How to Be an American Housewife

by Margaret Dilloway

  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.

  THERE WAS THE SOUND of movement to my right and a male voice. “Excuse me?”

  I looked up from the airline magazine. A young Japanese man inclined his head and smiled. Though historically I had been attracted only to all-white Wonderbreads, I couldn’t help noticing that he had beautiful straight teeth and skin like Werther’s cream toffees. I blushed.

  “I believe I’m sitting next to you,” he said in accented English, sliding his slim frame into the seat on the aisle.

  He had to be twenty-five, tops. I hadn’t been twenty-five for a hundred years. I smiled briefly at him and concentrated on the magazine.

  Helena leaned over me. “I’m Helena and this is my mom. We’re here to find our Japanese relatives.”

  “Really?” The man smiled. “Have they been lost long?”

  “Since before I was born,” I said quietly. My tongue felt thick from fatigue.

  He extended his hand. “Toshiro.”

  “Suiko.” I almost never identified myself by my Japanese name, not even in college, when doing so would have been chic.

  We shook hands. His was very warm.

  “Your English is great,” Helena said. “Does everyone in Japan speak it?”

  “We learn it in school. And I took classes from an American. Now I work for an English-teaching company.” He buckled his seat belt. “I’m going home for a visit, like you.”

  Like me. “We’re from the States.”

  He inclined his head. “Your ancestral home. I see you are mixed. You are part Japanese and part what?”

  Somehow his question wasn’t intrusive, the way it would if an American like Marcy asked it. Japanese ask personal questions to get to know you, I recalled from the little guidebook I’d brought along in my purse. It had also said that Japanese didn’t talk to strangers unless they were introduced; yet this man was. Perhaps it was because he taught foreigners. I relaxed. “Irish.”

  “Ireland.” He clapped his hands. “I’ve always wanted to go. Have you been?”

  I shook my head. “My father’s family came to the States generations ago. We don’t have any family there.”

  Helena nudged me. “That’s a good idea, Mom. Ireland next year. We can find our long-lost relatives on the Internet.”

  Toshiro and I laughed at this. “Your daughter is bright, yes?”

  “That’s what they tell me,” Helena said. “Bright as a button.”

  Toshiro rested his hand on the armrest between us. His fingers were touching my arm. “Tell me how these relatives of yours got lost.”

  I inhaled. Talking to strangers made me uncomfortable. I could talk about the weather or the high price of fuel, but nothing of the real me. The real me was a horrifying swamp of insecurity. “It’s complicated.”

  “You have a captive audience.” He grinned. “Perhaps I can help.”

  I glanced at him. He waited. Whether he was genuinely interested or only mildly bored, I suddenly didn’t mind telling him everything. Perhaps it was because I wouldn’t see him again. I told him all about my mother, my uncle, and me. My job and my wishes to teach. I talked until I needed a glass of water and Helena was staring at me with complete surprise at all I was revealing.

  “Taro sounds like a difficult case.” He kept asking questions whose answers I didn’t know. Where my uncle lived, why he wouldn’t talk to my mother after all these years had elapsed.

  His eyes flicked from my gesticulating hands to my face. The flight and this conversation would end in one hundred minutes, but somehow this effort was all worthwhile. I smiled at Toshiro.

  The last time I went on a date had been two years earlier, with a man who rented the house across the street from my parents. Thank God he moved soon afterward.

  Mom had called me up, eager. “You never guess who in Larramie house. Good-looking guy. Single!”

  “And?” I had closed my eyes in dread.

  “And I go over there, tell all about you. You most beautiful girl ever. Could marry big-time businessman if live in Japan.” Instead of Craig, I heard silently.

  “Mom, of course you say that. You’re my mother.” I imagined her chasing the poor man around his cement front patio, moving boxes still in his hands. Date my daughter.

  “I show him picture. He interested. Eyes get big.”

  I was afraid to ask which picture. Probably her favorite, from when I was nineteen. I had long hair down my back and a seductive smile. The best photo I’d ever taken, or ever would take. “Girls most beautiful at this age,” Mom had said when she saw it. “Then go down the hill.”

  “He gonna give you call, okay?” Mom was excited. “He own Internet company.”

  I made a skeptical noise. “That could mean anything. Anyone can open an Internet company.” I agreed to go out with him anyway.

  Jake met me at the sushi restaurant he had suggested. He was unremarkable: dark brown hair, medium build, brown eyes. “You’re even prettier than your picture.”

  I laughed. “I was afraid she showed you my junior high school portrait with the bad perm.”

  “She did.” He pulled out my chair. “Just kidding. No, as soon as your mom came over and started talking about her daughter, I knew I had to give it a shot. I have a thing for Japanese women.”

  Oh. He was one of those. “You otaku?” It meant someone who was perhaps unhealthily obsessed with Japanese culture. The word had negative connotations, but I used it anyway. I had met men like him before, who thought my mom had raised me right, that I would trail behind them in public and be some sort of sex slave who also kept an immaculate home.

  He blanched. “No. Well, maybe a little. Wasn’t your dad?”

  That gave me pause. Dad had pursued a woman who couldn’t speak his language. I didn’t want to date anyone like my father. “Maybe, but he knows better now. I’m American through and through. So’s my mom.”

  “Didn’t seem that way.” He smirked. “I can tell.”

  I got up. “A real Japanese girl would have sat here, pretending to like you. I prefer the American method. Direct.” Then I left.
/>   My mother wouldn’t speak to me for a week. “I no can go outside,” she moaned. “No want see Jake.”

  “Mom, he’s a renter. Don’t you want me to date someone with his own house?” I knew that would get her to leave me alone.

  “That true.” Mom sniffed. “Maybe no good anyway.”

  THE FLIGHT ATTENDANT BROUGHT coffee, tea, and hot chocolate packets. I chose a coffee and powdered hot chocolate to make myself a mocha. It tasted like thick, powdery chocolate sauce, and something else I couldn’t place. “This is different than what we have at home.”

  Toshiro dipped his tea bag up and down in hot water. “No offense. You must be butter-kusai. Not used to things with no butter.”

  I smiled. “Helena, remember Obāchan saying, ‘Butter-kusai! Get in shower’?” We smelled like butter because we ate so much of it.

  “Obāchan is butter-kusai by now, too.” Helena stuffed her sandwich into her mouth.

  I still couldn’t place what was in it. It must have been an ingredient I was unfamiliar with, or a slightly different way of making the hot chocolate mix.

  “But do you like it?” Toshiro pressed.

  I nodded.

  “Then that is all that matters.” He sipped his tea.

  I realized Toshiro was correct.

  KUMAMOTO CITY WAS in Kumamoto Prefecture on the island of Kyushu. We bade good-bye to Toshiro, who handed me his business card. “If I may be of assistance, do not hesitate.” He bowed. I bowed back. Then he extended his hand and shook mine. “I mean this, Suiko-san.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Best of luck.” He looked toward the ground. I wished for a moment that the Japanese were cheek-kissers. Instead, with another bow, Toshiro disappeared into the crowd.

  I watched him go for a second longer than necessary.

  “Let’s go, let’s go.” Helena moved off impatiently.

  We had to find the bus into Ueki, a suburb. At first glance, Kumamoto City looked kind of like California: power lines, mountains in the background. Except there weren’t any palm trees, and no big cars. And it smelled like powdered sugar and pine, mingled with the cigarettes everyone smoked. Helena coughed a little. The driver stowed our baggage underneath. “I hope they leave the windows open.”

  “Not every place is like California,” I reminded her, “with smoking laws everywhere.”

  She looked around the bus. People chattered to each other behind their hands, glancing at us. “What are they saying?”

  “I can only tell snips and bits. Foreign women. Half and half.” There probably weren’t too many Westerners venturing into the outskirts. Still, I didn’t expect us to be greeted with such curiosity.

  Helena leaned into me. “I bet you in a week I speak better Japanese than you.”

  “That’s a sucker bet. No way I’m taking it.” I glanced at my daughter. Her legs were crossed with one ankle over her knee. I remembered another cultural tidbit I had read. “Put your foot down,” I whispered. “Japanese sit with their feet on the floor.”

  She looked at the other people on the bus to find them doing the same thing. She corrected herself.

  “You really should believe your mother,” I said. “I know some things.”

  I looked at the address of the inn I had booked the week before. “We need to get to San-bon Machi.” In halting Japanese, I asked an elderly lady, her gray hair tied back in a navy blue scarf, what stop we needed.

  “Stop Shodo, close by. Two block,” the woman responded in English. “You speak Japanese very well.”

  “Arigatō.” I smirked at my daughter. She made a face.

  The woman launched into rapid Japanese with her seatmate, a nearly identical woman. This didn’t sound like the Japanese I had heard in class, and Mom had only spoken a few words here and there. I realized what I was hearing. “In school, they teach standard Japanese. This is a dialect, what Mom would speak,” I told Helena.

  “Like an accent?”

  “More than an accent. Different words for things, too.”

  She shifted. “I wish I knew the language.”

  I smiled. “I wish I knew the language, too.”

  Mom hadn’t believed in teaching me Japanese, fearing it would irrevocably contaminate my English. She and Dad did, however, use plenty of random Japanese words, usually baby words like shi-shi instead of “pee.”

  One of my favorite Japanese games was rock-paper-scissors, or, as Mom had taught me, Jan Ken Poi. “In Japan, use this for everything, even businessmen,” Mom had told me.

  Jan Ken Poi became a special game, done to break ties and decide between an eight o’clock and an eight-thirty bedtime.

  “Shodo, Shodo,” the woman next to us yelled, pointing at the stop cord. I jumped up and pulled. The bus shuddered to a halt.

  “Arigatō.” Helena waved.

  “Gūddo rākku.” The old woman returned it with a weathered hand. Good luck.

  Our driver retrieved our travel backpacks from under the bus. He bowed.

  We stood on the sidewalk for a moment, Helena looking expectantly up and down the road. These street signs were hieroglyphics to me. A 7-Eleven stood a block down. “Let’s get directions.”

  Helena grinned. “Can I get a Slurpee?”

  “Sure.”

  Inside, it was like any American 7-Eleven, except there weren’t any Slurpees, and there were things like rice balls and fast food made of fish. I inhaled the familiar smell of coffee and wondered if all the 7-Elevens in the world got their beans from the same place.

  The storekeeper, a short man in his mid-fifties, bowed. “Irasshaimase!” he exclaimed, waving his cigarette at us. Welcome.

  Helena immediately headed for the junk food aisle. “Excuse me,” I began in Japanese, “can you tell me how to get to San-bon Machi?”

  “Two blocks down”—he held up two fingers—“make right, three blocks, then left, one more block, right. Got it?”

  “Can you repeat that?” I reached into my purse for paper. He took a map from the display at the front, whipped it open, and marked the route in red ink.

  Helena dumped a Halloween booty’s worth of candy on the counter.

  “I don’t think so. If you’re hungry, get some onigiri.” I pointed to the rice balls, cold sticky rice wrapped in black seaweed paper, encased in a cellophane packet.

  “Fine.” She started putting the candy back.

  “Ah.” The storekeeper patted her on the head. He switched to English. “You like sweet?” He hand her a wrapped peppermint. “Your Japanese very good,” he added to me.

  “Arigatō,” Helena said with a big smile, unwrapping her candy. “People in this country are so nice.”

  WE WALKED THE HALF-MILE or so to the Shodo Inn, near the Tsuetate hot springs. It was a traditional Japanese inn, in a fortlike compound of log buildings. It was set another half-acre off the main road, up a dirt path.

  I chose this inn so Helena and I could get a true Japanese experience. Though we were here to see Taro, this trip was very possibly a once-in-a-lifetime event, at least for me, and I wanted us to get all we could out of it.

  Instead of the Western bed and bad art that has been in every hotel or motel I’ve ever encountered, there were shoji screens, tatami-covered floors, and a futon with a hard head roll that looked like a cylindrical pillow.

  “This is supposed to be a pillow?” Helena flopped onto the futon and tossed the head roll aside, wadding up her jacket under her head.

  “Obāchan had one lying around—don’t you remember? You used to play with it. It’s traditional.”

  “I hope this isn’t going to be one long history trip.” She turned over. I stifled my annoyance and desire to lecture, which would only lead to an exhausted fight. Instead I joined her, tucking the head roll under my neck.

  Helena moved her head roll under her neck, too. “This hurts.”

  “If your grandmother could sleep like this, so can we.”

  “We’re soft, spoiled Americans, Mom.”
She giggled. “This is like a sleepover.”

  “Mm-hmm.” My body ached.

  She shifted toward me and whispered. “I want to have a sleepover party for my next birthday.”

  “Sure. But check with me again tomorrow. I might be talking in my sleep right now.” I kept my eyes closed.

  “And I want to have it be coed.”

  I laughed shortly, fully awakening in an instant. “Think again.”

  “Why not? It’s totally platonic. Everyone does it.” I could hear she was going to try to wear me down with research. “I don’t see what the big deal is.”

  “You know very well what the big deal is, young lady, and if you ask me again, you won’t have any party whatsoever. Is that clear?” I made my voice final. “Now, please, can we sleep?”

  She was quiet for a second. “Can we get a pizza and have the closet makeovers like we did last time?”

  “Don’t get ahead of yourself. Your birthday’s still a ways off.”

  I had always enjoyed Helena’s slumber parties. At the last one, I’d bought a bunch of cheap cosmetics and had the girls pair up and go into a dark closet to give each other makeovers. Though Helena had gotten eye shadow in her eye, it was all great fun.

  When I was a child, I wasn’t allowed to go to slumber parties until I was ten. Once I turned twelve, I was forbidden again. Mom said, “You never know. You pretend spend night at someone’s house and be somewhere else.”

  “But I would never do that!” I swore up and down, finally appealing to my father for assistance. He told me to respect my mother.