The Favorites (9 page)

T
ama
Izumi was the most beautiful of the three sisters. She had full, perfectly formed lips like the Egyptian queen Nefertiti. She exuded a womanly coquetry that Sarah, despite her own lack of experience, instantly recognized as being attractive to the opposite sex. But unlike some beautiful women, Mrs. Izumi extended her good-natured flirtation to women and children alike, as if inviting everyone to share in her feminine appeal.

“Oh, Sarah-chan, you’ve turned out so
pretty
!” she said, and the girl fell in love with her all over again.

The women followed Mrs. Izumi into the parlor and kept her company while she unpacked her suitcases. This took a long time, for she kept stopping to chat.

“It seems like yesterday that your mother brought you home from the hospital, in a little bundle,” Mrs. Izumi told Sarah.

“Remember that time you babysat,” Mrs. Rexford said, “and you fed her mandarin oranges? I was so mad when I found those seeds in her diaper.”

“But, Big Sister, she wanted some!” Mrs. Izumi protested, laughing. “I swear! She threw a tantrum every time I stopped!”

Little Jun trotted into the room and stood over the open suitcase. He was an active four-year-old whose small brown legs, clad in little boys’ short pants, were constantly on the move. His mother drew out a stack of tiny shirts and placed them in an open bureau drawer. “Those are mine,” he told the women.

“Jun-chan, what a nice baseball cap you’ve got!” said Mrs. Rexford. It was navy blue with a yellow tiger’s head on it, for Han-shin Tigers. Mr. Kobayashi had given it to him when he arrived. “You’re one of the menfolk now,” he had told the boy, reaching down to tweak his visor. Over the next few days the boy would insist on wearing this cap everywhere, even to the bathhouse.

“I’m one of the menfolk,” Jun now told them.

“You certainly are!” said his grandmother. “It’s a lucky thing you’re here to protect us!”

Mrs. Rexford and Mrs. Izumi were reminiscing about friends of their youth. Bored, the little boy wandered away to the other end of the house.

“Mother,” said Mrs. Izumi, “whatever happened to Big Sister’s old boyfriend? The one who was studying Middle Eastern history?”

“Sekizaki-kun,” supplied Mrs. Rexford.

“
Soh,
Sekizaki-kun! I hear he goes around consulting for the big petroleum companies now,” said Mrs. Kobayashi. “Who could have guessed, back then, what would happen with Arab oil?” She turned to Sarah. “He was an odd one,” she explained. “For whatever reason, he was fascinated with that part of the world. Think: all that work to get into Kyoto University, then he defied his poor parents and studied the most impractical subject ever.”

“He had bite, that one,” said Mrs. Rexford.

“What’s bite?” asked Sarah.

“It’s a certain bravery,” said her grandmother, “an originality of intellect. Your mother’s boyfriends, they all had bite. Some of them are important men now.”

“No fair, Big Sister!” cried Mrs. Izumi in mock distress. “How come none of
my
boyfriends went on to careers of intellect?”

They all giggled.

“That’s because you dated bon-bons,” her sister said. Bon-bons were handsome, dashing boys from wealthy families who focused on sports cars and skiing trips instead of their studies.

Mrs. Izumi responded with a sour look, and they all laughed again.

Mrs. Izumi had met her husband in college. He was good looking and extremely polite; Sarah considered him romantic. His father was chief of neurosurgery at Osaka Municipal Hospital, but Mr. Izumi himself worked as an office manager. “Our Jun’s going to be a doctor. He’s going to take after his granddaddy,” Mrs. Izumi told the women.

Right now Mr. Izumi was in the family room, watching baseball. Mr. Kobayashi had joined him there, abandoning his work in order to play host. The men seemed slightly off-kilter, like caged animals waiting for their next meal. But they shared a certain solidarity, perhaps because they had been bon-bons in their youth. Little Jun, torn between his desire for male companionship and his attraction to the merrier women with their direct access to food, wandered back and forth between the two camps.

“What’s in this bag here?” asked Mrs. Rexford. She peeked inside. “What are all these books and magazines?
Watchtower?
What’s that, Jehovah’s Witness? Tama, are you into Christianity now?”

Her stepsister nodded sheepishly.

Tama Izumi’s personality had always tended toward the dra
matic. Several years ago she had discovered Confucianism, and she had announced this conversion by sending the Rexfords a hardbound religious text written in the original Chinese, which no one could possibly have known how to read. Before that, it had been some fundamentalist sect of Buddhism, and Sarah had received a child’s comic book depicting in lurid, colorful detail all the intricate levels of hell.

“Hmm,” said Mrs. Rexford, losing interest.

“Auntie, what was it like growing up with Mama?” Sarah asked.

“Well,” said Mrs. Izumi, “everyone admired your mother very much. But”—she made a little pout with her lovely lips—“she could be very
mean
to her little sister!”

“That’s because you were a pest,” replied Mrs. Rexford with an affectionate bluntness she would never have used with Mrs. Nishimura. “You were always bothering me and stealing my things.”

Mrs. Izumi pretended not to hear. “Sarah-chan,” she continued, “are you aware that your grandmother used to make me tiptoe past your mother’s room while she was studying for exams? And then Big Sister would complain I was breathing too loud, and
I’d
get scolded!” She was so droll, so childishly indignant, that everyone burst into infectious laughter.

As an only child, Sarah found this fascinating and vaguely unsettling. Sibling rivalry was perfectly normal, she knew. But after so many weeks of heightened tact, it was odd to hear her grandmother’s favoritism acknowledged so blatantly. Perhaps over the years, other family tensions had drained her grandmother and mother of sensitivity toward the baby of the family. After all, Tama was the lucky one. She had grown up with her real mother and father, she had been spared the war years, and she was clearly vocal enough to stand up for herself.

“Did you notice,” whispered Mrs. Rexford later that day in the kitchen, “how she steered completely clear of the altar?”

Mrs. Kobayashi reached into the icebox for a package of yakisoba noodles. “Well, you know,” she said. “Our tablets are barbaric idols, according to the Bible.”

Mrs. Rexford snorted with impatience.

Mrs. Kobayashi sighed. “I wouldn’t mind so much if it was a quiet, dignified sort of religion,” she said. “But those people insist on going around and ringing strangers’ doorbells, like peddlers from the deep country.”

“I know. We have Jehovah’s Witnesses in America too.”

This was why the Izumis were visiting now in the beginning of July, instead of waiting until the midmonth O-bon holiday when families traditionally came together. Their new religion forbade the celebration of holidays: not just Buddhist holidays like O-bon, but also Christian holidays such as Christmas and—even worse in Sarah’s opinion—neutral holidays such as children’s birthdays.

“I don’t understand,” Mrs. Rexford said, “why she can’t spend
two minutes
making a gesture of respect to her forebears.” No one in the house, with the possible exception of Mrs. Kobayashi, was religious in a theological sense. Praying at the altar was routine, like eating rice or bowing hello.

Mrs. Kobayashi dropped a handful of onions into the sizzling oil, and its aroma drifted up into the dining room. Sarah, setting the low table, sniffed appreciatively.

Mrs. Rexford popped her head around the shoji screen. “Where
is
everybody?” she asked the girl.

“They’re all out in the garden.”

Her mother’s head withdrew.

Eventually Sarah heard her saying, “When you die, Mother, and your tablet goes on those shelves, what does she plan to do then?”

“It’ll blow over before that. Don’t worry so much. Just enjoy being sisters.”

Mrs. Rexford said nothing.

S
arah
woke in the dark. Beside her, lying on sun-aired futons, her mother and her aunt were whispering.

She couldn’t quite follow what they were saying. She was groggy and the vocabulary was difficult. They seemed to be discussing philosophy.

She lay still, letting their voices drift through her mind. What time was it? The long drapes were shut, but above them a narrow rectangular window stretched from wall to wall. Through its wooden slats, the night sky glowed an eerie Prussian blue. The trees in the garden cast strange shadows on the walls.

She still had moments of dissonance when she felt like a Westerner. She was aware of the house’s smell: an exotic combination of wood, tatami straw, prayer incense, rice. Sometimes when she brushed her teeth she noticed, wafting in through the open window, some baffling night scent she could only associate with melons.

“…and his heart is so vast,” Mrs. Izumi was saying, “he feels identical love for each one of his children. Robber or saint, it makes no difference—we are all the same in his eyes.”

“It seems kind of impersonal,” Mrs. Rexford said, “to measure out the exact same love for everybody, like sugar in a rationing line.”

But it might be preferable, Sarah thought, to knowing that someone else was getting more than you.

“But that’s what makes it a miracle.” Mrs. Izumi seemed anxious to make her sister understand. “It’s exact and fair like a science, but it’s also extremely personal at the same time.”

Mrs. Izumi had a new Tokyo accent, not just because she lived in Tokyo but because she had purposely cultivated standardized speech. She used phrases like “namely” or “the truth of the matter.” Sarah knew this annoyed her mother, who scorned verbal posturing and took great pride in her Kyoto accent.

“…so you can see its significance,” her aunt continued. She had been talking for what felt like a long time. Sarah wanted to change position on the futon, but she was afraid to move. She had never heard this tone in her aunt’s voice before. The playfulness was gone; she was making a self-conscious effort to converse on the same level as her sister. Perhaps Mrs. Rexford sensed this too, for she murmured,
“Nnn hnn,”
without any more commentary or dissent.

It had never occurred to Sarah that grown people would want to change their identities. She’d thought identity was like height: it resolved itself by the early twenties, one accepted it and moved on.

In that moment, her longtime crush on her aunt Tama began to fade. It was a surprise, like ice cracking. She saw ahead to a time when her crush would be a faint, poignant memory, and she felt a pang of sorrow.

Outdoors, someone clapped two heavy wood blocks together. There was a long pause. Then the
kon…kon…
sound came again, closer and more piercing, leaving a high-pitched ringing
in the ears. Heavy footsteps sounded in the lane, striding hurriedly over the gravel.

Mrs. Izumi paused in her monologue. “
Hi-no-yojin
duty,” she murmured, suddenly sounding soft and wistful. This was the traditional neighborhood reminder to make sure all fires were extinguished before going to bed. Centuries ago, their ancestors had listened to this same sound as they rested their heads on wooden pillows.

“Nnn,”
murmured Mrs. Rexford. She yawned. “They’re late tonight.” So it was only ten or eleven o’clock, not the early hours of morning as Sarah had thought.

“Remember,” said Mrs. Izumi, “when we used to go with Papa, and he’d let us clap the blocks?” A hint of Kyoto dialect had crept into her voice, giving it a singsong quality. For the first time since her arrival, she actually sounded like someone’s little sister. For a surprising instant Sarah was transported back to a time before her own birth, to some long-lost ordinary night when these two sisters must have lain in bed as children. Then, as quickly as it had come, the moment vanished.

“Soh ne…,”
agreed Mrs. Rexford, echoing her sister’s nostalgia. “Tama-chan, can you believe how fast the time went?”

“I know, Big Sister…so fast…”

The footsteps faded, and the intermittent claps grew fainter. In their wake, night settled with finality over the houses.

Then Mrs. Rexford said, “It was interesting, what we talked about. I’ll definitely think it over.” Her voice held the same gentleness Sarah remembered from the lunch with her uncle Teinosuke. For a moment, the girl wondered if her mother was actually thinking of converting.

“I’ll show you my books tomorrow,” said Mrs. Izumi. Those brief moments of shared nostalgia must have eased something in her mind, for she didn’t follow it up with any more big words. They lay silent as if in a spell, listening to the last faint echoes of the wooden blocks.

T
he
next day, while the Izumis were away paying their respects at the Asaki house, Sarah saw her grandmother’s private photograph album for the first time.

She had been asking questions—about the war, about her real grandfather. “You’re becoming quite the historian,” Mrs. Kobayashi laughed, and turned to Mrs. Rexford. “What do you think, Yo-chan?” she said. “Is she ready to see some pictures?”

This album wasn’t kept in the storage recess like the others. Mrs. Kobayashi opened a bureau drawer and slid it out from between layers of seldom-worn kimonos.

“Let’s not mention this to anyone,” Mrs. Kobayashi said. She and Mrs. Rexford carefully turned the pages, with freshly washed hands smelling of soap.

“When your mother was young,” Mrs. Kobayashi said, “I used to show this book to
her.
”

Mrs. Rexford had very few memories of her real father. She had been three when he went off to war. Mrs. Kobayashi had been twenty-seven and pregnant with Masako.

“Here he is in his judo gear…Here he is at a company gathering…”

Shohei Kobayashi was handsome, like an old-time movie star, with perfectly proportioned features and eyes like elegant brushstrokes. Sarah had never seen a man like this outside of a samurai film.

“Here he is, holding your mother.” They all leaned in to scrutinize the black-and-white photograph.

“Every minute he had free, he was carrying your mother. Walking around, always holding her in one arm.”

“I think I remember being held by him,” Mrs. Rexford said.

“Your mother got carried around so much, with her arm curled around his neck or mine, that when she was set down she’d forget to move her left arm.”

The two women laughed wistfully.

“He’s really handsome,” said Sarah.

“Oh, do you think so?” her grandmother asked.

“Mother,” said Mrs. Rexford, “don’t be coy.”

They had met through work. Before her marriage, Mrs. Kobayashi had been a typist in the head office of a large Kobe corporation—not a
common
typist (as she always emphasized), but a foreign-language typist, using a machine equipped with English alphabet keys. In the 1930s English proficiency was a status symbol, proof of the higher education given to daughters from wealthy, academically liberal families. She had worn high heels to the office, and modish Western dresses with zippers and buttons and flounces. After work, she and a group of coworkers frequented the new dance halls, where waltzes and foxtrots were all the rage among the young well-to-do. Shohei was a young executive from the Kyoto branch who often visited the head office on business.

“Is this
you,
Grandma? You look so glamorous.” Sarah stared at a picture of a young woman with bobbed hair, lipstick, and a mischievous expression. “These pictures are so different from the others! It’s like a whole different world.”

“Granny Asaki was always jealous,” remarked Mrs. Rexford, “because your grandma came from a cosmopolitan background and she didn’t.”

“Look at this one,” Mrs. Kobayashi said quickly. “It’s our wedding reception.”

The photograph had been taken at night. A large party boat blazed with prewar exuberance: red paper lanterns hanging above the deck, serving women in dark kimonos balancing lacquered trays of sushi above their heads as they wove sinuously among the tightly packed guests. Sarah could almost hear the gay twanging of the stringed shamisen and the guests clapping time, their reserve loosened by cups of sake.

Mrs. Kobayashi gave a little smile. “I’ve often looked back on that boat,” she said, “from the distance of time.” Sarah wondered how she pictured it. Closing her own eyes, she imagined a small oasis of light and laughter, bobbing on the water’s dark expanse and spilling an occasional “To your future!” that faded into the night above the quiet lapping of the bay.

It was strange how both women, in different ways, had ended up falling from their youthful heights. Sarah wasn’t sure how to account for this. She could only sense vaguely that life was like a maze, and sometimes, through no fault of your own, a perfectly good path could veer off in an unexpected direction.

Over the next few days, Mrs. Izumi launched into her campaign of religious conversion. The women were patient and accommodating as she interrupted their conversations with clumsy segues into “love” or “the Lord.” But Sarah saw in her mother the restless eye movements, the flared nostrils through which she breathed rather more loudly than usual. She was worried for
her aunt; couldn’t she see she was alienating the very people whose circle she wanted to enter?

One afternoon Sarah and the three women were sitting down to tea in the family room. The men were out playing tennis with some of Mr. Kobayashi’s friends. Little Jun had gone downtown with Mrs. Asaki and the girls.

“Here, you do the honors,” Mrs. Kobayashi told Mrs. Rexford, gesturing toward the teapot. She knew her daughter wanted to practice her tea skills as much as possible; she often complained that living in America had made her rusty.

Mrs. Izumi turned to Sarah and said with mock sadness, “You see? I never get to pour.”

Sarah played along. “Because you’re the youngest?”

“That’s right.” Actually Mrs. Izumi had little interest in the tea ceremony. Both daughters had been formally trained in tea and koto, but only for Mrs. Rexford were they important as the last remnants of their old Kobe lineage. In those difficult early years, mother and daughter had bonded by honing the social skills that elevated them above the Asakis.

Mrs. Rexford lifted the teapot, giving it a gentle swirl before pouring the tea into thin porcelain cups. To Sarah’s relief, the tea service was casual. The formal teas, which she usually avoided, took place in the parlor. They involved heavy glazed bowls with deceptively rustic “flaws,” a cast-iron teapot, and a wooden whisk for frothing the matcha tea, which tasted bitter to the girl’s untrained tongue. Even the formal sweets were disappointing. Since the bitterness of the tea required a correspondingly strong sweetness, her grandmother served tiny artistic confections that, while beautiful to look at, tasted like pure sugar. “It’s the blend of opposites that makes it pleasurable,” she had explained.

Today’s tea was a mild sencha. Sarah would have preferred
cold barley tea, but such a watered-down drink, she knew, was too lowly even for an informal tea: one gave it to small children or else drank it from a thermos in place of water. At least her snack of
ohagi,
a sticky rice ball covered with sweet bean paste, was something she could really sink her teeth into.

As each woman accepted her tea with a slight bow of thanks, a polite silence fell over the table. The first sip was followed by formal murmurs of appreciation. Then, since it was a casual tea, Mrs. Izumi resumed the thread of her earlier conversation.

Sarah took an absentminded pleasure in watching the women’s fluid movements. It was like ballet above the waist; their precise alignment came from a lifetime of practice. Sarah envied their lack of concentration. She herself was always stiff and self-conscious when she took tea. She had sensed this same self-consciousness in Mrs. Asaki and Mrs. Nishimura. They made the right movements but they came from the brain, not from muscle memory. Sarah, remembering her recent grievance against Mrs. Asaki, felt a smug flash of pride in these women sitting beside her.

“So that big religious conference my friend went to, it was in the southern part of the country. I wanted to go too,” Mrs. Izumi said. “But my husband put his foot down.”

“People down in those southern areas eat a lot of pork,” Mrs. Kobayashi said. “They boil enormous chunks of it in iron kettles, along with cabbage and all kinds of strange things.”

“It wasn’t in Okinawa, Mother,” Mrs. Izumi corrected her. “It was a normal suburb of Kagoshima.” With the snobbery of mainland dwellers, the women regarded Okinawans as not quite Japanese, existing in the same category as Ainu aborigines from Hokkaido.

“Kagoshima has its own regional cuisine, doesn’t it?” said Mrs. Rexford. “When I went there on my school trip…”

Doggedly, Mrs. Izumi tried to steer the topic back to religion. Finally she pulled out a thin book from the pile next to her floor cushion. Turning to Sarah, she said, “Anyway, my friend brought me back some books. This one’s for you.”

Sarah was pleased, for her aunt usually ignored her when she discussed religion. “Wait, what does that word mean?” Sarah always demanded at crucial moments, knowing her mother and grandmother wouldn’t mind the intrusion. “Wait, wait! What does it
mean
?”

“Thank you, Auntie,” she said now, accepting the book with both hands and examining the cover. Some of the Chinese characters were unfamiliar—she recognized only the ideograms for
thousand, love,
and
ultimate
—but the illustration was clear enough. There was a grassy park with children of various nationalities laughing and playing in the foreground. Behind them, smiling parents strolled two by two beneath colorful fruit trees, past a lion and a lamb lying together in the shade.

The two women paused in their discussion of boiled pork. With wary expressions, they leaned forward—straight-backed, still in proper tea posture—to peer at the cover.

“Very nice,” said Mrs. Kobayashi faintly.

“Would you be interested,” Mrs. Izumi asked Sarah, “in meeting some people your age from the local branch?”

“
A, a!
Don’t even think about it,” said Mrs. Rexford. “The children are off limits.”

“Fine.” Mrs. Izumi sighed with comical resignation. She sipped her tea and took a bite of her
ohagi.
Then she looked up at the two women, this time with a flash of defiance. “You two don’t take me seriously,” she said. “I’m like a lapdog to you. Cute. Silly. A nuisance.”

The women looked up from their teacups.

“What if it turned out I wasn’t so stupid after all? What if it turned out I had the key to something that could completely change your lives?”

Mrs. Rexford thought for a moment. “I don’t think you’re stupid,” she said finally. “And maybe you
do
have the key. But right now I don’t want to change my life. I just want to talk with you like a real person, Tama-chan. I can’t seem to find you underneath all this religion.”

“But Big Sister, this
is
me.”

“It’s not the sister I used to know.”

“Well, of course not! I’ve grown up. I can’t live in your shadow forever. And now I have something important to share. I can
teach
you something. So why won’t you let me?” Mrs. Izumi was dead earnest now; she seemed to have forgotten Sarah’s presence. “Why can’t you both, for once, follow
me
?”

The women were silent.

Mrs. Kobayashi cleared her throat. “It’s a lovely idea, Tama-chan,” she said. “But—” She gestured up at the family altar, and they all knew she was referring to the late Shohei. “It would mean abandoning
him.
Who’d be left to say sutras for him every morning?”

But he’s dead, Sarah thought, and she’s alive. But even as she thought this, she knew it didn’t matter.

“And when Mother dies,” Mrs. Rexford chimed in, “I’ll be there to say sutras for her. That’s the way it has to be. You can’t just throw away history, Tama.”

There was silence as everyone pictured the chain of favoritism stretching forward into the afterlife.

“But don’t you think God understands? He can make provisions. The magnitude of his love…it transcends genealogy.”

“Maybe,” said Mrs. Rexford. “But here on earth it doesn’t
work that way. History creates commitments. That means certain people take priority over others. I can’t see any way around it.”

Mrs. Izumi made a moue as if thoughtfully considering this theory, but Sarah saw that her eyes were watery.