The woman in the booth across from Eve looked different from her picture. Her hair had been straight and black, now it was curled and dyed a dark cherry color. Next to her, Eve’s father Eugene still had the dumpy good looks of a long-retired movie star. He was wearing a new shirt and had combed his silver hair.
“Honey, this is Yuxi,” he said. “Yuxi, this is my eldest daughter, Eve.”
“Nice to meet you,” Eve typed in her phone. She tapped the audio symbol and it translated aloud in Mandarin. The app’s voice was clear, female, pleasant.
“Xièxiè.” Yuxi smiled and made a little bow. A server came and dealt menus but Yuxi barely glanced at it.
“She doesn’t like eating out,” Eugene said. “She never likes the way the food tastes. She’s such a good cook. She makes this delicious chicken thing with all kind of vegetables.”
Eugene had been trying for weeks to get them all together for lunch. Eve made excuses. Roman was busy and Cassie flatly refused.
Eve had always known what was going to happen if her mother went first. There would be no one to absorb and buffer her father and the cosmos would prevail upon her to take her mother’s place. Though things had gotten worse. Things had definitely gotten worse. Sometimes Eve did not answer his phone calls. When she did agree to visit, she averted her eyes from his cluttered countertops, the prescription refill bottles, unread mail and toast crumbs of solitary living, which all seemed to demand her intervention. When she hugged him he felt soft, like a ripe fruit beginning to rot. He’d always been all rind, and now he wanted to be cut open and savored.
Yuxi scrawled characters on her screen with a fingertip. My life is glorious, the voice said. Her hands were rough and squarish, almost too large for her slight frame.
“I think she likes me,” Eugene said. He patted Yuxi’s hand on the tabletop and plucked the fabric of his sleeve. “She got me this. Wasn’t that nice? Thanks, sweetie.”
Eve felt a surge of relief and an accusatory weight lift from her chest. He looked almost glossy in his happiness.
“You mommy,” Yuxi said, raising the hem of her sweater.
“What?”
“You mommy.” Underneath the sweater was a black-and-white striped shirt. Eve gasped. It was her mother’s shirt. It was cheap and cotton, laundered to dullness. At some point, she had just stopped buying new clothes.
“She’s learning English.”
Yuxi spoke into her phone in Mandarin and held it out to me. I am wearing your mother’s clothes and shoes.
“She alters them,” Eugene said. “She’s so talented and resourceful. She never wants to spend money.”
Eve had seen that shirt crumpled in the laundry basket and folded on top of the dresser, placidly evacuated. Now, it seemed to reanimate in protest. The small child in her recoiled at this appalling and apparently sanctioned act of vandalism. She’d been ambushed. Instead of fighting she froze.
Eugene gazed adoringly at Yuxi. It was plain he would be of no help.
In Taiwan I worked as a tailor, the voice said. In Taiwan I worked as a tailor.
Eve nodded and smiled as if she’d understood it better the second time.
Yuxi laughed. She laughed a lot. She was evidently full of uncontainable joy and delight. Eve gazed from one to the other. These two made each other happy.
All clothes can be changed, said the voice with a hopeful lilt.
At the appropriate time, Eugene had asked them if they wanted anything before he hauled their mother’s things away. Cassie wanted the oil portrait Eve had painted of her. They each took one of the two Japanese silk kimonos their grandfather had given their mother as a girl, one turquoise, one silver, and a few pieces of their grandmother’s jewelry, which weren’t wearable and had an overwrought Victorian heft. They had never met their grandparents, both died of alcoholism before the girls were born. Eve took the garnets, a multistrand necklace of dark, garlanded gems that looked like a bleeding wound on her collarbone. Cassie got the amethysts, a chunky bracelet and a fat brooch. They agreed to exchange them every few years. They were sentimental in private. It wasn’t something they openly shared.
Eugene studied the menu. With his heart, tennis had long ceased to be an option and even normal-speed walking was a labor. But his skin was still remarkably smooth and wrinkle-free and there was pink in his cheeks. His transformations were coming fast, frozen chunks of grief falling from him in great wet splats in his blood rush to green up and live again.
He had known Yuxi all of three months. In the picture he’d shown them, Yuxi was a petite, smiling Asian woman in hot-pink satin pajamas flashing flirty double Vs. He’d taken it in his living room with the old beige couch lolling in the background.
“My girlfriend’s name is pronounced you-she,” he beamed. “She’s very sweet. She cooks and cleans and gives me massages whenever I want. She takes such good care of me. She’s sixty-two and loves to laugh.”
“Don’t call her your girlfriend,” Cassie gasped.
“Well, she is.”
“What about Donna? Does Donna know about this? Are you two-timing her?”
“Donna knows all about it. I told her everything. She said she’s fine with it. We still talk every day. I go to Seattle and Donna drops me off for my massage and then goes shopping and picks me up later.
“Because Donna says it’s fine that makes it okay?”
“She understands. She says I was married faithfully for fifty years, it’s natural I would want to explore. She’s not too happy with me right now, though. Since her knee surgery I was lonely. I got a lot closer to Yuxi. Donna said she doesn’t like to feel like the second-best girlfriend.”
Eve took a sip of water and stared at the menu. It was his life. If Cassie were here, she would make a scene.
No one could blame Cassie for being protective. In her twenties she got unstoppable nosebleeds. She’d have to sit still with her head tipped back for an hour. She supported herself, an unemployed boyfriend and an overweight Dalmatian working at a grocery store and illustrating children’s books. The boyfriend took her to live in a series of awful communal places. One Thanksgiving, Cassie watched a random baby in a dirty diaper crawl across someone’s floor and try to eat a cigarette butt. Not long after leaving this man, Cassie discovered he’d opened several credit cards in her name and charged two-hundred thousand dollars in purchases and tuition. The guy disappeared and she couldn’t track him down. She opened fraud claims and tried filing for bankruptcy, but she didn’t qualify. She would never pay the debt off in her lifetime, she reasoned, so she might as well commit to her art.
The server returned to take orders. Yuxi hovered her phone over the lunch menu to translate it. Eugene pointed out options and she frowned and shook her head. The restaurant was called Colophon and was part of a bookstore. No one in the town could spell it or remember what it meant so people just called it the bookstore café. Eugene called it Coliform, like the gut bacteria. Nomi had loved going there. She liked books and bland food. She was a soup and sandwich gal.
Eugene finally ordered a salad with shrimp and sesame dressing for Yuxi.
“How’s work, honey?”
Eve knew to answer simply and without too much detail. That’s how Eugene liked answers. However he phrased questions, they were essentially yes or no.
“Eve works for China,” he told Yuxi. Yuxi nodded and peered intently at her phone.
“Works for China,” he dictated. Yuxi nodded again and began typing.
Eve was getting impatient. This was not good communication. The simplest things took ages.
“I don’t work for China,” Eve began, but Yuxi’s phone interrupted her.
What is that rash on your neck?
Eve clapped a hand below her right ear where she’d recently noticed an inflamed patch of skin.
I will give you tea to help cool and detoxify.
“Thank you,” Eve typed. She’d read that rashes could be stress related.
Yuxi bowed her head and excused herself to the restroom.
“At the massage parlor they have all kind of teas,” Eugene said. “When I go, they ask me if I’ve had breakfast and they cook for me. That’s how they do it. They all live there. It’s easier. That way they don’t have to drive or take the bus at all hours and they have each other for company. Chinese girls are amazing.”
Eve nodded. She felt a sudden strong urge to brush away a few grains of salt on the table. The more she tried to look away the more numerous they seemed.
Yuxi couldn’t rent, Eugene continued, because she didn’t have a bank account or any proof of income. She’d let her visa lapse the year before. She didn’t want to go back to Taiwan because you couldn’t make any money there.
Eve asked herself, where were you this whole time? Where had she been when her father was driving late at night to poorly lit roadside establishments and strip malls? When he was up early mornings looking for someone to take him in and make him breakfast?
She had been in her studio painting. The months had flown by.
Yuxi returned to the table and wrote in her phone. Your father is a kind gentleman.
Eve smiled, and typed, works for China. Words appeared: wéi zhōngguó gōngzuò. She copied that and translated it back to English. It read: we are still young.
This was madness. Eugene didn’t speak a word of Mandarin.
He did still sometimes bring up the one trip overseas he took for work nearly thirty years ago, to Shenzhen to tour a factory. Eve was little. All she could remember were his photographs of a theme park. There was a toy-sized Great Wall of China zigzagging over grassy mounds and little bushes pruned to look like trees. There was a mini-Forbidden City with a grinning toddler for scale like Godzilla let loose in a village of Pizza Huts.
Eve set her phone on the tabletop, exhausted. The food arrived and she took a few bites of bland turkey sandwich. Yuxi skated her shrimp in circles around her plate. Eve actually worked for an education company based in Shanghai, but this hardly seemed worth explaining now.
“Good?” Eugene pointed at Yuxi’s salad with his fork.
Yuxi shrugged. “No good.”
What Eve had to say would have to wait. She toyed with the wording in her head. Cassie would just blurt it. We have no money. Like, negative money. We can’t help you.
Eugene was at that age. An easy target.
In the first year after his wife Naomi died, Eugene didn’t know what to do with himself. He hammered together a few Adirondack chairs and took long drives and bought things he didn’t need. He started spending a lot of time online. He boasted of the tender ages of the women he chatted with, slipping non-sequiturs in conversations whenever he could. Eve felt like the concerned parent of a teenager lurching between hobbies. You prayed they didn’t stumble into anything irrevocable. Once, Cassie intercepted his plan to drive across state lines to meet a woman.
“Her name is Mary. She’s thirty-four and lives in Coeur D’Alene. She thinks it’s still too early to meet.”
Mary’s picture showed a slim Asian woman in a hotel lobby wearing a long, camel-colored coat.
“She just got a new coat.”
Cassie chastised him gently. Not that a lovely woman wouldn’t be genuinely interested in him, but was there a chance that all this was not real?
“Oh, honey, it’s not serious. Mary is too young for me. Besides, I don’t think anyone would do something so elaborate.”
Eugene wrote an autobiography about his boyhood in Seattle, working for his father’s furniture business and racing hot rods at Golden Gardens. In one part, a client visits their shop with a broken Queen Anne chair. The man says he used to be a cop and raided this very house for hooch forty years before. Old man Peterson was a bootlegger, all right, the guy says. See right here where the leg broke off? I can’t find it anywhere and it’s a shame, cause I can’t have a beautiful chair like that sitting around like an ugly whore in a Texas brothel.
Eve told Eugene she read the whole thing it and enjoyed it, though she hadn’t, couldn’t. It had a whiff of the posthumous.
“I don’t want to be forgotten,” Eugene said.
Eve was touched. She understood his sudden urge to divulge. Her mother had written a chronicle of her childhood in New Jersey that she’d never let anyone see. She gave Eve the thick stack of composition notebooks with black-and-white mottled covers rubber-banded together. They were full of handwritten pages in blue ballpoint ink. Several times, Eve opened them and tried to read. The sprawling cursive was so hard to decipher that her vision blurred and her eyes filled with tears. It was enough just to touch the words. Like fingerprints. They were everywhere; in her cookbooks, her checkbook, the birthday cards Eve kept. A folded paper fell from one of the notebooks, an infusion schedule at the oncology center dated three months before she died.
After the autobiography, Eugene wrote a science-fiction thriller. Henry, a retired mechanical engineer, restless and recently bereaved, abandons his carpentry projects to tinker in his garage lab. One day Henry makes a shocking discovery that answers one of science’s most baffling mysteries. Convinced he has detected dark matter, Henry writes a paper and secures an invitation to a prestigious conference in France, where he crosses paths with a sensationally sexy Chinese astrophysicist. Competing researchers antagonize him and he’s surveilled by the CIA. Henry flees with the lady to Switzerland, where he buys a nice watch and surrenders his findings to CERN for the good of all.
About halfway through the story, there’s a racy scene that takes place on a cot in the garage. When Eve failed to mention it, Eugene asked what she thought.
“I just get horny. I’m not trying to publish it or anything.” His eyes were full of mirth.
Things got worse. Eugene announced that he and Yuxi were in love.
“Was he born yesterday?” Cassie fumed. “Who is she? What do we even know about her?”
“He denies it,” Roman said from the computer video screen. He could seldom meet in person. As a physicist, and a son, he got away with being distant. “He says she’s not doing any of that anymore.”
“Like hell she’s not,” Cassie said. “Everyone knows that’s what they are. The FBI busted several in the area in recent years. She has some playbook for how to find an American man when he’s old so he gives her everything he’s got.”
“On the other hand, it’s less offensive than recreating Mom.” Roman sent a screenshot of Mao in a green army jacket and red arm band. “We just need a graphic of Dad’s relaxed face seen from below, waving like a tyrant god and encircled by his subservient women.”
Yuxi wasn’t eating. Eve wasn’t hungry. Eugene dripped some au jus down his shirt front. Yuxi dipped her napkin in her water glass and sponged the stain.
Eve saw her chance. “Dad, can we talk about your long-term plans?”
Eugene wiped his mouth with his napkin. “Of course, honey. A lot is going on. Yuxi wants to start her own business. She can’t make enough money working at the massage parlor down the street, so we’re looking for a parlor to buy or rent. To legally work, she has to get a work card. She applied for one and should get it in August.”
Yuxi’s phone sang out. In Taiwan I worked as a masseuse. Before that I took care of olds.
“She gives great massages, anytime I want. She treats me like a king.” He looked at Yuxi like the proud owner of a dog that had just performed a trick.
“We drove down south yesterday and looked at a couple places. Two of them won’t rent to a massage business. The woman said that’s because there was a massage parlor there a few years ago and it was at the center of a prostitution ring. So we’re still looking.”
Yuxi scribbled characters on her phone and placed it in the center of the table. To open a massage parlor, you must work on your own and be able to capture some regular customers. If you have to rely entirely on others to make money, young girls will make things difficult for their bosses. Will be annoyed by employees.
Eve started this. She had set something in motion and hadn’t monitored its progress. She’d bought him a massage at a classy spa. She just wanted him to feel better. She pushed her plate away.
Yuxi frowned and cooed softly at her phone like it was an upset baby.
“Now listen,” Eugene leaned in and spoke behind his hand. “I haven’t forgotten about your mother. But I am still young, and I deserve another chance at happiness.”