American Woman (31 page)

“That's okay.”

Pauline just stood there, not saying anything else. “Want a cigarette?” Jenny asked, to break the silence. Pauline accepted, sat down, leaned forward to take a light, began to smoke, without speaking.

There was a hawk turning slowly above them; Jenny watched it, feeling the way she might have on a boat, watching the horizon to keep from throwing up as the boat pitched and rolled. Clinging to belief in the tranquil apartness of that faraway point, from the tumult she found herself in. When Pauline finished her cigarette she ground it out at great length on the bottom of her sneaker. Pauline's old beet-colored dye job had grown out so much that an inch of brown showed at her scalp, strange and vulnerable-looking, like the fur of some blind newborn mammal. Then the wind picked her hair up and the pale brown roots were obscured. Pauline dug in her pockets and brought out her own cigarettes and a book of the matches that Jenny had brought back to the house when they'd first gotten here, from a gas station outside Ferndale. She had swiped a whole big box of the individual cardboard books of matches from the gas station's office while the attendant was under a car, because they went through their matches so quickly. They'd needed them to light the stove, and cigarettes, and since they were always lighting cigarettes outside, and there was often wind, they always used up many matches on just one cigarette; except for Juan, who had a trick for lighting a match with one hand, without tearing it out of the book. He'd bend the match backwards and then by some swift movement of his thumb make it ignite with particular violence. She'd once seen Pauline alone in the kitchen trying to duplicate Juan's trick with match after match until a whole book was splayed like a badly bent fork and the sulfur heads were all crumbled and Pauline's thumb, she imagined, was sore. Pauline didn't try to do the trick now; her hands were suddenly trembling as she handed Jenny a reciprocal cigarette and tore a match from the book to try to light them both. But she couldn't; Jenny took the matches from her. “Pauline,” she said. “What is it?” The breeze had gained strength, and on it she thought she heard the
POP, POP
of the gun again, just for an instant.

“Please do this thing with us,” Pauline said. “Do you remember the other night when I told you about what I did to remove the temptation? That was only to make sure I couldn't go back. It didn't let me go forward. It didn't prove to them I can be good, and not just a beginner.”

“I don't understand.”

“It's my job to persuade you to stay. To recruit you. You didn't think we'd be an army of three forever?” Pauline paused, watching her searchingly. “It's the first thing I've been given to do on my own. I don't get any help. And they know I won't let myself fail.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean they know I won't let myself fail. He could probably kill me.” Pauline was flushed, oddly triumphant from the terrible confession. “I wasn't supposed to tell you that. You know I wasn't supposed to tell you that. But you won't ever tell them.”

“No,” she said. She was suddenly sweating, she realized. Profusely. She thought of the bright red handprint, Pauline screaming at her in the barn. She saw the hawk drop like a meteor into the grass. For a moment the hillside looked just as it had. Then the hawk rose again, without anything.

“He only wants you to drive the switch car,” Pauline added.

Jenny was still staring at the blank patch of grass where the hawk had dropped down. What did it mean when people said, “I've decided . . . ?” Did anyone ever truly decide? A brand-new white purse set in place, her quick footsteps away; that had been a decision. And yet she couldn't recall when and where she'd
decided
to do that. “I drive the switch car, and Juan leaves you alone.” It came out as a statement, though it was meant as a question. Her own voice sounded distant to her. “And then what?” she belatedly asked, but Pauline had stood up.

“He's in the barn. He'll want to know we can go with Plan A.”

Jenny followed Pauline down the hill. Pauline moved hastily, almost eagerly. In the barn Juan was taking a break to reload. He was handling the gun with grave earnestness; seeing him like that, imitating the pure absorption of a child as his minion approached him, made her feel hatred for him like a rash of small spines bursting out of her skin. He looked up at Pauline without anything in his face but the fact that she'd roused him from deep meditation. “Jenny does want in,” Pauline announced. “I've been talking to her about it.”

Juan looked startled; he must have assumed and perhaps even hoped Pauline wouldn't succeed. But then he remembered to safeguard his pride; he turned to Jenny magnanimously. “It's a good thing I don't take back my offers,” he said. “You're gonna have to catch up. We'll rehearse before dinner.”

She stalked out of the barn tasting bile in her throat. When Pauline emerged a few moments after she pulled her aside, as Juan's shooting resumed.

“When this is over, you have to leave them.” She wished there were proof of the moment, a receipt or a bell, to mark Pauline's decision.

Pauline seemed to hesitate slightly. “Okay,” she finally said.

“H
I
, M
R
. M
ORTON
,” Yvonne called.

Then she would hurry to him, in a powder-blue dress from Margot's Modern Fashions, a light coat from the same on her arm. “Hi! Don't you remember me? Sandra. I'm back home for a visit.” She would put her coat arm partway around him, take his arm with her free hand.

He would say, “Sandra?” his small, creased eyes blinking at her. He would feel the hard thing in his back.

Yvonne urges him gently. “Keep walking. Sandra Smith, remember? From check-out. Now I'm engaged.”

“I don't remember . . .” he says, in a strangled voice. Fear, not resistance.

“It's a gun,” Yvonne says. “I won't use it if you'll just walk with me. Let's turn here, okay?”

They leave Main Street, the bank still a half block beyond them, and turn down a side street that leads to a rear parking lot. The side street is blank, no windows, just some side doors to businesses closed on Sundays. Juan is there. “This is my fiancé,” Yvonne says. “Why don't you give him the bag.”

Juan holds out his hand, warmly smiles. In rehearsal this takes barely a minute. A car pulls itself free of the cars in the lot and comes toward them, Pauline at the wheel. A few miles away, in a second car, Jenny is waiting.

“Good!” Juan said. “Now we're driving, we're calm . . .”

Past four in the morning Yvonne and Juan drove to Ferndale and hot-wired a nondescript four-door sedan. The two cars came rumbling back up the hill before dawn. Pauline sat in the driver's seat of the sedan and gripped the wheel so tightly her knuckles turned blue. “Drive up to the barn and come back and don't turn off the engine,” Juan said. The car rolled away, picked up speed. “California girl,” Juan observed of her. “She said she wasn't sure she could still drive. Like she'd ever forget.”

At ten o'clock Jenny was sitting in the Bug at an overgrown fishing access to a river so dry that she only saw piles of rocks, round and pale, and then sometimes a glint of reflection from deep between them when the sun left the clouds. Through the trees she could see the boat launch, a cracked, crumbling ramp of concrete. She was wearing her own jeans and T-shirt and sneakers; she'd refused to put on the pink dress. It was a grim day, intermittently raining: all the better for Sunday on Main Street. “Hi, Mr. Morton,” Yvonne calls. It had occurred to them, belatedly, that Mr. Morton did not seem to have white employees. Did this mean he had never had white employees? She hurries to him, in the dress, with the coat, puts her coat arm partway around him.

Jenny thought of the white purse, the green dress. On that years-ago day that is somehow more real than this one, she looks like a girl who has just been to church, in a dainty green dress with white piping, white shoes, clean white gloves, the white purse to match. In the middle of the bright business day, waiting calmly at the elevator bank in the lobby, later going back out the same way she went in. Perhaps the guard senses a ripple, in a distant recess of his mind; she does not have the purse anymore but the lobby is crowded, twenty people pass by every minute, he doesn't know what he has noticed and may not even know that he's noticed at all. She takes the bus home as if sleepwalking, as if levitated, or drugged. Seeing nothing. Trying to shake herself free of the trance, for the sake of safety, but she can't. Floating into Tom Milner's apartment, where they've arranged to regroup and observe, she finds not just William and Tom but Mike Sorsa, and Tom's practically brand-new girlfriend—she's still really a date—Lorraine, gathered there, waiting for her. One look at her face and William knows she's done it right; and of course the bag is gone. Before anyone can say anything, while they're still staring, stunned, she and William walk straight to each other and lock mouths desperately, and the tension, though it doesn't break, quavers briefly with keyed-up laughter and admonitions: “Aw, come on. Save the pornography.”

Tom Milner's brand-new girlfriend—he won't meet shy, loyal, nervous, impassioned Sandy until more than a year from this time—reveals she has made them a party: vegetarian chili heating up on the stove, a bowl of salad in the fridge, she's instructing various of them to get out paper plates, forks, napkins, she leads them onto the roof, the reason they're using Tom's—it has a view of the building—and there are lawn chairs set up here, as if it's a day at the beach, and a cooler of beer. It's only now that she registers how disturbed—not just disturbed, angry—she is that this girl, Lorraine, is here. William wraps his arms around her from behind and she shrugs him off; she can't scold Tom, or even reveal her irritation, and so she's left with being angry at William. “What?” he whispers, with the hint of a warning: don't ruin our night.

“Nothing,” she says. “But I'm nervous.”

“I love you,” he says. Waiting sternly until she meets his eyes.

She hates this pro forma exercise; what she really means, what she really feels, needs, craves, is hardly expressed by these words. These words seem like a fence to her, a little white line of pickets to keep things at bay. A formula to ward off other words, real words, words tightly bound to their meanings. But for William the utterance is like a dangerous thing he was taught to avoid. He says it with jaw jutted, with something like anger—I will possess this fatal weapon and use it!—and, finally, with the need for her to acknowledge the significance of his having chosen her.

“I love you,” she says.

And then all of them are eating the chili and drinking the beer, conversing at first uneasily, then with greater fluidity as the sun, and the beer, go down. They gorge themselves, lean back, open fresh beers. Mike Sorsa fills his little silver pipe and passes it around and they get high. It's a mild, fragrant night; she watches the green lights from the port come on, the lighthouse beating its tempo on Alcatraz Island. It almost feels like any summer night's roof party. It won't be fully dark until nine; then Lorraine, somewhat self-importantly, takes the leftover chili downstairs—it was good chili; they've all praised her, grinned over it, dunked bread into the pot and licked it off their fingers in stoned primitiveness when they got sick of using their plates—and comes back up with candles and the transistor radio. Jenny is annoyed again by Lorraine's manner—it is proprietary, braggartly, as if Lorraine is the center of events and not what Jenny feels she is, a dangerous interloper. Lorraine's easy femininity also seems boastful. Jenny decides she hates these girls who flaunt their casual associations with the marginal while at the same time oddly emphasizing their traditionalness—these girls who always end up acting as caretakers, the ones who stroke the foreheads of the boys overcome by LSD, who gladly whip up omelettes for twenty at four in the morning, who are always to be found, the next day, gliding easily among the prone, pungent bodies on the living room floor, collecting the glasses and plates and wiping up the spills. She is thinking she hates them; though she is more likely to be a caretaker herself than a prone body on the living room floor. All the same she is more and more, perhaps because of the grass, not just irked but frightened by the ramifications of Lorraine's inclusion in their circle. And also, perhaps because of the grass, she is less able than ever to summon the strength to do something about it. What could she do?

It is the kind of thing, she thinks, that will lead to disaster someday.

But hours are passing, have passed. William has gone downstairs also, and returned swinging a full bottle of whiskey by its neck. Nice whiskey. “I think this qualifies as a special occasion,” he says, smiling at her.

At half-past midnight she shudders suddenly, as if chilled. She's thoroughly lost track of time. “Shh!” she exclaims, and everyone stares at her. Lorraine looks at her with exaggerated concern, her eyebrows raised questioningly, as if Jenny were an inarticulate child.

“I just worry we're loud,” she says, embarrassed. She gestures around, at the indigo night, the palms swaying along the avenue, the lights from the strip, two blocks away, where the deli and grocery are. All is murmurous, as are they, she realizes. They're not loud, they're not even the only ones up on a roof, drinking beer, getting high. It's the season of roof parties.

“You just worry,” William teases, wrapping himself around her back like a chair. She leans into him, closes her eyes. She can feel his cock hardening against the base of her spine. He feels her feeling him and squeezes humorously; it's a joke of theirs, his uncontrollable hunger for her body. A fantastic joke she can't imagine tiring of. A sated drunkenness has overtaken them all. Tom Milner and Lorraine, around the corner of the hutlike structure that houses the entrance to the stairwell, are intensely necking and stroking each other; she can feel the heat washing off them, but with William against her, she doesn't care anymore. Sorsa, the quiet loner, is crouched near the roof's edge, cigarette pinched between his fingers, meditative and unmoved, it seems, by the pulse of sex behind him. She feels William work his hand beneath her shirt, under her waistband. When he fingers her she is already so wet he's sucked in by her flesh. She twitches, gives a jerk, as if her nerves are malfunctioning, and pushes against him anxiously; she hears his ragged breath. He sometimes comes, with sudden and great force, while touching her this way. Not touching himself at all. Then she hears Sorsa say, as if to himself, “One.”