The Favorites (21 page)

S
arah
found her aunt alone in the kitchen, making preparations for dinner. “I’m just finishing up this side dish,” she told Sarah, in apology for cooking in the presence of a guest. She was sautéing a combination of julienned carrots, hijiki seaweed, and fried tofu skin. It looked identical to the dish Mrs. Kobayashi often made, but this would have much less soy sauce and sugar. Mrs. Kobayashi disparagingly referred to it as “Kyoto flavor.”

Before going off to undress, Sarah leaned against the kitchen doorjamb and watched her aunt. The radio was on, a plastic Hello Kitty model long outgrown by Momoko and Yashiko. For years now, it had been tuned to the same classical station that played everything from the Western melodies of Strauss and Puccini to the elegant notes of koto, punctuated by a shamisen’s bitter twangs.

In general, Mrs. Nishimura seemed unchanged. Under her apron she wore a blouse of pastel yellow, with a round collar that had embroidered daisies on it. She still wore the short bob, although Sarah could see it was professionally cut at a salon, with graduated layers and the subtlest of brownish highlights to indicate she was coloring her roots.

But on closer inspection, Sarah did sense something of the change her grandmother had mentioned. That virginal, ethereal quality was gone. As Mrs. Nishimura reached for a bottle of seasoning, she leaned across the counter with an unfamiliar physical brio that reminded Sarah, for an unsettling moment, of her own mother.

She stared, but Mrs. Nishimura made no more surprising moves. Stirring quietly at the stove, she was once again the aunt of Sarah’s childhood: a gentle figure who never frowned or grimaced, who hovered with a damp cloth for wiping children’s fingers.

An early memory floated up in her mind. She was six years old; they were walking to the park on a winter afternoon. She was in the middle, between her aunt and Momoko—Yashiko wasn’t born yet. “Hold on to Big Sister’s hand, for safety,” Mrs. Nishimura had told Momoko. As young as she was, Sarah knew her aunt was doing this to flatter her; any other adult would have walked in the middle, keeping one child on either side. Little Momoko obediently clutched Sarah’s hand with her mittened one, looking up at her with a chubby, trusting face framed by a knitted hood with animal ears. Sarah felt a rush of importance, followed by overwhelming love for her aunt. The three of them held hands and strolled down the sidewalk.
“Ten ten ten—ten koro rin…,”
Mrs. Nishimura chanted softly as they swung their joined hands back and forth.

It had struck Sarah, with a small child’s intuitiveness, that no one but her aunt could have been capable of such sensitivity. Looking back now, she wondered if even then she had sensed a kinship between them, for they both knew how it felt to be on the outside.

“Sarah-chan,” her aunt said, “are you finding this Japanese weather too chilly?”

“Not at all, Auntie. Today’s quite warm, I thought.”

“Yes, you’re right!” said Mrs. Nishimura. “It’s unseasonably warm.”

Talking to her aunt was slightly awkward, as always. On a purely technical level, she wasn’t used to making allowances for Sarah’s simple Japanese vocabulary. Mrs. Kobayashi had the knack for putting complex ideas into simple terms. Nuclear physics, for instance, became “the rules of science involving—” followed by an exploding sound, with both hands outlining an enormous H-bomb mushroom. “Right, right!” Sarah would say, laughing and nodding. But her aunt would use the term
nuclear physics,
then be at a loss if Sarah didn’t understand. So she usually stuck to the simplest of conversational topics.

But language aside, direct emotional entry was difficult. Mrs. Nishimura had a particularly traditional sensibility, with an oblique quality Sarah recognized from historical films. She had to remind herself that her mother, who had married a foreigner, was the unusual one. Mrs. Rexford had little patience for old-school Japanese opacity. “I have a cosmopolitan soul,” she used to say, only half joking.

“Auntie,” Sarah said, “I’m really looking forward to attending your concert.”

Mrs. Nishimura glanced up from the stove and laughed, waving her free hand before her face in a no-no motion as if the very idea of her performing in a concert was absurd.

“I feel bad that I never even knew about your choir.”

“You mustn’t feel bad,” her aunt said mildly.

After some more small talk, Sarah went off to undress behind the cotton curtain. It seemed odd that the informal dining room should adjoin the bathing room, but this was common in traditional Japanese homes where private baths had to be added on. It made more sense, she thought, than the
Western custom of placing the bath in the same room as the toilet.

Fully naked, she slid open the glass door and entered the steaming bathing area. The tub was deeper than it was wide, with a lid to keep in the steam. Directly above the bath, mounted on the tiled wall, was a digital water temperature monitor (she was amused by this modern gadget, which was out of place with the rest of the house). At the other end of the room was a waist-high shower nozzle. Retrieving a low plastic stool from a stacked pile, Sarah drew it up before the nozzle, sat down, and soaped herself. As she shampooed her hair, she could hear faint clattering sounds in the kitchen, the energetic chatter of a commercial on the radio. Then the commercial ended and music came on. She recognized Pavarotti’s soulful tenor launching into his classic rendition of “Ave Maria.”

“Ave Maria”! There was a family story…

“She learned this new song in middle school,” Mrs. Asaki had once told the children. “And every day, when she went upstairs to hang up the towels and handkerchiefs, I’d hear…” The children waited eagerly as she placed her teacup deliberately onto the saucer with an elderly hand that, even back then, trembled. “Ave Maria!” She said it ominously:
Ah-beh-mah-lih-ah!
“All those strange foreign words—” Mrs. Asaki threw back her head and trilled an affected operatic tune. “Aaah…lalalaah…So loud! All over the neighborhood! I finally had to make her stop.
Maa,
what the neighbors must have thought!”

Sarah and her cousins had sprawled on the tatami floor, shrieking with laughter at Granny’s operatic performance. It was a bizarre anecdote. Neighbors here did not shout out to each other, or argue in public, or burst into song on balconies. Such activities were more in line with florid, excitable countries like Italy.

“Mommy did that, really?” Momoko gasped, and the image of gentle Mrs. Nishimura singing at the top of her voice made the girls burst anew into giggles. “She must have been really happy, to sing like that!” little Yashiko said.

Sarah turned off the shower and sat still, listening. This time, as an adult, she understood what she was hearing: a prayer, a pouring forth of something intense and mournful.

Now Pavarotti’s voice swelled in volume, reawakening her childhood remorse for her aunt. A random remark flashed through her mind: her mother (or grandmother) saying, “Let’s not mention this to Ma-chan. It’s just easier.” She was ashamed—partly on behalf of her mother and grandmother, but also for the eager way she had complied, proud of her place in their golden, laughter-filled circle.

Her remorse wasn’t just for her aunt. It was also for herself, for the change that had started when she hid the cream puffs behind her back. From that day on, she had followed the trajectory of that choice. Not that she regretted it. She had grabbed at life, as was her right; she had grabbed at a place in the sun. But she had always felt a vague regret for that side of herself she had left behind, that side akin to her aunt. Her memory of the winter day, when she and her aunt had held hands against the world, glowed with an innocent purity that seemed lost to her forever.

But with her mother gone, maybe things could be made right.

That day, for the first time, Sarah let go of a penance she had carried so long she had almost forgotten its weight. With a feeling of relief that was almost luxury, she felt herself relax into second place.

T
he
radio was playing “Tea for Two” when Sarah emerged from behind the curtain. The informal eating area was fragrant with soy sauce and ginger, and a small plate of seasonal chestnut dumplings was waiting for her on the low table. In the kitchen, her aunt hummed along to the lively
cha cha cha
s.

Taking off her apron, Mrs. Nishimura sat down at the low table to keep Sarah company as she ate the dumplings.

“Are these the tickets?” Sarah picked up the flowered envelope placed neatly beside her plate.

“Soh,”
said Mrs. Nishimura.

Sarah peeked inside. The tickets, glossy and professional-looking, showed an unexpectedly high admission price. The title was printed in raised Chinese characters: “Songs That Got Us Through: A Wartime Retrospective.”

Mrs. Nishimura was eying Sarah’s untouched cup of tea. “Oh—do you not drink Japanese tea?” she asked.

“Of course I do!” Sarah felt a twinge of her old insecurity. “Auntie, don’t you remember?” She took a sip of the tea and, after a suitably appreciative silence, asked, “Are you a soprano?”

“No—I sing with a low voice,” her aunt replied. Mrs. Koba
yashi would have given Sarah credit for an easy word like
alto,
considering it was a Western term to start with.

The large house was silent. The rice cooker bubbled in the kitchen.

“But your mother,” continued Mrs. Nishimura, “she used to sing with a high voice. A beautiful high voice. I can still remember her singing ‘Days of Yore’ at our middle school graduation.”

“Really? Tell me…” Now they were on secure ground. Sarah relaxed and listened with quiet pride. Even in death, her mother could fill up a conversational vacuum.

At one point she looked up and saw pity in the older woman’s eyes. It resonated sharply, even unpleasantly, for this was how she had always regarded her aunt. Now she realized, with dawning embarrassment, that her aunt was dwelling on her mother’s singing for no other reason but kindness.

“Auntie?”

“Yes?”

“I’m glad you’re here for Grandma.” Sarah plunged awkwardly into the heart of the matter. “When she talks about you, her face lights up. She’s so happy. I’m glad, and I know Mama would be glad too.” Truthfully, she wasn’t completely glad. Not yet. It struck her that siblings everywhere must face such ambivalence, and she was thankful she had been spared this as a child.

“No one will ever be like your mother,” said Mrs. Nishimura. “But I’ll do my best to take care of your grandma while you’re away.” She refilled their teacups with a no-nonsense briskness that reminded Sarah, once again, of her own mother.

Later, sated with tea and dumplings, Sarah got up to leave. She had probably held up her aunt’s dinner preparations. Gathering up her bath bag, she maneuvered carefully around the low table so as not to poke a hole in the shoji panels behind her.

Her aunt walked her out.

“You must really love singing,” Sarah said as she followed her aunt down the hallway, past one
fusuma
panel after another.

“
Aaa,
I know,” said Mrs. Nishimura sorrowfully, as if admitting to a bad habit.

Sarah had a deep sense of futility. We’re
family,
she wanted to say. Don’t use such good manners.

They came out to the front gate. Darkness had fallen, though it was still early. The drizzle had stopped, and the air was sharp with the smell of wet pine. It was indeed warm for November; the typhoon in Hokkaido had altered the air pressure.

Sarah rolled open the slatted gate and paused on the stone step. A faint breeze wafted against her skin, still overheated from the bath.

Caught in the knobby branches of the Ichiyoshis’ pine tree, heavy with white light and almost touchable, was a full moon. “Oh, look!” Sarah said. “The moon.”

“
Aaa,
isn’t it pretty.”

They were silent awhile, looking up.

“I look at the moon a lot,” Mrs. Nishimura said, and a certain quality in her voice made Sarah take notice. “Like this, with the branches silhouetted on it. In traditional art, you know, the moon’s never bare. It’s always half-hidden behind branches or clouds.” Sarah knew the art to which she was referring. She, too, had been affected by those old Japanese tableaus, by the sorrowful beauty of a shining thing glimpsed, only partially, through a layer of impediments.

Halfway down the lane, she looked back. Her aunt was standing by the gate as she had since Sarah’s childhood, waiting to return her wave.

M
rs.
Nishimura’s concert took place on a still, overcast Sunday afternoon. Sarah and her grandmother took a taxi to the matinee. Mr. Nishimura was working and Yashiko, having already attended the opening concert, had somewhere else to be. Mrs. Asaki was too old for these kinds of outings.

They sat quietly while the seats filled up around them. The orchestra made discordant notes as it warmed up. The audience was mostly middle-aged and older since the concert was a retrospective, held in honor of a songwriter who had written many of the classic tunes of the postwar period. War nostalgia was popular now. There was always something on television about a restaurant serving some wartime dish or a middle-aged person being tearfully reunited with a childhood friend from the occupation era. Sarah, who remembered how fondly her mother used to say “our generation, growing up after the war,” understood this need to look back.

She wondered what her mother would have thought of this state-of-the-art auditorium. She could picture her alert eyes looking about, taking in the high acoustical ceilings, the discreet spotlights built into the walls. “They didn’t spare any
expense, did they,” she would have said, “but I still liked the small, dark building from my childhood.”

Not so long ago Sarah would have shared this thought with her grandmother, tossing out her mother’s name as if she were still one of them. But it felt unnatural now, even forced. She was beginning to like having her mother to herself, like a private talisman. Her grandmother had her talisman too, and the two versions would become less and less alike as the years wore on.

She flipped idly through the program. Her knowledge of Chinese characters was spotty, so she recognized only the title—“Songs That Got Us Through”—as well as the words
Paris, Berlin,
and
New York.
Mrs. Kobayashi had mentioned that the choir performed abroad on occasion, though not everyone went. Many of them were homemakers with children, and their domestic duties came first.

Sarah put down her program and glanced over at her grandmother, who looked demure and poised in her mink collar. “They didn’t spare any expense, did they?” she said.

“
Soh,
they certainly didn’t.”

The spotlights caught the instruments down in the orchestra pit, bringing out the expensive gleam of polished wood and brass. This
is
a real choir, thought Sarah, a choir to be taken seriously. Her aunt must have worked hard—and kept it to herself, so as not to give her family the impression of neglect. Not that it stopped Mrs. Asaki from saying things like, “It’s a nice life she has. Singing like a bird while her old mother eats leftovers. But
maaa,
she loves it, so what can you do?”

Now the instruments died down and the lights dimmed overhead. Sarah leaned forward in anticipation of her aunt’s entrance. And in that moment, she knew with certainty that she was going to be all right on her own. Her mother had even said it:
Once you’ve come first, it stays a part of you.
This moment, right
now, was the strongest she had ever felt: being secure enough in her own powers to enjoy someone else about to have her day in the sun.

The choir began filing onstage, one by one, unassuming and matronly in their navy-blue dresses. They lacked the seasoned stage presence of professional performers; one sensed these were ordinary women who, like the rest of the audience, had been personally affected by the songs they were about to sing. From the rising power of the clapping, Sarah knew the audience sensed this, too, and was responding to it. The choir flowed smoothly into its assigned lines, like a marching band. “Front row,” Mrs. Kobayashi whispered, leaning over to point her out. “Over there, third from the left.” And there indeed was Mrs. Nishimura, looking small but composed.

The conductor strode in swiftly to the center of the stage, bowed deeply, then turned his back to the audience. He raised his baton and waited. The clapping died down. Someone coughed. Sarah turned her head to look up at the audience: row upon row of pale faces rose up in the darkness, waiting. On this threshold, she felt a deep, sharp joy for her aunt and also a fore-shadowing of what lay ahead for the three of them: not the shining, laughing summers of her mother’s time but a tender new season that would resonate, like those bittersweet Japanese tableaus, with all the complexities of time’s passage.

The first soprano was a lone voice, barely audible. Then the others—second soprano, then first alto (that was Mrs. Nishimura’s section)—joined in with steadily gathering force, and finally the second alto, its heft overtaking all the others. Their voices swelled to a crescendo, then paused, the notes spreading out like ink in water.

They sang of yellow rapeseed flowers, blooming by the roadside in spring. Sarah’s mother had sung this song to her when
she was little. Sarah hadn’t learned until much later that it was about a bomb site in Nagasaki. Today, transformed by the orchestra and the sheer power of voices, its familiar childish words were elevated as she had never heard them: rich, omniscient.
Small flowers are nodding,
they sang out with one voice.
Cheery and bright…

Sarah thought of young Aunt Masako standing alone amidst flapping laundry, singing out to an empty sky. She thought of the strange power of thwarted emotions. She thought how pervasive thwarted love was, how it lay beneath so much of life’s beauty.
We let them ferment,
her mother had said,
till you can’t tell them apart.