Mary Waters - The Favorites

On this note, the burial was over.

They ate their lunch a few meters from the gravestone, on blankets spread under a cherry tree. They were famished. Mrs. Nishimura had brought a simple snack of rice balls to tide them over until they reached a restaurant in the city. A modern woman in her own way, she had bought them at a convenience store. They were huge, containing as much rice as four normal rice balls, and triangular in the Tokyo style. They were individually wrapped in an ingenious system of plastic wrapping. One tab broke apart the outer wrapping; another tab removed an inner plastic sheet that separated the crisp, dry sheet of seaweed from the moist rice.

“Which filling would you all like?” Mrs. Nishimura said. “Umeboshi? Or salmon with mayonnaise?”

“It’s amazing,” said Mrs. Kobayashi, “what they can do nowadays!” She still molded her husband’s rice balls by hand when he went off with his friends for a morning of golf.

“Here, I’ll show you how it works,” Mrs. Asaki told the couple. She was proud of her familiarity with modern techniques. “First you pull this,” she told them, demonstrating.

But nothing happened.

“Areh?” She turned over the rice ball in confusion.

“Let me do it, Granny,” said Momoko. She snatched it out of the old woman’s hands and deftly pulled the correct tabs.

“Ara maa,” cried Mrs. Kobayashi, “how clever!”

Mrs. Asaki sat quietly. She was suddenly very, very tired.

Mr. Kobayashi took a hearty bite. “Not bad!” he said, surprised.

“Not bad at all,” agreed his wife. “The rice tastes quite fresh. Soft and chewy, and salted just right.”

“Oh, it’s fresh all right,” Mrs. Nishimura assured her. “They make them fresh every morning.”

They placed one of the rice balls on the Kobayashi gravestone, in between the fresh flower bouquets. Considering the occupants, umeboshi seemed the proper choice. Salmon and mayonnaise was too new; that combination had become popular only in the last decade.

“Well,” Mr. Kobayashi remarked as everyone sat eating hungrily and drinking cold tea from a thermos, “It’s too late for the cherry viewing, but it’s still very nice.”

“Yes, isn’t it lovely?” said Mrs. Kobayashi. “Yo-chan loved eating here. She used to say it gave her quite an appetite.”

The homebound train was almost empty, so they had their pick of seats. Mrs. Asaki and Mrs. Kobayashi settled into the “silver” section. Everyone else took ordinary seats farther back.

The two women were silent as the scenery slid past. Their airy cheer fell away. Today’s events, casual as they were, had taken a toll that was only now beginning to make itself felt.

Mrs. Asaki was remembering an incident when she had been a young wife, raking leaves in the garden. A scrawny alley cat was stalking its way across the top of the fence and she had stopped to watch it. The cat, too, came to a wary halt. Ueno cats, which had survived for generations by stealing fish out of open-air kitchens, were alert to mistreatment by irate housewives.

Resting both hands on the rake handle, she gazed into its slit-pupiled eyes. The cat stared back, unblinking.

She had pretended it was a creature of prey, a big cat from Africa. She imagined herself shrinking down in size, becoming more and more at its mercy, until the experiment began to feel real. Suddenly she was afraid. Quickly, roughly, she shooed it away with her rake.

That experience had stayed with her. Maybe she recognized in it some germ of prophecy, the way one does with powerful dreams. She now thought of the exasperated way Momoko had snatched the rice ball out of her hand. Once she would have thought nothing of reprimanding the child, but more and more she regarded her with a kind of fear that was new. This momentum would continue, she knew. It would soon extend to Yashiko, to her own daughter, to her son-in-law…

On the seat beside her, Mrs. Kobayashi was absently stroking the folded silk furoshiki on her lap. Earlier that day it had been wrapped around her daughter’s boxed remains.

“I looked at Sarah-chan’s thumb,” Mrs. Asaki told her, although in truth she had forgotten all about it until now. “And I do see what you mean.”

Mrs. Kobayashi nodded. “Yes,” she said simply.

Mrs. Asaki felt a wistful envy for those two, for the closeness and promise still lying in wait for them. How did her sister-in-law manage to go through life never at a loss for a close, passionate relationship to sustain her?

Turning her head, she looked out the window. The hills were close, invigoratingly close. Rice paddies spread out before her; here and there, dirt paths wound away into the hilly terrain. In the corridors of her memory she saw similar roads stretching away: through rice paddies, through canopies of trees. Many times, after a long day in the fields, the locals had ridden home on a wooden cart, facing backward with their feet dangling over the edge. It struck her now, at eighty-three years of age, that this image-a dirt road stretching away behind her-was the most evocative and defining memory of her childhood. She had one early memory-perhaps it had been her first-of such a road stretching away into a blurry sort of greenery. She had seen it from her mother’s lap, the back of her head resting securely against her mother’s breast. It was so long ago it no longer felt like her own memory but a scene from some nostalgic television drama.

And here she was decades later, a success in life. She knew what her fellow train passengers saw: a well-dressed elderly woman surrounded by a devoted brood. A woman with a secure old age ahead of her. And yet…

She tried to remember how it had felt to sit in her mother’s lap. She tried to picture herself being held close, being coddled and cared for, and something stirred deep in her core. She felt her eyes blur over with tears.

“Would you like a throat drop?” she heard Mrs. Kobayashi say. She must have noticed something, for her voice was gentle.

Mrs. Asaki nodded her head with a little bow of thanks, not because she wanted one but because it was the easiest thing to do. The candy was an old-fashioned flavor she hadn’t tasted in years, brown sugar, and it spread out in her mouth with surprising and comforting sweetness. This, coupled with the unexpected tenderness from her sister-in-law, filled her with a tremulous sense of gratitude.

After a while, still sucking on the throat drop, she turned to the woman sitting beside her. So many times during the war they had come home like this on the train, tired and spent. Once again she had the sensation, as she had at the open grave, of blinking once to find the grieving young woman beside her transformed into a grieving old woman. Who knew Mrs. Kobayashi would lose yet another daughter? Mrs. Asaki, knowing her own guilt in the matter, felt a rush of sorrow.

She said, “Yo-chan was a good child.”

“Yes.”

“She was happy,” Mrs. Asaki persisted. “She loved passionately all her life.”

Mrs. Kobayashi nodded her thanks. The corners of her mouth wobbled involuntarily, for it had been a long day. This was a dangerous time for both of them; they were old women and they had been holding things together for a very long time.

“She was a good child,” Mrs. Asaki repeated. Reaching out timidly, she patted her sister-in-law’s hand. Mrs. Kobayashi did not draw it away. Instead she turned up her palm to meet Mrs. Asaki’s hand with her own. At this surprising gesture, long denied her and coming from such an unlikely source, the old woman felt her throat constrict.

“The way you raised that child,” she said finally, “was a success.” In this heightened moment of compassion and remorse and gratitude, she was moved to offer up the most private, painful part of herself. It was the first time she would admit this to another living being. It would also be the last.