AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Danny and his dad always had to think about Joe before including new women in their lives. Danny had liked Yi-Yiing--no small part of the reason being how sincerely she'd paid attention to Joe--though it was awkward that Yi-Yiing was Danny's age, and that the writer was attracted to her.
In those three years, Danny and his dad had rented three different houses on Court Street in Iowa City--all from tenured faculty on sabbaticals. Court Street was tree-lined with large, three-story houses; it was a kind of residential faculty row. The street was also within safe walking distance of the Longfellow Elementary School, where Joe would attend second, third, and fourth grades. Court Street was somewhat removed from downtown Iowa City, and Danny never had to drive on Iowa Avenue, where he'd earlier lived with Katie--not, in any case, on his way to and from the English-Philosophy Building on the Iowa River. (The EPB, as it was called, was where Danny's office at the Writers' Workshop was.)
As big as the rental houses on Court Street were, Danny didn't write at home--largely because Yi-Yiing worked irregular hours in the ER at Mercy Hospital. She often slept in the cook's bedroom until midday, when she would come down to the kitchen and fix herself something to eat in her silk pajamas. When she wasn't working at the hospital, Yi-Yiing lived in her slinky Hong Kong pajamas.
Danny liked walking Joe to school, and then going to write at the English-Philosophy Building. When his office door was closed, his students and the other faculty knew not to bother him. (Yi-Yiing was small of stature, short but surprisingly heavyset, with a pretty face and long, coal-black hair. She had many pairs of the silk pajamas, in a variety of vibrant colors; as Danny recalled, even her black pajamas appeared to vibrate.) This parenthetical non sequitur, long after he'd begun his morning's writing--an alluring image of Yi-Yiing in her vibrating pajamas, asleep in his father's bed--was a lingering distraction. Yi-Yiing and her pajamas, or their enticing presence, traveled to the English-Philosophy Building with Danny.
"I don't know how you can write in such a sterile building," the writer Raymond Carver said of the EPB. Ray was a colleague of Danny Angel's at the workshop in those years.
"It's not as ... sterile as you may think," Danny said to Ray.
Another writer colleague, John Cheever, compared the EPB to a hotel--"one catering to conventioneers"--but Danny liked his fourth-floor office there. Most mornings, the offices and classrooms of the Writers' Workshop were deserted. No one but the workshop's administrative assistant was ever there, and she was good about taking messages and not putting through any phone calls--not unless there was a call from young Joe or Danny's dad.
The aesthetics of a given workplace notwithstanding, writers tend to love where they work well. For as much of the day as Joe was safe in school, Danny grew to love the EPB. The fourth floor was silent, a virtual sanctuary--provided he left by midafternoon.
Usually, writers don't confine their writing to the good things, do they? Danny Angel was thinking, as he scribbled away in his notebook at Avellino, where Iowa City was foremost on his mind. "The Baby in the Road," he had written--a chapter title, possibly, but there was more to it than that. He'd crossed out the The and had written, "A Baby in the Road," but neither article pleased him--he quickly crossed out the A, too. Above where he was writing, on the same page of the notebook, was more evidence of the writer's reluctance to use an article--"The Blue Mustang" had been revised to "Blue Mustang." (Maybe just "Baby in the Road" was the way to go?)
To anyone seeing the forty-one-year-old writer's expression, this exercise was both more meaningful and more painful than a mere title search. To Dot and May, the troubled-looking young author seemed strangely attractive and familiar; waiting for their food, they both watched him intently. In the absenc
e of signs to read out loud, May was at a momentary loss for words, but Dot whispered to her friend: "Whatever he's writin', he's not havin' any fun doin' it."
"I could give him some fun doin' it!" May whispered back, and both ladies commenced to cackling, in their inimitable fashion.
At this moment in time, it took a lot to distract Danny from his writing. The blue Mustang and the baby in the road had seized the writer's attention, almost completely; that one or the other might make a good title was immaterial. Both the blue Mustang and the baby in the road were triggers to Danny's imagination, and they meant much more to him than titles. Yet the distinctive cackles of the two old ladies caused Danny to look up from his notebook, whereupon Dot and May quickly looked away. They'd been staring at him--that much was clear to Danny, who would have sworn that he'd heard the fat women's indelible and derisive laughter before. But where, and when?
Too long ago for Danny to remember, obviously, seized as he was by those fresher, more memorable details, the speeding blue Mustang and that helpless baby in the road. Danny was a far distance from the twelve-year-old he'd been in the cookhouse kitchen, where (and when) Dot and May's cackling had once been as constant as punctuation. The writer returned his attention to his notebook; he was imagining Iowa City, but he was closer to that time in Twisted River than he could have known.
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 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.
