How to Be an American Housewife (6 page)

“I know that. But I always this way. No different.” I spoke softly, but I wanted to yell. “I need go.”

“He said no,” Charlie said.

“Next year, when you recover,” Dr. Cunningham said, touching my arm.

I grabbed my purse and stood up. Didn’t they know I didn’t care if there was a next year anymore? I felt dizzy and had to sit down again. “Take me home.”

 

 

WE ALWAYS TOOK SURFACE STREETS, all the way from Balboa Park to San Carlos, through the terrible neighborhoods and potholes bigger than the Grand Canyon. “Take too long,” I said every time. Charlie hated driving on the freeway.

“Less traffic this way,” he said. Or he said nothing. Often I thought he didn’t hear me. I knew he never listened to me.

Despite this, Charlie was a better husband than some other American men. He had a steady Navy job that was enough money, especially when we lived in Japan. He bought books for me and tried to learn Japanese. Another Japanese Navy wife I met in Guam had a husband who made her sit behind him in the car, like they did in Japan. But if Charlie had asked me to, I would have.

I would have done almost anything for Charlie to keep him happy. My friend Toyoko had shown me that. Back when Mike was a baby in Norfolk, I knew no Japanese Navy wives. There weren’t many around in the early days. But one evening shortly after Mike turned two, Charlie arrived home with a broad smile and two extra people for dinner. “Shokochan, I have a surprise.”

I got up from where Mike and I were playing blocks, already thinking about how I could stretch two chops into more and planning to tell him off later for bringing guests without telling me.

Then I saw who was following him inside. A Japanese woman about my age, maybe younger, and a black sailor. Her hair was cut short and permed into soft curls all over her head.

She bowed, taking off her shoes. In her hands was a casserole dish tied up in a purple scarf. “Forgive intrusion,” she said, her voice high and polite and in English far better than my own. “I brought macaroni and cheese.”

Toyoko and her husband, Jim, had just moved on base. They’d met as Charlie and I had, on the Iwakuni Air Base. Toyoko’s eyes met mine and we smiled big as children.

“Welcome!” I said, wondering if we should switch to Japanese. No. It would be impolite not to include the men.

Charlie read my mind. “Go ahead and speak Japanese. We want to learn, right, Jim? Besides, the language sounds like music.”

Toyoko and I did everything together for the next year. We tried to learn English better. There were no classes offered, at least none that we could easily get to, so Charlie got us a couple of textbooks, and we tried to study those. Most of the time, it was gibberish.

Our plan was to become citizens in five years. “That way, they can’t get rid of us,” Toyoko said with a sly grin, revealing a big gap between her front teeth. Most people thought that was unattractive, but on her it was good. Like a beauty mark.

The citizenship test promised to be difficult. You had to learn the Constitution and know all kinds of history, more than the average school-kid. If I could pass that, I would be a true American.

But the next year, Charlie got transferred to Hawaii. I embraced Toyoko and promised to write. “We can do a citizenship correspondence course,” I said.

In Hawaii, it was much easier to blend in. There were so many darker-skinned people that no one gave me a second glance. I made many friends there. More Navy men had Japanese wives in Hawaii. Pidgin English was quicker to learn than standard, especially because Charlie was gone too much to teach me proper English.

Toyoko and I wrote regularly for years. Jim got transferred to Yokosuka, Japan, and I thought she must be thrilled. She was not.
The other Japanese wives won’t talk to me because Jim is black,
she wrote.
I miss you, Shoko.

Don’t let them get the better of you! You’re too good for them anyway,
I responded. It had not occurred to me that these wives would treat each other like this, but I saw it more often in Hawaii, where there were more Japanese wives. Cliques formed based on what your husband’s race was. Neither group would accept the other.

Then I didn’t hear from Toyoko for a year. She sent me a postcard from Japan.
It was too hard
, she wrote.
Jim left me.
She was one of the lucky ones, able to return home, still childless. I wondered what had happened to those who weren’t so lucky. They probably had to find another serviceman. That’s what I would do if Charlie left me. It always nagged at the back of my mind. I tried to be the best wife I knew how.

 

 

WE DROVE DOWN THE STEEP HILL on Florida Street, to the dip that flooded with every light rain. We went over a pothole and I clutched the door. “Careful, Charlie!”

Charlie spoke. “Operation sounds good, doesn’t it? Wonder if it’ll help all the other things going wrong with your body.”

“Maybe I run all over town again, huh? Then what you gonna do?” I poked at his belly. “Get you going again.”

Charlie shifted away from me and turned up the radio. KPOP, hits from the 1940s and ’50s. One thing we had in common, we hated newer music. “I’m too old to get going again.”

“You not too old until dead.” I chewed my lower lip in frustration. Ever since Charlie had retired from the Navy, he had acted as though he had retired an old person instead of just age forty-one.

We ended up in San Diego, Charlie’s last station. Hawaii had been our favorite, but Hawaii, he said, was too expensive. And we didn’t want to move all the way back across the Pacific, though I wouldn’t have minded being closer to Japan.

The first thing we did was buy a house with a no-down-payment VA loan. It was the 1970s, when Sue was a baby and Mike was already twenty-two. Charlie wanted the house on the mountain side of the street, because there would never be people behind us. Jacaranda Street was lined with the flowering trees along the parking strips, purple clouds every spring. “Look like cherry tree in Japan,” I had said when we were looking for a house. But still, there were problems. With every big rain, the water poured down the mountain into our yard, and Charlie had to dig a ditch out to the street to let it out. Sometimes brush fires broke out behind us, too.

There was nothing built in the community. “Closest park five mile,” I said to Charlie. “No good for kids.” Developers were just beginning to push into eastern San Diego. I had no car; we could only afford one.

Charlie had looked exasperated. “This is what we can afford.”

“They got older houses by park,” I pointed out. “Can get loan on those, too.”

“I want a new house.” That was Charlie. He had caviar wishes and champagne dreams, like Mr. Robin Leach would say.

With us settled, Charlie went to college on the GI Bill. Originally, because he’d been a medic, he wanted to be a doctor. “But I’m too old,” he said. He was. No new doctor was in his fifties, the way he’d be by the time he finished.

He settled on nursing. But when he graduated, no one was hiring. Not even a former corpsman he knew at a hospital who had been to Korea and Vietnam with Charlie.

Our times got tough for a while, and Charlie withdrew more and more. I tried to get him moving. One afternoon months after he finished school, Charlie sat eating a family-size bag of Lay’s in his TV chair. A pile of old junk mail lay on the floor next to him.

I stared at the heap. All this work I had to do, trying to save us money. I washed Sue’s diapers by hand. We never ate out. I dyed, permed, and cut my own hair. I dug up the hard clay earth and made a vegetable garden in the back, planting a fig tree and a tangerine tree to bear fruit. I saved rainwater in buckets—not that we got much rain—and used it to water the garden. Never did I think I would have to remember what my mother had taught me back in Japan.

Charlie was sitting there, getting chip crumbs all over the place.

I turned the TV off. “Why no apply job? What doing sit around all day?”

“Turn that back on.” It was the days before remotes, but Charlie was too lazy to get up. “What’re you doing?”

“All do is sit. Eat. TV. I throw TV away if you no get job soon. You no can sit ’round. You no old.” I pointed to Sue, who lay in her playpen looking at us. “You got baby girl.” I wished more than anything that I could go out into the world and conquer it for my family.

He blinked at Sue, as though seeing her for the first time.

I put my hands on my hips. “You apply every hospital in county? North, south, middle?”

He shifted in his chair, not answering.

“You apply Orange County if have to. We move. Who care?” I picked up his junk mail and tossed it high in the air. It scattered all over the floor. “Look at trash you make me.”

Charlie pursed his lips, then closed his eyes. He inhaled. “It’s hard, Shoko. How they look at me when I go apply. I’m so much older than everyone.”

“Shut up. You got combat experience. What more they want?” I shook my head. Sue whimpered. I walked over and picked her up, putting my nose into her soft baby neck. She cooed. I smoothed back her hair, red at the time.

Charlie got up and picked the trash off the floor. He threw it away. Then he got changed into a shirt and tie and went out with his black vinyl briefcase full of résumés, all without saying a word.

Finally, Conroy Jewelers hired Charlie to work at the Mission Valley Mall one Christmas. Charlie had always liked jewelry. He learned how to do simple welding, and stayed there until his arthritis made it too hard for him to size rings for newlyweds and women whose fingers got bigger after childbirth, or to set tiny pearls some girl found in a Sea World oyster into a pendant. He made barely enough for us; with his Navy retirement, we got by.

Over the next twenty years, off and on, I tried to prod him into nursing. The job market didn’t stay down forever. “Hospital got good benefit,” I reminded him.

“I have Navy benefits. Besides, I can’t move patients around anymore. That’s the only reason they hire men.” But still he sang all day and night, and if he wasn’t singing, he had the radio or TV on, as though he could not bear to be with his thoughts.

 

 

CHARLIE SANG NOW as he drove us home in the old Ford Taurus, the windows rolled down and the air-conditioning off. I tilted my seat back slightly, knowing he was in no mood to talk.

I wished we could get a new car with freezing air-conditioning. When we got this one brand-new, years ago, I had thought it was the nicest car I’d ever seen. It had gray cloth seats and maroon paint. It even had a real stereo with a tape deck, and air-conditioning, the kind of car I always dreamed about. I thought it was as nice as our next-door neighbor Lorraine’s Buick Regal. When we bought it, I showed it to her. She told me how great it was. The next week, her husband bought her a brand-new Mercedes with license plates that said “ILUVLOR.”

Lorraine wasn’t really a friend, but she was the only person I knew who would talk to me. Everyone in our part of town was white, Christian, working-class, people like Charlie who watched
Hee Haw
or
Lawrence Welk.
The other housewives were a good fifteen years younger than I was. No time for someone like me, someone whose accent made her difficult to understand, and who never had anything worthwhile to say.

With no car, it was hard to do anything. Sue and I were on our own. Mike was going to community college part-time, still living with us but hardly ever home.

It felt lonelier than when Charlie had been in the Navy. At least when he was deployed, I got to use the car. Now I had to depend on Charlie or the neighbors for everything, which I hated.

When I got too lonely, I’d send Sue out to play with the neighbor kids and I’d go talk to Lorraine, who would be sitting in her plaid armchair, her feet bare on dark blue shag carpeting. She welcomed me into her house with a hearty laugh, brushing back her dark curls, leaving her soaps on the television and her magazines all over the glass and brass coffee table. “What new with you, Lor?” I asked on one of these visits. She gave me a glass of Coke and ice. I sipped it with relish. Charlie, being Mormon, didn’t allow Coke.

“Same old, same old.” She didn’t care that she had a hard time understanding me. She talked enough for five people, never mind two. “Ken’s flying the boys up to visit their grandparents while I’m stuck here waiting on Sears to finish our cabinets. Lordy, you wouldn’t believe the mess they make.”

“You got maid, though, right?” I prompted.

“I feel bad if she has too much to do. I clean before she cleans!” Lorraine yodeled a laugh. Lorraine also had a gardener who mowed her lawn, a pool guy, and a husband who didn’t mind her TV dinners. They had more money than the rest of the neighborhood put together. She sat and watched soaps all day and called her friends to gossip. And ate.

This was how I thought I would be as an American housewife, except for the too-much-eating part. When I first married Charlie, we were in Japan, where the dollar was strong. I had thought he was rich. I thought we would always be rich. I was wrong.

I nodded at Lorraine, my eyes falling to the women’s magazines spread over the glass coffee table, the snack trash near Lorraine’s recliner. She was like Charlie, I saw.

The doorbell sounded. “Come on in,” Lorraine said.

It was the woman who lived across the street, Charlene. We smiled politely at each other. “Sorry, Lorraine, didn’t know you were busy.” She fiddled with her red curls.

“You’re not interrupting at all,” Lorraine said.

I glanced at Lorraine, hurt, realizing that for all the times I popped in, she never did the same.

“I was going to run to the mall. You want to come with?” Charlene avoided my eyes.

“Sure. Let me get my purse.” Lorraine launched up from the chair.

I waited for them to ask me to go. Of course, they did not. I could have invited myself, but why? So I could tag along? “Thank you for Coke.” I put the glass down on the table, where someone who was not Lorraine would pick it up later.