How to Be an American Housewife

by Margaret Dilloway

  Unlike many of the new doctors at Balboa Naval Medical Center, where the doctors who just graduated from medical school go for training, Dr. Cunningham seemed to know what was going on.

  I liked Dr. Cunningham. He looked just like Tyrone Power, a movie star I had loved when I was young. And he was single! If I had been young and single, I could have gotten him for sure. When I was in my teens, I’d been the prettiest girl around. High defined cheekbones, Cupid’s bow of a full mouth, shiny blue-black hair, and pale white skin, like a baby’s. I had an hourglass shape even with no girdle—a full bust, tiny waist (twenty-two inches), and womanly bottom. Men chased me from the time I turned twelve. And I enjoyed it, though being a nice girl, I shouldn’t have.

  My own daughter was as enchanting, if not more so. She didn’t have short Japanese legs like I did. Her limbs were long and lean, her neck and fingers graceful. Eurasians were exotic, and men liked that, too. Sue could have had anyone, if she’d only waited for college before finding a husband, instead of marrying the first boy who came along. Which did not last, as I knew it would not.

  I said to Dr. Cunningham, “My daughter could marry anyone, you know. Rich businessman love her.”

  And then Dr. Cunningham said, “If she’s half as lovely as you, Mrs. Morgan, I’m missing out.” He was so nice!

  I picked up the phone by the bed now and dialed Sue’s cell phone, hoping she wouldn’t see my number and let it go to voice mail. I held my breath, waiting. She picked up. “What’s up, Mom?” She sounded artificially cheerful. I imagined her sitting at her desk, twirling her dark brown hair around one finger, her pale face greenish in the light from her computer screen.

  “Suiko-chan. You wanna take me doctor today?” I asked. “Got appointment after lunchtime.”

  I heard her carefully repressed sigh. “Is Dad busy?”

  “Don’t know. Maybe so.” I couldn’t tell her that Charlie had taken me yesterday and the day before that. I didn’t want to worry her.

  “I have a meeting, Mom.” Sue was a manager at a financial services firm. Her voice turned brisk. “Are you still trying to get me to meet your doctor?”

  I was glad she couldn’t see the surprise on my face. If I could have, I would have chosen a husband for Sue. Sue needed someone already established, who had done all the hard work already. She needed someone to take care of her, so the dark circles under her eyes would go away.

  Dr. Cunningham would be perfect. But in America, they find husbands themselves. I had found Charlie myself, almost American-style, and maybe I would have done things differently if I could go back.

  “He’s not interested, Mom,” Sue said, her voice so flat it made my heart ache even more. “He’s being polite. What’s he supposed to say? Don’t bother the man.”

  “But you need see this guy. If I you, I grab him up! Single doctor won’t last long.” I tried to keep my voice light, but my daughter didn’t understand. A single doctor really wouldn’t last long.

  Sue snorted. “Mom, please. I can find my own man.”

  But she couldn’t.

  I heard what she was saying. Stay out of my life. I sat for a moment in silence. I am writing a letter to your uncle now, I wanted to tell her. I am going to Japan. Don’t you want to know? I wanted to tell her so much more.

  Dr. Cunningham had told me my heart was getting flabby, which meant it wasn’t working well. He wanted me to have surgery with a specialist. They would cut a wedge out and make it smaller. “It’s risky, but not as risky as a transplant,” he had said.

  “Fine,” I had said. It took them months to schedule anything. I’d be to Japan and back before the first pre-op appointment.

  “Is there something else, Mom?” Sue was trying to sound patient but not succeeding.

  I tried to think quickly of something that would make her want to come with me. My daughter was too sensitive, too fast to hear criticism. Perhaps it was partially my fault.

  I did not have the knack of subtlety. When she was a college sophomore, Sue had come to me while I was in my bedroom one afternoon. She squeaked the door closed, her face so pale, even in the golden light coming in from the west, that I thought she was ill. She sat on my side of the bed, next to the photo of my parents. “What’s a matter you, Suiko-chan?” I asked her.

  “Craig and I are going to move in together,” she whispered.

  I was shocked. I shouted at her. “You do that,” I said, “and we no pay college no more! You bring shame on us.” In my town, my family would never have been able to show their faces again if I had done something so scandalous.

  Sue had looked around. “Shame from whom? We don’t have any family here. The neighbors don’t care.” The afternoon sun made her hair glint red. “Besides, you’re hardly paying anything. I have a ton of loans.”

  “I no can hold my head up.” I was really hoping this would make her ditch Craig.

  She had sighed. Nineteen years old, she was at the peak of her beauty. She thought her beauty would go on forever. The way I thought mine would. She needed to find someone better while she still could. “Then it’s Plan B. We’re getting married.”

  “Marry?” I closed my eyes and changed my tactics. My lovely daughter could not marry this person, the first boy she’d ever kissed. I had told her that you should only kiss if you were going to get married, but that was to keep her from being a slut. I never thought she’d take it so seriously. “Why you gonna marry same guy you drag around high school? That’s why we send college. Find good man marry.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with Craig.” Sue’s voice rose in anger.

  She was right. There was nothing wrong with him. Except he would make a lousy husband. Too flighty, too artistic. High-maintenance. Maybe in twenty years he’d be ready. “Sue,” I pleaded.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll be out of your hair in a week,” she spat, leaving the house. “I won’t shame you anymore.” The next weekend, she was in Vegas. Too young to drink but old enough to get married. And to have a baby.

  I never said a bad word about Craig again, no matter what he did or how he acted.

  Sue thought differently than I did, and I didn’t understand her. Sometimes I thought I had chased her out of the house too soon, been too hard on her the way I had been too easy on her brother. It seemed both parenting methods had failed.

  On the line with my daughter, I heard another beep. “Mom, my boss is calling me,” Sue said. “Is there anything else you needed?”

  It wasn’t the right time to tell her everything. Not on the phone. “Go, then.” I hung up. I suspected her boss wasn’t on the phone, that she was simply tired of listening to her old mother. But she couldn’t keep the honcho waiting.

  I got dressed. In my bedroom, I had crammed pieces of Japan everywhere, all covered up. There was a hand-painted folding screen by the closet, wrapped in black trash bags. Scrolls and fans were in boxes in the closet. I didn’t want anything to be ruined by the light, not until I could take them out again. When the kids took their junk out of the other bedrooms, I would make a Japanese room.

  These things used to be displayed, treasured. When Charlie first brought me from Japan to Norfolk, I decorated our home to the best of my ability, with my Japanese furniture that Charlie and I had taken equal delight in picking out and that the Navy had shipped over: the Japanese screen painted with a waterfall and peacocks; ink-painted scrolls; statues of badgers and lions; and silk satin floor cushions I’d made. We had a sofa, too, but no one used it. With Mike a baby, the floor was more convenient.

  Once a week, I’d go to the park and clip whatever foliage and flowers I could find, arranging them in the Japanese way on the sideboard. A tall piece, a medium-size piece, and a small, all designed to suggest nature.

  We had lived in a small two-bedroom town house with floors so crooked, you could roll a Coke can from one end to the other. Charlie was getting ready to ship out for at least a year, and it would be just me and the baby.

  Charlie’s relative
s lived in Maryland, and they came to visit a few times. His mother, Millie, a stout woman who had borne eight children in ten years, was so encouraging that I thought all Americans would be like her. “Don’t you marry her and then get rid of her like everybody else,” she took Charlie aside and warned. Many Japanese women who married servicemen got abandoned when they got to the States and they found out how hard it was to live in a biracial marriage. Even more got left back in Japan, pregnant and unmarried.

  “Don’t worry,” Charlie said.

  “You call if you need anything, and I’ll get someone to take me here,” his mother said every time she left.

  “Yes, Mother.” I knew I would never bother her.

  When she visited, she would bring me practical things, like boxes of tissue or a frying pan. I was grateful, but not when she looked around our small apartment.

  It was different from her house, where nobody took off their shoes and they would rather use bricks and boards for shelving than spend money on furniture, and the only decorations were pictures of Jesus. If she had flowers, she stuck them all in a vase so big you couldn’t see the other person at the table.

  “This is all so fancy,” Millie said every time she visited, trying to understand but not succeeding.

  This way of living was the only way I knew. I couldn’t live in a space without having something lovely to look at. Even when my parents were poor, they could still trim a pine bush outside into a bonsai. I imagined Millie went home and talked about how Charlie’s wife spent all his money on unimportant clutter.

  Charlie enjoyed Japanese art, though. I tried to teach him sumi-e brush painting, but no matter how much he practiced, his paintings looked like rudimentary stick figures. “How you get a few strokes to look like a deer—you’re a genius,” he said to me.

  I only knew what a “genius” was from his awed tone. “Try again.”

  “There’s only room for one genius here.” He had three of my paintings matted and framed, and they hung in a trio on the wall.

  Adjusting to the U.S. was difficult in other ways for me, especially in the beginning. If I borrowed an egg from a neighbor, I returned two, the Japanese way. They didn’t understand; why did I give them two? It made them angry, like I was insulting them. When you “borrowed” an egg or a cup of sugar in America, you never actually returned it. Charlie had to explain: “It’s her tradition.”

  “Never heard of a tradition like that,” our neighbors said.

  When Charlie wasn’t home to explain my odd ways to people, I went to the store alone, with Mike bundled up in a thousand layers in his stroller. I made sure to dress up. My favorite outfit was a pencil skirt, button-up black blouse with white pipe trim, and heels. It wasn’t the most comfortable thing to take care of a child in, but I was young and didn’t care. I wanted to look presentable, not like a maid or a Jap with buckteeth and wild hair, but an American girl.

  As I walked the two blocks from housing to the store, people stopped and stared, whispering, “There goes that Jap wife!” I smiled and waved, even when mothers held their children against them. A few of them stopped me, said hello, wanted to touch my hair, so much coarser than theirs. “Like horsehair!” they exclaimed.

  I reminded myself that the Japanese had done the same thing with Charlie and his fire-red hair. “There goes the demon!” they had whispered. Certainly I could take it.

  I kept my head high and said, “Hello!” I had practiced my l sounds in the mirror before I ever left Japan. It didn’t matter whether people said hello back or not. I was holding up my end. What they did was their own business.

  I SWUNG MY LEGS up onto the bed and massaged my ankle, wishing I could run for miles, like Sue could. I remembered how it felt not to get winded. When I was a kid, I had been a real tomboy. “Stay inside, Shoko,” Father had said to me. “Your skin will get dark.”

  But I loved to play baseball, and I hit the ball better than the boys. I still loved baseball today. I watched every game I could on television, making Charlie grumble. He hated sports. I hated being indoors, but now allergies and the sun bothered me too much to spend time outside.

  Once, when I was little, I sneaked out to the field where my brother played ball with his friends. “Go home and do the laundry, Shoko,” Taro yelled at me when he saw me. His friends laughed and Taro drew himself up taller than he was, which was still half a head shorter than me. His black hair poked out crazily from under his ball cap; Taro had an unfortunate double-helix cowlick on the crown of his head. “We don’t want girls messing up our game.”

  I couldn’t let my little brother speak that way to me, especially in front of his older friend, Tetsuo, who always looked at me in a sly way and winked. I squared my shoulders. “I bet you your manju that I hit a home run.” Our mother was making the steamed sweet bean cakes. Treats were getting fewer these days, so this was a bet of the utmost seriousness.

  Of course I did hit a homer. Tetsuo and the other boys hooted and hollered. And Taro ran home and told our father, who beat me with a willow stick. “For being better than a boy?” I had shouted at him as he did it.

  “For disobedience,” Father had said, giving me an extra whack for talking back. Father, a tall and skinny scholar with glasses falling down his nose, hardly had the heart to give me a good beating. He did it only because it was the right thing for a father to do when a daughter ran wild.

  Worst of all, he gave Taro my manju. But that night, after everyone had gone to sleep, I’d been awakened by a soft prodding on my cheek and the smell of sweet beans at my nose. “Here, Shoko-chan,” Taro had whispered. “I’m sorry.” He had given me two, his and mine.

  “You better be sorry,” I had responded, stuffing both into my cheeks. “I’ll really fix you next time.” I punched his arm. Taro giggled, and we drifted to sleep, the manju beans making my lips sticky.

  Was Taro even still alive?

  If you are lucky enough to become a mother to a son, do not attempt to raise him in the American way. Raise him in the Japanese way and he will become a fine young man in the Japanese tradition.

  This means treating him better than you treat your husband. Prepare all your son’s favorite meals, buy him toys when he desires them, try to accommodate all his desires before he can voice them. In this way, you will gain his respect and appreciation.

  —from the chapter “American Family Habits,”

  How to Be an American Housewife

  Three

  Charlie interrupted my memories by coming in and patting my shin. “You want me to bring you Sanka in here?”

  I sat up, then lay back down. How idiotic that the simple act of getting dressed had tired me out. Some days were better than others. “Please.”

  “Okay.” He got up and left before I could mention my letter.

  I stretched, thinking about how I would run after I got my heart fixed, then got up and applied my makeup. I only wore it to the store or to the doctor’s, really the only places we ever went anymore.

  Loud TV came out of my son’s room, which was across from ours. I smelled cigarettes. My chest tightened. I went out and pounded on his door. “No smoke in house, Mike!”

  He cracked the door open, his nearly black eyes rimmed with red. There were so many papers and trash and clothes on the floor you couldn’t see the carpet. At the foot of his bed was a big-screen TV, up too loud. “What?” he said, like when he was sixteen, me trying to get him to come out for dinner, when he’d rather eat in his room alone. This was Mike’s way.

  Mike looked much more Japanese than Sue. He had sharp high cheekbones, eyes that turned up at the corners. His nose had a flat bridge like my brother’s, but was long like his father’s. Ever since he was little, wherever we went, people had stared at his Asian eyes, his sharp cheekbones, and his coarse black hair. He looked like the star of an old samurai movie, out of place in this time. I told him to stick his tongue out at them.

  Maybe that was why he preferred the company of animals. Everywhere we moved,
he had fish and a lizard. I wouldn’t let him have cats and dogs until after we were done with our overseas tours, so we wouldn’t have to give them up.

  Moving so much for the Navy had been hard for Mike. It took him about two and a half years to make a good friend, and three years was how long each duty station lasted. When we left Washington state, Mike was six. He had sat down in the doorway of our old Craftsman bungalow and held on to the doorjamb, rocking himself back and forth while the movers hauled off our belongings, while his little friend Jimmy came to say good-bye, and his father and I packed the car. Five hours total. Nothing would budge him. “I’m staying. I like it.”

  I tried to pick him up. “Come on. We miss plane.”

  His fingernails left grooves in the wood, and he screeched. It sounded like a bald eagle getting shot down. He banged his head on the doorjamb.

  “You hurt self! Stop!” I tried to block him and he gave me a tremendous slap on the arm. I backed off.

  “Cut it out, Mike.” Charlie put the last piece of luggage in the car and turned around, his face reddening in anger. “Get over here right now.”

  “I’ll run away.” Mike looked up at me. His face was sweaty and tear-stained. A bright red gash and a purple bruise were starting to appear. I bent to touch it and he jerked away.

  I looked at my husband. Charlie wiped his brow, then sat down next to him and put his arm around him. “Mike, Daddy’s getting time off after we move. I’ll take you fishing in Guam. You won’t believe the fish they have there. And the water’s so warm. You can swim every day.” Charlie always made the most of his leave time, taking Mike camping and fishing and giving me a break to be alone.

  “But Jimmy’s not there.”

  “You can write.”

  He glared at his father. “I don’t know how.”

  Charlie ignored that. “Listen. This is how life is, Mike, and you have to adjust.” Charlie stood up. “Get in the car.”