American Woman (48 page)

In her dreams of revenge on Pauline, which were really heartbreak—it was possible this was the first true heartbreak of her life—she eventually sensed a kinship to another transformative anger she'd carried for years. It had been overwhelming anger that drove her when she set out to protest the war. She had been enraged by the state of the world, but perhaps even more she'd been enraged by herself, such a ridiculous, small, not-taken-seriously, average American girl. Not the president, or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or the CEO of Dow Chemical. If she withheld her approval, those in power wouldn't scramble to suit her. The poor wouldn't be fed, tanks withdrawn. Or apologies made. She had wanted apologies made. She had wanted the powerful men who wreaked such great destruction to feel remorse. It occurred to her now, as she stewed in a pain even worse than she'd felt after William's arrest—for he hadn't left her, he'd been taken, and she'd known that she still had his love—that her most carefully rational acts had been shot through with rage. She had always felt she would have done the same things without William as with him; that they were soulmates must mean they would have acted and thought the same way, even if they had lived separate lives. But it was also true that she'd given herself to William, feeling privileged and grateful that he could channel her fury, and transmute it into useful action. Together they'd been such a closed globe; it had been easy to disregard the vast anger that fueled them both. As much as she'd thought she was fighting for justice, perhaps what she'd wanted was less justice than vengeance—because justice wasn't an eye for an eye, an act of violence to match acts of violence. Even if the violence was planned to occur late at night, when not a janitor roamed the long halls. Even if it was staged as a symbol. She had never
believed
in violence as a provocation, as a means to incite revolution by inciting the government to repress its own people. And she had certainly never believed in assassination, like some of the comrades she'd known. But nevertheless she'd believed in violence—as the only reliable way to seize people's attention. As a means toward enlightenment. And, perhaps, as a way to wreak vengeance; she feared this about herself now, as she seethed in her cell.

She thought of the monk she had seen years ago on the news, immolating himself. It was a sight that had shocked and transformed her perhaps more than anything else in her life. She supposed now that in her time with William it had been that unparalleled shock of the real she had wanted to force onto others, the way she'd felt it forced onto herself, by the monk in his column of flame. She had wanted to force others to see, no matter what it might take, and had felt this was just what the monk had been doing. But perhaps she'd been wrong, and the monk had really meant to convey the horrifying idea that had first crossed her mind seeing him, and that afterwards she'd so urgently tried to refute: that a passion for rightness was never enough, that one's every attempt would be futile. That in the end the only way to protest was by simply removing oneself from the world.

Because what other way guaranteed you would never do harm? She and William had taken such pride in their careful actions, but they'd owed more to luck than they would ever have wished to admit. Mere dumb luck, the god she'd so slavishly served in her year with Pauline, all the while believing it was not luck, but righteousness, that preserved them. As she'd believed with William: that it could never have merely been luck that kept the buildings she bombed as empty as she'd meant them to be. Bombing a building that “ought” to be empty was not so different in type, if very different in scale, from bombing a village that “ought” to house only the enemy and not any civilians. And yet there were always civilians; and there never had been an employee returning, past midnight, to Jenny's targeted building for a left-behind coat. Was this because Jenny was righteous, or was it just her good luck? Good luck that kept her from being a killer while she was trying to save and redeem. If so, bad luck that killed Mr. Morton, not Juan's impure motives, as she'd wanted to think.

In the past, with William, she'd believed high intentions gave her the right to use violence; the same violence she abhorred in her government, and even among other comrades whose aims weren't sufficiently pure. But it wasn't intentions, however lofty or petty, that mattered, but how things turned out. When she shined that harsh light onto all of her acts, her bombings no longer seemed so exalted. Exalted intentions—never fatal results, perhaps just thanks to luck. No salvation, either. Only anger, infectious like fire: Jenny's anger at her nation's abuses; the patriotic American's anger at subversives like her. The anger of the young men who'd risked their lives fighting and come home to be spat on by peers. The anger of the Vietnamese—although it was hard to know, caught up in the rage and confusion at home, if the Vietnamese were most rightly described as “angry.” Hard to know anything concrete about them, these people to whom she'd felt pledged. They had been an abstraction, the way Mr. Morton had been an abstraction, although now Jenny sees him with almost unbearable clarity. She sees him coming out of his store on a bright summer day and calling out to a favorite employee. Pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose, squinting carefully back through the doors. The glasses' prescription is years out of date; Mr. Morton is trying to stretch things as far as they'll go. Wearing glasses that reveal a watery, imprecise world, so that when a pretty young blond calls his name and takes hold of his arm, he's a long time in grasping that what she holds out is a gun.

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.

W
HILE 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.”

S
OMETIMES
, 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.