How to Be an American Housewife - Margaret Dilloway [3]
The noise returned as the plane turned around. “It’s coming back!” Taro yelled. He grabbed my arm, I grabbed Suki’s arm, and we jumped over an embankment into an irrigation ditch at the side of the road. I looked up and saw the pilot and the plane as it came low. It had a star on its side, a skull and crossbones on the tail, and a half-naked woman painted near the front. The pilot saw me and laughed. He had been playing with us, scaring us. If he had wanted to, he could have killed us. That was the first time I ever saw an American.
Suki’s face and body were muddy, and she was wailing. I took a chunk of mud out of her pigtails. Taro stood up and kicked at the dirt embankment, causing a slew of pebbles to fall down. He shook his fist toward the plane. “We will kill you all!” he shouted. “American fiends!”
I HAD NOT THOUGHT of this story for years.
I sat up on the couch in my San Diego living room, where I had been napping. Bright morning light made the room uncomfortably warm.
When I had told this story to my daughter, Sue, when she was still young enough to ask for stories, she had looked at me as if I were telling a grim fairy tale. “Why would they do that?” she had whispered, her eyes big.
“Those stories scare her,” my husband, Charlie, had said. “The past is past.”
He was right. And so I hardly talked about my past at all to my daughter. It was a lifetime ago. I had grown tired of my own stories, even of my old dreams. What good did dreams do me now? When you are young, dreams are the reason you pray for a new year and better luck.
Except for this. This one small dream of mine.
Taro and I together again.
I got a piece of tissue-thin airmail stationery and my husband’s fountain pen out of the desk drawer. Sitting down on the floor at the coffee table, I put the pen to my lips, thinking. From the garage, Charlie sang as he put laundry in the washer. One of my adult son Mike’s cats meowed at the screen door. I began my letter to Taro.
Many American husbands enjoy traditional aspects of Japanese culture, including the o-furo and the massage.
American husbands expect their Wives to be well-versed in massage as a Japanese tradition. Many men find that a small Japanese wife is an asset when she walks on his back after a long, tiring day.
Often when a Japanese person begins consuming Western foods, they become fat. Do not overindulge. It is important to keep oneself at a light enough weight so that the husband’s back is uninjured.
The o-furo may also be enjoyed by your husband. Offering to scrub his back as you would with a Japanese spouse is likely to be welcomed. It is a small piece of service you may offer to him.
—from the chapter “A Map to Husbands,”
How to Be an American Housewife
Two
I carried the letter into my bedroom, pushing the door shut with my shoulder. We had lived here for over thirty years, and still this bedroom door was not fixed. I looked about for a place to hide the letter. Not that my husband, Charlie, was nosy, but he always thought of reasons to say no to me.
I stuck the note into my underwear drawer in the dresser. I met the eyes of the two Japanese samurai dolls in their glass case on top of the bureau. The man had a sword, and the girl had a tiny metal knife tucked into her kimono sleeve. A secret weapon no one saw. Underneath their case I had a secret of my own.
I opened the little glass door and lifted out the dolls, then lifted up a hidden compartment. Inside that was my hesokuri, my secret money. I’d been pinching pennies all these years. Stealing out of Charlie’s change jar, saving bits of our tax refunds and Charlie’s Navy retirement checks. Now I had a lot. Enough to go to Japan. I touched the cash and smiled.
Then I opened my closet to decide what to wear to see my cardiologist, Dr. Cunningham. Lately, I had been seeing him too much, getting tests and medications. My heart was giving out, and other things along with it. Last summer, I’d gotten Bell’s palsy, paralyzing my face’s right side for a week. I got a patch, like a pirate, so my eye wouldn’t