The Favorites (2 page)

A
lthough
Sarah Rexford had been sitting at the low-level breakfast table for less than an hour, her brain was already overloaded. For one thing, the Japanese conversation was fast. For another, there was an unexpected strangeness about all the things that should have been familiar. Her grandmother’s traditional table setting, for instance, struck her for the first time as something exotic. Over the last five years, Sarah had grown used to the plain white Corelle back home in California. Now she was fascinated by the toylike arrangement before her: tiny porcelain bowls for rice, tiny lacquered bowls for miso soup. In the center of the table was a cluster of artfully mismatched bowls, each holding a different condiment that everyone picked out with chopsticks and placed on individual dishes that were one third the size of saucers. Sarah picked up each dish as if it were a museum piece, cradling it in both hands in order to savor its shape and heft. One was a rustic, pitted ceramic glazed with summer hues of ecru and blue; another was a paper-thin porcelain of misty lime, upon which a single bamboo stem was etched in white brushstrokes.

“Mother! This takuan is amazing!” exclaimed Mrs. Rexford,
munching vigorously on a slice of pickled daikon radish. “Where did you
get
this?”

“I made my own this year,” Mrs. Kobayashi said. “You should take some home with you.” Her expression brightened, as if she was about to discuss the pickle making, but she stopped herself. Her husband was about to speak.

Mr. Kenji Kobayashi was a handsome man in his sixties, permanently browned from years of tennis and golf. He designed avant-garde jewelry for a living. While extremely social in public—he was popular with both men and women—he was absentminded at home, as if conserving energy for his outside pursuits. When conversing with children, he often gave the impression of being slightly irrelevant, slightly off the mark. “So how many slices of bread,” he now asked his granddaughter, “does an American person eat in a single day?”

“
Saa
—at least four,” Sarah said. “Two slices of toast for breakfast, a sandwich for lunch…dinner’s usually something else, like noodles or potatoes. But some people eat dinner rolls too, along with the main course.” She glanced at her mother for confirmation, which was out of character for her. Back home, Sarah was a know-it-all; she was quick to correct her mother’s English mistakes, or her gaps in Western knowledge, with contemptuous finesse. But this switch in turf had wrought some change in Mrs. Rexford, giving her the relaxed authority she lacked in America. The girl sensed this, as dogs sense the subtle ups and downs of their masters, and already the balance of power had shifted between them.

Mr. Kobayashi continued his interrogation. “So do you eat breakfasts like this in America?” he asked.

“Sometimes. But not very often. Mama usually makes eggs and toast and orange juice. And sometimes pancakes, because my father and I like pancakes.”

“Pancake…?” said Mrs. Kobayashi.

“She means hotcakes,” Mrs. Rexford explained.

“Aaa, hotcakes!”
Mrs. Kobayashi nodded her understanding. “How tasty!”

Sarah wished her grandfather would stop asking these questions. She felt the old, familiar shame of being singled out for her foreignness. She remembered her early childhood here in Japan, how it had felt to board a streetcar or walk down a street: the baleful stares of children, the frank curiosity of vendors or those weaving people who lived on the other side of Murasaki Boulevard. Such people, of course, were the minority; their social graces were less polished than the rest of the population. But they betrayed the truth behind everyone else’s tactful facades of indifference. Young Sarah, who had grown up among Japanese faces (with the exception of her father, the only foreigner she knew), felt taken aback herself each time she passed a shop window and caught a glimpse of her own reflection: a pointy nose sprinkled with freckles, a sharp chin that was severe, almost foxlike, compared to the softer, more pleasing contours of those around her.

To shift the subject away from America, she announced to the table at large, “Granny Asaki waved to me from her balcony this morning.”

Mrs. Asaki, or Granny Asaki as she was known in the neighborhood, was Mr. Kobayashi’s elder sister. A longtime widow, she lived kitty-corner down the gravel lane with her daughter, her son-in-law, and her two grandchildren. The two houses, while bound by close ties, had something of an uneasy relationship. It had never occurred to Sarah to wonder why; she simply accepted it as the nature of her family.

As Sarah had anticipated, her mother and grandmother turned toward her with an air of sharp interest that, in the pres
ence of Mr. Kobayashi and herself, they attempted to disguise with expressions of kindly disinterest.

“You saw her already? How nice,” said Mrs. Kobayashi. “Did she happen to be hanging up something on the clothesline?” The two women exchanged a brief, sardonic glance.

Sarah nodded importantly. This had happened less than half an hour ago. She had folded up the futon comforters, stowed them in the closet, and was heading toward the dining room when she was struck by a sudden urge to see the garden where she had played so often as a little girl. Hurrying over to the wall of sliding glass doors that opened out onto the garden, she had thrown open the heavy, floor-length drapes. The metal rollers slid back with a
shhh,
like a receding wave, and the room was suffused with green light.

The garden was pleasantly unchanged—although smaller than she remembered—with the same four-legged stone lantern in one corner and the familiar stepping-stones spaced at artistically irregular intervals. The roof’s extended eaves cut off the sky, intensifying the effect of mass foliage: maple and yuzu and bamboo and camellia, all at the peak of summer lushness.

From a slightly stooped position Sarah could peer up, under the eaves and over the wooden fence and the dwarf yuzu tree, and get a good view of Granny Asaki’s second-story balcony. Mrs. Asaki was pinning up handkerchiefs and socks on the clothesline. She, too, was unchanged: small and spry, with the faint beginnings of a hunchback, and dyed black hair slicked into a small bun at the nape of her neck. Immediately spotting the girl’s face at the window, the elderly woman leaned over the wooden railing and vigorously waved a wet handkerchief, causing a large crow to flap up from a nearby pine branch. Sarah waved back.

“It was almost like she’d been watching our house,” Sarah
now reported to her mother and grandmother. From past experience, she knew that any evidence of Mrs. Asaki’s nosiness was guaranteed to hold their attention. But the Japanese code of conduct deemed that children—even teenagers—should remain unsullied by any awareness of adult conflict, so Sarah made her remark with an air of bland innocence.

To her satisfaction, the women once again exchanged knowing glances.

“Granny Asaki has sharp eyes,” said Mrs. Rexford dryly. Then, catching herself, she switched to a tone of bright geniality. “Not nearsighted, like the rest of us! Her health is remarkable, especially for someone her age…it must be the good family genes!
Ne,
Father?”

Mr. Kobayashi, who shared his elder sister’s robust health, chuckled with pleased pride, and his wife murmured that good health was indeed a quality to be envied. The two women turned back to Sarah with expectant faces. Then, perceiving that this was the extent of the girl’s contribution, they drifted off to another topic.

“That reminds me,” said Mrs. Kobayashi several minutes later, “I think you and Sarah should go visit them first. They usually finish breakfast by eight thirty. So eat fast and run over there, quick, before they show up here.”

“Why
shouldn’t
they show up here?” Mrs. Rexford said. Relaxed and smiling, she made no attempt to eat faster. “I’m the older one. Masako should come to
me,
even if her husband’s a little older than I am.”

“No, no,” said Mrs. Kobayashi. “Forget Masako’s husband. Granny Asaki’s the real head of that house. And she outranks
our
head…” She nodded toward her own husband, whose face was obscured by the lacquered bowl from which he was drinking.

“But, Mother, it’s not Granny who’s going to be coming
over. Everyone knows I’ll pay her my formal respects during visiting hours. We’re just talking about
my
generation.”

“There is no such thing,” said Mrs. Kobayashi, “as just
my
generation.” She glanced surreptitiously at her husband. He was drinking a mixture of rice and tea with loud abandon, clearly uninterested in the conversation.

Mrs. Kobayashi leaned forward and silently mouthed the words
Be careful.
The women’s expressions were no longer amused but grave.

Watching this, Sarah felt the first stirring of curiosity.

Mrs. Rexford looked up at the clock. Sarah followed her gaze. The clock was a shiny modern piece, incongruous with the aged wall post on which it hung. The wooden post dated back to a more traditional time, when aesthetically minded craftsmen used to leave small remnants of nature in their work. Each wall post in the room retained some individual quirk: a curious burl, or the serpentine tracks of beetle larvae just below the surface of the wood.

“A little more rice, Father-san?” Mrs. Kobayashi asked, holding out her hand in anticipation of her husband’s empty bowl. They waited in silence while he drank down the last drop.

“Aaa,”
he said, handing the bowl over. He then turned to Sarah. “Do people in America talk this much about manners?” he asked. “They just do whatever they feel like, right? Anytime they want?”

“
Soh,
pretty much.” She giggled politely, and her grandfather chuckled with her. But there was more to this than etiquette. What it was she couldn’t say, but there was definitely something more.

S
omeone
was tapping on the frosted glass panels of the kitchen door. The women froze, chopsticks in midair, and looked up at the clock. It was far too early! Only a quarter after eight!

But it was just the two little girls from the Asaki house, ages eight and eleven. They had slipped away from their mother in their eagerness to come early. They stood bashfully outside the kitchen door, peering up at the breakfast scene. They had to look up, since the vestibule was a foot above ground level and the main tatami floor was another two feet above that.

Instantly the energy of the house altered; there were peals of excited laughter from the women, exclamations of “Come on up! Don’t be shy!” and “Look, Sarah, you have visitors!” There was a flurry to fetch additional floor cushions, which were encased in summer cotton covers of white and blue to suggest the coolness of ice and water. Room was made at the breakfast table, a tin of chocolates brought down from the cabinet. Mr. Kobayashi, outnumbered by all the females, picked up his cup of green tea and wandered off to a quieter room. On his way out, he stooped down and affectionately ruffled the little girls’ heads as they bent
over to line up their sandals properly in the small cement vestibule. Grinning up at him, the barefooted girls clambered up the high wooden step onto the tatami mats.

There was no choice now but to stay and entertain them; this resolved the etiquette dilemma for both houses involved. Sarah wondered if the girls’ mother, also unsure as to the best policy, had purposely turned a blind eye. If so, it had been a tactful move on her part.

“Look at you both, how big and fine you’ve grown!” Mrs. Rexford cried, grasping each girl’s shoulder with a Western-style physicality that Sarah had never seen her use back home in America.

Clearly smitten, the two little girls beamed up at her.

“So healthy and brown!” Mrs. Rexford’s face glowed with heightened emotion. It was years since she had laid eyes on real Japanese children. Yesterday at the airport, she had followed her fellow Japanese travelers with avid eyes, remarking wistfully that in her youth, she had never really appreciated the cuteness of Asian babies. Sarah, vaguely stung by this comment, had made a noncommittal grunt.

The two girls sat down, their eyes moving rapidly over the elaborate breakfast spread. They looked nothing like the chubby little girls of five years ago. They had the same slender build, doll-like bangs, and high Kobayashi cheekbones that Mrs. Rexford had in old photographs.

Mrs. Kobayashi, as if thinking along these same lines, sighed. “You know, Yo-chan,” she said, “they remind me so much of you as a child.” Sarah felt a stab of jealousy.

Little Yashiko, her tan accentuated by a white tank top, eyed Sarah’s pale arms with timid curiosity. “Do children play outdoors in America?” she asked.

“Yes, of course,” said Sarah. “But I have to be careful so I
don’t burn and peel.” The girls looked mystified. Mrs. Kobayashi and Mrs. Rexford and even their own mother were every bit as white as Sarah, but in their youth they had all been brown. It was a rite of passage: Japanese girls stayed in the sun until adulthood, upon which they switched standards and adopted pale makeup and shielded their complexions with parasols.

Momoko, the elder girl, politely changed the subject. “Auntie Mama,” she said, using the Western title as if it were a proper name. “Can Big Sister Sarah come with us to Morning Tai Chi Hour, Auntie Mama? We already got her a summer pass.”

“What an excellent idea!” cried Mrs. Rexford and Mrs. Kobayashi at the same time, which made everyone laugh. Sarah and Momoko exchanged shy looks of friendship. They had been playmates before Sarah’s move but now they were self-conscious, preferring to use the adults’ easy conversation as their conduit.

“Do they still do tai chi at Umeya Shrine, like they used to?” Mrs. Rexford asked. Momoko nodded importantly. She replied using some advanced phrase with which Sarah wasn’t familiar: something about public office, or maybe community organization. “Teacher Kagawa’s in charge of it this year,” she added.

“Kagawa?” Mrs. Rexford turned to her mother. “Any relation to that family near the park?”

“Yes, yes! That’s the one,” said Mrs. Kobayashi. “Remember Emiko had a little sister? She’s teaching at Tendai Elementary now.”

“Ah, really!” Mrs. Rexford turned back to Momoko. “When your teacher was little,” she told the girl, “she used to come to me for tutoring.” Her lips parted in a proud, careless smile, and Sarah suddenly realized that her mother was beautiful.

It was becoming increasingly clear that she had underestimated her mother. Ever since their arrival in Japan, Mrs. Rexford had exuded the same air of relaxed entitlement that Sarah
had observed in popular girls back home. Sarah herself was not popular; it was unsettling to be reminded that her mother belonged in a higher social league than her own. She felt embarrassed now, remembering all the times she had taken advantage of her mother’s ineptness in English. One fight in particular she wished she could forget. Her mother, struggling to articulate the proper comeback, had turned away too late to hide tears of frustration. Their argument had stopped instantly. Mother and child, both stricken, had tried to pretend nothing happened.

Yoko Rexford was twenty-five years old when she and her husband first moved to America. They had stayed there ever since, with the exception of a few years when they lived in the Kyoto hills. Yoko’s social dominance did not survive this move, although the proud posture and intelligence were innately hers. Her college-level English was good, but it lacked the elegant execution with which she had been used to cutting down opponents or carving out poetry. Her stature in the community, which she had always democratically pooh-poohed, was suddenly gone.

Ever practical, young Mrs. Rexford had channeled her energies into more realistic pursuits: gardening, cooking, needlework, all of which she tackled with her old academic zeal. Each Saturday she visited the town’s small, outdated library, borrowing cookbooks by James Beard and Julia Child (as a new bride, not knowing what American men ate for breakfast, she had prepared for her bemused husband an elaborately arranged tray of fruit and nuts). She punched down homemade bread dough with arms still sculpted from tennis, experimented with coq au vin and crepes suzette. She executed complex projects of lace tatting, crewel embroidery, traditional American quilt patterns. In time, she became an expert in all the skills that modern American women had long since abandoned.

Sometimes she remembered, with the same wistful wonder with which amputees remember running, how it had felt to have all the right skills at her disposal, to have powers commensurate with the force of her personality. She fervently admired the tennis star Martina Navratilova. “She never plays it safe by trying to be liked,” she told her husband. “She just goes out on the court, with no one cheering for her, and still beats every last one of them. Oh, I
envy
her that feeling!”

If Sarah could have probed to the bottom of her fourteen-year-old heart, she would have found there a pity for her mother that was too deep, and too painful, to be faced directly.

Meanwhile, at the breakfast table, she struggled to follow the rapid-fire conversation all around her. She felt an unfamiliar clenching between her temples. It occurred to her that her mother must experience this same clenching back home, as a result of the permanently strained vigilance with which she braced herself for American speech. Mrs. Rexford’s English, although heavily accented and occasionally halting, was always grammatically correct; never, at any time, did she allow herself to lapse into pidgin.

But judging from her mother’s manner at the table, there was no such tension now. She was eating heartily, interrupting the chatter every so often with a dramatic moan of appreciation for her mother’s cooking, as if she hadn’t eaten a square meal in years.

“Mother, this is absolutely delicious,” Mrs. Rexford said, using her chopsticks to herd together some scattered flakes of leftover mackerel. “It’s exactly the way I remembered it.” A floodgate of appetite seemed to have opened up within her. She couldn’t stop eating. “Have some,” she urged little Yashiko who was sitting beside her, still too shy to speak.

Then, looking over at Sarah’s fish plate, she exclaimed, “
Ara!
You haven’t touched the skin at all. You don’t like it?”

“There’s this thick layer of fat on the inside.”

“But that’s where the best flavor is!” Mrs. Rexford looked insulted.

“I’ll eat it,” piped up Yashiko.

“Good girl!” said Mrs. Rexford warmly. “We can’t let this go to waste, now can we?”

“
Aaa,
that’s how you can spot a true-blue Japanese,” laughed Mrs. Kobayashi. “Even the prime minister himself, I bet, wouldn’t say no to salt-broiled mackerel skin.”

Reaching over with her chopsticks, Mrs. Rexford picked up the strip of skin, which was toasted to a bubbly brown crisp and frosted with salt, and transferred it from Sarah’s rectangular fish plate to her own. Their eyes met, then looked away.

Something like pity flickered over Mrs. Rexford’s face. “The child can’t help it,” she said quickly. “They don’t even sell mackerel in the stores back home. Did you know that on the East Coast, where John grew up, oily fish was considered lower grade? They actually
preferred
the bland white types like sole or flounder.”

“Hehh?!”
cried Mrs. Kobayashi in amazed disbelief. She and Momoko darted a quick, curious glance at Sarah, as if the explanation for such a peculiar fact might somehow be detected in her American face. Little Yashiko, nestled against Mrs. Rexford, finished off the mackerel skin with quiet efficiency.