American Woman (8 page)

Instead he says, sounding dully pragmatic, “Your current situation doesn't look like much of an improvement over living with Helen and Dick. That old lady doesn't pay you, I bet. Or she can't pay you much.”

“What are you saying?” she asks, and from the stillness of her face, her concealed alarm, he can tell he's guessed right.

“What I mean is you don't have a plan, Jenny, do you? You're running, from everyone, from
me
, even, but you don't have anywhere to run to.”

“I might.”

“Oh, really? Where?”

“None of your business.”

Then he knows that she truly has nowhere to go, and knows as well that she knows it. His excitement, his almost evangelical joy at the opportunity that has befallen him—them—returns to him, and some of the speech along with it. “What if I were to tell you that I've recently met with some people. People whose principles we basically agree with, though we might find their tactics a little way out. People who are in trouble, the way you've been in trouble, although I should say they're in trouble to a way, way,
way
bigger degree. They need a safe haven immediately. What would you say to all that?”

“I'd say that you'll probably help them, and they'll be far more grateful than I was.”

“Not me. You. You'll be the hero who helps them.” She's resisting the vision, but he's expected her to, at the outset. “Because you have the underground know-how, the wisdom.
Yes
, I'm saying you have nothing to lose, it's the truth, but more I'm saying you have everything to gain! Jenny, listen to me. These people, who need us—who need you—aren't just any group of people. They're people who have such a sensational story to tell that if they could just get a safe haven, and write it all down, they would make tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars. For their cause, and for the people who help them. But,” he holds up a cautioning hand, “it's tricky. Because these people need someone aboveground, who's not compromised, to make the arrangements for them.
And
they need someone belowground—like you—to take care of the everyday things. The grocery shopping. The phone calls. Someone like you, who can serve as the go-between—between these people, for example, and me.”

“But I only move around because I have to. It's risky for me.”

“Nowhere near as risky as it is for people who are in
Time
magazine every week. Who are on fucking TV every
night
, Jenny, whose story is wanted by
everyone
—”

Now she's staring at him, very pale. “My God,” she says. “You're not talking about who I think you are, are you?”

“What if I was?” he replies, and his long effort to contain himself finally fails. He grins giddily at her.

“This is just what I was always afraid of,” she gasps. “You think you're so suave, and you're really so reckless! You think you're discreet but you
talk
—don't tell me you came from those people to me. You met with those people, and then you came and found me!” She looks around wildly. “I'm going.”

“Don't do that,” he says.

But she's not even staying to argue. Before he can take in what's happening she's back on her feet and then actually running from him, her form receding across the deep field and slipping into the trees. He's abruptly, completely alone. One half-circle around him the trees Jenny's disappeared into, the other the far-off horizon. Himself at the center, as if he's awoken on top of this mountain and everything else was a dream. He hears a ship's horn, perhaps down on the river, perhaps a hundred miles away on the sea. Under these weird acoustical conditions it seems he might hear her heart if he tried. He hasn't heard her car engine. He shoots up and goes sprinting across the field himself—you can take the quarterback out of the game but you can't take the game out of the quarterback—and bursts through the trees into the parking lot, but it's empty, apart from his car.

3.

T
here's the long way and then there's the very long way, much farther west into mountains before turning east by way of angling south, which means rolling gradually down through the foothills instead of precipitately through the gorge. Even though she's on none of the roads that she used to come up, she's still glancing in her rearview so often she keeps crunching onto the shoulder. Rule number one is don't drive, and if you must, please don't drive like you're sleeping or drunk. She tries not to drive all the time, but now she's a regular face on the train. Known and liked by the different conductors: another rule broken. Hey, Iris. Going down to Poughkeepsie today? Knowing it's bad that she smiles and says Hey. Bad that she's friends with the ticket seller at the station because he sits all day reading the paper. Bad that she's a familiar face in Rhinebeck, also, in spite of sometimes shopping down the river in Poughkeepsie, and getting her mail two towns over in Red Hook, and saving serious emotional collapses for the spot she's just left, because the view is worth the risk of the bridge. Bad that she's rooted in the transient train, the anonymous post office box, precisely the places that Frazer has managed to find her.

And because she's taken the very long way she hasn't managed to get back before tea. She's usually ensconced deep in the house by now, after having boiled the water and spilled the box of cookies onto the dish and decanted the milk into the creamer and dropped the cubes of sugar in the sugar bowl with tongs—Miss Dolly is scrupulous about the use of tongs, to prevent spread of germs—and carried the rattling tray onto the porch with the old woman bringing up the rear in her fragile, methodical way. And then politely ducking off to some project-in-progress, before any visitor comes up the path. By that time she'll be lying well out of reach and very nearly out of sight beneath the library ceiling, on her jerry-rigged scaffold with a bowl of soapy bleach-water, gently wiping away at one hundred years of brown pipe-smoke residue. And listening. Hiding from the ritual of teatime but anxiously listening.
How's that lovely Oriental girl working out? So-and-so saw her at Buell's Hardware shopping for tools. Where is it she hails from, originally
? Coming around the last bend in the Wildmoor road she can see that someone has already arrived, and unhooked the chain, and turned around the little sign from the side saying
HOUSE TOURS
to the side saying
JOIN US FOR TEA
. 4–6
P.M. DAILY.
It's just ten past four. Miss Dolly's visitors are all extremely punctual and ancient, the men thin and erect and slow-moving, like large wading birds, the women tiny and blurry and loud. They all seem to have lived on the river for eons, and never had jobs. Whoever has unhooked the chain has left it lying in the dirt across the drive, and after she bumps over it she gets out of the car and pulls it properly off to one side, noticing as she does that there's a small white streak of bird shit on the sign. She scratches it off with her thumbnail. The sign looks old and faded already. It's one of the first things she made when she came here.

She drives the rest of the way through the trees and tries to slip in the back door, but then someone calls out “Iris!” from the porch. “Yes!” she calls back. Her voice snags and she falls over coughing. Too many smokes. “Come visit with us for a minute!” The speaker, unsubtly sing-songing, is clearly relishing some innuendo. Not Dolly, but Mrs. Fowler, the lady from the historical society who leads the house tours. Jenny's heart picks up speed; the body's quick fear, always five beats ahead of the brain's. Still, she keeps moving and hacking toward the front of the house until she comes into the dining room and catches sight of herself in the huge sideboard mirror. Gray-skinned and red-eyed and with hair like Medusa's, matted up from the wind, sticking straight off her head. She looks cringing and hunted and ugly but she also looks like herself, an upsetting coincidence, and though she can't now put particular words to it, her shock has something to do with existence, with the continuing presence of
her
through these worlds upon worlds. She wants to sit down, on the nearest solid surface, but all her hand finds is the shiny gnarled upright of a thronelike velvet chair, and it doesn't seem right to sit there. Is it all right to sit on the floor? Her body gives a panicked twitch the way it used to when she was so miserably high on something William had given her that she was secretly sure she was dying, that each labored beat of her heart was its last, that her lungs were somehow blocked from filling properly—she would involuntarily twitch out of fear she was dead. She leans heavily against the thronelike chair until the room stops moving and then sneaks a look at her reflection again—no real change. She turns very carefully around and edges her way through the rest of the house to the porch with her eyes on the floor. Miss Dolly is perched in her usual chair, stiff-necked, looking slightly bemused. Mrs. Fowler is bent over the tea tray, but when Jenny comes out she nearly pounces on top of her. “You've had a visitor!” she trills. Jenny has long suspected that Mrs. Fowler's ideas about her involve rock gardens and tea ceremonies and slender bamboo writing tools; that Mrs. Fowler, a connoisseur of the Arts of the Orient, is stubbornly awaiting from Jenny some endorsement of her, Mrs. Fowler's, very own aesthetic gifts. Mrs. Fowler has previously attributed Jenny's avoidance of her to mist-enshrouded Oriental remoteness. Now she seems delighted to have Jenny on the spot. She picks an envelope up off the tea tray and waggles it suggestively. “I
knew
you had an admirer. From the way he asked questions about you, I could just tell that he'd met you before. He was trying to be subtle but I'm a very canny reader of men! And he just now dropped by here again with some adorable story about wanting to ask your advice about having his house painted. We tried to make him stay for tea but he wouldn't, he just scribbled you a little note and then asked for an
envelope
for it. I was just saying to Dolly, We've got hot tea right here, we ought to steam it open! For heaven's sake I'm teasing you, Iris. I'd never. Are you all right? You look green. Have some tea. Sit right there and I'll get you some tea and we can open the envelope.”

“Quit fussing, Louise,” Dolly says. As usual, an exercise in sharing Mrs. Fowler's excitement has given way to irritation. Like Jenny, Dolly tends to disappear from the house when Mrs. Fowler gives tours; this is one of the reasons Mrs. Fowler so regularly comes to tea.

“No, thank you,” Jenny says, trying to make a casual grab for the envelope and instead falling sideways into one of the porch chairs.

“There's lemonade. Miss Dolly's
famous
lemonade, of course,” Mrs. Fowler says, waving the envelope around busily, in the style of a symphony conductor. She winks over her shoulder at Dolly.

Dolly ignores her. “I bet it's all those fumes you're working with,” she tells Jenny. “What about those fumes in the porte cochere? I don't know if you should be using that paint-stripper stuff on the porte cochere. It might be bad for my bluebirds.”

“Your bluebirds!” exclaims Mrs. Fowler.

Miss Dolly regards Mrs. Fowler remotely. “The bluebirds that nest in the porte cochere,” she says.

“That's so darling!”

“That's what birds do,” Dolly says. “Did you hear me, Iris? If those fumes are making you look so green, I bet they'll fry those little birds.”

“I had no idea you had nesting bluebirds—I'll have to add that in to my tour. I thought they said those PCPs or whatever they are have killed off all the bluebirds. Oh, did you want to look at this, Iris? What do you say, Dolly? Should we let her look?”

Once Jenny has the envelope in hand she tries standing up. “Excuse me,” she begins.

“Oh, no.” Mrs. Fowler pushes her, gently and firmly, back into her chair. “Miss Dolly and I have been climbing up the walls with curiosity, haven't we, Dolly? You're so mysterious, Iris. Won't you just tell us a thing or two? Where in the world did you meet this young man? You never seem to have pals or go out or do anything except shop for paint.
Tell us
. Dolly, make her tell us.”

“Please recall our agreement,” Dolly says instead, in her bland, unoiled voice. “Regarding room and board.”

Jenny nods. “Of course,” she says.

Mrs. Fowler blinks at Dolly. “What agreement?”

“Regarding room and board,” Dolly says.

“No male visitors,” says Jenny. “This man wasn't visiting—I don't know him. He must have made a mistake—”

“Oh, Miss Dolly. That's so unromantic and unrealistic. This is
1974
. The girls are going to do whatever they want no matter how you try to stop them. I know that with my girls, I'd much rather have the boyfriends coming by the house than taking them out God knows where. Just the other day Maureen—”

“Even if he was a boyfriend, which he wasn't,” Jenny says, “because I don't even know him, I would never have him visit—”

“Please correct me if I am somebody's parent,” Dolly says. “So far as I know I am nobody's parent. Whenever I have taken a boarder at Wildmoor I have forbidden lady visitors if the boarder was a male, and male visitors if the boarder was a lady, and it hasn't been because I'm somebody's parent. It's because it's my house!”

“Of course it is,” says Mrs. Fowler.

“No matter how many folks come tramping in and out at three dollars a pop. It's my house.”

“And thank goodness for that!” Mrs. Fowler exclaims. “When I see some of these lovely old homes come separated from their owners it just breaks my heart. Like at the old Bellingham place? When the last Bellingham finally gave up and sold it to the state for the back taxes? They turned it into a park, and they didn't even give it a budget for oversight or preservation or anything, just stuck an ‘Open, dawn to dusk' sign at the gate and a line of Porta Potties on the drive. You go over there now and there are all these people who haven't got anywhere better to go barbecuing hot dogs on the lawn. Remember that mosaic of lovely little colored tiles in the bottom of the fountain? Somebody's pried those up, every single one of them. It doesn't even matter because the fountain is practically a public swimming pool. It just breaks my heart.”