The Favorites

by Mary Yukari Waters

  Mrs. Asaki, still seated at the low table, was reprimanding someone about something. Mrs. Nishimura couldn’t make out the words, but she knew that tone of disapproval. Her heart sank. Why did her mother have to choose such inconvenient times? As it was, the girls had a short fuse when it came to her constant meddling. It wasn’t such a problem with Yashiko, but there had been several skirmishes with Momoko. “Let it go,” Mrs. Nishimura once told her daughter in private. “She just wants to feel like she’s still relevant in your life. I know she’s controlling, but that’s just her way. She’s not the type to beg.”

  “Why are you so protective of her feelings?” Momoko had asked. It was a peculiar question, so peculiar that Mrs. Nishimura knew her daughter was referring to the adoption. She had almost forgotten that her daughter knew. The girl had shown so little interest at the time-as Mrs. Rexford had said, a grandmother wasn’t the same thing as a mother. And when Yashiko was told, several years after that, she had been more concerned about her upcoming field trip.

  Now Momoko’s question opened up a strange new dimension between mother and daughter.

  Mrs. Nishimura did not say what she felt. Her daughter, at seventeen, might be old enough to know the facts, even shrewd enough, in some misguided way, to draw conclusions that made her feel protective of her mother. But she lacked the life experience to understand gray areas. She couldn’t put herself in her grandmother’s place and know what a mother might feel, year after year, when her only child didn’t cleave to her-truly cleave, like Mrs. Kobayashi and Mrs. Rexford. It was something Mrs. Nishimura could never make up to her adoptive mother, no matter how much she tried. This remorse, perhaps more than she realized, had shaped her own choices in life. She had persuaded her husband to keep living in this house. She had kept a slight emotional distance from her girls so they wouldn’t be burdened with a sense of obligation. The less she expected of them, the less chance she would suffer her mother’s fate. But none of this was Momoko’s business. Not yet.

  “Because,” she had replied, “she’s my mother, and I honor her. What a question.”

  Now Mrs. Nishimura slid the flat steel lunchboxes into their embroidered bags. Hoping to forestall any bickering, she hurried out to the informal dining area.

  “Here you are,” she said a little breathlessly, holding out the boxes to the girls. “Go now, go. You’re going to be late.”

  “Masako, take a look at this.” Mrs. Asaki’s face was grave with disapproval. She gestured to the girls’ buckled canvas bookbags, the wide straps of which were slung across their navy jacket uniforms. “The material is starting to fray. Girls, why can’t you be more careful with your possessions?”

  “Everyone’s bags are like that, Grandma,” said Yashiko cheerfully.

  “When I was a young woman,” Mrs. Asaki said, “we never left the house unless our furoshiki cloths were in perfect condition. No loose threads. No tiny rips. It was a point of honor.”

  “It’s not so bad, Mother, really,” said Mrs. Nishimura gently. “People nowadays don’t hold schoolbags to the same high standard as furoshiki. Besides, it’s just not economical to keep replacing them.”

  “If you’d come to me,” said Mrs. Asaki, glancing at Momoko, “I would have bought you as many bags as you needed.”

  Momoko held her tongue.

  In less than a year, the girl would be leaving home. How quickly the time had gone! Mrs. Nishimura wished her child’s last year could have been more carefree. It occurred to her that in all these years of keeping the peace, of avoiding conflict and assuaging her private guilt, she had never stood up for her daughters and her husband.

  “Girls!” she cried. “You’ll be late for school! Now go!” The girls fled down the hallway, calling out a formal “Itte kimasu!” in farewell. Stepping out into the hallway, she sent them off with a wave and the formal response: “Itte rasshai!” A few minutes later the heavy outer door rattled open, then shut. And the large house was silent.

  Mrs. Nishimura returned to the dining area, where her mother sat at the low table swallowing the last of her miso soup. Drained, she sank down onto a floor cushion. Drawing out a clean pair of chopsticks from the container on the table, she reached over in a gesture of companionship and picked an eggplant pickle from her mother’s condiment dish.

  “They have a nice clean taste, don’t they,” said Mrs. Asaki. Mrs. Nishimura nodded in agreement. She munched silently.

  Later today she would catch the bus for choir practice. Her heart lifted at the thought. She wished she could feel this same kind of lift at home. She thought of the afternoon with Mrs. Kobayashi, when deep, powerful emotions had risen to the surface. She wanted to feel that again…

  But first there was something she had to do. “The girls are at such an awkward age,” she began.

  “Maa maa, they’re fine children!” said her mother brightly.

  “A really awkward age,” Mrs. Nishimura repeated gently. “They’re so combustible. They don’t mean to be, but…Sometimes they just need a few minutes to themselves. You know, to let the steam out.” Something in her voice must have alerted Mrs. Asaki, for she looked up with a wary expression.

  Mrs. Nishimura charged on, her mouth dry. “It might be best,” she said, “if you stayed upstairs during certain periods, just when they’re most easily provoked…” She forced herself to hold her gaze. In her mother’s eyes was an odd expression: not sadness, not hurt, but the weary relief of someone who has fought hard and lost. That look, Mrs. Nishimura thought, would haunt her to her dying day.

  “Like maybe…the half hour right after breakfast,” she continued, choking a little. “And the half hour…right when the girls come home from school. It might be easier on everybody.”

  Mrs. Asaki did not argue. “Soh, perhaps that’s best,” she agreed crisply. She rose to her feet and headed down the hall to do the laundry. No one expected her to do housework, but the old woman liked to be useful. On sunny days she often worked outdoors in one of the utility gardens, crouching over a plastic basin and scrubbing at the girls’ canvas sneakers with a toothbrush.

  Alone in her kitchen, Mrs. Nishimura began washing the breakfast dishes. It took several minutes for her mind to fully grasp what she had done. Tiny tremors began running along her spine. How had she found the courage? She had to turn off the tap and take several deep breaths before she could go on.

  chapter 36

  The rainy season drew to a close, and each day the sun shone with ever-increasing strength. The intimate, sodden hush of the Ueno lanes gave way to a bright, bustling energy, a quickening. Sound traveled swiftly and clearly. Children whizzed past on bicycles; alley cats darted through the long, lush weeds.

  One sunny morning, Mrs. Nishimura ran into Mrs. Kobayashi at the open-air market. Mrs. Nishimura was coming out of Shinsendo Bakery, a new establishment with Parisian awnings of red, white, and blue. Mrs. Kobayashi was approaching from the direction of the pickle store. She noticed her daughter and her face brightened in recognition. Mrs. Nishimura waited, admiring the older woman’s firm, pleasing stride as well as the peach gauze scarf tucked into the neckline of her blouse.

  Stepping away from the bicycles and pedestrians, they exchanged small domestic updates. Momoko was still studying hard for her entrance exams. Sarah was interning at a financial consulting firm over the summer.

  “In a week or so,” Mrs. Kobayashi said, “it’ll be hot enough to carry a parasol.” She tilted back her head to look at the sun. Mrs. Nishimura, too, lifted her face to the sky: a strong blue, with the classic cumulus clouds of early summer. They lingered, savoring the bright warmth and the communal lightheartedness of fellow shoppers stepping past in summer clothes.

  Mrs. Kobayashi looked over at Mrs. Nishimura’s woven straw basket. “So,” she said in a playful tone, “what did you buy?” She had never asked such an intimate question before.

  “Saa, let’s see…” Shyly, Mrs. Nishimura parted the handles of her basket. The action felt oddly familiar;
she had watched her big sister do it many times. She peered into her own basket, just as her sister used to do.

  With friendly curiosity, Mrs. Kobayashi leaned in to look. Among the usual items-garlic shoots, ginger, dried whitebait, fried tofu skin-were two loaves of Shinsendo bread and a kimono fashion magazine. Kimonos were Mrs. Nishimura’s weakness. In her free time she pored over the fat quarterly glossies, in which elegant women modeled seasonal kimonos with expressions of gentle tranquility.

  “This bread’s for Mother,” Mrs. Nishimura explained. “She tears off little pieces and dips them in sugar. She calls it a nostalgic craving.”

  Mrs. Kobayashi nodded. “That’s right. She told me a long time ago that it used to be a special treat when she was growing up in the country.” She opened her own string bag for inspection. “All I have so far is pickled seaweed.”

  They were suddenly approached by a middle-aged woman from Mrs. Nishimura’s choir. “Nishimura-san!” The woman gave two half-bows of greeting, one for each person. “Do you live in this area too?”

  Mrs. Nishimura and her mother automatically jerked away from each other, embarrassed to be caught peering into each other’s shopping baskets.

  “Maa, Kimura-san, good morning! This is my…” But aunt felt wrong somehow, after all that had happened. She had a sudden impulse: How would it feel to stand here on this street, in the bright light of day, and tell the truth? It would make no difference to her choir mate.

  “This,” she said, “is my mother, Haruko Kobayashi. And this is Mrs. Aki Kimura, who sings with me in the choir.” For a brief moment, time stood still.

  “How do you do?” The choir woman bowed, unaware that anything was out of the ordinary.

  Mrs. Kobayashi, usually such a fluent conversationalist, could not speak. She was deeply moved; it showed plainly on her face. But she had enough social presence to bow deeply, more deeply than the occasion required, in order to make up for her muteness.

  Seeing her mother’s tremulous mouth, Mrs. Nishimura felt a piercing joy. And a sort of wonder: with a single word, she had turned all her years of yearning into a benediction for her mother.

  Part 4

  chapter 37

  The first day back in her grandmother’s house gave Sarah a sense of wavering in time. Her American self dropped away. In its place, long-forgotten former selves came swimming up from the depths: the little girl who had attended school in Japan, the fourteen-year-old who had lived here one summer, the various older selves she had been on subsequent visits. She was twenty-four years old. She had passed the CPA exam and joined the tax department of a multinational corporation.

  “This soup is delicious,” she said. “Creamy. Very delicate.”

  Mrs. Kobayashi nodded. “I changed the ratio of white miso to red. That way it won’t interfere with the flavor of the squash.”

  “Look at these colors.” Sarah held out her bowl at arm’s length, admiring the overall effect. “So nice and autumnal. The orange of the squash, the speckled brown of the mountain potato…”

  “Against the red lacquer of the bowl,” said her grandmother proudly.

  “A perfect combination.”

  Sarah returned the bowl to its proper position in the palm of her left hand.

  “No one makes breakfasts like this anymore,” Mrs. Kobayashi said. She nodded at the array of side dishes: eel omelette, umeboshi, glazed kelp and beans. “Over at Granny’s house, they sometimes eat their rice with nothing but miso soup and fried eggs. Momoko told me.”

  “Not very satisfying,” said Sarah, forgetting that her usual breakfast in America was nothing but cereal and a banana.

  They ate contentedly.

  Sarah gazed about at the wooden posts and fusuma panels of her childhood. She still half expected to hear her grandfather’s hammer tap-tapping in the workroom.

  “It’s quiet with him gone, ne,” she said. Mr. Kobayashi had died of a heart attack two years ago. Although his loss paled in comparison with that of her parents, Sarah had loved her grandfather and his death had been a shock.

  “Yes, it’s hard to get used to. It’s strange living alone.”

  Sarah remembered his affectionate, if clumsy, presents: boxes of caramels for her, packets of Japanese radish seeds for her mother, a bottle of processed seaweed paste (“to put on your bread when you get home”) or some other impractical thing for them to take home to America.

  “Granny Asaki visited me the week he died-did I ever tell you? You’d gone home by then.”

  Sarah shook her head.

  “She rang the bell at the visitor gate. I’m thinking, what’s all this? Then she seats herself in the parlor and bows her head to the floor, over and over. She says, ‘You were a fine wife. He didn’t deserve you. It’s humbled me all these years, the way you worked so hard without complaining.’”

  “How lovely,” said Sarah. “I adore Japanese formality.”

  Mrs. Kobayashi snorted. “Well, it’s true. I gave him decades of exemplary service. It was for my own self-respect.” Then her voice softened. “He appreciated it near the end, though. He used to look up from his plate and say, all gruff and embarrassed, ‘You were always good to me. Thank you.’”

  Sarah nodded.

  “I did more than enough for the man,” her grandmother said briskly. “I have no regrets.”

  “Do you ever dream about him?”

  “Not really. Do you?”

  “No. I still dream about my parents, though. I keep forgetting they’re dead. You’d think after six years, it would soak through to my subconscious.”

  Her grandmother, chewing, nodded with interest and encouragement.

  “It’s odd,” said Sarah, “that they’re so fresh in my dreams. It’s like that part of my brain is frozen in time.”

  “Yes, the human brain is very mysterious.”

  Sarah had thought the same thing ten years ago, when the burbling of pigeons brought back her eight-year-old self.

  “Where are the pigeons?” she said now. “I don’t hear any.”

  “Aaa, they’re all gone. The temple ban finally had its effect.”

  They ate silently. Sarah’s thoughts returned to her grandfather. It was a pity that as she grew into womanhood, the scrim separating adult and child had never lifted between them as it had with her grandmother. Now he was gone, and his inner life would always be a mystery. He must have been lonely, she thought. He must have had love to give, though much of it had gone unclaimed.

  chapter 38

  Sarah and her grandmother were walking to the open-air market. The morning was hushed and gray, absorbing sound and turning the lanes into a silent movie.

  “Oh, that smell!” she cried, breathing in the long-forgotten aroma of burning leaves. Back home in California, backyard fires were against the law.

  “Soh, it’s that time of year,” agreed her grandmother, as if humoring a child.

  This was the first time Sarah had visited in November. The pungent smell took her far back in time, to her kindergarten days in the Kyoto hills. During recess their teacher had tended a small fire in the center of the playground and raked out indigenous sweet potatoes, blistered and blackened, for the children’s afternoon snack.

  They approached Murasaki Boulevard and crossed the intersection. “A! A!” Mrs. Kobayashi exclaimed. “Good thing I remembered! Remind me, if I forget, to buy shiso leaves. You know, to wrap the sashimi in.”

  The open-air market had changed since the seventies. There was a new supermarket, where they bought a small bundle of shiso leaves. The store wasn’t as big as the supermarkets in California; the aisles were too narrow for shopping carts. But it was just as well, for once-a-week shopping was still an alien concept for Ueno women. The supermarket was popular for its cheap produce, mass-farmed and shipped in from distant places. Women had stopped buying locally grown vegetables; they were too expensive during the economic recession. Vendor carts were a pleasant rarity. The sun-browned farmers in their old-fashioned garb seeme
d like relics from another era.

  “This street’s so quiet!” said Sarah. Vendors no longer hawked their wares with loud, exuberant bellows. Cash registers had replaced abacuses and jingling money bags.

  “Remember how quiet the weavers’ alley was just now?” Mrs. Kobayashi said. “That’s the way it was in wartime, when I was a young woman.”

  Sarah remembered her mother’s comment about looms moving in tandem with the stock market. “It’s odd,” she said, “that even in this bad economy, there’re all these new buildings. So many things changing.”

  “Not everyone’s hurting, I guess.”

  They approached the “expensive” fish store. The open-air market had two seafood stores: the expensive place with the good-quality seafood, and the cheap place with affordable seafood, mostly imported.

  “You’re visiting at the perfect time,” her grandmother told her. “The fish right now, the big heavy cold-current ones, they’re at their fattiest this time of year. Sashimi is at its prime!”

  Sarah noticed there were no customers in line. Plenty of people were bending over the crushed-ice display, but no one was buying.

  One of the vendors, a shrewd older woman, came out from behind the counter to show Mrs. Kobayashi her most expensive items. “Madam!” she said by way of greeting. “After your granddaughter goes home to America you’ll be kicking yourself, with all due respect, for not letting her taste this highest-quality roe! At its absolute prime, madam, this time of year!” She waited, with a complacent smile, as Mrs. Kobayashi wavered. Reaching out a hand, she let it hover dramatically over a display of enormous scallops. “Sashimi grade,” she said simply. “Flown in a few hours ago from Hokkaido.”

  It occurred to Sarah that she hadn’t heard her grandmother bargain in a long time. That practice must have gone out of style.