Whenever I felt this way, I got another cup of water and distracted myself with chitchat. Today, I did what I felt like doing. What I thought my mother would do if she could, if she were me. I grabbed my jacket and ran.
The blue silk blouse stuck to my armpits. Late February and eighty degrees. A San Diego winter. I ran to the far end of the parking lot, that same glee I had felt when I ran as a child, my hair whipped back. I was sure that no one had seen me leave, and if they had, they did not care.
By the time I got to my car, my bad mood had disappeared completely. I would go pick up my daughter. We would have dinner with my parents—too much starch, which would make me sleepy. All would be well.
I cranked up a mix I made about ten years ago, probably for my ex-husband. It didn’t matter. These songs were my favorites. I bobbed my head and sang along to the Smiths, waved at the cute guy wearing Ray-Ban Wayfarers in the convertible to my right. He rewarded me with a grin.
As usual, traffic was backed up in Mission Valley by the time I got to Finney Plimpton Middle School. No worse place existed for a school, sandwiched between shopping malls and business parks. Helena loved it, though, and with my husband’s parents footing the bill for a private education, I couldn’t turn down the opportunity.
I parked by a banana-yellow Escalade. The kids were in the auditorium, rehearsing their sixth-grade play, South Pacific. Helena was playing Nurse Nellie. Somehow I, Suiko Morgan Smith, had raised a kid who was everything I was not—ultrabright, ultratalented, ultraconfident, ultranice. I held my breath for her thirteenth birthday and hoped she wouldn’t morph.
When I went back to work, Mom had been scandalized at day care. “You gonna let stranger take care kid?” she had demanded. “What if shake death?”
“She’s not going to get shaken to death,” I had said, though of course the thought insinuated itself as a late-night worry, eyes wide open. You never know, my mother’s voice whispered in my head.
“What am I supposed to do?” I had asked her. “You can’t take care of her.”
“Yes can.” Mom had tried to convince me to leave my baby with her, but that was impossible. They were in their sixties by then, and their ailments made them seem older than their years. I would not leave her for more than short periods. Day care had treated her fine.
I watched my daughter, her long hair shampoo-commercial shiny, in the middle of a pack of girls. “Hey, you. Look who’s here early.”
Helena broke away. Her caramel-colored eyes, the same shade as mine, were bright with tears. I put my arm around her. “What happened?”
“Amelie’s having a Disneyland weekend,” she sniffed. “I can’t pay for tickets.”
We got in the car. “I bet Grandma and Grandpa will foot it. You could do some chores for them.” I meant Craig’s folks, or Grandma and Grandpa Trump, as I called them.
Helena clicked her seat belt shut. “They don’t want chores, Mom. They want me to watch old British comedies and be the fourth for their old-fogey bridge parties.”
“Consider it character building.”
“Amelie thinks she’s all that because she got her period months ago and is already in a B cup,” Helena blurted out. “Kiana just got hers, too. When am I going to get mine?”
“You’ll get yours, honey. Don’t be in a hurry. Believe me.”
“Mom. You don’t understand.” Helena shut up and stuck iPod buds into her ears.
I do, I wanted to tell her. My own parents were like my grandparents in my childhood, older than everyone else’s parents and tired out from living. But Helena and I were only twenty years apart in age, and I remembered what she was going through all too well.
My awkward phase had been something for the books, lasting approximately fifteen years. I was shy, afraid I would shatter at the sound of my voice in public, which might have had something to do with the fact that I couldn’t see two feet in front of me and no one noticed until third grade. I hated my nose, which spread out over my face more than other peoples’. I didn’t grow a bridge until I was thirteen.
The really bad part began in fourth grade. My Dorothy Hamill hair-cut, combined with huge, thick glasses, actually caused a girl to scream when I went into the girls’ room. “I thought you were a boy,” she said.
The misery continued into junior high. Dad’s idea of what a young lady should wear to school was business attire, as though I were going to work on Wall Street. “No jeans,” he said severely when he took me clothes shopping at Penney’s. Apparently he believed that it was still the 1950s, when only disreputable greasers wore denim.
Mom hated shopping. “Spend too much, get tired,” she grumbled. “Daddy take you.”
I looked longingly at the triangle emblem of the Guess jeans a passing girl had on, rolled up with white Reeboks. “School is your job and you need to dress like it.” So instead of jeans and sneakers, I was forced to wear middle-aged dresses with big shoulder pads and nylons. My Dynasty years, I joked now.
Helena would be saved from this same fate, if I had anything to do with it, but with her father’s looks and her own sense, my daughter was not in need of saving.
WE ARRIVED IN ALLIED GARDENS, a couple miles north of San Diego State University, a Mayberry of small bungalows. The park had a year-round heated pool and a library, people handed out hot chocolate and apples during trick-or-treating, neighbors watched your house while you were gone. It was a good place to raise a child.
My phone beeped. Work had called. Perhaps someone had noticed my early departure after all. My stomach roiled.
Our house was about a thousand square feet, consisting of a living room adjoined by a kitchen and a hallway, with two closet-sized bedrooms and one bathroom. Our house was the only thing of value my ex and I had had at the age of twenty-two, mostly paid for by his parents; and I got to keep it in the divorce, as I had kept Helena.
It was decorated with a colorful mix of stuff my parents didn’t want anymore, like the Japanese screen my parents brought over in the 1950s, hand-painted with bright peacocks. Their old shiny black Japanese dining table with the removable legs was our coffee table, where we often ate in front of the TV.
Housekeeping was low on my priority list. Lower than even my job. Dust bunnies, clean laundry waiting to be put away, dirty laundry waiting to go into the wash, everything out of place. I hated having people over. “I’m a single mother,” I announced before people could say anything, think anything. “No time for housekeeping.”
Mom would have none of that. Last Easter, she had showed up for dinner with a mop and a bucket, wearing old clothes, her nice clothes on hangers. “Ai! Kitanai your house. I no can eat ’less clean up.”
Why couldn’t she say, I thought you might need some help, dear?
“It’s only a family dinner,” I had said, following her into the bathroom.
“We no good company?” Mom filled up her bucket in the tub. “I bring you wood-floor soap. Good floor.” She squirted a generous amount into the hot water. “You got time plenty thing: run, eat out all time. Why no clean?” She attacked a corner of the room behind a door. “No pride,” she muttered. “No pride in house, have nothing!”
When I was growing up, despite her tiredness, Mom maintained a punishing cleaning routine that would make Martha Stewart cower in her well-turned heels. Every day, a different part of the house was tackled. Mom got down on her hands and knees and scrubbed floors, using a rag and plenty of Borax dissolved in hot water. In between chores, she lay on the couch and napped.
Laundry day was a whole other production. Mom had a washer and dryer but said the electric dryer cost too much to run. She carted the heavy, wet laundry in a two-wheeled shopping cart from the garage at the front of the house, around the side yard to the back, where she had erected two wooden crosses with hooks and eyes across the bars. My job was to thread a heavy white rope back and forth across to make a clothesline, then take it down when she was done. “Japanese like sun,” she said. “Sun not use too much denki
like dryer. Denki takai. You know how much denki bill was? I save big money.”
She hand-washed dishes for the same reason, though I tried to tell her the dishwasher used less water.“Sue, why don’t you help your mother?” Dad said every night after dinner as he watched TV from the couch.
“You could help her, too,” I grumbled. He and Mike were served like kings. If I ever had a son, there would be none of that. My theoretical son would set the table before I asked, clear my plate and his. My theoretical husband would wash dishes alongside Helena.
Boys of my own had not been in the cards for me. Sometimes I thought I was giving up too soon on the whole finding-a-man-and-having-more-kids idea.
But what if I did get married again and the same thing happened, and I was a single mom to not one but two kids? Or more? How could you know that someone wouldn’t leave?
HELENA WALKED into our house and threw her books down on the coffee table. “What’s for dinner?”
“We’re going to Ojı̄chan and Obāchan’s house, remember?”
“Oh, yeah.” Helena grinned. “Spaghetti, I suppose. At four.”
“But of course.” My mother always made spaghetti when we visited. It was as dependable as her cleaning schedule.
I went into the bedroom to change my clothes. This room was no neater. No money to buy the nice little fabric organization boxes or closet systems that I longed for. Just a full-sized bed, big for this tiny room. Books were stacked in corners, dusty. Math Achievement in the Classroom. Teaching Grammar and Punctuation to English Learners. Fiction books I hadn’t touched for years. Why did I even bother to keep them? Suddenly the clutter was overwhelmingly claustrophobic. Disgust seized my throat. I wanted to throw everything out the window. I walked around and began picking up what I could put away easily.
A box of old greeting cards stood on my dresser. Birthday cards from every year since I turned six, cards from Craig, handmade cards from my daughter. Proof of love. I picked up the box and shoved it into my closet, then sat on my bed and unbuttoned my blouse.
My mother’s visit to my office yesterday still nagged at me. No matter what Dad had told me, there was something wrong. I could feel it. I replayed the scene with her again, eyes closed, my mother telling me that she had simply driven twenty miles on her own to go to the Commissary.
My eyes opened. That was it. My mother had looked me in the eyes. My mother had been lying. She had something to tell me, something important.
Mom usually refused to meet my gaze. It was rude in Japan to make eye contact, and somehow I had learned this habit from her by osmosis. I grew up being told by my teachers, “Look adults in the eye when you talk to them.” My mother would get angry with me if I did. “No respect,” she would mutter.
She was maddening in that way, how she parceled out information as though she were a government spy declassifying documents. I was on a need-to-know basis, and it seemed I never needed to know anything until Mom was ready to tell me. Never mind whether or not I was ready. I was sure that if I asked her directly, she would claim no knowledge of what I was talking about. “Wild ideas, Suiko,” Mom would say. “Better keep quiet.”
Perhaps this time she would remember to look away while she was talking to me, so I wouldn’t know she was lying.
I THREW MY BLOUSE into the dry-cleaning hamper. I heard Helena flush the toilet, call out to me. I wanted to crawl into bed and hide. Not face my mother again, my mother with her precious spaghetti and her wounded heart. Not hear what I felt to be coming, news of her mortality that I was not ready to hear. I pulled on jeans.
“Are you ready?” Helena was at the bedroom door. “I’m starving.”
I cast off my mood and smiled at my child. “Of course.”
Some Wives who emigrate to America have the opportunity to visit Japan with their new families, causing the Wife to worry about the reaction to her half-Asian child. In America, the half-Asian child may be scorned. However, Japanese believe the half-Asian child to be pretty. Most love them, especially if they are lucky enough to inherit the round Western eyes while keeping some Japanese features.
—from the chapter “The American Family,”
How to Be an American Housewife
Three
Two weeks later, I stood in Tokyo International Airport. The place contained more Mom look-alikes than I had ever seen in all of San Diego, in all of my life. Although none of these people were related to me, I felt safe here, like I could go up to anyone and they would help me with the same big smile Mom gave to strangers.
I had never expected to be able to go to Japan, certainly not to meet the family I only knew from the occasional New Year’s portrait postcard or funeral or birth announcement. I had enough trouble putting a few dollars into my 401(k) without dipping into the grocery budget. Yet I had still hoped I could go one day, taking college Japanese classes, sponging up whatever Japanese culture my mother meted out. Being here now, so suddenly, was like awakening in an alternate universe.
Monitors played soundless music videos and commercials with giant dancing bubblegum balls; blue screens announced flights. This was what I wanted, if I could only translate the letters quickly enough. The screens scrolled through the English lettering too fast for my tired eyes.
“Are we there?” Helena shifted her red duffel. “You don’t know where you’re going.” I sensed rather than saw the eye roll, which was so frequent that I didn’t register it as disrespectful. My mother would never have allowed it. But I was not my mother.
The truth was, Helena was right. This was the first big trip I’d ever been on. I never even took the bus at home—how was I supposed to find a connecting flight? I had no idea if we were supposed to take a shuttle or the subway or whatever it was they had at this airport.
Helena pointed. “Terminal Fifteen. Flight 267 to Kyushu. That’s us.”
I smoothed her golden brown bangs. She dried her long hair stick-straight and would wear eyeliner if I gave in. “What would I do without you?”
“Probably die here in the terminal.” Helena took my hand—she hadn’t held my hand since she was little, and her hands were big and adult now—and walked confidently down past the terminal numbers. “Stick with me, Mamacita. I’m the brains of this operation.”
It is not advisable to teach your American-born children Japanese. It will only confuse their language development. Children who learn Japanese and English will speak English like their mothers—with an accent. This is, of course, not desirable.
Teaching two languages may also confuse them as to their identity. They are Americans and should learn only English, as Americans do.
—from the chapter “American Family Habits,”
How to Be an American Housewife
Four
We finally found the connecting flight and boarded, clutching wrapped sandwiches from an airport shop. Everyone took off their shoes and put on paper slippers. The Japanese were very hygienic, like Mom, a fastidious hand-washer and non-cross-contaminator. Some would say Mom was too hygienic, but I didn’t get a cold until I was in second grade. Her house was like living in a bubble.
As though awakening from a long half-dream, I noticed everything. At home I moved through my surroundings as quickly as possible, never seeing who was around me, always intent on doing what I needed to do. I listened closely to the chatter of Japanese, both familiar and foreign, picking up only a few words. I marveled at the well-mannered way everyone got onto this plane. No one yelled at any flight clerks, no one pushed or line-jumped.
Helena kicked off her sneakers. “I love Japan so far. And I did most of my homework on the plane, so I don’t have a thing to worry about.”
I frowned. “There must not have been much work.”
“No joke. Can I be homeschooled? I mean, that was nearly two weeks’ worth of work. What am I spending all that time at school for?” Helena took a piece of gum out of her Hello Kitty denim backpack, handing me a piece.
“Sure. If you can find som
eone to homeschool you.” I yawned despite myself, flipping through the airline magazine.
“I can homeschool myself.” She smiled. High cheekbones, like Mom’s, irises outlined with darker brown so they glowed in the sun, a perfect slim nose like her father’s. When she and Craig were together, you knew immediately they were related.
CRAIG AND I HAD MET in English class, his eyes catching mine as we filed in on the first day of junior year. His eyes were so blue, his irises ringed with black, that they seemed to glow.
Freshman and sophomore years, I was quiet. Unnoticed unless someone needed help with their English paper or calculus problem. The only bad marks I got were for not raising my hand. At last, in junior year, I’d gotten a salon perm and contacts. I began to smile at people. My skirts got short and my baby fat disappeared. Boys finally saw me.
Craig slid into the desk next to mine and gave me his trademark half-grin, the one that got him elected Cutest Sophomore in the yearbook. “Hey,” he said.
I blushed. “Hey.”
Craig leaned forward, sandy blond hair falling over his forehead. “I’m a real idiot in English. I hear you’re smart. Think you can help me?”
I looked straight ahead, afraid I was going to be shy again, but somehow I wasn’t. “Sure, but the class just started. Don’t you want to see how hard it is first?”
He laughed. “Believe me, I know how hard it is.” I blushed.
My previous experience with love had been with the New Kids on the Block posters in my locker. This guy, who played football and baseball and oozed testosterone, was all too real. I was floored.
Craig waited for me at the door, walked me to my locker, talked to me more in his bantering guyspeak. He followed me like a lovesick duckling, not caring about his popular status. People called to him, waved from every sideline. I felt like a star. Just like that, I was in his circle. Sneaking out at night to meet his friends at Sunset Cliffs beach to smoke pot and drink beer, Craig pushing his motorcycle for blocks so my parents wouldn’t hear. He kissed me for the first time at that beach, wrapped me up in a blanket he had brought, in between sandstone cliffs where his friends couldn’t see. I did worse in school and he did better. And then we started at State, still bound at the hip.
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