American Woman (38 page)

Here we are
, Jenny thinks, all alone in a graveyard of cars, at the top of the world. The dark sky scuds over their heads. The damp wind smells like rain. In this light Pauline's eyes aren't at all green but gray. Pauline looks at her. Jenny looks back. They hang there, on a thread. “You must look like some actress,” the man decides, shrugging. “Just give me a buck,” he tells Jenny.

And then they try to get over the Rockies and the car overheats once again. They're transfixed by the glowing orange light on the dashboard, the sign of the car's great distress. Pauline manages to tear her eyes off it, examines their atlas. “There's a little town a few miles away. Do you think we can make it?” They crawl, twenty miles an hour, trailing a plume like a steam locomotive, and reach a shuttered gas station on one side and a roadhouse on the other, perhaps the first hint of the town. But the car gives out here. They come to rest by the gas station's pump in the gathering dusk. Their effusion of white steam takes on an unearthly blue tint. The roadhouse is a low, sagging, tar-papered building, barely distinct from the dark foothills rising behind and the darkening sky, but it has a few neon beer signs for
BUDWEISER
and
COORS
and these make it seem studded with jewels. They've turned off the engine, extinguished their own baleful orange light and the rest of the lights on the dashboard. They gaze across the road at the red and blue letters, the warm amber mug with its glowing white foam. They can faintly hear music. Five trucks and a car are pulled up. Now Jenny knows that there isn't a town. Only this: a named gathering point, equidistant from lone habitations.

She looks at Pauline. Pauline looks at her. Neither of them seems to put forth the idea; consensus is already there. Pauline fluffs her blond curls—they've bought plastic curlers, and they set Pauline's hair every night. “Are my freckles smeared?” Pauline asks her. Jenny turns on the dome light and checks.

“No,” she says.

They get out of the car, lock the doors, cross the dark silent road.

Later she remembered the sensation of the room's attention swinging toward them as a physical thing on her skin: a wave striking, cresting, retreating to watch from afar. There had been a pool table lit up by a low-hanging lamp and together they'd comprised a distinct bell-shaped region of light, into which people dipped with pool cues, out of which they receded again. Beyond, a few neglected tables and a long bar holding up several men who had turned to look toward them. There could not have been more than twelve people in that dim little room, the ceiling of which was so low she could have stood on tiptoes and put her palm flat against it, but there was still the sense of entering a space that had been completely colonized long ago, and in which they were glaring intruders. Without seeing anyone clearly—her vision seemed shrunk to a point—she somehow sensed, in a way she was starting to think was specific to women, the presence of a few other women. In this sort of situation other women always radiated their own distinct coldness, and yet even in very small numbers they could alter the charge of a mostly male room. Perhaps she was only reflecting on how much her concerns in these settings had changed. Perhaps she wasn't having these reflections at all. The jukebox was loud, and though the room's attention had swung palpably—curiously, coldly, assessingly, all these ways intermixed—toward them as they opened the door, still no one had given up their competition with the music to be heard by each other, and so the two forms of human expression, attention and speech, had seemed to come unhooked from each other a moment, as everyone stared as one person and yet with their voices maintained their indifference. She and Pauline must have been visibly intimidated as they slowly approached the long bar, but they got there, and Jenny felt immediately better as she climbed on a stool, as if she'd pulled a door shut at her back. Pauline climbed on a stool beside her. They didn't look at each other; they wouldn't want to appear to be so cowed as to need to hold council. The bartender—barrel-shaped, middle-aged, in a plaid workshirt—came toward them with the bartender's expression of explicitly withholding his judgment, and asked what they wanted. Jenny asked for a beer and Pauline echoed her, though she knew now that Pauline didn't really like beer—she found it too bitter and fizzy. But Pauline accepted the beer very coolly, as if she'd accepted beers all up and down the great country and thought this one was handed to her in an average way. Jenny paid the man and when he'd turned away to the cash register she unostentatiously laid down an extra dollar. “Thanks,” the man said when he noticed it. He picked it up and tucked it into a large glass carafe that held a loose filling of bills and spare change.

Going into tough bars with William had been a part of what she thought of as the testing period of their love affair, though she supposed you could also have termed it a hazing. He hadn't begun to include her in his political activities until she'd proved she was really
the
woman—the woman who could swagger down barrio streets at his side, as if they'd been born there. The woman who could drink beer, as he did, in bars where students were met with contempt, if not violence. William had possessed a sort of reverse entitlement, it occurred to her now—he had seemed to assume that because he dignified them with his efforts, he deserved a particularly hearty reception in the realms of the poor and the marginalized. Not that this bar was anything like those had been. Two thirds of the way through her beer she knew her senses had calmed and her perceptions were more accurate. The bar was not a small dark arena in which people would joust with each other. She and Pauline had been given the label of traveler by all of these people; their appearance was something infrequent, but far from amazingly rare. The bartender was at the far end of the bar, one foot propped up, talking to people. “Why'd you get beer?” she asked Pauline.

“I like it,” Pauline said. She was drinking the beer in quick grimacing sips, as if it were medicine.

“You do not,” Jenny said.

The bartender came down to them. “Another?” he asked.

“I'll take a whiskey,” Pauline said.

“Rocks?”

“Neat. With a little splash of water.” She straightened up, watching. “No, a little more. That's good.”

“Fancy,” said Jenny when the bartender had left them again.

“Shut up,” said Pauline.

“I'm just glad you're not driving. Did I ever tell you what Frazer would say?” They edged their stools a little closer together. “He'd say, The handbook for fugitives has just three simple rules. Don't drive.”

“Uh oh,” Pauline said.

“Don't get drunk.”

“Well, we barely do that.”

“And don't sleep with people who don't know who you are. In case you tell them, in a moment of passion.”

“Oh.” Pauline widened her eyes. She covertly examined the room. “At least we won't break number three,” she concluded. They broke into hilarious giggles.

With their third drink their probationary term seemed to end. “This one's on me,” said the bartender, rapping the bar with his knuckles. A man had come up from the pool table to stand right beside them.

“So what are you?” the man demanded of Jenny, leaning hard on his cue. “If you don't mind my asking.”

“She's a
person
,” Pauline said.

“You guess,” Jenny said.

“Crow Indian. No, Eskimo.”

“Wrong, wrong,” Jenny said.

“She's
Californian
,” Pauline said, frowning when Jenny kicked her. “How come you don't ask what I am? Just because—” Jenny kicked her again.

“I know what you are. You're the girl called Trouble with a capital T,” the man said, with nostalgia.

Later the bartender came to talk to them. “To New York, huh?” he said when Jenny named this as their destination. For a moment she wanted to stand up and dance, she was so thrilled by the impulse she'd had to tell him they were headed back east. It was like having erased all their tracks! When he asked where they planned to stay that night she said Casper, remembering the last big town they'd seen.

“Not a hell of a lot in between here and there, that's for sure. I don't care for Casper, I guess I'm just a country boy at heart. Now New York, you'd have to bound me and gag me and carry me, to get me out there. I don't know how they live in that way.”

“You can't do it if you're used to a wide-open space,” Pauline told him intensely. “When I was little my family had this big place, but not ranch land like this. It was in the—mountains—”

“I live for the fishing myself. If you asked me I'd say turn back, take a good look at Jackson. Let me guess—you don't fish—”

“We were coming from, um, Seattle. Which road? Little ones . . . not the interstate highways . . .”

“We like the back roads.”

“I do, too: you find interesting things on the way. You found the Outlaw Inn, didn't you? Pardon me, ladies.” A thirsty group at the bar's other end had been waving to him.

After he'd left them alone Pauline said, “Did he say that's the name of this place?”

For the first time they noticed, like a frieze above the bar, a wallpaper stripe of posters: edge to edge, taped or tacked up, spanning the bar and then spreading out over the walls. Twisting on her stool Jenny saw, through striated layers of cigarette smoke, posters papering the bar's farther walls; posters on top of posters, a few posters defaced with moustaches or dialogue bubbles or corners torn off. Some were novelty reproductions, in old-fashioned sepia tones, with unlikely pictures of their subjects in defiant postures, waving guns.
WANTED: THE OUTLAW JESSE JAMES
.
WANTED: BILLY THE KID
.
WANTED: FOR CATTLE RUSTLING IN THE COUNTY OF JOHNSON.
But most of the posters were real. They seemed to span decades, and Jenny wondered if they represented the length of time that the Inn had been open, or the length of time since the owner—the man tending bar?—had been inspired to begin his collection.

“There I am,” Pauline whispered.

There she was, above the bar and the bartender's head, just below the low ceiling. It was the familiar three-quarters view portrait, with the set brunette hair, and the pearls. The poster had been hung with four tacks, over somebody else, and it was crisp at its edges, unfaded, and free of graffiti. She gazed at the picture a long time, and then looked at Pauline. Pauline was more precisely drawn, somehow. Her eyewells deeper, cheekbones more prominent. And her pale yellow hair, obviously bleached, tinged her whole being. It repositioned her slightly. It made her look cheap, Jenny realized. A little bit hungry, and hard.

Pauline slid her free hand into Jenny's, and threw back the rest of her drink.

“Well, we're headed to Casper,” Jenny called, as they slid off their stools. “Thanks a lot for the drink.”

“So long, girls. They're off to New York,” he announced to the bar.

“Youth is for big mistakes,” someone said.

O
NE NIGHT
in a roadside motel Pauline asks, “Did you ever do that?—go to bed, with a woman.” Jenny's not sure where they are: if there are mountains out the window or salt flats, if it's the piney chasm of the Sierras, or the Valley, with its sticky airborne floss, and its turning windmills, and its heat. They've driven all night. Now it's day, and the sun is blocked out by the drapes. They're in bed, on their separate pillows. The TV is flickering in perpetual unrest. Neither of them can sleep.

“. . . no,” she says, after a while.

“Did you ever want to?”

“I don't know. If I did, I might not have realized.”

“Your conditioning might have repressed it. You might have had the feeling, but it was somehow disguised.”

In sleep their bodies twine together at the center of the bed. There have already been nights with frost but even when it's not cold they still wake up touching, sometimes tightly spooned. Pauline's small breasts crushed to her back, Pauline's arm on her waist, their bare thighs front to back, their cold feet, their old T-shirts and panties. A scent like warm bread from their groins. That's all there is: in spite of the one conversation, or perhaps because of it, there is only this edging against the idea, in the same way their bodies edge up to each other in the guise of blind sleep. Later, when they have an apartment, they will assume a conventional distance apart—one room but two beds, one bathroom but no rush to get back on the road, so they will no longer shower together. Then it will only be late nights when they've possibly drunk too much wine, the kinds of nights that they fight, and Pauline almost phones up her mother, and Jenny her father, and each hates the other for seeing her armor break down—it will only be then that they'll crave some explicitly sexual battle. Possession of the other and erasure of the self. They'll want to fuck, a slick tangle of limbs, and come pressed to each other. They'll dream back to the floating motel rooms, the one mushy bed, and yet while they are there they do nothing. They wake up, feeling drugged from the long-deferred sleep. For a long moment they don't remember their childhood homes, what their parents look like. Prior history all seems unreal. They don't remember that they are two girls, fabulous prey, on the run from the law everywhere. In this sticky cocoon it's surprising, perhaps, that they never make love to each other. It isn't a secret they have to discover. Pauline has descended, under cover of dark, felt her heart race with confusion and dread. She's slid her tongue cautiously into a woman, recoiled, pushed forward again. She's done it, at the outset always more obediently than with desire, then abruptly overshooting desire for something narcotic and unprecedented. Yet now it is barely remembered; it is the way, though they don't realize yet, this time also will be. In the near future this will be the half-grasped fever dream. Perhaps that they don't make love isn't surprising; their haze is too dense to be roused into lust. At seven
P.M.
it's almost time for Jenny to creep forth and look for their dinner. She waits for the last of the sunshine to fade. There's a bright thread of light where the curtain falls short of the sill. Pauline shifts, stares at the TV, starts when she sees her own face. “Turn it up,” she tells Jenny. But though Jenny imagines herself getting up she does not. They are somehow no longer so moved by the sight of Pauline, floating over the news anchor's shoulder like an oversized cameo brooch. That portrait again, from the three-quarters angle, the brown lustrous hair carefully set. The usual thick rope of pearls. Below this arbitrary demarcation the image fades out before fully defining her shoulders. The short update, whatever it consisted of, ends, and Pauline is replaced by a map of some faraway part of the world.