American Woman by Susan Choi Page A

like herself, an upsetting coincidence, and though she can’t now put particular words to it, her shock has something to do with existence, with the continuing presence of her through these worlds upon worlds. She wants to sit down, on the nearest solid surface, but all her hand finds is the shiny gnarled upright of a thronelike velvet chair, and it doesn’t seem right to sit there. Is it all right to sit on the floor? Her body gives a panicked twitch the way it used to when she was so miserably high on something William had given her that she was secretly sure she was dying, that each labored beat of her heart was its last, that her lungs were somehow blocked from filling properly—she would involuntarily twitch out of fear she was dead. She leans heavily against the thronelike chair until the room stops moving and then sneaks a look at her reflection again—no real change. She turns very carefully around and edges her way through the rest of the house to the porch with her eyes on the floor. Miss Dolly is perched in her usual chair, stiff-necked, looking slightly bemused. Mrs. Fowler is bent over the tea tray, but when Jenny comes out she nearly pounces on top of her. “You’ve had a visitor!” she trills. Jenny has long suspected that Mrs. Fowler’s ideas about her involve rock gardens and tea ceremonies and slender bamboo writing tools; that Mrs. Fowler, a connoisseur of the Arts of the Orient, is stubbornly awaiting from Jenny some endorsement of her, Mrs. Fowler’s, very own aesthetic gifts. Mrs. Fowler has previously attributed Jenny’s avoidance of her to mist-enshrouded Oriental remoteness. Now she seems delighted to have Jenny on the spot. She picks an envelope up off the tea tray and waggles it suggestively. “I knew you had an admirer. From the way he asked questions about you, I could just tell that he’d met you before. He was trying to be subtle but I’m a very canny reader of men! And he just now dropped by here again with some adorable story about wanting to ask your advice about having his house painted. We tried to make him stay for tea but he wouldn’t, he just scribbled you a little note and then asked for an envelope for it. I was just saying to Dolly, We’ve got hot tea right here, we ought to steam it open! For heaven’s sake I’m teasing you, Iris. I’d never. Are you all right? You look green. Have some tea. Sit right there and I’ll get you some tea and we can open the envelope.”
    â€œQuit fussing, Louise,” Dolly says. As usual, an exercise in sharing Mrs. Fowler’s excitement has given way to irritation. Like Jenny, Dolly tends to disappear from the house when Mrs. Fowler gives tours; this is one of the reasons Mrs. Fowler so regularly comes to tea.
    â€œNo, thank you,” Jenny says, trying to make a casual grab for the envelope and instead falling sideways into one of the porch chairs.
    â€œThere’s lemonade. Miss Dolly’s famous lemonade, of course,” Mrs. Fowler says, waving the envelope around busily, in the style of a symphony conductor. She winks over her shoulder at Dolly.
    Dolly ignores her. “I bet it’s all those fumes you’re working with,” she tells Jenny. “What about those fumes in the porte cochere? I don’t know if you should be using that paint-stripper stuff on the porte cochere. It might be bad for my bluebirds.”
    â€œYour bluebirds!” exclaims Mrs. Fowler.
    Miss Dolly regards Mrs. Fowler remotely. “The bluebirds that nest in the porte cochere,” she says.
    â€œThat’s so darling!”
    â€œThat’s what birds do,” Dolly says. “Did you hear me, Iris? If those fumes are making you look so green, I bet they’ll fry those little birds.”
    â€œI had no idea you had nesting bluebirds—I’ll have to add that in to my tour. I thought they said those PCPs or whatever they are have killed off all