How to Be an American Housewife (8 page)

Shigemi chuckled at me, potato peels flying. “These Americans don’t know any better than to hire Eta. The Eta think they can work their way up, now that the Americans are here.”

I took off my apron and tossed it at her face. “It’s not worth me working here, Shigemi. I quit.” I’d find a job somewhere else. There was plenty going on in Kumamoto City. I was no scarlet woman.

I left by the back door and started walking toward the road. The gardener came running up beside me, pushing a wheelbarrow full of roses. “Fine day for a walk, isn’t it?” he said cheerfully. I ignored him. Then his foot hit a hole and he tumbled over, sideways, into a bush. The roses slid out after him.

Forgetting he was Eta, I held out a hand for him. He grasped it firmly in his own, which was lean, tan, and hard. Shocked, I pulled my hand away.

“You are marked now,” he said gleefully. His hat had come off and left a ring around his forehead. His face was unlined and handsome, with sparkling black eyes, a strong chin, and a lean nose. He looked vaguely European, not like an untouchable. Besides, I corrected myself, untouchables looked like everyone else. “Ronin, at your service.”

A
ronin
was a samurai without a master. Fitting. I smiled and discreetly wiped my hand on my dress. “Shoko.”

“Nice to meet you,” he said with a bow. “And where are you headed in such a hurry? Quit your job already, eh?”

I blanched. “I have another,” I lied.

“Of course, it’s not hard for a girl like yourself to get a new job just like that.” He snapped his fingers. He righted his wheelbarrow and threw the roses back into it. “But if you are so inclined, I happen to know that the Kumamoto Hotel is hiring.”

The Kumamoto Hotel had a lot of foreign business in those days.
That wouldn’t be a bad place to work at all,
I mused. “Thank you, Ronin-san.”

He looked at me as if I’d kissed him. “You’re welcome.” He watched me walk to the gate. I felt his eyes on my hips burn like a touch. My face reddened under my makeup. I turned around and gave him a little wave. It didn’t matter, I wouldn’t see him again. He raised his hand in return.

 

 

WHEN I WAS A CHILD we would sometimes see Eta living in the little encampments they had lived in for generations. “Who are they?” I asked when we passed by.

“Don’t look at them,” Mother told me. I stopped asking.

When I was three, while I waited for my mother at the fish market, an old man approached me with a toothless grin and petted my shiny black hair with a leathery hand. Mother had screamed so loud that I wet my pants. “Dirty Eta,” she hissed. “Get away.” She scolded me for letting him get so close. “You don’t want to be tainted, do you? You can’t get rid of an Eta touch.”

It wasn’t until during the war that mother changed her mind a bit. Food supplies were low. It was especially hard on the children. I knew one girl whose menses never came due to malnutrition; she remained forever stuck in childhood, flat-chested and barren.

At first, we complained of sore stomachs. Or Taro did. He was the only one allowed to. I, being eleven and female, was far too mature to make my parents feel worse about something they couldn’t control.

“Quiet,” Father told him in a voice much sterner than I had ever heard before.

A few months earlier, Mother had had a miscarriage. She had called me into the house while Father was away. I stopped at the door, alarmed. Mother lay on her bedroll, all the windows shut to make it night-black, blood seeping out of her onto old newspapers. Her face was marble white. “Get the midwife,” she had whispered.

I ran into town and returned with the midwife. Mother held my hand as she pushed out the tiny baby boy, only five months along. He was perfectly formed, with long see-through nails and wispy eyelashes and the beginnings of dark hair.

The midwife, a woman who looked ancient with a humpback though she was probably only fifty, said a prayer. “Not enough food for her and the baby,” she had said, wrapping him in a blanket as we waited for Father to return from church.

I held him, wiping the blood from his face with the blanket’s edge. He was already cold.

Mother held out her arms to take him. “Go out and take care of your brother and sister,” she said. “And take them to get Father.”

“Tokidoki,”
the midwife said sadly: Sometimes. Sometimes your fortune can turn on the drop of a pin. Good or bad.

I went outdoors, blinking in the brightness. Outside, a jay sang. I had forgotten it was spring.

Taro and Suki played in a muddy puddle, making small turtles out of the clay soil. “We’ve got to get Father,” I said importantly, taking off at a run. The baby seemed like a dream to me. My legs were lead in the balmy air.

Father was meditating at the altar when we arrived. “Father,” I whispered urgently, “the midwife is at home.”

He opened his eyes and looked into nothingness. “Not again.”

“Again?”

He shushed me.

Later, much later, I found out that Mother had had three miscarriages. This one had been the furthest along.

She named the stillborn boy Kenji, meaning “intelligent second son.” This birth had taken everything out of her. Mother recovered in bed, too ill to move much for weeks.

I did the housework and cooked whatever food we had. “We can’t hold out much longer,” Father said. “The Emperor is talking about surrender.”

“Never.” Taro looked fierce. He probably would have run away to be a child soldier if Father hadn’t told him we needed him here. Taro hunted rabbits, but in the winter they got scarce. Besides, everyone was hunting the same thing. Our chickens even stopped laying, and we ate them though they were tough as jerky.

Mother grew weaker and weaker until one day Father brought home a cupful of rice. And the next day another and then another, stretching it into a thin gruel soup for all of us, until Mother got strong enough to rouse herself.

“Where did that rice come from?” she asked him on the fourth night in a low voice. We slept on two mattresses: Father, Mother, and Taro on one; my sister and I on the other, all pushed together so Taro was next to me.

“Neighbor.” Father was lying. Even I could tell. He was too holy to be a good liar.

“What neighbor do we have left?” I could almost hear her eyes narrow in the darkness.

“Someone who came to me for a blessing.” Father rolled over with a soft thud.

Mother was silent for a minute. “It was Haruko, wasn’t it?”

I inhaled sharply and nudged my brother in the ribs. He snored in response. Boys slept through everything good.

Haruko lived in the Eta village. She had been trying to come to church for years, only to be dissuaded by my mother. Father had taken to letting the Eta people gather in the garden for a service early in the morning. It was a compromise he had reached with Mother. Father saw the good in everyone.

Mother gasped. “I am ill. Why do you try to kill me?”

“I am not. You will be well.” Father’s voice was firm, a hand holding hers in the darkness. “I blessed the rice myself. You must find it in yourself to be strong.”

“I cannot.” Mother choked. “It’s been too hard for too long. I cannot.”

Father exhaled. “We will do what is necessary to live.”

“Even if it kills me?” Mother muttered, but this time I could hear the humor in her tone.

“If it’s not one thing, it’s another.” I heard him kiss her. “Good night.”

The Eta woman kept sharing her rice—I think she got extra because she didn’t report that her two young children had died from scarlet fever—and we kept eating it until Mother was up and about again. She still would not greet the woman if we saw her in the street, but she no longer crossed to the other side.

 

 

I WENT STRAIGHT to the Kumamoto Hotel, not even bothering to change out of my maid’s uniform. I had to get another job fast. I couldn’t survive long without money. That Shigemi. I would have to find a new roommate, too. How could I live with someone who would throw me to the lions in a snap?

I walked through the big double glass doors and went up to the front desk. My heels caught in the thick, plush carpeting. Enormous landscape paintings of lands I’d never seen decorated the walls. The man at the desk told me the manager would be right out. I went and sat on the red velvet couch, staring at a painting of the Eiffel Tower. How nice it would be to visit France, drink coffee at an outdoor café.

I heard a low whistle behind me, and turned. I was startled to see my brother’s childhood friend, Tetsuo, dressed in a bellhop’s uniform, leaned over the back of the sofa. I hadn’t seen him in over a year, and he’d grown into a handsome young man, with quick eyes and a strong, dimpled jaw.

“Tetsuo! I didn’t know you worked here.”

His eyes widened when he recognized me. “Shoko-chan! I can’t believe it.”

“Why are you whistling at strange girls, then?” I smiled. Tetsuo was my favorite of my brother’s friends. He and I were like brother and sister. Until now, the way he was looking at me.

He hopped over the back and landed, cross-legged, beside me. His face broke into a grin. “You still playing baseball?”

“When I can.” I smoothed out my skirt.

The manager appeared, a short, balding American with a potbelly. Tetsuo stood up. “Hello,” the manager said in English. “I’m Mr. Lonstein.”

“I can vouch for her, sir,” Tetsuo said. I was surprised that he knew English so well. I only knew a few words. Stop. No. Please.

Mr. Lonstein gave me an appraising look. “You can start right away.”

 

 

HE PUT ME in the gift shop, where I had to ring up purchases for the American sailors and others coming through. Mostly, the gift shop had glass cases full of figurines and cheap Japanese souvenirs marked “Made in Occupied Japan.” Many servicemen stayed at this hotel. They also liked coming to the restaurant and dance club.

“Thank you very much,” I said after each purchase. I got to wear a beautiful cream silk kimono, decorated with pink camellias and climbing green vines. One lady even took a picture of me to show her friends back in the States, her arm around my waist, as though we were bosom friends. Americans were overly familiar. I got used to it.

Within a week of me starting the job, Tetsuo showed up at my counter. “How would you like to go out on Friday?” he asked.

“Let me think about it.” Nice girls turned down the first request. “No, Friday I’m busy.”

“Guess you’ll miss out on the fun. Oh, well, I’ll call another girl.” Tetsuo pretended to leave.

I smiled. I needed fun. And no one was around to tell me how to behave. “I suppose I can go with you.”

He leaned his elbows on the countertop. “Meet me at ten.” He winked at me and snapped his fingers and pointed his fingers like guns at me. I winked back.

I
’d been dating Tetsuo for a couple of weeks when, one day, I went outside on my lunch break. The gardens at the hotel were nice, made to look English, with a maze about five feet tall made out of boxwood bushes.

I walked into this maze with my
bento
box, remembering Tetsuo saying there was a fountain somewhere inside. My brother and family were pleased that I was dating Tetsuo, my mother relieved. I was already nineteen, and many of the girls I went to high school with were married. However, I had many single friends, women like me who sought to improve their positions.

Every weekend night, sometimes even weeknights, Tetsuo picked me up from the one-room apartment I shared with another girl from the hotel, and we went dancing. Oh, Tetsuo could dance! He was the only man I ever knew who could. I lent him out to my friends, too. I wasn’t even jealous when I looked up from my drink—Coca-Cola, of course, since I didn’t like alcohol—to see Tetsuo slow dancing with my new roommate, Yuki, their eyes closed, cheek to cheek, dreamily moving under the orange and blue lights. Mitsui, another girlfriend of mine, nudged me. “You better watch her. She’s a man-stealer.”

“Yuki?” Why would I be jealous of Yuki? Her face was moon-round and her waist already looked matronly. “I guess some men might like that. Not Tetsuo.”