The Favorites (10 page)

S
hortly
afterward, Mrs. Izumi went away to pay a call on someone she had met through church.

Mrs. Rexford was irritable and restless. “I think I’ll go out,” she told her mother.

“
Soh soh,
that’s a good idea,” said Mrs. Kobayashi soothingly. “Take a stroll through one of your old haunts.” Mrs. Kobayashi herself did not go in for aimless walks; she left that to the young people.

“I think I’ll go out for an ice. Come on,” Mrs. Rexford told Sarah.

“Are we going to the snack shop?” Sarah asked.

“No. I’m taking you to an old-fashioned teahouse, the kind we used to go to before they came up with those dreadful convenience stores. Can you believe it, Mother? That a child of mine has never eaten shaved ice at Kinjin-ya in the middle of summer?”

“It’s downright un-Japanese,” said Mrs. Kobayashi. “You should fix that right away. Run along, then. Go enjoy yourselves.”

They strolled through the lanes, becoming absorbed in the larger outdoor world of cicadas and trees and wind chimes and
bicycle bells. Sarah felt her mother’s agitation fade. Smugly, she thought how silly her aunt Tama was to ruin a perfectly nice visit with all that religion.

Her own position, in contrast, felt sweet. How things had changed since America! It seemed ages ago that she had whined because her mother insisted on trimming her sandwich crusts or drawing little sketches on her brown paper lunch bags. Sarah pushed those memories away, ashamed of herself.

And yet—would the changes last? She remembered a science experiment at school, where she had dropped an egg into various liquids. In some, the egg floated to the surface; in others it sank like a stone. What if Japan was the only alchemy in which she could float?

The Kinjin-ya teahouse was small and unpretentious. Sarah had passed it many times on the way to the open-air market but had never gone inside. Its atmosphere was quite different from the modern tea shops downtown. It reminded Sarah of the pickle shop, with its aged wooden walls from when Japan had been a poor country. On one side hung a row of rectangular wooden tablets, one for each item on the menu, bearing the name and price in old-fashioned black brushstrokes. At this time of day the tables were empty; the only other customers were a little boy about Jun’s age and his mother. The boy was spooning his way through a plate of om-rice—an omelette stuffed with ketchup-flavored rice—a children’s favorite since the postwar years.

Mrs. Rexford and Sarah ordered shaved ice topped with a mound of sweetened azuki beans. It came in fluted glass dishes with long-handled spoons. “My generation grew up on this,” Mrs. Rexford said. “
Maa,
it really takes me back!”

They were silent, savoring the crushed ice and the creamy sweetness of the beans.

“Remember this, remember the way it tastes,” Mrs. Rexford told Sarah. And Sarah did, decades later. Many random experiences would be cemented in her mind by her mother’s phrase “remember this.”

Mrs. Rexford leaned back in her chair, gazing about her with a pleased expression. The seasonal cloth flaps over the open doorway cast a bluish tint on the room. Every so often, a breeze broke apart the heavy flaps and let in a flash of sunlight.

Taking advantage of this peaceful moment, Sarah ventured, “It’s weird now, isn’t it, with Auntie being Christian.”

“Well,” her mother said, “she never had top priority growing up. But it couldn’t be helped—you know how complicated things were back then.”

Sarah nodded.

“It’s an issue in every family, though. Remember that day we had snacks at the Asaki house?”

“Oh right, the bottle of Fanta.”

There had been one large bottle of orange Fanta to share among the three children. Dividing it was quite a project: first the empty glasses were lined up side by side, then each one was filled with the same number of ice cubes, and finally Mrs. Nishimura had poured the Fanta, little by little, until the levels were precisely equal. Momoko and Yashiko seemed familiar with the routine. They had crouched down on their hands and knees so as to be eye-level with the glasses, making sure that neither sibling got a milliliter more than the other.

“You and I are lucky,” said Mrs. Rexford. “Some people never get to come first.” Sarah thought of her aunt Tama making a moue to hide her tears. She thought of her aunt Masako waving from her shadowed gateway as the Kobayashi household strolled past, laughing and chatting, on their way to the bathhouse.

But now for the first time her sympathy was tinged with
something hard, an unwillingness to give up her advantage. Her grandmother’s favoritism might not be working in her aunts’ favor, but it was working in hers. For the first time in her life she was blooming. This was the luck of the draw, and she was tired of feeling guilty. In some dim recess of her mind she had begun to feel she deserved it, that fate had recognized her worth and was finally rewarding her.

“I guess there’s no way around it,” Sarah said, echoing her mother’s words from earlier that day.

“I guess not,” said Mrs. Rexford. They were silent, spooning up the last of the azuki beans.

“When you come first in someone’s heart,” Mrs. Rexford said, “it changes you. It literally, chemically changes you. And that stays with you, even after the person’s gone. Remember that.”

Sarah nodded. The idea of chemical change resonated with her, and once again she thought of the eggs floating.

She let out a little sigh of well-being. So this was how it felt to eat shaved ice at Kinjin-ya in the middle of summer. It was pleasant to sit in the path of the old-fashioned fan and feel the air flow over her moist arms and legs, exactly as it must have done when her mother was a girl. She felt curiously relaxed, all her pores open to the world. For the first time she noticed that some defensive part of herself—her habitual readiness to shrink and harden at a moment’s notice—had melted away, leaving a sense of implicit trust in the world. This, she thought, is how it must feel to be a queen bee.

They left the teahouse in excellent spirits.

“That was yummy.” Sarah used the childish word on purpose.

“It was,
ne,
” agreed Mrs. Rexford.

They walked slowly, in no rush to get home. They took a roundabout route through a neighborhood Sarah had never seen.
Some of the houses had old-fashioned thatched roofs instead of the usual gray tile.

“They look like the houses in those history books Grandma sent me,” said Sarah.

“This lane hasn’t changed in generations,” Mrs. Rexford said. “It’s never going to change, I’m sure.”

They passed under the shade of a large ginkgo tree that leaned out over an adobe wall into the lane. The fan-shaped leaves, dangling from thin stems, fluttered and trembled. The
meee
of cicadas was directly overhead now, sharpened from a mass drone into the loud rings of specific creatures, each with a different pitch, a different location among the branches. Mrs. Rexford paused and lowered her parasol to see if she could spot one. Not finding anything, she lifted her parasol and resumed walking.

“Mama?”

“Hmm?”

“Were you always Grandma’s favorite?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“Even before she knew what kind of person you’d turn out to be?”

“
Soh,
even then. Because I was part of her old life before the war, back when she was happy and in love.”

The lane narrowed and they fell into single file. The dappled shadows danced on the back of Mrs. Rexford’s parasol.

Sarah pictured Shohei’s handsome, unfamiliar face. It was odd to imagine anyone other than her mother holding such power over her grandmother’s heart. That it was a man seemed especially strange. Sarah had grasped early on that while the men in this family were flattered, catered to, and fed extremely well, they were not that important in the scheme of things.

“When your grandfather died,” said Mrs. Rexford, “all her love for him had to go somewhere. So it came to me, all of it.
Maybe I turned out the way I did because of that early love. It’s hard to say.”

“So it’s like you piggybacked off of what they had,” Sarah said.

“That’s right. And now you’re piggybacking off of what she and I have. That’s why you’re the favorite grandchild, you see?”

Sarah pondered this. She had always thought love began and ended with the actual person involved. She remembered her mother telling Momoko about emotions fermenting over time and getting blurred together till you couldn’t tell them apart. It seemed that love, too, was blurry when it came to recipients. The remainder of one love could go on to feed the next, like those sourdough starters that American pioneer families had handed down for generations.

“It’s not on your own merits,” said Mrs. Rexford. “Not yet. You reach her through me. Remember that.”

“Okay,” Sarah agreed.

They strolled through the shifting tree shadows of late afternoon. The
k’sha k’sha
of gravel was loud beneath their feet. The buzz of traffic floated over from some larger street several blocks down. Trailing her fingers along a low wall, Sarah felt its braille of pebbles and straw; she breathed in the scent of sun-warmed adobe. She felt perfectly happy.

They approached two young boys standing under a tree with a plastic insect cage at their feet, staring up at a horned beetle just above their reach. They turned toward Sarah with that look of avid curiosity she knew so well. But they seemed mollified to see her mother was Japanese; she wasn’t, then, a complete outsider.

“Where are your nets, boys?” Mrs. Rexford called out in the friendly tone of a fellow enthusiast. “Do you need me to get that for you?”

The boys gazed with tongue-tied gratitude as she pulled the horned beetle from the bark and transferred it to their plastic cage. “Look at the size of these antlers,” she said. “It’s a real beauty.” Too shy to speak, the boys broke into big foolish grins. Sarah, who had always felt uneasy around small Japanese boys, marveled at how harmless they could be, how sweet.

As they resumed walking abreast Sarah remarked, “Little kids don’t stare as much when I’m with you.” It was the first time she had openly referred to her shame.

“Let them stare,” her mother said breezily.

“Soh ne,”
agreed Sarah with her new queen-bee expansiveness. What had she been so afraid of?

Mrs. Rexford gave her daughter an approving glance but said nothing.

Years later Sarah would remember this afternoon for its intensity of color: the gleaming lacquer of the beetle against the bark, the hills rising all around them in a crescendo of green. The parasol cast a rose-colored glow over her mother’s face, drawing Sarah’s eyes to its unfamiliar beauty. Even the air had color, a whitish glow like light refracted through a shoji screen. When she grew older and began falling in love with men, she would experience this same sense of heightened color—although in a weaker form—and see this for what it had been: her first and most powerful romance.

O
-bon
was almost upon them. It was a three-day festival of reunion, when spirits of dead relatives returned to visit the living. Families were walking en masse to bus stops and train stations that would take them to ancestral gravesites out in the country. This was the time for graveyard maintenance. The fathers carried garden tools; the mothers carried delicate food offerings for the dead (and, if they were old-fashioned, a hearty picnic lunch for the living) discreetly wrapped in silk
furoshiki;
the children trudged behind with flowers.

As the Kobayashi household ate breakfast, they could hear the crunching of gravel as chattering families passed directly outside, taking shortcuts through the narrow lane. A woman’s voice cried, “
A!
We forgot the thermos!” It was the last weekend before the holiday. Everyone, it seemed, was heading out to the country.

“They’re getting ready for O-bon,” said little Jun in a sullen voice. Everyone else was silent, chewing.

“I’m afraid we’ve held you back in your preparations,” Mr. Izumi said. He was referring to the housecleaning, for family altars were just as important as graves. “It was thoughtless of
us,” he said. Sarah’s heart went out to him. His fine long eyes, slanted ever so slightly downward, gave his face a mournful air.

“Not in the least, Izumi-san!” Mrs. Kobayashi batted the air dismissively, as if to swat away his concern. “The O-bon dinner will be over there”—she gestured toward the Asaki house—“so there’s really nothing for me to do.”

They all knew this was a lie. Housewives cleaned obsessively before a priest’s yearly visit. The priests from So-Zen Temple had already begun their neighborhood rounds, chanting long incantations before each family altar to guide the spirits on their return journey. This was a grueling time for priests, who made back-to-back calls from morning till evening. It was for such occasions, as well as for funerals, that they practiced year round. No priest from So-Zen Temple had yet marred a ceremony with coughing or hoarseness.

“This house is spotless all the time, anyway,” said Mrs. Izumi.

“Mommy,” said Jun, “can’t we stay for O-bon night dancing?”

“No—I already told you. We’re going home tomorrow.”

Another set of footsteps crunched by on the gravel. They heard a small child’s excited voice saying, “…great big rice balls, sprinkled with sesame salt!”

“I don’t envy those people,” said Mr. Kobayashi with well-meaning heartiness. “It’s going to get really hot today.”

“You’re absolutely right, Father-san,” Mrs. Kobayashi replied. “Maybe we should have grilled eel for lunch. It’s good for heat fatigue. Would everyone like that?”

“O-bon, O-bon, it’s almost O-bon,” Jun droned tunelessly.

“Jun-chan, stop that,” said his mother. “No singing at the breakfast table.”

Sarah felt bad for her aunt. In the excitement of the upcoming holiday, the Izumis’ departure would create hardly a ripple.

Afterward, washing dishes at the sink, Mrs. Rexford said, “I
can’t believe she went out to pay calls
again.
On her last day. Who’s she visiting, us or the Jehovah people?”

“It’s all right,” said Mrs. Kobayashi. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Mother, it’s
not
all right.”

Having finished the dishes, Mrs. Rexford began wiping the sides of the sink. Mrs. Kobayashi continued to dry, passing the dishes up to Sarah, who was kneeling on the tatami floor of the dining room. The girl stacked each item on the shelves of the floor-level cabinet. Every time she reached into its depths, she breathed in a faint, familiar aroma from her childhood: the wooden damp of freshly washed chopsticks, soy sauce within its cut-glass cruet, condiments such as seven-spice and sesame seeds.

“She won’t even help around the house.” Mrs. Rexford wrung out the dishtowel with an angry twist. “You know what? She hasn’t changed at all. She says long prayers at the table but doesn’t care if our food gets cold while we wait. She sips tea and talks about charity, and meanwhile her aging mother’s slaving away down in the kitchen.”

“Nnn!”
protested Mrs. Kobayashi. “‘Aging mother’?!”

Mrs. Rexford refused to be sidetracked. “That kind of hypocrisy earns no respect from me,” she said.
“None!”
Sarah was fascinated, even excited, to see her mother angry at someone other than Sarah herself.

“Don’t,” said Mrs. Kobayashi quietly. “You know how guilty I feel about her.”

There was a long pause. “I’m sorry,” Mrs. Rexford said.

Afterward Sarah and her mother went to a graveyard in the city to see the O-bon decorations. The somber headstones were transformed by
sasaki
grass, fruit and flower offerings, and branches of umbrella pine; the crumbling baby Buddhas were resplendent in new red bibs. White threads of incense wavered
up by the dozen, hovering in the humid air like ghostly forms bending over their own headstones.

“We’ll visit our own graveyard after your aunt and uncle leave,” Mrs. Rexford told Sarah. “It won’t be as crowded as this one, because it’s out in the country. But it’ll be lovely too in a different way.”

Lately, with Mrs. Izumi away so much, Sarah and her mother had been going out alone. Sometimes they visited a little-known restaurant whose only item on the menu was dumplings from a secret family recipe handed down since the Momoyama era. Once they visited the Gion district to look at geishas. But mostly they wandered through out-of-the-way haunts from Mrs. Rexford’s youth. They strolled past the tennis courts of her old high school or lingered in a neglected children’s park on the bank of the Kamo River. Mrs. Rexford told stories of her youth, and Sarah listened with an attentiveness she had never shown back home.

When they arrived home, Mrs. Izumi’s and Jun’s shoes were already lined up in the vestibule. “Welcome home!” called Jun’s treble voice from the family room. He was sitting at the table with his hands curled around a cold glass of sweet, tangy rice Calpis. “Mommy’s changing her clothes,” he said.

Sarah pulled down some blue-and-white floor cushions from the stack in the corner. The electric fan on the floor whirred gently, swiveling back and forth like a spectator at a tennis game.

Mrs. Rexford soon entered, followed by Mrs. Kobayashi bearing a tray with a large Calpis bottle and glasses. “The men went across the lane to see Uncle,” she said. The Asaki house had already finished its gravesite duties.

When everyone except Mrs. Izumi was settled, Mrs. Kobayashi said, “So did you have fun today, Jun-chan? Did you meet some nice people?”

Jun nodded, taking a noisy gulp of his drink.

“What did you all talk about?” Sarah asked curiously.

“Heaven.”

“Oh! That sounds nice.”

Jun nodded again, pleased to be the center of attention. “We’re all going there,” he said, as if discussing an upcoming vacation. Then, remembering something important, he turned to his grandmother with an anxious look. “Grandma,” he said, “Mommy says you don’t want to go to heaven with us.”

“It’s not that I don’t want to, Jun-chan. But there are other reasons, you see.”

“Grandma, they told me I should ask you to come.” He widened his eyes, the whites so babyishly clear they had a bluish cast. “Because I don’t want you to go to hell, Grandma.”

“I’ll be just fine, dear. There’s no need for you to worry.”

“No, Grandma. Listen!” Jun’s brow puckered with the effort of trying to make her understand. “Listen! Hell is a really, really scary place. You won’t like it there. I don’t want you to go there, Grandma.”

Mrs. Kobayashi said nothing. She looked distressed; the lines around her mouth deepened until they looked like parentheses. She reached out helplessly and stroked her grandson’s crew cut.

Jun seemed baffled by his grandmother’s lack of sense. “How come you don’t want to go with us?” he persisted.

By this time Mrs. Izumi had returned and was standing in the doorway, watching her mother’s predicament with a smug expression on her face.

Mrs. Rexford looked over at her sister, and her lips compressed. A mighty force seemed to rise up in her, charging the room like air before a storm. Sarah had never seen this brutal, avenging side of her mother; back home, she hadn’t defended
anyone but herself. Sarah remembered the stories of her mother as a child, protecting the weak on the playground.

“Raise your child any way you want,” Mrs. Rexford said. Her voice, though quiet, had such intensity and force that Sarah wondered for one crazy moment if her mother would stand up and hit her sister the way she had when they were children. “Raise him any way you want, but don’t you
dare
use him to hurt my mother.”

The sisters stared at each other for several minutes.

Then, surprisingly, Mrs. Rexford’s face contorted. “Mother,” she said, and suddenly she was crying.

Sarah and her aunt exchanged a glance of surprise and concern.

Mrs. Kobayashi got up and went over to kneel beside her daughter, running her hand up and down her back. “There, there,” she consoled, her face twisting in sympathy. “Shhh, now.”

Sarah felt a terrible sickness in her stomach. This was how her mother must have felt as a child.

Mrs. Rexford turned her face away from them, tensing her shoulders in an effort to stop her sobs.

At this point, Sarah and her aunt both remembered little Jun, who was sitting rapt, his mouth open with curiosity.

“I’ll take him,” Sarah whispered to her aunt. She stood up and held out her hand to the boy. “Come on, Jun-chan.”

“Big Sister, how come Aunt Mama’s crying?”

“I’ll tell you later. Let’s go, now.”

As she led him out of the room, she heard her aunt saying in a small, stunned voice, “Big Sister, I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right, both of you,” said Mrs. Kobayashi’s voice. “It’s all right, now.”

As Sarah passed through the dining room to the opposite
end of the house, she came face-to-face with her grandfather. He must have come home early in order to get some work done. Like Sarah, he was heading for the opposite end of the house, with a sketch pad in one hand and a cup of cold tea in the other. He must have heard part of the women’s conversation, but it was hard to tell his reaction.

“Can we come watch you work, Grandpa?” she asked.

“Sure, sure,” he said, smiling.

Still holding Jun’s hand, Sarah followed her grandfather down the hallway to his accustomed spot on the garden veranda. Even in her agitation, she was aware of the pleasant coolness of varnished wood under her bare feet. The garden side of the house had an austere quality—perhaps it was the earthen walls or the formality of the dark wood—that required a certain mental adjustment, like entering a museum from a busy street.

Jun, active as always, immediately clambered down onto a pair of gardening sandals and trotted into the garden. Squatting down, he picked up an empty cicada shell. “Look, Big Sister! Come look what I found!” he cried, already forgetting about his Aunt Mama in the other room. Sarah found another pair of gardening sandals and climbed down after him.

They crouched together, searching for more cicada shells. Eventually Mrs. Izumi came out and joined her father on the veranda.

The two adults sat for a while in silence. Mr. Kobayashi lit a cigarette, and its scent wafted out into the afternoon air like a rich, comforting incense.

He cleared his throat and said, “It’s no use trying to change them, you know.” He spoke gruffly, for he knew he was intruding into women’s territory.

“I know,” Mrs. Izumi replied, a bit shortly. Again they were silent.

Sarah knew her aunt Tama had been his favorite as a child. The family albums were full of photographs of little Tama beaming at the camera, her gap-toothed smile playing up to her father behind the lens. Being his favorite should have been enough for her. But Sarah understood why it wasn’t; nothing else compared with the brightness that was her grandmother and mother.

“It runs too deep,” Mr. Kobayashi said, and an echo of private remembrance gave his words a strange resonance.

“I know,” Mrs. Izumi said again.

Sarah glanced over at her aunt. There was an uncharacteristic stillness about her, as if her coquettish energy had finally run out.