“I think I’ll go out for an ice. Come on,” Mrs. Rexford told Sarah.
“Are we going to the snack shop?” Sarah asked.
“No. I’m taking you to an old-fashioned teahouse, the kind we used to go to before they came up with those dreadful convenience stores. Can you believe it, Mother? That a child of mine has never eaten shaved ice at Kinjin-ya in the middle of summer?”
“It’s downright un-Japanese,” said Mrs. Kobayashi. “You should fix that right away. Run along, then. Go enjoy yourselves.”
They strolled through the lanes, becoming absorbed in the larger outdoor world of cicadas and trees and wind chimes and bicycle bells. Sarah felt her mother’s agitation fade. Smugly, she thought how silly her aunt Tama was to ruin a perfectly nice visit with all that religion.
Her own position, in contrast, felt sweet. How things had changed since America! It seemed ages ago that she had whined because her mother insisted on trimming her sandwich crusts or drawing little sketches on her brown paper lunch bags. Sarah pushed those memories away, ashamed of herself.
And yet-would the changes last? She remembered a science experiment at school, where she had dropped an egg into various liquids. In some, the egg floated to the surface; in others it sank like a stone. What if Japan was the only alchemy in which she could float?
The Kinjin-ya teahouse was small and unpretentious. Sarah had passed it many times on the way to the open-air market but had never gone inside. Its atmosphere was quite different from the modern tea shops downtown. It reminded Sarah of the pickle shop, with its aged wooden walls from when Japan had been a poor country. On one side hung a row of rectangular wooden tablets, one for each item on the menu, bearing the name and price in old-fashioned black brushstrokes. At this time of day the tables were empty; the only other customers were a little boy about Jun’s age and his mother. The boy was spooning his way through a plate of om-rice-an omelette stuffed with ketchup-flavored rice-a children’s favorite since the postwar years.
Mrs. Rexford and Sarah ordered shaved ice topped with a mound of sweetened azuki beans. It came in fluted glass dishes with long-handled spoons. “My generation grew up on this,” Mrs. Rexford said. “Maa, it really takes me back!”
They were silent, savoring the crushed ice and the creamy sweetness of the beans.
“Remember this, remember the way it tastes,” Mrs. Rexford told Sarah. And Sarah did, decades later. Many random experiences would be cemented in her mind by her mother’s phrase “remember this.”
Mrs. Rexford leaned back in her chair, gazing about her with a pleased expression. The seasonal cloth flaps over the open doorway cast a bluish tint on the room. Every so often, a breeze broke apart the heavy flaps and let in a flash of sunlight.
Taking advantage of this peaceful moment, Sarah ventured, “It’s weird now, isn’t it, with Auntie being Christian.”
“Well,” her mother said, “she never had top priority growing up. But it couldn’t be helped-you know how complicated things were back then.”
Sarah nodded.
“It’s an issue in every family, though. Remember that day we had snacks at the Asaki house?”
“Oh right, the bottle of Fanta.”
There had been one large bottle of orange Fanta to share among the three children. Dividing it was quite a project: first the empty glasses were lined up side by side, then each one was filled with the same number of ice cubes, and finally Mrs. Nishimura had poured the Fanta, little by little, until the levels were precisely equal. Momoko and Yashiko seemed familiar with the routine. They had crouched down on their hands and knees so as to be eye-level with the glasses, making sure that neither sibling got a milliliter more than the other.
“You and I are lucky,” said Mrs. Rexford. “Some people never get to come first.” Sarah thought of her aunt Tama making a moue to hide her tears. She thought of her aunt Masako waving from her shadowed gateway as the Kobayashi household strolled past, laughing and chatting, on their way to the bathhouse.
But now for the first time her sympathy was tinged with something hard, an unwillingness to give up her advantage. Her grandmother’s favoritism might not be working in her aunts’ favor, but it was working in hers. For the first time in her life she was blooming. This was the luck of the draw, and she was tired of feeling guilty. In some dim recess of her mind she had begun to feel she deserved it, that fate had recognized her worth and was finally rewarding her.
“I guess there’s no way around it,” Sarah said, echoing her mother’s words from earlier that day.
“I guess not,” said Mrs. Rexford. They were silent, spooning up the last of the azuki beans.
“When you come first in someone’s heart,” Mrs. Rexford said, “it changes you. It literally, chemically changes you. And that stays with you, even after the person’s gone. Remember that.”
Sarah nodded. The idea of chemical change resonated with her, and once again she thought of the eggs floating.
She let out a little sigh of well-being. So this was how it felt to eat shaved ice at Kinjin-ya in the middle of summer. It was pleasant to sit in the path of the old-fashioned fan and feel the air flow over her moist arms and legs, exactly as it must have done when her mother was a girl. She felt curiously relaxed, all her pores open to the world. For the first time she noticed that some defensive part of herself-her habitual readiness to shrink and harden at a moment’s notice-had melted away, leaving a sense of implicit trust in the world. This, she thought, is how it must feel to be a queen bee.
They left the teahouse in excellent spirits.
“That was yummy.” Sarah used the childish word on purpose.
“It was, ne,” agreed Mrs. Rexford.
They walked slowly, in no rush to get home. They took a roundabout route through a neighborhood Sarah had never seen. Some of the houses had old-fashioned thatched roofs instead of the usual gray tile.
“They look like the houses in those history books Grandma sent me,” said Sarah.
“This lane hasn’t changed in generations,” Mrs. Rexford said. “It’s never going to change, I’m sure.”
They passed under the shade of a large ginkgo tree that leaned out over an adobe wall into the lane. The fan-shaped leaves, dangling from thin stems, fluttered and trembled. The meee of cicadas was directly overhead now, sharpened from a mass drone into the loud rings of specific creatures, each with a different pitch, a different location among the branches. Mrs. Rexford paused and lowered her parasol to see if she could spot one. Not finding anything, she lifted her parasol and resumed walking.
“Mama?”
“Hmm?”
“Were you always Grandma’s favorite?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“Even before she knew what kind of person you’d turn out to be?”
“Soh, even then. Because I was part of her old life before the war, back when she was happy and in love.”
The lane narrowed and they fell into single file. The dappled shadows danced on the back of Mrs. Rexford’s parasol.
Sarah pictured Shohei’s handsome, unfamiliar face. It was odd to imagine anyone other than her mother holding such power over her grandmother’s heart. That it was a man seemed especially strange. Sarah had grasped early on that while the men in this family were flattered, catered to, and fed extremely well, they were not that important in the scheme of things.
“When your grandfather died,” said Mrs. Rexford, “all her love for him had to go somewhere. So it came to me, all of it. Maybe I turned out the way I did because of that early love. It’s hard to say.”
“So it’s like you piggybacked off of what they had,” Sarah said.
“That’s right. And now you’re piggybacking off of what she and I have. That’s why you’re the favorite grandchild, you see?”
Sarah pondered this. She had always thought love began and ended with the actual person involved. She remembered her mother telling Momoko about emotions fermenting over time and getting blurred together till you couldn’t tell them apart. It seemed that love, too, was blurry when it came to recipients. The remainder of one love could go on to feed the next, like those sourdough starters that American pioneer families had handed down for generations.