How to Be an American Housewife (18 page)

THE DAY AFTER I went to the bathroom on my own, my blood pressure stabilized and Dr. Su finally came to see me. He was a friendly-looking guy about fifty years old, wearing wire-frame aviator-style bifocals. His hair was thin and bald in front, but he didn’t comb it over. I liked that. Nice white smile, too. I decided that I would get my teeth bleached as soon as I got out of there. Have my own movie-star teeth.

Charlie and I held our breath as Dr. Su looked at my charts and at my blood pressure history. “Looks good, Shoko. We’ll do it tomorrow.”

“So soon?” I asked.

“Yes.” Dr. Su said. “If your vitals hold.” He made some notes on a piece of paper. “Sign this release, please.”

I read it. It was the usual: you can die from this operation or from anesthesia, et cetera. I signed. “If my brain die,” I said, “you let me go, right? No keep around.”

Charlie nodded. “If you say so.”

“I do.” I handed the form back to Dr. Su. “Okay if I have Japanese food, Doctor?”

He shrugged. “Just lay off the
shōyu
.”

I saluted him. “Can do, chief.”

I liked Dr. Su already.

 

 

SURGERY DIDN’T MAKE ME NERVOUS. Being sick was what made me nervous. And being around Charlie while sick made me extra nervous, because he acted so different than normal. Why couldn’t he be calm? Was this what he was like medevacing soldiers out of the jungle? I doubted it.

The procedure began at six. I closed my eyes as they wheeled me into the operating room and the anesthesiologist started talking to me about procedures. Over the years, Mother and Father visited me in my dreams. They held my daughter, born after they were dead. After Mike was born, I’d dreamed of Ronin talking to me and telling me how he was happy I had made a good life for myself.

Now I hoped I wouldn’t see this trio as I slept. Today, it might mean that I had really died.

What would I tell Sue if I could see her again? Would I visit her in her dreams? And Helena?

The anesthesiologist patted my hand as he put the oxygen mask over my face.

“I don’t want be ghost,” I said.

He didn’t hear. His face was shrouded by the bright light behind him. “Now we’re going to count backwards from ten. Ten, nine, eight . . .” and I was gone.

I
had always been an obedient girl.

When the doctors were sure my mother was gestating a boy, my parents declared they were wrong. I would be a girl. My mother could feel it in the way I made her crave enormous amounts of Hershey’s Kisses, the manner in which I stretched and dropped down below her pelvis, pushing into her bladder like my brother never had. “A girl,” my mother had said. I easily imagined her sounding resigned.

“Girls are precious,” my father said. He bought a pink layette in preparation and chose a girl’s name. Suiko, after a Japanese empress.

“Now it better be girl,” my mother grumbled. “No can return all that stuff.”

I, obeying, turned out female. It had not been a penis but the umbilical cord the doctors had spotted, the same one that tried to choke me to death during delivery.

Like any good little girl, I wore dresses when I wanted to wear jeans. I stopped climbing trees when my breasts started growing. When the boys in my classes yelled out answers, I stayed quiet. I tried as hard as I could not to be an inconvenience to anyone, at least not in a way that anyone would find out about.

In my memories of childhood, I remembered my mother always being present, whether she had really been there or not. It was her voice that was always there, whispering or shouting in my subconscious, tenacious as Jiminy Cricket. Even now, I always paused before I acted, to hear what she had to say, sometimes not hearing her until it was too late. “That no good. You
baka-tare
or what?” (
Baka-tare
means “stupid.”) Or, more rarely, “Good girl, Suiko-chan.”

When I was a child, I would do anything to hear the latter. I tiptoed around my mother and her constant exhaustion. I feared if she got angry enough, her heart would stop. Clean the bathroom while she was gone, diet down to a sylphlike size, play the perfect sonata on the piano. “I wish I play piano,” Mom would sigh, and I felt victorious. I only wanted to see her approving nod and hear that statement. Finally I had done something right.

When I was fourteen, our relationship began its shift, a moving of tectonic plates that never fit together correctly again. It began with my subscription to
Young Miss
magazine.
Young Miss
sounded prim and proper, my parents thought. But eventually Dad began looking at the magazine covers and what was inside. He tore out the pages I wasn’t allowed to read. “This is censorship!” I said to my mother on the afternoon that I discovered the deceit.

“Daddy know what bad,” Mother said, indifferent to my red face and indignant tone. How could she calmly stand in the kitchen, drying dishes with a too-wet dish towel, when her own daughter was being discriminated against?

In the few stories Mom had told me about her time growing up, she cast herself as the renegade. The one smarter than the boys, more beautiful than the rest of the girls, destined for greatness, only thwarted by her circumstance. “Is that what you would have done when you were my age?”

She blanched, turning her back to me. Steam from the hot water rose to her face. “Thing different your time. Girl grow up too fast. Not same.”

“It’s not fair,” I said, unable to articulate any better at that age. What else could I expect? My father wouldn’t let me join Girl Scouts—he said they promoted feminist values. He probably wished women still wore girdles and gloves and left calling cards when they drove around in their horse-drawn carriages. But my mother—why wouldn’t my mother take my side?

I thought of the mothers of my friends, the ones who sat down with them and talked about boys, about how the girls could break the glass ceiling when they grew up, while also frosting gingerbread houses at Christmastime. But my mother kept me both close and at arm’s distance.

I turned away from her, leaving her at the sink, so she wouldn’t see my tears. She did anyway. “What you cry ’bout? Nobody hit you.” She clattered a metal pan. “Do what good for you, Suiko.”

I focused and made my tears stop. It was a trick that I had learned early. “I’m not crying, Mom.” I smiled at her. “See, I’m fine.”

She shook her head as she bent over the dishes again. “You no like me,” she muttered. “No can cry ’bout everything. People hurt you too much.”

She was right. I did cry too much. I was weak.

This particular article was about birth control. My parents wouldn’t sign the consent form for sixth-grade sex ed class—nor did they give me an alternate education at home. They thought that if I knew about the mechanics of condoms, then I would run out and sleep with the entire middle school lacrosse team.

Or maybe my parents were all too aware of the hot intent lying beneath my demure surface. My friends’ parents—even the one whose family never missed Sunday Mass—let them have posters of Patrick Swayze or half-naked military men on their walls. I hid my perversions, photos from
TeenBeat
of Michael J. Fox and Kirk Cameron, under the paper lining of my dresser drawers, the only place my nosy mother would never look.

What was it that my parents wanted for me? To go to college, pristine as the day I was born, and find Prince Charming hiding in a biology class. A future M.D. snagged while young and geeky.

But what I wanted was to live on an island in the South Pacific like Margaret Mead. Or to be Anaïs Nin living with Henry and June, or the notorious Bettie Page pinned up on soldiers’ lockers. Mata Hari using her wiles to spy for the government, or a scientist like Rosalind Franklin, who helped discover DNA—only I’d make sure I got credit. I grew up counting the days until childhood ended, when I would no longer have to be good.

I needed to learn about condoms.

The birth control article was easy to find, tucked away among scraps of papers in the daily mail nest my father piled up by his easy chair. Its glossy page was a beacon. I slipped it under my shirt and went into the bathroom to read it. It’s only information, I reminded myself. I futilely pushed down on the broken door lock.

I heard my mother in my head. “
Baka-tare!
Stupid girl. What you doing?”

“Shut up,” I told that voice. “I’ll do what I want.”

I read the article, my heart beating so hard I could feel the pulse in my tongue.

A knock sounded on the bathroom door. “Just a minute!” I called out.

“What doing?” Mom’s voice was suspicious, and I knew I’d been found out.

“Going to the bathroom, of course. Can’t I have a little privacy?” I said anyway, sticking the magazine under the sink.

The door opened. Mom’s eyes went to the sink cabinet, which she must have heard shut. She opened it up and took out the article. “I knew you go find this when I tell you no.” Mom gasped as her eyes fell on the photos of a condom being placed over a banana. “You no-good sneak. What’s matter you?”

“They teach this stuff in science class!” I yelled. “It’s no big deal.”

She looked at me like I’d been caught robbing a bank. “You gonna be bad, huh?” She shook her head, then shut the door.

From then on, I was more careful. Dad, for all his blustering, was easy to fool. He forgot why he was mad in an hour. My mother did not. For a week, I didn’t exist to her. She refused to talk to me.

When I was pregnant with my daughter, Helena, I made a list of Things I Would Not Do Like My Parents. Number One: I would not freeze her out to punish her. Number Two: I would teach her to do anything a boy could do. And more.

I finished high school without incident. I got good grades. I did my chores. If I ditched class, it was because I was an office monitor and doctored the records so no one found out.

I married the first boy I ever kissed. Exactly as my mother had told me I should. Because I, Suiko Morgan, also known as Sue, was a good girl. With morals that meant nothing to me.

And then everything really went to hell.