Free American Woman by Susan Choi

somewhere that could help peg the date. Maybe it was March 1972, when I saved your ass from prison. I have this vague memory of seeing you then. Is that the fucked-up time you’re thinking of?”
    â€œRob.”
    â€œOf course I haven’t told him. I always assumed you would, as part of some holy-moly purifying ritual. ‘Forgive me my terrible sin, but I had sex with Frazer.’ Isn’t that your thing? Pure heart, pure life. You can’t hold down a job in the capitalist system at the same time as you fight for revolution and you can’t lie to your lover at the same time as making sure you’re perfect soulmates who never power-trip each other! Right? Every time I go see him I think he’s gonna try to punch me through the Plexiglas window but he’s just all smiles and all love because you never told him. You’re scared to.”
    â€œI am not! It’s just not something I would ever disclose in a letter—that’s real cowardice. When I tell him it’ll be to his face. And what about you? You haven’t had Carol taken away, you could tell her to her face, but you haven’t.”
    â€œMe and Carol don’t believe in monogamy, so I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    â€œOh!” She leaps up in frustration. “Why are you here anyway, Rob? Why did you come after me?”
    She’s standing now, angrily planted, but he knows she’d rather stride off across the green field, down the worn trail, and get in her car and leave him. He can remember any number of their arguments in the past, arguments ostensibly about ideas but really about his persistence, her refusal, that have ended this way. With Frazer left alone, carefully avoiding all movement because to move is to reanimate a world stopped in its tracks by her violent departure and to reanimate that world is to allow the shroud of humiliation, still hanging uncertainly in the air the way silence hangs uncertainly after a door slams, to complete its descent onto him. He always needs a few moments to get ready for the shroud. He likes to wear it as lightly as possible. In the past Jenny did a lot of her storming off and leaving him in the parking lot of a pancake diner where they’d go on nights that Carol was with her women’s group or her acting class and William was teaching his seminar or working the night shift, nights that were frequent, and they almost always fought, and insulted each other’s characters and reviled each other’s beliefs, but they kept doing it, didn’t they? And didn’t that mean something? Didn’t it mean something bound them, somehow?
    She’s wearing a pair of old, faded, paint-covered jeans that Frazer hasn’t been looking at closely, but now that she’s standing, hands on hips, poised to depart, and he’s leaning back on his elbows and pretending to gaze unconcerned into the distance while actually looking at her, he can see that these jeans, so splattered with recent activity, are a pair she’s had for years and years, a pair that used to be nice, and that he remembers because they have seams on their fronts. Pointless, decorative seams, stitched with gold thread to form a thin ridge of denim running like a highway stripe down the centers of her thighs, over her kneecaps, and the rest of the way to her ankles. These were Jenny’s signature jeans. He remembers one night years ago, when they all still lived in California, and when none of them were in prison, and when they were feeling that unalloyed excitement about being together, about being a group of friends that felt more like a family, like the sort of dream-family nobody had and that doesn’t exist. Carol had been trying for weeks to talk them into playing a game from her acting class and everyone had been pretending to think it was stupid, but this night they were all high and goofy, and William said, Let’s play Carol’s game.