American Woman by Susan Choi

precipitately through the gorge. Even though she’s on none of the roads that she used to come up, she’s still glancing in her rearview so often she keeps crunching onto the shoulder. Rule number one is don’t drive, and if you must, please don’t drive like you’re sleeping or drunk. She tries not to drive all the time, but now she’s a regular face on the train. Known and liked by the different conductors: another rule broken. Hey, Iris. Going down to Poughkeepsie today? Knowing it’s bad that she smiles and says Hey. Bad that she’s friends with the ticket seller at the station because he sits all day reading the paper. Bad that she’s a familiar face in Rhinebeck, also, in spite of sometimes shopping down the river in Poughkeepsie, and getting her mail two towns over in Red Hook, and saving serious emotional collapses for the spot she’s just left, because the view is worth the risk of the bridge. Bad that she’s rooted in the transient train, the anonymous post office box, precisely the places that Frazer has managed to find her.
    And because she’s taken the very long way she hasn’t managed to get back before tea. She’s usually ensconced deep in the house by now, after having boiled the water and spilled the box of cookies onto the dish and decanted the milk into the creamer and dropped the cubes of sugar in the sugar bowl with tongs—Miss Dolly is scrupulous about the use of tongs, to prevent spread of germs—and carried the rattling tray onto the porch with the old woman bringing up the rear in her fragile, methodical way. And then politely ducking off to some project-in-progress, before any visitor comes up the path. By that time she’ll be lying well out of reach and very nearly out of sight beneath the library ceiling, on her jerry-rigged scaffold with a bowl of soapy bleach-water, gently wiping away at one hundred years of brown pipe-smoke residue. And listening. Hiding from the ritual of teatime but anxiously listening. How’s that lovely Oriental girl working out? So-and-so saw her at Buell’s Hardware shopping for tools. Where is it she hails from, originally ? Coming around the last bend in the Wildmoor road she can see that someone has already arrived, and unhooked the chain, and turned around the little sign from the side saying HOUSE TOURS to the side saying JOIN US FOR TEA . 4–6 P.M. DAILY. It’s just ten past four. Miss Dolly’s visitors are all extremely punctual and ancient, the men thin and erect and slow-moving, like large wading birds, the women tiny and blurry and loud. They all seem to have lived on the river for eons, and never had jobs. Whoever has unhooked the chain has left it lying in the dirt across the drive, and after she bumps over it she gets out of the car and pulls it properly off to one side, noticing as she does that there’s a small white streak of bird shit on the sign. She scratches it off with her thumbnail. The sign looks old and faded already. It’s one of the first things she made when she came here.
    She drives the rest of the way through the trees and tries to slip in the back door, but then someone calls out “Iris!” from the porch. “Yes!” she calls back. Her voice snags and she falls over coughing. Too many smokes. “Come visit with us for a minute!” The speaker, unsubtly sing-songing, is clearly relishing some innuendo. Not Dolly, but Mrs. Fowler, the lady from the historical society who leads the house tours. Jenny’s heart picks up speed; the body’s quick fear, always five beats ahead of the brain’s. Still, she keeps moving and hacking toward the front of the house until she comes into the dining room and catches sight of herself in the huge sideboard mirror. Gray-skinned and red-eyed and with hair like Medusa’s, matted up from the wind, sticking straight off her head. She looks cringing and hunted and ugly but she also looks