“Banzai!” cried Sarah happily. She was perched on the ledge of the inner veranda, swinging her bare legs and watching her elders as she nibbled on a snack of dried whitebait and cheese.
“So as I was saying”-Mrs. Rexford was also panting-“I was always so harsh to her and now I feel bad about it.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” said Mrs. Kobayashi. “You were only children.”
The women lifted the bamboo pole in unison. Raised arms trembling with effort, each fitted her end into the loop of twine hanging overhead. Then Mrs. Rexford said, “I have a confession to make. Remember that time Tama drank the entire bottle of rationed milk from the icebox?”
“I do. I had to lie and tell Father I’d mismanaged the household funds. Aaa, he was so angry…”
“Well,” said Mrs. Rexford, “I cornered Tama afterward. I was so mad I slapped her, right across the face.”
“Oh, Yo-chan! She was just a little girl!” Then after a pause, “What did she do?”
“She stood there and sniffled. I said, ‘Look what you’ve done! My mother’s getting yelled at, and it’s all because of you!’
“She looked ashamed, but she stuck out her chin and said, ‘She’s my mother too.’ I told her, ‘Then act like it!’”
Having finished with the futons, the two women climbed up onto the veranda and into the shade of the family room. Sinking down gratefully onto the floor cushions, they picked up round paper uchiwa and fanned the moisture from their faces.
Sarah followed them inside. “What’s for lunch?” she asked timidly. But the women were too engrossed to pay her any attention.
“But Tama never learned,” continued Mrs. Rexford. “Time would pass, then she’d do something else just as thoughtless. That was the problem.”
Mrs. Kobayashi nodded regretfully. They fanned themselves in silence.
Little Tama had grown up largely unaffected by family tensions. She had both of her natural parents and she knew nothing about her half sister’s adoption, at least until she was older. In truth she was a little self-centered. Mrs. Kobayashi, typical of postwar mothers, had raised her with unusual leniency, as if to atone for those hardships that had forced her older children into premature adulthood. Or maybe the girl was just born that way; someone had once remarked that she was, after all, Kenji Kobayashi’s daughter.
“But she was always a good girl at heart,” said Mrs. Rexford, “never sneaky or mean-spirited like Teinosuke. When I think of her following me around, wanting my approval no matter how much I scolded her…” She stopped, overcome with emotion.
“There, there,” soothed Mrs. Kobayashi. She reached over with the uchiwa and gently fanned her daughter’s face. “Forget all that. You’re both grown women, and this is your chance to develop a true womanly friendship. Ne?”
Mrs. Rexford nodded.
“I know how much you wanted that with Masako,” said Mrs. Kobayashi.
Mrs. Rexford nodded again. It was a source of sorrow that Mrs. Nishimura, whom she romantically regarded as her “true” sister, never dropped her outside face in her presence-or in the presence of anyone else. “It’s so hard to talk to her,” Mrs. Rexford had lamented. “She won’t even gossip.”
“At least with Tama,” said Mrs. Kobayashi, “you have a chance.”
Real family, all staying in the same house! Even after her experience with the Asaki household, Sarah had romantic notions about large families. She liked the companionable lulls: she and her cousins often sat on the garden veranda, watching Mr. Kobayashi as he chain-smoked and stared off into space and sketched in hurried spurts. With the women’s occasional laughter in the background, the girls sat contentedly within the aromatic haze of his cigarette smoke, sucking on popsicles from the snack shop. Being on the periphery of adult focus was a new experience for Sarah. She liked it. It felt like a sign of tacit approval.
Neighbors, too, were family. There was always someone nearby to whom she could bow a greeting: housewives in the narrow lane, buying greens from the vendor’s cart; an old man wearing geta and watering the shrubs outside his slatted wooden gate. Even strangers, passing through on their way to somewhere else, seemed to know who Sarah was. Early on she had made the mistake of bowing to random people in the open-air market, assuming everyone knew her family. “Who were you bowing to just now?” her mother or grandmother would ask, puzzled.
Best of all were the titles of familiarity. Friends of the family, shop clerks, even strangers who happened to drop handkerchiefs in the street were addressed as Auntie, or Big Brother, or Granny. To Sarah’s satisfaction, Momoko and Yashiko addressed her as Big Sister.
“Don’t you miss living here?” she once asked her mother. “Don’t you ever wish you’d married someone from Japan?”
“No,” said Mrs. Rexford. “And if I had, you wouldn’t be here right now.”
“Yes, I would! And I’d be completely Japanese, instead of just half.”
It wasn’t that Sarah had anything against Fielder’s Butte. She liked its austere beauty: miles of empty fields that, in summer, gave off an aroma like bran muffins; giant oak trees left over from Indian days; an industrial-sized sky of flat blue, blank except for the freewheeling hawk or the white trail of a plane. But thinking of it now gave her a forlorn feeling.
This, here, was the center of the world. The landscape confirmed it: hills of bright green rising up all around them, a lovely distraction to her unaccustomed eye. Sometimes in the evening, when she and her elders strolled home from the bathhouse in the gentle gray light of the narrow lanes, she looked up at the hills glowing in the last pink wash of sunset. In that light they loomed so close, so clear, she could make out individual trees packed tightly together like broccoli florets. “In ancient days,” her mother explained, “those hills kept our city safe from invading warrior clans. That’s why it was the perfect location for the royal court.” As they headed home, Sarah felt those hills shielding them from the huge sky that, in Fielder’s Butte, made the sunsets so lonely and stark.
chapter 17
Tama Izumi was the most beautiful of the three sisters. She had full, perfectly formed lips like the Egyptian queen Nefertiti. She exuded a womanly coquetry that Sarah, despite her own lack of experience, instantly recognized as being attractive to the opposite sex. But unlike some beautiful women, Mrs. Izumi extended her good-natured flirtation to women and children alike, as if inviting everyone to share in her feminine appeal.
“Oh, Sarah-chan, you’ve turned out so pretty!” she said, and the girl fell in love with her all over again.
The women followed Mrs. Izumi into the parlor and kept her company while she unpacked her suitcases. This took a long time, for she kept stopping to chat.
“It seems like yesterday that your mother brought you home from the hospital, in a little bundle,” Mrs. Izumi told Sarah.
“Remember that time you babysat,” Mrs. Rexford said, “and you fed her mandarin oranges? I was so mad when I found those seeds in her diaper.”
“But, Big Sister, she wanted some!” Mrs. Izumi protested, laughing. “I swear! She threw a tantrum every time I stopped!”
Little Jun trotted into the room and stood over the open suitcase. He was an active four-year-old whose small brown legs, clad in little boys’ short pants, were constantly on the move. His mother drew out a stack of tiny shirts and placed them in an open bureau drawer. “Those are mine,” he told the women.