American Woman (30 page)

Pauline didn't move from the doorway. The cigarette that she held stayed unlit. She seemed irresolute, as if she might turn on her heel and leave. “You're making a mistake,” she said finally.

“Let's not talk about it.”

“You don't have anywhere to go. It's like Juan said: You're just making a self-righteous stand. What are you going to do? Who can you turn to? You've decided robbery is wrong on principle, but it won't hurt that man, and it'll help all of us. It's not his money, anyway. All his business comes from the black people of that neighborhood who don't have any other store to shop in. They can't get loans to start their own stores because the banks are so racist. So stealing from him isn't stealing. He profits from racism.”

Jenny wondered how it was that Juan, whose analysis this obviously was, managed to take very plausible statements and make them sound trite. “I think that's probably true,” she allowed. “It doesn't mean I'll add armed robbery to my rap sheet.”

“Why was it justifiable for you to blow up a building the government owned? That's against the law, too. That's destruction of property.”

“That was different.”

“Why?”

“That was to try to
end a war
. These things aren't all on the same scale, Pauline. The lives of millions of Vietnamese, and thousands of young American men, aren't quite the same as the wellbeing of a bunch of lunatics.”

“And that's what we are?”

“I don't know,” she said after a minute.

“Because if that's what we are, that's what you are! You think you're a saint. Maybe you're just a little too proud of yourself.” Jenny had heard this one, too; she could not remember quite where or when. But she didn't have the chance to say so; Pauline had slammed her door hard and gone back downstairs.

S
HE KNEW
it had been an unthinking insult, seized upon and fired off randomly, but for the rest of the morning Pauline's saying that she might be a little too proud nettled her. Her father had always been maddened by what he called her moral absolutism. And once when she'd criticized Frazer's self-promotion in the guise of political action, he'd dismantled her in return. “At least I'm not deluded about my desires,” he'd said. “At least I know that I'm selfless
and
selfish. We all are, sweetheart. We're just human.” One of the first things she'd loved about William was his tireless perfectionism; he never chose a target for an action without researching exhaustively first, without being able to demolish its potential defenders with chapter and verse, without knowing its board of directors or slate of officials, its funding, the whole range of its acts, bad
and
good, in the world—but had this rigor been vanity, too? If so, she'd been equally vain. She'd never wanted some ill-defined public glory, like Frazer. Even in their intimate circle of comrades she'd been relieved to let William take most of the credit. Yet she knew, in a way that now made her feel oddly abashed, that she'd longed to be morally perfect. That was either self-denying, or vain, or perhaps it was both.

She still felt sure that none of this touched on armed robbery. Armed robbery simply was wrong, and saying so wasn't endorsing the capitalist system, no matter what Juan might insist. For one thing, it did nothing to alter that system. For another—but Juan wasn't interested in arguments. “This ain't theory, this is practice,” he said, brushing past her. He and Yvonne had overshot the Bug's usual spot when they came back from wherever they'd gone, and instead parked in back of the barn. By the time she was climbing toward them they were on their way down and the spark plug wire, she knew, had been plucked from the engine again and concealed somewhere. That afternoon Juan and Yvonne and Pauline went into the barn to rehearse. As soon as the barn doors swung shut she began on the house: she searched underneath the back steps, in the toilet tank, under the mattresses of their ripe, rumpled beds. When she lifted up Pauline's mattress she saw the patch that she'd made on the underside, eons ago. She ripped the lid off the coffee can and dug through the grounds. When she heard target practice and knew they couldn't hear her she walked up to the Bug and examined its engine again. She felt along the insides of the fenders and wheel wells and door panels, but she was more and more sure the wire was simply on Juan. Like the gun, it now went with him everywhere.

She thought of Frazer, probably stretched on his couch in New York, his glare drilling holes in the unringing phone. He hoped to be called and apologized to; he expected to always be needed. She willed him to realize that he was expendable—to grit his teeth, rehearse a smile of defeat, and drive back up the hill. But he was also too proud; too proud to imagine his fugitives could hatch a scheme of their own, not in spite of his help but because of it. This was a great part of their happy activity, she knew: the rediscovered pleasure of calling the shots. Of course they were too proud to have stayed Frazer's wards forever. She'd felt the same way when she'd left Dick and Helen: disgusted with them and afraid Frazer might compromise her, but beyond all that, fed up with being dependent. She'd hated being dependent, and Juan and Yvonne and Pauline hated it just as much. If their plan was to remake the world, then they had to be able to remake themselves. She understood that very well; at least that was one thing she could still sympathize with.

That night at dinner they were loudly optimistic. Juan said, “It's so obvious to me we could rebuild our cadre right here. The one mistake I've made is I took so long realizing that. Take that kid, Thomas. That kid's never heard of Black Power, he's like a powder keg ready to blow.”

“You'd better leave him alone,” Jenny said.

“I've gotten to like rural life,” Juan continued, ignoring her. “I can imagine a headquarters here.”

“‘For Rent, Fishing Camp, on the Delaware River,'” Yvonne read, as they ate. “Fishing Camp—that's right on. We could catch our own food.” Then she looked up at Jenny. “What about you, Sister? Wouldn't you like that? You love being in nature so much.”

Only Pauline said nothing, and kept her eyes trained on her plate. After dinner Jenny sat in her room at the window, reexamining the things she'd lined up on her sill over the course of the summer. Things she'd found on her walks and felt compelled to slip into a pocket, which had always looked diminished when she found them again, slightly crushed, or dusted over with lint. The spiny rind of a chestnut; a smooth white bracket mold, like a tongue of spilled cream. The one thing that hadn't been damaged in transit was a robin's-egg shell that she'd cupped in her palm all the way down the hill. Someone, between dinner and her mounting the stairs to go to bed, had hung one of the size-four dresses, the pink one, on her doorknob. Compared to the blue of the egg the pink shade was a vile one, tainted with orange. The effort, whoever had made it, to tempt her with the dress, then the whole costume drama-in-progress, with its earnest makeup and its script and the greatness of its imagined results, almost made her laugh, it was all so absurd. Then she thought she might cry. Downstairs was shrill laughter and footsteps; they must be getting drunk. Their bedroom door slammed but then she heard someone mounting the stairs. Pauline appeared in the doorway. “You're still awake,” Pauline said.

“So are you. I thought you'd gone to bed.”

“They did. I wanted to talk to you.”

Pauline looked much more resolute now. Jenny thought of Pauline's shooting stance, the wide legs, shoulders shrugged to her ears. “Pauline, my mind is made up.”

“There was just something I thought of I wanted to tell you. Our old leader—before our comrades died our old leader once said when you're weak, you have to fight to get strong. But you can help yourself out by removing temptation. Like the temptation to go back to a life that's complacent and selfish. I had that temptation. My comrades needed money to keep doing actions, and I needed to remove the temptation. So I robbed a bank with them.”

After a moment Jenny said, “You shouldn't tell me about crimes you've committed.”

“But there's more. There's something else that I wanted to say: It helps us help them. Help the People. Because without it we just can't continue. Of course it isn't an ideal situation. Money is evil, there's no good way to get it. But it's a necessary evil, until the revolution changes everything. Until then, we need money. There's no good way to get it, and there's no bad way to get it. You just have to get it, that's all.”

“That sounds like something Juan would say.”

“Why can't I make you understand?”

“It's not your job to.”

“Yes it is. Yes it
is
.” Pauline sat on the floor suddenly, leaning onto the door frame.

When Jenny had come upstairs the room had been cool; now the chill night air was making her shiver. Pauline was biting her thumbnail, intense, but turned inward again. Jenny got up and closed the window, and realized it was the first time she'd closed it since they had arrived. She knew that she'd never imagined the four of them still in this place, as the leaves on the maples turned red, and the larches turned yellow, and magnificent weather refilled the small pond and then gave it a clear skin of ice. They were always supposed to be gone by the end of the summer. Autumn was coming, and none of them even owned socks. They had turned all their socks into wrist weights.

She lit a cigarette and held it out silently to Pauline, and Pauline took it and inhaled hungrily, without comment, and in that instance the undeniable nonaloneness of the past several months overwhelmed her. Of course she would only taste it when it came to an end.

“I'll stop bothering you,” Pauline said, and she went back downstairs.

T
HE NEXT DAY
she'd finally packed all her things—her blue jeans and T-shirts and the old leather jacket for when it got cold, her underpants and her modest collection of paperback books, the tools she'd accumulated that were too valuable to give up, like the big crescent wrench and the drill from Wildmoor that an ancient worker had abandoned; and the notebooks of her journal of more than two years, and her letters from William—when she realized her duffel and accordion file were too much to carry. She hefted one and then tried for the other and almost fell over. It would have been different if the duffel was something else, like a backpack, or if the file had a handle. She finally got the duffel hung over one shoulder, and took a tentative step. Once she got used to this she could try the accordion file under an arm. Juan came jogging up the stairs and eyed her coldly from her doorway. So far today he had been treating her not with goading argumentation or comradely persuasion or ostentatious indifference, but a sort of hostile minimality: she had spurned his great offer, and now he was finished with her. “We'd like to rehearse, and we'd rather not go to the barn just so you can kick back in the house.”

“Then I'll leave.”

“And put the bag down. You're not free to go yet.”

“I'm just seeing how well I can carry it.”

“Bullshit. Put it down.”

“I'm not trying to sneak off, Juan,” she snapped.

“Put it down.”

She let the duffel bag fall to the floor; its impact shook the room. “You're a prick,” she said, shouldering past him to get out the door. She felt her eyes welling up suddenly.

Outside was a late summer day, clear and warm but alive with cool breezes. The sky seemed huge for the mammoth clouds traveling through it. She walked the steepest and fastest way up to the woods but once in the dense mix of boulders and trunks she was forced to slow down. She picked her way through obstacles. She was near the split-boulder reconnaissance point that Pauline had picked out long ago, or at least thought she was. Now she couldn't locate it. She kept moving, not climbing or descending but just steadily crossing the flank of the hill. Then she reemerged in the open, in the uppermost pasture. From here the house looked like a toy left behind in the grass. The hillside was ragged with milkweed and goldenrod and other hardy things she didn't know the names of, the kinds of things that drift and root everywhere and don't need a particular place. She thought of her father, always trying to teach her to build chairs from scrap wood or grow food from seeds. Maybe that had been his way of describing internment to her. He'd always brushed off her questions about it, but maybe he'd been telling her things all her life. This is how you make a horse stable into a home, and a burlap sack into a bed. This is how you pack one little bag, though you're going so far for so long . . . She thought of her duffel and accordion file, waiting for her like a pair of old dogs. They seemed like so little and they still were too much. She hadn't learned very well. And her eyes, spilling tears that she chose to ignore, also burned from how badly she'd slept. She hadn't learned that, either. Her father had expected her to sleep well anywhere and under all circumstances. On the ground, in the back of the car. Across chairs in the bus station waiting room.

She closed her eyes and lay carefully back in the bug-teeming grass. After a while she had finally stopped crying. She knew the sun alternated with clouds from the shifting of warmth on her face. Some time later she heard the back door slam, the noise carried to her on the wind. When she sat up she saw the tiny figures of Juan and Yvonne moving over the grass. Halfway to the barn they paused for a moment, then parted. Yvonne dropped to the ground and began doing sit-ups. Lately she did them by the hundreds, bobbing and gasping with calm fixity, like a yogi. Yvonne had decided that they were too decadent with their meals, and begun halving hers; now she even tore her sticks of gum in half. Juan went on to the barn. A few moments later Jenny heard the
POP, POP
of the gun.

The next time she opened her eyes she must have been responding to the strange length of time that her face had been covered by shadow. Pauline stood over her. She sat up on her elbows and Pauline said, “I didn't mean to wake you.”