Mary Waters - The Favorites

“This house is spotless all the time, anyway,” said Mrs. Izumi.

“Mommy,” said Jun, “can’t we stay for O-bon night dancing?”

“No-I already told you. We’re going home tomorrow.”

Another set of footsteps crunched by on the gravel. They heard a small child’s excited voice saying, “…great big rice balls, sprinkled with sesame salt!”

“I don’t envy those people,” said Mr. Kobayashi with well-meaning heartiness. “It’s going to get really hot today.”

“You’re absolutely right, Father-san,” Mrs. Kobayashi replied. “Maybe we should have grilled eel for lunch. It’s good for heat fatigue. Would everyone like that?”

“O-bon, O-bon, it’s almost O-bon,” Jun droned tunelessly.

“Jun-chan, stop that,” said his mother. “No singing at the breakfast table.”

Sarah felt bad for her aunt. In the excitement of the upcoming holiday, the Izumis’ departure would create hardly a ripple.

Afterward, washing dishes at the sink, Mrs. Rexford said, “I can’t believe she went out to pay calls again. On her last day. Who’s she visiting, us or the Jehovah people?”

“It’s all right,” said Mrs. Kobayashi. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Mother, it’s not all right.”

Having finished the dishes, Mrs. Rexford began wiping the sides of the sink. Mrs. Kobayashi continued to dry, passing the dishes up to Sarah, who was kneeling on the tatami floor of the dining room. The girl stacked each item on the shelves of the floor-level cabinet. Every time she reached into its depths, she breathed in a faint, familiar aroma from her childhood: the wooden damp of freshly washed chopsticks, soy sauce within its cut-glass cruet, condiments such as seven-spice and sesame seeds.

“She won’t even help around the house.” Mrs. Rexford wrung out the dishtowel with an angry twist. “You know what? She hasn’t changed at all. She says long prayers at the table but doesn’t care if our food gets cold while we wait. She sips tea and talks about charity, and meanwhile her aging mother’s slaving away down in the kitchen.”

“Nnn!” protested Mrs. Kobayashi. “‘Aging mother’?!”

Mrs. Rexford refused to be sidetracked. “That kind of hypocrisy earns no respect from me,” she said. “None!” Sarah was fascinated, even excited, to see her mother angry at someone other than Sarah herself.

“Don’t,” said Mrs. Kobayashi quietly. “You know how guilty I feel about her.”

There was a long pause. “I’m sorry,” Mrs. Rexford said.

Afterward Sarah and her mother went to a graveyard in the city to see the O-bon decorations. The somber headstones were transformed by sasaki grass, fruit and flower offerings, and branches of umbrella pine; the crumbling baby Buddhas were resplendent in new red bibs. White threads of incense wavered up by the dozen, hovering in the humid air like ghostly forms bending over their own headstones.

“We’ll visit our own graveyard after your aunt and uncle leave,” Mrs. Rexford told Sarah. “It won’t be as crowded as this one, because it’s out in the country. But it’ll be lovely too in a different way.”

Lately, with Mrs. Izumi away so much, Sarah and her mother had been going out alone. Sometimes they visited a little-known restaurant whose only item on the menu was dumplings from a secret family recipe handed down since the Momoyama era. Once they visited the Gion district to look at geishas. But mostly they wandered through out-of-the-way haunts from Mrs. Rexford’s youth. They strolled past the tennis courts of her old high school or lingered in a neglected children’s park on the bank of the Kamo River. Mrs. Rexford told stories of her youth, and Sarah listened with an attentiveness she had never shown back home.

When they arrived home, Mrs. Izumi’s and Jun’s shoes were already lined up in the vestibule. “Welcome home!” called Jun’s treble voice from the family room. He was sitting at the table with his hands curled around a cold glass of sweet, tangy rice Calpis. “Mommy’s changing her clothes,” he said.

Sarah pulled down some blue-and-white floor cushions from the stack in the corner. The electric fan on the floor whirred gently, swiveling back and forth like a spectator at a tennis game.

Mrs. Rexford soon entered, followed by Mrs. Kobayashi bearing a tray with a large Calpis bottle and glasses. “The men went across the lane to see Uncle,” she said. The Asaki house had already finished its gravesite duties.

When everyone except Mrs. Izumi was settled, Mrs. Kobayashi said, “So did you have fun today, Jun-chan? Did you meet some nice people?”

Jun nodded, taking a noisy gulp of his drink.

“What did you all talk about?” Sarah asked curiously.

“Heaven.”

“Oh! That sounds nice.”

Jun nodded again, pleased to be the center of attention. “We’re all going there,” he said, as if discussing an upcoming vacation. Then, remembering something important, he turned to his grandmother with an anxious look. “Grandma,” he said, “Mommy says you don’t want to go to heaven with us.”

“It’s not that I don’t want to, Jun-chan. But there are other reasons, you see.”

“Grandma, they told me I should ask you to come.” He widened his eyes, the whites so babyishly clear they had a bluish cast. “Because I don’t want you to go to hell, Grandma.”

“I’ll be just fine, dear. There’s no need for you to worry.”

“No, Grandma. Listen!” Jun’s brow puckered with the effort of trying to make her understand. “Listen! Hell is a really, really scary place. You won’t like it there. I don’t want you to go there, Grandma.”

Mrs. Kobayashi said nothing. She looked distressed; the lines around her mouth deepened until they looked like parentheses. She reached out helplessly and stroked her grandson’s crew cut.

Jun seemed baffled by his grandmother’s lack of sense. “How come you don’t want to go with us?” he persisted.

By this time Mrs. Izumi had returned and was standing in the doorway, watching her mother’s predicament with a smug expression on her face.

Mrs. Rexford looked over at her sister, and her lips compressed. A mighty force seemed to rise up in her, charging the room like air before a storm. Sarah had never seen this brutal, avenging side of her mother; back home, she hadn’t defended anyone but herself. Sarah remembered the stories of her mother as a child, protecting the weak on the playground.

“Raise your child any way you want,” Mrs. Rexford said. Her voice, though quiet, had such intensity and force that Sarah wondered for one crazy moment if her mother would stand up and hit her sister the way she had when they were children. “Raise him any way you want, but don’t you dare use him to hurt my mother.”

The sisters stared at each other for several minutes.

Then, surprisingly, Mrs. Rexford’s face contorted. “Mother,” she said, and suddenly she was crying.

Sarah and her aunt exchanged a glance of surprise and concern.

Mrs. Kobayashi got up and went over to kneel beside her daughter, running her hand up and down her back. “There, there,” she consoled, her face twisting in sympathy. “Shhh, now.”

Sarah felt a terrible sickness in her stomach. This was how her mother must have felt as a child.

Mrs. Rexford turned her face away from them, tensing her shoulders in an effort to stop her sobs.

At this point, Sarah and her aunt both remembered little Jun, who was sitting rapt, his mouth open with curiosity.

“I’ll take him,” Sarah whispered to her aunt. She stood up and held out her hand to the boy. “Come on, Jun-chan.”

“Big Sister, how come Aunt Mama’s crying?”

“I’ll tell you later. Let’s go, now.”