How to Be an American Housewife - Margaret Dilloway [17]
Over the next twenty years, off and on, I tried to prod him into nursing. The job market didn’t stay down forever. “Hospital got good benefit,” I reminded him.
“I have Navy benefits. Besides, I can’t move patients around anymore. That’s the only reason they hire men.” But still he sang all day and night, and if he wasn’t singing, he had the radio or TV on, as though he could not bear to be with his thoughts.
CHARLIE SANG NOW as he drove us home in the old Ford Taurus, the windows rolled down and the air-conditioning off. I tilted my seat back slightly, knowing he was in no mood to talk.
I wished we could get a new car with freezing air-conditioning. When we got this one brand-new, years ago, I had thought it was the nicest car I’d ever seen. It had gray cloth seats and maroon paint. It even had a real stereo with a tape deck, and air-conditioning, the kind of car I always dreamed about. I thought it was as nice as our next-door neighbor Lorraine’s Buick Regal. When we bought it, I showed it to her. She told me how great it was. The next week, her husband bought her a brand-new Mercedes with license plates that said “ILUVLOR.”
Lorraine wasn’t really a friend, but she was the only person I knew who would talk to me. Everyone in our part of town was white, Christian, working-class, people like Charlie who watched Hee Haw or Lawrence Welk. The other housewives were a good fifteen years younger than I was. No time for someone like me, someone whose accent made her difficult to understand, and who never had anything worthwhile to say.
With no car, it was hard to do anything. Sue and I were on our own. Mike was going to community college part-time, still living with us but hardly ever home.
It felt lonelier than when Charlie had been in the Navy. At least when he was deployed, I got to use the car. Now I had to depend on Charlie or the neighbors for everything, which I hated.
When I got too lonely, I’d send Sue out to play with the neighbor kids and I’d go talk to Lorraine, who would be sitting in her plaid armchair, her feet bare on dark blue shag carpeting. She welcomed me into her house with a hearty laugh, brushing back her dark curls, leaving her soaps on the television and her magazines all over the glass and brass coffee table. “What new with you, Lor?” I asked on one of these visits. She gave me a glass of Coke and ice. I sipped it with relish. Charlie, being Mormon, didn’t allow Coke.
“Same old, same old.” She didn’t care that she had a hard time understanding me. She talked enough for five people, never mind two. “Ken’s flying the boys up to visit their grandparents while I’m stuck here waiting on Sears to finish our cabinets. Lordy, you wouldn’t believe the mess they make.”
“You got maid, though, right?” I prompted.
“I feel bad if she has too much to do. I clean before she cleans!” Lorraine yodeled a laugh. Lorraine also had a gardener who mowed her lawn, a pool guy, and a husband who didn’t mind her TV dinners. They had more money than the rest of the neighborhood put together. She sat and watched soaps all day and called her friends to gossip. And ate.
This was how I thought I would be as an American housewife, except for the too-much-eating part. When I first married Charlie, we were in Japan, where the dollar was strong. I had thought he was rich. I thought we would always be rich. I was wrong.
I nodded at Lorraine, my eyes falling to the women’s magazines spread over the glass coffee table, the snack trash near Lorraine’s recliner. She was like Charlie, I saw.
The doorbell sounded. “Come on in,” Lorraine said.
It was the woman who lived across the street, Charlene. We smiled