American Woman (40 page)

They had been living in the apartment for almost a month when Tom came by very early on a Saturday morning with a long duffel bag that had the faded word “Milner” stenciled on in black ink. “From my dad's army days,” Tom explained. The bag's canvas was soft and its contents were falling around inside and poking against the fabric in a way that seemed previolent, like the tip of a knife against skin. The drawstring closure wasn't even closed; Tom was clutching the freight to his chest like a difficult sack of groceries. “Here,” he said hastily, dumping the bag in the kitchen, with a sound like a full set of golf clubs—or a full set of shotguns—coming down on a hard tile floor. He was sweating, though the day was quite cool.

“Careful!” Jenny cried. “Jesus, Tom, what have you brought us?”

But Pauline was already on her knees in front of the bag, drawing forth its contents carefully. Connoisseurially. Her touch denoted recognition and pleasure, not fear. She was like a dealer of precious exotica, welcoming home from a long expedition her own Marco Polo.

“Oh, Tom,” Pauline finally said. “This is great.”

“Yeah?”

“Here's the M1—it's the one that I learned on. I can field-strip it. This one is good, too. It's good for women. It has less recoil, it won't bruise your shoulder so much. This one they never let me handle. I'll look it up in that book that you brought.” Pauline turned her face up to him, and it was as if he had finally delivered to her the one thing that would make her complete. That, Jenny thought, was her wonderful, terrible, undiminished, inbred social grace: that her face could say such ringing things—even mean them, short-lived as they were. “Thanks,” Pauline said.

Tom glowed, all the dangers forgotten. “Sure thing,” he said, grinning.

After Tom was gone she watched Pauline a long time without speaking, while Pauline sat cross-legged on the kitchen floor handling the weapons spread out around her. Finally Pauline looked at her. “They're the guns that we had to leave here, when we went with Frazer.”

“I figured,” she said.

Her cool reaction only made Pauline grin; Pauline had known she'd object if they'd talked about this in advance. “I know you hate guns, but I had an idea: I want to teach other women the things that I learned with the cadre. Not so that we can hurt or kill people, so that we can understand what these things really
are
. When I learned I felt so—powerful, but that's beside the point, maybe. The point is, it would be a woman's approach to firearms. To understanding why men use them, and misuse them. And if you really hate guns, don't you think you should
know
about them? Know thy enemy: isn't that what you say?” Now Pauline was even more cheerful: she knew she was winning. “And: ignorance is the most inexcusable weakness. Don't you say that too, Jenny?” They both knew that she did.

It helped that they started out with activities that weren't directly related to shooting the guns: names of parts, principles of ballistics, categories of gun and the job each is most suited for. Jenny had to admit there was pleasure in sitting on the deep pile carpet of the living room floor with Sandy, and Sandy's younger sister Joanne, and Joanne's housemate Lena, the five of them dismantling a 12-gauge shotgun, cleaning it with pipe cleaners and household rags, using their hands. A pleasure in framing questions and absorbing the answers, in making lists upon lists of ideas. A pleasure in wonderment, she realized. Learning to learn without being embarrassed. One thing they all agreed on, one thing they realized was true across contexts and even in the best of situations, was that in their relations with men they had subtly but constantly presented themselves as more knowledgeable than they were; all the time, in the wings, playing catch-up. She knew that for her that tension, between the girl she was and the bold, brilliant woman she'd pretended to be, had been central to falling in love—had
been
love, the thrill of transforming, in secret, into the lover her lover desired. She and the others didn't think men had known more than them. But, they agreed, men had a culture of already-knowing, so that you could never read Marx, you had already read him. You could never have an orgasm for the first time because you already had one each time you had sex. You could never ask directions when driving—you knew where you were, even if you were lost. With men it was a confidence game, and there was nothing about this that wasn't seductive, that didn't make a woman want to play along. But being just among women was something more sweet, the fresh pleasure of coming to things the first time, and of showing their wonder—of not having known, and then knowing.

Of course, Pauline said, there was no substitute for the shooting of guns—for the punch in the shoulder, the noise, for the fleet, pungent curl of smoke—Jenny shot her a stern look of warning, and Pauline concluded it was still valuable just to hold the guns up and pretend. Even that had its dangers, because someone outside might see them, so before they began she and Pauline made drapes for the windows. They hadn't minded the cheap window shades that came with the apartment, but when the shades were pulled down a thin band of light showed at their edges where they didn't quite cover the windows. Now they felt their group wouldn't be safe until this was corrected. All they did was cut long rectangles of fabric and sew deep hems at one end for a dowel to run through, but when they were finished it was another improvement the pleasure of which exceeded the purpose it served. “Our beautiful feminist curtains,” Pauline said. “They might
look
bourgeois, but they're not.”

I
T WAS ONLY
a matter of time before they would have to appeal to fresh resources. They couldn't rely on Tom and Sandy indefinitely, and now the grocery store money was gone. Jenny asked Tom to contact Mike for her, and one afternoon left Pauline alone and took the bus to Golden Gate Park to meet him. In spite of her hat and her glasses he recognized her immediately; he strode across the grass toward her and without speaking pulled her into his arms. When they stepped apart to look at each other he pressed something into her hand, a doubled-up envelope full of money. It turned out to be five hundred dollars, in twenties and fifties. “Don't object,” he warned her. “I'm pissed off already you didn't call me right away. I knew something was up—Milner's been looking like the cat who just ate the canary. I never dreamed it was you, though. Christ, Jenny. And I hear you've made interesting friends.”

They stayed in the park talking for as long as she felt comfortable, and then Mike offered to drive her back home in the truck. “Oh, my God,” she said when she saw it. “Oh God!” She hugged him again, and now she was laughing and crying. “Tom said it still ran but I couldn't believe it.”

“Believe it, baby. This little truck's gonna keep you afloat. Brothers' business is booming. I think it must be the pretty orange sign.”

They drove a few moments in silence. “I don't know why you'd do this,” she said finally.

“William's my friend.”

“And so you'd go broke—and risk your neck, by the way—for the girlfriend who should have been locked up with him.”

“You're having a really hard time seeing me as a noble kind of guy. Would it help if I said that I promised? A long time ago. He once said, if anything happened to him, would I make it my sworn fucking duty to keep you okay. Those were his words. My sworn fucking duty.”

“As if I couldn't survive without him,” she said irritably.

“No. As if you might one day have legal hassles, which you do, and so need help you wouldn't need otherwise. Even so you've made me wait all this time to keep my promise. Frazer got to be the hero instead. The hotshot beat me to the punch.”

“You never liked him, did you?” she said, smiling.

“I guess I was jealous,” he said, smiling too.

It was only after he'd driven her back that she asked what he'd meant. She had let it drop at the moment, and not felt she would ever retrieve it. That had taken her so long to learn: that you could end awkward moments by holding your tongue. Oh, the tongue!—which she so often thought of now that she'd returned. The tongue that had been so shy when it met William Weeks and then so voracious once he'd finished with it. Not just voracious to prosecute wrongs but to change standard vision, to challenge as William would challenge, to hammer on innocent comments, make people think twice, knock away their complacence. And then also voracious for sex. All the regions of flesh he had driven her tongue to make love to. That was a liberation that felt like a discipline. Finding silence at moments like the strange one with Mike was a discipline that felt very much like liberation. And yet as they sat in the truck she couldn't resist going back to it. This was part of homecoming, she knew; this picking away at old scabs. In the window she saw the drape twitch. Pauline must hear the truck. Pauline would be trying to line up her eye with the fissure between drape and wall. That reeling desire for aloneness to end and the bottomless fear that goes with it. Pauline would know that the truck was Mike bringing her back, but clutched in the animal heart of her mind was the fear that the truck was an agent, the start of an ambush, The End. “I should go in,” Jenny said, but then added, “What did you mean by you guessed you were jealous?”

“I always had the sense,” he said, and then paused to feel for words. “I always had the sense that there was a kind of what-if drama going between Frazer and Carol, and William and you. Maybe Frazer just wished that was true, and made everyone think so.”

Of course she knew what he meant. But she still said, “What-if?”

“What if you weren't hooked up with William, and Frazer wasn't with Carol. What would happen with Frazer, and you.”

“That's absurd,” she said. “I love William. And you know how Rob is.”

“I know,” Mike said, smiling.

“What?” she demanded.

“Nothing. I just think it's funny. We spend so much time hashing out the big forces that control our lives. Capitalism, the class system. Private ownership of the land. Like, I'm always wondering how come I can't grow my own food and just live in a hut and be happy. Instead I paint rich people's houses. Now I'm learning to paint fake marble surfaces so that not-so-rich people can feel like they are. Have a little touch of class on your fake fireplace. Isn't that crazy? People like William and you understand, but then sometimes I think you don't notice the personal things. All the messy emotional things. Those control our lives, too.”

“For example?”

“God, I don't know. For example, Frazer rushed to the rescue. I won't comment further on why. All I know is I never got to fulfill my old promise, so let me do it now, right? Let me think about how you could earn money. Let me meanwhile keep you afloat. Let me help you survive. And your new roommate, too.”

She leaned back in the truck when she'd finally got out, wanting to say something else. But she couldn't.

“You should have come home sooner,” he scolded, ignoring her tears.

“W
HY DOES EVERYONE
love him so much?” That was Pauline's response when Jenny showed her the money from Mike, and Jenny knew “him” meant not Mike, but William. “As if it's not bad enough that we're dependent on men,” Pauline added. She and Jenny should take out an ad like the ones that you saw for the Third World orphans. For a dollar a day you can feed and clothe two fugitives! Help them live on to fight for your rights! What kind of feminists lived as kept women?—but it wasn't Mike's money that bothered Pauline. The complaints were all code for Pauline's first demand: Why does everyone love him so much? And that was code for the actual question: Why do
you
love him, Jenny?

Pauline had decided that Jenny, in her years underground, had changed too much to reunite with William once he got out of prison. For one thing, Pauline pointed out, Jenny herself had begun to feel that the actions she and William had done had been flawed and perhaps even wrong. It was true that when Mike Sorsa had asked Jenny if she was interested in meeting with new comrades of his, though she hadn't shown it, within she'd recoiled. She knew that to him she looked even more hardened, impatient to get off the sidelines. Though from the inside out their weapons group had transformed her, made her feel braver and more capable, and though she could see the way in which it had emboldened Joanne and Sandy and Lena, and no one more than Pauline, there was also an outside-in view that she'd glimpsed while with Mike. She could see them as outsiders would: violent, courting destruction. It frightened her badly. More and more she thought of revolution not as mustered force that might topple The System, but as a delicate process of changing individual minds, or as the rare chance to try.

When she talked about this with Pauline, and especially when they discussed her past actions with William, Pauline took a narrower view. “It's no wonder he used methods we now see weren't the most effective,” Pauline said. “He's a man, after all.” In their group they had been discussing the problem of women's role in the revolution, and had finally opened their eyes to the fact that everywhere in the world, women followed. Even history's most notable women revolutionaries were the helpmeets to more-worshipped men. They'd been dismayed but also electrified to have seen it so clearly;
resolved
, Pauline wrote (she kept minutes because she had the best handwriting):
Women must assume leadership roles in the revolution
. But after this they began arguing. Pauline talked about her kidnapping: her old comrades grabbing her in her bathrobe, at gunpoint, was so typically masculine, rapacious and violent. It was as if men, even when trying to effect positive change, could only do so in the most backward, masculine way. It was the same thing with William—

“Wait a minute,” said Jenny. “You can't say men are doomed to do things certain ways, just because they're born men. That's like saying that women do housework because it's their nature.”