—from the chapter “A Map to Husbands,”
How to Be an American Housewife
Fourteen
A few days after Sue and Helena left for Japan, I began having trouble sleeping again. At first I thought it was because I was worried about them. Neither had ever been out of the country before. Anything could happen, I fretted. Charlie had been right.
This morning, I sensed something was wrong. My body knew it. All night I sweated, pain deep in my joints, unable to turn over or call out to Charlie, who slept deeply beside me. Finally the sun broke through the horizontal blinds and Charlie got up to use the bathroom. When he returned, my eyes were open and staring at him. I floated outside of myself.
“You all right?” he said in alarm.
My lips and mouth were parched. “No,” I whispered.
He put his hand on my forehead. “You’re paler than a ghost.” He felt for my pulse in my neck. “We better go to the hospital.”
They put me in the ICU, oxygen tubes stuck up my nose, a machine helping my heart pump, an IV shooting fluids and medication through me.
Dr. Cunningham arrived and didn’t say much. He wrote something down on my chart and put his hand on my leg. “Feeling better now?”
“When can I go home?” My voice sounded weaker than I expected. It felt like a weight was on my chest.
“You’re going to stay for observation.”
I kicked my feet under the thin blankets. I hated staying there. “When you going do big operation? Pretty soon, huh?”
“Let’s get you stabilized. Then we’ll worry about that.” He gestured to Charlie to come outside with him, probably to tell him I was really about die and to make me as comfortable as possible, let me think I was going to be okay.
I wanted to scream, I can know, too! I am an adult! Anger caused my blood pressure and pulse to shoot up, and the on-call nurse rushed in. I didn’t need to be told what was wrong. It was my heart, same as always. They would give me some new drug mix; I’d stay a couple of days and then go home. It would get stronger again. It always had. I had to keep believing that. I pushed all my doubts away.
Charlie came back in and sat down next to me. He patted my hand. “What did the doctor say?” I asked anyway.
“Not much.” Charlie looked at me sideways. He was honest—my father had been right about that. A terrible liar.
“What, he say I gonna die today?”
Charlie leaned back, his eyes on a far wall. A nurse walked by. There was no privacy here. “He said you had to stay so they can run some tests.”
“Great.” I stared at my husband, willing him to tell me the truth. We’d been through so much together. True, I didn’t love him when we first got married. But love can grow.
DURING ONE PERIOD in the Navy, Charlie went to Alaska with a spy group every few months. He stayed on the ground while pilots spied on the Russians. Charlie had said there was nothing much to do but sit around and wait for the planes to come back. He was there in case someone got hurt. The worst thing he ever treated was a runny nose.
He went walking on the beaches there. One morning, he found some jade. Real, deep-green jade. He took it home and had it made into earrings and a necklace for me. I knew that was how he showed his love.
In Vietnam, he rode in helicopters with the Marines through enemy fire to retrieve wounded men out of the jungle. But he never told me about the details, never wrote, “You wouldn’t believe how many times we got shot at today! I saw the intestines coming out of five Marines!” Instead, he wrote, “You wouldn’t believe how cheap the silver is here!” He brought back tortoiseshell bracelets, ebony salad bowls, hammered silver cuff links. Only once did he talk about it. Sue’s hair got singed while she was blowing out birthday candles and Charlie got a faraway look in his eyes. “Nothing’s worse than the smell of human hair burning,” he said. “Smelled that and human flesh all the time in Vietnam. Put me off steak for a long time.” Then he shook it off and smiled. “Not forever, though.”
DEATH LY ILL PEOPLE filled the ICU. The man in the next bed died that night—from what, I didn’t know. I never saw his face, only heard his machines and his rasped breathing through the thin polka-dot curtain separating our beds.
Charlie went home only once in two days. I told him I was fine, that all I needed to do was sleep. “But you can’t stay alone,” he said fretfully, reminding me of an old woman. In fact, he looked more like one every day, his angular features filling out and softening, breasts forming under his shirt. I could not remember the last time we had been intimate. Years. In his religion, intimacy was for the purpose of baby-making, not for fun. I didn’t know if the church had told him this or if he had decided on his own. I used to miss it, taking care of myself with the Hitachi magic wand that Charlie thought was a shoulder massager.
“I stay alone, Charlie. There nurses here.”
“They take a half-hour to answer your call button.”
“Only since they know you stay.” He was annoying me, always hanging around rattling his newspaper or dozing off. He had never spent so much time staying close to me at home. I had had enough. Charlie never listened to me unless I was brusque. “I better faster if you go away.”
He scratched his chin. He hadn’t shaved in days. It looked awful, all salt-and-pepper whiskers that scratched my face when he kissed my cheek.
“But they should know . . .”
“Go home and sleep!” I said, wanting to get up and push him out. “Call Mike. I go home tomorrow. Too much fuss, eh? What matter with you?”
He paused a moment, and I thought he would tell me what the doctor said in the hallway.
I made a shooing motion at my husband. “Go away,” I said, as fiercely as I could. “You want make me better? Leave me alone!”
He still stood there. “I’ll call Mike,” he said slowly.
“Yes.” I didn’t know if he would come. You never knew with Mike.
Charlie kissed my forehead, then left. Right away I wanted him to come back, but I didn’t call for him. Now there were just machines beeping at me and Navy nurses sweeping by, some nice, some acting like hell demons. I felt like crying.
Child-rearing in America is a good deal more callous and cold than in Japan. Americans do not believe in letting the baby sleep with them, or carrying them all the time, the way a Japanese mother does. They take a far more disciplinarian approach to child-raising than we do in Japan.
Every mother must do what is best for her children and her conscience, as well as adhere to the wishes of her husband. Ideally, the father leaves such details to the mother, but this is not always the case.
—from the chapter “American Family Habits,”
How to Be an American Housewife
Fifteen
Late that night, I awoke to find Mike staring at me, his chair only inches away from the bed. “Last time you in hospital is when I had you,” I said, remembering decades ago like it was yesterday. I even remembered my Naval Hospital room, the big blond woman sharing it who screamed, “Take it out already!”
“Really?” Mike said, as though he had not heard this story a million times before. I knew I retold stories. I wasn’t senile.
“I was in labor forty hours,” I said. Charlie had wondered if this was why Mike seemed to be on his own planet, since his head had been squeezed over and over and his heart rate had dropped with each contraction, but I was sure the doctors would not have let me labor so long unless there was no danger.
He took my hand, which he hadn’t done since he was four years old. “Are you going to be all right, Mom?”
Part of me wanted to tell him, of course, and the other part of me wanted to scream that I wasn’t God. “I don’t know,” I said, for the first time since I’d been admitted. He looked down at the ground, his long dark lashes casting a shadow on his cheek. Such beautiful lashes wasted on a boy, I used to say. My poor daughter had skimpy ones, like mine. “Don’t you cry like Daddy.” I slapped him gently on the face.
He looked up and his eyes were clear. “Get some sleep,” he said. He settled back into the chair with his book.
“It not too late for you, you know it?” I said. “Get out there, and get what you want, Mike. You waste your life sit around.” In my hospital bed, I felt brave. I would never have said anything like that to my son before. He was stubborn and proud, and if anyone criticized him, he would turn away forever, like he had from Charlie when Charlie tried to make him stay in college.
Mike would have been happier as the son of a farmer. Just him and the land and some animals. No people to worry about.
In the past, I thought about what life would have been like with Mike and Ronin, if we had come here and started a company. No moving around for the Navy. Maybe it would have been better, maybe it would have been far worse.
But then—I wouldn’t have Sue. Or Helena. I didn’t look backward. The past was past.
When I thought of Ronin today, it wasn’t with heartache. It was with fondness. Nothing could have been different in the circumstances I was in. The person I used to be could have made only one choice; the grown-up Shoko might have made a different one. That was how life was. You only figured out the right thing after you were old.
MIKE SHUT HIS BOOK and leaned into my face. Even though he thought I was dying, I was still surprised by his response. “I’ll do better, Mom,” he said simply.
“Good.” I smoothed out the blanket with my hand. I’d done it so often I had a waffle-weave burn. My mouth felt parched, but the pitcher at my bedside was empty. I pressed the nurse buzzer.
“What do you need?”
“Water.” No one was at the nurses’ station. They were always so busy here.
Mike stood over me to reach the pitcher. His hair, already well streaked with white, fell into his eyes, and the stubble on his face was a week old. No wonder he couldn’t get a job. “I’ll get it, Mom.” Close up, I could see holes in his jeans. They weren’t the stylish kind. He smelled of cigarette smoke. I coughed. He left the room.
The nurse beeped the intercom. “What do you need?”
“Nothing,” I said.
Mike came back and poured me a cup, handing it to me. Then he sat down and opened the fantasy novel he’d brought, like the ones I’d been shocked at when he was a teenager, with a huge-breasted lady on the cover, bursting out of her metal bustier and riding a dragon. Through the night he read, as I slept.
Forgiveness is a skill that, like cleanliness, should be learned early and practiced often. Whether it be forgiving the war, or forgiving your husband when he neglects to show up for dinner, you should bend like a willow tree in a fierce storm.
—from the chapter “Culture for Women,”
How to Be an American Housewife
Sixteen
Charlie came to see me in the morning, wiping tears out of his eyes.
“What happened to the big, tough Marine I marry?” I said. Charlie used to refer to himself that way, when he was in the war and attached to Marine units. It was a point of pride I wanted him to remember. Now if my husband cried, I had to be strong, and I wanted to be weak.
He didn’t answer, just picked up my cup of ice chips and offered a spoon to me. I opened my mouth. My lips peeled dry and my mouth wrinkled like a prune. He applied Vaseline to them.
“I want Japanese food. Can go get some?”
“No sushi. The raw fish could make you sick,” he said. “And nothing too salty. You’re restricted.”
“I know, I know,” I said, picking at the white thermal blanket. “Get just noodles, then. Hate hospital food. Taste like paper.” All I ate were ice chips and Ensure. I did not even take soup. I lifted my hip up and grimaced.
He sort of laughed. “You need to shi-shi?”
“No.” I said. I felt sorry to be so cranky to Charlie, especially when he was being helpful, but I couldn’t help it. I wanted to be home, where I wouldn’t get woken up by a blood pressure cuff at three a.m. I had to be nice to everyone in the hospital, polite and meek, when I really wanted to shoot them all between the eyes.
“Did they talk Taro?” I asked Charlie.
“I don’t know. Mike talked to Sue, not me.”
Of course Mike would never think to ask. Had Taro told them anything? Everything?
I didn’t know if I wanted Taro to tell my story or not. In one way, it would be easier on me if he did. Then I wouldn’t have to.
Telling Charlie about Mike had not been easy. Mike had been born a month and a half earlier than he should have been, by Charlie’s calculations. This would have been all right had he not weighed nine pounds, four ounces, with the fully developed lungs of a baby born at term.
“I didn’t know he would look so Japanese,” Charlie marveled often the first month, sending me into guilty spasms. He wanted to believe Mike was his.
Finally, when Mike was six weeks, I couldn’t stand it anymore. Charlie had a right to know. One evening, when Mike was asleep, I told Charlie everything in my poor English. I began crying as I did so, remembering it all, the stress of having this secret for months. I was the only one who knew. Not even Ronin knew.
Charlie simply sat and stared into the corner. I waited for him to storm out, shout at me. Then Mike woke and wailed.
“It’s time for his feeding.” Charlie prepared Mike’s bottle.
I picked up Mike and changed him, still waiting for a reaction.
Instead, Charlie took Mike from me and sat down, holding the milk bottle to Mike’s lips, cooing at him as Mike stared up, his black eyes watching Charlie’s face intensely. The only sound was Mike’s greedy eating, slurping in too much air.
Finally Charlie spoke without taking his eyes off the baby. “What’s past is past, Shoko. All right?” He put Mike on his shoulder to burp him. “My name is on the birth certificate. He is my son.” Charlie’s eyes turned a brilliant sapphire and he glared at me with something like defiance.
I was shocked. I knew Charlie forgave and forgot more easily than most, but this—I had been expecting more. Instead he gently rocked the gas out of Mike.
“No bother you?” I asked.
Charlie dabbed at the spit-up on Mike’s chin. “Of course it bothers me. But I knew you had boyfriends before me. I knew about your other Americans. But I can’t do anything about it now. What is it you say, tokidoki?”
I nodded.
“So let’s not talk about it anymore.” Charlie stood.
“How can do this?” I still couldn’t understand.
Charlie squished his eyes closed. He spoke next in a low, authoritative voice, the sort I had not heard him use. “I never want to hear about it again, do you understand?”
I drew in my breath and nodded. “Yes. Never.”
Mike began crying. “Come on, big guy. Time for bed.” Charlie hummed a lullaby, carrying him out of the room.
I exhaled. How lucky I was.
DR. CUNNINGHAM KEPT SAYING, “We’ll see, we’ll see,” whenever I asked him about the surgery. This morning when he came in, saying, “Knock, knock,” before he entered, as he always did, I asked him if I was too old to have the operation.
“It’s not that,” he said, hesitantly. “If we can get your blood pressure up, we’ll be fine.”
Always “we,” as if we were a team that could control my body. “How about monkey heart?” I asked.
He grinned, but I wasn’t kidding. “We’ll do our best, Shoko, that much I can promise.” Then he touched my foot. “I’ll get you another blanket. You’re freezing.” He always said this. Although I always felt fine.
“I been here a week,” I said, pouting. “When I get out?”
“We’re moving you to Navajo Hospital,” Dr. Cunningham said. “They have a special cardiology unit.”
Charlie looked concerned. “Does the military insurance cover that?”
“You bet, if we order it.” Dr. Cunningham frowned at Charlie, as though he thought Charlie would want to pay no matter what. But you never knew which be
nefits the government would cut, even though Charlie wouldn’t have stayed in the damn military for over twenty years if he hadn’t been promised so much when he retired.
I sighed. “You better tell everybody.” I looked up at Dr. Cunningham’s concerned, handsome face. At least Sue would get to meet him. I pulled the covers up to my chin and smiled despite myself.
AT NAVAJO, my new cardiologist was Dr. Jenkins, a thin man in his sixties whose bald head shone.
“If I him,” I said to Charlie, “I wear wig. Easter egg head.”
Charlie laughed so hard he snorted. This made me laugh.
Dr. Jenkins came in, looking at his notes. “As soon as the blood pressure is stabilized,” he said to the machine behind me, “we can get moving on the procedure.”
“Who you talking to, the wall?” I said. Charlie had told me lots of good doctors had horrible manners, but I didn’t care. “You going do it or what? No can wait forever.”
“Dr. Su performs this particular procedure.” Dr. Jenkins finally managed to lower his gaze to mine. His eyes were brown and tired.
I held out my hands. “Where Dr. Su?”
“When you’re a suitable candidate, he will see you.” Dr. Jenkins turned on his heel to go.
Charlie picked up my hand from where it lay limp on the scratchy white bedsheets. I turned it over and showed him my palm.
“Look here. Life line going away.” To me it appeared to be fading, smoothing out.
He pursed his lips and said nothing.
“What, don’t you think I be okay?”
How to Be an American Housewife Page 12