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eter Tanagawa, a dark-haired man of thirty-three with twinkly brown eyes that express exuberance, leans forward in the leather chair of the small office attached to a technical books store. Speaking in a low voice, he sums up something small but key: “Nina wants me to do more with the kids, to be more concerned with their education and development, be more of a family person. And I am! But not as much as she is.”
The issue of how much of a “family person” he should be was not new for Peter. Early on in their vibrant courtship, riding their bicycles, talking for hours on end, Peter and Nina had explored their ideas about “men” and “women,” as couples do. Nina had wanted to anchor her basic identity at home, to ground only what was psychologically left: over at work. In this she stood between Carmen Delacorte (who wanted to stay home and put Frank out in the world) and Nancy Holt (who wanted to balance herself and Evan equally between home and world). When Nina and Peter first met, each was attracted to the way the other felt about the roles of men and women. Peter’s career in book sales, they agreed, would take priority over any job Nina would pick up later, but she’d want to pick up something. They were right for each other, both transitionals.
Just as in the Holts’ marriage, tension developed between their two notions of gender. Like Nancy Holt, Nina Tanagawa pressed
Peter to do more at home, and like Evan Holt, Peter resisted. But because Nina started on more traditional footing, she was to turn to an irresistible job offer as “the reason5 she was venturing further into the world, and as the reason he should move further into the home. More than the Holts and Delacortes, the story of the Tana — gawas is a story of how their traditionalism made Nina feel lucky and how Ninas feeling lucky affected the second shift, and about what happened to their daughter Alexandra along the way.
As a child growing up in a close-knit Japanese community in Hawaii, Peter had been his mothers favorite, and he had been distant from his father, who worked long hours and came home tired and distracted. Now, as a father himself (his two children, Alexandra and Diane, were five and three), he felt more engrossed in their lives—like a mother—and more discontent with his book business than his gender ideology would allow. He seemed to need Nina between himself and the children for things to feel right.
Nina, a stunning, slender blue-eyed blond of thirty-three, is slightly shy in manner. When I interviewed her in the evening at home, she seemed still ready for the office, dressed in a white skirt and jacket that was decorated with a tasteful small red pin—a fairy princess in a business suit. Like her father, Nina is resourceful and practical. Her mother, a lifelong housewife and busy volunteer, had been intermittently restless with her husbands refusal to “allow55 her to work. Nina had been determined to have “a job that gave me some sort of satisfaction55 but she also expected to be the center at home. Yet, now inadvertently, she had been drawn by her own success toward a desire to be the linchpin of Telfacs personnel department. Gradually she was shedding the feminine identity she5d had when she was twenty—or was she?