How to Be an American Housewife (30 page)

“No hurry, Dad.” I smiled at him. “You’re going in first.”

 

 

A FEW DAYS LATER, Mom became more alert. She had oxygen tubes up her nose and wires everywhere. Monitors showed her heart beating at a steady, reassuring rate. I settled into a chair and pulled a blanket over my legs. A nurse asked if I needed anything.

“Sue?” Mom’s voice came hoarsely.

I bent over her. She opened one eye, her pupil trying to focus. “I’m here.”

“You see Taro?”

I nodded. It felt hard for me to speak, too. “He gave me what you asked for.”

Mom’s hands reached for mine, her rounded nails stripped of coral polish. Our hands were alike, with long, straight fingers. A surgeon’s hands, or an artist’s, she would tell me. Not the knobby short fingers of my father. “Only for just in case. No worry.”

I nodded again. I reached into my big tote bag, touching the smooth lacquered box. “Taro sent this to you.” I showed it to her.

Her eyebrows went up. “I thought thrown away! Where find?”

“I don’t know how he had it.” I set the box on the bed and took out the photos, holding each one up. “These are pictures he sent you.”

“Who all these people?”

“Family.” I tried to name them all. “Here’s Suki and her son, Yasuo.”

She closed her eyes again. “Taro tell story of Ronin?”

I couldn’t think of who that was. “Is that a cousin?”

“No. Not cousin.” Her voice came more forceful. She opened her eyes. “Big story.” She reached for my hand again. “Mike don’t know either. No tell, okay? This only for you, Suiko.”

I smoothed her hair, alarmed. “Rest, Mom, don’t talk.”

She gestured to the water pitcher on the side table and I gave her water out of a straw and cup. “First,” she said slowly, licking her dry lips, “I very proud you. Thank you for go Japan.”

“You’re welcome.” I sat.

She pointed to me. “You are beautiful. Smart. Now be happy. Okay?”

“Okay.” I looked at her monitors. Her heart had sped up a little bit. “Please, Mom, get some rest.”

“No. I need talk. I fine. Look me.” She cleared her throat. “What I want tell now is hard. Long, long time ago, I had another boyfriend. Before Daddy. Another I no mention. Ronin. The real, real reason Taro hate me.”

“He doesn’t hate you, Mom, not anymore. You can rest easy.” I moved my chair close to her. “Go back to sleep, now. You’re still tired.”

“I no can wait. One thing I know, I no change anything. But you no can tell Mike. He no can handle. Daddy no even want me tell you.” Haltingly, she began the story.

“Once, a long long time ago, there a young woman who wanted good life. New life. So this what she did.”

Mom shut her eyes, but she would not cease speaking. She talked for an hour, until I was back in Japan with her, with Ronin, until the whole story had spilled, hidden, gritty pearls out of an oyster. When at last she had finished, she opened her eyes again to look into mine.

I put my forehead on the edge of her bed. My brother was my half brother. What an enormous burden for my mother to carry all these decades. I looked at her. “Is that the only reason you married Dad? Because you were pregnant?”

“I love Daddy,” Mom said quietly. “Not then. I do now. Love can grow.” She touched my head. “No time in this life think ‘What if?’ Just got do. Okay?”

I wiped at my eyes. “Do you wish you had left with Ronin?”

She did not pause. “Not possible.”

I gazed at her, thinking about my brother and his biological father. “Does Dad know?”

She nodded. “Special kind man. He love Mike no matter what.” Her eyes clouded with tears.

I grasped her hand. “But Mike doesn’t know.”

“No.” Her voice creaked.

“Mom, you need to tell him.”

“How? He break.”

I thought of him showing up at the hospital, at the fire. “Mom, he’s not a little boy. He can handle it.”

She sighed. “Maybe you right, Suiko.” She shifted her weight. “I so lucky. You such good girl. Never thought I would have daughter. First thought daughter was no good, but you . . .”

I kept my gaze on her blankets. “Do you really feel that way, Mom? You’re not saying that because of the drugs?”

“No. Not ’cause drugs. Don’t be crazy, Sue.”

I inhaled, daring to ask one more question now, while she was open. “It’s just that it seems like you were so ashamed of me. Because of Craig. Because I can’t be everything you wanted me to be.”

Mom snorted. “Me? ’Shamed you? How can be? Don’t you listen what I did before you?” She hit her bed lightly with her hand. “You ’member, Suiko. You good, good girl. Things no work out way want, yeah?”

“I know.” I thought about my daughter, of how I was different and the same from my mother, of how Helena would be different and the same as me.

Mom looked out the window. In the distance, a pale moon was appearing. “Full moon come up.”

A giant, silvery moon. I was struck with a memory from my childhood. “Remember when you told me the story of the moon princess whenever there was a full moon, or if I couldn’t sleep?”

“Little bit.” She moved her legs around.

When I was a child, I was an insomniac, waking and sleeping in fits. My parents’ room was catty-corner to mine, and we always slept with our doors open. If going back to sleep took me an especially long time, I’d whimper and Mom would materialize beside my bed, smelling of cold cream and White Shoulders perfume. “What wrong?” she would ask. “Sick?”

“Tell me the story about the princess,” I’d whisper.

Mom would sit on my bed and tell me about the princess who came down from the moon. She would go on and on, rubbing my back, until I fell asleep. I was not like my mother in every way, but when Helena was little, I remembered what my mother had done for me. I never yelled at Helena for waking me up.

I leaned closer to my mother in her hospital bed.

“An old bamboo cutter found a beautiful baby girl in the bamboo,” I said. “He took her home to raise her as his own, and in three months she was full grown and beautiful. She shone light in the house, even in the night. Word of her beauty got out and suitors came to call. Her father set forth five knights to get impossible items. They all failed. Then the Emperor himself came and begged her to come live in the palace with him. She said, ‘If I have to live in the palace, I will become a shadow.’ She got homesick and the Moon People came to get her. She didn’t want to leave, but she couldn’t survive where she was.”

“And she left potion that make live forever with Emperor. He burn on Mount Fuji. That why smoke go up.” Mom smiled. “All I ever want is you be happy. Don’t forget, you hear?”

A knock-knock-knock sounded. “Come in!” Mom called. It was Dr. Cunningham. Mom grinned. “Dr. Cunningham! This my daughter, Sue.”

I felt shy. He was exactly as my mother had described. Handsome, with kind eyes. “Hello. I thought you worked at Balboa.”

“I do. I always come see my patients if they go elsewhere.” He smiled. “Nice to finally meet you. I’m Dr. Cunningham. You can call me Seth.” He shook my hand warmly, then felt Mom’s ankle for puffiness. “Dr. Su’s the best,” he said. “I want to make sure your recovery goes as well as your surgery.”

“Much better now you here, Doctor,” Mom purred. I laughed.

He glanced at me, one black eyebrow raised. “I would guess she’s on the mend.”

“Another minute with you in here and she’ll be doing the samba.”

He laughed, patting Mom’s leg, then checked all her vitals. “Looking good, Mrs. Morgan. I’ll see you at my office in a month for a follow-up.” He took a card out of his pocket and handed it to me. “Let me give you my card. Call me if you have any questions.”

I watched him leave.

Mom did, too. “Now you see what I talk ’bout?”

I put my head down by hers. “Mom, when you get out of the hospital, can we write down how you cook your pizza? And spaghetti?”

“Pinch of this, little bit of that, hard to write down. But I show.” She patted my head. “You strong girl. You can do whatever you want.” Her arm gestured around the room.

I smiled, surprised. “You think so?”

“I know it. All the time I am proud of you, Suiko-chan. All the time. You much more better mommy than me. Patient. No like me.” She paused. The machines whirred mechanically. “Maybe videotape my cooking? I always want be movie star, you know that?”

“I know.” I smiled at her.

She wiped away the mascara smudges from under my eyes. “If doctor like you like that, he like you no matter what. You better fix face before see him ’gain, huh?”

I nodded. “I will, Mom.”

A
week and a half passed, or so Charlie said. I didn’t bother keeping track. As I dozed in my hospital bed, I dreamed about my brother and me, hiding in our darkened house. I was kneeling, my head on a blanket so my bottom was in the air like a stinkbug. My parents held Suki close by. Taro got next to me. “Little big sister,” he crooned, his cheek pressed to mine, “all will be well.”

“How do you know?” I asked, opening an eye. All I could see was the shiny white of his eye, glowing in the near total blackness. A plane roared, deafening, overhead; the house rattled with a not-so-far-off explosion. Suki whimpered, and my mother nursed her to quiet her. I prayed.

“We are together, princess.” Then he belched directly onto my nose, his breath fish-stinky, laughing, and I shoved him away.

The room brightened. I opened my eyes and was not in Japan at all, but in my hospital room, an oxygen tank helping me breathe. My heart beat strong in my chest; I pictured the stitches healing magically.

“Shoko-chan?” A male voice. It’s so familiar, but I can’t place it. Not Charlie or Mike or a doctor.

Then a face wove into view. My baby brother, hair gray, face wrinkled, but the same broad nose and big-toothed grin. My Taro. “I am not dead?” I said in Japanese, surprising myself.

“Too stubborn, like me.” Taro laughed. I took his arm and pinched it—not hard, because I was weak. He squealed all the same. He was real.

WE SPOKE OF MANY THINGS. Sue had called after the surgery, and he had decided to come, just like that.

My Japanese flowed through rusty old pipes at first, but then came strong and clear. We talked of our children and grandchildren, but not one word of what drove us apart. It no longer mattered. I took his hand in mine, stuck through with tubes. “Look at us, two old farts,” I said, patting his liver spots.

“Only the shell is old.” Taro’s eyes twinkled as I remembered. My baby sister flashed before me, her lilting laugh, her pigtails flying with her jump rope. Oh, if only I could have seen Suki, too! “If Shoko can’t come to Japan, Japan comes to Shoko,” Taro said, showing me photos of Sumiko and Taro-chan.

I smiled. “I will come. You’ll see.”