A few more years, Sarah thought, and these lanes would be unrecognizable. She imagined a day in the future, perhaps when her grandmother was gone, when she might walk through these lanes with her own daughter-a child with even less Japanese blood than she. And a certain quality of reproach in the slant of sunlight would remind her with a pang, as it did now, of her mother’s confident voice saying, “It’s never going to change, I’m sure.”
“Once, when I was a girl,” Sarah would tell her daughter, gripping her hand tightly, “I walked these lanes just like you, with my own mother.” Saying these inadequate words, she would sense keenly how much fell away with time, how lives intersected but only briefly.
“Thank goodness I remembered the shiso leaves,” Mrs. Kobayashi said now, leaning over and peering into Sarah’s string bag. “When you were little you refused to eat your sashimi and rice without it, remember? Maa, I never saw such a particular child!”
“That wasn’t me, Grandma,” Sarah said. “That was Mama.”
“Oh…” Mrs. Kobayashi was silent for a moment. “Well, that would make more sense, ne,” she said finally. “Poor thing. Autumn hiramasa was her favorite. But we couldn’t afford it during the postwar years. Then just when things got better and she could have eaten her fill, she moved away…”
Sarah looked over at the old woman beside her. Mixed in with her sympathy was a certain satisfaction: here was someone who still mourned, who still hurt deeply and had not forgotten.
“Grandma,” she said, in the gentle tone she had often heard her mother use. “There’s no use thinking like that. It doesn’t matter anymore.”
Mrs. Kobayashi quickened her pace, as she sometimes did when she was feeling emotional. “People don’t always get the luxury of timing,” she said.
chapter 39
One day Sarah noticed that her grandmother had bought more roasted eels than the two of them could eat.
“Do you want me to take some over to Auntie’s?” she asked.
“No, no. There isn’t enough for everyone in that house. This isn’t cheap, you know.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “The extra portion’s for your auntie’s anemia. What I do, ne, is flag her down sometimes when she passes by the kitchen door. I sneak her in for a quick bite, and no one’s the wiser. Or sometimes I give her liver-you know, the kind I always make for you with ginger and soy sauce. Of course it’s a secret.”
This was the first Sarah had heard of her grandmother keeping secrets with anyone but her mother and herself.
A few days later, when she complimented her grandmother on the miniature rosebush in the garden, she learned it had been a gift from Mrs. Nishimura.
“Oh…” She was puzzled. The two houses sometimes exchanged cuttings, but never brand-new plants from the nursery. That had been Mrs. Rexford’s style-many times, after one of her outings, she would come home saying, “Mother, look!” and holding out a pot of bluebells or fragrant jasmine.
“Oh,” Sarah said again. “Well, that was really nice of her.”
It occurred to her that her mother’s name had been coming up in conversation much less than it used to.
One night the two women were sitting at the kotatsu in the family room. The kotatsu was a small low table with an electric heater attached to its underside, and a heavy quilted cover that extended down to the floor and covered their laps. Like most traditional homes in this neighborhood, the Kobayashi house had no central heating. One stayed warm by huddling around a kotatsu while chatting or watching television. Sometimes, since it was just the two of them, Mrs. Kobayashi and Sarah ate their meals there as well.
“You two had a spat?” Sarah was saying. “You’re joking!”
“It was completely one-sided,” Mrs. Kobayashi said. “We were talking on the phone about something…I can’t even remember what…then all of a sudden, she got upset and said, ‘You never wanted me anyway!’ And she hung up.”
“What!”
“I know! I couldn’t believe my ears. She’s never said anything like that in her entire life.”
“So what happened?”
“I rushed over there. I didn’t even stop to think. I just knew I could never live with myself if I didn’t make it right. I said to her, ‘I’ve done a terrible thing to you.’ God knows where Granny was that whole time! And I told her, ‘There hasn’t been a day in all these years I haven’t regretted it.’” Mrs. Kobayashi nodded, her eyes watering at the memory. “It was surreal, like jumping off a cliff. But you know how much I’ve always wanted to tell her that.”
“I know.” Sarah remembered her grandmother saying to her mother, “I wish I knew if deep down, behind that face, she’s all right. I wonder if deep down, she hates me.”
“Your aunt was such a reserved girl,” Mrs. Kobayashi said now. “There was that coolness about her, not like your mother or your aunt Tama. But now she’s starting to blossom. Little by little, she’s turning into the person she was always meant to be.”
“Really? I hadn’t noticed.”
“Well, it might be something only a mother notices.”
Just then, someone tapped on the kitchen door.
“Who could that be, so late?” Mrs. Kobayashi murmured.
It was Yashiko on her way home from her college prep session. She couldn’t stay, she told them. She had brought a box of piping-hot octopus balls, a classic cold-weather snack. “Mother said to pick these up for Aunt Mama,” she said, referring to the tradition of offering the deceased’s favorite foods at the family altar. “I have to run-I’m late for dinner!”
This was typical of Mrs. Nishimura’s thoughtfulness. She remembered little things, like how her big sister used to eat these octopus balls standing up like a man, in front of the vendor cart with its red cotton flaps. Even now, on winter nights, that same old-fashioned cart set up shop in the same place: the sidewalk next to the vermilion gateposts of Umeya Shrine. Octopus balls were a nighttime commodity, geared toward college students or salarymen on their way home from work. Since Mrs. Kobayashi never ventured out after sunset and discouraged Sarah from doing so as well, Mrs. Nishimura’s gesture was doubly considerate.
After Yashiko hurried home to her dinner, Mrs. Kobayashi carried the box directly to the altar. She lit the incense, struck the gong, and with a good-humored “Eat up, Yo-chan!” placed the Styrofoam box on the slide-out shelf beneath the altar. Then the two women, having finished their own dinner several hours ago, sat back down at the kotatsu. After a suitable amount of time, Sarah got up and retrieved the box from the altar. The contents were still hot. The balls of dough were generously studded with octopus chunks, green onions, and pickled red ginger; their tops were drizzled with savory sauce and dried bonito flakes and green seaweed powder. Mrs. Kobayashi took one but ate only half. “You have a young person’s digestion, so you might as well eat it all,” she said, pushing the box toward Sarah. “They’ll be no good once they get cold.”
Sarah began working her way through the octopus balls, spearing them one by one with a toothpick. “So why now, do you think?” she asked, returning to their earlier conversation.
“Saa…who knows? Strange things happen to women in middle age. Emotions rise up from quiet places. They realize life is short, and it makes them act differently.”
They were silent.
“Can I tell you something?” Having broached this subject, her grandmother seemed eager to keep on talking. “A few years back-right before your grandpa had his heart attack-we ran into each other at the open-air market. She introduced me to someone she knew. And you know what she said?” Mrs. Kobayashi paused dramatically. “She said, ‘This is my mother.’”
Sarah speared another octopus ball and said nothing.
“She said, ‘This is my mother,’” Mrs. Kobayashi repeated. “As cool as a cucumber, right in public. She said, ‘This is my mother.’”