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  Mr. Kobayashi, who shared his elder sister’s robust health, chuckled with pleased pride, and his wife murmured that good health was indeed a quality to be envied. The two women turned back to Sarah with expectant faces. Then, perceiving that this was the extent of the girl’s contribution, they drifted off to another topic.

  “That reminds me,” said Mrs. Kobayashi several minutes later, “I think you and Sarah should go visit them first. They usually finish breakfast by eight thirty. So eat fast and run over there, quick, before they show up here.”

  “Why shouldn’t they show up here?” Mrs. Rexford said. Relaxed and smiling, she made no attempt to eat faster. “I’m the older one. Masako should come to me, even if her husband’s a little older than I am.”

  “No, no,” said Mrs. Kobayashi. “Forget Masako’s husband. Granny Asaki’s the real head of that house. And she outranks our head…” She nodded toward her own husband, whose face was obscured by the lacquered bowl from which he was drinking.

  “But, Mother, it’s not Granny who’s going to be coming over. Everyone knows I’ll pay her my formal respects during visiting hours. We’re just talking about my generation.”

  “There is no such thing,” said Mrs. Kobayashi, “as just my generation.” She glanced surreptitiously at her husband. He was drinking a mixture of rice and tea with loud abandon, clearly uninterested in the conversation.

  Mrs. Kobayashi leaned forward and silently mouthed the words Be careful. The women’s expressions were no longer amused but grave.

  Watching this, Sarah felt the first stirring of curiosity.

  Mrs. Rexford looked up at the clock. Sarah followed her gaze. The clock was a shiny modern piece, incongruous with the aged wall post on which it hung. The wooden post dated back to a more traditional time, when aesthetically minded craftsmen used to leave small remnants of nature in their work. Each wall post in the room retained some individual quirk: a curious burl, or the serpentine tracks of beetle larvae just below the surface of the wood.

  “A little more rice, Father-san?” Mrs. Kobayashi asked, holding out her hand in anticipation of her husband’s empty bowl. They waited in silence while he drank down the last drop.

  “Aaa,” he said, handing the bowl over. He then turned to Sarah. “Do people in America talk this much about manners?” he asked. “They just do whatever they feel like, right? Anytime they want?”

  “Soh, pretty much.” She giggled politely, and her grandfather chuckled with her. But there was more to this than etiquette. What it was she couldn’t say, but there was definitely something more.

  chapter 3

  Someone was tapping on the frosted glass panels of the kitchen door. The women froze, chopsticks in midair, and looked up at the clock. It was far too early! Only a quarter after eight!

  But it was just the two little girls from the Asaki house, ages eight and eleven. They had slipped away from their mother in their eagerness to come early. They stood bashfully outside the kitchen door, peering up at the breakfast scene. They had to look up, since the vestibule was a foot above ground level and the main tatami floor was another two feet above that.

  Instantly the energy of the house altered; there were peals of excited laughter from the women, exclamations of “Come on up! Don’t be shy!” and “Look, Sarah, you have visitors!” There was a flurry to fetch additional floor cushions, which were encased in summer cotton covers of white and blue to suggest the coolness of ice and water. Room was made at the breakfast table, a tin of chocolates brought down from the cabinet. Mr. Kobayashi, outnumbered by all the females, picked up his cup of green tea and wandered off to a quieter room. On his way out, he stooped down and affectionately ruffled the little girls’ heads as they bent over to line up their sandals properly in the small cement vestibule. Grinning up at him, the barefooted girls clambered up the high wooden step onto the tatami mats.

  There was no choice now but to stay and entertain them; this resolved the etiquette dilemma for both houses involved. Sarah wondered if the girls’ mother, also unsure as to the best policy, had purposely turned a blind eye. If so, it had been a tactful move on her part.

  “Look at you both, how big and fine you’ve grown!” Mrs. Rexford cried, grasping each girl’s shoulder with a Western-style physicality that Sarah had never seen her use back home in America.

  Clearly smitten, the two little girls beamed up at her.

  “So healthy and brown!” Mrs. Rexford’s face glowed with heightened emotion. It was years since she had laid eyes on real Japanese children. Yesterday at the airport, she had followed her fellow Japanese travelers with avid eyes, remarking wistfully that in her youth, she had never really appreciated the cuteness of Asian babies. Sarah, vaguely stung by this comment, had made a noncommittal grunt.

  The two girls sat down, their eyes moving rapidly over the elaborate breakfast spread. They looked nothing like the chubby little girls of five years ago. They had the same slender build, doll-like bangs, and high Kobayashi cheekbones that Mrs. Rexford had in old photographs.

  Mrs. Kobayashi, as if thinking along these same lines, sighed. “You know, Yo-chan,” she said, “they remind me so much of you as a child.” Sarah felt a stab of jealousy.

  Little Yashiko, her tan accentuated by a white tank top, eyed Sarah’s pale arms with timid curiosity. “Do children play outdoors in America?” she asked.

  “Yes, of course,” said Sarah. “But I have to be careful so I don’t burn and peel.” The girls looked mystified. Mrs. Kobayashi and Mrs. Rexford and even their own mother were every bit as white as Sarah, but in their youth they had all been brown. It was a rite of passage: Japanese girls stayed in the sun until adulthood, upon which they switched standards and adopted pale makeup and shielded their complexions with parasols.

  Momoko, the elder girl, politely changed the subject. “Auntie Mama,” she said, using the Western title as if it were a proper name. “Can Big Sister Sarah come with us to Morning Tai Chi Hour, Auntie Mama? We already got her a summer pass.”

  “What an excellent idea!” cried Mrs. Rexford and Mrs. Kobayashi at the same time, which made everyone laugh. Sarah and Momoko exchanged shy looks of friendship. They had been playmates before Sarah’s move but now they were self-conscious, preferring to use the adults’ easy conversation as their conduit.

  “Do they still do tai chi at Umeya Shrine, like they used to?” Mrs. Rexford asked. Momoko nodded importantly. She replied using some advanced phrase with which Sarah wasn’t familiar: something about public office, or maybe community organization. “Teacher Kagawa’s in charge of it this year,” she added.

  “Kagawa?” Mrs. Rexford turned to her mother. “Any relation to that family near the park?”

  “Yes, yes! That’s the one,” said Mrs. Kobayashi. “Remember Emiko had a little sister? She’s teaching at Tendai Elementary now.”

  “Ah, really!” Mrs. Rexford turned back to Momoko. “When your teacher was little,” she told the girl, “she used to come to me for tutoring.” Her lips parted in a proud, careless smile, and Sarah suddenly realized that her mother was beautiful.

  It was becoming increasingly clear that she had underestimated her mother. Ever since their arrival in Japan, Mrs. Rexford had exuded the same air of relaxed entitlement that Sarah had observed in popular girls back home. Sarah herself was not popular; it was unsettling to be reminded that her mother belonged in a higher social league than her own. She felt embarrassed now, remembering all the times she had taken advantage of her mother’s ineptness in English. One fight in particular she wished she could forget. Her mother, struggling to articulate the proper comeback, had turned away too late to hide tears of frustration. Their argument had stopped instantly. Mother and child, both stricken, had tried to pretend nothing happened.

  Yoko Rexford was twenty-five years old when she and her husband first moved to America. They had stayed there ever since, with the exception of a few years when they lived in the Kyoto hills. Yoko’s social dominance did not survive this
move, although the proud posture and intelligence were innately hers. Her college-level English was good, but it lacked the elegant execution with which she had been used to cutting down opponents or carving out poetry. Her stature in the community, which she had always democratically pooh-poohed, was suddenly gone.

  Ever practical, young Mrs. Rexford had channeled her energies into more realistic pursuits: gardening, cooking, needlework, all of which she tackled with her old academic zeal. Each Saturday she visited the town’s small, outdated library, borrowing cookbooks by James Beard and Julia Child (as a new bride, not knowing what American men ate for breakfast, she had prepared for her bemused husband an elaborately arranged tray of fruit and nuts). She punched down homemade bread dough with arms still sculpted from tennis, experimented with coq au vin and crepes suzette. She executed complex projects of lace tatting, crewel embroidery, traditional American quilt patterns. In time, she became an expert in all the skills that modern American women had long since abandoned.

  Sometimes she remembered, with the same wistful wonder with which amputees remember running, how it had felt to have all the right skills at her disposal, to have powers commensurate with the force of her personality. She fervently admired the tennis star Martina Navratilova. “She never plays it safe by trying to be liked,” she told her husband. “She just goes out on the court, with no one cheering for her, and still beats every last one of them. Oh, I envy her that feeling!”

  If Sarah could have probed to the bottom of her fourteen-year-old heart, she would have found there a pity for her mother that was too deep, and too painful, to be faced directly.

  Meanwhile, at the breakfast table, she struggled to follow the rapid-fire conversation all around her. She felt an unfamiliar clenching between her temples. It occurred to her that her mother must experience this same clenching back home, as a result of the permanently strained vigilance with which she braced herself for American speech. Mrs. Rexford’s English, although heavily accented and occasionally halting, was always grammatically correct; never, at any time, did she allow herself to lapse into pidgin.

  But judging from her mother’s manner at the table, there was no such tension now. She was eating heartily, interrupting the chatter every so often with a dramatic moan of appreciation for her mother’s cooking, as if she hadn’t eaten a square meal in years.

  “Mother, this is absolutely delicious,” Mrs. Rexford said, using her chopsticks to herd together some scattered flakes of leftover mackerel. “It’s exactly the way I remembered it.” A floodgate of appetite seemed to have opened up within her. She couldn’t stop eating. “Have some,” she urged little Yashiko who was sitting beside her, still too shy to speak.

  Then, looking over at Sarah’s fish plate, she exclaimed, “Ara! You haven’t touched the skin at all. You don’t like it?”

  “There’s this thick layer of fat on the inside.”

  “But that’s where the best flavor is!” Mrs. Rexford looked insulted.

  “I’ll eat it,” piped up Yashiko.

  “Good girl!” said Mrs. Rexford warmly. “We can’t let this go to waste, now can we?”

  “Aaa, that’s how you can spot a true-blue Japanese,” laughed Mrs. Kobayashi. “Even the prime minister himself, I bet, wouldn’t say no to salt-broiled mackerel skin.”

  Reaching over with her chopsticks, Mrs. Rexford picked up the strip of skin, which was toasted to a bubbly brown crisp and frosted with salt, and transferred it from Sarah’s rectangular fish plate to her own. Their eyes met, then looked away.

  Something like pity flickered over Mrs. Rexford’s face. “The child can’t help it,” she said quickly. “They don’t even sell mackerel in the stores back home. Did you know that on the East Coast, where John grew up, oily fish was considered lower grade? They actually preferred the bland white types like sole or flounder.”

  “Hehh?!” cried Mrs. Kobayashi in amazed disbelief. She and Momoko darted a quick, curious glance at Sarah, as if the explanation for such a peculiar fact might somehow be detected in her American face. Little Yashiko, nestled against Mrs. Rexford, finished off the mackerel skin with quiet efficiency.

  chapter 4

  At 8:30 on the dot, Masako Nishimura arrived to apologize for her daughters’ untimely intrusion.

  Mrs. Nishimura and Mrs. Rexford gave off such different energies, it was hard to believe they were cousins. On closer scrutiny, however, one could see they shared the same high cheekbones from the Kobayashi side. Sarah had seen old school photographs in which they looked virtually identical with their bobbed hair, cat’s-eye glasses, and young, unformed expressions. More than once, leafing through the Asaki album with her great-aunt looking over her shoulder, Sarah had gotten them mixed up. Mrs. Asaki would correct her patiently, murmuring, “It’s a strong family likeness, ne…”

  Over the years, the women’s faces and even their bodies had evolved to reflect their different personalities. Mrs. Rexford’s confident posture, and the hint of muscle in her arms and calves, were natural extensions of her personal strength. In contrast, Mrs. Nishimura was less substantial, almost ethereal. She had a physique more suited to traditional kimonos: narrow, sloping shoulders; a walk that was an unobtrusive glide, as opposed to her cousin’s firm, decisive stride.

  When it came to faces, Mrs. Nishimura wore one basic expression: one of pleasant, attentive cooperation. It was a classic “outside face.” Every well-bred person used it at some point, usually on formal occasions or with strangers. Westerners, who were its most frequent recipients, assumed-understandably, if incorrectly-that this Japanese veneer of politeness was a permanent condition. And with Mrs. Nishimura, that may indeed have been the case. One always sensed in her a certain emotional reserve, even in the most casual situations.

  Mrs. Rexford was the opposite. Among her Ueno neighbors, she frequently dropped her mask to show spontaneous reactions: affection, enthusiasm, gossipy fascination. In truth, these flashes of emotion were not always so spontaneous or genuine. But Mrs. Rexford, blessed with surer social instincts, understood the value of judicious lapses in etiquette. Since childhood, she had used this technique to downplay her achievements and make herself more approachable. Since this familiarity was used from a position of power, it gave the flattering illusion of inner-circle acceptance.

  “I’m so sorry about the girls,” Mrs. Nishimura now said in a voice as gentle as her face. Instead of standing squarely within the doorway, she peered around the sliding door in the pose of a hesitant intruder. “Bothering you, right in the middle of your breakfast…”

  Mrs. Rexford laughed and waved away the apology. “Anta, don’t be silly! Children will be children!” she cried, throwing an affectionate look at the girls. “Ma-chan, how have you been?”

  Mrs. Nishimura decided to scold her daughters anyway. “Kora,” she admonished them softly. Momoko and Yashiko grinned with guilty embarrassment.

  “Come up and have some tea!” said Mrs. Kobayashi, already pouring out an extra cup.

  Mrs. Nishimura stepped up into the small vestibule. She still wore the short bob of her college photos, parted on one side and pinned with a barrette. There was a sheltered, almost virginal quality about her, emphasized by a pale pink blouse with a Peter Pan collar. As a child Sarah had subconsciously registered the shades and shapes that, like abstract art, made up her “auntie”: the round bob above the round collar, the pastel clothing against the whitish cast of Japanese cosmetics. These combinations struck a deep chord of recognition within her, like the sound of the pigeons earlier that morning.

  Once again, the currents in the house altered. Although it was relaxed and intimate, there was now a slightly guarded quality that hadn’t been there before. It was as if two identical masks of kindness had dropped over Mrs. Kobayashi’s and Mrs. Rexford’s faces.

  They all sat cozily around the low table, ignoring the uncleared breakfast dishes. Now the conversation no longer included the children but circled among the adults. Sensing this, Sarah and Momok
o began talking to each other in low voices.

  “Mama and I are coming over to your house later,” Sarah said. “We’ll probably bring French pastries, or maybe a cake.”

  “What kind? Do you know yet?”

  “I’m not sure-we still have to go to the bakery.”

  “What are you doing later? Do you want to come up and play in our room?”

  Little Yashiko, who had sidled over to sit beside her big sister, murmured that she had once tasted lemon custard cake, and she had liked it.

  Having thus reestablished their friendship, the three girls were content to fall silent and eat chocolates out of the tin, all the while following the adults’ conversation.

  “…a mere toddler! He was kicking that ball, running after it, kicking it, running after it, so excited…” Mrs. Kobayashi was reminiscing about one of their neighbors’ sons, a young man who had recently moved to Berlin to study under the famous conductor Seiji Ozawa. “Laughing and drooling, with that soccer ball practically up to his knees…”

  The children shrieked with laughter. Mrs. Nishimura rocked with mirth, demurely covering her open mouth with her hand.

  “And he went right on going, out of sight!” Mrs. Rexford chimed in. “Just vanished over the horizon, like in some surrealist movie! You should have seen those little legs working, choko-choko-choko…” Mrs. Rexford and Mrs. Kobayashi worked well as a team. Their chemistry was so bright, it seemed to suck the air right out of the room.

  They were all laughing so much that no one heard the footsteps on the gravel or the kitchen door rolling open. Suddenly Mrs. Asaki was standing in the doorway, smiling. “Good morning!” she chirped, in that singsong cadence of Kyoto old-timers.

  There was a moment of surprised silence before Mrs. Kobayashi and Mrs. Rexford jumped up from their cushions. Even Sarah felt somehow caught in the act. “Ara, Granny-san!” Mrs. Rexford protested. “Sarah and I are supposed to visit you! We were waiting until ten o’clock!”