How to Be an American Housewife - Margaret Dilloway [53]
How to Be an American Housewife
One
I had always been an obedient girl.
When the doctors were sure my mother was gestating a boy, my parents declared they were wrong. I would be a girl. My mother could feel it in the way I made her crave enormous amounts of Hershey’s Kisses, the manner in which I stretched and dropped down below her pelvis, pushing into her bladder like my brother never had. “A girl,” my mother had said. I easily imagined her sounding resigned.
“Girls are precious,” my father said. He bought a pink layette in preparation and chose a girl’s name. Suiko, after a Japanese empress.
“Now it better be girl,” my mother grumbled. “No can return all that stuff.”
I, obeying, turned out female. It had not been a penis but the umbilical cord the doctors had spotted, the same one that tried to choke me to death during delivery.
Like any good little girl, I wore dresses when I wanted to wear jeans. I stopped climbing trees when my breasts started growing. When the boys in my classes yelled out answers, I stayed quiet. I tried as hard as I could not to be an inconvenience to anyone, at least not in a way that anyone would find out about.
In my memories of childhood, I remembered my mother always being present, whether she had really been there or not. It was her voice that was always there, whispering or shouting in my subconscious, tenacious as Jiminy Cricket. Even now, I always paused before I acted, to hear what she had to say, sometimes not hearing her until it was too late. “That no good. You baka-tare or what?” (Baka-tare means “stupid.”) Or, more rarely, “Good girl, Suiko-chan.”
When I was a child, I would do anything to hear the latter. I tiptoed around my mother and her constant exhaustion. I feared if she got angry enough, her heart would stop. Clean the bathroom while she was gone, diet down to a sylphlike size, play the perfect sonata on the piano. “I wish I play piano,” Mom would sigh, and I felt victorious. I only wanted to see her approving nod and hear that statement. Finally I had done something right.
When I was fourteen, our relationship began its shift, a moving of tectonic plates that never fit together correctly again. It began with my subscription to Young Miss magazine. Young Miss sounded prim and proper, my parents thought. But eventually Dad began looking at the magazine covers and what was inside. He tore out the pages I wasn’t allowed to read. “This is censorship!” I said to my mother on the afternoon that I discovered the deceit.
“Daddy know what bad,” Mother said, indifferent to my red face and indignant tone. How could she calmly stand in the kitchen, drying dishes with a too-wet dish towel, when her own daughter was being discriminated against?
In the few stories Mom had told me about her time growing up, she cast herself as the renegade. The one smarter than the boys, more beautiful than the rest of the girls, destined for greatness, only thwarted by her circumstance. “Is that what you would have done when you were my age?”
She blanched, turning her back to me. Steam from the hot water rose to her face. “Thing different your time. Girl grow up too fast. Not same.”
“It’s not fair,” I said, unable to articulate any better at that age. What else could I expect? My father wouldn’t let me join Girl Scouts—he said they promoted feminist values. He probably wished women still wore girdles and gloves and left calling cards when they drove around in their horse-drawn carriages. But my mother—why wouldn’t my mother take my side?
I thought of the mothers of my friends, the ones who sat down with them and talked about boys, about how the girls could break the glass ceiling when they grew up, while also frosting gingerbread houses at Christmastime. But my mother kept me both close and at arm’s distance.
I turned away from her, leaving her at the sink, so she wouldn’t see my tears. She did anyway. “What you cry ’bout? Nobody hit you.” She clattered a metal pan. “Do what good for you, Suiko.”
I focused and made my tears stop. It was a trick that I had learned