Hapa Girl: A Memoir

19. Glamour Puss

Everyone has a moral line in the sand that cannot be crossed. For my parents it was hearth and home. They weren’t going to give up their house. Both of them had led nomadic childhoods, for different reasons but with the same result: they weren’t going to lose their South Dakota farm without a fight. One afternoon my mother and I were shopping in the Piggly Wiggly, when a cart rounded the corner and the wife of one of the other vice presidents came into view. She looked startled to see us, and for a second her face flushed, her eyes darted to the side, as though she were looking for an easy way to back up and head in the opposite direction. But then the panic settled, hardened. And she pushed her cart, looking straight ahead as though we were invisible, as though we weren’t standing right there in front of the peanut butter and jam jars. “Hello, Mrs. St—” my mother called out, her voice strong. The woman stopped behind her cart and eyed my mother icily. “Oh, you’re still here? Not homeless yet?” “Homeless!” The woman must have imagined that she was being clever, but now my mother was furious. Her Irish was up, as she used to say. My mother smiled so that all her teeth showed. She was going to bite this woman in two. “Ha! What a joker you are. We’ve never been better! Winberg is very happy traveling with his consultancy job. In fact, we’re expanding the farm. Chickens, cows, goats. It’s so 19 Glamour Puss wonderful, this wholesome life. What a funny, funny person you’ve become!” The vice president’s wife didn’t know what to say. Her lips twitched. She wanted to smile or sneer but her mouth wouldn’t obey and gaped open instead. My mother flashed her smile—her teeth were blinding—and I followed her quickly down another aisle. By now, in 1982, we knew what was being said behind my father’s back. We knew why he wasn’t getting any of the academic jobs he was applying for. Can we sue them? My mother wanted to know. Not without a lot of money, my father thought. Besides, he added, the publicity could be just as damaging. People would think there had to be some truth, something terrible to justify the animosity. Administrators were suspicious by nature. They wanted to avoid controversy. “There’s no hope,” my father said.“They want to destroy me. They want to destroy my career.” He decided to continue his consulting work, and in the meantime he’d try to wait the situation out. The young president who’d first hired my father had already left the university, left academia altogether to go into business, but the vice presidents were still around. They were applying for other jobs, trying to move up the chain of command. Once they left, maybe he’d have a chance. “We just have to hold on for a while,” he told my mother. Sometimes my father returned from Texas in a good mood. For Christmas he brought us unusual gifts, exquisite things we’d never seen before and couldn’t find in our town. For my mother he bought long leather gloves with mink cuffs, a jade necklace with a pendant carved into a monkey clutching a peach. “Where am I going to wear something like this?” my mother exclaimed, laughing. She slipped the necklace over her neck, then tried the gloves on, holding her long fingers up before her eyes. Glamour Puss • 137 138 • Chapter 19 “Wear them anywhere. Everywhere. To the grocery store!” my father laughed too. He took her right hand in his and kissed the back of her gloved wrist. For my brother there were exotic toolkits, miniature pens that unscrewed and turned into screwdrivers, Swiss Army knives that unfolded with kitchen utensils and lock-picking devices, multiblade knives and scissors that could cut through sheet metal. For me there was a jade-colored sweater from the Gap—a store I’d seen advertisements for in magazines but had never been inside—and a pair of Texas-weight legwarmers, red and white striped. The legwarmers fascinated me. They were silky and soft but completely worthless in terms of warmth. When I pressed them to my cheek, I thought I could smell the heat...