I shouldn’t have been surprised. Mom wasn’t like any of the other mothers. My friends came over with a mix of anxiety and anticipation. “Will we have to bow? Take our shoes off? Kneel on the floor?” my friend Shauna asked.
“Just the shoes,” I said.
Mom was always pleased to see my friends show up. “You popular girl, huh? Only popular girl have so many friends.”
“Please, Mom, I have like three,” I’d say each time. This was true.
“Tell me what new at school while Sue get ready.” Mom would try to waylay them as they came through, inviting them to sit on the couch beside her.
“I can’t understand half of what she says,” Shauna would tell me afterward, right in front of my mother, as though she were deaf instead of accented.
“Tell me about it,” I would say, deliberately ignoring the hurt on my mother’s face. I regretted my cruelty now.
It was a particularly sharp betrayal since so many of the English speakers she encountered daily treated her this way. In fourth grade, I made a new friend, Cindy, who invited me over to her house, which was about twice the size of ours. “Gotta meet mother first. Never know who people are,” Mom said. She took me to their house, wearing her finest dress-up clothing.
Mom rang the doorbell as I nervously waited. The mother answered. “Come on in.” She wore shorts, a T-shirt, and white Keds and had wide blue eyes. In the background, Cindy jumped up and down. “You didn’t have to get dressed up for me.”
“I always dress up,” Mom said, which was totally untrue. She stepped indoors and took her shoes off.
Cindy’s mother grimaced but didn’t say anything. “Well, come in and sit down. Have some tea.”
Cindy and I began playing Barbie on the floor. Mom sat on the couch and reached for a piece of coffee cake. She put it on a napkin.
“Oh, don’t you want a plate?” Cindy’s mother picked up one of the tea plates from the table.
“Napkin fine. Less dish wash.” Mom took a bite of cake with her fingers. Cindy’s mother sat down and put a piece of cake onto her plate and ate it with a fork. I felt horribly embarrassed, but said nothing.
“It’s great that you’re trying to learn English,” Cindy’s mother commented. “You must not have been here very long.”
Mom smiled coolly. “I here longer since before you born!”
Later, I would invite Cindy to my house, but her mother always had an excuse for declining.
Now that I was a mother, I understood how excluded my mother must have felt, at least in part. Last year, I was at a PTA meeting. We were eating store-bought cookies afterward and chatting.
“We’re going to Cabo for Ski Week this year,” one mother piped up. Ski Week was what they called the school’s vacation week surrounding Presidents’ Day. Public schools gave two days off, but Helena’s school gave the entire week off. The mother’s clothes were casual jeans and a T-shirt, but the sort of casual that sets you back several hundred dollars.
“Only you would go to a beach for Ski Week, Stacey!” another mother chimed in. She shifted on her too-high pumps. “We’re going to Sun Valley. It’s Jim’s favorite place.” She turned to me. “You going anywhere, Sue?”
I could never tell if they were being polite and trying to include me, or if they were baiting me. It had to be obvious to anyone with a pair of eyeballs that I wasn’t the one paying Helena’s tuition. “We’re going to kick it here in S.D., old-school,” I said. “Maybe we’ll go to the Mission Beach roller coaster.” I tugged up the waist of my own Target brand jeans, which always started out tight and got too loose by day’s end.
“Is that even open in February?” the mother asked.
I shrugged. In reality, Helena would be spending the week with her grandparents while I worked. I didn’t get a Ski Week.
The circle of conversation closed around me, and I backed away with my chocolate-chip cookie, unnoticed. I stopped attending PTA meetings. No one ever asked me why.
HELENA AND I , instead of taking a short nap, ended up sleeping through until the next morning. At eight, a quiet knock sounded. Slits of sun bordered the wooden blinds. A gray-haired woman bowed over a tray of food. Unfolding a low table from a corner, she set the food down. She smiled. As we stood, she rolled up our futon, opening the shutters to bright light. Then she bowed and left.
“Oh my gosh. What is this?” Helena poked at a square white bowl filled with brown beans on top of steamed white rice. As she lifted her chopsticks, trails of goo stretched like long ribbons of snot.
Nattō. I’d heard of this acquired taste—fermented soybeans. I’d also read that there were a lot of Japanese people who hated it, never mind gaijin like us.
Helena shuddered and put down her chopsticks. “No, thank you.”
I gulped and decided I would try it. “Nattō. It’s a traditional Japanese breakfast food.” It tasted like very slimy edamame beans. “It’s not so bad.”
I wondered if my mother had ever eaten nattō. If she had, she had never mentioned it, nor bought it. She only made Japanese food at New Year’s—sushi and all kinds of pickled foods she set out in lacquered boxes. But she wouldn’t show me how to cook.
I had loved to be in the kitchen with her, on a stool by the island, watching her chop up onions or frying potatoes on the stovetop, her hair held back with a bandanna. “Always cover head. If you go restaurant,” she pronounced, holding her small knife aloft, the same knife she used to cut everything from vegetables to large roasts, “and people no have hairnet, get out.”
There was one cookie in particular Mom made that I loved, a tiny raisin-filled tart. When I was eleven, I asked her to teach me how to make it.
Mom had sighed. Dad, from his easy chair in the adjoining family room, tsked. “It’ll be good for her. Go ahead.”
“Read ingredients, get out everything first,” Mom told me. She put her apron on, and I tied my little apron with Dutch flower girls embroidered on it around my waist. “First, wash hand.”
I did as she said, then pulled out the flour, the sugar, the raisins, the baking soda.
Mom cleaned the countertops where we’d roll out the dough.
“I can do that,” I said.
She handed the cloth to me and observed. “Don’t forget corner. Spray there.”
I scrubbed harder, knowing that if I missed any spot on the yellow Formica, she would see.
“Can I measure?” I noticed the look of displeasure, but she nodded. Nervously, I measured two cups of flour.
“Scrape! Scrape!” Mom cried, as though I were running into traffic. I scraped the top. “Must be even. Smooth.”
My hands quaked. I spilled the flour on the floor.
“Now see what happen you not careful? Not old enough. Sit.” Mom got out the broom. “Easier do myself.”
“Honey,” Dad said, not looking up, “she’s just a kid.”
“You teach, then. Your kid, too.” She swept up the floor.
“I’m sorry,” I said in a small voice.
She nodded. I felt her disappointment in my pores. “You play. I make cookie. You eat, okay? That your job.” She dismissed me from the kitchen.
That was the last time I asked her to teach me how to make anything. I wanted to know how she made her spaghetti, her fried chicken, her sushi, and especially her pizza. I waited for her to offer, but she never did.
When Craig and I got married, his mother asked what I wanted for a wedding gift. I asked for cookware: All-Clad pans, baking dishes, a bright green enameled Le Creuset Dutch oven. Then I got some cookbooks and taught myself how to cook.
Even this would not impress my mother. A few years ago, as part of dinner, I made my parents baked Brie in phyllo dough. “Ai! Sour,” Mom said. Dad did not comment, but put his fork down. Now if they came to dinner, I made the simplest of meals or ordered takeout. It was too hard to please them. Helena was the only one who knew of my secret Julia Child experiments, the one who watched me cook now, and whom I taught how to co
ok.
My mother once had similar aspirations. Usually, she presented us with the meat and potatoes Dad liked. But sometimes I saw her leafing through her big green cookbook, looking at recipes, marking the ones she wanted to try, cutting out interesting ones from the newspaper’s food section. Coq au vin.
“Where are we going to get an old rooster?” Dad couldn’t believe she wanted to cook coq au vin. “And I can’t have wine.”
“Alcohol cook away!” Mom tossed the recipe down, dejected. “Use chicken. Same thing.” She smiled. “Maybe raise chicken backyard, huh?”
“The coyotes will get them.” Dad laughed. “How about chicken and grape juice?”
My mother made coq au vin with chicken and grape juice that she soured with vinegar as a wine substitute. It tasted, if not like the original, then passable as another dish entirely. My father was delighted. “Best chicken ever!”
I wondered why she had not continued to try new recipes. Perhaps it was her heart; perhaps she had simply lost interest. But I still wished she would teach me how to make her signature dishes, the way only she made them. Even the chicken and grape juice.
Mom had also taken care with her cooking for class potlucks. While everyone else slapped together a casserole or a green salad, to Mom the potluck was a point of family pride. She would either borrow the neighbor’s giant pasta pot and make a boatload of spaghetti, or make pizzas from scratch. All day she’d bake or stir the sauce. “Enough for army,” she would say happily. “Nobody else do it, huh? Mine is best.” I was filled with pride for my mother as my classmates clamored for her food.
I did the same for Helena. Even if I had to stay up into the wee hours, I would make a homemade mac-and-cheese casserole that the other mothers raved over, or homemade cupcakes instead of store-bought for her class parties. And I took special pleasure in it, just as my mother had. At least in this I am best, my plate of cupcakes said.
I played with the remaining nattō on my plate, wishing it were a cup-cake instead.
“Aren’t you going to finish it?” Helena asked.
I wiped my mouth. “Another thing to know. In Japan, if you want to have more, you eat it all. If you are done, leave a little food on your plate.”
“All these rules.” Helena rubbed sleep from her eyes.
“Think of all the unspoken rules we have, Helena.”
“Like finishing our food?” Helena picked up the rolled egg omelet with her chopsticks. “A doughnut wouldn’t kill anybody.”
“Maybe tomorrow.” I smiled at her and finished my breakfast, still remembering my mother with every bite.
When assimilating into America and making new acquaintances, remember that Americans are a somewhat aloof group of people. They may avoid conversations of a personal nature, unlike Japanese.
This repression is difficult to become accustomed to, especially given the too-gregarious nature of other American habits, such as public hugging and back-slapping. It is puzzling to the Japanese person: why is it wrong to talk about personal subjects, but not wrong to hug someone you have just met?
It is best to smile and go along with what the American wants.
—from the chapter “Turning American,”
How to Be an American Housewife
Five
The small house was easy to find. Two lines, one above the other, stood for number two. It was close to its neighbors, built out of weathered wood with a simple tile roof. It looked very old, like modernization didn’t quite make it this far. The door practically opened onto the street, and it was windowless at its front. Behind was a rectangle of fenceless land. White towels and boxer shorts fluttered in the wind.
“Mom.” Helena waved her hand in front of my face. “Are we going to stand here forever?”
“Go ahead and knock.” I nodded to the door.
“You do it.” She shrank behind me.
I felt her anxiety. What if he shut the door in our faces? Or worse, was dead? It was strange not to know an entire side of the family. Dad’s family were on the East Coast, but at least they were on the same continent, and had always been easily available by phone.
I knocked. No one answered.
“He couldn’t even hear you.” Suddenly brave, Helena pounded with two fists.
I grabbed her shoulder. “Stop.”
Someone shuffled to the door and creaked it open, Haunted Mansion-style. A salt-and-pepper-haired Japanese man, probably in his early forties, blinked at the sudden light. He drew his kimono close around him. Was this our cousin Yasuo, Suki’s son? I momentarily held out my arms to embrace him, then remembered. Japanese did not hug. As my mother did not. “Sumimasen,” I said, “Watashi-wa Suiko.”
He interrupted in flawless English. “Aaah. Your pronunciation is terrible.”
“Yasuo?” I bowed.
His smile cracked his face, a plate breaking. “Yasuo doesn’t live here anymore. He moved to Kikuchi City.” He started to shut the door.
“Wait.” I stuck my foot into the door, certain the wood was old enough to break. “Surely you’ve got an address.”
“If you have business with him, you should have his address, not me.” He pushed my foot back with his bare one.
“We’ve come all the way from America.” Helena turned her big eyes up to him, tearing up. She was either exhausted or an excellent manipulator. I suspected the latter. “My mother is his cousin.”
The man relented. “Ah, yes, his American cousins. He has spoken of you.”
“You know him?” I said, hopeful.
“Yes.” He contemplated us.
“We’re on a mission.” Helena drew herself up importantly. “We need to find Great-Uncle Taro.”
“Taro?” The man’s laugh turned into a shuddering cough. “Go to Ueki High School. Yasuo teaches art part-time. Good-bye, now.” He quickly closed the door, hasping the lock.
“Where’s Ueki High School?” I asked the closed door.
“Not even a cup of tea or anything.” Helena’s unlaced Converse kicked up dirt on the road. “I thought he’d invite us to a tea ceremony.”
“The man obviously wasn’t feeling well.” I wondered how he knew Yasuo.
“Where to now?”
Good question. Helena watched me expectantly. “We’ll go back to the hotel and ask for directions,” I said. I had no idea if the high school was a quarter mile away or ten miles away. We would find it no matter what, even if I had to carry Helena on my back.
I attempted to retrace our steps to the hotel, but all the buildings had changed. I was leading us down a trail of blown-away bread crumbs.
“We’re lost,” Helena said.
I opened the map. “If I look carefully at the symbols, we can find our way back.” I tried to match up the map with the street signs. Slow work.
Helena trudged after me. The streets became narrower, until we arrived at what appeared to be a town square. On a platform in the middle, a large gong hung from a wooden altar. “That’s what they ring at New Year’s to chase away the evil spirits.” I walked up the steps of the platform. “There’s one in San Diego, too.”
“Have you ever been?” Helena touched the gong.
“I don’t go out on New Year’s. You know that.” I smiled at her. “Maybe we’ll go next year.” Funny how, now that I could go out on New Year’s, I no longer wanted to. New Year’s was the most important holiday to my mother, not an excuse to party. In high school, I’d get the occasional invitation to a bash and have to turn it down. “Stay home,” Mom said. “Never know what gonna happen, crazies run around. Besides, New Year for family.”
I would spend the evening watching my parents snooze in front of Dick Clark. Mike had long gone. When he was a teenager, my mother had said, he went out on New Year’s. “Boys different,” she said. “And maybe was mistake. Mike too wild. We do right thing for you.” I had to pay for every time Mike watched too much television and failed a test, or smoked a reefer at the park and got picked up by the cops.
&nb
sp; “I want to ring it.” Helena looped around. “Where’s the hammer?”
“It’s not New Year’s.” I didn’t want all the locals staring at us for breaking a taboo.
“It could be for any time. It’s in the middle of the square.”
I exhaled. “Please just listen to me for once.”
“Oh, Mom. I always listen to you.” Helena crossed her eyes and grinned. “I’m a good little girl.”
“We’ll find someone and ask where the high school is.”
Around the perimeter of the square were dozens of cherry trees, topped with clouds of pink, continuing all the way down the next road as far as we could see. Underneath, people picnicked on blankets spread out over the green grass. It was an Impressionist painting. My eyes filled.
“It’s so beautiful,” I whispered.
Helena shrank back. “Mom, what are you crying about? I swear, if it’s not a Hallmark commercial, it’s something else.” Nonetheless, she patted my hand.
I blew my nose into a tissue. “Get the camera, honey.”
“Only if you stop embarrassing me.” She reached into her knapsack. “Sheesh. They’re only flowers.”
“Stand by the trees.” I held my hand out for the camera.
She shook her head. “Of you. You never let me take pictures of you.” I hated getting my picture taken. Invariably, I was squinting, I had a double chin, or my mouth was twisted into a gargoyle grimace.
Dad had dozens of photos of Mom posing, shoulders back, bust out, hands on hips, red-lipsticked lips smiling like Lana Turner. From her twenties until now, her pose hadn’t changed. It said: Look at Me. Mine said: Don’t. Please.
Nonetheless, I stood by the gong, arranging myself into a Shoko-like stance. Helena snapped the photo. “Perfect.” She showed me the image. “You look happy for once.”
“I’m always happy, Helena.” And for once, I felt this was mostly true. I was happy here, even as we got lost and my feet blistered and I didn’t know where we would be the next night. I felt as calm as if everything were already taken care of. I waved to a passerby. “Let’s find this high school.”
How to Be an American Housewife Page 16