The Favorites (7 page)

S
arah
sat outdoors, trying to remember how it had felt to be a child.

She was perched on the shallow step leading up to the Kobayashis’ visitor gate. The gate had slatted sliding doors, set upon grooved sills that were raised slightly off the ground. If she twisted around and pressed her face against the vertical wooden laths, she could peer in at the walkway of stepping stones and bamboos that led up to the main door. From this vantage point the garden looked bigger, more imposing, the way it used to when she was little.

She sat attuning herself to the afternoon silence. Closing her eyes, she breathed in the smells of the lane: the aged, musty undertones of wood, mellowed with moss and warmed by the sun; hot cotton hung out to air; banks of perspiring leaves in the carefully tended gardens; and floating in from somewhere (someone was cooking a late lunch), a faint bitter whiff of grilled sardines. Mixed in with it all was some complex, private scent inseparable from early childhood.

“Big Sister! Big Sister!”

Sarah looked down the lane toward Mrs. Asaki’s upstairs bal
cony. Momoko and Yashiko were leaning over the railing, waving at her with all four arms. “How come you’re sitting there all by yourself?” Momoko called. “We’re coming right down!” The two girls vanished from the balcony.

Soon they were all squeezed together on the Kobayashis’ stone step. Rolling their sandaled feet back and forth over the gravel, they discussed ways to amuse themselves. A wind chime tinged, sounding muffled in the humid air.

They decided to play American Emotions. They had invented this game shortly after Sarah’s arrival, while they were playing at the Kobayashi house. Sarah, wanting to seem as Japanese as possible, had been parodying American movies. “I love you, son,” she said in a deep voice. “You are very special to me.” Momoko and Yashiko had been delighted; they recognized this kind of dialogue from Hollywood films that occasionally aired on Japanese television.

Encouraged by their laughter, Sarah had continued. “I care about you, son. I care very deeply.” Even Mrs. Kobayashi and Mrs. Rexford broke into reluctant smiles.

Afterward Momoko said thoughtfully, “It’s like American people use words that are stronger than what they feel. I mean…they yell and cry, but it’s almost like it’s on the outside…” She stopped, unsure how to express herself.

“Americans believe it’s unhealthy to keep feelings inside,” Mrs. Rexford had explained to her nieces. “So if they feel an emotion coming on, they try to get it out of their system before it affects them too much.” Everyone listened respectfully; she was the resident expert on America. “They’re afraid if they keep it in too long, it’ll fester and cause damage.”

“My father isn’t like that,” added Sarah quickly. “He’s more like us, because he grew up on the East Coast.”

Momoko was gazing at Mrs. Rexford, nodding slowly as if
cementing this new knowledge into her memory. “So that’s why they’re always talking about the way they feel,” she said.

Sarah had another theory, which she kept to herself because her language skills weren’t up to the task. Americans, she thought, were like people slightly hard of hearing. On an emotional level they didn’t register subtle sounds; they needed loud voices and overly clear enunciation in order to prevent misunderstandings. She herself was perfectly comfortable with this. But ever since entering her grandmother’s household she had noticed a change in her own emotional acuity, as if she had sprouted the ears of a rabbit that could prick forward, swivel, and sense underground vibrations.

“That’s right,” Mrs. Rexford told Momoko. “So their words have a certain thin quality, like you said. It’s like grape juice compared to wine. People like us, we keep our feelings inside and let them ferment—till the happy and the sad and the good and bad get all mixed together so we can’t tell them apart.”

Ever since that day, the three girls had performed many variations of American Emotions. Now they rose up from the stone step, disturbing some pigeons pecking halfheartedly among the gravel. They took their stances in the middle of the lane. They had decided, on Sarah’s suggestion, to do a mental therapy scene. Sarah had the role of therapist; as the tallest and eldest, she held the most authority. Momoko, second-eldest, was the patient. Yashiko stood eagerly by, awaiting the supporting role that would be created for her once the game got under way.

“I’m filled with rage,” said Momoko. “I’m going to kill myself.”

“More emotion, Momo-chan,” Sarah prompted. She realized too late that she should have taken the role of patient instead. It required a certain flamboyance that Momoko seemed to lack.

“I’m
filled
with
rage
!” said Momoko loudly. Baring her teeth, she pulled at her hair. “I’m going to
kill
myself!”

Yashiko clapped with approval and anticipation.

“Excellent! Let it all out!” said Sarah. “Get all your feelings out of your system!”

Momoko stood at a loss, unsure how to improve on what she had already done.

Sarah came to her aid. “But first,” she said, “you’ll need love! Let me give you a hug.” With both arms, she folded Momoko in a tight embrace. The daring physicality of this move drew little shrieks of nervous laughter. Now the game was really under way.

“Pretend you’re chewing gum!” cried Yashiko, recalling one of their previous games. “With your mouth wide open!”

Amid their cries of laughter, Sarah became aware of an urgently hissed
“Kora! Kora!”
coming from the balcony. It was Mrs. Asaki. Sarah looked up, and for a fleeting instant she caught a look of revulsion in the old woman’s eyes, a look that pierced her to the quick.

She understood instantly that their physical antics were in bad taste. It didn’t matter that she had been
mocking
these foreign mannerisms in a spirit of Japanese solidarity; her great-aunt would only see that it was an unsavory influence on her cousins. Now Mrs. Asaki would probably talk to her granddaughters in private, explaining that Big Sister came from a “different world” and they mustn’t imitate everything she did. Sarah had grown up listening to Granny Asaki’s talks; she and her cousins had been constantly warned not to imitate the slang used by children from the weaving district, or the precocious mannerisms of child stars on television. “It’s fine for
those
people,” Mrs. Asaki would say, “but our family has different standards.” All of this flashed through the girl’s mind, and her face burned with humiliation.

By now, they had all stopped playing and were looking up at the balcony. Smiling benevolently, the old woman placed her forefinger to her lips as if noise had been her only concern. Then she gave a little wave and turned away.

Had Sarah imagined that steely look? No. It had been there.

For the first time, she felt the start of a slow-rising anger: against Mrs. Asaki, and against these children who had to be so carefully protected from her crass influence.

S
till
in shock, Sarah followed her cousins into the Kobayashi house. At the sound of the kitchen door rolling open, Mrs. Kobayashi and Mrs. Rexford looked up from the low dining table where they sat doing sums on scraps of paper. From their guilty expressions, Sarah guessed they had been making financial calculations. In this period of rising yen, the vacation money that Mrs. Rexford had recently converted was increasing in value. And Mrs. Kobayashi’s stock investments, which she secretly funded with part of her household budget, were rising as well. These days, a good many Japanese housewives indulged in financial speculation for pocket money. But they were discreet about it, for such activities were not becoming to a lady.

“Girls! Why don’t you go over to the snack shop and get yourselves some ice cream,” said Mrs. Rexford. “We need a little privacy to discuss adult matters.” She stood up, rummaged in a cupboard drawer, and gave them a handful of loose change.

“What’s wrong, Big Sister?” Momoko asked as they walked over to Mrs. Yagi’s snack shop.

“Nothing,” Sarah replied shortly.

They ate their ice cream sitting outside in public, on a wooden bench set up next to the snack shop. They had purchased the new ice cream phenomenon, Jewelry Box, currently advertised on television. It was a single-serving container of vanilla ice cream, in which “jewels” were embedded: shards of colored ice in red and blue and yellow and green.

The afternoon street was deserted, with cicadas droning in full force. The girls scraped carefully with their wooden spoons. “Look,” said Momoko. “I got a red diamond!”

“I got a green one!” said Yashiko.

As Sarah’s shock wore off, her anger grew. She itched to strike back at Mrs. Asaki, who overprotected her grandchildren at the expense of another child’s feelings. And those grandchildren weren’t even hers!

Yashiko left the bench and wandered away to examine an anthill.

“She really likes bugs,” Momoko remarked. “She says she’s going to be a scientist when she grows up.”

Sarah turned to face Momoko. The gathering force of her feelings flickered into a flame of intention.

“You know what?” she said. “I bet you didn’t know that Granny Asaki isn’t your real grandmother.” After so many weeks of vigilance it was a relief, like poking at a house of cards.

Momoko listened, looking suitably awed. But she accepted the story much more readily than Sarah would have expected.

“I
thought
there was something funny,” she said finally.

“You did? Really? Why?”

“Because Granny’s so much older than all my friends’ grandmothers.”

“Oh.” That simple logic had never occurred to Sarah.

They sat in silence. Sarah’s anger, now drained, was replaced by dawning horror at what she had just done. If the grown-ups
ever found out…! Her mother’s new tenderness, her place in the women’s circle, everything would be ruined.

“You can never, never tell anyone you know,” said Sarah desperately. “Do you promise?
Ne,
do you promise?”

“Nnn,”
agreed Momoko in that bland, agreeable way of children. It did not inspire confidence.

Sarah thrust out her pinkie finger, and Momoko hooked it with her own. But Sarah felt doomed. An eleven-year-old child could not be trusted. She herself had already slipped up, and she’d known for less than a month.

“Sarah-chan, don’t pick at your food,” said Mrs. Rexford. “It’s an insult to your grandmother’s cooking.”

In the two days since the incident with Momoko, Sarah had eaten hardly anything but rice and umeboshi. To the puzzlement of the adults, she had taken to watching television in the middle of the day until Mrs. Rexford firmly turned off the TV set. This afternoon Sarah had hidden away on the garden veranda and watched Mr. Kobayashi sketching designs for his upcoming show.

She now gave a short bow of apology toward her grandmother. She choked down a bite of breaded prawn. Her mother watched her with an inscrutable expression.

“Let’s go for a stroll,” said Mrs. Rexford after dinner. “I want to show you a special place.”

Mother and daughter strolled through the lanes until they reached the main thoroughfare. It was pleasantly busy with evening traffic: people coasting by, straight backed, on bicycles; locals strolling to the bathhouse carrying plastic washbasins and towels.

With the sureness of a local, Mrs. Rexford slipped into a
small opening between a cigarette shop and a bus-token stand. Here, tucked away from the outside world, was a pocket-sized temple area. A roofed platform displayed a standing stone Buddha with an outstretched hand. At the foot of the statue lay homely offerings of flowers, in glass household jars washed clean of labels.

“I like this little place,” said Mrs. Rexford. She headed for a bench and Sarah followed her. In the dim gray light of evening, this little clearing had a magical quality. They sat for a while in peaceful companionship.

After a while her mother turned to her and said, very gently, “What’s wrong?”

Before this tenderness to which she was still unaccustomed, Sarah crumbled. As she blurted out her secret, she watched her mother’s eyes change from puzzled concern to sharp comprehension. At this, she began to cry with dry, harsh sobs.

“I don’t know why I did it,” she sobbed. And it was true, for at this point her reasons seemed nothing short of insane.

She hadn’t cried like this with her mother in years. Some detached part of her now savored this reversion to childhood, knowing it was probably the last time she would cry with such abandon.

As if from a great distance, she heard her mother saying, “Sarah-chan, Sarah-chan, it’s not the end of the world. I’m not angry. There’s no need to cry.”

She lifted her eyes. The light had grown slightly grayer. In the silence between her hiccups, she could hear the peaceful pulsing of crickets.

“Momoko would have found out sometime,” Mrs. Rexford said.

“She wasn’t supposed…to know until…” Traditionally, adopted children weren’t told of their status until they came
of age. Neighbors and friends were trusted to keep a discreet silence.

“Oh, that doesn’t matter with the second generation,” said Mrs. Rexford. “A grandmother’s hardly the same thing as a mother.”

“But why…then…all the secrecy…”

“It’s to protect Granny Asaki. She wants so much for those girls to think of her as their real grandmother. She’d be really hurt if they switched their affections to someone else. But as long as they pretend not to know about it, there’s no harm done.”

“But I’m afraid…Momo-chan will blab. I’ve been so worried.”

“It’ll be all right,” said Mrs. Rexford confidently. “Sure, she might tell someone, but it’ll be her mother, it won’t be Granny. That girl knows her way around. This is how it is when you grow up in a complicated family. Your aunt and I were like that too. We were used to the pressure, so we never buckled.”

Sarah felt utterly chastened.

“I’ll go talk to your auntie tomorrow, just to make sure,” Mrs. Rexford said. “But don’t worry. It’ll be all right.”

“Will she be mad?” At the thought of her aunt’s gentle face, Sarah almost began to cry again.

“To tell you the truth,” her mother said, “I think she’d like her girls to know who their real grandma is.” There was a knowing quality in her voice that made Sarah realize that the sisters, for all their differences, shared some deep, unspoken rapport.

“Slipups happen to the best of us,” Mrs. Rexford continued. “Your auntie learned about her situation when she was about Momoko’s age.”

“Oh no…”

“She heard a rumor at school and came to me to ask if it was
true. She was quiet, kind of shaken. She seemed so alone. I sat her down and told her that our mother never wanted to give her away, that she’d always regretted it. I think it helped. I
hope
it helped.”

They sat quietly. The dusk had deepened, and the standing Buddha was now a flat, dark silhouette.

“Did she talk to Granny?”

“No. We kept that conversation a secret from the adults. To this very day, neither your grandma nor Granny has any idea she found out early.”

Sarah lifted her face to look at her mother. Their eyes met in relief that they had been spared such a fate.

Never again was Sarah fully at ease around the Asaki household.

She was ashamed to meet her aunt Masako’s eyes. And in Momoko she no longer saw a simple child, but an additional complication in the forward-thinking game. Now, if her grandmother bought her a new dress or a trinket, Sarah hid it from her cousins. She constantly searched Momoko’s eyes, alert for any signs of jealousy.

If she could be so angry after just one look from Mrs. Asaki, then how could it not be different for her aunt and cousin? What resentments did they feel that they could not express?

Thus it came about that Sarah drew away from the Asaki house, choosing to adopt the social boundaries of her elders. As the years passed, the distance between the girls would grow to resemble that of the generation before them.