How to Be an American Housewife - Margaret Dilloway [11]
He kissed me with a laugh, spinning me around so the collar on his dark sailor’s uniform flew out. “Yes, madame.” He scraped the metal chair out from the table and swung his leg over it, cowboy style. Then he tasted the spaghetti. I held my breath. He made a face. “Too sweet.”
I sat down, trying to think of the English words. I shook my head and raised my hands. “What mean?”
“It’s not like my mother’s.” He pushed the plate away. “I don’t like the onion chunks.”
His mother’s sauce had most certainly been watered-down tomato paste and sugar, with no spices because they were poor. I stood up so quickly that the little wooden table slid away from me. “No eat, I throw!” I pointed at his head.
“What?” His lips twitched, trying not to smile.
“I throw.” I picked up the plate. I saw that on television once. That was how I spent most of my time in America, watching television and learning English. On one show, the wife threw the dinner at the husband’s face. “This from book.” I shook my head. “No throw out.” I would never really throw food at Charlie. I only wanted his attention. I never wasted food. In Japan, we never wasted a grain of rice or a speck of salt.
Charlie’s eyes were big. I thought about our wedding day, when I wore a tall headdress. Some people said it was to cover up the woman’s horns that showed up after marriage. That’s what my father told Charlie, who had laughed. I wondered if Charlie was thinking about that, too, thinking that my horns were showing.
“All right, already,” he said, putting a forkful into his mouth. He stared at the TV, like he always did. He used to watch it until two or three every night, even when there was nothing good on. And then he ate the entire plate, with seconds. As he should have. It was delicious, worth all my effort.
I had spent most of the previous day searching for the spices in the Commissary, the discount grocery store on the base where we bought our food. It was a marvel unlike anything else I’d seen in America so far, including the Statue of Liberty. There were gleaming aisles of every type of food you could dream of. In Japan, especially during the war, the storekeepers only had a few bags of rice. Salt. Some roots. Here, I wanted to buy everything and nothing. I didn’t know how to cook the big juicy steaks Charlie loved; mine turned out leather dry. I had no idea how to make soup without miso or fish stock. I used water instead, and it tasted awful.
Day after day, I experimented with American foods from the Commissary, learning how to cook all over again. Fry up a piece of meat, boil potatoes, carefully reading the recipes in my book over and over. It was hard learning recipes from a book, all alone, with new ingredients. Sometimes I misread them, mixing up “baking powder” and “baking soda” more than once.
My own mother had taught me how to cook by observation. No formal measurements. Learning how to cook was like learning a language. You picked it up. All I had to do was be around her while she made rice or manju or fish stock, and just like that, I knew how to make these things, too.
From the time I first had memories, my mother had been teaching me how to be a good housewife. I helped her do the chores every day, cooking and cleaning and sewing. As we worked, she would sing. Usually she sang isobushi, meaning “rocky-beach melody,” in her high, thin voice. It was one of the oldest folk songs, the same song fishermen and Noh actors had performed. It sounded like wailing, a lament.
Mother was tough; she came from farming peasant stock. She had a long torso, short powerful legs, and wide feet. The type of person who could squat in a field like a salaryman sat at a desk. Her hair had been half gray since I could remember. Her kimonos were darker colors, solid blues and reds flecked with white.
“Shoko-chan,” she would say, “take this for me.” I would take over stirring the pot of vegetables while she shifted my little sister Suki from her back to her front to nurse. In those days, children got nursed for a long time, until age two or three or even