How to Be an American Housewife - Margaret Dilloway [16]
We ended up in San Diego, Charlie’s last station. Hawaii had been our favorite, but Hawaii, he said, was too expensive. And we didn’t want to move all the way back across the Pacific, though I wouldn’t have minded being closer to Japan.
The first thing we did was buy a house with a no-down-payment VA loan. It was the 1970s, when Sue was a baby and Mike was already twenty-two. Charlie wanted the house on the mountain side of the street, because there would never be people behind us. Jacaranda Street was lined with the flowering trees along the parking strips, purple clouds every spring. “Look like cherry tree in Japan,” I had said when we were looking for a house. But still, there were problems. With every big rain, the water poured down the mountain into our yard, and Charlie had to dig a ditch out to the street to let it out. Sometimes brush fires broke out behind us, too.
There was nothing built in the community. “Closest park five mile,” I said to Charlie. “No good for kids.” Developers were just beginning to push into eastern San Diego. I had no car; we could only afford one.
Charlie had looked exasperated. “This is what we can afford.”
“They got older houses by park,” I pointed out. “Can get loan on those, too.”
“I want a new house.” That was Charlie. He had caviar wishes and champagne dreams, like Mr. Robin Leach would say.
With us settled, Charlie went to college on the GI Bill. Originally, because he’d been a medic, he wanted to be a doctor. “But I’m too old,” he said. He was. No new doctor was in his fifties, the way he’d be by the time he finished.
He settled on nursing. But when he graduated, no one was hiring. Not even a former corpsman he knew at a hospital who had been to Korea and Vietnam with Charlie.
Our times got tough for a while, and Charlie withdrew more and more. I tried to get him moving. One afternoon months after he finished school, Charlie sat eating a family-size bag of Lay’s in his TV chair. A pile of old junk mail lay on the floor next to him.
I stared at the heap. All this work I had to do, trying to save us money. I washed Sue’s diapers by hand. We never ate out. I dyed, permed, and cut my own hair. I dug up the hard clay earth and made a vegetable garden in the back, planting a fig tree and a tangerine tree to bear fruit. I saved rainwater in buckets—not that we got much rain—and used it to water the garden. Never did I think I would have to remember what my mother had taught me back in Japan.
Charlie was sitting there, getting chip crumbs all over the place.
I turned the TV off. “Why no apply job? What doing sit around all day?”
“Turn that back on.” It was the days before remotes, but Charlie was too lazy to get up. “What’re you doing?”
“All do is sit. Eat. TV. I throw TV away if you no get job soon. You no can sit ’round. You no old.” I pointed to Sue, who lay in her playpen looking at us. “You got baby girl.” I wished more than anything that I could go out into the world and conquer it for my family.
He blinked at Sue, as though seeing her for the first time.
I put my hands on my hips. “You apply every hospital in county? North, south, middle?”
He shifted in his chair, not answering.
“You apply Orange County if have to. We move. Who care?” I picked up his junk mail and tossed it high in the air. It scattered all over the floor. “Look at trash you make me.”
Charlie pursed his lips, then closed his eyes. He inhaled. “It’s hard, Shoko. How they look at me when I go apply. I’m so much older than everyone.”
“Shut up. You got combat experience. What more they want?” I shook my head. Sue whimpered. I walked over and picked her up, putting my nose into her soft baby neck. She cooed. I smoothed back her hair, red at the time.
Charlie got up and picked the trash off the floor. He threw it away. Then he got changed into a shirt and tie and went out with his black vinyl briefcase full of résumés, all without saying a word.
Finally, Conroy