How to Be an American Housewife (19 page)

Y
esterday, I had been innocently wasting my life away at work, unaware that my mother was about to arrive, asking me to take her to the Commissary. I would have been less surprised to see a UFO land in the parking lot.

This morning I called my father as soon as I got to work. “Is Mom all right today?”

“She is. She goes through spells sometimes, just like she always has.” Dad sounded reassuring, chewing food, the television in the background. Everything was normal, I wanted to believe.

“But why did she come up here alone?”

“I was busy.” Dad crunched on something. “Sue, don’t worry, everything’s fine. We’ll see you for dinner.”

Now I tapped my pen on my desk, staring at the half-alive fern I kept near my monitor. Dad must be right. A seriously ill woman wouldn’t be making spaghetti sauce from scratch, the kind you had to cook all day long. No, she would use a jarred sauce.
But your mother is stubborn,
I reminded myself, and pushed the voice away. Dad was there. My mother was, if not well, then the same as always.

The phone rang, then stopped before I could answer. I was a New Accounts manager, as soulless a paper-pushing processing job as you can get without actually turning into a zombie. People opened accounts, I input their information. I listened to employees ask for raises that I couldn’t grant. The joke was that my company, PFD Financial, stood for Pays Fewer Dollars. I had worked there, I was ashamed to say, for nearly ten years. Ever since Craig and I got divorced. A steady paycheck and benefits were worth a little grind, though.

Every year I told myself this was the last. I’d start something new. Once upon a time, I’d wanted to teach. It was a modest goal, especially compared to my early daydreams. Yet it had proven unachievable so far. The night-class teacher education program cost too much; no use getting in debt for the sum of one’s entire first-year salary. The cheaper state-school program scheduled classes during the day while I was working. I couldn’t figure out how to manage. The only answer I came up with was to wait until my daughter had finished school. I’d still be young, relatively speaking, with twenty years left until retirement.

On this day, I looked at the coffee cup on my desk and realized that I’d taken fourteen breaks that day. Dreaming at the water cooler, looking into space. I heard the gasping cackle of the woman next to me, the low hum of the dim lights.

I thought again about my mother, arriving at my office the day before. A trip she had never made or asked to make, to see me. A trip to buy groceries that she would never dare make alone.

Ever since I could remember, Mom’s heart had been no good. Always tired, always needing to lie down, barely enough energy to make dinner. Why had they had me, so late, at age forty-two? She had had a murmur before that; it had turned into something worse after she’d had me. “Your mother couldn’t pick you up after you were a month old,” Dad had said matter-of-factly. “You were too heavy.” I had worn her down. How else would you explain it? Babies are hard on bodies. I knew this, and I had only had one.

And nobody could say what had happened to her with certainty. Genetics or environment, radiation sickness or scarlet fever, a simple virus—anything could tweak the heart, make it weak.

As though I needed to atone for my own strong heart, I began to run. I ran every morning, up at four, two and a half miles around the park next to my house, before Helena woke up. I ran even if I got painful shin splints, even if my knees got puffy. I ran fast, until I couldn’t talk, until my heart thumped in my ears, hard rain on a tin roof. The doctor told me that when my heart couldn’t speed up, that was the time to worry.

When I first began running, pushing Helena in her stroller, my brain wouldn’t empty. Worries pushed up like weeds poking through good soil. I learned how to stomp them down. Now all I heard were my heart and my feet. No music.

Then I walked back down the short hill, slow, to my house. The air inside, so cold when I’d left, always felt hot and stale. Every day, I wanted to open the windows, but I worried that Helena would get a chill. I left them closed.

“I wish I run,” Mom would say, every time she saw my running shoes by the door. “I use run faster than anybody. Beat even you.”

 

 

THE PHONE ON MY DESK RANG AGAIN, and I did nothing. The endless years stretched out before me as though they had already been lived. I felt a lurching in my bones so violent, I thought we were surely experiencing an earthquake. I needed to get out of here.

Whenever I felt this way, I got another cup of water and distracted myself with chitchat. Today, I did what I felt like doing. What I thought my mother would do if she could, if she were me. I grabbed my jacket and ran.

The blue silk blouse stuck to my armpits. Late February and eighty degrees. A San Diego winter. I ran to the far end of the parking lot, that same glee I had felt when I ran as a child, my hair whipped back. I was sure that no one had seen me leave, and if they had, they did not care.

By the time I got to my car, my bad mood had disappeared completely. I would go pick up my daughter. We would have dinner with my parents—too much starch, which would make me sleepy. All would be well.

I cranked up a mix I made about ten years ago, probably for my ex-husband. It didn’t matter. These songs were my favorites. I bobbed my head and sang along to the Smiths, waved at the cute guy wearing Ray-Ban Wayfarers in the convertible to my right. He rewarded me with a grin.

As usual, traffic was backed up in Mission Valley by the time I got to Finney Plimpton Middle School. No worse place existed for a school, sandwiched between shopping malls and business parks. Helena loved it, though, and with my husband’s parents footing the bill for a private education, I couldn’t turn down the opportunity.

I parked by a banana-yellow Escalade. The kids were in the auditorium, rehearsing their sixth-grade play,
South Pacific.
Helena was playing Nurse Nellie. Somehow I, Suiko Morgan Smith, had raised a kid who was everything I was not—ultrabright, ultratalented, ultraconfident, ultranice. I held my breath for her thirteenth birthday and hoped she wouldn’t morph.

When I went back to work, Mom had been scandalized at day care. “You gonna let
stranger
take care kid?” she had demanded. “What if shake death?”

“She’s not going to get shaken to death,” I had said, though of course the thought insinuated itself as a late-night worry, eyes wide open.
You never know,
my mother’s voice whispered in my head.

“What am I supposed to do?” I had asked her. “
You
can’t take care of her.”

“Yes can.” Mom had tried to convince me to leave my baby with her, but that was impossible. They were in their sixties by then, and their ailments made them seem older than their years. I would not leave her for more than short periods. Day care had treated her fine.

I watched my daughter, her long hair shampoo-commercial shiny, in the middle of a pack of girls. “Hey, you. Look who’s here early.”

Helena broke away. Her caramel-colored eyes, the same shade as mine, were bright with tears. I put my arm around her. “What happened?”

“Amelie’s having a Disneyland weekend,” she sniffed. “I can’t pay for tickets.”

We got in the car. “I bet Grandma and Grandpa will foot it. You could do some chores for them.” I meant Craig’s folks, or Grandma and Grandpa Trump, as I called them.

Helena clicked her seat belt shut. “They don’t want chores, Mom. They want me to watch old British comedies and be the fourth for their old-fogey bridge parties.”

“Consider it character building.”

“Amelie thinks she’s all that because she got her period months ago and is already in a B cup,” Helena blurted out. “Kiana just got hers, too. When am I going to get mine?”

“You’ll get yours, honey. Don’t be in a hurry. Believe me.”

“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 heels. Every day, a different part of the house was tackled. Mom got down on her hands and knees and scrubbed floors, using a rag and plenty of Borax dissolved in hot water. In between chores, she lay on the couch and napped.

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.”