How to Be an American Housewife (17 page)

L
ate that night, I awoke to find Mike staring at me, his chair only inches away from the bed. “Last time you in hospital is when I had you,” I said, remembering decades ago like it was yesterday. I even remembered my Naval Hospital room, the big blond woman sharing it who screamed, “Take it out already!”

“Really?” Mike said, as though he had not heard this story a million times before. I knew I retold stories. I wasn’t senile.

“I was in labor forty hours,” I said. Charlie had wondered if this was why Mike seemed to be on his own planet, since his head had been squeezed over and over and his heart rate had dropped with each contraction, but I was sure the doctors would not have let me labor so long unless there was no danger.

He took my hand, which he hadn’t done since he was four years old. “Are you going to be all right, Mom?”

Part of me wanted to tell him, of course, and the other part of me wanted to scream that I wasn’t God. “I don’t know,” I said, for the first time since I’d been admitted. He looked down at the ground, his long dark lashes casting a shadow on his cheek. Such beautiful lashes wasted on a boy, I used to say. My poor daughter had skimpy ones, like mine. “Don’t you cry like Daddy.” I slapped him gently on the face.

He looked up and his eyes were clear. “Get some sleep,” he said. He settled back into the chair with his book.

“It not too late for you, you know it?” I said. “Get out there, and get what you want, Mike. You waste your life sit around.” In my hospital bed, I felt brave. I would never have said anything like that to my son before. He was stubborn and proud, and if anyone criticized him, he would turn away forever, like he had from Charlie when Charlie tried to make him stay in college.

Mike would have been happier as the son of a farmer. Just him and the land and some animals. No people to worry about.

In the past, I thought about what life would have been like with Mike and Ronin, if we had come here and started a company. No moving around for the Navy. Maybe it would have been better, maybe it would have been far worse.

But then—I wouldn’t have Sue. Or Helena. I didn’t look backward. The past was past.

When I thought of Ronin today, it wasn’t with heartache. It was with fondness. Nothing could have been different in the circumstances I was in. The person I used to be could have made only one choice; the grown-up Shoko might have made a different one. That was how life was. You only figured out the right thing after you were old.

 

 

MIKE SHUT HIS BOOK and leaned into my face. Even though he thought I was dying, I was still surprised by his response. “I’ll do better, Mom,” he said simply.

“Good.” I smoothed out the blanket with my hand. I’d done it so often I had a waffle-weave burn. My mouth felt parched, but the pitcher at my bedside was empty. I pressed the nurse buzzer.

“What do you need?”

“Water.” No one was at the nurses’ station. They were always so busy here.

Mike stood over me to reach the pitcher. His hair, already well streaked with white, fell into his eyes, and the stubble on his face was a week old. No wonder he couldn’t get a job. “I’ll get it, Mom.” Close up, I could see holes in his jeans. They weren’t the stylish kind. He smelled of cigarette smoke. I coughed. He left the room.

The nurse beeped the intercom. “What do you need?”

“Nothing,” I said.

Mike came back and poured me a cup, handing it to me. Then he sat down and opened the fantasy novel he’d brought, like the ones I’d been shocked at when he was a teenager, with a huge-breasted lady on the cover, bursting out of her metal bustier and riding a dragon. Through the night he read, as I slept.

C
harlie came to see me in the morning, wiping tears out of his eyes.

“What happened to the big, tough Marine I marry?” I said. Charlie used to refer to himself that way, when he was in the war and attached to Marine units. It was a point of pride I wanted him to remember. Now if my husband cried, I had to be strong, and I wanted to be weak.

He didn’t answer, just picked up my cup of ice chips and offered a spoon to me. I opened my mouth. My lips peeled dry and my mouth wrinkled like a prune. He applied Vaseline to them.

“I want Japanese food. Can go get some?”

“No sushi. The raw fish could make you sick,” he said. “And nothing too salty. You’re restricted.”

“I know, I know,” I said, picking at the white thermal blanket. “Get just noodles, then. Hate hospital food. Taste like paper.” All I ate were ice chips and Ensure. I did not even take soup. I lifted my hip up and grimaced.

He sort of laughed. “You need to
shi-shi
?”

“No.” I said. I felt sorry to be so cranky to Charlie, especially when he was being helpful, but I couldn’t help it. I wanted to be home, where I wouldn’t get woken up by a blood pressure cuff at three a.m. I had to be nice to everyone in the hospital, polite and meek, when I really wanted to shoot them all between the eyes.

“Did they talk Taro?” I asked Charlie.

“I don’t know. Mike talked to Sue, not me.”

Of course Mike would never think to ask. Had Taro told them anything? Everything?

I didn’t know if I wanted Taro to tell my story or not. In one way, it would be easier on me if he did. Then I wouldn’t have to.

Telling Charlie about Mike had not been easy. Mike had been born a month and a half earlier than he should have been, by Charlie’s calculations. This would have been all right had he not weighed nine pounds, four ounces, with the fully developed lungs of a baby born at term.

“I didn’t know he would look so Japanese,” Charlie marveled often the first month, sending me into guilty spasms. He wanted to believe Mike was his.

Finally, when Mike was six weeks, I couldn’t stand it anymore. Charlie had a right to know. One evening, when Mike was asleep, I told Charlie everything in my poor English. I began crying as I did so, remembering it all, the stress of having this secret for months. I was the only one who knew. Not even Ronin knew.

Charlie simply sat and stared into the corner. I waited for him to storm out, shout at me. Then Mike woke and wailed.

“It’s time for his feeding.” Charlie prepared Mike’s bottle.

I picked up Mike and changed him, still waiting for a reaction.

Instead, Charlie took Mike from me and sat down, holding the milk bottle to Mike’s lips, cooing at him as Mike stared up, his black eyes watching Charlie’s face intensely. The only sound was Mike’s greedy eating, slurping in too much air.

Finally Charlie spoke without taking his eyes off the baby. “What’s past is past, Shoko. All right?” He put Mike on his shoulder to burp him. “My name is on the birth certificate. He is my son.” Charlie’s eyes turned a brilliant sapphire and he glared at me with something like defiance.

I was shocked. I knew Charlie forgave and forgot more easily than most, but this—I had been expecting more. Instead he gently rocked the gas out of Mike.

“No bother you?” I asked.

Charlie dabbed at the spit-up on Mike’s chin. “Of course it bothers me. But I knew you had boyfriends before me. I knew about your other Americans. But I can’t do anything about it now. What is it you say,
tokidoki
?”

I nodded.

“So let’s not talk about it anymore.” Charlie stood.

“How can do this?” I still couldn’t understand.

Charlie squished his eyes closed. He spoke next in a low, authoritative voice, the sort I had not heard him use. “I never want to hear about it again, do you understand?”

I drew in my breath and nodded. “Yes. Never.”

Mike began crying. “Come on, big guy. Time for bed.” Charlie hummed a lullaby, carrying him out of the room.

I exhaled. How lucky I was.

 

 

DR. CUNNINGHAM KEPT SAYING, “We’ll see, we’ll see,” whenever I asked him about the surgery. This morning when he came in, saying, “Knock, knock,” before he entered, as he always did, I asked him if I was too old to have the operation.

“It’s not that,” he said, hesitantly. “If we can get your blood pressure up, we’ll be fine.”

Always “we,” as if we were a team that could control my body. “How about monkey heart?” I asked.

He grinned, but I wasn’t kidding. “We’ll do our best, Shoko, that much I can promise.” Then he touched my foot. “I’ll get you another blanket. You’re freezing.” He always said this. Although I always felt fine.

“I been here a week,” I said, pouting. “When I get out?”

“We’re moving you to Navajo Hospital,” Dr. Cunningham said. “They have a special cardiology unit.”

Charlie looked concerned. “Does the military insurance cover that?”

“You bet, if we order it.” Dr. Cunningham frowned at Charlie, as though he thought Charlie would want to pay no matter what. But you never knew which benefits the government would cut, even though Charlie wouldn’t have stayed in the damn military for over twenty years if he hadn’t been promised so much when he retired.

I sighed. “You better tell everybody.” I looked up at Dr. Cunningham’s concerned, handsome face. At least Sue would get to meet him. I pulled the covers up to my chin and smiled despite myself.

 

 

AT NAVAJO, my new cardiologist was Dr. Jenkins, a thin man in his sixties whose bald head shone.

“If I him,” I said to Charlie, “I wear wig. Easter egg head.”

Charlie laughed so hard he snorted. This made me laugh.

Dr. Jenkins came in, looking at his notes. “As soon as the blood pressure is stabilized,” he said to the machine behind me, “we can get moving on the procedure.”

“Who you talking to, the wall?” I said. Charlie had told me lots of good doctors had horrible manners, but I didn’t care. “You going do it or what? No can wait forever.”

“Dr. Su performs this particular procedure.” Dr. Jenkins finally managed to lower his gaze to mine. His eyes were brown and tired.

I held out my hands. “Where Dr. Su?”

“When you’re a suitable candidate, he will see you.” Dr. Jenkins turned on his heel to go.

Charlie picked up my hand from where it lay limp on the scratchy white bedsheets. I turned it over and showed him my palm.

“Look here. Life line going away.” To me it appeared to be fading, smoothing out.

He pursed his lips and said nothing.

“What, don’t you think I be okay?”

“Yeah.”

I took my hand back. “Help up. I wanna go bathroom.”

“I’ll get the bedpan.”

I shook my head. I would have to prove to them I could handle the surgery or they’d give up on me, saying my blood pressure wasn’t good enough or I was too weak. I could see it happening already. Transfer her there. Give her to this doctor. Wait and wait some more. They wanted to let me die.

“My feet not so swollen. Come on.”

Charlie unhooked me from the monitors and put his arm around me. I swung my legs out of bed. His feet slipped a bit.

“Careful,” I said.

“You’re too weak,” he said, out of breath, losing his grip. I started to fall and gripped the metal bed rail.

He caught me. “Sorry.”

“Watch what doing.” Slowly, carting the IV bag, we made it to the bathroom. He helped me raise my gown and sit on the toilet.

When I finished, Charlie turned on the sink for me to wash my hands. I held on to the edge and looked in the mirror. My hair was half white, since I hadn’t dyed it in so long. I needed lotion and there were big bags under my eyes. My face had lost its moon shape and my cheekbones stuck out. “I’m too skinny,” I said wonderingly, touching my collarbone. “Heh, all my life I want be skinny, and now too much.”

In the mirror, I could see Charlie’s downcast eyes. Did he not want to look at me? “Help me back bed,” I said.

A nurse appeared. “Where are you? You went off the monitors.” She was African-American, older, short like me. She was a nice lady who brought me vanilla ice cream in a paper cup when it wasn’t on the menu. She saw where we were and rushed to help me.

“We’re fine,” Charlie insisted.

The nurse came over to help anyway. “Good job, honey,” she told me. “You keep it up.”

I nodded, too winded to speak. I never thought I would have just as good a chance of going
shi-shi
by myself as I did of climbing Mount Everest with no oxygen.
Maybe the doctors are right,
I thought for the first time ever. Scared, I blocked it out of my head. I smiled at the nurse. “How ’bout some of that vanilla ice cream?”