could play a conspicuous game of shared secrets that, whether by design or not, did not include her. By dinner that night Pauline's hearing had begun to return, and then this was a new game: Juan and Yvonne would say things to each other in Pauline's presence but in normal tones, and Pauline would yell, “What?” Or, alternatively, every minor announcement was bellowed: “I WANT MACARONI FOR DINNER!”

She wondered if Pauline, in those in-between days when she had no longer been simply a captive, but was not yet a comrade, had felt the way she was starting to feel: neither satisfactorily with the group nor completely outside it. They had all laughingly offered her the notepad and pencil while Pauline was deaf, they'd done nothing outright to exclude her—but she'd had nothing she wanted to say to all three of them, and that was the heart of the game, that the three were as one. The next day Pauline was back to normal and they decided to work on their book. Now Jenny eavesdropped on purpose, but she learned nothing about why they'd fought. She did learn at least one of the reasons the project was taking so long. They couldn't seem to make the first statement without delineating the premises on which it was founded; and every premise required its own proof beyond all possible doubt. “U.S. imperial incursions into peaceful Vietnam,” Yvonne began. “Wait a minute,” Juan said. “We can't forget that the French were in Vietnam first.” “So we can't say it was peaceful?” “It's not that, it's the way the world's powers
collude
with each other to exploit the brown peoples. The way we
colluded
with France.” “We colluded with France?” Pauline said. And it went on like that, endlessly. The foundation of their worldview sank swiftly into the past: condemnation of the war required dissection of the Kennedy administration's foreign policy, which demanded criticism of the imperially minded rearrangement of national borders in the wake of the Second World War, which led to a long meditation on the rise of the nation-state. Gone were the days when they'd been happy to make incendiary, irresponsible statements with no basis in fact; and the further they beat back the brush of the past the less effort they gave to the present.

That afternoon they were still working when she heard a car laboring up the hill. Jenny went down to the kitchen, and the three of them emerged from the front room. Juan said, “What the fuck is Frazer doing back here already? He said he'd give us another two weeks.” She looked out the window and saw, instead of Frazer's battered brown coupe, a blue four-door come around the last turn of the drive.

“It's not Frazer,” she heard herself say, “unless he bought a new car.” But she knew, although she could only see the barest hint of the person inside the sedan, that it was someone unknown.

“Upstairs,” Juan said to Pauline.

A solid, blond, red-faced white man, perhaps in his mid-forties, was coming toward the back door. He had an off-duty look to him. Pauline's last pounding step had sounded at the top of the stairs and now Jenny and Juan and Yvonne were all locked there like statues. The man seemed to know the house; a stranger would have tried the front door, not knowing it barely got used. He passed from view through the window and reappeared right away in the door. “Afternoon,” he said cheerfully. “Sorry to barge in on you folks.” They didn't manage to utter a word of response. The man opened the screen tentatively. “I'm Bob, the owner. Where's—Dierdre? I'm lousy with names. For a second I thought you were her,” he added, to Yvonne.

None of them knew if Yvonne should be Dierdre or not. “Bob,” Juan repeated. Jenny felt her skin crawl. She knew it was only her paranoia that made this man look like a cop, but what must they look like to him? Juan had a dully fixed look to his face, like a reptile eyeing a fly. The man said, “Are you Dierdre's husband?” and shook Juan's stiff hand, and then Jenny understood suddenly, and Yvonne must have, also.

“I'm Dierdre's sister,” Yvonne announced boldly. “And this is my husband, George. And this is our friend Judy.”

“You all having a good holiday? Wife and I both grew up in these parts. We wish we could get back here more. I thought Dierdre was meaning to be with her kids here all summer.”

“She did, but she just took them down to our mother's for a couple of days,” Yvonne said. “Our mother lives in Pennsylvania,” she added, warming to the exercise. “In Philadelphia.”

Jenny felt a bead of sweat leave her armpit and draw a wet path down her side. The man had shaken her hand very briefly and turned his gaze back to Yvonne. Juan was still staring hard at the man but the man only glanced toward Juan courteously. “Excuse me,” Jenny murmured, and slipped from the kitchen. The front room was a riot of ashtrays and unwashed wine glasses and empty potato-chip bags and heaps of newspaper and inexplicable detritus like Juan's flower-pot barbell; they had been living here with no thought for whomever the house was owned by, as if the house would vanish into the ground the instant they moved out. Now she saw the accumulated damage of months, the blackish-purple splash of spilled wine on the couch, the ashes and dirt that had darkened the carpet, the beer bottles kicked in the corners, and this was not even the barn, with the block-mounted gun and the silhouette shot full of holes, or the pasture, where the grass was stamped flat in an oval-shaped course. Juan had taped a list to the wall hugely titled CODE OF WAR and she ripped this down and was crumpling it into a ball when the others came out of the kitchen. Bob stopped in the doorway and she saw him take in the room very quickly before turning away. “Because the number Dierdre gave me doesn't work,” he was saying. “I might have took it down wrong. You don't have it?”

“No,” Yvonne said. “She just moved.”

“It's nothing important. I just like to have a number for my tenants.” Bob cleared his throat. When he'd turned away from the front room Juan and Yvonne had been just on his heels, and now the three of them were crowded in the little vestibule between front room and kitchen, at the foot of the stairs. Jenny hovered behind them. Bob's back was encased in a thin brown windbreaker and she wanted to plant both her hands on this jacket and catapult him from the house. Juan was still staring at Bob as if he were a steak to be carved up and eaten and she understood, suddenly, the great impulse that he was restraining; Juan could murder this man. He could actually kill him. “Do you want us to give Dierdre a message?” Yvonne asked, steering Bob toward the kitchen. But Bob resisted; he looked up the stairs.

“Anything I should know?” he asked. “Roof leaking? Plumbing all right?”

“Fine,” Yvonne said, rather sharply.

He finally followed her back to the kitchen. “I hate to intrude on a person's vacation. Just tell her to make sure, when she mails me the key, to include an address. I'll need it to refund her deposit. I somehow never got it from her.”

“She's been so absentminded. She moved . . .”

At last he was standing outside, with the three of them crowding the door like a barricade. Jenny tried to remember that most people trust. He would take what he'd seen as the basis for standard regret, might not refund all the deposit. It's people like us, she thought, who mistrust everyone. She had spent years of her life trying to instill mistrust in the average person. Your leaders are misleading you, she might say, and misspending your taxes, and killing your children—not just strange foreign children, but
yours
. Very few people listened. Now she relied on that stubborn, instinctual trust. Yet this man lingered on the grass. “That your car?” he asked, indicating the Bug.

“Yes,” Yvonne said.

“You might need a new muffler.” He bent to look, hands on his knees. “Say,” he said, straightening again. “Say, would it bother you all if I took a short walk through the fields? It's been a long time since I've been here. I come by to check on the plumbing and errands like that, but I never just amble around.” He must have seen something in all their faces; he blanched suddenly. “On the other hand, I don't have time,” he amended. “You all didn't rent out this place to get bothered by me.”