THEIR FIRST YEAR ON COURT STREET, Danny and his dad and Joe gradually grew used to sharing the house with Yi-Yiing and her vibrant pajamas. She’d arranged her schedule at the hospital so that she was usually in the house when Joe came home from school. This was before Joe’s bike-riding began in earnest, and what girlfriends Danny had were transient; the writer’s passing acquaintances rarely spent the night in the Court Street house. The cook left for the kitchen at Mao’s every midafternoon-that is, when he wasn’t driving to Lower Manhattan and back with Xiao Dee Cheng.
Those two nights a week when Tony Angel was on the road, Yi-Yiing didn’t stay in the Court Street house. She’d kept her own apartment, near Mercy Hospital; maybe she knew all along that Danny was attracted to her-Yi-Yiing did nothing to encourage him. It was the cook and young Joe who received all her attention, though she’d been the first to speak to Danny when Joe started riding his bike to school. By then, they’d all moved into the second house on Court Street; it was nearer the commuter traffic on Muscatine Avenue, but there were only small backstreets between Court Street and the Longfellow Elementary School. Even so, Yi-Yiing told Danny that he should make Joe ride his bike on the sidewalk-and when the boy had to cross a street, he should walk his bike, she said.
“Kids on bikes get hit by cars all the time in this town,” Yi-Yiing told Danny. He tried to overlook whichever pair of pajamas she was wearing at the moment; he knew he should focus on her experience as an emergency-room nurse. “I see them all the time-there was one in the ER last night,” she said.
“Some kid was riding his bike at night?” Danny asked her.
“He got hit on Dodge Street when it was still daylight, but he was in the ER all night,” Yi-Yiing said.
“Is he going to be all right?” Danny asked.
Yi-Yiing shook her head; she was making tea for herself in the kitchen of the second Court Street house, and a thin piece of toast dangled like a cigarette from her lower lip. Joe was home sick from school, and Danny had been writing at the kitchen table. “Just make Joe ride his bike on the sidewalk,” Yi-Yiing said, “and if he wants to go downtown-or to the pool, or the zoo, in City Park-for God’s sake, make him walk or take the bus.”
“Okay,” Danny told her. She sat down at the table with him, with her tea and the rest of her toast.
“What are you doing home?” Yi-Yiing asked him. “I’m here, aren’t I? I’m awake. You should go write in your office. I’m a nurse, Danny-I can look after Joe.”
“Okay,” Danny said again. Just how safe could Joe get? the writer was wondering. The boy had an ER nurse taking care of him, not to mention two Japanese babysitters.
Most nights, both the cook and his emergency-room nurse were working; either Danny stayed home with Joe, or one of the Japanese twins looked after the boy. Sao and Kaori’s parents were from Yokohama originally, but the twins had been born in San Francisco and they’d grown up there. One night the cook had brought them home from Mao’s; he’d woken up Danny to introduce him to the twins, and he’d taken Sao and Kaori into Joe’s room to allow them to observe the sleeping boy. “See?” Tony whispered to the twins, while Danny lay bewildered and barely awake in his bed. “This child is an angel-he’s easy to look after.”
The cook had disapproved of Danny asking his workshop students to babysit for Joe. Danny’s students were writers-hence easily distracted, or preoccupied, in Tony Angel’s opinion. Young writers lived in their imaginations, didn’t they? the cook had asked his son. (Danny knew that his dad had always distrusted imagination.) Furthermore, these young writers were graduate students; many of them were older than the usual graduate students, too. “They’re too old to be competent babysitters!” the cook had said. His dad’s theory was new to Danny, but he liked Sao and Kaori, the identical twins-though he could never 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 maître 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 maître 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.