American Woman (41 page)

Pauline, flushing, disregarded the actual point. “Why do you always defend him?” she said. “Why does everyone love him so much?”

But their worst argument came when she suggested Pauline try to contact her parents—just to send them a small sign that she was alive. They would make sure it couldn't be traced. Pauline screamed, “How could you say that? Just when everything's finally fine!” Jenny was a traitor, a turncoat, no better than Juan and Yvonne; now that Jenny had reunited with all her old friends she just wanted to get rid of Pauline. Perhaps the years separating their ages made Jenny less like Pauline than like Pauline's parents! An illogical, terrible insult, considering the amount of time they had spent puzzling over the enormous abyss that seemed to separate them from their parents. Yet Jenny feared that there
were
differences. Pauline was not quite twenty-one while Jenny had just turned twenty-six. Jenny had always thought that age brought greater focus on the past, while youth looked to the future, but she found that her own aging fixed her on the future in unprecedented ways. Concerns she would have shrugged off as recently as one year before, like the peace of mind of her father, and her own future relationship to him, were gaining legitimacy. Her appeal to Pauline was really a selfish appeal, that they protect their future selves from present behavior those selves might regret. But Pauline saw Jenny equating a slight advantage in age with broad advantages in understanding, and perhaps that was the real betrayal—not Jenny's suggestion that they breach their closed circle, but Jenny's breaching of it herself in suggesting their minds were different. “If you want to leave you can leave!” said Pauline. “You're a self-centered child!” said Jenny. Pauline hurled a heavy glass ashtray that might have killed Jenny if it had connected. Instead it sailed through the closed kitchen window, showering shards of glass onto the ground. The next day was one of the few occasions in their entire time in San Francisco when the debilitating anxiety of their previous life, which they'd almost conquered, rose with all its old force. Jenny called Mr. Minski about the window. She'd known that she had to tell him, before he possibly heard it from one of the neighbors. The long respite she'd had from her vigilance had left her out of practice in managing people. She was overwhelmed by the consciousness of her and Pauline's mistake, and she stammered when she spoke to Mr. Minski, and could feel herself trembling as if it were cold. “Of course we'll pay for it,” she told him. “We were having this dumb argument.” Mr. Minski said, “Girls fight! My two daughters are close like you girls, but when those two fight,” and he'd trailed off, impressed. How sexist, Pauline would have said. As if it's surprising that women would fight. But Jenny was satisfied that their mystical luck seemed intact, and that because there was no danger she did not have to share the conversation with Pauline and so destroy, with needless retrospection, the moment at which they'd reforged their link whole. Pauline coming into their room; it was hard for her, Jenny realized. It was possible she was too proud: she would sooner recite all her wrongs, head tossed back, than admit the least wrongness of one of them. But Pauline had come in and apologized, and then they'd both cried. And been fine.

One afternoon they smelled the sweet heavy perfume of wood smoke in the air. It was scattered too thinly on the hot breeze, was too much like a memory—they sniffed intently, and it faded; they relaxed, and it surged up again—for them to be frightened of actual fire. They were only vaguely aware of a strange overcast, the light falling through their repaired kitchen window as if out of clouds of fine dust, the strength of the sweltering breeze, like the gusts from an oven. They had a container of yogurt in the fridge, a jar of cold coffee from yesterday that they poured over ice; they padded about the warm kitchen in cutoffs and tank tops, self-sufficient, serene, with a music tape playing instead of the news. They would have gone out eventually, would have finally seen an unobstructed patch of sky above them and their flesh would have crawled in alarm, because the sky would have looked like apocalypse. But instead it was Mr. Minski who came red-faced and excited up the outside back stairs and put his head in the door—it was open, as always. “You girls okay?” he demanded. “You think I should spray on the house with a hose?”There was a drought on, as everyone knew; lawn watering was forbidden, the few owners of private swimming pools in this crowded city representing the height of bourgeois self-indulgence. “Spray the house with a hose?” said Pauline rather sternly. “Why would you? There's a
drought
on, you know.”

That was the day that the East Bay was burning; wildfires had sprung up overnight in the Berkeley hills, perhaps from a dropped cigarette. Fire had spread in all directions with incredible speed, and now threatened the city. There were trees in the Oakland graveyard that had gone up in flames, like the Biblical bush. Mr. Minski went off down the street to talk the situation over with other home owners; they took their radio and went up to the roof, and there, beneath a strangely red sun, awash in the ovenlike wind with the scent of wood smoke twined within it—and stronger, it seemed, every minute—they watched a shelf of black smoke coming toward them. Great heat trapped beneath it. They saw the orange sparkings of fire on the smoke-shrouded hills. The radio said that the Bay might not stop the advance; wind-borne embers were traveling miles, and the city was tinder. The smell of fire filled their nostrils; they sat close by each other, wordless, as the frantic dispatches came in from reporters in Berkeley, and the vista of hills seethed black smoke and the sparks flared and faded. And although they knew that they ought to be frightened, as if God Himself had arrived to destroy them, they still felt strangely far from the world. Its pulse beat just under their fingers, and yet it was distant and miniaturized. It could never touch them.

T
HE FARMHOUSE
had been empty and quiet through the rest of the fall and deep into the winter. One morning, tiny brown pellets of mouse shit must have begun to reappear near the edges of things, where the mice like to leave them. A cluster were dropped on the rear of the stove. Nearby a box of McCormick's black pepper was upended and marked by small teeth. The seedlike shits lined up at the back of the sink, in the damp place behind faucet and taps. The teeth marks appeared on a round cake of soap, and the toilet paper roll was shredded. A week after Labor Day 1974 the owner still had not gotten the key in the mail and so he drove out there, expecting the worst, but he found a clean house, not including the work of the mice. His tenants must have moved out early and forgotten to send back the key. He secured the house for winter and left again, pretending he'd change all the locks, though he knew that he wouldn't.

The house was empty and quiet again, as the hills that it lived in flamed red and then faded away and the scalp of the land started showing through denuded trees. Mice did their work, with energy and puzzling inconsistency. Why eat soap and not curtains? Why ravage one spot with passion, while leaving a similar spot barely touched? Those fingerprints that might have survived the house-cleaning would now be deteriorating. They did deteriorate; fine impressions of bodily sweat, there's no reason they wouldn't. No one knew how long they stayed intact, or what factors affected their breakdown. It was the kind of thing you'd think someone would know, but they'd never done studies. The man, the first person to enter the house since its owner had left it, contemplated the rational bases for ghosts. Delicate whorls of sweat, the fine snow from a scalp, orphan hairs, crusts from nostrils and eyes. All discarded by the body in the nonviolent course of a day, to no purpose apart from provoking the sense that the body lives on after death. Only fingerprints served the additional purpose from which his profession derived. He moved slowly through the house, thinking of ghosts. The house was cold, and he could see his breath in the air before him, an ephemeral ghost of his own. His team was waiting outside in the ankle-deep snow. He divided the house in his mind, and then brought them inside. The rest of the agents would wait until his team was done.

Oh, for the ballpoint clutched tight by the scrivener, the glass grasped by the drinker, the window or counter or table against which a weary one leaned with a palm! They didn't find any of that, but they did find a clear partial that matched the man's left index finger. This brought them onto the trail, though the trail was, as usual, cold. The man had been here, perhaps with the girls, perhaps on his own, at least six months prior to this. The house had been empty at least since September. The fingerprint expert stepped out and accepted a thermos of coffee. After a while he went in again and oversaw the gentle disembowelment of the couch. No pens hidden in the couch cushions; not even loose change. This absence of standard detritus was its own kind of presence; the house wasn't this clean by accident. The young fugitives had learned something these past thirteen months. When this had begun they'd left great bratty messes behind, heaps of spiral-bound notebooks of nonsense, filthy clothing, spoiled food, cigarette butts all over the floors like confetti, graffiti on all of the walls. A bathtub filled with water, piss, rancid red wine and whatever they'd had in their fridge, within which they'd submerged “evidence.”
DIVE RIGHT IN, PIGS!
they'd scrawled cheerfully on the mirror. A fearless exuberance that he'd admired, in secret. Now this was replaced by resigned apprehension. There was something paradoxically doomed about the effort with which they'd protected themselves, through erasure.

He went around door and window frames and into the backs of the cupboards and along the floorboards with a flashlight, looking for telltale niches, loose boards, too-wide cracks, anywhere they might have concealed and forgotten something. He had the kitchen dismantled and dusted each plate, fork, spoon, mug, rusty pan, knowing he was echoing them in a sort of reverse. The partial had come off a metal cot frame, and after a while they circled back to the beds superstitiously. Then one of his team said, “Here's something.” One of the mattresses, turned over, revealed a thick patch of tape. The tape adhered badly to the cloth mattress ticking and came away easily, with a fat plug of newspaper attached. A filled hole in an old rotting mattress. As if unfurling another cache of the Dead Sea scrolls they flattened one sheet of the newspaper and regarded its primitive date. June 12, 1974, almost ten months before. The temperature in the room seemed to have dropped ten degrees. Someone tried dusting the newspaper but it was ink dust to start with. “Take a look at the tape,” the man said. A few moments later he said, “Oh my goodness,” with gratification. In spite of the coldness of the room and the trail he broke into a grin. “We've got both thumbs here. I think we've got a right index finger, I've got a middle finger, a very clear partial . . .” They were all piled up like a spill of coins sliced from a tiny tree trunk, but as he squinted into his eye piece they resolved from each other. Each print preserved between layers of tape in a beautiful concatenation. Ghostly hands playing as if on a keyboard; a summer thunderstorm of evidence in the middle of winter. It was a letter to him from this person, in fingerprint-newsprint, a language. What it wasn't was any of the three fugitives, or the houses owner. “Some random person who plugged up that mattress a long time ago,” someone said.

“There's a date on the paper! June 12, 1974.”

“Some person who sold them the mattress?”

“The mattress was here when they got here. The house came fully furnished.”

“So we see if the lab can get a hit? I guess search by known radicals. East Coast, to narrow it down.”

“Ought to at least do east of the Mississippi. That gets in Wisconsin. That East?”

“That's Midwest.”

The man interrupted. “Look at how many fingers we have! Tell them to search the whole country.”

A
PRIL WAS MILD.
They planted a garden in a corner of the neglected backyard of their building, hacking the earth with a hoe: lettuce, zucchini, tomatoes, and carrots. In their group they spent less time on guns than on feminist books, so that when they met they could all sit outside and enjoy the good weather. They got drunk and discussed their orgasms; “No, stop!” Pauline shrieked, as a flushed Sandy regaled them with pornographic descriptions of her and Tom Milner's sex life. In oddly formal, intellectual terms, they discussed sexual love between women. It was just as profound and legitimate, they agreed, as was sex between women and men.

In May, whether because of her heightening consciousness, or lessening orgasms, or some other distress, Sandy broke up with Tom Milner and moved in with them. She stayed up all night and slept during the day, so that they had to tiptoe and whisper to avoid waking her. She scattered her things everywhere and then, although they hadn't asked her to, heaped them on top of her suitcase again angrily. She locked herself in the bathroom for hours to cry. One night, when they were sharing a bottle of wine, she announced guiltily, “Frazer was here looking for you. I mean, not here. Not at this apartment. He was here in the city, last week. I told him I didn't know where you were, but he didn't believe me. He said so to my face. And then he told me not to tell you I'd seen him, if I ‘happened' to see you. He said he thought if you knew he was here you'd leave town and he'd have to start looking all over again.”

“How did he know we were here?” Jenny asked. Pauline said nothing, but she lifted the bottle of wine from the carpet and emptied it, completely, into her glass; they were drinking from tumblers, so that this was possible even though the bottle had been almost half full.

“I don't know if he
knew
you were here. He just thought you might be. He was really freaked out about finding you. He kept saying it was really, really urgent and he totally lost his temper with me and accused me of lying but I held out, I just gave him a stone wall.” Now Sandy launched into a diversionary account of the heroic effort with which she'd withstood Frazer's queries. “I wanted to tell you right away,” she added, “but Tom really thought that I shouldn't, he kept saying we could keep our word to you and Frazer both, but I thought he was wrong. We fought hard about it.”