The Favorites (5 page)

N
ormally
Sarah and her mother and grandmother walked to the open-air market together, but one morning Mrs. Kobayashi stayed behind. She was cooking a big pot of curry while the day was still cool.

“What I’ll do is divide this into packets and put them in the freezer,” she told Mrs. Rexford. “That way, we can heat them up anytime we’re in a rush.” She demonstrated by crouching down and pulling open the door of the icebox, which was barely half the size of the Rexfords’ freezer back home. Women in the Ueno neighborhood didn’t need much storage space, since they bought fresh fish and produce every day. “See?” Mrs. Kobayashi revealed a tiny freezer compartment crammed with small, shrink-wrapped lumps and squares. “Look, I even froze the potato croquettes. Plus that filet mignon Sarah didn’t finish—actually we could chop that up today, don’t you think, and use it in fried rice?”

Sarah and her mother now strolled through the narrow lanes toward the open-air market. Mornings in this part of the neighborhood were always heavy with silence, except for those brief periods when clusters of children tramped to Tai Chi Hour or
summer school meetings. Dark wooden houses rose up on either side, somber and shrinelike. Up in the trees, cicadas shrilled and shimmered, their unrelieved drone intensifying the silence instead of lessening it. Walking through this noise was like walking through the very heart of summer.

For a while, neither said a word. They hadn’t been alone together in the daytime since…probably since America.

They passed old-fashioned houses similar to the Kobayashis’. One had a charming trellis fence made of bamboo poles, whose deep golden hue contrasted nicely with the black twine knotting them together. Tall shrubbery from the garden poked out through the square openings, creating a nice textural effect while protecting the occupants’ privacy. Many of these fences were deliberately rustic, homages to country dwellings of the past. Sarah’s favorite was a fence that looked like a solid wall of dried twigs, cleverly held in place by slender crosspieces. But she also admired one of its neighbors that stood farther down the lane. It was a large property, with the slightly forbidding air of a
yashiki
manor. The fence consisted of a low foundation of boulders that was reminiscent of the stone bases of imperial castles. From these stones rose a solid, dun-colored wall of mud plaster, topped by a miniature rooftop of gray tiles. Above it, only the tops of the trees within were visible.

“I used to come and play here all the time,” Mrs. Rexford said, trailing her fingers along the mud wall. And Sarah marveled that none of this held any mystery for her mother.

They reached Umeya Shrine and cut through its grounds toward Tenjin Boulevard. Umeya was a tiny neighborhood shrine, well below the radar of those official tour buses that rumbled in and out of the So-Zen Temple complex several blocks away. The grounds here were deserted, the white expanse
of raked sand emphasizing the gravity of the dark, moss-stained structures lining its periphery.

This was where Sarah and her cousins came each morning, before breakfast, to do tai chi exercises. They were joined by other neighborhood children, as well as old people who no longer needed to go to work or prepare breakfast for their families. At first, the children had stared at Sarah. But by now they had grown used to her presence, although there were still some who sneaked glances when they thought she wasn’t looking. Momoko and Yashiko didn’t seem to mind being seen with her; they acted nonchalant, as if they hosted Western visitors all year round.

Today a young mother stood in the open space, tossing out bread crumbs to a half circle of pigeons and urging her toddler to do the same. The little boy clutched a fistful of his mother’s skirt and gazed distrustfully at the bobbing, pecking birds.
“Hato po’po…,”
the woman sang softly, trying to encourage him with an old-fashioned ditty about feeding pigeons in the temple.

“Do you remember that song?” asked Mrs. Rexford. “I used to sing it to you when you were little.”

“I remember,” Sarah said. It seemed a lifetime ago. It was unsettling to hear this strange young woman singing it. She remembered a time when her own mother’s voice had held such unguarded tenderness, and sharp sorrow slipped through her belly.

They walked on, passing a stone statue of a fox deity, and entered the shade of a row of maple trees. “Granny Asaki says that starting in October, it’ll be against the law to feed pigeons,” Sarah said. “She says their droppings are ruining all the wood.”

“Did she? Well, it was bound to happen,” said Mrs. Rexford,
“with so many tourists nowadays. But it’ll be strange, won’t it, not having them around anymore.”

Within these cloistered grounds, they sensed the busy, noisy world lying in wait just beyond. Somewhere behind one of the shrine buildings, someone hammered, paused, then began hammering again. At the other end of the grounds, in the gap framed by massive vermilion gateposts, cars and buses flashed by with a muted whizzing.

Mrs. Rexford halted in the shade of the maple trees. Lowering her parasol, she lifted her face toward the leaf-laden branches.

“Look, Sarah,” she said, pointing up. “You see how the sunlight’s coming down through these leaves?” She had a tendency to lecture when she felt deeply moved. “This is exactly the way it used to look when I was a child. The exact same way.” She kept on pointing, as if determined to press these unremarkable trees onto her daughter’s memory.

“Oh,” said Sarah.

Mrs. Rexford raised her parasol, and they walked on.

Once Sarah had read a poem about “a lifetime caught in a fall of light,” or perhaps it was “a century caught in a fall of light.” She remembered nothing else about the poem, just that phrase, which rose up from nowhere to claim the moment.

She pictured her mother hunting for cicadas as a child, perhaps in these very trees: a tomboy with a bamboo pole, squinting up with determination through the knife-edged glints of light flashing through the leaves. She pictured her mother in later years, reading and sketching outdoors. There must have been moments when she paused in her work to look up at just such a canopy of tiny, star-shaped leaves, their green made translucent by the sun. She thought, too, of an anecdote her grandmother had told: when Sarah was a baby, her mother had held her up to a tree branch, then laughed and laughed with
delight when her child reached out and curled her tiny fingers around a low-hanging leaf.

How did it feel to be her mother, to look up at a tree and be transported back to all those previous lives? Was it like hearing pigeons in the morning?
Caught…in a fall of light…
Something unfamiliar stirred in the girl: an inarticulate feeling, diffuse and layered like the groundswell of an orchestra. She knew it was an adult emotion, one caused by the passage of time.

They reached the vermilion gateposts and descended the shallow stone steps to the sidewalk, where floating dust motes vanished in the direct sunlight. As if in response to this abrupt change in atmosphere, Mrs. Rexford switched to English. “Okay, which route should we take?” she said briskly. “The weavers’ alley? Or So-Zen Temple?”

The magic spell was broken. “The weavers’ alley,” Sarah replied, switching the conversation back to Japanese with a hint of her old asperity. It annoyed her when her mother used English for no good reason. Sarah had once asked her to speak nothing but Japanese while they were here, only to be told, “Sometimes English is more efficient.” She was too embarrassed to insist, for it was true there were gaps in her Japanese. She certainly couldn’t say, “I feel more loved when you use Japanese. Your voice becomes warmer…” Nor could she admit how much of an outsider it made her feel, having to use a different language from the others.

In her own youth, Yoko Kobayashi had taken quiet pride in standing out from the masses. She sported a sleek, traditionally cut bob while other young women were frazzling their hair with Western-style permanent waves. Having no shortage of male admirers, she considered herself exempt from girlish affecta
tions such as covering her mouth when she laughed. As a badge of distinction, she liked to wear something unusual but not ostentatious—a man’s muffler, or an outré piece of jewelry designed by her stepfather—catching in people’s eyes that flash of respect. Years later in Fielder’s Butte, she took a perverse pleasure in wielding her parasol with poise as she walked past the apartment pool where American women slathered in baby oil lay baking their bodies in halter tops and short jean cutoffs. Although these American eyes met hers with curiosity, condescension, or blank dismissal, there was a fleeting instant when they assessed her neckline and slender figure with the universal glint of female rivalry. She knew they noticed her skin, which was exceptionally smooth, with a porcelain sheen that had attracted attention all her life.

Where, then, did her daughter get her timidity?

Not from her husband. John Rexford was fifty-seven, his wife’s senior by eighteen years. Formerly a physicist, he had taken early retirement in order to “read and think.” He admitted this humbly, almost sheepishly. Mrs. Rexford admired his modesty. She bragged to Sarah on his behalf, explaining in detail all she knew of his professional accomplishments, of his wide range of knowledge and interests.

But the mere fact of her husband’s modesty wasn’t what held her interest. It was what she sensed behind it: a genuine lack of need for public approval. Mrs. Rexford, who secretly struggled to reconcile what she had been with what she was now, envied his strength of mind. Her husband, like her, had tossed away the crutch of social position. But unlike her, he didn’t seem to feel its loss. It helped, of course, that he was living in his native country. But even when they were living in Japan, he had stayed remarkably, transcendently unchanged. “You’re hardly human!” she had cried during one of their rare fights. She was constantly
trying, and failing, to emulate her husband. Her devotion to him was fueled by this enormous respect.

And yet Mr. Rexford was charming to the townsfolk, full of dry wit and a seasoned grace of manner. (Mrs. Kobayashi had once remarked that he put her in mind of those gentlemen in Sherlock Holmes movies. Having grown up near the cosmopolitan port of Kobe, she had always been something of an Anglophile.) Mrs. Rexford was fascinated by this social side of him, this flashback from a former life that excluded her.

Fielder’s Butte was a small logging town, hours away from any major city. It was an ideal place for living within the tight budget imposed by Mr. Rexford’s early retirement. Mrs. Rexford enjoyed the creative challenge of making do within monetary limits. Sometimes, though, she felt a keen loss for their social identities, not just her own but her husband’s too. But in its place was a life more free and elemental than any she had ever known. It was no coincidence they both loved Thoreau’s
Walden.

When Sarah was small and they still lived in the Kyoto hills, Mrs. Rexford had tried to instill in her child something of this mental strength. “Stand up tall,” she said. “Lift up your chin…like I taught you, like this. Then the boys won’t bully you.” She had even cut her daughter’s hair short, striving for a jaunty, non-vulnerable look. But it was all in vain. Even after they moved to America, Sarah said things like, “Mother, I can’t wear those pants. They’re not what the other girls are wearing.” Or, “Why can’t we eat dinner at Burger King? The other families are all doing it.”

It wasn’t that Mrs. Rexford couldn’t sympathize. She, too, remembered the shame of not fitting in. Once in middle school, some girls in her class had made a snide remark about her wearing the same sweater year after year. It was true: each summer, Mrs. Kobayashi would unravel the yarn and reknit it, adding new stripes in different-colored yarn to accommodate her daughter’s
growing body. Hearing the girls’ words, young Yoko had felt a deep stab of humiliation. She had resolved, on the spot, to demand a new sweater the minute she got home.

But when she remembered her mother knitting late into the night, sweating in the summer humidity, so lovingly and carefully holding the sweater up against Yoko’s chest for measurements, a surge of pity and then fury had made her lift her eyes to those girls and say, with a careless smile, “
Saa
—what can I say? Some mothers go to a lot of trouble for their children. That’s how you know if they really love you.”

“I guess our mothers show love in different ways,” sneered one girl.

“Yes, I’ve noticed that,” said Yoko. “I’ve noticed who brings the fewest side dishes in her lunch box. I’ve noticed whose mother
isn’t
at the Temple of Wisdom, praying for her child, the evening before an exam. So when certain people talk big, they’re not fooling
me.
” And her knowing smirk had brought a flicker of anxiety to the aggressor’s eyes.

Why couldn’t Sarah, just once, stand up for
her
like that?

Mrs. Rexford felt a keen, wretched misery. Her daughter did not love her the way she loved her own mother. Mrs. Rexford had doted on Sarah with the same passion and focus that her own mother had lavished on her, but the results, like everything else she tried in America, had come out slightly skewed. “Can’t you think for yourself?” she would snap at her daughter. “Is everyone worth imitating except your own mother?” And that was how their fighting would begin.

T
he
open-air market was at the height of activity. As usual on a Monday, housewives were out in full force. Parked bicycles cluttered the sidewalks, forcing the shoppers out into the street, where they wove in and out among the slow-moving cars. A small crowd was stooped over the fish market display. Now that the rainy season had passed, dispelling worries about food poisoning and mold, a large selection of raw fish had been set out on crushed ice. Thin wooden tablets, stuck upright into the ice, displayed prices written in black brushstrokes. On the pavement stood a row of blue plastic buckets, in which live fish moved in slow circles.

“Ladies!” called a middle-aged fishmonger from behind the counter, his eyes locked on the mackerel he was speedily filleting. “
Haai
—welcome! How about some nice chilled sashimi slices? Take a little home for lunch!” He cast his voice out over the street in controlled, far-reaching arcs of sound, as a fisherman flings out his nets. Its reverberation reminded Sarah of the So-Zen priests who came chanting each morning.

A young man working beside him, probably his son, chimed in. “Baby octopus! Cockles for clear soup! Everything fresh fresh
fresh!” His energetic bellowing made up in volume what it lacked of his father’s practiced resonance. At the far end of the counter, a woman in a white frilled apron stood over an open grill of eel fillets, using two battered cardboard
uchiwa
to fan the fragrant smoke out toward prospective buyers. The provocative aroma of glazed soy sauce and sugar hung in the air and made Sarah’s mouth water, even though she had just eaten breakfast.

The housewives succeeded each other with quick, efficient footsteps that were at odds with their peaceful expressions. Mrs. Rexford wove through the crowd with nimble expertise, not bothering to look back. Sarah lurched after her mother, clutching her wicker basket and string bag and trying to avoid the sharp points of the women’s parasols.

The produce booths were crowded too. Sarah’s mother and grandmother usually made her wait on the sidewalk while they darted in to make fast, efficient transactions. Huge bundles of freshly picked edamame boughs were piled high on tables, the hairy pods still attached to the branches. Small green yuzu, or citrons, were in season but expensive. All booths featured carrots that were bright red instead of orange, a variety native to the Kyoto area. There were seedless
kyuuri
cucumbers, delicious when sliced and dipped in a mixture of Worcestershire sauce and sweet Japanese mayonnaise. “Let’s get some of those!” Sarah suggested.

“Do you hear that jingling?” asked Mrs. Rexford as they walked toward the pickle shop. “Isn’t it pretty?” The sound of countless tiny bells pervaded the street. It came from the stall owners’ money bags, which hung overhead from rubber cords. Working the abacus with one hand, a vendor would pull down the bag with his free hand when he wanted to withdraw or deposit loose change.
Omamori
—religious charms with little bells attached, sold at local temples and shrines—hung from each money bag. When the vendor released his bag after a trans
action, it bounced up on its rubber cord, and the
omamori
bells—as well as the coins within—continued jingling for a minute or so until the bag stopped moving.

“It
is
pretty!” said Sarah.

“People call that the sound of prosperous commerce.”

After the street bustle it was a relief to enter the cool, restful shade of the pickle store. The pickle store wasn’t a stall like the others, but an extension of a private home. When the proprietor emerged from the back of the store to serve them, they caught a momentary glimpse of tatami mats and white floor cushions through the open sliding door. There was a timeless, prewar quality about this place, due to the blackened wall boards and the wooden shipping barrels stacked against them.

“Welcome back, miss,” the proprietor greeted Sarah. He was an elderly man with a thin strip of white cotton tied around his head, the traditional sign of a man ready and eager to work. “Remember how you used to stick your hand in the pickles when you were a little girl, before your mother could stop you?” Sarah giggled, embarrassed but also pleased that he had remembered. To hide her sudden shyness, she leaned over to inspect the lacquered display boxes. They held a large array of pickled items: long fat daikon radishes, cucumbers, scallions, lotus roots, Japanese eggplant, gourds, greens, seaweed. They lay limply within various fermented pastes, whose pungent aroma stirred up in Sarah some memory from her early childhood that fell just short of definition.

“Pickles are Kyoto’s most famous commodity,” Mrs. Rexford informed her daughter, primarily for the shopkeeper’s benefit. “They’re a cultural treasure, you know, with all the subtleties of wine. Visitors from other cities always stock up on these to take home as gifts.” Sarah had received similar “lessons” in the presence of other vendors, for her mother and grandmother were
skilled in the subtle flattery that resulted in spontaneous markdowns.

The proprietor beamed as he scooped up Mrs. Rexford’s order: sweet red pickle relish to serve with the curry Mrs. Kobayashi was making. “You both look very cosmopolitan today!” he said admiringly. “Simple elegance—now
that’s
what I like!” He too was good at flattery. But it was true that Mrs. Rexford and her daughter made a striking pair.

Mrs. Rexford wore a new blouse of lipstick red. Few other women could have carried off such an intense color. Sarah wore a wide-brimmed straw hat with a big green ribbon tied off-center beneath her chin. The green of the ribbon brought out the green-gray tints of her eyes. Naturally, Mrs. Rexford had chosen it. The girl hadn’t resisted. She had no clue as to what was acceptable in this country, and she trusted her mother’s judgment here as she did not in America. Yielding to her mother had filled her with a surprising rush of happiness.

During the course of their shopping, they ran into several acquaintances.

“I see you all the time with your mother,” one woman told Mrs. Rexford. “But I can never bring myself to intrude…you always look so close and intimate…”

“You’re far too polite!” scolded Mrs. Rexford.

“It’s so touching,” the woman continued wistfully, “to see the way you scrub each other’s backs at the bathhouse.”

Some women from the weaving class, whom Mrs. Kobayashi would have regarded with some social reserve, took this opportunity to draw near and chat.

“Do you live in San-Fran City?” they asked admiringly, looking them both over. “Do you wear trousers?” “Your girl’s grown so big…so pretty…”

With a wide American smile, Mrs. Rexford chatted back.

Sarah watched and listened in silence. Among American women back home, her mother would have been the picture of Oriental demureness. Her attitude was one of wide-eyed fascination: “How smart and funny you are!” Privately, Mrs. Rexford considered the Fielder’s Butte women her intellectual inferiors, and had the playing field been level, she would have considered them her social inferiors as well. So her stories at home, while observant and witty, were not always kind. But some American women were flattered and charmed. Nurturing instincts aroused, they went out of their way to offer tutelage and protection. “Honey, your mama’s a real
doll
!” they would tell Sarah, handing her recipes for potato chip casseroles and Jell-O molds. “Give this to your mama, I know she’ll enjoy it. She’s an absolute sweetheart, such an adorable little Chinese lady!”

Mrs. Rexford now stood in the crowded market, her red blouse like a flame attracting the pale, mothlike shades of the local women’s dresses. This flamelike quality was also in her face. Watching her, Sarah felt that same deep joy as when her mother had picked out her hat.

Their final encounter was at the poultry stall. They approached two other customers who were standing under the red-and-white-striped awning, peering down at a straw-lined display of eggs in various sizes and colors. “Auntie Sasaki!” Mrs. Rexford called out to one of them, in the breezy voice that came so easily to her in this country. “What dish are you going to make with those eggs?” The elderly woman turned around to see who had spoken. Her face brightened with pleasure, and they fell immediately into conversation.

“Just look at you, Yo-chan,” the woman said at one point, patting Mrs. Rexford’s shoulder in the overfamiliar manner of the weaving class. “I bet you’re the queen bee over in America too, aren’t you? Just like you were here. Oh yes, I know you
are—don’t deny it!
Anta,
I’m very perceptive! I can tell, just from looking at your face.”

“Oh,
please!
” Mrs. Rexford protested, laughing. She dismissed the compliment with a languid wave of her hand, as she had been doing all morning. But this woman’s bluntness caused a frisson of awkwardness to pass between mother and daughter. For Sarah knew what no one, not even her grandmother, fully understood: the truth of how things were in America.

“Is it true you once beat up a bully?” asked the second customer, a vacant-looking young woman in her twenties.

“Oh yes!” said the old woman. “That’s a
true story.
I know, because it was my very own boy that was being picked on.”

“Once a success, always a success,” chimed in the poultry vendor, who had come over with some fresh boxes from the back. “You’ve done us proud.” The little group beamed at Mrs. Rexford, their eyes shiny with approval.

On that note, they headed home. They passed a small tea shop, the last outpost before the street turned residential. Inside the display window was an assortment of skewered summer dumplings arranged on lacquered trays.

Sarah glanced at her mother. There was a pleased flush on Mrs. Rexford’s cheeks, a glint in her eye, as if she had just come away from a party held in her honor. She caught her daughter’s eye, then looked away.

“I guess the shopping took a little longer than usual,” she said. She said this with a sheepish kind of dignity, and Sarah felt a rush of pity. Or maybe it was guilt: she, with her petty teenage cruelties, had been responsible for many of her mother’s difficulties in America.

“Did it?” Sarah said gently. “I didn’t notice.” They walked on in silence.

The last time she had felt this sort of pain for her mother—
the kind that made her stomach feel sick—had been almost a year ago. Mrs. Rexford had made German coleslaw for Sarah to bring to her school potluck: an authentic recipe with caraway seeds and vinegar. Hardly anyone at school had touched it, preferring the more familiar mayonnaise-covered potato salad. On her way home, Sarah had dumped the uneaten remains in the grass. Her mother, greeting her at the door, had seen the empty serving dish and cried, “Why, they ate it all!” and her happy expression had haunted Sarah for days.

What did it matter, she now asked herself fiercely, if her mother wasn’t a queen bee on both continents? How many people were that lucky?

Sarah herself had never been a queen bee anywhere. But these days her status was rising. The neighbors’ admiration and affection for her mother flowed over onto her with little distinction between them. Even in her own family, Sarah belonged—if only partially—to her grandmother’s inner circle, for no other reason than lineage.

Even though she knew she was merely basking in her mother’s glory, the effect was heady. It was like the time when she was a little girl and her grandfather had carried her on his feet while dancing a waltz. In that moment she had understood, for the first time, how it felt to move through space with elegance and authority. “
Soh soh,
that’s right,” her grandfather had chuckled. “
Soh soh,
see? Your body knows it.”

Lately there were moments when Sarah found herself gliding through daily life with uncharacteristic confidence and entitlement, just like her mother. It was surprising how easy it was, how natural and right it felt. During such moments she felt a glimmer of hope that her true personality had been in hiding all these years, just as her mother’s had been, and the whole world was opening up before her.