Mary Waters - The Favorites

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.

Shortly afterward, Mrs. Izumi went away to pay a call on someone she had met through church.

Mrs. Rexford was irritable and restless. “I think I’ll go out,” she told her mother.

“Soh soh, that’s a good idea,” said Mrs. Kobayashi soothingly. “Take a stroll through one of your old haunts.” Mrs. Kobayashi herself did not go in for aimless walks; she left that to the young people.

“I think I’ll go out for an ice. Come on,” Mrs. Rexford told Sarah.

“Are we going to the snack shop?” Sarah asked.

“No. I’m taking you to an old-fashioned teahouse, the kind we used to go to before they came up with those dreadful convenience stores. Can you believe it, Mother? That a child of mine has never eaten shaved ice at Kinjin-ya in the middle of summer?”

“It’s downright un-Japanese,” said Mrs. Kobayashi. “You should fix that right away. Run along, then. Go enjoy yourselves.”

They strolled through the lanes, becoming absorbed in the larger outdoor world of cicadas and trees and wind chimes and bicycle bells. Sarah felt her mother’s agitation fade. Smugly, she thought how silly her aunt Tama was to ruin a perfectly nice visit with all that religion.

Her own position, in contrast, felt sweet. How things had changed since America! It seemed ages ago that she had whined because her mother insisted on trimming her sandwich crusts or drawing little sketches on her brown paper lunch bags. Sarah pushed those memories away, ashamed of herself.

And yet-would the changes last? She remembered a science experiment at school, where she had dropped an egg into various liquids. In some, the egg floated to the surface; in others it sank like a stone. What if Japan was the only alchemy in which she could float?

The Kinjin-ya teahouse was small and unpretentious. Sarah had passed it many times on the way to the open-air market but had never gone inside. Its atmosphere was quite different from the modern tea shops downtown. It reminded Sarah of the pickle shop, with its aged wooden walls from when Japan had been a poor country. On one side hung a row of rectangular wooden tablets, one for each item on the menu, bearing the name and price in old-fashioned black brushstrokes. At this time of day the tables were empty; the only other customers were a little boy about Jun’s age and his mother. The boy was spooning his way through a plate of om-rice-an omelette stuffed with ketchup-flavored rice-a children’s favorite since the postwar years.

Mrs. Rexford and Sarah ordered shaved ice topped with a mound of sweetened azuki beans. It came in fluted glass dishes with long-handled spoons. “My generation grew up on this,” Mrs. Rexford said. “Maa, it really takes me back!”

They were silent, savoring the crushed ice and the creamy sweetness of the beans.

“Remember this, remember the way it tastes,” Mrs. Rexford told Sarah. And Sarah did, decades later. Many random experiences would be cemented in her mind by her mother’s phrase “remember this.”

Mrs. Rexford leaned back in her chair, gazing about her with a pleased expression. The seasonal cloth flaps over the open doorway cast a bluish tint on the room. Every so often, a breeze broke apart the heavy flaps and let in a flash of sunlight.

Taking advantage of this peaceful moment, Sarah ventured, “It’s weird now, isn’t it, with Auntie being Christian.”

“Well,” her mother said, “she never had top priority growing up. But it couldn’t be helped-you know how complicated things were back then.”

Sarah nodded.

“It’s an issue in every family, though. Remember that day we had snacks at the Asaki house?”

“Oh right, the bottle of Fanta.”

There had been one large bottle of orange Fanta to share among the three children. Dividing it was quite a project: first the empty glasses were lined up side by side, then each one was filled with the same number of ice cubes, and finally Mrs. Nishimura had poured the Fanta, little by little, until the levels were precisely equal. Momoko and Yashiko seemed familiar with the routine. They had crouched down on their hands and knees so as to be eye-level with the glasses, making sure that neither sibling got a milliliter more than the other.

“You and I are lucky,” said Mrs. Rexford. “Some people never get to come first.” Sarah thought of her aunt Tama making a moue to hide her tears. She thought of her aunt Masako waving from her shadowed gateway as the Kobayashi household strolled past, laughing and chatting, on their way to the bathhouse.

But now for the first time her sympathy was tinged with something hard, an unwillingness to give up her advantage. Her grandmother’s favoritism might not be working in her aunts’ favor, but it was working in hers. For the first time in her life she was blooming. This was the luck of the draw, and she was tired of feeling guilty. In some dim recess of her mind she had begun to feel she deserved it, that fate had recognized her worth and was finally rewarding her.