How to Be an American Housewife (2 page)

I came onstage in my beautiful silk kimono and red lips as my teacher played her shamisen. The bulbs shone in my eyes, but I would not squint. I lowered my gaze and snapped open my fan as I launched into the dance.

I heard an intake of breath from the men. I looked up and saw their admiring gazes fixed on me. I blushed, and kept on, knowing that wherever I went onstage their stares would follow. The other girls became invisible. I had more power in dance than I did at baseball.

I understood then that my skills in school or in sports would not make my life come about in the way I wished. I took my bows at that recital, vowing I would learn what I needed and make the best marriage possible.

 

 

THE WAR HAD CHANGED my life’s direction from East to West. I heard about Pearl Harbor from my father. I was in third grade. Father, a priest in a religion that believed in peace, was worried. “America is so big,” he fretted. “They will destroy us.”

Mother reassured him. “If the Emperor says we will win, it will be fine. Japan is mighty.”

Father seemed to be the only one around who questioned the Emperor. Everyone else thought we would triumph easily and show the West how strong we were. Even Father dared not bad-mouth the Emperor in public. The Emperor was supposed to be a god, and to say anything to the contrary could land you in prison.

At first, the war stayed far away, something we knew only from the radio. Then we began having blackouts and sirens. We built shelters in the hillsides to hide in when the planes came.

“Why would they bother with a countryside village, with no targets except chickens?” Father said.

But they did. One night, the alarms went off and we blacked out our windows so the planes wouldn’t have easy targets. “It’s just a drill,” Father told us. We didn’t bother to go out to the shelters.

But then we heard a great roar, the bombers overhead.

A blast rumbled the house. Something had been destroyed. At first light, I went outside. Our neighbor, Mrs. Miyama, and her little boy had been using their outhouse, and the light had been a beacon. Just like that, they were gone.

Another time, Taro, Suki, and I were walking to school. It was fall, the air just turning cold, the sky still gray. We had on our navy-blue-and-white school uniforms, our nice shoes that we could wear only to school. I remember that Taro’s hair was slicked down as flat as Mother could get it.

Our road went through farmland, a country road with country people, nothing of any significance. Nothing that the Americans should bother with. Suddenly we heard the roar again. It was deafening. Suki stopped and clapped her hands over her ears. Father had told me what to do.

“Drop!” I ordered, pulling my sister to the ground and falling on top of her. Taro fell, too.

There were popping noises and the brown dirt in front of us lifted. We were being shot at. Three little children. I put my head down and prayed that we would be all right. The plane flew past and I started to get up.

The noise returned as the plane turned around. “It’s coming back!” Taro yelled. He grabbed my arm, I grabbed Suki’s arm, and we jumped over an embankment into an irrigation ditch at the side of the road. I looked up and saw the pilot and the plane as it came low. It had a star on its side, a skull and crossbones on the tail, and a half-naked woman painted near the front. The pilot saw me and laughed. He had been playing with us, scaring us. If he had wanted to, he could have killed us. That was the first time I ever saw an American.

Suki’s face and body were muddy, and she was wailing. I took a chunk of mud out of her pigtails. Taro stood up and kicked at the dirt embankment, causing a slew of pebbles to fall down. He shook his fist toward the plane. “We will kill you all!” he shouted. “American fiends!”

 

 

I HAD NOT THOUGHT of this story for years.

I sat up on the couch in my San Diego living room, where I had been napping. Bright morning light made the room uncomfortably warm.

When I had told this story to my daughter, Sue, when she was still young enough to ask for stories, she had looked at me as if I were telling a grim fairy tale. “Why would they do that?” she had whispered, her eyes big.

“Those stories scare her,” my husband, Charlie, had said. “The past is past.”

He was right. And so I hardly talked about my past at all to my daughter. It was a lifetime ago. I had grown tired of my own stories, even of my old dreams. What good did dreams do me now? When you are young, dreams are the reason you pray for a new year and better luck.

Except for this. This one small dream of mine.

Taro and I together again.

I got a piece of tissue-thin airmail stationery and my husband’s fountain pen out of the desk drawer. Sitting down on the floor at the coffee table, I put the pen to my lips, thinking. From the garage, Charlie sang as he put laundry in the washer. One of my adult son Mike’s cats meowed at the screen door. I began my letter to Taro.

I
carried the letter into my bedroom, pushing the door shut with my shoulder. We had lived here for over thirty years, and still this bedroom door was not fixed. I looked about for a place to hide the letter. Not that my husband, Charlie, was nosy, but he always thought of reasons to say no to me.

I stuck the note into my underwear drawer in the dresser. I met the eyes of the two Japanese samurai dolls in their glass case on top of the bureau. The man had a sword, and the girl had a tiny metal knife tucked into her kimono sleeve. A secret weapon no one saw. Underneath their case I had a secret of my own.

I opened the little glass door and lifted out the dolls, then lifted up a hidden compartment. Inside that was my
hesokuri
, my secret money. I’d been pinching pennies all these years. Stealing out of Charlie’s change jar, saving bits of our tax refunds and Charlie’s Navy retirement checks. Now I had a lot. Enough to go to Japan. I touched the cash and smiled.

Then I opened my closet to decide what to wear to see my cardiologist, Dr. Cunningham. Lately, I had been seeing him too much, getting tests and medications. My heart was giving out, and other things along with it. Last summer, I’d gotten Bell’s palsy, paralyzing my face’s right side for a week. I got a patch, like a pirate, so my eye wouldn’t dry out. People crossed the street when they saw me coming. Once, they would have crossed the street to look at me.

“I ugly now,” I said to Charlie more than once, just to hear him tell me I was beautiful.

He didn’t disappoint. “You’re beautiful still, Shoko.”

“Why this happen?” I asked.

“No one knows,” he said. “Only God.”

Only God. I prayed to
kamisama
, not God, as my parents had raised me. I sighed and took out a pair of slacks I had worn the previous week, wondering if Dr. Cunningham would recognize them.

Unlike many of the new doctors at Balboa Naval Medical Center, where the doctors who just graduated from medical school go for training, Dr. Cunningham seemed to know what was going on.

I liked Dr. Cunningham. He looked just like Tyrone Power, a movie star I had loved when I was young. And he was single! If I had been young and single, I could have gotten him for sure. When I was in my teens, I’d been the prettiest girl around. High defined cheekbones, Cupid’s bow of a full mouth, shiny blue-black hair, and pale white skin, like a baby’s. I had an hourglass shape even with no girdle—a full bust, tiny waist (twenty-two inches), and womanly bottom. Men chased me from the time I turned twelve. And I enjoyed it, though being a nice girl, I shouldn’t have.

My own daughter was as enchanting, if not more so. She didn’t have short Japanese legs like I did. Her limbs were long and lean, her neck and fingers graceful. Eurasians were exotic, and men liked that, too. Sue could have had anyone, if she’d only waited for college before finding a husband, instead of marrying the first boy who came along. Which did not last, as I knew it would not.

I said to Dr. Cunningham, “My daughter could marry anyone, you know. Rich businessman love her.”

And then Dr. Cunningham said, “If she’s half as lovely as you, Mrs. Morgan, I’m missing out.” He was so nice!

I picked up the phone by the bed now and dialed Sue’s cell phone, hoping she wouldn’t see my number and let it go to voice mail. I held my breath, waiting. She picked up. “What’s up, Mom?” She sounded artificially cheerful. I imagined her sitting at her desk, twirling her dark brown hair around one finger, her pale face greenish in the light from her computer screen.

“Suiko-chan. You wanna take me doctor today?” I asked. “Got appointment after lunchtime.”

I heard her carefully repressed sigh. “Is Dad busy?”

“Don’t know. Maybe so.” I couldn’t tell her that Charlie had taken me yesterday and the day before that. I didn’t want to worry her.

“I have a meeting, Mom.” Sue was a manager at a financial services firm. Her voice turned brisk. “Are you still trying to get me to meet your doctor?”

I was glad she couldn’t see the surprise on my face. If I could have, I would have chosen a husband for Sue. Sue needed someone already established, who had done all the hard work already. She needed someone to take care of her, so the dark circles under her eyes would go away.

Dr. Cunningham would be perfect. But in America, they find husbands themselves. I had found Charlie myself, almost American-style, and maybe I would have done things differently if I could go back.

“He’s not interested, Mom,” Sue said, her voice so flat it made my heart ache even more. “He’s being polite. What’s he supposed to say? Don’t bother the man.”

“But you need
see
this guy. If I you, I grab him up! Single doctor won’t last long.” I tried to keep my voice light, but my daughter didn’t understand. A single doctor really wouldn’t last long.

Sue snorted. “Mom, please. I can find my own man.”

But she couldn’t.

I heard what she was saying.
Stay out of my life.
I sat for a moment in silence.
I am writing a letter to your uncle now,
I wanted to tell her.
I am going to Japan. Don’t you want to know?
I wanted to tell her so much more.

Dr. Cunningham had told me my heart was getting flabby, which meant it wasn’t working well. He wanted me to have surgery with a specialist. They would cut a wedge out and make it smaller. “It’s risky, but not as risky as a transplant,” he had said.

“Fine,” I had said. It took them months to schedule anything. I’d be to Japan and back before the first pre-op appointment.

“Is there something else, Mom?” Sue was trying to sound patient but not succeeding.

I tried to think quickly of something that would make her want to come with me. My daughter was too sensitive, too fast to hear criticism. Perhaps it was partially my fault.

I did not have the knack of subtlety. When she was a college sophomore, Sue had come to me while I was in my bedroom one afternoon. She squeaked the door closed, her face so pale, even in the golden light coming in from the west, that I thought she was ill. She sat on my side of the bed, next to the photo of my parents. “What’s a matter you, Suiko-chan?” I asked her.

“Craig and I are going to move in together,” she whispered.

I was shocked. I shouted at her. “You do that,” I said, “and we no pay college no more! You bring shame on us.” In my town, my family would never have been able to show their faces again if I had done something so scandalous.

Sue had looked around. “Shame from whom? We don’t have any family here. The neighbors don’t care.” The afternoon sun made her hair glint red. “Besides, you’re hardly paying anything. I have a ton of loans.”

“I no can hold my head up.” I was really hoping this would make her ditch Craig.

She had sighed. Nineteen years old, she was at the peak of her beauty. She thought her beauty would go on forever. The way I thought mine would. She needed to find someone better while she still could. “Then it’s Plan B. We’re getting married.”

“Marry?” I closed my eyes and changed my tactics. My lovely daughter could not marry this person, the first boy she’d ever kissed. I had told her that you should only kiss if you were going to get married, but that was to keep her from being a slut. I never thought she’d take it so seriously. “Why you gonna marry same guy you drag around high school? That’s why we send college. Find good man marry.”