How to Be an American Housewife - Margaret Dilloway [37]
I found my way to my daughter.
SUE HUNCHED over her small desk, typing. I looked around. Fabric walls not as tall as I was stretched from here to the smoked-glass window. The only light came from dim green fluorescents. I shook my head. This had to be the wrong place. My daughter was a manager. Managers had offices overlooking the ocean, didn’t they? And secretaries doing all their work for them.
“Suiko-chan?”
“Mom? What on earth are you doing here?” Her tone was incredulous and, I thought, annoyed.
As usual, my daughter had blue-black circles under her eyes, as though life had socked her in the face. Hereditary, she said. Not from my side, I said.
Her hair was pulled back into a messy ponytail; too-long bangs hung over her face. I bit back my urge to tell her to straighten up. How could she get promoted looking like she’d rather be anywhere but here?
“Come say hi to you.” I sat down. My feet dangled in the chair. Sue studied my brown wool dress slacks and the cream cashmere sweater I always wore to the Commissary, along with my heavy gold rope chain. If I didn’t dress up for the store, I would never get to dress up.
Her coworker popped up from the next cubicle, wearing more makeup than a prostitute would have back in my day. “Hey, is this your mom?”
Sue nodded. “This is Shoko. Mom, this is Marcy.” Sue seemed relieved to be interrupted. I shifted.
“How you do?” I held out my hand, my pronunciation careful.
“I didn’t know Sue was half Asian,” Marcy marveled. “I thought she was Hispanic.”
“Filipina, maybe look like.” People thought all Asians looked alike. Even Sue had a hard time telling the difference. I had tried to describe what the subtleties were; she still could not pick up on it. If she ever lived in Asia, she would know.
“I don’t know these things.” Marcy disappeared back into her den.
I wondered if Sue was ashamed to tell them about me. About herself. I played with my diamond engagement ring. It was too loose, spinning around my knuckle so much I was afraid it would fall off. Sue stared at that, too, then at my face, at the sunken hollows under my cheekbones. My face burned.
“No office yet? I thought you manager.” She had pictures of Helena all over her walls. Helena in a school play, Helena at the beach. None of me or Charlie. No men. I touched the plastic laminate of the desk and blanched. “So kitanai.” Dirty. “They too cheap for cleaning woman?”
Sue’s brow furrowed. I spoke again, quickly. “Not your fault, Sue.” No matter how much I tried to help her, or how hard Sue worked, she could not get ahead.
Sue had always been bright, always in the gifted classes, but other parents were able to boost their children in ways I couldn’t. One February afternoon when Sue was in eighth grade, she arrived home from school and threw her backpack to the side.
“Pick that up, Sue.” Then I saw the worried look on her face, still flushed from the walk and still round with baby fat. That year she had grown tall, bigger than most of the boys at her school. “What happen? Boy bother you?”
“I have to do a project for the science fair, and I don’t know what to do.” She sat in our old armchair and pulled off the lace doily from the arm, twirling it on her finger.
“Teacher no tell how?”
She shook her head. Every night, Sue struggled with her science and math homework as I watched helplessly. English and art were her subjects. Her father was no aid, either. These matters were beyond us, especially the way they were taught in the indecipherable “new style.” I thought quickly. “I help,” I said to her.
On the base of the mountain behind the house, I knew of a hollow that filled with rainwater if we had a good wet season. It was an easy, short ascent that Charlie had taken us to before, but still I held on to Sue’s shoulder as we walked the orange-brown dirt trail. I carried