Mary Waters - The Favorites

“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.