Mary Waters - The Favorites

It wasn’t that Sarah had anything against Fielder’s Butte. She liked its austere beauty: miles of empty fields that, in summer, gave off an aroma like bran muffins; giant oak trees left over from Indian days; an industrial-sized sky of flat blue, blank except for the freewheeling hawk or the white trail of a plane. But thinking of it now gave her a forlorn feeling.

This, here, was the center of the world. The landscape confirmed it: hills of bright green rising up all around them, a lovely distraction to her unaccustomed eye. Sometimes in the evening, when she and her elders strolled home from the bathhouse in the gentle gray light of the narrow lanes, she looked up at the hills glowing in the last pink wash of sunset. In that light they loomed so close, so clear, she could make out individual trees packed tightly together like broccoli florets. “In ancient days,” her mother explained, “those hills kept our city safe from invading warrior clans. That’s why it was the perfect location for the royal court.” As they headed home, Sarah felt those hills shielding them from the huge sky that, in Fielder’s Butte, made the sunsets so lonely and stark.

Tama 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 dramatic. 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.”