How to Be an American Housewife - Margaret Dilloway [13]
I went into the living room. Charlie turned up Rush Limbaugh so loud you could hear it from outside. Sometimes I listened, too. Charlie nodded along, and I asked questions. “Why these feminazis love hate everybody so much? Why Rush got yell all time?”
Today, wanting quiet, I went in the backyard with my Sanka. Charlie had built a patio of old bricks; it was the best thing he had ever made, because he had done it properly, on a sand bed with a wooden border holding it in place. Overhead, I grew Chinese wisteria on the porch roof, the wild vines shooting up onto the house’s roof, too. Purple flowers would be hanging down soon.
I fretted again about my trip to Japan. About my hesokuri, my hidden stash of money, and how I would have to ask Sue to buy the airline tickets on the computer. I sat down and formulated a plan for finding my brother at his last known place of employment, the high school where he had been principal. I had so much to tell him.
Taro was the only person left in my family, the only one who knew me, the real Shoko. We had our differences. What brother and sister didn’t? But sometimes I swore he could read my mind.
That was all gone now. Taro had not spoken to me since I married Charlie, even though my father had endorsed the marriage. My brother hated Americans, and me as well, both for marrying an American and for other reasons I had long preferred not to think about. But fifty years was a long time to hold a grudge, even for someone who thought forgiveness was a weakness.
Japanese culture is different from American. We do not forgive readily. Sometimes we accept, which is different from forgiveness. In cases like this, where I’d done something Taro thought was evil, the taint would cling to me forever.
After the war, my father and I accepted the reality of the new Japan. Even after the way it ended.
I remembered the afternoon in 1945, jumping rope outside my house with Taro and Suki nearby. A cloudy, muggy summer day. Suddenly a bright light, then a shaking rumbling unlike any earthquake.
I dropped the jump rope and instinctively reached for my brother and sister, holding them tight. We didn’t know what it was, but the sinking dread and nausea in my stomach told me everything I needed to know. I rocked my younger siblings until my mother came and brought us inside.
Nagasaki, fifty miles away.
We were spared for the most part. Except that many got sick, or died too young, like my parents. Mysterious blood ailments, hair falling out. Suki’s heart and mine were likely sickened by this poison. And for all I knew, Taro’s was, too. Perhaps that was why he could not accept the way things had changed.
It seemed to me that the Japanese should have surrendered sooner. We were out of food, our people were dying, and thousands more died in Hiroshima. It seemed that the Emperor would have every last man, woman, and child die in Japan before he would give up his holy throne. The price was too high, too high either way.
I DRANK THE LAST of my bitter Sanka and went back inside the house. The floors were torn up, the carpeting halfway pulled back. Charlie had gotten a discount on hardwood flooring and had been trying to install it. Only half the room was floored, with jagged edges too far from the wall.
My husband fancied himself a great handyman. He would watch a home-improvement show on television and say, “That looks easy. I’ll try it.” But he always managed to leave out a step. As when he put in our sod—he put it over dead grass, then forgot to water it.
So this was why our house was crumbling. If we had money for supplies, we never had it for professionals to do the work.
I knew not to say anything about his flooring. It would only make him angry—angry that I had noticed—and frustrated with himself. “Charlie,” I said instead, over the radio, “how ’bout you and me go on trip?”
He groaned, massaging his knee. I sat beside him and motioned for him to put his foot on my lap so I could massage it. “We’ve already been everywhere. Where do you want to go?”
“Different now.