American Woman (49 page)

Jenny knew she'd survive, too. Of course she would, although with certain huge losses. The loss of William pained her most for her awareness that it was she who betrayed him, and not even consciously so much as with inattention. William continued to respond to her letters through her sentencing and her own entrance into prison, he assiduously advised her with the aid of his prison's law library, wrote her generous words of encouragement, exhortations to courage, admonitions to do this or that, treated her, in other words, as if she were one of his prison comrades, a worthy cause, a noble person brought low by complex circumstance, a pillar of strength who only needed reminders to hold herself up. The one thing she was not was his lover. Selflessly, rationally, always bearing in mind that the work of the struggle is more important than the trials of the heart, William offered her everything he could give from his own prison cell but his previous love. She received the same love he extended to all humankind. He never upbraided her for leaving him, and this rationality of his, whether a put-on or not, was another shocking loss, though she knew it was enormously selfish to want the man that you no longer loved to keep pining for you. He finally, quietly let her go, let three months pass before answering one of her letters. She knew then to stop writing back.

The loss of her freedom, of these years of her twenties, ended up being nothing next to the loss of her confidence in the choices she'd made. The world hadn't healed itself in the meantime. If anything she felt it was worse, now that there was no war to focus protest and discussion, no palpably identifiable evil to point fingers at. It was just the same fatal world as always, with its staggering inequities, which she realized now weren't exceptions to be excised but the rules of the game, the very engine that kept the thing running. She felt more powerless now than she ever did in the years of the war, and not just because the problem had grown so diffuse, but because no solutions remained. It was this ultimate disenchantment that disfigured the largest portion of her, that took up the most space. She'd carry this unsolved problem forward, into the rest of her life. As well as the knowledge—and here the injured party was her pride—that she was no better than Juan or Yvonne. No wiser, no less prone to dumb, selfish acts. In the months leading up to her trial she, too, was interrogated as to what else she knew, and she thought of the lawyer in Peekskill, and his warning to her. He'd said it would be hard not to tell what she knew. It was hard, but not because she was tempted to win herself points. She always knew she wouldn't be a stool pigeon. She still had her strict moral code. But her act of loyalty to Juan and Yvonne was, in the end, her acknowledgment to them that her moral code had failed her utterly, that she was not morally better than them but the same, flawed, her failure as great.

C
AREFULLY
, she tried writing. She wrote that maybe life waxed and waned, like the light, which she missed more than anything else. That maybe the hour before sunset, when a day's worth of the light's alterations seem exposed all at once, was the light's way of knowing itself, in the same way she was trying to know herself now, with her life in a forge. She remembered a book she'd once read, in which the narrator was only three different ages: he was first a child's age, around twelve, and then for chapters and chapters he remained twenty-two, before finally, suddenly being forty. She thought it made sense for herself; she could only sporadically seize on the course of her life. She could only await the rare glimpse of its change in direction. Decades from now she would remember this time in the most broken-up, episodic, disjointed way, but the great change taking form would be clear, like a superimposition of a cell, dividing and dividing, eventually swallowing all that lay near it. While the change was occurring she'd hang between two far-flung places, as if on a wire. Sitting in her cell, and writing, amazed she could render herself into words.

There were so many things about herself that she had never told Pauline, lost continents of her life, or simply odd moments, resonances, connections, in which she found herself most fully for the fact that she somehow retained them. Their intimacy, from the moment it really began, had seemed so complete that she supposed it would have been an aspersion, a tremor of doubt, if either had begun to bring forward such artifacts. They spoke intensely and exhaustively within the frame of their short time together, about the kidnapping and the cadre, about Juan and Yvonne and Tom Milner and Sandy and Frazer, about power for women and the rent that they owed and the news in the paper that morning—and even about William—but they never carefully tutored each other in their own histories. There'd been the sense that all that was assumed, that each knew the whole of the other one's past. To suggest otherwise would have shattered their union somehow.

And then after they were apart, for a time she had felt in the opposite way: that there was nothing she shouldn't have said, and that a failure of hers in conveying herself must explain why their friendship had ended. That had still been the tail end of longing; all the self-immolations of heartbreak are their own forms of love. Perhaps this was still why she finally filled up the notepads: for Pauline, not herself. But in the process she slowly recovered; tunneling so long she came back aboveground a vast distance from where she'd last been. She understood now that Pauline had realized her adventure was over. Pauline knew that her place in the world was assured—she need only resolve to accept it. And she had, out of fear, or resignation, or hard pragmatism, or perhaps just because, for them both, youth had come to an end. Old enough to feel rage, young enough to indulge it completely!—they hadn't had children or aged, ailing parents, none of the minor responsibilities of the heart, so insignificant when compared to the woes of the world. Even if Jenny was wrong about Pauline—even if Pauline had not become wise but had just lost her nerve—Jenny knew that her own youth was done.

Her trial began a few months after Pauline's, was short and disregarded by the press. But every day the courtroom was full of the Japanese and Filipino and Korean and Chinese faces, the tight-knit people her father had always avoided. They clustered resolutely around him, invited him to eat in their homes, brought him casseroles when he demurred. They wore buttons that simply said
JENNY
. It was the tireless support of these people—she did nothing to earn or retain it, she simply received it dumbstruck, as she would any miracle—which the judge cited as his reason for sentencing her to the minimum. Not any unusual worth of her own.

Toward the end of this time, though she knew it was an awful cliché, Pauline came to her in a dream. In the dream Pauline read Jenny's notepads—a pen in her mouth, one skinny leg folded beneath her. Jenny had given the notepads to Pauline as if nothing were more natural, and it was only after a long peaceful silence, Pauline reading, Jenny watching her read, that it occurred to her what she had done. She wondered urgently how she could take back the notepads, before Pauline understood that what she was reading was all about her. That Jenny's unedited thinking of her stomped and thundered across every page. Jenny's heart pounded, her palms sweated, she saw Pauline calmly reading, turning the page back, turning the next back, every once in a while deftly flipping all the turned-over pages beneath the notepad's cardboard backing the way she deftly rearranged her lengthening hair when it slipped free of her ears, as it did with a slow regularity. Jenny could just sidle over and slide the whole pile of notepads out from under Pauline, and surely Pauline wouldn't notice. It was a dream, after all. What had she said: that she loved her? Loathed her? Dreamed of her, even during this moment? That she'd surrendered her whole self somehow, the one thing she'd sworn not to do. And then, as she was expecting realization and anger, Pauline's face finally turning to her hard with accusation, Pauline looked up and said, mildly puzzled, “Jenny, why do you always say ‘money'? We never called it that, don't you remember? We always called money ‘bread.' That's the word that we used.”

H
OME AGAIN
in Berkeley, two years later, she was sometimes surprised to find herself missing the East Coast: its lushness, its quiet. Though she still associated it with a degraded past self, a self that craved irresponsible freedom. She could be guilty, she knew, of victimizing herself with her own politics—her politics were all she had to justify the wrong turns and lost time, and so she cherished them, even when they made more difficult the justification of herself. Or rather, the justification of her intense, unimportant desires, like the desire to have a nice room. She was afraid to want things for herself. She didn't think she deserved them.

But in time, she answered a roommate-wanted ad for a house in Berkeley, and in the house found her room, though it wasn't yet hers, or even really a room. It was the dining room, a three-sided space off the kitchen with a giant bay window. But she fell hard for that window, with its view of the rosemary plant in the yard, and beyond it, the lime tree. The room they'd meant her to have was a real bedroom, upstairs, with four walls and a door, but it was also dark, under the eaves, and with a view of the roof of the neighboring house. Nothing green. Something in her was determined to have that bay window. Something in her, then, was ready to want things again. Humbly, but distinctly. Already she had been thinking of how she would remember this time of her life. She knew it was a temporary station; every station is, but some convey this feeling powerfully from the start. The members of the house had seen her face, her lingering in the dining room at the bay window, her cursory glance at the bedroom. They liked sitting in that dining room together, drinking tea or wine around the big wooden table. But after she left they had a house meeting and voted—they wanted her in. She had a modest aura of heroism about her she would have tried to snuff out if she'd glimpsed it herself. The members of the house were all younger than her—she was now twenty-nine, and feeling within herself an almost completed transition. She'd been thinking, with bemusement but routinely, of how much she'd like to have a child. Secretly saw herself, now, as a person accumulating the knowledge and ability to be the best of the world to a child. She never thought of romance, or marriage, or family life, only of herself as a companion to a child. Perhaps this wasn't true leaning toward motherhood—perhaps those other things, those amusingly traditional things, would turn out to be crucial. But she didn't think so. And so she had the idea, as she chose her place for the moment, that this was mere preparation. She would spend a little more time with herself, and then the child, she had the strange faith, would come. On its own, she imagined.

This calm must have shown in her face, and been attractive to the young people in the house—the twenty-one and twenty-three-year-olds, all young graduate students or searchers. All of them, she imagined, the sort of people who had they been born just a few years sooner would have met the world at a sharply different angle, done things with no hesitation that now, in their remarkably altered world, would seem wild, laborious, frightening. They were the same people, Mike Sorsas and Sandys and Toms. Even a Pauline of a sort, a beautiful, cocky girl from Maine, slumming a while in California. But theirs was a different world; living communally, buying their staples in brown paper bags, pushing the compost around with a hoe, were their forms of resistance. They called her at her father's and told her they wanted her to live with them, in the dining room nook—they'd help make a partition. “We just could see you in that space, and we couldn't really see you in the other one,” their spokesperson, Jeremy, told her. “We thought we'd make the upstairs room into a sort of library. You know, a quiet reading place where we can hang out, and not be lying in our beds? Everybody liked that idea.” She thanked him and said yes, she would come.

I
T WAS THROUGH
those housemates that she got a job at a juice bar—another collective, but one with a surprising sense of permanence. She found that she had desperately missed regular work. She liked going to a place separate from her home, with a small social order distinct from that of her home, and working, with her hands, and roving idly in her mind. Of course the work wasn't of staggering significance, but she liked the earthiness of it, the elemental connotations. Taking fruits of the earth and reducing them to bright, fragrant liquid. The juice bar was a little bit of a scene, young—even younger than her house—and ebullient, carefree, pleasantly silly. Sometimes, she could tell that the person buying juice from her knew who she was, thought of her as a minor celebrity, had come to see her. A shyness in their manner, that asked to be noticed. A certain wry or hopeful smile when they met her eye, as if to telegraph that they knew her, understood her, were with her. She neither shrugged off nor acknowledged these people—she simply smiled her usual smile, asked her usual questions, made the usual juice. Her minor celebrity had gained her, she noticed, a new and different sort of estrangement—her very conspicuousness meant that strangers were timid with her, and that she could, in playing dumb, repel them easily. She never let on that she knew that they knew. They would go away slowly, glance back quickly. She pretended she wasn't looking for anyone in particular, but she did mark certain private watersheds, and view the world differently after she had. William had finally gotten parole; even if he did not know she had been paroled too, he would have remembered her original release date. When this passed she waited, not sure if with hope or with dread, but he never came. When Pauline was released Jenny half expected her to come ducking through the door, although she never would. This didn't mean Jenny saw it less clearly. Pauline would use her slouchy walk but she wouldn't be able to hide the half-cowed, half-arrogant habit of looking all around her to ensure she hadn't—or had—been noticed. She would be wearing jeans, a sweatshirt, a sunhat, big shades. Flat, limp canvas sneakers. That remarkably alluring sloppiness of the very, very rich. Her long hair in a rubberband.