Read Online How to Be an American Housewife by Margaret Dilloway - Free Book Online Page A

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