How to Be an American Housewife

by Margaret Dilloway

  The Kumamoto Hotel had a lot of foreign business in those days. That wouldn’t be a bad place to work at all, I mused. “Thank you, Ronin-san.”

  He looked at me as if I’d kissed him. “You’re welcome.” He watched me walk to the gate. I felt his eyes on my hips burn like a touch. My face reddened under my makeup. I turned around and gave him a little wave. It didn’t matter, I wouldn’t see him again. He raised his hand in return.

  WHEN I WAS A CHILD we would sometimes see Eta living in the little encampments they had lived in for generations. “Who are they?” I asked when we passed by.

  “Don’t look at them,” Mother told me. I stopped asking.

  When I was three, while I waited for my mother at the fish market, an old man approached me with a toothless grin and petted my shiny black hair with a leathery hand. Mother had screamed so loud that I wet my pants. “Dirty Eta,” she hissed. “Get away.” She scolded me for letting him get so close. “You don’t want to be tainted, do you? You can’t get rid of an Eta touch.”

  It wasn’t until during the war that mother changed her mind a bit. Food supplies were low. It was especially hard on the children. I knew one girl whose menses never came due to malnutrition; she remained forever stuck in childhood, flat-chested and barren.

  At first, we complained of sore stomachs. Or Taro did. He was the only one allowed to. I, being eleven and female, was far too mature to make my parents feel worse about something they couldn’t control.

  “Quiet,” Father told him in a voice much sterner than I had ever heard before.

  A few months earlier, Mother had had a miscarriage. She had called me into the house while Father was away. I stopped at the door, alarmed. Mother lay on her bedroll, all the windows shut to make it night-black, blood seeping out of her onto old newspapers. Her face was marble white. “Get the midwife,” she had whispered.

  I ran into town and returned with the midwife. Mother held my hand as she pushed out the tiny baby boy, only five months along. He was perfectly formed, with long see-through nails and wispy eyelashes and the beginnings of dark hair.

  The midwife, a woman who looked ancient with a humpback though she was probably only fifty, said a prayer. “Not enough food for her and the baby,” she had said, wrapping him in a blanket as we waited for Father to return from church.

  I held him, wiping the blood from his face with the blanket’s edge. He was already cold.

  Mother held out her arms to take him. “Go out and take care of your brother and sister,” she said. “And take them to get Father.”

  “Tokidoki,” the midwife said sadly: Sometimes. Sometimes your fortune can turn on the drop of a pin. Good or bad.

  I went outdoors, blinking in the brightness. Outside, a jay sang. I had forgotten it was spring.

  Taro and Suki played in a muddy puddle, making small turtles out of the clay soil. “We’ve got to get Father,” I said importantly, taking off at a run. The baby seemed like a dream to me. My legs were lead in the balmy air.

  Father was meditating at the altar when we arrived. “Father,” I whispered urgently, “the midwife is at home.”

  He opened his eyes and looked into nothingness. “Not again.”

  “Again?”

  He shushed me.

  Later, much later, I found out that Mother had had three miscarriages. This one had been the furthest along.

  She named the stillborn boy Kenji, meaning “intelligent second son.” This birth had taken everything out of her. Mother recovered in bed, too ill to move much for weeks.

  I did the housework and cooked whatever food we had. “We can’t hold out much longer,” Father said. “The Emperor is talking about surrender.”

  “Never.” Taro looked fierce. He probably would have run away to be a child soldier if Father hadn’t told him we needed him here. Taro hunted rabbits, but in the winter they got scarce. Besides, everyone was hunting the same thing. Our chickens even stopped laying, and we ate them though they were tough as jerky.

  Mother grew weaker and weaker until one day Father brought home a cupful of rice. And the next day another and then another, stretching it into a thin gruel soup for all of us, until Mother got strong enough to rouse herself.

  “Where did that rice come from?” she asked him on the fourth night in a low voice. We slept on two mattresses: Father, Mother, and Taro on one; my sister and I on the other, all pushed together so Taro was next to me.

  “Neighbor.” Father was lying. Even I could tell. He was too holy to be a good liar.

  “What neighbor do we have left?” I could almost hear her eyes narrow in the darkness.

  “Someone who came to me for a blessing.” Father rolled over with a soft thud.

  Mother was silent for a minute. “It was Haruko, wasn’t it?”

  I inhaled sharply and nudged my brother in the ribs. He snored in response. Boys slept through everything good.

  Haruko lived in the Eta village. She had been trying to come to church for years, only to be dissuaded by my mother. Father had taken to letting the Eta people gather in the garden for a service early in the morning. It was a compromise he had reached with Mother. Father saw the good in everyone.

  Mother gasped. “I am ill. Why do you try to kill me?”

  “I am not. You will be well.” Father’s voice was firm, a hand holding hers in the darkness. “I blessed the rice myself. You must find it in yourself to be strong.”

  “I cannot.” Mother choked. “It’s been too hard for too long. I cannot.”

  Father exhaled. “We will do what is necessary to live.”

  “Even if it kills me?” Mother muttered, but this time I could hear the humor in her tone.

  “If it’s not one thing, it’s another.” I heard him kiss her. “Good night.”

  The Eta woman kept sharing her rice—I think she got extra because she didn’t report that her two young children had died from scarlet fever—and we kept eating it until Mother was up and about again. She still would not greet the woman if we saw her in the street, but she no longer crossed to the other side.

  I WENT STRAIGHT to the Kumamoto Hotel, not even bothering to change out of my maid’s uniform. I had to get another job fast. I couldn’t survive long without money. That Shigemi. I would have to find a new roommate, too. How could I live with someone who would throw me to the lions in a snap?

  I walked through the big double glass doors and went up to the front desk. My heels caught in the thick, plush carpeting. Enormous landscape paintings of lands I’d never seen decorated the walls. The man at the desk told me the manager would be right out. I went and sat on the red velvet couch, staring at a painting of the Eiffel Tower. How nice it would be to visit France, drink coffee at an outdoor café.

  I heard a low whistle behind me, and turned. I was startled to see my brother’s childhood friend, Tetsuo, dressed in a bellhop’s uniform, leaned over the back of the sofa. I hadn’t seen him in over a year, and he’d grown into a handsome young man, with quick eyes and a strong, dimpled jaw.

  “Tetsuo! I didn’t know you worked here.”

  His eyes widened when he recognized me. “Shoko-chan! I can’t believe it.”

  “Why are you whistling at strange girls, then?” I smiled. Tetsuo was my favorite of my brother’s friends. He and I were like brother and sister. Until now, the way he was looking at me.

  He hopped over the back and landed, cross-legged, beside me. His face broke into a grin. “You still playing baseball?”

  “When I can.” I smoothed out my skirt.

  The manager appeared, a short, balding American with a potbelly. Tetsuo stood up. “Hello,” the manager said in English. “I’m Mr. Lonstein.”

  “I can vouch for her, sir,” Tetsuo said. I was surprised that he knew English so well. I only knew a few words. Stop. No. Please.

  Mr. Lonstein gave me an appraising look. “You can start right away.”

  HE PUT ME in the gift shop, where I had to ring up purchases for the American sail
ors and others coming through. Mostly, the gift shop had glass cases full of figurines and cheap Japanese souvenirs marked “Made in Occupied Japan.” Many servicemen stayed at this hotel. They also liked coming to the restaurant and dance club.

  “Thank you very much,” I said after each purchase. I got to wear a beautiful cream silk kimono, decorated with pink camellias and climbing green vines. One lady even took a picture of me to show her friends back in the States, her arm around my waist, as though we were bosom friends. Americans were overly familiar. I got used to it.

  Within a week of me starting the job, Tetsuo showed up at my counter. “How would you like to go out on Friday?” he asked.

  “Let me think about it.” Nice girls turned down the first request. “No, Friday I’m busy.”

  “Guess you’ll miss out on the fun. Oh, well, I’ll call another girl.” Tetsuo pretended to leave.

  I smiled. I needed fun. And no one was around to tell me how to behave. “I suppose I can go with you.”

  He leaned his elbows on the countertop. “Meet me at ten.” He winked at me and snapped his fingers and pointed his fingers like guns at me. I winked back.

  When you get your passport, you will notice that your race will be classified as “Mongoloid,” although you are not from Mongolia. There is no point in debating this.

  America consists primarily of Caucasians. It is understood without explanation or question that in the United States a Japanese person will not be considered an equal. If you married a non-Caucasian American, you will be considered in even a lesser light.

  Therefore, you must work as hard as you can to prove yourself more than equal—the most polite, the best worker, an adept English learner, the most well-turned-out Housewife your husband could ever ask for. This is your duty, to both your home country and to your new one.

  —from the chapter “Turning American,”

  How to Be an American Housewife

  Seven

  I’d been dating Tetsuo for a couple of weeks when, one day, I went outside on my lunch break. The gardens at the hotel were nice, made to look English, with a maze about five feet tall made out of boxwood bushes.

  I walked into this maze with my bento box, remembering Tetsuo saying there was a fountain somewhere inside. My brother and family were pleased that I was dating Tetsuo, my mother relieved. I was already nineteen, and many of the girls I went to high school with were married. However, I had many single friends, women like me who sought to improve their positions.

  Every weekend night, sometimes even weeknights, Tetsuo picked me up from the one-room apartment I shared with another girl from the hotel, and we went dancing. Oh, Tetsuo could dance! He was the only man I ever knew who could. I lent him out to my friends, too. I wasn’t even jealous when I looked up from my drink—Coca-Cola, of course, since I didn’t like alcohol—to see Tetsuo slow dancing with my new roommate, Yuki, their eyes closed, cheek to cheek, dreamily moving under the orange and blue lights. Mitsui, another girlfriend of mine, nudged me. “You better watch her. She’s a man-stealer.”

  “Yuki?” Why would I be jealous of Yuki? Her face was moon-round and her waist already looked matronly. “I guess some men might like that. Not Tetsuo.”

  And yet, when I danced with Yuki’s boyfriend—not even a slow dance—Tetsuo cut in, enraged. He shoved the boy aside and drew me in to him. “I can’t stand to have anyone else touch you,” he said, putting his hand on the side of my face, gripping my jaw.

  I drew my head back and forced a smile. “It’s only a dance.” I did not argue with him about Yuki. My mother said it was better that a man was jealous, to have him care about you more than you cared about him. It kept him close.

  Tetsuo looped me next to his body. He slid his hand up and down my back. “Shoko,” he sighed, and he pressed his pelvis close to mine. I tried not to jump. “Shoko, tonight?” He took my hand and brought it to his lips.

  I thought quickly. Mother hadn’t gone over this part of relationships. I’d been at a girls’ high school, forbidden to date, and I was naïve in some ways. If I didn’t give in, he might lose interest and move on. Tetsuo was too good of a catch. Handsome and smart and ambitious. But if I did give in, he might also lose interest. I decided to put him off a little longer.

  I turned so my back was to him and swayed to the slowing drumbeat. “Soon,” I purred over my shoulder. “Have patience.”

  He pulled me back to him again and put his lips on the soft skin of my neck. I shivered. “You drive me crazy, Shoko.” He turned me around and bent down as though to kiss me.

  I panicked. A kiss meant I was telling him he could have his way with me. This was how it was during my time. Everyone would see and know. He closed his eyes and his lips landed on the side of my hair. “I do care for you, Tetsuo. But you know I am a nice girl. The sister of your friend.” I hoped that would inspire his sense of honor.

  He held out his arm to spin me. As I whirled across the floor, my circle skirt flying out, I saw the eyes of everyone at our table.

  A FEW DAYS LATER, I was walking through the hotel gardens, trying to figure out how to cha-cha. Back, forth, cha-cha-cha. My feet kicked up gravel. I went around the path again and again, my arm on the shoulder of an imaginary partner.

  “Very good,” a voice said from where the path forked to my right. I jumped, my hand at my throat. A man stepped into sight.

  It was Ronin. Wearing his gardener’s clothes, a hedge clipper in his gloved hands, he bowed. “So sorry to frighten you,” he apologized.

  I drew myself up, flushing. What was he doing here? I couldn’t associate with him any longer. Holding my head high, I took the other fork of the path.

  “That’s not the way to the hotel,” he said.

  “No matter. I’ll find my way.”

  He clipped at a bush. “You’ll find yourself in Okinawa before too long.”

  I stopped. He was right. I would get lost. I spun around and headed back the way I thought I’d come.

  “Still wrong,” Ronin said in a low voice.

  I looked away from him. “I’m not supposed to be talking to you.”

  He raised his eyebrows at me. “The Americans are here now. We’re all equal.”

  I thought about what my mother would say, and my father, too, for that matter. He might have taken rice from burakumin, but it was another matter to have his daughter socializing with them. “My family is descended from the seal-bearer of the Emperor,” I said.

  Ronin leaned on his clippers. “It’s a new era, is it not? Otherwise, you wouldn’t be working as a maid for foreigners.”

  “I’m not a maid!” I said. “I’m a salesgirl.”

  He grinned. “You’re too smart to work at that hotel. Why don’t you go to college?”

  This floored me. “I can’t afford to.”

  He shrugged. “Me neither. At least, not right now. Tell you what. You show me how to cha-cha, and I’ll show you how to get out of this maze.”

  I pursed my lips. “Fine. But you cannot touch me.”

  “Fine,” he said, looking at me in a way that made my insides wiggle like tofu.

  I knew I shouldn’t, but I went walking in the gardens often after that. My job in the store wasn’t taxing—in fact, it was so mindless that I wanted to sleep—and I needed the diversion of a friend. Ronin was merely an interesting man. Completely innocent.

  I never tried to find Ronin, but he always found me, falling into step so quietly that I leaped up in fright every time, making him roar with laughter.

  Then he started bringing food. “I bought it, so don’t worry,” he said, bowing his head.

  Now that I knew him, I was ashamed that I’d treated him so disrespectfully before. “Of course I would eat your food. I’m eating with you, after all. It’s no different.”

  He looked shamefaced. “It’s just—I’m a rotten chef.”

  I laughed.

  We sat in the sun, eating from our bento boxes. “When I was a child,” he said, “this would
have been unheard of.”

  “Eating lunch with a beautiful girl or working here?” I teased.

  He looked about. “Where is this beautiful girl?” Ronin swallowed his fish hard, to disguise his laughter. “Both, Shoko. We lived in the Eta village and no one would have anything to do with us.”

  “Except other Eta.”

  “Yes. But no one like you or your family. It was like being a ghost.” He put a cucumber into his mouth. “One day, my mother was at the market, selling the leather shoes that she had made. My mother was a beautiful woman. Almost as beautiful as you.

  “She was doing her usual business when an English businessman happened by. He met her eyes and they fell in love.

  “He was my father. He sent money, visited from time to time.” Ronin smiled. “I suppose he did what he could. He left for England right before Japan attacked China. He asked my mother to come with him.

  “She wanted to go and take me, but the country wouldn’t let her out. They were gearing up to take over the world. No special considerations for her, especially as she was Eta.” He looked into the shrubbery at something I couldn’t see. “It wouldn’t have worked out anyway. Englishman and Japanese.”

  “It’s different now,” I said.

  “I hope so. I don’t fit in here, I might as well try my luck elsewhere.” He finished his lunch and replaced the red lid with a click. “I have a plan.” He looked at me sideways. “America, here I come. The land of opportunity.”

  I was excited despite myself. “What will you do there? Cook in a Japanese restaurant?”

  “Landscape. Like I do here, but bigger. I have big dreams, my Shoko.”

  How dare he? “I am not ‘your Shoko.’ ”

  He ignored that. “There is nothing for me here. I want to be my own boss.”

  “I wish you well.” I finished eating my own lunch, demurely taking small bites and chewing slowly. I admired his dreams, but they were as crazy as my diplomat ones. I would not tell him this—what good would it serve?—so he continued to talk and to gaze starry-eyed at me, and I continued to feel guilty. “We are friends only, you know that,” I said to him over and over.