“It’s not on your own merits,” said Mrs. Rexford. “Not yet. You reach her through me. Remember that.”
“Okay,” Sarah agreed.
They strolled through the shifting tree shadows of late afternoon. The k’sha k’sha of gravel was loud beneath their feet. The buzz of traffic floated over from some larger street several blocks down. Trailing her fingers along a low wall, Sarah felt its braille of pebbles and straw; she breathed in the scent of sun-warmed adobe. She felt perfectly happy.
They approached two young boys standing under a tree with a plastic insect cage at their feet, staring up at a horned beetle just above their reach. They turned toward Sarah with that look of avid curiosity she knew so well. But they seemed mollified to see her mother was Japanese; she wasn’t, then, a complete outsider.
“Where are your nets, boys?” Mrs. Rexford called out in the friendly tone of a fellow enthusiast. “Do you need me to get that for you?”
The boys gazed with tongue-tied gratitude as she pulled the horned beetle from the bark and transferred it to their plastic cage. “Look at the size of these antlers,” she said. “It’s a real beauty.” Too shy to speak, the boys broke into big foolish grins. Sarah, who had always felt uneasy around small Japanese boys, marveled at how harmless they could be, how sweet.
As they resumed walking abreast Sarah remarked, “Little kids don’t stare as much when I’m with you.” It was the first time she had openly referred to her shame.
“Let them stare,” her mother said breezily.
“Soh ne,” agreed Sarah with her new queen-bee expansiveness. What had she been so afraid of?
Mrs. Rexford gave her daughter an approving glance but said nothing.
Years later Sarah would remember this afternoon for its intensity of color: the gleaming lacquer of the beetle against the bark, the hills rising all around them in a crescendo of green. The parasol cast a rose-colored glow over her mother’s face, drawing Sarah’s eyes to its unfamiliar beauty. Even the air had color, a whitish glow like light refracted through a shoji screen. When she grew older and began falling in love with men, she would experience this same sense of heightened color-although in a weaker form-and see this for what it had been: her first and most powerful romance.
chapter 21
O-bon was almost upon them. It was a three-day festival of reunion, when spirits of dead relatives returned to visit the living. Families were walking en masse to bus stops and train stations that would take them to ancestral gravesites out in the country. This was the time for graveyard maintenance. The fathers carried garden tools; the mothers carried delicate food offerings for the dead (and, if they were old-fashioned, a hearty picnic lunch for the living) discreetly wrapped in silk furoshiki; the children trudged behind with flowers.
As the Kobayashi household ate breakfast, they could hear the crunching of gravel as chattering families passed directly outside, taking shortcuts through the narrow lane. A woman’s voice cried, “A! We forgot the thermos!” It was the last weekend before the holiday. Everyone, it seemed, was heading out to the country.
“They’re getting ready for O-bon,” said little Jun in a sullen voice. Everyone else was silent, chewing.
“I’m afraid we’ve held you back in your preparations,” Mr. Izumi said. He was referring to the housecleaning, for family altars were just as important as graves. “It was thoughtless of us,” he said. Sarah’s heart went out to him. His fine long eyes, slanted ever so slightly downward, gave his face a mournful air.
“Not in the least, Izumi-san!” Mrs. Kobayashi batted the air dismissively, as if to swat away his concern. “The O-bon dinner will be over there”-she gestured toward the Asaki house-“so there’s really nothing for me to do.”
They all knew this was a lie. Housewives cleaned obsessively before a priest’s yearly visit. The priests from So-Zen Temple had already begun their neighborhood rounds, chanting long incantations before each family altar to guide the spirits on their return journey. This was a grueling time for priests, who made back-to-back calls from morning till evening. It was for such occasions, as well as for funerals, that they practiced year round. No priest from So-Zen Temple had yet marred a ceremony with coughing or hoarseness.
“This house is spotless all the time, anyway,” said Mrs. Izumi.
“Mommy,” said Jun, “can’t we stay for O-bon night dancing?”
“No-I already told you. We’re going home tomorrow.”
Another set of footsteps crunched by on the gravel. They heard a small child’s excited voice saying, “…great big rice balls, sprinkled with sesame salt!”
“I don’t envy those people,” said Mr. Kobayashi with well-meaning heartiness. “It’s going to get really hot today.”
“You’re absolutely right, Father-san,” Mrs. Kobayashi replied. “Maybe we should have grilled eel for lunch. It’s good for heat fatigue. Would everyone like that?”
“O-bon, O-bon, it’s almost O-bon,” Jun droned tunelessly.
“Jun-chan, stop that,” said his mother. “No singing at the breakfast table.”
Sarah felt bad for her aunt. In the excitement of the upcoming holiday, the Izumis’ departure would create hardly a ripple.
Afterward, washing dishes at the sink, Mrs. Rexford said, “I can’t believe she went out to pay calls again. On her last day. Who’s she visiting, us or the Jehovah people?”
“It’s all right,” said Mrs. Kobayashi. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Mother, it’s not all right.”
Having finished the dishes, Mrs. Rexford began wiping the sides of the sink. Mrs. Kobayashi continued to dry, passing the dishes up to Sarah, who was kneeling on the tatami floor of the dining room. The girl stacked each item on the shelves of the floor-level cabinet. Every time she reached into its depths, she breathed in a faint, familiar aroma from her childhood: the wooden damp of freshly washed chopsticks, soy sauce within its cut-glass cruet, condiments such as seven-spice and sesame seeds.
“She won’t even help around the house.” Mrs. Rexford wrung out the dishtowel with an angry twist. “You know what? She hasn’t changed at all. She says long prayers at the table but doesn’t care if our food gets cold while we wait. She sips tea and talks about charity, and meanwhile her aging mother’s slaving away down in the kitchen.”
“Nnn!” protested Mrs. Kobayashi. “‘Aging mother’?!”
Mrs. Rexford refused to be sidetracked. “That kind of hypocrisy earns no respect from me,” she said. “None!” Sarah was fascinated, even excited, to see her mother angry at someone other than Sarah herself.
“Don’t,” said Mrs. Kobayashi quietly. “You know how guilty I feel about her.”
There was a long pause. “I’m sorry,” Mrs. Rexford said.
Afterward Sarah and her mother went to a graveyard in the city to see the O-bon decorations. The somber headstones were transformed by sasaki grass, fruit and flower offerings, and branches of umbrella pine; the crumbling baby Buddhas were resplendent in new red bibs. White threads of incense wavered up by the dozen, hovering in the humid air like ghostly forms bending over their own headstones.
“We’ll visit our own graveyard after your aunt and uncle leave,” Mrs. Rexford told Sarah. “It won’t be as crowded as this one, because it’s out in the country. But it’ll be lovely too in a different way.”
Lately, with Mrs. Izumi away so much, Sarah and her mother had been going out alone. Sometimes they visited a little-known restaurant whose only item on the menu was dumplings from a secret family recipe handed down since the Momoyama era. Once they visited the Gion district to look at geishas. But mostly they wandered through out-of-the-way haunts from Mrs. Rexford’s youth. They strolled past the tennis courts of her old high school or lingered in a neglected children’s park on the bank of the Kamo River. Mrs. Rexford told stories of her youth, and Sarah listened with an attentiveness she had never shown back home.