How to Be an American Housewife - Margaret Dilloway [6]
We had lived in a small two-bedroom town house with floors so crooked, you could roll a Coke can from one end to the other. Charlie was getting ready to ship out for at least a year, and it would be just me and the baby.
Charlie’s relatives lived in Maryland, and they came to visit a few times. His mother, Millie, a stout woman who had borne eight children in ten years, was so encouraging that I thought all Americans would be like her. “Don’t you marry her and then get rid of her like everybody else,” she took Charlie aside and warned. Many Japanese women who married servicemen got abandoned when they got to the States and they found out how hard it was to live in a biracial marriage. Even more got left back in Japan, pregnant and unmarried.
“Don’t worry,” Charlie said.
“You call if you need anything, and I’ll get someone to take me here,” his mother said every time she left.
“Yes, Mother.” I knew I would never bother her.
When she visited, she would bring me practical things, like boxes of tissue or a frying pan. I was grateful, but not when she looked around our small apartment.
It was different from her house, where nobody took off their shoes and they would rather use bricks and boards for shelving than spend money on furniture, and the only decorations were pictures of Jesus. If she had flowers, she stuck them all in a vase so big you couldn’t see the other person at the table.
“This is all so fancy,” Millie said every time she visited, trying to understand but not succeeding.
This way of living was the only way I knew. I couldn’t live in a space without having something lovely to look at. Even when my parents were poor, they could still trim a pine bush outside into a bonsai. I imagined Millie went home and talked about how Charlie’s wife spent all his money on unimportant clutter.
Charlie enjoyed Japanese art, though. I tried to teach him sumi-e brush painting, but no matter how much he practiced, his paintings looked like rudimentary stick figures. “How you get a few strokes to look like a deer—you’re a genius,” he said to me.
I only knew what a “genius” was from his awed tone. “Try again.”
“There’s only room for one genius here.” He had three of my paintings matted and framed, and they hung in a trio on the wall.
Adjusting to the U.S. was difficult in other ways for me, especially in the beginning. If I borrowed an egg from a neighbor, I returned two, the Japanese way. They didn’t understand; why did I give them two? It made them angry, like I was insulting them. When you “borrowed” an egg or a cup of sugar in America, you never actually returned it. Charlie had to explain: “It’s her tradition.”
“Never heard of a tradition like that,” our neighbors said.
When Charlie wasn’t home to explain my odd ways to people, I went to the store alone, with Mike bundled up in a thousand layers in his stroller. I made sure to dress up. My favorite outfit was a pencil skirt, button-up black blouse with white pipe trim, and heels. It wasn’t the most comfortable thing to take care of a child in, but I was young and didn’t care. I wanted to look presentable, not like a maid or a Jap with buckteeth and wild hair, but an American girl.
As I walked the two blocks from housing to the store, people stopped and stared, whispering, “There goes that Jap wife!” I smiled and waved, even when mothers held their children against them. A few of them stopped me, said hello, wanted to touch my hair, so much coarser than theirs. “Like horsehair!” they exclaimed.
I reminded myself that the Japanese had done the same thing with Charlie and his fire-red hair. “There goes the demon!” they had whispered. Certainly I could take it.
I kept my head high and said, “Hello!” I had practiced my l sounds in the mirror before I ever left Japan. It didn’t matter whether people said hello back or not. I was holding up my end. What they did was their own business.
I SWUNG MY LEGS up onto the bed and massaged my ankle, wishing