The Wangs vs. the World (11 page)

“Daddy’s key not working. You just climb in the open window up there and open door from inside, okay?”

One long look from Grace, and then a smile that he wasn’t expecting. “Good one, Dad.”

“Not a joke, okay? Daddy too old to climb things, right?”

“Oh, no, I know, I don’t think it’s a joke. Just a good one,” she said, winking.

Teenagers were such a mystery. Parts of Saina and Andrew had turned unknowable in those years, too. There was a time when he thought that Saina might be someone else forever, back when she was entangled with that fiancé of hers. Grayson.

Charles shook his head. A terrible name. Cold and limp, followed by a diminutive. The son of something boring and colorless could only be even more boring and colorless, yet somehow his brilliant daughter had been taken in by him. It was true that the boy had been good-looking. Charles suspected sex was the lure, though he didn’t quite want to admit that to himself.

“Okay, I’m ready.” Grace had taken off her ridiculous fur vest and little boots, and slipped on a pair of those fabric shoes that Charles had noticed on the feet of more and more of his friends’ children recently. Ugly shoes, like the ones that poor people in China wore. “What if we pull the car over and I stand on the hood? I think I can boost myself up from there.”

She could, and now her head poked out the back door.

He’d never seen the warehouse so empty before. It was infuriating that someone would take hold of his business and sell it off in pieces instead of letting Charles turn it back around. Because he could. Even though Lehman Brothers filed Chapter 11 yesterday and interest rates were down to 2 percent, he could have turned it all back around because America still needed makeup. He knew, with the certitude of someone who had grown up calling this land across the Pacific
Mei Guo
—Beautiful Country—that, more than any other country, this was one that would never reject improvement. Even those signs along the freeway said it:
KEEP AMERICA BEAUTIFUL
. But the bank with its unimaginative managers had refused to see things his way. They’d rather pull down the entire country than believe in Charles Wang.

Shafts of streetlight filtered into the building through the dusty windows, giving off just enough of a glow for Charles to find the pile of boxes destined for Opelika.

“So why do we need these?”

“We make personal delivery.”

“Okay, but why these?”

Why these? Because it was one of the few orders he’d personally sold since his business had grown. Ellie and Trip were a glowing young couple that he’d met on a flight to New York. They’d been bumped up to business class and refused his offer to switch seats, instead including him in their enthusiasm over the warm mixed nuts and free mimosas. The pair were en route from one friend’s wedding in Malibu to another’s on Cape Cod. Afterwards, they were moving back to her Alabama hometown to open a new-school take on a traditional general store. Handmade clothes, vintage hoes, and whole grains. Enchanted by their entrepreneurial drive and soft southern accents, Charles found himself recounting his first flight to America—the nausea, the revelation in the bathroom, all of it.

“I come to America to get rich, and now I am!” he’d finished.

“So you came here for the American Dream!” said Ellie, pleased.

Charles had laughed. “Not only American Dream! Everybody, every country, have same dream! Al Gore think he invent Internet, America think they invent American Dream!” And then he found himself convincing them to develop a line of magnolia-scented lotions and candles. “Magnolia oil you get local, send to me, I do everything else, you sell and say ‘local magnolia’ and everybody will buy!” he’d enthused, imagining it as the beginning of a southern beauty empire for them, a surefire melding of gracious tradition and modern style. Pooh-poohing their lack of capital, Charles waived his minimums and promised that they could spread out their payments, that their orders could grow as their business grew.

He did it for that bubbling, champagne-in-the-veins high, that desire to be part of someone else’s new life, someone else’s realized potential.

Vampires must feel like that.

“Because I sell to them personally, and I make them spend all their money, so Daddy feel bad if they lose. Besides, we never go to Alabama before.”

“But couldn’t you just mail it?”

“Business is all about the personal.”

She looked at him, considering. “Okay, that’s a good lesson. I’ll remember it. Business is all about the personal.”

Love surged in Charles. Gracie wasn’t lost. Living away from home those two years hadn’t ruined her. Family was still family. “Good girl,
xiao bao,
” he said, reaching out to pat her on the head as she loaded the dolly with boxes.

Grace straightened up and smiled at him, then skipped ahead. She was taller, and she’d loosened up the prim, baby-doll manner she’d had as a girl, all quiet voice and shy eyes. It had been such a shock when Grace, at fourteen, ran away with a boy who flattered her into thinking he was in love with her, who tricked himself into thinking the same thing. A Japanese boy, no less, a fact that Charles felt was a betrayal of the entire nation of China and everything she had suffered at the hands of the Japanese soldiers. He would have expected that kind of treachery from Saina, maybe, but not of his youngest, a girl who had never so much as ordered a pizza on her own and still liked to be tucked in bed each night by Ama. She was fourteen and the boy was fifteen, so they didn’t get far; Saina had come home and tracked the wayward lovers to a family friend’s empty beach house in La Jolla. A new Gracie had ranted and raved and called it a Shakespearean tragedy; Saina had insisted that she was being more like silly Lydia Bennet, the runaway youngest daughter in
Pride and Prejudice,
than a Bel-Air Juliet; and Charles had privately lamented and rejoiced at the irresistible beauty of his daughters. But when Grace responded to his order that she never speak to the boy again by wailing at the dinner table every night and trying, again, to run away with him, Charles had packed her off to Cate, which, besides being the only boarding school he’d heard of in California, also used its feminine name to make him think at first that it was an all-girls school. A week into the semester, he missed Grace terribly and was increasingly upset that the school was coed, but by then it was too late to go back on his declarations.

But now here they all were again. Almost all. Charles pushed the last of the magnolia-scented lotion out through the back door and slammed it shut, testing the knob to make sure that the warehouse was locked against any other interlopers.

十三
I-10 East

EVERYBODY BUT BARBRA was on the phone. She alone had no one to notify, no one with whom to plot or commiserate. Her everyone was in the seat right next to her, driving with both hands on the wheel and a phone wedged to his ear, edging his shoulder away from her as if that would be enough to keep her from overhearing. Grace chattered to Andrew. Even Ama talked—shouted, actually, voice sharp, face animated—to a someone.

Barbra nudged her husband. “How are all the phones still on?”

He took a hand off the wheel to cover the mouthpiece, and whispered to her, “Not end of month yet.”

And once it was, what then? Would they just be cut off from civilization, left to languish in Saina’s house, relegated to the role of poor relations? Barbra closed her eyes and leaned her head against the cool pane of the window, letting the family’s conversations wash together. They alternately spoke and were quiet, listening to the people on the other end of their lines with an intensity that exhausted her, ratcheting up their voices with each response.

CHARLES
: That is all the names I have. What did they say?

AMA
:
Yi ding yao zuo fan la!

GRACE
: Yeah, I thought tonight too, but they think it’ll be too late—

AMA
:
Shei ne me xiao qi? Qian, wo gei qian!

GRACE
: Something Palms? Thirty-four Palms? Ninety-nine Palms?

CHARLES
: Of course. Everything good also is difficult. No, no matter—

GRACE:
Oh yeah, that’s it, Twenty-nine. So just tonight.

AMA
:
Hao le la, bu yao zai chao
. . .

CHARLES
: The money, don’t worry about.

GRACE
: Seriously? Who, like a bounty hunter?

CHARLES
: Enough for this.

GRACE
: And they just showed up?

CHARLES
: Okay, okay, I wait.

GRACE
: Oh my god, Andrew, really? They just took it?

AMA
:
Hao, wo men bu jiou jiou dao le. Xiao Danzi zen yang ah?

CHARLES
: Yes, I wait. You call me again when you have anything. Thank you.

GRACE
: Are you okay? Did they do anything to you?

AMA
:
Ne jiou hao le. Hao,
bye-bye.

GRACE
: What did you do?

GRACE
: (Laughing.)

GRACE
: But seriously, I can’t believe it happened like that. Dad said something about giving it back, but I thought it would be something . . . civilized, at least.

GRACE
: Yeah, okay. So we’ll see you tomorrow. God, lock your doors! Do you think they’re going to try to repossess your iPod or something?

GRACE
: (Laughing.)

GRACE
: Okay. Bye.

Barbra heard her stepdaughter sigh and, despite herself, felt a prick of worry for Andrew. “Grace? What happen to your brother? What are you talking about?”

Grace was quiet for a moment, then she searched out her father in the rearview mirror.

“Dad, Andrew said that a repo man came and took his car.”

Charles kept his eyes on the road.

“Did you know that was going to happen?”

Barbra watched her husband’s grip on the wheel tighten as he stared straight ahead. Then he shrugged, small.

“I don’t know, exactly.”

“But you knew that he had to give the car back. You
said.
”

Silence.

“What happened to the other cars? Babs, what happened?”

Barbra hadn’t taken her eyes off of Charles, but he didn’t seem to react to Grace’s question. Well, there was no reason she should be spared the truth. It could hardly have escaped her notice that she’d been pulled out of school, and soon they’d be bunking down in dingy motel rooms across America. She turned to face Grace.

“They were all repossessed last week. Your father didn’t want to ask Andrew to drive back home, so his was repossessed at school.”

“Daddy?”

Charles shrank into his collar. He really wasn’t going to reply. Nothing. In all the years of their marriage, in all the years since they’d met, really, Barbra’s admiration of Charles had never wavered. She respected the fact that he wasn’t an academic, someone with extant family money and a nearsighted squint; that he’d wrested a cosmetics empire out of the wilds of this foreign land. There had been a time, in the sex-soaked half decade that began their relationship, when the sight of him snapping a shirt straight before putting it on had been enough to send a weakening shot between her legs. But now, in the silence that sank into the pinpoints of the perforated leather upholstery, Barbra looked at Charles and felt curiously maternal. She had never even held a newborn before, but it must feel something like this, this urge to soften the world around him while simultaneously finding herself bewildered by the creature to whom she had once been so intimately connected.

Touching his arm, she pointed at a rapidly approaching In-N-Out sign, and said, low, “We should eat before we get there—we can’t ask her daughter to feed us all.” Charles turned towards her, grateful, and flicked on the right turn signal.

“Eh?” Ama called out.
“Ni yao jia you ah?”

“Wo men qu chi
In-N-Out,
hao ma?”
replied Charles.

“Bu bu bu, wo nu er yi jing zai zuo wan fan le.”

Oh, dinner at Ama’s daughter’s house
. Barbra couldn’t bear the thought. A casserole. A can of soup hastily heated in a dinged pot. An iceberg salad. Or, even worse, something that had been labored over and was still nearly inedible.

Chicken à la king. Beef stroganoff.

Any one of those horrid American cookbook concoctions that Ama’s daughter probably tried to solder together out of supermarket ingredients in her desert shack.

But Charles, dutiful to his Ama if nothing else, kept the car on the highway and didn’t even glance at the cluster of fast food joints as they zoomed past.

“Do we have to stay there?” asked Grace. “Like, for the night?”

Charles peered at her over his shoulder, trying to gauge his daughter’s tone. “Maybe we stay. Rest and leave early in the morning. Ama invited us, so it not so polite to refuse.”

Oh dear
. Barbra hadn’t even considered that possibility. Scratchy Kmart sheets and thin bars of soap. It would be a preview of every motel they were due to check into on this journey, probably with a desperately chugging swamp cooler dampening the hard carpet and sun-faded patches on the vulgar sofas. Back to a life she thought she’d left behind.

Grace said nothing, but Barbra could hear the girl shift in the backseat, and a moment later, she felt a pair of teenage knees jam themselves into her spine. May Lee’s daughter. That’s how Barbra thought of her sometimes. The last productive thing May Lee ever did. Saina felt like Charles’s daughter, and Andrew was a sort of free agent, sunny even in the aftermath of his mother’s death and strangely impervious to parenting. Grace was the one she had known from infancy and probably the one who came closest to her practical outlook on the world, but a polite distance always remained between the two of them.