How to Be an American Housewife (13 page)

Her building was tall glass that reflected the clouds and sun. The company was so big, it took up all the office space. At the receptionist’s desk, I asked where Sue worked.

“Second floor, New Accounts. You want me to call her?” the girl asked. She snapped her gum. Rude.

Another young woman was already heading through the double doors. “I go with her, okay?” I walked in behind the woman before she could let the doors close.

“It’s upstairs to the right,” the woman told me. Her clothes were so chic; her perfume smelled expensive. It made me wish that we could switch positions.

I thanked her. My mind whirred with the stories I needed to tell my daughter, to get her to understand why I needed her. I should have called. Maybe she had a meeting; maybe this wasn’t a good time. How could I work Japan into a two-minute conversation? This needed hours, days maybe.

I found my way to my daughter.

 

 

SUE HUNCHED over her small desk, typing. I looked around. Fabric walls not as tall as I was stretched from here to the smoked-glass window. The only light came from dim green fluorescents. I shook my head. This had to be the wrong place. My daughter was a manager. Managers had offices overlooking the ocean, didn’t they? And secretaries doing all their work for them.

“Suiko-chan?”

“Mom? What on earth are you doing here?” Her tone was incredulous and, I thought, annoyed.

As usual, my daughter had blue-black circles under her eyes, as though life had socked her in the face. Hereditary, she said. Not from my side, I said.

Her hair was pulled back into a messy ponytail; too-long bangs hung over her face. I bit back my urge to tell her to straighten up. How could she get promoted looking like she’d rather be anywhere but here?

“Come say hi to you.” I sat down. My feet dangled in the chair. Sue studied my brown wool dress slacks and the cream cashmere sweater I always wore to the Commissary, along with my heavy gold rope chain. If I didn’t dress up for the store, I would never get to dress up.

Her coworker popped up from the next cubicle, wearing more makeup than a prostitute would have back in my day. “Hey, is this your mom?”

Sue nodded. “This is Shoko. Mom, this is Marcy.” Sue seemed relieved to be interrupted. I shifted.

“How you do?” I held out my hand, my pronunciation careful.

“I didn’t know Sue was half Asian,” Marcy marveled. “I thought she was Hispanic.”

“Filipina, maybe look like.” People thought all Asians looked alike. Even Sue had a hard time telling the difference. I had tried to describe what the subtleties were; she still could not pick up on it. If she ever lived in Asia, she would know.

“I don’t know these things.” Marcy disappeared back into her den.

I wondered if Sue was ashamed to tell them about me. About herself. I played with my diamond engagement ring. It was too loose, spinning around my knuckle so much I was afraid it would fall off. Sue stared at that, too, then at my face, at the sunken hollows under my cheekbones. My face burned.

“No office yet? I thought you manager.” She had pictures of Helena all over her walls. Helena in a school play, Helena at the beach. None of me or Charlie. No men. I touched the plastic laminate of the desk and blanched. “So
kitanai
.” Dirty. “They too cheap for cleaning woman?”

Sue’s brow furrowed. I spoke again, quickly. “Not your fault, Sue.” No matter how much I tried to help her, or how hard Sue worked, she could not get ahead.

Sue had always been bright, always in the gifted classes, but other parents were able to boost their children in ways I couldn’t. One February afternoon when Sue was in eighth grade, she arrived home from school and threw her backpack to the side.

“Pick that up, Sue.” Then I saw the worried look on her face, still flushed from the walk and still round with baby fat. That year she had grown tall, bigger than most of the boys at her school. “What happen? Boy bother you?”

“I have to do a project for the science fair, and I don’t know what to do.” She sat in our old armchair and pulled off the lace doily from the arm, twirling it on her finger.

“Teacher no tell how?”

She shook her head. Every night, Sue struggled with her science and math homework as I watched helplessly. English and art were her subjects. Her father was no aid, either. These matters were beyond us, especially the way they were taught in the indecipherable “new style.” I thought quickly. “I help,” I said to her.

On the base of the mountain behind the house, I knew of a hollow that filled with rainwater if we had a good wet season. It was an easy, short ascent that Charlie had taken us to before, but still I held on to Sue’s shoulder as we walked the orange-brown dirt trail. I carried an old pickle jar. “We see if pollywog come yet.”

“Where do they live?”

“Hide underground. Egg dry up.” We crested the small hill. Yes, there it was, the small pond, bordered by boulders and wild shrubs and an old mattress someone had dumped. I sent her down with the jar. “Go find egg.”

Sue grew the tadpole eggs in two jars. One she kept in a dark closet, the other in the light. Naturally, the one in the light grew better. It was as good of a project as I could come up with. Sue was happy with it, reporting on their progress every day. “When they turn into frogs I’ll put them back in the pond,” she said.

We made the science fair display board out of an old cardboard box. I cut it as square as I could with a pair of scissors, but it turned out crooked. Sue used her father’s old typewriter to type out her findings. We carefully lettered the headings by hand and glued it all onto the board with rubber cement.

“It looks pretty good,” Sue said.

“Course. ’Cause Mommy help you,” I said. She smiled.

The morning of the school science fair, I drove her to school. We walked into the auditorium with the sign and the jars.

Instantly I saw that her project wasn’t right. The other students had bought their display boards, so they were bright white and perfectly straight. The headings were made out of stickers. But that wasn’t all that caught my attention. It was the quality. One had a big machine heart that pumped fluid from one plastic compartment to the next. One had chemistry-lab results posted, with charts and results from experiments that could never be done at home. Another had a huge working model of an engine.

“How do this?” I asked Sue, pointing to the heart.

“His dad’s a cardiologist,” she said. “That one’s dad is a mechanical engineer. That one’s mother is a chemist.” She drew her arms into her body and slouched. I did not tell her to stand up straight.

In front of the stage, I spotted Sue’s science teacher in a cluster of parents. “I be right back,” I said to her, walking over to the teacher.

I had only seen him once before, at the Open House in the fall. He was a short man, even shorter than I was. He looked like a skinny garden gnome. “’Scuse me, Mr. Moynahan,” I said in my sweetest voice, tapping him on the shoulder.

He turned away from the other parents, who smiled smoothly and blankly. This neighborhood school had both wealthy and not-so-wealthy families, but these parents all looked like professionals to me. Well groomed, the women in short heels and slacks, the men in polo shirts and khakis. I looked no different, I thought, in my own slacks and sweater set with my string of pearls. I looked like I belonged.

Mr. Moynahan held out his hand. “Mrs. Morgan! Isn’t the fair wonderful?”

I nodded. “Oh, yes. But why you no tell Sue ’bout what buy? How we know how do all this?” I gestured to the machines and charts. “How I know all this?”

He frowned, then shrugged his plaid-shirt-covered shoulders. “This is how science fairs are always done.”

“But you no tell kid how do. I no doctor. I no scientist. How expect me know?” I tried to keep my voice polite, but I could not remember when I was last so angry. “No fair, parent do all work.” I took his arm and walked him back to where Sue’s project leaned crookedly on a table. She was nowhere to be found. “See? I don’t know ’bout these boards you can buy at store.”

“Haven’t you ever been to a craft store, Mrs. Morgan?” He examined Sue’s project.

“I don’t got money for craft store.” I tried to think of how I could express myself better and wished Sue would come help. I spotted her in the corner with her friends, turned deliberately away from me. I leaned toward Mr. Moynahan. “You gonna give my daughter bad grade ’cause you no tell her how to do this? Huh?”

He took a red Sharpie out of his pocket and wrote a B on her board. “That’s for the project, Mrs. Morgan. Not for the display. The display only matters if you go to the county.”

“And you going tell people ’bout board and how make look pretty?” I wanted him to tell me that next year he would do a better job. Next year, maybe someone like Sue would be saved this trouble.

His face rumpled as he tried to decipher what I had said. “But it’s already done. Don’t worry about it.” He patted my hand. “You know, science isn’t for everyone. Sue’s a nice girl. Too quiet. I barely notice her.” He gave me a little salute and turned and walked away.

I stood and waved to Sue. She walked over, her short heels making a dull clicking noise on the tile. “What?”

“These people know nothing.” I shook my head. “No help kid out.”

“Mom. Lower your voice.” Sue shrank herself down again.

“I tell you what, science fair not fair.” I watched the parents, undoubtedly congratulating their Ph.D. minds on completing an eighth-grader’s work. The cardiologist dad slung an arm casually around his son. I thought about putting my arm around Sue to comfort her, in the American way, but while I was thinking about it the moment passed and Sue moved out of reach. “No good school,” I said instead.

“Just forget about it, Mom.”

I looked up at her. She was so beautiful, so tall. Only a few friends ever came around. Her teachers hardly noticed her. How could she be so invisible to everyone? “You got speak up, Suiko, get what you want.”

She sighed heavily, opened and closed her mouth. I wondered what she had been about to say.

I watched the parents for a minute, trying to figure out who had money and who didn’t, who was nice and who wasn’t, and was unable to. I looked at my own clothes and felt like a pretender.

The bell rang. Sue moved around her tadpole jars. The parents began filing out. I stayed put, watching my daughter move aimlessly, her head down.

“Sue, I tell you. Not right, how they do this. I talk principal.” I put my hand on her shoulder.

She shrugged away. “Forget it, okay?” She turned and strode off. “I’ll see you after school.” I waited until she left, then went home myself.

 

 

“ MOM , WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?” Sue’s voice startled me over the clicking keyboards and phone beeps in her office. Maybe I had been daydreaming too long.

I breathed in and out. What would Sue believe? The Marine base with the Commissary was a few miles away from her work. As retirees, we got to use it as much as we liked. I had never been there without Charlie. I looked Sue in the eyes, a lighter, more golden brown than mine. “Oh, you know, I go Commissary. Thought I say hi.” I waved. “Hi.”

“Where’s Dad?”

I made a show of rolling my eyes. “Daddy never let me get good food. Always penny-pinching. I go alone, get what I want. Dad help Mike move.”

Sue twirled her pen in her fingers. I could read her.
My mother has lost her mind.
“I’m surprised to see you, that’s all.”

“You no want me here, I go.” I knew she would not tell me to leave. “Want to see where daughter work.”

She glanced at her clock, calculating how many more minutes she had to spend with me before she could politely say good-bye. It was something she had started doing early on, around age nine. I couldn’t say I blamed her. I had done the same with her sometimes when she was younger, wanting only to rest when she was ready to play.

“Mom. I can take lunch now. You want me to come with you?”

“If you like.” I took care to make it sound like her suggestion. “Maybe get food for you, too. I take home and put fridge.”

“Mom, I’m fine. I don’t need you to buy groceries.” She was offended.

She was a single parent. Of course we would help her whenever we could. We didn’t have much, but we had more than enough for food. “I like to. My treat.” I inhaled again.
I must talk to her about Japan.
“Maybe good mommy-daughter time, huh?”

She gave me a strange look. True, I had never used such a term. And, true, I had never tried to do things with her, the way some other modern American mothers did. I never took her out to lunch. We never chatted on the phone. I felt my heart do a fast thump-thump, unexpected.

I needed to tell Sue the other bit of news before I told her about Japan. Aunt Suki, my sister. I studied the desk. “Aunt Suki die.”

“Today?”

“Couple month ago. Her husband just now write.” I shrugged, not wanting Sue to see how hurt I was. “Always forget ’bout little Shoko in America, yeah?”

“Was it her heart?”

I nodded. “Poor little Suki. Always she was happy one.”

“That’s terrible.” Sue put her hand on mine.

She did not know how terrible. Sue did not know the bond of a sibling. Not with Mike. For this I would always be sorry. Nonetheless, I did not want to upset her with my sadness. “
Tokidoki
, huh? We know coming for long, long time.” I smiled at my daughter. “Now you take me Commissary or what?”

 

 

MIRAMAR WAS RIGHT DOWN the road from where Sue worked, past car dealerships and furniture wholesalers. I looked at the disabled jets on show from the street. “I live here so long and never go single air show or museum.”

“I didn’t know you were interested in jets.” Sue drove my car carefully, unused to the controls.