Mary Waters - The Favorites

“That means your auntie is your true aunt. And Momoko and Yashiko are your true cousins.”

Sarah mulled this over. “Why did Grandma give her away?”

“She didn’t just give her away. It was more complicated than that.”

They were silent. Outside in the lane, a neighbor’s bicycle crunched slowly over the gravel.

“Here’s what you need to know. After your real grandfather died in the war, your grandmother was beholden to the Asakis. It was wartime and…things were complicated. She didn’t want to give up her baby, but she felt she had to. That’s it, basically.”

“But why-”

“No more questions.” Her mother switched back to Japanese. “We have to get some sleep.” Resigned, Sarah rolled onto her back and pulled the light summer comforter up to her chin. “Good night,” she said.

“Good night.”

She closed her eyes. Despite her exhaustion, she couldn’t shut down her brain. It was as if she’d been awake for so long, she had forgotten how. Inside her skull the echoes of Japanese voices chattered on and on, and would not stop.

After several minutes, her mother spoke again. “You mustn’t judge your grandmother. It was a difficult time.”

“I won’t.”

“In-family adoptions are actually an old tradition. In the villages, if you didn’t have children there was no one to take care of you in old age. So extended relatives had to help each other out. But they always kept the child inside the family. Japanese people never give away their babies to strangers.”

“Hmmm…”

“People still do it. Sometimes it’s to maintain the family line. That’s really important, you know, because family altar tablets have to be passed down from generation to generation. Or else rich families do it so they can pass down assets to a member of their clan.”

“Is that why-”

“No. Go to sleep.”

Mrs. Rexford soon drifted off. Sarah lay listening to her deep breathing.

If she had known of this adoption as a child, she probably would have thought nothing of it. Small children accepted everything as normal. After all, how was this any stranger than her grandmother marrying two brothers? Talk about keeping things within the family! Mrs. Kobayashi had married twice, the first Mr. Kobayashi for love and the second Mr. Kobayashi out of necessity. It had never occurred to the girl to find this curious. As a child, all she cared about was that her grandpa was related to her by blood, even though he wasn’t technically her grandfather.

Her thoughts drifted to the attic, silent now, emptied of snakes and black-market rice and the energy of a turbulent past. She thought of the war that polite people never mentioned-the war that had brought illegal rations into this house, caused her grandmother’s second marriage, and somehow contributed to her aunt’s adoption. In the shadowy rafters, the brutality of those times seemed to still linger.

After the formal visits of the first day, the two houses kept mostly to themselves. They did, however, drop by almost daily to share freshly cut flowers from their gardens, or an extra eel fillet bought on sale, or half of a designer melon received from a visitor. On certain evenings, Mrs. Kobayashi had Sarah walk over a platter of tempura or pot stickers, hot and crisp from the frying oil. These were greeted with great enthusiasm because-as Mrs. Kobayashi explained privately-the cooking over there was not so good. The Asaki household followed the old Kyoto tradition, using seasonings so subtle they were practically flavorless. (Mrs. Kobayashi, the Kobe native, went on to say that Kyoto people were notorious for donning beautiful silks in public but making do with substandard cuisine in private.) Sometimes Mrs. Asaki, laden down with shopping bags and beaming-she loved going downtown, where all the action was-tapped on the Kobayashis’ kitchen door on her way home and dropped off a French bakery bag filled with brioches and frankfurter pastries. But these exchanges lasted only a few minutes, and the women rarely took off their shoes and entered each other’s houses.

“How come we never sit around and talk, like we did the first day?” Sarah asked. Deep down, she knew why. But a childish part of her was disappointed, even petulant; she had been hoping for a constant round of social activity.

“Goodness, child. Who has the time! A house doesn’t just run itself,” said Mrs. Kobayashi, laughing.

Mrs. Rexford shot Sarah a glance of warning. “People need boundaries,” she said.

Luckily the children had no such restrictions. Sarah spent hours at the Asaki house. Within that household were two different worlds, one downstairs and one upstairs.

Downstairs was Mrs. Nishimura’s domain-not just during the day but also at night, when she and her husband rolled out their futons in the television room. Unlike the sunny rooms upstairs, the ground floor was tinged with restful green light from the garden. Since the formal dining room was used only for guests, the children gravitated toward the informal eating area that directly adjoined the kitchen. Under the large low table, stacked in tin boxes, were snacks: rice crackers wrapped in seaweed, shrimp crackers, curry-flavored puffs.

In the pale underwater light, Mrs. Nishimura glided in and out of the kitchen bearing delicate glass dishes of flan pudding, or salted rice balls, or crustless sandwich triangles garnished with parsley. “Hai, this is to wipe your fingers,” she told them, offering steaming-hot hand towels rolled into perfect tubes, just like the ones in restaurants. Her conversation was as soft and serene as the leaf-filtered light. “Do you like juice?” she would ask gently, as if Sarah were still seven or eight instead of fourteen. She made conversation by saying things like, “Yashiko’s favorite spoons have Hello Kitty on them, don’t they, Yashiko?”

Sarah sometimes wondered if her aunt switched personas as soon as she was alone with her own children, dropping her outside face and talking in rapid, droll sentences like everyone else. She watched carefully when her aunt was in the company of other women. Although Mrs. Nishimura did switch to an adult-level vocabulary, her demeanor remained as soft and ethereal as with the children. She lacked the impulsive, gossipy spark that the other women seemed to share in abundance. Once, in a private uncharitable moment, Mrs. Rexford sighed sharply to her mother, “I swear! She’s like a blancmange pudding.”

Then Mrs. Rexford had immediately rectified her blunder (“Because blancmange pudding is pure and white, never sullied by anything ugly”) to ensure that there would be no true understanding on her daughter’s part.

“It’s okay, Mama, I know,” said Sarah. “She’s sort of like a Christian Madonna, isn’t she.”

Mrs. Rexford’s relieved eyes met hers. “Exactly,” she said.

It wasn’t as if the two sisters disliked each other. Mrs. Rexford was protective of Mrs. Nishimura, who in turn looked up to her big sister with sincere admiration. But they weren’t everyday friends, the way Mrs. Rexford was with their mother.

When the girls tired of playing downstairs, they climbed up to the second story, where the tatami mats were warm from the sunlight flooding in through the glass wall panels. Sometimes they slid shut the latticed shoji screens against the midday glare. Then a soft, diffused light glowed through the rice paper and created a lovely effect, as if they were living inside a giant paper lantern.

The girls’ room wasn’t a true “room” in the Western sense, since the entire second floor was one enormous room. In place of solid dividing walls, there were fusuma: wall-to-wall partitions of sliding doors that were left open during the day and slid shut at night. These doors were covered on both sides with thick, durable paper whose fibrous surface was interwoven with what looked like delicate strands of green seaweed.