Last Night in Twisted River (38 page)

“Table of four,” Loretta was saying to Greg, the sous chef. “One wild-mushroom pizza, one pepperoni,” she told the cook.

Celeste came into the kitchen from the dining room. “Danny’s here, alone,” she said to Tony.

“One calamari with penne,” Loretta went on, reciting. When it was busy, she just left the two cooks her orders in writing, but when there was almost no one in Avellino, Loretta seemed to enjoy the drama of an out-loud presentation.

“The table of four doesn’t want any first courses?” Greg asked her.

“They all want the arugula salad with the shaved Parmesan,” Loretta said. “You’ll love this one.” She paused for the full effect. “One chicken paillard, but hold the capers.”

“Christ,” Greg said. “A sauce
grenobloise
is all about the capers.”

“Just give the bozo the red-wine reduction with rosemary—it’s as good on the chicken as it is on the braised beef,” Tony Angel said.

“It’ll turn the chicken
purple
, Tony,” his sous chef complained.

“You’re such a purist, Greg,” the cook said. “Then give the bozo the paillard with a little olive oil and lemon.”

“Danny says to surprise him,” Celeste told Tony. She was watching the cook closely. She’d heard him cry in his sleep, too.

“Well, that will be fun,” the cook said. (Finally, there’s a smile—albeit a small one—Celeste was thinking.)

MAY WAS A TALKATIVE PASSENGER.
While Dot drove—her head nodding, but usually not in rhythm to whatever junk was playing on the radio—May read most of the road signs out loud, the way children who’ve only recently learned to read sometimes do.

“Bellows Falls,” May had announced, as they’d passed that exit on I-91—maybe fifteen or more minutes ago. “Who would want to live in Bellows Falls?”

“You been there?” Dot asked her old friend.

“Nope. It just sounds awful,” May said.

“It’s beginnin’ to look like suppertime, isn’t it?” Dot asked.

“I could eat a little somethin’,” May admitted.

“Like what?” Dot asked.

“Oh, just half a bear or a whole cow, I guess,” May said, cackling. Dot cackled with her.

“Even
half
a cow would hit the spot,” Dot more seriously proposed.

“Putney,” May read out loud, as they passed the exit sign.

“What kinda name is that, do you suppose? Not Injun, from the sound of it,” Dot said.

“Nope. Not Injun,” May agreed. The three Brattleboro exits were coming up.

“How ’bout a pizza?” Dot said.

“BRAT-el-burrow,” May enunciated with near perfection.

“Definitely not an Injun name!” Dot said, and the two old ladies cackled some more.

“There’s gotta be a pizza place in Brattleboro, don’tcha think?” May asked her friend.

“Let’s have a look,” Dot said. She took the second Brattleboro exit, which brought her onto Main Street.

“The Book Cellar,” May read out loud, as they drove slowly past the bookstore on their right.

When they got to the next traffic light, and the steep part of the hill, they could see the marquee for the Latchis Theatre. A couple of the previous year’s movies were playing—a Sylvester Stallone double feature,
Rocky III
and
First Blood
.

“I saw those movies,” Dot said proudly.

“You saw them with
me,”
May reminded her.

The two ladies were easily distracted by the movie marquee at the Latchis, and Dot was driving; Dot couldn’t drive and look at both sides of the street at the same time. If it hadn’t been for May, her hungry passenger and compulsive sign-reader, they might have missed seeing Avellino altogether. The
Avellino
word was a tough one for May; she stumbled over it but managed to say, “Italian cooking.”

“Where?” Dot asked; they had already driven past it.

“Back there. Park somewhere,” May told her friend. “It said ‘Italian’—I know it did.”

They ended up in the supermarket parking lot before Dot could gather her driving wits about her. “Now we’ll just have to hoof it,” she said to May.

Dot didn’t like to
hoof it;
she had a bunion that was killing her and caused her to limp, which made May recall Cookie’s limp, so that Cookie had been on the bad old broads’ minds lately. (Also, the
Injun
conversation in the car might have made them remember their long-ago time in Twisted River.)

“I would walk a mile for a pizza, or two,” May told her old friend.

“One of
Cookie’s pizzas
, anyway,” Dot said, and that did it.

“Oh, weren’t they
good!”
May exclaimed. They had waddled their way to the Latchis, on the wrong side of the street, and were nearly killed crossing Main Street in a haphazard fashion. (Maybe Milan was more forgiving to pedestrians than Brattleboro.) Both Dot and May gave the finger to the driver who’d almost hit them.

“What was it Cookie wanted to put in his pizza dough?” Dot asked May.

“Honey!” May said, and they both cackled. “But he changed his mind about it,” May remembered.

“I wonder what his secret ingredient was,” Dot said.

“Didn’t have one, maybe,” May replied, with a shrug. They had stopped in front of the big picture window at Avellino, where May struggled out loud to say the restaurant’s name.

“It sure sounds like real Italian,” Dot decided. The two women read the menu that was posted in the window. “Two different pizzas,” Dot observed.

“I’m stickin’ to the pepperoni,” May told her friend. “You can die eatin’ wild mushrooms.”

“The thing about Cookie’s crust was that it was really thin, so you could eat a lot more pizza without gettin’ filled up,” Dot was remembering.

Inside, a family of four was finishing their meal—Dot and May could see that the two kids had ordered pizzas. There was a good-looking man, maybe fortyish, sitting alone at a table near the swinging doors to the kitchen. He was writing in a notebook—just a lined notebook of the kind students use. The old ladies didn’t recognize Danny, of course. He’d been twelve when they’d last seen him, and now he was a whole decade older than his father was when Dot and May had last seen the cook.

Danny had looked up when the old ladies came in, but he’d quickly turned his attention back to whatever he was writing. He might not even have remembered what Dot and May looked like in 1954; twenty-nine years later, Danny didn’t have the slightest idea who those bad old broads were.

“Just the two of you, ladies?” Celeste asked them. (It always amused Dot and May when anyone thought of them as “ladies.”)

They were given a table near the window, under the old black-and-white photograph of the long-ago logjam in Brattleboro. “They used to drive logs down the Connecticut,” Dot said to May.

“This must have been a mill town, in its day,” May remarked. “Sawmills, paper, maybe—textiles, too, I suppose.”

“There’s an insane asylum in this town, I hear,” Dot told her friend. When the waitress came to pour them water, Dot asked Celeste about it. “Is the loony bin still operatin’ here?”

“It’s called the
retreat
,” Celeste explained.

“That’s a sneaky fuck of a name for it!” May said. She and Dot were cackling again when Celeste went to get them menus. (She’d forgotten to bring the old biddies menus when she brought them their water. Celeste was still distracted by the cook’s crying.)

A young couple came in, and Dot and May observed a younger waitress—Celeste’s daughter, Loretta—showing them to their table. When Celeste came back with the menus, Dot said, “We’ll both have the pepperoni pizza.” (She and May had already had a look at the menu in the window.)

“One each or one to share?” Celeste asked them. (Just looking at these two, Celeste knew the answer.)

“One
each
,” May told her.

“Would you like a salad, or a first course?” Celeste asked the old ladies.

“Nope. I’m saving room for the apple pie,” May answered.

Dot said: “I imagine I’ll be havin’ the blueberry cobbler.”

They both ordered Cokes—“
real
ones,” May emphasized to Celeste. For the drive ahead, not to mention the slew of children and grandchildren, Dot and May wanted all the caffeine and sugar they could get.

“I swear,” May said to Dot, “if my kids and grandkids keep havin’
more
kids, you can check me into that so-called retreat.”

“I’ll come visit you,” her friend Dot told her. “If the pizza’s any good,” she added.

In the kitchen at Avellino, maybe the cook had heard the old ladies cackling. “Two pepperoni pizzas,” Celeste told him. “Two
probable
pie and cobbler customers.”

“Who are they?” the cook asked her; he wasn’t usually so curious. “A couple of locals?”

“A couple of bad old broads, if you ask me—locals or otherwise,” Celeste said.

It was almost time for the Red Sox game on the radio. Boston was playing at home, in Fenway Park, but Greg was listening to some sentimental crap called
The Oldie-But-Goldie Hour
on another station. The cook hadn’t really been paying attention, but the featured recording, from 1967, was
Surrealistic Pillow—
the old Jefferson Airplane album.

When Tony Angel recognized Grace Slick’s voice singing “Somebody to Love,” he spoke with uncharacteristic sharpness to his sous chef.

“Time for the game, Greg,” the cook said.

“Just lemme hear—” the sous chef started to say, but Tony abruptly switched stations. (Everyone had heard the impatience in his voice and seen the angry way he’d reached for the radio.)

All the cook could say for himself was: “I don’t like that song.”

With a shrug, Celeste said to them all: “Memories, I guess.”

Just one thin wall and two swinging doors away were two more old
memories
. Unfortunately, the cook would not get rid of Dot and May as easily as he’d cut off that song on the radio.

CHAPTER 9

THE FRAGILE, UNPREDICTABLE
NATURE OF THINGS

O
UT ON THE CORALVILLE STRIP, WITHIN SIGHT OF MAO’S
, there’d been a pizza place called The Greek’s; kalamata olives and feta cheese was the favorite topping. (As Danny’s dad had said at the time, “It isn’t bad, but it isn’t pizza.”) In downtown Iowa City was an imitation Irish pub called O’Rourke’s—pool tables, green beer every St. Patrick’s Day, bratwurst or meatball sandwiches. To Danny, O’Rourke’s was strictly a student hangout—an unconvincing copy of those Boston pubs south of the Haymarket, in the vicinity of Hanover Street. The oldest of these was the Union Oyster House, a clam bar and restaurant, which would one day be across the street from a Holocaust commemoration site, but there was also the Bell in Hand Tavern on the corner of Union and Marshall streets—a pub where the underage Daniel Baciagalupo had gotten drunk on beer with his older Saetta and Calogero cousins.

Those taverns had not been far enough out of the North End to have escaped the cook’s attention. One day he’d followed Daniel and his cousins to the Bell in Hand. When the cook saw his young son drinking a beer, he’d pulled the boy out of the tavern by his ear.

As the writer Danny Angel sat working away in his notebook at Avellino—waiting for his dad, the cook, to surprise him—he wished that his humiliation in the Bell in Hand, in front of his older cousins, had been sufficient to make him stop drinking before he really got started. But in order to stop himself, Danny had needed a greater fright and subsequent humiliation than that earlier misadventure in a Boston bar. It would come, but not before he was a father. (“If becoming a parent doesn’t make you responsible,” the cook had once said to his son, “nothing will.”)

Had Danny been thinking
as a father
when he’d typed a one-page message to the hippie carpenter, and had driven out the back road to Westminster West in order to put the message in the asshole dog owner’s mailbox, before driving to Brattleboro and his surprise dinner at Avellino? Was this what the writer would have wanted young Joe to do, if his son were to find himself in a similarly hostile situation?

“I am truly sorry your dog is dead,” Danny had typed. “I was angry. You take no responsibility for your dogs, and you won’t acknowledge that a public road is not your dogs’ territory. But I should have held my temper better than I did. I’ll run somewhere else. You’ve lost a dog; I’ll give up my favorite run. Enough is enough, okay?”

It was just a plain piece of typing paper. The writer didn’t include his name. If Armando was right—if the asshole was a
writer
carpenter, and/or one of Danny’s former students at Windham—then of course the infuriating dog owner already knew that the runner with the squash-racquet handles was the writer Danny Angel. But Danny saw no reason to advertise this. He didn’t put the piece of paper in an envelope, either; he’d just folded it twice and put it in the dog owner’s mailbox, out where the driveway lined with dead vehicles met the road.

Now, as he sat writing in Avellino, Danny knew what Armando would say: “You don’t try to make peace with assholes,” or words to that effect. But Armando didn’t have children. Did that make Armando more unafraid? The very idea of an altercation escalating out of control—well, wasn’t that high on the list of things to protect your children from? (In the notebook, where Danny was scribbling to himself, the phrase “a nameless fear” stood out with an identifying awkwardness in several unfinished sentences.)

As a boy, and as a young man, Danny had always assumed that his dad and Ketchum were different, chiefly because his dad was a cook and Ketchum was a river driver—a logger, tougher than his caulk boots, an intemperate woodsman who would never back down from a fight.

But Ketchum was estranged from his children; he’d already lost them. It wasn’t necessarily true that Ketchum was braver, or more bold, than the cook. Ketchum wasn’t a father, not anymore; he didn’t have as much to lose. Danny only now understood that his dad had been doing his best to look out for him. Leaving Twisted River had been a
father’s
decision. And the cook and his son were both trying to look out for young Joe; their mutual fear for the boy had brought Danny and his dad closer together.

He’d felt close to his father in Iowa City, too, the writer was remembering. (Their
Asian
interlude, as Danny thought of Iowa that second time around.) His dad’s steadiest girlfriend those years in Iowa City had been an ER nurse at Mercy Hospital—Yi-Yiing was Chinese. She was Danny’s age—in her early thirties, almost twenty years younger than the cook—and she had a daughter, who was Joe’s age, back in Hong Kong. Her husband had left her upon the daughter’s birth—he’d wanted a son—and Yi-Yiing had trusted her mother and father to care for her child while she’d made a new life for herself in the Midwest. The nursing career had been a good choice, and so had Iowa City. The doctors at Mercy Hospital had declared that Yi-Yiing was indispensable. She had her green card and was on track to become a U.S. citizen.

Of course Yi-Yiing would hear the occasional
gook
word—the most common insult from a prejudiced patient in the emergency room, and from an unseen driver or passenger in a moving car. But it didn’t faze her to be mistaken for the war bride of a Vietnam vet. She had a harder, uphill task ahead of her—namely, moving her daughter and her parents to the United States—but she was well on her way to unraveling the red tape that was involved. Yi-Yiing had her own reasons for remaining undistracted from achieving her goal. (She’d been assured it would be easier to bring her family to the United States once the war in Vietnam was over; it was “only a matter of time,” a reliable authority had told her.)

What Yi-Yiing had said to Tony Angel was that it wasn’t the time for her to be “romantically involved.” Maybe this was music to his dad’s ears, Danny had thought at the time. Quite possibly, given Yi-Yiing’s heroic undertaking, the cook was a consoling and undemanding partner for her; with so much of his life lost to the past, Tony Angel wasn’t exactly seeking so-called romantic involvement, either. Moreover, that the cook’s grandson was the same age as Yi-Yiing’s daughter gave the nurse a motherly affection for young Joe.

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 absence 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.”