How to Be an American Housewife - Margaret Dilloway [58]
Laundry day was a whole other production. Mom had a washer and dryer but said the electric dryer cost too much to run. She carted the heavy, wet laundry in a two-wheeled shopping cart from the garage at the front of the house, around the side yard to the back, where she had erected two wooden crosses with hooks and eyes across the bars. My job was to thread a heavy white rope back and forth across to make a clothesline, then take it down when she was done. “Japanese like sun,” she said. “Sun not use too much denki like dryer. Denki takai. You know how much denki bill was? I save big money.”
She hand-washed dishes for the same reason, though I tried to tell her the dishwasher used less water.“Sue, why don’t you help your mother?” Dad said every night after dinner as he watched TV from the couch.
“You could help her, too,” I grumbled. He and Mike were served like kings. If I ever had a son, there would be none of that. My theoretical son would set the table before I asked, clear my plate and his. My theoretical husband would wash dishes alongside Helena.
Boys of my own had not been in the cards for me. Sometimes I thought I was giving up too soon on the whole finding-a-man-and-having-more-kids idea.
But what if I did get married again and the same thing happened, and I was a single mom to not one but two kids? Or more? How could you know that someone wouldn’t leave?
HELENA WALKED into our house and threw her books down on the coffee table. “What’s for dinner?”
“We’re going to Ojı̄chan and Obāchan’s house, remember?”
“Oh, yeah.” Helena grinned. “Spaghetti, I suppose. At four.”
“But of course.” My mother always made spaghetti when we visited. It was as dependable as her cleaning schedule.
I went into the bedroom to change my clothes. This room was no neater. No money to buy the nice little fabric organization boxes or closet systems that I longed for. Just a full-sized bed, big for this tiny room. Books were stacked in corners, dusty. Math Achievement in the Classroom. Teaching Grammar and Punctuation to English Learners. Fiction books I hadn’t touched for years. Why did I even bother to keep them? Suddenly the clutter was overwhelmingly claustrophobic. Disgust seized my throat. I wanted to throw everything out the window. I walked around and began picking up what I could put away easily.
A box of old greeting cards stood on my dresser. Birthday cards from every year since I turned six, cards from Craig, handmade cards from my daughter. Proof of love. I picked up the box and shoved it into my closet, then sat on my bed and unbuttoned my blouse.
My mother’s visit to my office yesterday still nagged at me. No matter what Dad had told me, there was something wrong. I could feel it. I replayed the scene with her again, eyes closed, my mother telling me that she had simply driven twenty miles on her own to go to the Commissary.
My eyes opened. That was it. My mother had looked me in the eyes. My mother had been lying. She had something to tell me, something important.
Mom usually refused to meet my gaze. It was rude in Japan to make eye contact, and somehow I had learned this habit from her by osmosis. I grew up being told by my teachers, “Look adults in the eye when you talk to them.” My mother would get angry with me if I did. “No respect,” she would mutter.
She was maddening in that way, how she parceled out information as though she were a government spy declassifying documents. I was on a need-to-know basis, and it seemed I never needed to know anything until Mom was ready to tell me. Never mind whether or not I was ready. I was sure that if I asked her directly, she would claim no knowledge of what I was talking about. “Wild ideas, Suiko,” Mom would say. “Better keep quiet.”
Perhaps this time she would remember to look away while she was talking to me, so I wouldn’t know she was lying.