Mary Waters - The Favorites

Within this group of old-timers, Mrs. Rexford’s legacy lived on. Naked, dripping women still sighed by way of a conversation opener, “Such a pity, ne-”

Sarah, seated on a plastic stool, was washing her grandmother’s back. Proper etiquette required a person to be fully scrubbed and rinsed before entering a communal bath.

“Ara, how nice,” said a bent old woman, pattering past on her way to the bathing area.

Sarah and her grandmother, still seated, smiled and returned her half-bow.

She resumed her gentle soaping. At first, she had often pretended it was her mother’s back she was washing. It had eased her ache to give her grandmother the tenderness she had never given her mother. Even now, she couldn’t forgive herself for the way she had acted as a child.

After their summer in Japan, things had improved. It wasn’t noticeable at first, for their closeness fell away in America. But as the months passed, that indefinable chemical change within Sarah asserted itself. She still struggled with her mother for freedoms and privileges, but their arguments weren’t as frequent or as personal. For Sarah had seen her mother at her strongest and most admired, and her mother knew she had.

Their arguments became less about Sarah wanting to fit in with her peers, and more about her wanting to try new experiences-something that her mother could understand. Over time, her outsider anxiety dropped away altogether, giving her much more in common with her mother. This took years, of course, and Mrs. Rexford didn’t live to see the full effect. But before her death there had been the start of a true womanly friendship between them. For the first time, Sarah had looked into the future and seen the full-fledged bond theirs would become.

She knew this now: her relationship with her mother hadn’t been a bad one. But back then, the only yardstick they had was the closeness between her mother and her grandmother. It was a source of regret for Sarah, as she knew it had been for her mother, than they hadn’t been able to replicate it.

“Look!” said Mrs. Kobayashi. She was pointing down at their feet on the tiles. “You and I have the same toes.” It was true; the first three toes of Mrs. Kobayashi’s feet were all the same length, just like Sarah’s.

“Maa, she takes after her grandma!” a nearby bather commented kindly. It touched Sarah to think of her grandmother eyeing her body so discreetly, so hopefully, searching for the smallest of connections.

They rinsed under the showerhead, then walked over to the bathing area. The enormous tub took up the entire room; through the heavy steam, they could glimpse several heads rising from the surface of the turquoise water. Echoes bounced off the high domed ceiling. On the other side of the tall dividing wall, they could hear the occasional burst of male voices.

They straddled the side of the pool-like tub and stepped into the steaming water. Gritting her teeth to keep from yelping, Sarah descended the steps until the hot water was up to her neck.

“Aaa…,” sighed Mrs. Kobayashi, holding a soaked washcloth up to her cheek in order to absorb even more heat. “Nothing feels more luxurious than soaking in an old-fashioned communal bath.”

“Isn’t that the truth, madam,” agreed a woman several meters away. “Those new houses with the baths added on, they have such tiny little tubs. There’s no way you can get the water truly hot, like it is here.”

“One of my daughters lives in a house with a private tub,” Mrs. Kobayashi told her. “She’s never bathed here, even though she passes by every day on her way to the market. Such a pity. I often think how much she’d enjoy it here.”

Sarah felt a flash of anger. This was her mother’s special place, not her aunt’s. With a queer feeling in her stomach, she remembered how loyal her mother had been, as loyal as Benkei. Don’t you dare hurt my mother, she had said. And she had cried…

Now an unfamiliar woman, treading water with her hands, made her way over to Mrs. Kobayashi. “This must be Yo-chan’s daughter?” She turned to Sarah, her face flushed from the heat. “Your mother,” she said, “used to light up a room. She was so full of life.”

“Thank you,” Sarah replied. Gratitude welled up, making her voice unsteady. “It’s so kind of you to remember.”

“And this one here’s becoming more and more like her mother,” Mrs. Kobayashi told the woman. “Sometimes I almost forget who I’m talking to.”

The woman nodded and beamed with approval. Sarah, somewhat mollified, smiled back modestly.

Her grandmother was correct, to a certain extent. Sarah had adopted many of the social mannerisms that had endeared her mother to the public-her habit of clapping once when she had a bright idea, or her sunny demeanor and facility for easy chatter. She had internalized her mother’s attitude of taking others’ approval for granted. It hadn’t come easily. She had blurred their identities, as she had once learned to waltz by standing on her grandfather’s feet. No one was going to call her a blancmange pudding.

Yet there was a difference: these qualities were learned, whereas in her mother they had been instinctive. Sarah knew, and realized her grandmother knew, that she would never have the true spark of the original.

For the next two days it rained continuously: sometimes a downpour, sometimes an invisible mist. According to the weather report, a typhoon was blustering up near Hokkaido and affecting the main island.

Today the rain had stopped, but it was still overcast. Sarah and her grandmother were walking home from the open-air market. The air was damp and warm and hushed.

“Let’s cut through So-Zen Temple,” Sarah suggested.

“Good idea,” said her grandmother. “The pines will smell nice.”

The lanes near the temple had hardly changed. Prewar wooden houses still stood behind their rustic fences, the same fences Sarah had admired as a teenager. “Thank god for zoning laws,” the neighbors said. After all, So-Zen Temple was an important historical attraction.

They entered the temple grounds through an unassuming back entrance. So-Zen had multiple entrances because it was such a sprawling complex, one of the largest in the country. They walked down a path so narrow they could feel the clammy moisture of the stone walls on either side. Above them towered a profusion of trees-bamboos, flaming red maples, gnarled pines that housed the largest crows Sarah had seen anywhere. Their guttural cah-cahs broke through the cheeping of smaller birds.

“You know what Mama told me once?” Sarah gestured up at the trees with her free hand. “She said when she was little, some boy climbed all the way up one of these pine trees to get a nest of eggs. And the mother crow swooped in and pecked at his head…”

“Soh soh! And he fell and broke his leg,” supplied Mrs. Kobayashi with relish. “I do remember that.”

It was odd to think of neighborhood children having free rein in what were now official grounds. But when her mother was little, children had pattered up and down the wooden verandas of temple buildings that were now fenced and roped off and labeled like museum exhibits. On this hushed autumn morning, with the grounds empty now that the autumn tourist season had drawn to a close, Sarah sensed for the first time what So-Zen must have been like when Japan was a poor country. The temple buildings seemed to deflate, receding into the foliage and taking second place to the living creatures emboldened at having the grounds to themselves: crows flapping heavily from branch to branch; smaller birds bursting into the air in groups of two or three, their wings sounding like a deck of cards being shuffled.

“This is where Mama used to catch snakes when it rained.” Sarah gestured to a ditch running alongside the lane. It was a ditch from a bygone century: narrow and deep, lined with granite blocks. “She said she once found a white one, but she put it back because, you know, white snakes are supposed to be holy.”