How to Be an American Housewife (20 page)

“But of course.” My mother always made spaghetti when we visited. It was as dependable as her cleaning schedule.

I went into the bedroom to change my clothes. This room was no neater. No money to buy the nice little fabric organization boxes or closet systems that I longed for. Just a full-sized bed, big for this tiny room. Books were stacked in corners, dusty.
Math Achievement in the Classroom. Teaching Grammar and Punctuation to English Learners.
Fiction books I hadn’t touched for years. Why did I even bother to keep them? Suddenly the clutter was overwhelmingly claustrophobic. Disgust seized my throat. I wanted to throw everything out the window. I walked around and began picking up what I could put away easily.

A box of old greeting cards stood on my dresser. Birthday cards from every year since I turned six, cards from Craig, handmade cards from my daughter. Proof of love. I picked up the box and shoved it into my closet, then sat on my bed and unbuttoned my blouse.

My mother’s visit to my office yesterday still nagged at me. No matter what Dad had told me, there was something wrong. I could feel it. I replayed the scene with her again, eyes closed, my mother telling me that she had simply driven twenty miles on her own to go to the Commissary.

My eyes opened. That was it. My mother had looked me in the eyes. My mother had been lying. She had something to tell me, something important.

Mom usually refused to meet my gaze. It was rude in Japan to make eye contact, and somehow I had learned this habit from her by osmosis. I grew up being told by my teachers, “Look adults in the eye when you talk to them.” My mother would get angry with me if I did. “No respect,” she would mutter.

She was maddening in that way, how she parceled out information as though she were a government spy declassifying documents. I was on a need-to-know basis, and it seemed I never needed to know anything until Mom was ready to tell me. Never mind whether or not I was ready. I was sure that if I asked her directly, she would claim no knowledge of what I was talking about. “Wild ideas, Suiko,” Mom would say. “Better keep quiet.”

Perhaps this time she would remember to look away while she was talking to me, so I wouldn’t know she was lying.

 

 

I THREW MY BLOUSE into the dry-cleaning hamper. I heard Helena flush the toilet, call out to me. I wanted to crawl into bed and hide. Not face my mother again, my mother with her precious spaghetti and her wounded heart. Not hear what I felt to be coming, news of her mortality that I was not ready to hear. I pulled on jeans.

“Are you ready?” Helena was at the bedroom door. “I’m starving.”

I cast off my mood and smiled at my child. “Of course.”

T
wo weeks later, I stood in Tokyo International Airport. The place contained more Mom look-alikes than I had ever seen in all of San Diego, in all of my life. Although none of these people were related to me, I felt safe here, like I could go up to anyone and they would help me with the same big smile Mom gave to strangers.

I had never expected to be able to go to Japan, certainly not to meet the family I only knew from the occasional New Year’s portrait postcard or funeral or birth announcement. I had enough trouble putting a few dollars into my 401(k) without dipping into the grocery budget. Yet I had still hoped I could go one day, taking college Japanese classes, sponging up whatever Japanese culture my mother meted out. Being here now, so suddenly, was like awakening in an alternate universe.

Monitors played soundless music videos and commercials with giant dancing bubblegum balls; blue screens announced flights. This was what I wanted, if I could only translate the letters quickly enough. The screens scrolled through the English lettering too fast for my tired eyes.

“Are we there?” Helena shifted her red duffel. “You don’t know where you’re going.” I sensed rather than saw the eye roll, which was so frequent that I didn’t register it as disrespectful. My mother would never have allowed it. But I was not my mother.

The truth was, Helena was right. This was the first big trip I’d ever been on. I never even took the bus at home—how was I supposed to find a connecting flight? I had no idea if we were supposed to take a shuttle or the subway or whatever it was they had at this airport.

Helena pointed. “Terminal Fifteen. Flight 267 to Kyushu. That’s us.”

I smoothed her golden brown bangs. She dried her long hair stick-straight and would wear eyeliner if I gave in. “What would I do without you?”

“Probably die here in the terminal.” Helena took my hand—she hadn’t held my hand since she was little, and her hands were big and adult now—and walked confidently down past the terminal numbers. “Stick with me, Mamacita. I’m the brains of this operation.”

W
e finally found the connecting flight and boarded, clutching wrapped sandwiches from an airport shop. Everyone took off their shoes and put on paper slippers. The Japanese were very hygienic, like Mom, a fastidious hand-washer and non-cross-contaminator. Some would say Mom was too hygienic, but I didn’t get a cold until I was in second grade. Her house was like living in a bubble.

As though awakening from a long half-dream, I noticed everything. At home I moved through my surroundings as quickly as possible, never seeing who was around me, always intent on doing what I needed to do. I listened closely to the chatter of Japanese, both familiar and foreign, picking up only a few words. I marveled at the well-mannered way everyone got onto this plane. No one yelled at any flight clerks, no one pushed or line-jumped.

Helena kicked off her sneakers. “I love Japan so far. And I did most of my homework on the plane, so I don’t have a thing to worry about.”

I frowned. “There must not have been much work.”

“No joke. Can I be homeschooled? I mean, that was nearly two weeks’ worth of work. What am I spending all that time at school for?” Helena took a piece of gum out of her Hello Kitty denim backpack, handing me a piece.

“Sure. If you can find someone to homeschool you.” I yawned despite myself, flipping through the airline magazine.

“I can homeschool myself.” She smiled. High cheekbones, like Mom’s, irises outlined with darker brown so they glowed in the sun, a perfect slim nose like her father’s. When she and Craig were together, you knew immediately they were related.

 

 

CRAIG AND I HAD MET in English class, his eyes catching mine as we filed in on the first day of junior year. His eyes were so blue, his irises ringed with black, that they seemed to glow.

Freshman and sophomore years, I was quiet. Unnoticed unless someone needed help with their English paper or calculus problem. The only bad marks I got were for not raising my hand. At last, in junior year, I’d gotten a salon perm and contacts. I began to smile at people. My skirts got short and my baby fat disappeared. Boys finally saw me.

Craig slid into the desk next to mine and gave me his trademark half-grin, the one that got him elected Cutest Sophomore in the yearbook. “Hey,” he said.

I blushed. “Hey.”

Craig leaned forward, sandy blond hair falling over his forehead. “I’m a real idiot in English. I hear you’re smart. Think you can help me?”

I looked straight ahead, afraid I was going to be shy again, but somehow I wasn’t. “Sure, but the class just started. Don’t you want to see how hard it is first?”

He laughed. “Believe me, I know how hard it is.” I blushed.

My previous experience with love had been with the New Kids on the Block posters in my locker. This guy, who played football and baseball and oozed testosterone, was all too real. I was floored.

Craig waited for me at the door, walked me to my locker, talked to me more in his bantering guyspeak. He followed me like a lovesick duckling, not caring about his popular status. People called to him, waved from every sideline. I felt like a star. Just like that, I was in his circle. Sneaking out at night to meet his friends at Sunset Cliffs beach to smoke pot and drink beer, Craig pushing his motorcycle for blocks so my parents wouldn’t hear. He kissed me for the first time at that beach, wrapped me up in a blanket he had brought, in between sandstone cliffs where his friends couldn’t see. I did worse in school and he did better. And then we started at State, still bound at the hip.

Marriage happened even though Craig’s parents advised degrees first. “Living together first wouldn’t be the worst idea ever,” his mother told us. “Share expenses, see if you can get along.”

I blanched. My parents weren’t nearly so liberal.

“You live with him, no married, you kill Daddy!” Mom shouted at me when I brought it up. “We stop pay college if do that!”

I went back to Craig with the news. “If we’re going to get married, we might as well get married now.”

“Why not?” Craig agreed. Craig used to agree to everything I said.

My father looked sad when I told him. “I’d hoped you wouldn’t marry so young,” he said. I waited for guidance, but that was all.

Mom was furious. “I send college find man, not marry boy drag through high school!”

“But you told me we had to get married!”

“No. Say you no can live with. Not same.” She squinted at me. “Why, you
have
get married?”

“I am not pregnant. You told me that living with him was wrong, but I want to be with him. I give up. There’s no pleasing you.”

The disintegration of my marriage came about not with flying fists, alcoholism, felonies, or anything that my parents would consider a good reason for divorce. No. It was our two-sentence conversations, our staring blankly at each other when we were supposed to be out having fun, nothing left to say. When I finally began talking to other people in my classes, I found that I could have a better conversation with a random state college boy than I could with my own husband.

When Craig began staying out with his friends and sleeping in instead of getting up with our baby, I knew it was coming. When he told me, when Helena was two, that he was quitting college to be an actor, I didn’t do much to stop him. When he said it would be easier to live in L.A. than commute from San Diego, I agreed. The relationship petered out as quietly as it should have when we began.