How to Be an American Housewife (5 page)

Mother was tough; she came from farming peasant stock. She had a long torso, short powerful legs, and wide feet. The type of person who could squat in a field like a salaryman sat at a desk. Her hair had been half gray since I could remember. Her kimonos were darker colors, solid blues and reds flecked with white.

“Shoko-chan,” she would say, “take this for me.” I would take over stirring the pot of vegetables while she shifted my little sister Suki from her back to her front to nurse. In those days, children got nursed for a long time, until age two or three or even older. Sometimes that was all of the nourishment they got. It certainly was for my sister.

I watched my mother, her weariness etched on her face though her voice soared, her breasts two sad sacks of rice, and her song seemed more like a warning to me.

 

 

WHEN I HAD MY OWN DAUGHTER, I had tried to teach her how to cook, but Sue was a clumsy child. Nervous.

Once, at age seven or so, she made cookies with me. “Measure flour. Make flat with knife,” I said to her. She spilled the flour all over immediately, then the sugar on the floor, then stuck a finger up her nose as she stood there, almost crying. I couldn’t believe it. When I was seven, I was cooking and going to the shops alone, and my child couldn’t even measure flour or tie a shoe.

“You watch, okay? Sit watch.”

She had sat with a sad face on the chair.

“When old, no spill, you can help, okay?” I felt bad for her, but I did not have the time or energy to redo what she had done.

Now I realized I was too impatient. I should have taught her how to clean up. I should have shown her what to do as my mother had for me. Maybe that was why Sue could not learn my own
isobushi
, hear my own warning.

I
returned to the bedroom to kneel before my shrine, which I kept in a glass-shelved curio cabinet. When I left Japan, Father gave it to me, knowing there would be no Japanese churches where I was going. It was about the right size for a Barbie doll, maybe a little smaller. It looked exactly like a little wooden temple, with a glass door, writing, a tiny altar, everything. There were three small bowls for freshwater, uncooked rice, and salt.

The shrine had an envelope with special blessed tissue paper in it. I used the paper on anything that hurt. I wet it and put it on any sore spot, like a cut, and by morning, the sore spot had disappeared. The kids even used it on their zits.

Charlie dismissed it as toilet paper. Charlie was a Mormon. I did not believe in his God, he did not believe in mine.

Here I also kept my other small treasures: a few Japanese dolls with real hair and silk kimonos; clay pots the children made; photos.

I clapped my hands twice for the
kamisama
’s attention, praying for my heart. I prayed for Mike and Sue to be happy. I asked that my granddaughter, Helena, do well in school. I wanted Charlie’s knee to be healed. Most of all, for a good ten minutes, I prayed for my brother.

Charlie came in with more laundry. “Why do you already have your good clothes on? Your appointment’s not until after lunch.”

“I like get ready early.” I sat on my dressing stool.
I want to go to Japan,
I wanted to say.
I want you to come.

But Charlie was looking grumpy. He rooted around in his sock drawer. “Where are my thick white socks?”

“How I know? You do laundry,” I reminded him. “Why you no go walk?” It would improve his mood. Besides, the doctor had told him to lose weight or get diabetes. His potbelly was so big it pitched him forward and rounded his posture. Nothing like the skinny corpsman I had met.

He put on some other socks and cheap tennis shoes from the drugstore. “My knee hurts.” Charlie hated sweating. In Vietnam, his skin got tan—really his freckles growing together. He said that was enough outdoor time for him forever.

I wished that my knee was the only thing hurting me. “That ’cause you got two hundred extra pounds on it,” I said. Charlie huffed and puffed and left the room. His idea of a walk was down four houses, up three houses.

I went into the living room. Charlie turned up Rush Limbaugh so loud you could hear it from outside. Sometimes I listened, too. Charlie nodded along, and I asked questions. “Why these feminazis love hate everybody so much? Why Rush got yell all time?”

Today, wanting quiet, I went in the backyard with my Sanka. Charlie had built a patio of old bricks; it was the best thing he had ever made, because he had done it properly, on a sand bed with a wooden border holding it in place. Overhead, I grew Chinese wisteria on the porch roof, the wild vines shooting up onto the house’s roof, too. Purple flowers would be hanging down soon.

I fretted again about my trip to Japan. About my
hesokuri
, my hidden stash of money, and how I would have to ask Sue to buy the airline tickets on the computer. I sat down and formulated a plan for finding my brother at his last known place of employment, the high school where he had been principal. I had so much to tell him.

Taro was the only person left in my family, the only one who knew me, the real Shoko. We had our differences. What brother and sister didn’t? But sometimes I swore he could read my mind.

That was all gone now. Taro had not spoken to me since I married Charlie, even though my father had endorsed the marriage. My brother hated Americans, and me as well, both for marrying an American and for other reasons I had long preferred not to think about. But fifty years was a long time to hold a grudge, even for someone who thought forgiveness was a weakness.

Japanese culture is different from American. We do not forgive readily. Sometimes we accept, which is different from forgiveness. In cases like this, where I’d done something Taro thought was evil, the taint would cling to me forever.

After the war, my father and I accepted the reality of the new Japan. Even after the way it ended.

I remembered the afternoon in 1945, jumping rope outside my house with Taro and Suki nearby. A cloudy, muggy summer day. Suddenly a bright light, then a shaking rumbling unlike any earthquake.

I dropped the jump rope and instinctively reached for my brother and sister, holding them tight. We didn’t know what it was, but the sinking dread and nausea in my stomach told me everything I needed to know. I rocked my younger siblings until my mother came and brought us inside.

Nagasaki, fifty miles away.

We were spared for the most part. Except that many got sick, or died too young, like my parents. Mysterious blood ailments, hair falling out. Suki’s heart and mine were likely sickened by this poison. And for all I knew, Taro’s was, too. Perhaps that was why he could not accept the way things had changed.

It seemed to me that the Japanese should have surrendered sooner. We were out of food, our people were dying, and thousands more died in Hiroshima. It seemed that the Emperor would have every last man, woman, and child die in Japan before he would give up his holy throne. The price was too high, too high either way.

 

 

I DRANK THE LAST of my bitter Sanka and went back inside the house. The floors were torn up, the carpeting halfway pulled back. Charlie had gotten a discount on hardwood flooring and had been trying to install it. Only half the room was floored, with jagged edges too far from the wall.

My husband fancied himself a great handyman. He would watch a home-improvement show on television and say, “That looks easy. I’ll try it.” But he always managed to leave out a step. As when he put in our sod—he put it over dead grass, then forgot to water it.

So this was why our house was crumbling. If we had money for supplies, we never had it for professionals to do the work.

I knew not to say anything about his flooring. It would only make him angry—angry that I had noticed—and frustrated with himself. “Charlie,” I said instead, over the radio, “how ’bout you and me go on trip?”

He groaned, massaging his knee. I sat beside him and motioned for him to put his foot on my lap so I could massage it. “We’ve already been everywhere. Where do you want to go?”

“Different now. Back then, work all time. When we live Hawaii, we never leave Honolulu even.”

“There was no reason to.” Charlie didn’t want to see the other islands, not even the volcanoes or rain forests, no matter how much Mike and I begged. “Oahu had everything we needed. It was too expensive to go all over the place.”

I took my hand off of him. “I want go Japan.”

He was quiet, like he didn’t hear. Then he said, “Why do you want to go there?” like I had said I wanted to go to Iraq in the middle of the war.

“You promise me we go back. I no go back. Now we almost too old to move. My sister dead. I see Taro, before too late.”

Still he said nothing. Maybe he was hoping I’d shut up if he ignored me. “How ’bout it?” I asked.

“Maybe next year,” he said. “We don’t have the money now.”

“I do.” I plumped the brown floral couch cushion. We didn’t have money for furniture for fifteen years after we moved in here. Charlie had put a redwood patio chair set in this room. It had two seats, vinyl cushions, and a table in the middle with a hole for an umbrella. Mike was too embarrassed to have his friends over. He moved out as soon as he could. Sue was little and didn’t know any better. “I save little bit here and there.”

“Your brother won’t even see you,” he said. “All these years, you hardly talked about him. You said you’re dead to him.”

“He see me if I’m there. We both old now.” I wanted to believe this. Taro may have softened with age.

Charlie shook his head. “I’m not coming.”

“Because your knee?” He still said nothing. “You too proud. Not use cane. Not tell doctor you need new knee. Always wearing slippery shoes, falling all over place.” Charlie liked to wear Italian dress shoes, too narrow for his feet.
“Baka-tare!”
Stubborn fool.

“Your doctor won’t let you go,” Charlie said. “You’re too sick, Shoko.”

“Maybe I no live through surgery,” I said, saying what everyone was afraid to say. “I want go.” I thought of something. “If Dr. Cunningham say okay, you say okay, too? You go with me?”

Charlie nodded, looking relieved. “But he’s not going to say okay, Shoko.”

“Deal,” I said, sticking my hand out and shaking my husband’s.

I
n the afternoon, Charlie drove us home from Dr. Cunningham. He had said no to Japan, just as Charlie said he would.

“You’ll need oxygen by the time you get off the plane.” Dr. Cunningham crossed his arms and spoke as to a child. He was even more handsome when he looked stern.

“I do fine,” I said.

He and Charlie exchanged looks. “If you put this off, you will die,” Dr. Cunningham said quietly. “I’m afraid there’s no other way to say it.”