Last Night In Twisted River

tell them apart. (Over time, Joe could, and wasn’t that all that mattered?)

“The Yokohamas,” as Danny thought of the twins-as if Yokohama were their family name-were undergraduates and part-time waitresses at Mao’s. Therefore, Iowa City had a decidedly Asian flavor not only for the cook but for Danny and young Joe. The twins spoke Japanese to each other, which Joe loved but Danny found distracting. Most nights, when Sao worked at Mao’s, Kaori was Joe’s babysitter-or vice versa. (In which case, no Japanese was spoken.)

The Yokohamas had at first maintained a distant respect for Yi-Yiing, whose ER schedule did not often allow her to coincide in the house with either Sao or Kaori. They were more likely to run into one another at Mao’s, where Yi-Yiing occasionally came late (and by herself) to dinner-though she preferred the all-night shift in the emergency room to working daytime hours.

One night, when Xiao Dee was the maitre d’, he mistook Yi-Yiing for one of the waitresses who worked at Mao’s. “You’re late!” he told her.

“I’m a customer-I have a reservation,” Yi-Yiing told Little Brother.

“Oh, shit-you’re Tony’s nurse!” Xiao Dee said.

“Tony’s too young to need a nurse yet,” Yi-Yiing replied.

Later, the cook tried to defend Xiao Dee. (“He’s a good driver-he’s just a shitty maitre d’.”) But Yi-Yiing was sensitive.

“The Americans think I’m Vietnamese, and some Shanghai clown from Queens thinks I’m a waitress!” she told Tony.

Unfortunately, one of the Japanese twins, who was a waitress-at this moment, she was also young Joe’s babysitter-overheard Yi-Yiing say this. “What’s so bad about being a waitress?” Sao or Kaori asked the nurse.

The Japanese twins had also been mistaken for Vietnamese war brides in Iowa City. Most people in their native San Francisco, either Sao or Kaori had explained to Danny, could tell the Japanese and Vietnamese apart; apparently this was not the case in the Midwest. To this shameful lumping together, what could Danny truthfully say? After all, he still couldn’t tell Sao and Kaori apart! (And, after Yi-Yiing used the waitress word as an epithet, the Yokohamas’ formerly distant respect for the nurse from Hong Kong grew more distant.)

“We’re all one happy family,” Danny would later try to explain to one of his older workshop students. Youn was a writer from Seoul; she came into Danny’s fiction workshop the second year he was back in Iowa City. There were some Vietnam vets among the workshop students in those years-they, too, were older. And there were a few women writers who’d interrupted their writing lives to get married and have children, and get divorced. These older graduate students had an advantage over the younger writers who’d come to the Writers’ Workshop right out of college; the older ones had something to write about.

Youn certainly did. She’d been a slave to an arranged marriage in Seoul -“virtually arranged,” was how she first described the marriage in the novel she was writing.

Danny had criticized the virtually. “Either it was an arranged marriage or it wasn’t, right?” he’d asked Youn.

Her skin was as pale as milk. Her black hair was cut short, with bangs, under which her big dark-brown eyes made her appear waifish, though Youn was over thirty-she was exactly Danny’s age-and her efforts to get her real- life husband to divorce her, so she wouldn’t be dragged through “the Korean rigmarole” of trying to divorce him, gave her novel-in-progress a labyrinthine plot.

If you could believe either her actual story or her novel, the writer Danny Angel had thought. When he’d first met her, and had read the early chapters, Danny didn’t know if he could trust her-either as a woman or as a writer. But he’d liked her from the beginning, and Danny’s developing attraction to Youn at least alleviated his inappropriate fantasizing about his father’s girlfriend in her countless pairs of pajamas.

“Well,” the cook had said to his son, after Danny introduced him to Youn, “if there’s a Chinese nurse and two Japanese girls in the house, why not a Korean writer, too?”

But they were all hiding something, weren’t they? Certainly, the cook and his son were in hiding-they were fugitives. His dad’s Chinese nurse gave Danny the impression that there was something she wasn’t saying. As for Danny’s Korean writer, he knew she exhibited a seemingly willful lack of clarity-he didn’t mean only in her prose.

There was no fault to be found with the Japanese babysitters, whose affection for young Joe was genuine, and whose fondness for the cook stemmed from the camaraderie of them all working together in the ambitious chaos of Asian and French cuisine at Mao’s.

Not that Yi-Yiing’s rapt attention to Joe was insincere; the ER nurse was a truly good soul. It was her relationship with the cook that amounted to a compromise, perhaps to them both. But Tony Angel had long been wary of women, and he was used to hedging his bets; it was Yi-Yiing who shouldn’t have tolerated Tony’s short- term flings with those traveling women he met at the Writers’ Workshop parties, but the nurse accepted even this from the cook. Yi-Yiing liked living with a young boy the same age as her missing daughter; she liked being a mother to someone. Being a part of the cook’s all-male family may also have struck Yi- Yiing as a bohemian adventure-one she might not find so easy to slip into once her daughter and parents finally joined her in America.

To those bold young doctors at Mercy Hospital who would inquire as to her status- was she married, or did she have a boyfriend? they wanted to know-Yi-Yiing always said, to their surprise, “I live with the writer Danny Angel.” She must have liked saying this, for reasons beyond it being a conversation-stopper, because it was only to her closer friends and acquaintances that Yi-Yiing would bother to add: “Well, actually, I’m dating Danny’s father. He’s a cook at Mao’s-not the Chinese one.” But the cook understood that it was complicated for Yi-Yiing-a woman in her thirties with an unsettled life, living so far away from her native land, and with a daughter she knew only from photographs.

Once, at a party, someone who worked at Mercy Hospital said to Danny, “Oh, I know your girlfriend.”

“What girlfriend?” Danny had asked; this was before Youn came into his fiction workshop, and (before long) had moved into the second house on Court Street.

“Yi-Yiing-she’s Chinese, a nurse at-”

“She’s my dad’s girlfriend,” the writer quickly said.

“Oh-”

“What’s going on with Yi-Yiing?” Danny had later asked his father. “Some people think she’s living with me.”

“I don’t question Yi-Yiing, Daniel. She doesn’t question me,” the cook pointed out. “And isn’t she terrific with Joe?” his dad asked him. Both of them knew very well that this was the same point Danny had made to his father about his former Windham College student Franky, back in Vermont-yet it was strange, nonetheless, Danny thought. Was the cook, who was turning fifty, more of a bohemian than his writer son (at least until Youn moved into that second Court Street house)?

And what was it that was wrong about that house? It had been big enough for them all; that wasn’t it. There were enough bedrooms so that everyone could have slept separately; Youn used one of the extra bedrooms as a place to write, and for all her things. For a woman over thirty who’d had no children and endured an incomprehensible Korean divorce-at least it was “incomprehensible” in her novel-in-progress, or so Danny thought- Youn had remarkably few things. Had she left everything behind in Seoul, not just her truly terrifying-sounding former husband?

“I’m a student,” she’d said to Danny. “That is what is so liberating about being a student again-I don’t have any things.” It was a smart answer, the writer thought, but Danny didn’t know if he believed her.

IN THE FALL OF ’73, when Joe was starting third grade, the cook kept a crate of apples on the back porch of their Iowa City house. The porch overlooked a narrow, paved alley; it ran the length of the long row of houses that fronted Court Street. The alley didn’t appear to be used for anything, except for picking up garbage. Only an occasional slow-moving car passed, and-more often, even constantly-kids on bicycles. There was some loose sand or gravel on the little-used pavement, which meant the kids could practice skids on their bikes. Joe had fallen off his bike in that back alley. Yi-Yiing had cleaned the scrape on the boy’s knee.