Mary Waters - The Favorites

Sarah darted a quick glance at her grandmother. So she knew that Sarah knew!

“Would Granny feel bad?” Sarah asked doubtfully.

“Of course! She’s very insecure.”

Before turning the corner onto the main street, they paused. Mrs. Rexford peeked around the wooden fence. Ahead of them was the neighborhood snack shop whose owner, chatty Mrs. Yagi, was usually outside gossiping with a customer. “She’s not there. Quick,” Mrs. Rexford said, and the three of them strode briskly past in their telltale clothes: Sarah in her good dress, the women in their heels.

They relaxed when they entered the long, tree-lined stretch of Ginnan Street, where the crosstown bus stop was.

“So if Granny feels insecure and frustrated”-Mrs. Rexford was slightly out of breath-“then what happens? She takes it out on-whom?”

“Nnn…Uncle?” Sarah knew something about the in-law situation; her parents had discussed it. Things were a bit strained because the mother-in-law, not the son-in-law, owned the deed to the house. In theory it made perfect sense to take in a son-in-law and his family-the house was too big for a widow living alone. But there was something emasculating about it. And apparently Mrs. Asaki was not above taking subtle advantage of the situation.

“Very good,” said Mrs. Rexford. “Then what would happen?”

“There’s more?”

“This is really not that hard,” her mother said. “Use your brain. If the harmony of their house is disturbed, who has to act as go-between and calm everyone down?”

“That would be your auntie,” said Mrs. Kobayashi. “And a thankless task it is,” she added grimly.

“So then you’d have three adults upset and troubled, all because you didn’t think ahead. Is that what you want?”

“No! I don’t want that.”

“Then as strange as it may seem,” concluded her mother, “slipping out like this is actually the best solution.”

“Very true,” said Mrs. Kobayashi.

For Sarah, this was an unfamiliar way of thinking. It was exciting but also exhausting, like that playground game where balls came at you from every direction. Despite the good intentions, it struck her as vaguely distasteful. The Asaki household would be shocked and hurt if they knew how much strategy lay behind her grandmother’s and mother’s actions…or would they? Apparently large families were much more complex than Sarah had imagined. Those big, jolly families she read about in children’s books, the kind that stood around the Christmas tree holding hands and singing, never seemed to face these kinds of issues.

“Are they really that sensitive?” she asked her grandmother later that day. “Do you really think we have to be this careful?” She had waited to catch her grandmother alone, because she feared her mother would tell her to mind her own business.

“Saa…,” Mrs. Kobayashi replied, “it’s better to be safe than sorry, don’t you think?”

“Are all Japanese families like this?”

“Probably not,” her grandmother said.

Normally Sarah and her mother and grandmother walked to the open-air market together, but one morning Mrs. Kobayashi stayed behind. She was cooking a big pot of curry while the day was still cool.

“What I’ll do is divide this into packets and put them in the freezer,” she told Mrs. Rexford. “That way, we can heat them up anytime we’re in a rush.” She demonstrated by crouching down and pulling open the door of the icebox, which was barely half the size of the Rexfords’ freezer back home. Women in the Ueno neighborhood didn’t need much storage space, since they bought fresh fish and produce every day. “See?” Mrs. Kobayashi revealed a tiny freezer compartment crammed with small, shrink-wrapped lumps and squares. “Look, I even froze the potato croquettes. Plus that filet mignon Sarah didn’t finish-actually we could chop that up today, don’t you think, and use it in fried rice?”

Sarah and her mother now strolled through the narrow lanes toward the open-air market. Mornings in this part of the neighborhood were always heavy with silence, except for those brief periods when clusters of children tramped to Tai Chi Hour or summer school meetings. Dark wooden houses rose up on either side, somber and shrinelike. Up in the trees, cicadas shrilled and shimmered, their unrelieved drone intensifying the silence instead of lessening it. Walking through this noise was like walking through the very heart of summer.

For a while, neither said a word. They hadn’t been alone together in the daytime since…probably since America.

They passed old-fashioned houses similar to the Kobayashis’. One had a charming trellis fence made of bamboo poles, whose deep golden hue contrasted nicely with the black twine knotting them together. Tall shrubbery from the garden poked out through the square openings, creating a nice textural effect while protecting the occupants’ privacy. Many of these fences were deliberately rustic, homages to country dwellings of the past. Sarah’s favorite was a fence that looked like a solid wall of dried twigs, cleverly held in place by slender crosspieces. But she also admired one of its neighbors that stood farther down the lane. It was a large property, with the slightly forbidding air of a yashiki manor. The fence consisted of a low foundation of boulders that was reminiscent of the stone bases of imperial castles. From these stones rose a solid, dun-colored wall of mud plaster, topped by a miniature rooftop of gray tiles. Above it, only the tops of the trees within were visible.

“I used to come and play here all the time,” Mrs. Rexford said, trailing her fingers along the mud wall. And Sarah marveled that none of this held any mystery for her mother.

They reached Umeya Shrine and cut through its grounds toward Tenjin Boulevard. Umeya was a tiny neighborhood shrine, well below the radar of those official tour buses that rumbled in and out of the So-Zen Temple complex several blocks away. The grounds here were deserted, the white expanse of raked sand emphasizing the gravity of the dark, moss-stained structures lining its periphery.

This was where Sarah and her cousins came each morning, before breakfast, to do tai chi exercises. They were joined by other neighborhood children, as well as old people who no longer needed to go to work or prepare breakfast for their families. At first, the children had stared at Sarah. But by now they had grown used to her presence, although there were still some who sneaked glances when they thought she wasn’t looking. Momoko and Yashiko didn’t seem to mind being seen with her; they acted nonchalant, as if they hosted Western visitors all year round.

Today a young mother stood in the open space, tossing out bread crumbs to a half circle of pigeons and urging her toddler to do the same. The little boy clutched a fistful of his mother’s skirt and gazed distrustfully at the bobbing, pecking birds. “Hato po’po…,” the woman sang softly, trying to encourage him with an old-fashioned ditty about feeding pigeons in the temple.

“Do you remember that song?” asked Mrs. Rexford. “I used to sing it to you when you were little.”

“I remember,” Sarah said. It seemed a lifetime ago. It was unsettling to hear this strange young woman singing it. She remembered a time when her own mother’s voice had held such unguarded tenderness, and sharp sorrow slipped through her belly.

They walked on, passing a stone statue of a fox deity, and entered the shade of a row of maple trees. “Granny Asaki says that starting in October, it’ll be against the law to feed pigeons,” Sarah said. “She says their droppings are ruining all the wood.”

“Did she? Well, it was bound to happen,” said Mrs. Rexford, “with so many tourists nowadays. But it’ll be strange, won’t it, not having them around anymore.”