American Woman (50 page)

In the end it was Frazer who came, the last person she had ever imagined would walk through that door. She was in the middle of an order, and so he was greeted by her co-worker and asked for his order. He stared at the juice list a little belligerently, to convey that juice was not what he'd come for, and finally chose carrot and ginger. Because carrot took so long, she was free before his order was filled, and she came down the counter and was surprised when he leaned across it, pulled her toward him, and kissed her. “This is your unlucky day,” he said. “A little bird told me I'd find you here.”

“How did it know?” she asked, still feeling his kiss, like a brand, on her mouth.

Frazer shrugged. “Little birds hear these things. But it hadn't seen you. You don't want to see anybody, I guess.”

“No. To be honest, I don't. But I'm happy you came.”

He smiled, embarrassed. He cast about—happily, she could tell—for some good light rejoinder. Finally he seemed to give up, and instead asked, earnestly, “Are you happy, in general?”

She looked at him with her head cocked, surprised. It wasn't his kind of question.

“I am,” she said. “Are you?”

“I—no, not really. Me and Carol are getting divorced. But what the fuck. I didn't come here to talk about me, if you can believe that. I just wanted to see how you were.”

“Good. I really am.”

“I'm glad,” he said.

They looked at each other a long time, unstintingly, across the counter. Her co-worker came and gave him his carrot and ginger, and he thanked her and paid and looked at Jenny again, and then somehow their gazing tipped over the line into too great, too confusing intensity, and they both blushed at once. She didn't know why—was this one of those moments of dumb truth Frazer used to expound on? He would say, The one thing you must do, the one thing that if you do it it'll always keep you safe, is listen to your body. Know what it's saying. Follow its dictates. Hers was hot, teeming, pleased in some way. Exact message unclear.

“I'll see you,” Frazer said, and across the counter they embraced again, awkwardly, the width of wood between them. And then, as she watched, he was gone.

I
T WASN
'
T QUITE
true that she never saw Pauline again. One spring evening, curled up on the couch with her dinner and watching the news, Jenny learned that Pauline had been married. The groom was a member of the around-the-clock security detail her parents had hired for her when she got out of prison. On Jenny's small, snowy TV, Pauline emerged from a great limestone church, an unrecognizable girl in a huge puff of gauze. Then she ran down the steps to a car, with her skirts in her fists. Ran, as if the girl she'd once been still lurked there, in the crowds of reporters. Or as if the girl that she had to be now still might leave her behind.

Celebrity was strange, Jenny thought. It provoked the delusion that you were near to a person, but it was not like a person at all. It was more like a movie, diffuse streams of light briefly caught on a screen. Should the actual person have ever appeared in your life—small and solid and uneasily making her way to her seat, casting a blot on the image behind her but otherwise coinciding with it not at all—that other image could not be sustained. She was sure she remembered sitting with Pauline on their porch every evening at dusk, wondering why the birds surged from their roosts and then settled again and then surged, and then settled—were they trying to get comfortable?—but she couldn't align this real time in her life with the person whose image she saw. She was full of other ghosts, of the oval-shaped track that they wore in the pasture, and the sound of Juan's gun riding up on the wind, and the blood of the man that they killed, on the seat of the Bug. A worn patch and a noise and a trace, all alive in her mind. It was only Pauline that had long disappeared.

That was the same spring that Jenny had bought her own car. It was surprisingly wonderful, driving legitimately. Or at least, driving with her own registration and license, if not within the speed limit. One Saturday morning she drove out to Stockton, speeding, and arriving there felt the sweet, cinematic, slightly grandiose sensation of returning to her childhood home in a fast-moving car and sunglasses. Then as always the house and greenhouse made her wince when she caught sight of them. They probably hadn't been painted since she was a child. Lately she'd been telling her father he ought to retire. “Yeah right,” he would say. “Because you'll take such good care of me. I can live in your commune and eat your steamed tofu. No thanks.”

To her surprise he was already dressed when she got there. Sitting on the small bench outside the front door, hands in his lap, as if it weren't his own home and he were awaiting the owner. He had a knit watch cap pulled over his ears and a scarf around his neck, although it wasn't cold, and his neck was also circled by a bandanna. When she got out of the car he held another bandanna out to her, but didn't get up. She could see that the house and greenhouse were all locked. His was a state of uncharacteristic readiness. She'd told him she was coming at seven in the morning because she'd expected she wouldn't get him into the car before eight. “I don't want to do this,” he announced, waving the bandanna toward her with irritation. She took it from him.

“What is this for?”

“For putting over your face when the sand blows around. It'll fill up your ears, too. You don't have a hat? This is the most miserable place in the world you're dragging me to. I don't want to do this.”

“Come on,” she said.

“I don't want to do this,” her father repeated, standing up and getting into her car. As they headed back down to 120 he added, “There's supposed to be blizzards up in the Sierras. They might close 108. And the Yosemite road isn't open this early in the season. We won't get across.”

“Calm down,” she said. “It's April.”

“Blizzards happen up there in July. Didn't you call the Weather Service? You should have called to make sure it's still on. It's a crazy time of year to go out there. If it's not rain it's wind. Then sand fills up your ears.”

“It's on,” she said. “If it's not we'll turn around and come back.”

At Twain Harte they left the floor of the valley and began climbing into the mountains. The pine forest rose on either side of them like a dusky cathedral; she remembered the days at the farmhouse, lying in the cistern on the hillside with her head back, staring up at the trees. No, those trees had been nothing like these. There was no mistaking the East for the West. The air had cooled swiftly around them, as if there were water nearby, though it was only the vault of the woods. The road was narrow now, and dark gray from a recent shower, but she didn't see snow. In Dardanelle, at the foot of the pass, she stopped into a log-cabin lodge like a toy between columnar trees and asked about the weather. “All clear,” the man said. They did the pass at a crawl anyway, her father staring wordlessly out the window, at the flanks of the mountains above them, and then into the spume of the fast-moving river that flowed for a while beside them. All these years, she thought, living an hour away from these almighty mountains. He had only seen them a few times, and like this, from a car. And he loved mountains; when they'd arrived in Japan he had only been comfortable there, in the dense mountains outside their town.

Descending out of the pass again they came to 395 and then it was a more regular drive through deep forest, with the knowledge of the great mass to the west but not so much of a lump in the throat from inexplicable sadness. “You hungry?” she said. “I have sandwiches.”

“I thought there's food there.”

“There is, there's going to be burgers on the hibachi. I just thought you might be hungry now.”

“
Burgers
.” His face darkened and he sat back in his seat abruptly, snapping the lever underneath to make it scoot back as far as it went, and at the same time swinging his right ankle up onto his left knee. This was a familiar expression of disgust, but she wasn't sure if she'd ever seen it in a car—it most often occurred at the table. He would push himself back and assume that remote, haughty posture. She realized that she had never seen it performed in a car because she'd never been the driver, and he the passenger, before. “They think this is some kind of cookout?” he spat. “So we'll all sit around and eat
burgers
?”

“So have a sandwich,” she said rather shortly.

“
Sand
wich. It'll be a goddamn
sand
burger.”

“Ha ha,” she said, and got silence in reply.

South of Bishop they were suddenly driving through desert; as with all such amazing transitions, she could not understand when it happened, when the earth went from black and dark green and snow-white to this pondwater brown. The forest was gone and now the nude brown hills dotted with sagebrush rolled into the distance, to meet the white wall of the mountains, still the Sierras, exposed to their very spine now, and continuing their march to the south. The Owens River came to accompany the road on their other side and she felt that they'd left California and gone to some far-flung frontier, or perhaps to the past. “My God,” said her father, uncrossing his legs. “It all looks exactly the same.”

“Remember stuff?”

“Don't ask me to.” But after a few minutes he said, as the endless dun hills and the endless sagebrush and the distant white wall unscrolled slowly beside them, “A landscape like this, it takes a rigorous mind to appreciate. There's a certain austerity to it. Most people find this too lonely. These ugly hills, how tall do you think they are?”

“I can't tell. They seem like they might be little humps, or big enough to be small mountains. I'm having trouble judging how far the Sierras are, too.”

“They're close. Close. At night out here, you can feel the air coming off them. Like out of a freezer. You're having trouble judging the height of these hills because there's nothing on them to give you a sense of scale. That's what's so amazing. They're only a few hundred feet at the most.
But
—” He paused dramatically. “But, when you climb one of them, it's just like you're up on a mountain. Why?”

“Visibility,” she answered.

“Exactly. It goes on forever.”

“So you did have an all right time out here,” she said, ruining it. She was sorry the minute she'd said such a facile thing.

“An
all right
time? They let us go hiking
one time
, under guard. With goddamn rifles pointed at us.”

After that, he was silent the rest of the way.

Her first glimpse of it was as a strange living patch in the desert, a tattered green quilt of grasses and weeds. She knew this was because they had diverted water here to grow crops for the camp. There were supposed to be fruit trees still alive on the site. The road had swung west and now they were so near the Sierras again, to their sudden ascent from the level, to their startling cut-diamondness, she felt gripped by a weird, thrilling fear. A magnificent wall for an abandoned and overgrown prison. A dirt track led off 395 and as she turned she saw a small sign banged into the weeds that said
MANZANAR REUNION, STRAIGHT AHEAD
, but there was no need for the sign. Even from here they could see, perhaps one mile distant and that much closer to the upsurge of mountains, a scattering of cars parked at all kinds of angles on the scrub-covered ground, and the small forms of people moving purposefully on the floor of the desert beneath the vast peaks, setting up a crude stage, unfolding long portable tables for food, hunting big rocks to weigh everything down. They bumped slowly along the dirt track and pulled up next to an old school bus.
MANZANAR OR BUST!
had been spray-painted onto the back. When Jenny turned off the engine they heard hammers
tocking
briskly, their noise seeming to echo for miles. Besides that the wind, and the voices it snatched. The earth was the color of concrete dust; pale gray, and grainy. The wind lifted it up by the handful and rained it back down. She pulled the bandanna out of her pocket and tied it in readiness around her neck, as her father had. “Thanks for this,” she said, but he was already getting out of the car and gazing around him.

A young man passed them, clutching a taiko drum like a beer keg to his chest. “Welcome!” he called. “We're just now setting up. Give a hand if you want, or just dig the cool view.” But her father seemed not to have seen the young man—the young man who was about the same age he had been, she realized, when he was brought forcibly to this place.

“Hey,” her father said. “I
lived
here.”

“I know,” she said.

“Let's go help them set up.” He turned and strode off.

In a moment, she followed.

About the Author

© 2003 by Mitch Butler