How to Be an American Housewife - Margaret Dilloway [63]
I watched him go for a second longer than necessary.
“Let’s go, let’s go.” Helena moved off impatiently.
We had to find the bus into Ueki, a suburb. At first glance, Kumamoto City looked kind of like California: power lines, mountains in the background. Except there weren’t any palm trees, and no big cars. And it smelled like powdered sugar and pine, mingled with the cigarettes everyone smoked. Helena coughed a little. The driver stowed our baggage underneath. “I hope they leave the windows open.”
“Not every place is like California,” I reminded her, “with smoking laws everywhere.”
She looked around the bus. People chattered to each other behind their hands, glancing at us. “What are they saying?”
“I can only tell snips and bits. Foreign women. Half and half.” There probably weren’t too many Westerners venturing into the outskirts. Still, I didn’t expect us to be greeted with such curiosity.
Helena leaned into me. “I bet you in a week I speak better Japanese than you.”
“That’s a sucker bet. No way I’m taking it.” I glanced at my daughter. Her legs were crossed with one ankle over her knee. I remembered another cultural tidbit I had read. “Put your foot down,” I whispered. “Japanese sit with their feet on the floor.”
She looked at the other people on the bus to find them doing the same thing. She corrected herself.
“You really should believe your mother,” I said. “I know some things.”
I looked at the address of the inn I had booked the week before. “We need to get to San-bon Machi.” In halting Japanese, I asked an elderly lady, her gray hair tied back in a navy blue scarf, what stop we needed.
“Stop Shodo, close by. Two block,” the woman responded in English. “You speak Japanese very well.”
“Arigatō.” I smirked at my daughter. She made a face.
The woman launched into rapid Japanese with her seatmate, a nearly identical woman. This didn’t sound like the Japanese I had heard in class, and Mom had only spoken a few words here and there. I realized what I was hearing. “In school, they teach standard Japanese. This is a dialect, what Mom would speak,” I told Helena.
“Like an accent?”
“More than an accent. Different words for things, too.”
She shifted. “I wish I knew the language.”
I smiled. “I wish I knew the language, too.”
Mom hadn’t believed in teaching me Japanese, fearing it would irrevocably contaminate my English. She and Dad did, however, use plenty of random Japanese words, usually baby words like shi-shi instead of “pee.”
One of my favorite Japanese games was rock-paper-scissors, or, as Mom had taught me, Jan Ken Poi. “In Japan, use this for everything, even businessmen,” Mom had told me.
Jan Ken Poi became a special game, done to break ties and decide between an eight o’clock and an eight-thirty bedtime.
“Shodo, Shodo,” the woman next to us yelled, pointing at the stop cord. I jumped up and pulled. The bus shuddered to a halt.
“Arigatō.” Helena waved.
“Gūddo rākku.” The old woman returned it with a weathered hand. Good luck.
Our driver retrieved our travel backpacks from under the bus. He bowed.
We stood on the sidewalk for a moment, Helena looking expectantly up and down the road. These street signs were hieroglyphics to me. A 7-Eleven stood a block down. “Let’s get directions.”
Helena grinned. “Can I get a Slurpee?”
“Sure.”
Inside, it was like any American 7-Eleven, except there weren’t any Slurpees, and there were things like rice balls and fast food made of fish. I inhaled the familiar smell of coffee and wondered if all the 7-Elevens in the world got their beans from the same place.
The storekeeper, a short man in his mid-fifties, bowed. “Irasshaimase!” he exclaimed, waving his cigarette at us. Welcome.
Helena immediately headed for the junk food aisle. “Excuse me,” I began in Japanese, “can you tell me how to get to San-bon Machi?”
“Two blocks down”—he held up two fingers—“make right, three blocks, then left, one more block, right. Got it?”
“Can you repeat that?” I reached into my purse for paper. He took a map from the display at the front, whipped it open,