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.
“Jun-chan, what a nice baseball cap you’ve got!” said Mrs. Rexford. It was navy blue with a yellow tiger’s head on it, for Han-shin Tigers. Mr. Kobayashi had given it to him when he arrived. “You’re one of the menfolk now,” he had told the boy, reaching down to tweak his visor. Over the next few days the boy would insist on wearing this cap everywhere, even to the bathhouse.
“I’m one of the menfolk,” Jun now told them.
“You certainly are!” said his grandmother. “It’s a lucky thing you’re here to protect us!”
Mrs. Rexford and Mrs. Izumi were reminiscing about friends of their youth. Bored, the little boy wandered away to the other end of the house.
“Mother,” said Mrs. Izumi, “whatever happened to Big Sister’s old boyfriend? The one who was studying Middle Eastern history?”
“Sekizaki-kun,” supplied Mrs. Rexford.
“Soh, Sekizaki-kun! I hear he goes around consulting for the big petroleum companies now,” said Mrs. Kobayashi. “Who could have guessed, back then, what would happen with Arab oil?” She turned to Sarah. “He was an odd one,” she explained. “For whatever reason, he was fascinated with that part of the world. Think: all that work to get into Kyoto University, then he defied his poor parents and studied the most impractical subject ever.”
“He had bite, that one,” said Mrs. Rexford.
“What’s bite?” asked Sarah.
“It’s a certain bravery,” said her grandmother, “an originality of intellect. Your mother’s boyfriends, they all had bite. Some of them are important men now.”
“No fair, Big Sister!” cried Mrs. Izumi in mock distress. “How come none of my boyfriends went on to careers of intellect?”
They all giggled.
“That’s because you dated bon-bons,” her sister said. Bon-bons were handsome, dashing boys from wealthy families who focused on sports cars and skiing trips instead of their studies.
Mrs. Izumi responded with a sour look, and they all laughed again.
Mrs. Izumi had met her husband in college. He was good looking and extremely polite; Sarah considered him romantic. His father was chief of neurosurgery at Osaka Municipal Hospital, but Mr. Izumi himself worked as an office manager. “Our Jun’s going to be a doctor. He’s going to take after his granddaddy,” Mrs. Izumi told the women.
Right now Mr. Izumi was in the family room, watching baseball. Mr. Kobayashi had joined him there, abandoning his work in order to play host. The men seemed slightly off-kilter, like caged animals waiting for their next meal. But they shared a certain solidarity, perhaps because they had been bon-bons in their youth. Little Jun, torn between his desire for male companionship and his attraction to the merrier women with their direct access to food, wandered back and forth between the two camps.
“What’s in this bag here?” asked Mrs. Rexford. She peeked inside. “What are all these books and magazines? Watchtower? What’s that, Jehovah’s Witness? Tama, are you into Christianity now?”
Her stepsister nodded sheepishly.
Tama Izumi’s personality had always tended toward the dramatic. Several years ago she had discovered Confucianism, and she had announced this conversion by sending the Rexfords a hardbound religious text written in the original Chinese, which no one could possibly have known how to read. Before that, it had been some fundamentalist sect of Buddhism, and Sarah had received a child’s