Polite Lies Page 8

  Chuck and I didn’t want to “start” a family. We didn’t plan to have children. We were annoyed by the common assumption that now that we were buying a house, we would soon “settle down” and “raise a family.” There were other expectations, too. After we bought the house, Chuck’s family and old friends, most of whom lived in town, began to ask us questions like, “What color is your living room?” “How will you do your bathroom?” “Are you going to change the wallpaper?” We didn’t know that a living room could be identified by one single color. We ignored the questions and did what we wanted—which was to say, as little “decorating” as possible.

  We were responsible homeowners. We promptly shoveled the sidewalk and driveway in the winter, cut the lawn and planted flowers and vegetables in the summer, raked leaves in the fall and put them on the curb. Chuck painted the outside of the house every three or four years and took off or put up the storm windows at the right times. But the inside of our house never had the grown-up look of other people’s houses.

  When we got married, we didn’t have furniture because we were still in school. By the time we bought the house, we had been together for five years and we both had fulltime jobs; we still slept on the mattress and box spring I had earned in graduate school by typing another student’s paper. When we were finally forced to buy a new mattress two years later, because the broken springs of the old one began to stick out and stab us in our sleep, we got a futon from a local co-op and put it on top of the old box spring so we would not have to buy a bed frame. The futon stuck out from the box spring because it was a little bigger, but we didn’t care: nobody saw our bed except us and the cat. The rest of the house wasn’t any better. None of our dinner plates or chairs matched. We had thrown out the dining room table to make space. Chuck played his electric guitar and I used my spinning wheel in the empty room under the chandelier we always meant to replace with a ceiling fan.

  For years, I didn’t mind the makeshift look of our home. It began to bother me only around the time my father died, in 1993. The night I heard the news, after calling my brother and agreeing to travel to Japan, I went into our living room to sit down and relax. But as I looked around I didn’t feel relaxed. The room made me think that my whole life was a mess.

  Our living room was full of mismatched furniture: an ash and cherry coffee table and entertainment center made by Chuck’s friend Dean, various chairs inherited from other friends or bought at garage sales. One chair had a plush rose-colored cover, while another, right next to it, was sixties earth-tone plaid. We hadn’t been completely blind to the sad state of our decor. Every time we visited other people’s houses, we noticed how bad our furniture was except for the coffee table and the entertainment center. In a halfhearted way, we talked about buying some “real furniture” to go with the two good pieces and throwing out the rest, but neither of us took the initiative. Getting new furniture became one of the things we talked about but never did—like remodeling the master bedroom, putting in an extra bathroom, building a sun room, looking for a summer cottage. We kept talking about the repairs and improvements we never started; we kept inheriting chairs and lamps like bad karma. Until that night, I had been resigned to our inaction. Home-decorating isn’t important to either of us, I used to think. But that night, the state of our living room bothered me.

  “Oh, this is the graduate-student, pre-baby living room we used to have,” one of our guests had said when we had first moved in. Our living room looked the same seven years later. At least in an outward way, we had made very little progress since our mid-twenties. We were stuck in a time warp of bad decor, unable to move on.

  I stood in the midst of our clutter, too anxious to sit down. Chuck was upstairs in the spare bedroom, listening to music and reading. He was leaving me alone because my father’s death was a shock and I didn’t know what to make of it. In times of confusion, I never want to talk—I want to be alone. Chuck was doing the right thing by giving me space, being considerate. Just for a moment, though, I wanted to run upstairs and tell him that we needed to make some changes and start living like adults—but I wasn’t sure what that would mean or why I felt the need to say it. So I sat down on the couch—the only item we bought new, beige to match our cat so his hair wouldn’t show even if we didn’t vacuum very often. Closing my eyes, I took a deep breath and tried to prepare myself for the trip ahead—for acting like an adult in Japan even though my American home was like an overgrown dorm room.

  Chuck and I couldn’t decorate our house partly because we were rebelling against our parents’ houses. He grew up in a small house divided into three bedrooms, a kitchen, a dining room, and a living room; each room was decorated with wallpaper, borders, painted trim, furniture and lamps that matched. After Chuck and his siblings left home, his parents converted one of the bedrooms into a den; every couple of years, his mother redecorated, changing the color scheme or the style of the rooms. She once had a dream about wallpapering the inside of the toilet—she had to cut and paste the paper just right.

  Chuck got along well enough with his parents, but he didn’t want to live in a house that was just like the one he had grown up in. Because his parents’ house had been divided into small rooms full of furniture, he wanted ours to have a lot of “open space”—a dining room without a table, a master bedroom without a bed frame, a spare bedroom that had only a desk and a couch. He liked our rooms to look spare and open, to have an almost Eastern feeling.

  While he tried to pare down our belongings and open up more space, I was working hard to clutter that space, to make it more comfortable. I had lived with my father and stepmother in a Japanese house that didn’t have clear boundaries. Though my own room was Western-style with a regular door, carpeted floor, and a bed, the rest of the house had sliding fusuma doors that were kept open most of the time so that one room emptied into another. Everyone else in my family slept on futons that were put away during the day. Open doors and empty spaces reminded me of how scared and lonely I used to be: the only place where I felt safe in that old house was behind the closed door of my bedroom. So when I had my own house, I continued to mark off small territories of my own with stacks of books, plastic cartons of my spinning, weaving, and knitting supplies, piles of sweaters that didn’t fit into closets. I insisted that we keep all the living-room furniture people had passed on to us. Our separate rebellions left our house looking minimalist and cluttered at the same time.

  I often envied Chuck because his “baggage” about homeownership seemed much lighter than mine. When we went to feed his mother’s cats while his parents were away, he would always open the refrigerator and drink a soda or eat the candy his mother kept in glass dishes. In their living room, there was a big studio portrait of the four children, taken when Chuck was in first grade. I made fun of the portrait because everyone’s ears looked too big, but I was jealous. For Chuck, his old house was still a place of free food and drinks, a place where his parents proudly displayed pictures of him. I could not imagine feeling so comfortable in my parents’ house; after my mother died, no one in my family ever took a photograph of me.

  In another way, too, I thought Chuck had it easy. Being a man, he rebelled only against his own past, while I was up against something bigger. In both Japan and Green Bay, a woman’s place is considered to be inside her house. I resented the expectation that it was my job—not Chuck’s—to “make a nice home” for us by decorating, cooking, and cleaning.

  Everyone who asked Chuck and me about home decorating addressed me more than Chuck. They made eye contact with me and directed their questions to me, not him. When we were at parties and someone talked about buying furniture or a new appliance, many of the men said they left the final decisions up to their spouse. “My wife chooses and I pay,” they said, laughing in a proud and manly way. In small towns in the American Midwest, household tasks are divided by gender. Women are supposed to take charge of anything decorative, aesthetic, and superficial, leaving their men to deal with the m
ore important decisions about finances or overall structure. Many women choose their husbands’ new clothes as well as the wallpaper, the furniture, the color and the style of the new appliances for their homes. But if the house needs a new roof, a new furnace, or a large structural repair, their husbands are in charge of assessing the damage, calling the right kind of repair people, and negotiating with them.

  Owning a house made me more aware of these stereotypes. When Chuck and I were living in an apartment, people didn’t expect us to be like other married and settled couples. They didn’t ask me about furniture, so I didn’t know that many people expected me to be more interested in house decoration than in writing, teaching, or running. Once I knew, I couldn’t get over feeling angry and belittled. People talked as though, in all areas of life, women were more interested in surface decoration than content. When my friend Diane, a philosopher married to another philosopher, mentioned having helped her husband write his books, even some of our colleagues at the college assumed that she had proofread his manuscripts and suggested stylistic changes. They looked surprised to hear her husband say that Diane had helped him examine his basic concepts by challenging the weak links in his arguments. Talking about marriages and houses seemed to bring out everyone’s sexism.

  When Diane was teaching part-time at our college—where her husband teaches full-time—she ran into someone from work while she was shopping. Her arms loaded with sweaters, she was looking for a fitting room. The man smiled at her, winked, and said, “Out spending your husband’s money?” She nodded curtly and kept walking—when she got to the fitting room and closed the door, she realized that she was holding back her tears.

  I understood how Diane had felt. She had been too shocked by the man’s comment to respond or to correct him. What distinguishes unjust discrimination from other forms of rudeness may be that we never get used to it: every time, we are shocked and appalled as if it were the first time. I had known about sexism before Chuck and I bought a house. But reading books, attending women’s studies classes, or watching interviews on TV never prepared me for experiencing it myself. Every time someone asked me if I ironed Chuck’s shirts, if I planned to work part-time or stay home once we had children, I wanted to cry or slam the door and walk out. I never got used to being reminded that I was “just a woman” and that a woman’s place was in the house. I couldn’t help seeing the house as something that was used to put a woman “in her place”—a form of punishment.

  If gender discrimination were something we could get used to, I would have been well prepared long before I bought a house. In Japan, a woman’s place is always in the house, which belongs to a man. The most common Japanese word for a wife is ka-nai, literally,“house inside.” It is a word that a man uses to refer to his own wife, not to someone else’s (the word for that is okusan, “an honorable person in the back”). In contrast, a woman refers to her husband as shu-jin, which means “master,” “a person in charge.”

  Because these words, along with most people’s first impressions of Japan, imply that men are considered far superior to women, Americans and other “foreigners” are often surprised to discover that in everyday practice men are not in charge of their homes or families. In most households, wives control the family finances and make both large and small decisions that influence every member of the family. Japanese men turn over their paychecks to their wives, who give them small monthly allowances. The wife decides which house the family will buy, what furniture or appliances they will purchase, where their children will go to school. Some wives lock their husbands out if the men return home too late after a night of drinking. A drunken husband is not fit to come into the house.

  In a way, Japanese wives are more truly “in charge” than their American counterparts. No man in Japan would say, “My wife chooses the furniture and I pay,” because the money belongs to the family, not to him. If a roof needs to be repaired or an addition has to be built, a Japanese woman contacts the repair people and negotiates with them herself. She doesn’t expect her husband to be the spokesman for the family. A Japanese wife does not merely decorate her house and wait for her husband to make sure that it is structurally sound. Even the Japanese pictorial character for safety is composed of parts suggesting “a woman under a roof.” It is a woman, not a man, who gives a sense of security to a house in Japan.

  But when I think of the Japanese women I know—my mother, my aunt, my friends from school—I understand that being in charge is not the same thing as having power or freedom. A person can be in charge of her house and still be trapped by it. As a mainstay of the family, a Japanese woman is expected to work hard and to make many sacrifices. Everything she does is for the good of the house and her family (the word ie means both a house and lineage or family), not for her own pleasure.

  When I stayed at my Aunt Akiko’s house in 1993, I understood why I was always turning up the heat in my house in Green Bay and cluttering up the space with yarn and books. I was trying to make sure that my house didn’t become a cold, comfortless place like the Japanese houses in which I had grown up. Akiko’s house was one of those houses. My family lived there for a year with my grandfather when I was in kindergarten; my brother and I also stayed there for a month after our mother’s death.

  Coming back to this house as an adult, I couldn’t get over its lack of warmth. One morning after Akiko had gone back to bed to rest, I sat in the kitchen trying to read a book. Though it was a sunny, warm April morning, the kitchen was dark and cold. Like many old Japanese houses, Akiko’s house was designed to stay cool during the hot summer months; it had large windows and most of the rooms faced north or were shaded by trees and an outside wall. Maybe for the two hot months of the year, these features made the house a comfortable place, but for the other ten months, the house was dark, drafty, and cold. There was no central heating. The only heat came from small electric space heaters placed in a few of the rooms. Even with the heater on, the kitchen was freezing.

  I considered going upstairs, where it would be a little warmer, but there would be no place to sit. The three upstairs rooms were the traditional tatami-floor bedrooms with scarcely any furniture. During the day, when the futons were folded up and put away, the rooms were empty. There were no chairs or couches. I couldn’t sit around reading in bed in the middle of the day, as I sometimes do at my house in Green Bay when I want to spend a relaxing afternoon.

  Except for the kitchen, the only room that had chairs was the formal drawing room downstairs, the coldest room in the house. The couch and the chairs there were stiff and uncomfortable. My grandfather had used the drawing room only for guests; we didn’t sit there ourselves even on special holidays. I stayed in the kitchen, hunched over the book with my hands tucked inside my sleeves.

  To many Japanese women who stay home all day their houses must seem oppressive—not a sanctuary from the outside world or a place of rest, but a place that drives them to hard work and sacrifice. Many upper-middle-class women, like my aunt, spend their days in cold kitchens, and yet they don’t renovate their houses and put in central heating, which they can surely afford. They will not spend money on something that would benefit only themselves. Their husbands and children, who follow typical Japanese work and school schedules, are seldom home except to sleep. Having a warm house all day long is not an important concern for them, so the women choose to put up with the cold. “It’s just me at home all day,” they say. “It’s not important.” The women don’t have a lot of time to sit around anyway: there is so much work to do, and they reason that working will keep them warm.

  My aunt, a typical Japanese housewife, never sat down to relax for more than ten minutes unless she was ill. For her, to be in the kitchen was to be at work. She was always getting up and cleaning the sink, washing the few dishes that we had just used, or sweeping the floor once again. Even though my cousin and I wanted to help, she would not hear of it. Working alone was a habit with my aunt. She and most women her age—and many younger women,
too—lived all their lives with men who never washed dishes or even boiled water for their tea. These men expected to be waited on once they were home from work. The children, too, were supposed to spend their time studying, not helping their mothers around the house. The women were left alone to do all the work, and yet what they did left no trace. They were constantly cleaning the kitchen to erase any sign of their hard work—dropped crumbs, scattered tea leaves, peeled vegetable skins.

  An ideal Japanese woman effaces—rather than expresses—herself. She is valued for her ability to pretend that her hard work is nothing, that she is scarcely there. The home she creates is a pure, empty space. Its beauty is elegant but cold. My aunt’s sparsely furnished kitchen didn’t reflect her personality or taste. The walls were bare except for a calendar from the paint company my grandfather had owned and a small Shinto shrine that had been put up to guard his health. Even though he had been dead for a few months, he seemed more present than my aunt or my cousin. I missed the kitchens of my neighbors or in-laws in Green Bay with the potpourri, scented candles, and country-decor hearts and geese I thought I despised. I wished I hadn’t made fun of the things people had put in their homes to express their taste or personality. Anything seemed preferable to the emptiness of my aunt’s house.

  I also missed my living room with its mismatched furniture. No matter how bad our furniture was, our house was still a home. In all the rooms, there were places to sit and relax: watch television, listen to music, talk, read. Chuck and I had put up our friends’ artwork and posters of our favorite museum exhibits. The shelves were full of our books and music cassettes and CDs. Anyone who visited us would learn something about our tastes, interests, hobbies. Our house in Green Bay didn’t reflect the Japanese ideal that a woman should go through her life taking care of other people, leaving no trace of herself. Both Chuck and I were leaving plenty of marks on the space we occupied.