How to Be an American Housewife - Margaret Dilloway [72]
“He gone?” she asked. “I come over.”
Then Mom surprised me by listening to all I had to say. “If he leave, not nothing for you do, huh?” she said philosophically. “Tokidoki.” Then she sighed. Nonetheless, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Mom viewed me with disappointment, as though she were measuring up her old hopes for me against the reality and finding it short. I would feel her eyes on me in quiet moments. “What, Mom?” I would say, and she always said, “Nothing,” and went back to whatever she was doing.
We finished all the sukiyaki. “It’s fine with me if we never see that old badger again,” Hiroshi said while carrying in graham crackers, chocolate bars, and marshmallows. “You know what these are?”
“S’mores! What happened to traditional Japanese food?” Helena popped a marshmallow into her mouth. “Better than nattō any day.”
“Good for you for trying nattō. I never have.” Yasuo offered us bamboo skewers, then put his own marshmallow over the gas flame. “I fear Taro won’t be any more forgiving of your mother than he has been of me. When he has hard feelings, they last forever.”
This was not unlike my mother. She had a mental list of who had wronged her: the kid up the street who stole a rose from her garden; the neighbor who put his bags of grass clippings on our side of the property line; me for any number of things. I always chalked it up to her life spent trapped, peering out onto the street from behind the living room curtains. Perhaps it was cultural. Dad always said, “It’s in the past. Move on!”
“Taro wrote a nationalist curriculum for the schools.” Hiroshi retrieved a Japanese textbook from a shelf. “He is rewriting history. Saying the Rape of Nanking never happened.”
The book was as big and heavy as a college textbook. “They actually use this in schools?”
“Not all. Some.” Yasuo wiped chocolate off his fingers. “We have not used it since Taro retired.”
I looked at my daughter to see how much of this she was taking in. All of it, of course. She said, “So Taro is like one of those Holocaust deniers? My teacher talked about that. Why can’t he just admit that it happened and move on?”
Yasuo nodded. “It is not so easy. Japan suffered a lot during the war and after. Where once we were proud, we had to bow. Some, like Taro, had a very difficult time doing this. It was hard enough to admit defeat to Americans. To admit all these other atrocities as well—I’m afraid Taro may not be capable.”
“But my grandmother forgave.” Helena violently squished a marshmallow between two crackers. “She married an American. And if she hadn’t, I wouldn’t be here.”
Hiroshi put his hand on Helena’s arm. “There are some who cannot live in the present, Helena, and we should feel sorry for them rather than angry.”
“Maybe he’s softened since you’ve seen him.” I thought of my mother’s father, by Mom’s account, a gentle man and a priest for the same church. Surely he raised his son to be the same. I reserved judgment. I had no other choice. Otherwise I would have to give up and go home.
Hiroshi bowed his head. “We hope so.”
THE NEXT MORNING, a Sunday, fog made the mountains disappear. I checked us out of the inn, and Yasuo and Hiroshi picked us up to go to the dock. “We will make a stop. Where our mothers grew up,” Yasuo said. He took us to a little plot of land that stood between two large, modern homes. “Their house was torn down long ago, and the land divided between these two owners. But our house stood here.” He walked several hundred feet into the land and turned to look at us.
I stared at the terrain, picturing the house. This was where all of Mom’s stories took place. I imagined my mother as a youngster, laughing, putting up laundry on a line. Maybe that field to the west was where she and Taro had to take cover from the B-24s. Here was where Dad returned with her as a bride, where her fate was decided on the basis of a blurry photograph. Melancholy, pure and liquid, flooded me. I wanted to sit, but instead crossed my arms.
Helena took a picture of the countryside. “I didn’t know