The Wangs vs. the World (32 page)

Barbra threw aside her sheet and slid out of bed. The thing was to do everything before Grace woke up, before Charles returned. Her leaving should be presented as a fait accompli rather than a matter up for debate. She tiptoed over to the closet and pulled out her packed suitcase. Rather than risk waking Grace up with the sound of the zippers, she changed into yesterday’s clothes, still hanging on the back of a chair, and piled her pajamas on top of the leather case.

She edged around Grace’s bed and closed the bathroom door behind her softly. Yes. This was the thing to do. The best thing. The only thing. Charles didn’t deserve to have her stay. In a calm, cold rage, Barbra pulled the face wash out of her cosmetics bag and squirted some into her hand, dabbed dots of it on her forehead, cheeks, chin, then worked it into a bubbly lather before splashing her face with water again. An angry swipe of the rough towel that hung from the rack—Orange! Even this ugly motel should know better than to buy orange towels!—that she tempered with softer pats, mindful of the collagen she must try to preserve. Automatically, she reached for the heavy green jar of face cream and unscrewed it, enjoying, despite her anger, the cool weight of the lid in her hand. She looked at herself in the mirror as she dipped a finger into the thick white lotion and tapped it gently under each eye, impatient as she waited for it to soak into her skin. Her skin looked sallow and dull in the unflattering light, but she knew that as soon as she smoothed on a coat of foundation her face would glow as much as it could for a forty-nine-year-old woman—fifty, she was fifty now—who had spent the last sixteen years in a city that worshipped the sun. After that, the thinnest trace of eyeliner, just enough to make her eyes a little less round, then a few coats of mascara and a quick brush of her eyebrows, tweezer ready to eradicate any errant hairs. Last would come the lipstick, a holdover from the Failure that she had snuck out of the trash can—after all, a woman couldn’t change her lipstick color based on the state of her husband’s business ventures. And that would be it. Her face.

Every morning she did this, every single day of her life.

And every night, every single night of her life, she washed it all off. Only to put it all back on again the next morning.

She could do it with her eyes closed. She could do it while she planned the best way to leave her husband.

It was all so ephemeral. And this was what Charles had dedicated his life to. Makeup. It was enough to make her weep. She had thought, often, about the fact that he had chosen her unbeautiful self to be his wife. Of course, she’d made up for it by figuring out how to look expensive, which, in her estimation, was much more of an accomplishment. Never mind the charms with which you were born, what mattered most was your willingness to put in the effort.

Oh, Charles
. At their best, they had talked to each other endlessly, never running out of opinions and observations about the alien world around them.
Where had that man gone?

Barbra uncapped her lipstick, feeling reassured by the familiar red of it. She turned the bottom of the tube and concentrated as the tip emerged. Already she could smell the rose-scented perfume embedded in that creamy stick; it got stronger as she lifted it towards her face and carefully traced the thin lines of her mouth, bringing herself into focus.

And then just like that, with a smack of her own red lips, Charles reclaimed his place. Barbra cursed. She had given her heart to Charles Wang, and no matter what, she couldn’t take it back.

三十三
I-85 North

SHE WAS SO TIRED. And hot. Hot enough to melt, they used to say, and now it was true. Whoever thought the California sun was relentless never wheeled through miles of Texas desert, nothing but giant cacti on either side, nowhere a shady stretch or a wayward sprinkler. All around was sand, just sand, a few degrees away from melting into glass. And they had never rolled out of that desert, astonished at their continued existence, only to find themselves in the unforgiving humidity of the American South.

Nobody even pretended to love her anymore.

Andrew was gone, his seat empty. Where did he go? Why didn’t he come back? Why had they left without him? No one spoke of it, just poured gas into her belly and pointed her east, so that she had no choice but to leave him behind. Now it was only Grace in the backseat, dirty bare feet scrubbing against the mat like a street urchin’s.

She could feel the rust building up behind her wheel wells—invisible now, but if it went untended, the corrosive brown would bloom across the caverns and there would be no stopping it. These were the things that led lesser vehicles to ruin. The slow, steady wearing away of a body. Unless you were made of plastic—
that
never withered. It cracked, cheap, and clattered off.

The Barbra still wasn’t talking. The Barbra seemed different today. She moved her seat forward, granting Grace an extra half inch of precious space. The scarf was still wedged into her window frame, but the Barbra let it flutter, its soft fabric brushing her hot glass. Strangest of all, the woman leaned ever so slightly, almost unnoticeably, into Charles. Grace didn’t even look up. What was the point of Grace? The Barbra leaned and Charles, always ready to be adored, canted his body towards the Barbra, a grateful puppy, tongue lolling in the perfumed breeze. Men! So simple! Withhold a thing and it becomes instantly desirable.

The Barbra reached one spider arm up and draped it across Charles’s shoulders, wedging a hand between his neck and the headrest until the sharp edges of the cursed woman’s diamond rings dug into her plush seat and then, without warning, the hand began to undulate, kneading, pressing, prodding, into Charles’s neck, and Charles dipped his head forward, fluttering his eyes. It was disgusting. An obscenity. Flesh and blood might be different from metal and glass, but this was a display as brazen as a twenty-four-karat-gold gearshift.

She shuddered.

She swerved.

And, a moment too late, remembering Grace in the backseat, she tried to catch herself. There was no time. The rings kept digging against her soft parts, and the road just slipped out from under her.

A ribbon, loose, spooling away.

She could feel her bolts tighten in their holes and then:
Boom. Crash
. Done.

三十四
High Point, NC

2,911 Miles

A SICKENING SPIN
.

Grace looked up, confused.

Spinning backwards. Spinning sideways.

She gripped the door handle.

Infinitely slow.

Her right leg flung itself skyward until it was stopped by the door itself.

Out of time.

Grace slid sideways. Her neck arced back and her head knocked against the seat, ping-ponging weightlessly.

Airborne. Up, above the gravel on the shoulder, nose down and rear up.

Her face was knocked against the window and her eyes were open. She seemed to be upside down. It was green outside. It sounded like they were underwater. It felt as if she were a necklace in a gift box all padded with cotton. Why would she think something like that? She was so weird sometimes.

A crunch, a scream, a bright, shrill shattering of glass.

And then everything slammed back to earth and sped up faster, faster, faster, and Grace was bracing her feet against the seat in front of her even though it was above her now, and an arm, her own arm, was flung violently in front of her face, luckily shielding her eyes against a hailstorm of glass shards, and she was waiting, every nerve in her body lit up, waiting for the spinning to end, because it had to end; accidents always ended, no matter how bad they were.

Mom,
she thought, said, screamed. “Mom!”

Stillness.

Then, “Grace! Gracie!”

For a too-brief angels-and-rainbows-and-unicorns sort of second, she thought that maybe it really was her mother, watching over her, or that maybe she was dead now, and there actually was an afterlife. But, of course, it was her father.

“Bu yao hai pa! Baba gen ni yi qi!”

“Me, too. I’m here.”

三十五
Helios, NY

SAINA BREATHED IN, nervous. Leo’s truck windows were rolled down, and a recent bout of summer rain made everything smell like warm asphalt; the grass and trees were green in that vibrant way that happened only in the East Coast gloom. They sped by, a verdant mass, as Leo gunned past a vintage truck. This would be her first public appearance since she’d holed up in the Catskills, and Saina wanted to do it as much as she didn’t.

“Don’t think of it as being in hiding,” said Leo. “Think of it as a hiatus. Now you’re ready to get back in the ring.”

“How did you know?”

“Because I know you, Saina. And I know that you’re not going to stay up here and perfect your house forever. And these Bard kids, they’re gonna love you.”

She felt warm. Seen. And a little bit indignant.

“Hey, Saina.”

“Yeah?”

“How come you never talk about your mom?”

“What? Why bring this up now?”

“I’ve been thinking about it. And you don’t let me in, always.” He smiled a big flash of a smile at her. “Sometimes I have to stage an emotional sneak attack.”

Saina looked out the window. “You know, when I first moved up here, this lady at the hardware store told me that I shouldn’t even
think
about planting until the leaves on the trees were as big as squirrel’s ears.”

“Why don’t you talk about her? And that’s true, by the way.”

“Isn’t that just so country? Sometimes people are exactly who you secretly hope they’ll be.”

Leo took his hand off the gearshift and placed it on her knee.

“Do you think about her? You must. I don’t have a single memory of my mother, my birth mother. All I have is a picture, and I still think about her all the time.”

“There’s a picture?”

“Yeah, it was some Little Orphan Annie shit. A picture of her holding me as a baby. Or, you know, a picture of some black lady holding a fat little kid.”

“All the time?”

“Huh?”

“You still think about her all the time?”

“Oh. Yeah. I guess that’s something I’ve never talked about.”

“See? Do you still have the picture?”

He shook his head.

“What happened to it?”

Leo cursed as the car in front of them hit the brakes.

“I don’t really know. That house was chaos—no one could keep anything. Every time I saved up a bunch of coins in a jar, someone would break into it and say they needed twenty bucks for a phone bill or something.”

“You think the picture of your mom got sold down the river?”

“Pretty much.”

There wasn’t usually any traffic on this route. Unless there was a thunderstorm. Then the Volvos and Subarus piled up in hatchbacked bunches and every stand of trees looked like it could be home to the Headless Horseman. But today was clear after the recent rain, and the glut of vehicles on the county road made no sense.

“You really don’t remember anything about her?”

“No, stop. You don’t get to distract me with questions about mine. I asked you.”

Saina tried. “It’s true, I
don’t
talk about her a lot. I don’t know. There’s not a lot to say.” She searched for something. “A friend of mine, she lost her mom at around the same time, when she was thirteen. She said the only true thing I’ve ever heard anyone say about their mom dying. We were . . . I don’t know, it’s weird. I think we were laughing about something. We were trying to joke about it, because that’s what nobody else ever does, right? And then she looked up at me, and said, ‘That bitch just keeps on dying.’”

Leo laughed, a low, sardonic guff of it. “Mine, too. Fucking bitches.”

Saina leaned over the gearshift and brushed her cheek against his shoulder, soft as a cat. Sometimes she forgot that Leo was an orphan. It was enough to make her cry. Or to make her want to have babies with him so that he’d have someone of his own, a little somebody who might have his big, sweet eyes, his crooked hairline, his easy smile. Leo had grown up looking only like himself, while Saina didn’t just have a father who gestured and stood exactly like she did and memories of a mother and two infuriating, adorable siblings, she had a whole giant country, a billion potential family members to love and loathe and claim as her own because the Wang bloodlines were traceable backwards and forwards, if she cared to search them out. She nudged her head into his armpit, digging it against his soft plaid shirt, and said: “Come in.”

He kissed the top of her head and they sat like that, quiet, idling at a red light, until Saina raised her eyebrows and Leo grinned in recognition and swerved down a side street just a few blocks from the warehouse where Bard’s final MFA show would be held. Without speaking, they opened their doors and, half a second later, collided in the backseat.

“Can people see us?” asked Leo.

“Who cares?”

“The guy who could be mistaken for a rapist cares.”

Saina swung one leg over him and ran her hands across his shoulders. “I think the consensual nature of our union is pretty clear.” She tugged on his belt buckle.

“Do you remember the first time we kissed?”

She nodded, still struggling with his buckle. “At your place.” Why did guys always belt themselves in so tightly? This must be what it was like to have no curves.

“Hey! I’m trying to be romantic here!” he said.

He swiped a knuckle over her lips and she caught it lightly between her teeth. Released it. “I’m just trying to get some. Boys are so sentimental.”

“Oh yeah?” In one practiced move, he’d opened his jeans and thumbed her underwear aside.

“Yeah.” She smiled down at him, feeling her lids flutter shut as he positioned her hips, the zipper of his jeans digging against her ass until they moved into each other.

One of the things Saina liked most about sex was that it made her
feel
sexy. As if she could see herself through the soft blur of a Vaseline-smeared lens, back arched, boudoir hair a fetching mess. A vintage
Playboy
version of sex. Smut with a smile.