In the booth across from me, Yuxi’s formerly straight, black hair was now curled and dyed a cherry cola color. Beside her, Dad wore a new sweater and had combed his silver hair. He still had the dumpy good looks of a long-retired movie star.
“Hi hi,” Yuxi said.
Nice to meet you, I typed in my phone. I tapped the audio symbol and it translated aloud in Mandarin. The app’s voice was clear, female, pleasant.
“Xièxiè,” Yuxi smiled and dipped her head. A server slid menus to us like a card sharp. Yuxi glanced at it. Disdainfully, I thought, but what did I know about her or her preferences?
“She doesn’t like eating out,” Dad 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.”
How are you, I typed. I was trying. He looked really happy. And that filled me with hope, and lifted an accusatory weight off my chest. Yuxi scrawled characters on her phone screen with a fingertip and held it up. My life is glorious.
“I think she likes me,” Dad said, grinning. He patted Yuxi’s hand on the tabletop.
“You mommy,” Yuxi said. She plucked at her clothes and lifted the hem of her sweater.
“What?”
“You mommy.” Underneath the sweater was a shirt that had belonged to my mother.
“She’s learning English,” Dad said.
It was a cheap, striped cotton shirt, laundered it to dullness. Mom wore it all the time. At some point she had just stopped buying new clothes.
Yuxi spoke into her phone in Mandarin and held it out to me. I am wearing your mother’s clothes and shoes.
“She altered them,” Dad said. “She’s so talented and resourceful. She never wants to spend money.”
It was preposterous, that shirt on a stranger. It had seemed evacuated of her, but now filled with someone else that warm, inalienable essence seemed to evaporate, to flee. I was startled. No no no, said the child in me. But I was grown, and now was not the time.
In Taiwan I worked as a tailor. In Taiwan I worked as a tailor. I nodded and smiled. Maybe she thought by playing it twice I would understand it better.
All clothes can be changed, said the voice optimistically. Yuxi laughed. She laughed a lot. She seemed happy. Joyful. I was scrutinizing her, she must sense that. Apparently, my dad made her happy.
Dad had asked Cassie and me if we wanted anything of hers before he hauled it all away. Cassie wanted the oil portrait I’d painted of her in a kimono as a teenager. Other than that, we took the two Japanese silk kimonos, a gift from her father, and a few pieces of her mother’s jewelry, which weren’t really wearable pieces and had an overwrought, Victorian heft. I claimed the garnets and Cassie got the amethysts and we agreed to exchange them every few years.
Dad was studying the menu. He couldn’t hear very well or move very fast these days, and tennis was out of the question. But his skin was still remarkably smooth and wrinkle-free. He had known Yuxi all of three months. And where had he met her? Getting a massage. Her name was pronounced you-she. In the picture he showed us, Yuxi was a petite Asian woman wearing hot-pink satin pajamas. The picture was taken in his living room, I saw the couch in the background. She was smiling and making double bunny ears. He said they were in love. It’s been two years, he said, I deserve another chance at happiness. And he did, of course he did. So, I would try. I’d make an effort, go to lunch, translate Mandarin, try to understand. Try not to judge. I could be stoic. Ride the wave. If Cassie were here, she would make a scene.
The server returned to take our orders. Yuxi hovered her phone over the lunch menu to translate it and Dad pointed out suggestions. She frowned and shook her head. This restaurant had been one of Mom’s spots. It was called Colophon because it was attached to a bookstore. Dad called it coliform, like the gut bacteria. Mom liked bland food. A soup and sandwich gal. Dad was a creature of habit.
He finally ordered a salad with shrimp and sesame dressing for Yuxi and the server left.
“Honey, how’s work?” he asked me.
I knew to answer simply and without too much detail. That’s how he 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,” Dad dictated into his phone and the app translated. Yuxi nodded again and began typing. I was growing impatient. There were a lot of things to say. But the simplest things took ages to communicate.
“Dad, I don’t work for China,” I began, but Yuxi’s phone interrupted me.
What is that rash on your neck?
I clapped a hand below my right ear, where I had recently noticed an inflamed patch of skin.
I will give you tea to help cool and detoxify.
That’s very thoughtful, thank you, I typed. I’d read that rashes were stress-related.
Yuxi bowed her head and said, “xièxiè, sankoo,” and began tapping at her phone. Dad tapped at his phone. I picked mine up and typed works for China. Words appeared, wéi zhōngguó gōngzuò. I copied that and translated it back to English. It read: we are still young. This was madness. Dad didn’t speak a word of Mandarin. He still talked about the one overseas trip he took for work almost forty years ago, to Shenzhen.
I set my phone screen-down on the tabletop. The food arrived, and I took a few bites of bland sandwich. Yuxi picked at her shrimp with her fork. I actually worked for an education company based in Shanghai, teaching students painting over live video, but this hardly seemed worth explaining now.
The things I needed to say would have to wait. Tell him we have no money, said Cassie’s voice in my ear, like, negative money. We can’t help him.
We were worried; me, Cassie and our brother Roman. Dad was thoughtless with money, what little he had. And he was at that age. An easy target.
Now, I recalled the science-fiction thriller he wrote in the months after Mom died. He didn’t know what to do with himself. He was grieving. He took long drives, bought things we weren’t sure he could afford. It was like watching a teenager lurch from hobby to hobby, while you pray they don’t stumble into something irrevocable. Dad had asked us to read it. 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. There, he crosses paths with a sensationally sexy Chinese astrophysicist. Competing researchers antagonize him and he’s surveilled by the CIA. Henry flees with the astrophysicist to Switzerland, where he buys a nice watch and surrenders his findings to CERN for the good of all.
“I’m not trying to publish it or anything,” he’d said. There was a racy scene that took place on a cot in the garage. That should have told me what was coming.
“Dad, we’d like talk to you about your plans. Long-term. Can we do that sometime?”
He picked up a napkin and wiped his mouth. “Of course, honey. There’s a lot happening. Yuxi wants to start her own business. She can’t make enough working at the massage parlor down the street. So we are looking for a parlor to buy or rent.”
In Taiwan I worked as a masseuse.
“Yuxi gives a great massage. She treats me like a king.”
In Taiwan I worked as a masseuse.
“We drove down south yesterday and looked at a couple places. Two of the places 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.
This was my fault, in a way. I bought Dad a gift certificate for a massage at a classy spa in town. I thought he needed something nice. I thought he needed to relax. He liked it so much, he became a regular. He started going to massage places all over town, parlors he called them, then driving out of the city to other parlors.