How to Be an American Housewife - Margaret Dilloway [46]
After the first hour watching scratchy TV in the blood lab, I wished I had a book with me. Charlie and I weren’t big readers. Books were too expensive and library books were full of germs from all the people who had checked them out.
Charlie read an old AARP magazine and I looked at all the veterans, rows and rows of them in small vinyl-upholstered chairs, faces drawn, some coughing, some too weak to stand, too young to be here with us old people. I wondered what was wrong with them. Some kind of poison from the war? Cancer? Something else?
“Charlie,” I said, “when you come back from Vietnam, were lot people sick?” Charlie hadn’t talked about the war much to me, or about his job in the Navy.
“No,” Charlie said. Always the short answer.
“Seem like lot of people sick here.” I crossed my ankles, which swelled more each day. I hoped my surgery would be soon. I was getting uncomfortable. My doctor said I should use a wheelchair, but I hated doing that. Charlie could never push me up hills.
I smoothed out my outfit. Cashmere tan sweater, brown wool pants. Usually I wore my brown-and-white spectator pumps with this but I couldn’t get my feet into them now. I had to wear black flats, old ugly ones. I might as well be wearing pajamas and slippers. I still put on the Mikimoto pearls Charlie had given me shortly after we married, and the dangling pearl earrings he gave me for my birthday. I’d only had my ears pierced because Charlie wanted to buy me earrings. In my time, only prostitutes pierced their ears. But now was different.
Charlie tossed the magazine onto the side table. “Mommy,” he said, “I’ve been talking to Bishop Johanssen.”
“Uh-oh.” This was the guy in charge of his local church, or ward, as they called it.
“He said that maybe before this big surgery, when you could die”—Charlie looked uncomfortable—“I should ask you if you’re ready to join us.”
I laughed so loud several vets looked at me. “Be Mormon? You know answer.”
“Well, maybe after you pass,” Charlie said, “you’ll change your mind in Purgatory. If you do, come tell me. It won’t be too late to be baptized.”
I gave him a hard look. It was true that both Charlie and I believed in ghosts—it was part of my culture, as natural as breathing to me—but this Purgatory business I did not believe. Besides, only the unhappy came back. “I haunt you night and day, Daddy,” I said. “Boo!”
He shifted his body away from me, picking up the magazine again.
I could have become a Mormon a long time ago, but it was too secretive for me. When I went to my father’s Konko church, I had to sit before my father, who at that moment ceased to be my father and was my priest. We did something called toritsugi, a meditation. My father sat at the altar, with one ear toward that and the other toward you. You sat in front of the priest and simply said whatever you wanted to—a hope, a wish, whatever—for help with your problems, and the priest relayed it to our Tenchi Kane no Kami. Then you sat and thought about your problem and the priest gave you a message back.
The funny part of that was, of course, telling my troubles to my own father. When I was old enough to realize this, I was afraid. “Do not be, Shoko,” Father said, “because I am also your priest. Whatever you say is between you and Tenchi Kane no Kami.”
And indeed, Father acted like he never remembered what I said, whether I said I wanted to run away or had boxed Taro on the ears.
Once, as an adult, right after I’d married Charlie, I’d gone to see my father as a priest. “I am scared,” I said in a low voice. “I don’t know if this will turn out well.”
Then I closed my eyes, searching for the solution.
It was at least five minutes before Father spoke. “You are right to be afraid,” he said, “but where does this fear lead you? Nowhere. You must let go of fear.”
That was my last meditation with my father. He never mentioned that, either.
CHARLIE HAD