How to Be an American Housewife by Margaret Dilloway Page A

loved pretty things as much as I did. I went to the beauty parlor every week to get my hair done. For the first time in my life, I didn’t have to work. I felt rich. “I love to show off my beautiful wife,” he said, giving me hugs. Charlie would always take care of me.
    Around the time we married, I figured out I was pregnant. I was afraid to tell Charlie, afraid he’d figure out on his own that a baby born eight months after was not his. I decided to wait until after the danger of miscarriage had passed. I could tell him the baby was premature. I tried not to gain too much weight. A big baby would give it away.
    I took Charlie home for a traditional Japanese wedding. To pay for it, I gave my mother a hundred dollars. One hundred guests, dinner, rental for the ballroom—one hundred dollars paid for it all.
    As Charlie and I walked up our street, I pointed out my home. The kimonos on my mother’s clothesline flapped in the wind. Not fancy silk ones that foreigners thought we wore every day. Plain cotton yukata . I wondered if Charlie would laugh, but he didn’t. He came from poor, too.
    “Welcome, Charlie,” Mother said, managing to get the l sound out better than I could. She fixed my favorite, a rice curry, with extra-hot spice. Her hair had gone all white now, her skin devoid of any elasticity. In ten years, she would be dead.
    I knelt on the floor. Charlie had told me this hurt his knees, and taking off his shoes all the time had made his arches fall, but he was getting used to it. He was a good sport about doing Japanese things. Like a lot of the Navy people coming into Japan, he had fallen in love with the culture as well as with a woman. “My husband even likes sushi,” I said to Mother proudly.
    She was impressed. “Most foreigners can’t eat it at all.”
    Charlie took a bit of curry and his eyes welled. I gave him some tea to cool his mouth.
    My younger sister, Suki, crept up to him. She was fifteen and still our baby, even though anyone could see she was a lovely young woman with long black hair, wearing her school uniform of a white blouse and long plaid skirt. I was happy to see she was a bit plump; this meant she was eating well for once.
    Suki touched Charlie’s hair. “His hair is fire!”
    He pulled his head away. Charlie had his curls combed into a jelly roll, one on each side of his head, put into place with a lot of hair ointment. “Yes, fire,” he agreed in Japanese. He patted it back where she had mussed it.
    He had gotten used to the attention. It was probably a lot more than he’d ever gotten in the United States.
    My father knelt by him and watched him eat gravely, so intent that Charlie got nervous. His gaze meant approval. “It was a good choice, Shoko?” His hair was gray, too, and his skin already wizened. He ate slowly, as though he had all the time in the world to savor his food.
    “Yes.” I put my hand over Charlie’s, the hand that had my sparkling new rings from the Navy Exchange department store. A diamond engagement ring, surrounded by a swirl of diamonds on the wedding band.
    “Beautiful!” Mother picked up my hand to admire it. “Better than the richest ladies in Tokyo, I expect.”
    Father spoke to Charlie in the limited English he had been able to pick up. “Like Japan?”
    “Hai.” Charlie knew more Japanese than my father knew English. Charlie had gotten books on Japanese and studied them in an effort to communicate with me. He had a kimono made for himself. He waited at the shrine while I prayed and wrote a prayer for himself in awful Japanese letters. He tried hard.
    “Taro will be coming,” Mother said, happy to have her children all together again.
    I felt the sickness in my gut again. I hadn’t seen Taro since he had left me here after Ronin. Taro had gone back to school, finishing out the semester with my money, and then gotten a job, refusing to take any more of it. My parents thought that was natural, because now I was married and out of the