How to Be an American Housewife - Margaret Dilloway [43]
Sue and Helena pulled up, blocking the driveway. “Obāchan!” Helena called out, giving me a big hug. “Smells great.”
“You taller than me, Helena-chan.”
“I have been for three years.” She smiled and went inside.
Sue stood around, looking at the dead plants, the old windows, the crack in the chimney. I turned off the hose. “Gonna stand around all night?” I made my lips smile, but she looked in my eyes and saw what I meant. Quit looking around. Don’t tell us about the house. We already know. They say that Asians are stone-faced, but it’s all in the eyes. “Gotta finish dinner.”
We went inside. Sue opened the silverware drawer. “Wash hand first. Lotta good college did.”
Sue merely smiled. In one ear and out the other.
I remembered when I taught her how to wash the dishes. She had been six or seven. When I had been her age, I had done the laundry alone. “Use hot water, so hot make hands red,” I had said to her, pouring a good amount of Palmolive into the sink.
She had stood on a stool and dipped her hands into it. She looked at me with her wide eyes. “It’s too hot to touch.”
“Not too hot for me.” I put my hand in to show her. “Hot water get off gunk, see?” I dipped a plate that had dried beans on it into the water to show her. “Now take rag and scrub.”
I watched her make mounds out of the soap. “Mom, this is boring,” she said in a whiny voice after a second. “Besides, it’s still too hot.”
“You get used to.” I showed her how to clean the plates in a circular motion. “Then feel plate, see if all food got off.”
She tested it again. “It’s cooler now.” She washed a few, rinsing them in clean water and clattering them onto the drying rack.
I examined these. “No. Food on. Do again.”
“Where?”
I pointed to a speck.
“Can’t you just wipe it off with the dishtowel?”
“Learn do right.” I put the dish back into the sink. I would not let her get away with doing things halfway as I had with her brother.
She huffed a sigh, running her hand over her sweaty forehead, and washed the plate over.
I DIDN’T WISH to be short with Sue now. I stifled my impatience and made my voice pleasant. “You hungry, huh?” I put two pounds of pasta into the boiling water.
“Is Mike eating with us?” Sue asked.
“Think so.” When Sue was little, she would ask about Mike, who would show up occasionally, eat, and leave, without a word to her. “Mike loves you,” I would tell her. “He show in own way. Mike loner. Different.”
“He should work for Animal Control,” Sue said. “He likes animals more than people.”
It was true. Once there had been a rattlesnake in the garage, come down off the mountain.
I screamed every time I saw a snake, even a garter snake. “Kill it!” I had shouted. But Mike had gone in there, no shoes, no shirt, only shorts, and gently pushed it out with a broom handle. “It’s not the snake’s fault we built here,” he said. The snake hightailed it to Lorraine’s house, where it got its head whacked off with a shovel.
Sue was watching me like she thought I would break into a billion pieces. To distract her, I said, “Suiko-chan, get my big green cookbook. Want make peach oatmeal crisp dessert.”
I stirred the noodles and the sauce. Sue opened the deep drawer where I kept my books. “What’s this? How to Be an American Housewife?” She showed the book to me. There was an illustration of a dark-haired woman holding a plattered turkey in one hand, a broom in the other, as her husband and clean kids applauded her from the dinner table.
My heart sped up. I fought the desire to snatch it from her. “Housekeeping book. You take. Maybe give good idea.”
Sue flipped through the book. “It’s written in Japanese and English?”
“Yeah, so can learn language. Got recipes, tell about housekeeping.”
“Cleaning floors, laundry, getting along in America? Did people really follow this?”
“Mommy did.” Oh no. The photo was still in there. “Maybe you try, too. Let me see.” I held my hand out. I needed to get the photo.
But Sue had already found it. “Cleaning Floors” was bookmarked with a photo, an old black-and-white of a Japanese man, printed on card