American Woman (37 page)

“Go.”

“I still feel you're judgmental of me. The other day, when I told you about how I used to put broken glass into our neighbor's yard? Because my parents didn't like them, and I was just a little kid. I just wanted to help. But you acted like that was a sign I was some sort of Nazi—”

“
Switch
.”

“. . . I'm glad you told me what's wrong with my stance when I hold a shotgun. A lot of the other comrades think you just like to strut your stuff all the time and show off, but I—”

“
Who
thinks I like to show off?”

“No interrupting: Juan loses a turn. Speaker,
switch
.”

She. learned that for some reason, they always went clockwise. That most everyone fidgeted badly—sat with legs crossed, then leaned on something, then pulled knees up to chin, then did not. Tried to assume the blank face of judgment even while being judged. Some couldn't make eye contact, some glared confrontationally, some blushed beet-red—for her all the silent aspects of the drama, when she finally saw them, had been such a surprise, an unveiling. She had had trouble enough visualizing the large-scale arrangement. She knew there were swift recitations of words, most of which she could never make out, though she felt their emotional freight. She had known there were orders from what even she understood were the sidelines. She had not known that these were the times that they truly forgot her—she believed she was always forgotten, longed for a voice at the door even if it was cruel. But at these times, she forgot herself too. She'd inch a little more against the door, feel the outside air touch her slightly through the crack if the thing that they used to block it—just a towel, it turned out—wasn't perfectly pushed into place. Her cheek pressed flat to the gritty wood floor by what felt like a great weight, her skull. Her heart would sound less laboriously, less as if it were going to stop. Its noise might even fade for a while. She sensed the charge in the air at those times. One day, when the ritual ended in shouts and commotion, a door slammed open and shut, and then open and shut again, and suddenly there were two people in the space outside her door, the space that separated the box where she lay from the void where the rest of them were. “I
miss
you,” a girl wept, whispering. And in the closet the captive had listened, cheek studded with grit, her hands bound at her back, her closed eyes underneath their blindfold leaking tears of some larger emotion, some transcending form of deliverance.

Sometimes in their motel rooms at night—in South Bend, or Cheyenne, all the places they were—Jenny thought of the girl in the closet, curled up in the dark. On her side? Sitting up, with arms hugging her knees? She would open the door to the closet, stare at the small square of dirty shag carpet, the handful of wire coathangers. A string leading up to a bulb; they would have looped the string out of reach, perhaps cut it off for good measure; or maybe they just took out the bulb and left the string hanging there in the dark, to brush the girl's cheek if she managed to get on her feet. If, pouring sweat from the effort, she braced herself on the wall and inched up like a plant seeking light, though her limbs were all bound, and tilted her blindfolded head and with shock felt the string's whispered touch to her cheek.

What are you looking at? Pauline would say, glancing over her shoulder.

She would think of the girl, as if the girl wasn't Pauline at all but a ghost who eavesdropped while they talked. Curled up on her side; passing in and out of a black dreamless sleep. Waking to hear a boy's voice reading to her, the boy sitting outside on the carpet, cross-legged, intent, leaning close to ensure she could hear. Like her he's a little bit younger than everyone else. He has a clear boyish voice, almost piping; perhaps a slight rising inflection, as if sometimes unsure. The kind of voice she could fall in love with. She clings to that voice, discards the words, doesn't even attempt to perceive them. They're words that she might have once easily grasped, words she very possibly skimmed at some point in high school, neatly responded to in Comprehension Questions, then forgot. Now she lies on her side though it hurts for some reason; her hip seems to jab at her flesh like a blade. Her knees fail when they come to take her to the toilet, so they're practically carrying her; they say, “Try to stiffen your arms by your sides so we can lift by your elbows. It's less hard on your shoulder.” She tries to comply. The other day, doing this trip to the toilet, they had dislocated her shoulder by accident. It had clearly frightened them, to have her right arm pop out of its socket and hang loose in its thin sack of skin. Their hands had flown away from her; her own screams of pain were almost drowned out by their cries of alarm. She had slammed the shoulder back together herself, a surge of pure instinct and adrenaline after which she'd passed out. She'd done it once before; she had dislocated that shoulder when she was fifteen, climbing on the rocks of a small waterfall with her sisters at their mountain estate in McCloud. She'd lost her footing on the slick rocks, grabbed the rock face in front of her, slipped anyway, and not let go of the rock face in time. As she'd fallen her weight yanked the arm from its socket. Splashing into the water she'd wrenched it back in with her good hand, the right response, born of sheer panic. Downstream her sisters had laughed, not realizing. She'd floated, staring sightlessly up at the pines, the chill water dulling the intense yet now manageable pain. Her heart racing. When her sisters came swimming back toward her she'd smiled and said nothing. She'd never said a word to her parents. Even when she couldn't serve at tennis for months, when her arm froze while raising the racquet, she'd keep silent, streams of sweat rolling down her sides, beneath her outfit, from the pain. Each time she tried the arm rose perhaps a centimeter higher than the previous time before ceasing in spite of all effort, but this incremental progress wasn't noticeable to an onlooker. Her father would yell with impatience. “What's the matter with you? What'd you do with that good serve I taught you?”

Why had she stubbornly kept it a private ordeal? Perhaps because it had been her first real encounter with the limits of her body, and so with the notion of death. This wasn't to inflate its importance. But it had shaken her, and confirmed her strong sense of aloneness; and when her captors, her comrades, accidentally did it again, she hadn't told them about the old injury. Not to gain advantage with them, although it had done that, she realized later; they had held council and decided it was imperative she regain her strength. And with that decision, soon enough, had come the decision to take off her blindfold. “Now you've seen us,” the one named Evan said, and she'd wondered if this was a warning,
Now you've seen us, and there's no turning back
, but she hadn't seen them. All of them had been shimmery blotches of color. Her eyes had been so compromised from disuse that she'd feared she was blind. She hadn't told them that, either. Like the shoulder, it was a terror too huge to describe. Instead she stared hard, making out individual figures, growing nauseous from effort, and then she named them—she asked that they not tell their names, just say something to her. “Hi,” began a blur, and then giggled uneasily. “You're A_____,” she'd said, and they'd all been amazed. She'd named every one of them from just a word or two spoken, and as she had little lights of kinship had sprung up. She knew it sounded strange, but that was how it had been. In her time in the closet she'd learned all their voices.

And possibly fallen a little in love. Not because they were the comrades she'd sought before knowing quite what she was seeking. Not because they had words for the frightening world, lists of reasons and crucial solutions,
power disjunctions
and
racial disease
and
the cure for materialism
. Not because they were her yet
not
her, had transcended and so gave her hope. Just because she was nineteen years old, and might have fallen in love with any collection of beings devoted to lofty ideals. She might have fallen in love harvesting sugarcane in Cuba, or registering voters in Mississippi, or just handing out flyers on the safety of her school's Great Lawn, but she hadn't even done that—it had never come naturally to her. Like almost anyone of her age living in the place and the time that she did, and lacking strident beliefs of some kind, she felt called upon vaguely to Do Something; but whether she felt more called upon, or less able to answer, by virtue of whose daughter she was, she couldn't have said. She only knew that her name was a problem to her. She had never been buoyed by it, like her sisters. She had never had the audacity to define herself against it. She'd felt too conspicuous, too obscurely guilty. When one night she had opened the door to her off-campus college apartment—a modest affair by her mother's standards, although still very large and well-appointed and tasteful for the average freshman—and been seized by masked gunmen, beneath her unspeakable terror she had felt in some way that her debt had come due.

The day the blindfold came off was humid and warm, perhaps the middle of March. For the first time in more than a month she heard street noise, and smelled the damp earth. They'd opened a window to air the place out and secured the curtain with thumbtacks at the edges so it wouldn't blow open. Though she'd been in no condition to walk, let alone try to climb out a window, they still cuffed her wrist to a couch. “Am I in America?” she asked. They said yes. “Am I in California?” This they wouldn't confirm. It was several more weeks before she learned with amazement that she was still in San Francisco, just a few miles from her childhood home, where her parents were making their daily statements to reporters. She was in an apartment that faced the Panhandle—that was the wonderful scent of damp earth.

A
FTER THEY HAVE
made a spectacle of themselves before the full force of the Missouri state troopers they drive east again on new roads, because they'd been driving west; they imagine the realization dawning on those men in the big hats and ponchos. Perhaps their faces have developed in those men's minds like photographs in a darkroom—and not stopping there bloomed from their hats. They imagine the belated all-points bulletin. Before this, they've imagined it sprouting from Dolly: Dolly's brain is somewhat dry from age, but still fertile. Perhaps Dolly hadn't recognized Pauline immediately, but the seed had been dropped. Later that week, or that very same day, Dolly would have settled herself in her chair for the night's date with Walter Cronkite. Walter shows her a picture, her brain blooms, she picks up the phone. The reward for Pauline is a good deal more than the money she got for the car. And so Jenny and Pauline drive west, as the tendrils unfurl behind them; then they drive east, as the state troopers come to awareness; then they turn north, because they've gone too far east—all this time, nothing happens. They make a big, gradual circle, and start traveling west once again.

Somewhere west of the Mississippi the whole continent seems to tilt slightly; they feel themselves climbing gently to a vague culmination. Dolly's car starts overheating but Jenny knows how to deal with this. “It just has to cool down. We'll be fine,” she says. Pauline smokes enough cigarettes to encircle the spot where they're parked. On one of these days they see four-foot-tall sandhill cranes rising droopingly out of a field. On another—in Colorado? Wyoming?—they see pelicans turning and turning above them with unlikely grace, as if performing a water ballet. What are those birds
doing
here? They're nowhere near the ocean! Later in her life Jenny will accidentally come across, in some oddment of casual reading, the information that white pelicans migrate from the far North to the Mexican coast through the corridor of the Great Plains. She won't understand, for a moment, why this trivia startles her so, makes her heart hurt. Now the pelicans simply are magic. It makes her and Pauline strangely happy to see them out here, ocean birds in the great landlocked vastness. They wait for the car to cool off. All they hear is its light
tick tick tick
and the wind.

One day, the radiator cap bursts off completely, releasing white billows of steam. Later, at a junkyard that seems to extend halfway up the damp slope of a boulder-strewn mountain, Jenny picks her way between corpses of cars with a taciturn man. He says he can find a new cap. The ragged gray clouds seem just out of their reach; then the miles of dead cars. Nothing else, not a house or a power line on the horizon, not a lone working car on the road. They might be in Wales at the beginning of time. The man harvests a few caps he thinks ought to fit and they turn and head back toward the car. Pauline is there, with her arms crossed against the damp cold, her bright, brittle hair like a blown dandelion. The man props up the hood and asks where Jenny's from. She says, randomly, “Massachusetts.”

“I meant originally.”

She knows it's no use to tell him she was born in this country. “Japan,” she says. This satisfies him.

“How about you,” he says to Pauline. Pauline's hair is whipped off her face by the wind. She's not wearing a hat. It's too gray for sunglasses.

Pauline says, “Massachusetts.”

The man doesn't seem very interested in these answers. He's testing the caps, one by one, to see which is most snug. “Heading out to the Coast,” he infers, though they haven't said this. “All the kids want to live there. Ah—that's the one.” He gives the cap a last tightening turn and straightens, stretching his back. “You remind me of someone,” he tells Pauline abruptly.

Pauline looks at him, startled.

“I don't suppose you were ever in Laramie.”

“No,” she says.

“Never went to the school there?”

“No.”

“You an actress or something?”

“No.”

“It's funny. I feel like I've seen you on TV.”