How to Be an American Housewife - Margaret Dilloway [57]
“Mom. You don’t understand.” Helena shut up and stuck iPod buds into her ears.
I do, I wanted to tell her. My own parents were like my grandparents in my childhood, older than everyone else’s parents and tired out from living. But Helena and I were only twenty years apart in age, and I remembered what she was going through all too well.
My awkward phase had been something for the books, lasting approximately fifteen years. I was shy, afraid I would shatter at the sound of my voice in public, which might have had something to do with the fact that I couldn’t see two feet in front of me and no one noticed until third grade. I hated my nose, which spread out over my face more than other peoples’. I didn’t grow a bridge until I was thirteen.
The really bad part began in fourth grade. My Dorothy Hamill hair-cut, combined with huge, thick glasses, actually caused a girl to scream when I went into the girls’ room. “I thought you were a boy,” she said.
The misery continued into junior high. Dad’s idea of what a young lady should wear to school was business attire, as though I were going to work on Wall Street. “No jeans,” he said severely when he took me clothes shopping at Penney’s. Apparently he believed that it was still the 1950s, when only disreputable greasers wore denim.
Mom hated shopping. “Spend too much, get tired,” she grumbled. “Daddy take you.”
I looked longingly at the triangle emblem of the Guess jeans a passing girl had on, rolled up with white Reeboks. “School is your job and you need to dress like it.” So instead of jeans and sneakers, I was forced to wear middle-aged dresses with big shoulder pads and nylons. My Dynasty years, I joked now.
Helena would be saved from this same fate, if I had anything to do with it, but with her father’s looks and her own sense, my daughter was not in need of saving.
WE ARRIVED IN ALLIED GARDENS, a couple miles north of San Diego State University, a Mayberry of small bungalows. The park had a year-round heated pool and a library, people handed out hot chocolate and apples during trick-or-treating, neighbors watched your house while you were gone. It was a good place to raise a child.
My phone beeped. Work had called. Perhaps someone had noticed my early departure after all. My stomach roiled.
Our house was about a thousand square feet, consisting of a living room adjoined by a kitchen and a hallway, with two closet-sized bedrooms and one bathroom. Our house was the only thing of value my ex and I had had at the age of twenty-two, mostly paid for by his parents; and I got to keep it in the divorce, as I had kept Helena.
It was decorated with a colorful mix of stuff my parents didn’t want anymore, like the Japanese screen my parents brought over in the 1950s, hand-painted with bright peacocks. Their old shiny black Japanese dining table with the removable legs was our coffee table, where we often ate in front of the TV.
Housekeeping was low on my priority list. Lower than even my job. Dust bunnies, clean laundry waiting to be put away, dirty laundry waiting to go into the wash, everything out of place. I hated having people over. “I’m a single mother,” I announced before people could say anything, think anything. “No time for housekeeping.”
Mom would have none of that. Last Easter, she had showed up for dinner with a mop and a bucket, wearing old clothes, her nice clothes on hangers. “Ai! Kitanai your house. I no can eat ’less clean up.”
Why couldn’t she say, I thought you might need some help, dear?
“It’s only a family dinner,” I had said, following her into the bathroom.
“We no good company?” Mom filled up her bucket in the tub. “I bring you wood-floor soap. Good floor.” She squirted a generous amount into the hot water. “You got time plenty thing: run, eat out all time. Why no clean?” She attacked a corner of the room behind a door. “No pride,” she muttered. “No pride in house, have nothing!”
When I was growing up, despite her tiredness, Mom maintained a punishing cleaning routine that would make Martha Stewart cower in her well-turned