Mary Waters - The Favorites

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 affectations 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.”