Mary Waters - The Favorites

“I guess there’s no way around it,” Sarah said, echoing her mother’s words from earlier that day.

“I guess not,” said Mrs. Rexford. They were silent, spooning up the last of the azuki beans.

“When you come first in someone’s heart,” Mrs. Rexford said, “it changes you. It literally, chemically changes you. And that stays with you, even after the person’s gone. Remember that.”

Sarah nodded. The idea of chemical change resonated with her, and once again she thought of the eggs floating.

She let out a little sigh of well-being. So this was how it felt to eat shaved ice at Kinjin-ya in the middle of summer. It was pleasant to sit in the path of the old-fashioned fan and feel the air flow over her moist arms and legs, exactly as it must have done when her mother was a girl. She felt curiously relaxed, all her pores open to the world. For the first time she noticed that some defensive part of herself-her habitual readiness to shrink and harden at a moment’s notice-had melted away, leaving a sense of implicit trust in the world. This, she thought, is how it must feel to be a queen bee.

They left the teahouse in excellent spirits.

“That was yummy.” Sarah used the childish word on purpose.

“It was, ne,” agreed Mrs. Rexford.

They walked slowly, in no rush to get home. They took a roundabout route through a neighborhood Sarah had never seen. Some of the houses had old-fashioned thatched roofs instead of the usual gray tile.

“They look like the houses in those history books Grandma sent me,” said Sarah.

“This lane hasn’t changed in generations,” Mrs. Rexford said. “It’s never going to change, I’m sure.”

They passed under the shade of a large ginkgo tree that leaned out over an adobe wall into the lane. The fan-shaped leaves, dangling from thin stems, fluttered and trembled. The meee of cicadas was directly overhead now, sharpened from a mass drone into the loud rings of specific creatures, each with a different pitch, a different location among the branches. Mrs. Rexford paused and lowered her parasol to see if she could spot one. Not finding anything, she lifted her parasol and resumed walking.

“Mama?”

“Hmm?”

“Were you always Grandma’s favorite?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“Even before she knew what kind of person you’d turn out to be?”

“Soh, even then. Because I was part of her old life before the war, back when she was happy and in love.”

The lane narrowed and they fell into single file. The dappled shadows danced on the back of Mrs. Rexford’s parasol.

Sarah pictured Shohei’s handsome, unfamiliar face. It was odd to imagine anyone other than her mother holding such power over her grandmother’s heart. That it was a man seemed especially strange. Sarah had grasped early on that while the men in this family were flattered, catered to, and fed extremely well, they were not that important in the scheme of things.

“When your grandfather died,” said Mrs. Rexford, “all her love for him had to go somewhere. So it came to me, all of it. Maybe I turned out the way I did because of that early love. It’s hard to say.”

“So it’s like you piggybacked off of what they had,” Sarah said.

“That’s right. And now you’re piggybacking off of what she and I have. That’s why you’re the favorite grandchild, you see?”

Sarah pondered this. She had always thought love began and ended with the actual person involved. She remembered her mother telling Momoko about emotions fermenting over time and getting blurred together till you couldn’t tell them apart. It seemed that love, too, was blurry when it came to recipients. The remainder of one love could go on to feed the next, like those sourdough starters that American pioneer families had handed down for generations.

“It’s not on your own merits,” said Mrs. Rexford. “Not yet. You reach her through me. Remember that.”

“Okay,” Sarah agreed.

They strolled through the shifting tree shadows of late afternoon. The k’sha k’sha of gravel was loud beneath their feet. The buzz of traffic floated over from some larger street several blocks down. Trailing her fingers along a low wall, Sarah felt its braille of pebbles and straw; she breathed in the scent of sun-warmed adobe. She felt perfectly happy.

They approached two young boys standing under a tree with a plastic insect cage at their feet, staring up at a horned beetle just above their reach. They turned toward Sarah with that look of avid curiosity she knew so well. But they seemed mollified to see her mother was Japanese; she wasn’t, then, a complete outsider.

“Where are your nets, boys?” Mrs. Rexford called out in the friendly tone of a fellow enthusiast. “Do you need me to get that for you?”

The boys gazed with tongue-tied gratitude as she pulled the horned beetle from the bark and transferred it to their plastic cage. “Look at the size of these antlers,” she said. “It’s a real beauty.” Too shy to speak, the boys broke into big foolish grins. Sarah, who had always felt uneasy around small Japanese boys, marveled at how harmless they could be, how sweet.

As they resumed walking abreast Sarah remarked, “Little kids don’t stare as much when I’m with you.” It was the first time she had openly referred to her shame.

“Let them stare,” her mother said breezily.

“Soh ne,” agreed Sarah with her new queen-bee expansiveness. What had she been so afraid of?

Mrs. Rexford gave her daughter an approving glance but said nothing.

Years later Sarah would remember this afternoon for its intensity of color: the gleaming lacquer of the beetle against the bark, the hills rising all around them in a crescendo of green. The parasol cast a rose-colored glow over her mother’s face, drawing Sarah’s eyes to its unfamiliar beauty. Even the air had color, a whitish glow like light refracted through a shoji screen. When she grew older and began falling in love with men, she would experience this same sense of heightened color-although in a weaker form-and see this for what it had been: her first and most powerful romance.

O-bon was almost upon them. It was a three-day festival of reunion, when spirits of dead relatives returned to visit the living. Families were walking en masse to bus stops and train stations that would take them to ancestral gravesites out in the country. This was the time for graveyard maintenance. The fathers carried garden tools; the mothers carried delicate food offerings for the dead (and, if they were old-fashioned, a hearty picnic lunch for the living) discreetly wrapped in silk furoshiki; the children trudged behind with flowers.

As the Kobayashi household ate breakfast, they could hear the crunching of gravel as chattering families passed directly outside, taking shortcuts through the narrow lane. A woman’s voice cried, “A! We forgot the thermos!” It was the last weekend before the holiday. Everyone, it seemed, was heading out to the country.

“They’re getting ready for O-bon,” said little Jun in a sullen voice. Everyone else was silent, chewing.

“I’m afraid we’ve held you back in your preparations,” Mr. Izumi said. He was referring to the housecleaning, for family altars were just as important as graves. “It was thoughtless of us,” he said. Sarah’s heart went out to him. His fine long eyes, slanted ever so slightly downward, gave his face a mournful air.

“Not in the least, Izumi-san!” Mrs. Kobayashi batted the air dismissively, as if to swat away his concern. “The O-bon dinner will be over there”-she gestured toward the Asaki house-“so there’s really nothing for me to do.”

They all knew this was a lie. Housewives cleaned obsessively before a priest’s yearly visit. The priests from So-Zen Temple had already begun their neighborhood rounds, chanting long incantations before each family altar to guide the spirits on their return journey. This was a grueling time for priests, who made back-to-back calls from morning till evening. It was for such occasions, as well as for funerals, that they practiced year round. No priest from So-Zen Temple had yet marred a ceremony with coughing or hoarseness.