How to Be an American Housewife

by Margaret Dilloway

  “Yeah.”

  I took my hand back. “Help up. I wanna go bathroom.”

  “I’ll get the bedpan.”

  I shook my head. I would have to prove to them I could handle the surgery or they’d give up on me, saying my blood pressure wasn’t good enough or I was too weak. I could see it happening already. Transfer her there. Give her to this doctor. Wait and wait some more. They wanted to let me die.

  “My feet not so swollen. Come on.”

  Charlie unhooked me from the monitors and put his arm around me. I swung my legs out of bed. His feet slipped a bit.

  “Careful,” I said.

  “You’re too weak,” he said, out of breath, losing his grip. I started to fall and gripped the metal bed rail.

  He caught me. “Sorry.”

  “Watch what doing.” Slowly, carting the IV bag, we made it to the bathroom. He helped me raise my gown and sit on the toilet.

  When I finished, Charlie turned on the sink for me to wash my hands. I held on to the edge and looked in the mirror. My hair was half white, since I hadn’t dyed it in so long. I needed lotion and there were big bags under my eyes. My face had lost its moon shape and my cheekbones stuck out. “I’m too skinny,” I said wonderingly, touching my collarbone. “Heh, all my life I want be skinny, and now too much.”

  In the mirror, I could see Charlie’s downcast eyes. Did he not want to look at me? “Help me back bed,” I said.

  A nurse appeared. “Where are you? You went off the monitors.” She was African-American, older, short like me. She was a nice lady who brought me vanilla ice cream in a paper cup when it wasn’t on the menu. She saw where we were and rushed to help me.

  “We’re fine,” Charlie insisted.

  The nurse came over to help anyway. “Good job, honey,” she told me. “You keep it up.”

  I nodded, too winded to speak. I never thought I would have just as good a chance of going shi-shi by myself as I did of climbing Mount Everest with no oxygen. Maybe the doctors are right, I thought for the first time ever. Scared, I blocked it out of my head. I smiled at the nurse. “How ’bout some of that vanilla ice cream?”

  THE DAY AFTER I went to the bathroom on my own, my blood pressure stabilized and Dr. Su finally came to see me. He was a friendly-looking guy about fifty years old, wearing wire-frame aviator-style bifocals. His hair was thin and bald in front, but he didn’t comb it over. I liked that. Nice white smile, too. I decided that I would get my teeth bleached as soon as I got out of there. Have my own movie-star teeth.

  Charlie and I held our breath as Dr. Su looked at my charts and at my blood pressure history. “Looks good, Shoko. We’ll do it tomorrow.”

  “So soon?” I asked.

  “Yes.” Dr. Su said. “If your vitals hold.” He made some notes on a piece of paper. “Sign this release, please.”

  I read it. It was the usual: you can die from this operation or from anesthesia, et cetera. I signed. “If my brain die,” I said, “you let me go, right? No keep around.”

  Charlie nodded. “If you say so.”

  “I do.” I handed the form back to Dr. Su. “Okay if I have Japanese food, Doctor?”

  He shrugged. “Just lay off the shōyu.”

  I saluted him. “Can do, chief.”

  I liked Dr. Su already.

  SURGERY DIDN’T MAKE ME NERVOUS. Being sick was what made me nervous. And being around Charlie while sick made me extra nervous, because he acted so different than normal. Why couldn’t he be calm? Was this what he was like medevacing soldiers out of the jungle? I doubted it.

  The procedure began at six. I closed my eyes as they wheeled me into the operating room and the anesthesiologist started talking to me about procedures. Over the years, Mother and Father visited me in my dreams. They held my daughter, born after they were dead. After Mike was born, I’d dreamed of Ronin talking to me and telling me how he was happy I had made a good life for myself.

  Now I hoped I wouldn’t see this trio as I slept. Today, it might mean that I had really died.

  What would I tell Sue if I could see her again? Would I visit her in her dreams? And Helena?

  The anesthesiologist patted my hand as he put the oxygen mask over my face.

  “I don’t want be ghost,” I said.

  He didn’t hear. His face was shrouded by the bright light behind him. “Now we’re going to count backwards from ten. Ten, nine, eight . . .” and I was gone.

  PART TWO

  Butter-Kusai

  As a young Japanese lady, you have been schooled in all the ways of housekeeping. Your high school taught you how to arrange flowers, the fine art of fan dancing, and how to launder and store kimonos.

  Now that you have married an American, you might be at a loss as to certain American customs. How to iron a Western shirt. How to make a bed properly. If you were lucky enough to have worked as a maid in a Western-style establishment, you may already know these things. But for those of you who do not, or do not know the details of American culture, this book will provide all the higher education that you need.

  —from the Introduction,

  How to Be an American Housewife

  One

  I had always been an obedient girl.

  When the doctors were sure my mother was gestating a boy, my parents declared they were wrong. I would be a girl. My mother could feel it in the way I made her crave enormous amounts of Hershey’s Kisses, the manner in which I stretched and dropped down below her pelvis, pushing into her bladder like my brother never had. “A girl,” my mother had said. I easily imagined her sounding resigned.

  “Girls are precious,” my father said. He bought a pink layette in preparation and chose a girl’s name. Suiko, after a Japanese empress.

  “Now it better be girl,” my mother grumbled. “No can return all that stuff.”

  I, obeying, turned out female. It had not been a penis but the umbilical cord the doctors had spotted, the same one that tried to choke me to death during delivery.

  Like any good little girl, I wore dresses when I wanted to wear jeans. I stopped climbing trees when my breasts started growing. When the boys in my classes yelled out answers, I stayed quiet. I tried as hard as I could not to be an inconvenience to anyone, at least not in a way that anyone would find out about.

  In my memories of childhood, I remembered my mother always being present, whether she had really been there or not. It was her voice that was always there, whispering or shouting in my subconscious, tenacious as Jiminy Cricket. Even now, I always paused before I acted, to hear what she had to say, sometimes not hearing her until it was too late. “That no good. You baka-tare or what?” (Baka-tare means “stupid.”) Or, more rarely, “Good girl, Suiko-chan.”

  When I was a child, I would do anything to hear the latter. I tiptoed around my mother and her constant exhaustion. I feared if she got angry enough, her heart would stop. Clean the bathroom while she was gone, diet down to a sylphlike size, play the perfect sonata on the piano. “I wish I play piano,” Mom would sigh, and I felt victorious. I only wanted to see her approving nod and hear that statement. Finally I had done something right.

  When I was fourteen, our relationship began its shift, a moving of tectonic plates that never fit together correctly again. It began with my subscription to Young Miss magazine. Young Miss sounded prim and proper, my parents thought. But eventually Dad began looking at the magazine covers and what was inside. He tore out the pages I wasn’t allowed to read. “This is censorship!” I said to my mother on the afternoon that I discovered the deceit.

  “Daddy know what bad,” Mother said, indifferent to my red face and indignant tone. How could she calmly stand in the kitchen, drying dishes with a too-wet dish towel, when her own daughter was being discriminated against?

  In the few stories Mom had told me about her time growing up, she cast herself as the renegade. The one smarter than the boys, more beautiful than the rest of the girls, destined for greatness, only thwarted by her circumstance. “Is
that what you would have done when you were my age?”

  She blanched, turning her back to me. Steam from the hot water rose to her face. “Thing different your time. Girl grow up too fast. Not same.”

  “It’s not fair,” I said, unable to articulate any better at that age. What else could I expect? My father wouldn’t let me join Girl Scouts—he said they promoted feminist values. He probably wished women still wore girdles and gloves and left calling cards when they drove around in their horse-drawn carriages. But my mother—why wouldn’t my mother take my side?

  I thought of the mothers of my friends, the ones who sat down with them and talked about boys, about how the girls could break the glass ceiling when they grew up, while also frosting gingerbread houses at Christmastime. But my mother kept me both close and at arm’s distance.

  I turned away from her, leaving her at the sink, so she wouldn’t see my tears. She did anyway. “What you cry ’bout? Nobody hit you.” She clattered a metal pan. “Do what good for you, Suiko.”

  I focused and made my tears stop. It was a trick that I had learned early. “I’m not crying, Mom.” I smiled at her. “See, I’m fine.”

  She shook her head as she bent over the dishes again. “You no like me,” she muttered. “No can cry ’bout everything. People hurt you too much.”

  She was right. I did cry too much. I was weak.

  This particular article was about birth control. My parents wouldn’t sign the consent form for sixth-grade sex ed class—nor did they give me an alternate education at home. They thought that if I knew about the mechanics of condoms, then I would run out and sleep with the entire middle school lacrosse team.

  Or maybe my parents were all too aware of the hot intent lying beneath my demure surface. My friends’ parents—even the one whose family never missed Sunday Mass—let them have posters of Patrick Swayze or half-naked military men on their walls. I hid my perversions, photos from TeenBeat of Michael J. Fox and Kirk Cameron, under the paper lining of my dresser drawers, the only place my nosy mother would never look.

  What was it that my parents wanted for me? To go to college, pristine as the day I was born, and find Prince Charming hiding in a biology class. A future M.D. snagged while young and geeky.

  But what I wanted was to live on an island in the South Pacific like Margaret Mead. Or to be Anaïs Nin living with Henry and June, or the notorious Bettie Page pinned up on soldiers’ lockers. Mata Hari using her wiles to spy for the government, or a scientist like Rosalind Franklin, who helped discover DNA—only I’d make sure I got credit. I grew up counting the days until childhood ended, when I would no longer have to be good.

  I needed to learn about condoms.

  The birth control article was easy to find, tucked away among scraps of papers in the daily mail nest my father piled up by his easy chair. Its glossy page was a beacon. I slipped it under my shirt and went into the bathroom to read it. It’s only information, I reminded myself. I futilely pushed down on the broken door lock.

  I heard my mother in my head. “Baka-tare! Stupid girl. What you doing?”

  “Shut up,” I told that voice. “I’ll do what I want.”

  I read the article, my heart beating so hard I could feel the pulse in my tongue.

  A knock sounded on the bathroom door. “Just a minute!” I called out.

  “What doing?” Mom’s voice was suspicious, and I knew I’d been found out.

  “Going to the bathroom, of course. Can’t I have a little privacy?” I said anyway, sticking the magazine under the sink.

  The door opened. Mom’s eyes went to the sink cabinet, which she must have heard shut. She opened it up and took out the article. “I knew you go find this when I tell you no.” Mom gasped as her eyes fell on the photos of a condom being placed over a banana. “You no-good sneak. What’s matter you?”

  “They teach this stuff in science class!” I yelled. “It’s no big deal.”

  She looked at me like I’d been caught robbing a bank. “You gonna be bad, huh?” She shook her head, then shut the door.

  From then on, I was more careful. Dad, for all his blustering, was easy to fool. He forgot why he was mad in an hour. My mother did not. For a week, I didn’t exist to her. She refused to talk to me.

  When I was pregnant with my daughter, Helena, I made a list of Things I Would Not Do Like My Parents. Number One: I would not freeze her out to punish her. Number Two: I would teach her to do anything a boy could do. And more.

  I finished high school without incident. I got good grades. I did my chores. If I ditched class, it was because I was an office monitor and doctored the records so no one found out.

  I married the first boy I ever kissed. Exactly as my mother had told me I should. Because I, Suiko Morgan, also known as Sue, was a good girl. With morals that meant nothing to me.

  And then everything really went to hell.

  In the majority of instances, working outside the home is frowned upon. If your husband wanted to have an independent, working woman, he would have married an American. The Wife lives within the home, keeping it tidy and organized, preparing meals for the family, and keeping the children clean. In this way, you must live up to Japanese standards, not American. See it as a source of pride.

  In some instances, it may unfortunately be necessary for a Wife to seek outside employment, such as when the husband is dismembered or is dead.

  —from the chapter “A Map to Husbands,”

  How to Be an American Housewife

  Two

  Yesterday, I had been innocently wasting my life away at work, unaware that my mother was about to arrive, asking me to take her to the Commissary. I would have been less surprised to see a UFO land in the parking lot.

  This morning I called my father as soon as I got to work. “Is Mom all right today?”

  “She is. She goes through spells sometimes, just like she always has.” Dad sounded reassuring, chewing food, the television in the background. Everything was normal, I wanted to believe.

  “But why did she come up here alone?”

  “I was busy.” Dad crunched on something. “Sue, don’t worry, everything’s fine. We’ll see you for dinner.”

  Now I tapped my pen on my desk, staring at the half-alive fern I kept near my monitor. Dad must be right. A seriously ill woman wouldn’t be making spaghetti sauce from scratch, the kind you had to cook all day long. No, she would use a jarred sauce. But your mother is stubborn, I reminded myself, and pushed the voice away. Dad was there. My mother was, if not well, then the same as always.

  The phone rang, then stopped before I could answer. I was a New Accounts manager, as soulless a paper-pushing processing job as you can get without actually turning into a zombie. People opened accounts, I input their information. I listened to employees ask for raises that I couldn’t grant. The joke was that my company, PFD Financial, stood for Pays Fewer Dollars. I had worked there, I was ashamed to say, for nearly ten years. Ever since Craig and I got divorced. A steady paycheck and benefits were worth a little grind, though.

  Every year I told myself this was the last. I’d start something new. Once upon a time, I’d wanted to teach. It was a modest goal, especially compared to my early daydreams. Yet it had proven unachievable so far. The night-class teacher education program cost too much; no use getting in debt for the sum of one’s entire first-year salary. The cheaper state-school program scheduled classes during the day while I was working. I couldn’t figure out how to manage. The only answer I came up with was to wait until my daughter had finished school. I’d still be young, relatively speaking, with twenty years left until retirement.

  On this day, I looked at the coffee cup on my desk and realized that I’d taken fourteen breaks that day. Dreaming at the water cooler, looking into space. I heard the gasping cackle of the woman next to me, the low hum of the dim lights.

  I thought again about my mother, arriving at my office the day before. A trip she had never made or asked to make, to see me. A trip to
buy groceries that she would never dare make alone.

  Ever since I could remember, Mom’s heart had been no good. Always tired, always needing to lie down, barely enough energy to make dinner. Why had they had me, so late, at age forty-two? She had had a murmur before that; it had turned into something worse after she’d had me. “Your mother couldn’t pick you up after you were a month old,” Dad had said matter-of-factly. “You were too heavy.” I had worn her down. How else would you explain it? Babies are hard on bodies. I knew this, and I had only had one.

  And nobody could say what had happened to her with certainty. Genetics or environment, radiation sickness or scarlet fever, a simple virus—anything could tweak the heart, make it weak.

  As though I needed to atone for my own strong heart, I began to run. I ran every morning, up at four, two and a half miles around the park next to my house, before Helena woke up. I ran even if I got painful shin splints, even if my knees got puffy. I ran fast, until I couldn’t talk, until my heart thumped in my ears, hard rain on a tin roof. The doctor told me that when my heart couldn’t speed up, that was the time to worry.

  When I first began running, pushing Helena in her stroller, my brain wouldn’t empty. Worries pushed up like weeds poking through good soil. I learned how to stomp them down. Now all I heard were my heart and my feet. No music.

  Then I walked back down the short hill, slow, to my house. The air inside, so cold when I’d left, always felt hot and stale. Every day, I wanted to open the windows, but I worried that Helena would get a chill. I left them closed.

  “I wish I run,” Mom would say, every time she saw my running shoes by the door. “I use run faster than anybody. Beat even you.”

  THE PHONE ON MY DESK RANG AGAIN, and I did nothing. The endless years stretched out before me as though they had already been lived. I felt a lurching in my bones so violent, I thought we were surely experiencing an earthquake. I needed to get out of here.