American Woman (22 page)

“How old are you?” the bartender asked her.

“Twenty-five.”

“Whoa!” said the boy.

The bartender raised her eyebrows. “Thomas ain't even sixteen. Don't believe what he tells you. Why aren't you at work?” she demanded. “Don't make me lie to your mother.”

“I'm off
early
,” said Thomas, aggrieved.

When they'd slid into the booth farthest from the bar, near the window, she said, “Maybe we shouldn't stay here.”

“Why, 'cause of how mean she was? Oh, she's always that way. She likes me. My brother brung me in here all the time.”

“I'm sorry about your brother,” she said after a minute.

“Why? Ain't no big deal.”

“It is a big deal. He was killed in a terrible war. He should be with you now.”

Thomas looked narrowly at her. “Shit,” he said after a moment. He laughed briefly.

“What?”

He shook his head. “I don't know your name,” he realized. “My name's Thomas, did I already say that?”

“I'm Alice.”

“Alice, don't be mad.” He cast a backwards glance over his shoulder, but the older people at the bar were ignoring them now. He still lowered his voice. “I was just shitting you, Alice. My brother ain't dead.”

“He's not?”

“No.”

“Well, I'm glad to hear that,” she said tentatively.

He seemed much less comfortable now. “Where do you live, anyway? I never see you in town.”

She took a sip of her beer, fizzy and cold, and let it burn down her throat while she thought. She didn't know when she'd last sat in a bar and just let the time pass. “Outside town,” she said finally. “I live with this lady I work for.”

“You're a maid?”

“Pretty much.”

“Is it just you and her? That sounds lonely.”

“It is,” she said, and for a minute they fell into silence.

Soon her beer bottle was empty and before she could stop him Thomas went to the bar for another. “On the house,” he said, setting it down. “See? It's my bar, even if I can't drink.” She waved her thanks at the bartender, who waved her off, shrugging.

“Why'd you tell me your brother was killed?” she asked him, after taking a swig of the beer.

“Just kidding around.”

“Was he drafted?”

“Why?”

“I'm just asking.”

Thomas twisted around in his seat. With another quick glance toward the bar, he fished his cigarettes out of his pocket and gazed down at them. “She'll rat me out to my mother for sure,” he said irritably. After a while he added, “He was drafted but did not report. Then he ran off and never came back. So it's like he's dead. Maybe he is.” His Coke was finished but he poked his straw around in the ice cubes in an exploratory way, as if he might locate more.

“You shouldn't be ashamed of what he did.”

“It don't make any difference to me. He can do what he wants.”

“My dad did the same thing. But in World War II, not Vietnam. He was angry that the government put all the Japanese people in prison.”

“Who put all the Japanese people in prison?”

“The government. After Pearl Harbor. Not prison, but a camp that was just like a prison. Even if you were an American citizen, if your parents or grandparents were Japanese you got put into prison because you might be a spy. We were at war with Germany and Italy too, but if you were German or Italian that was fine. It was just the Japanese that got put into camps.”

“I never heard that in school.”

She shrugged. “They never teach it.”

“You're shitting me, right?”

“No. I'm not.” She threw back another long draught of beer. “How much do they teach you in school about slavery?”

“Right on,” Thomas grinned. “They don't teach us shit about that. But I hardly go, anyway.”

“Oh, Thomas. That's bad. You have to go to school.”

“You're just saying what bullshit it is!”

“You still have to go. That's what they expect you to do, as a young black man. Not go to school.”

Thomas considered this a while. “What happened to your dad, anyway?”

“He went to prison for a couple of years. Real prison, I mean.” Her heart had gained speed; she couldn't believe that she'd let herself mention her father. She wrapped her hand tightly around her beer bottle as if the cold could pull her back into line. The bottle was still beaded with chill water from the cooler, but like the last, it was suddenly empty.

“Alice,” Thomas was saying. “Hey, Alice. Don't cry.”

For a moment she didn't know why he was calling her that. “God, look at me. I don't drink much. That beer made me sappy.”

“At least your dad and you see eye-to-eye. My dad's not around, but if he ever got hold of my brother, my brother would
wish
he was in Vietnam.”

“What makes you think that we see eye-to-eye?”

“You said that you thought war was bad. So you're like all the antiwar people. And your dad must have been that way, too.” It was just an observation, a pleased notation of one possible harmonization in a generally discordant world. She looked at him, facing the single small window, his young face slightly dusted with light. Admiring her from that strange manchild zone of fifteen. The comb came out of the pocket again, and he lazily tugged at his hair: afternoon-off contentment. While she faced away from the window, her face near his, yet shadowed. She tried not to stand up too quickly.

“I have to go, Thomas,” she said. “I have to get back to work.”

“Aw, but you're telling me so much great stuff. You got great stories, Alice. Maybe we can meet up tonight when you're done with your job.”

“I don't think tonight.”

“You won't come by the store for a year. You got too much food last time.”

“I'll come by anyway.”

“Cool. Shake on it.” He stuck out his hand, and she shook it. “I have a magic touch with older women,” he warned her.

Outside he lit himself a cigarette, in his awkward, amateurish, impressively particular way. She wondered if it was just coincidence, the random crossing of their paths at a time she was desperately lonely, that had made her say so much to him. Or was it something about him, himself? Once William had said, of winning people to the cause of revolution, You have to get them while they're tender and young. He'd mostly been joking, but for a while afterward she'd imagined an invisible eye on the young, not yet shut, the way that the skull of a child is supposed to be not fully fused—so that being permeable to the world was a physical thing, that no matter how hard you tried not to, you lost as you aged. Thomas declined her offer of a ride to wherever he lived—I dig walking around, he explained. And she was relieved, and disappointed, and it was all she could do to depart casually. She'd broken a rule talking to him, and she knew she wouldn't let herself see him again.

“Hey,” he said as she started the engine. “Thanks for telling me all of that stuff.”

Driving off she still wasn't sure why she had. Her father's attitudes weren't things she hoped to alter or even fully understand anymore. She'd long given up brooding on his appalled opposition to her political beliefs, in spite of the fact that he should have been more likely than the average person to agree with her. Her father had been so embittered by the internment and his imprisonment for resisting the draft that when they'd moved to Japan, he'd meant to expatriate permanently. He must have thought there he would finally get some respect: he wouldn't be shunned by white people because of his race, and he wouldn't be shunned by his race, because he had failed to kowtow to white people. Resisting the draft as her father had done hadn't ever been a popular or noble position among the interned Japanese. It lumped you in, however unfairly, with the fanatical Emperor-worshippers, the few real America-haters who made everyone else look so bad. And so her father must have hoped the Japanese would embrace him as heartily as the Japanese-Americans had cast him out, but things hadn't wound up that way. In Japan he'd emerged as indelibly and hopelessly American. It had been in his slight advantage in height and his unerasable Los Angeles accent, in his casual dress which in Japan just seemed sloppy, in his inability to master Japanese. While she'd seemed to absorb Japanese in her sleep; leaving California she'd been shattered, but she'd also been nine, and by the time her father decided to move them home again she was fourteen. She remembered sobbing on the plane, all the way back across the Pacific. In Stockton there had been a dutiful visit to a school psychologist with an office in the municipal building, an occasion mostly notable for the perfect, child-high replica of the Statue of Liberty that had sat on a stand in the lobby. She had been transfixed by this, had reacted to it as if it were a challenge and a joke, had circled it and been reprimanded for trying to touch it and had then sat thinking irritably and irresistibly about it all the while that her father, uneasy and surly himself in a new suit and shoes, had sat with one ankle tensely propped on one knee and his hands in a casual pose in his lap, trying to explain the five-year hiatus in her education. “The school system there is superior,” she remembered him saying. And then he'd added, into the arctic silence that had greeted this comment, and in a stammering tone unlike him, “That is, superior compared to other foreign countries. Not compared to American schools.”

There had been tests of the sort she imagined were given to retarded or incorrigible children, flashlights shone in her eyes and then bright wooden puzzles and ink blots and reading aloud. California had looked so astoundingly different to her, not just because she was no longer nine, but fourteen. Not just because she had lived in Japan for five years. Not just because the psychologist had seemed disappointed when she passed all her tests, or because things were smaller, stripped of childhood enchantment, more uncanny the better she'd known them before. There had been something else, an aura of fraudulence in the burnished sunlight and the dense floral yards and in the bland self-absorption of faces. In Vietnam at the start of that summer a monk had immolated himself, and the ghastly flames eating his body had been shown on TV. Now her father was declaring a truce in his one-sided war on the land of his birth, but it was at the same moment she'd started to grasp why he'd waged it. It had been at her school in Japan that she'd learned about the internment. She'd never heard of it in California, where it had happened, or from her father, to whom it had happened, and when she'd asked him about it after school that day he'd just said with annoyance, “Why ask about that? All of that was a long time ago.”

But to her it had seemed like a key: to understanding him, to knowing him, perhaps even to being his daughter. Her discovery of what he'd endured was the beginning of her discovery of history and politics, of power and oppression, of brotherhood and racism, and finally, of radicalism; but it only drove them to fight with each other. As she grew increasingly involved in the antiwar movement she and her father fought with increasing fury, but not increasing complexity—never about issues, never about the war itself, only about her arrogance, or perhaps it was her stupidity, or her naivete, in daring to oppose it.
What do you know
? he would shout. She moved at eighteen to Berkeley without finishing high school; in spite of how well she had done on the tests, the Stockton psychologist had put her back three grades, perhaps to make a point about the superiority of American versus Japanese schools. In Berkeley she enrolled in a night class on modern political science at a local community center, with the idea she might eventually transfer to a college that didn't require a high school diploma. Her teacher was a clean-shaven senior at Berkeley, who'd just been thrown out for taking over the dean's office a few credits shy of his B.A. degree. By the end of the term they'd become lovers. This was the calm way in which William denoted what for her was an unprecedented development. She had never before had a lover. Until him, she'd never even been kissed. If the connection she felt to her father had already been tenuous, her involvement with William destroyed it completely. There had been one catastrophic visit from her father to the apartment she and William were sharing. The fight that erupted, in which her father and William began trading astonishing insults, had been even worse than she'd feared, and her worst fears had been suitably dire. After that she and her father, in what was the least hostile position they both could arrive at, simply broke off their contact. William became her world, his language her language. She remembered thinking to herself, and sometimes even daring to utter aloud that They Had Become Lovers. And she remembered the joy she'd felt being propelled, by a manner of speech she would never have used, toward a life she had never imagined.

Now that life was entirely gone; Dana had cut the last thread, all because Jenny had stuck her neck out for a trio of “comrades” who would never have done that for her, she would bet, and who still hadn't written a word of their book. She was furious by the time she was driving the last few steep yards up the hill. She slammed the Bug's door and strode toward the pond; they were skinny-dipping, something she'd been able to deduce before even reaching the house from the gay trail of clothes scattered over the grass. As she came level with the tea-colored, peat-stinking pool, she saw Yvonne waving to her and Pauline sitting carefully sunk to her shoulders, hair still dry. “I need to talk to you,” Jenny announced, surprised at how calm her voice sounded. Juan splashed up to Pauline from behind and plunged her under the surface. Pauline came up, screaming and sputtering.

“Motherfucker!” Pauline cried.

Pauline and Juan thrashed and churned in the murky water while Yvonne waded out, splashing mud off her knees and her thighs, and then turned back to watch them benignly. “Take a dip, Sister,” Yvonne said.