Stupid. How could Charles be so stupid? How could a man who’d made himself so wealthy be so stupid about finances? That was the one thing she’d never suspected of him. Everything else, but not that. She’d known for years that he was unfaithful, but as long as she never betrayed him with her knowledge, that was nothing they’d have to lose a house and a marriage over. She suspected that his factories were not as scrupulously safe as he claimed, but that wasn’t something that concerned her. She knew about his prejudices and knew that they probably extended rather further than he let on—especially about the native Taiwanese, especially about her own parents—but those were easy to indulge. Money made everything easy to indulge.
“Wang tai-tai, kuai yi dian la! Ni je me hai mei you kai shi shou yi fu? Mei shi jien le!” Ama shout-whispered as she appeared over Barbra’s shoulder in the mirror, a slash of coral lipstick under her beauty parlor perm.
“Yes, I know,” Barbra replied, staring back. “I’ll be ready in a moment.”
Ama, who had been Charles’s own wet nurse when he was a child, claimed that Barbra’s perfect Mandarin was too tainted with low-country squawk to understand, so in retaliation, Barbra spoke to her only in English, a language that the older woman barely spoke at all. It worked out perfectly well because Ama never wanted to hear Barbra’s replies to her faux-polite comments and commands anyway.
“Ah bao.” It was Charles. Talking to her in that vaguely disappointed tone that he’d used ever since he first came home and told her what had happened. As if she had been the one to let him down.
“I don’t need both of you here telling me what to do. I know, I know, only the important things.”
“Ah bao, we leaving soon.”
“Wo nu er zai deng wo men.”
Barbra burned inside. She didn’t care if Ama’s daughter was waiting for them. Her last moments in her dressing room and they refused to let her have a moment’s peace. She picked up a photo of herself and Charles at the dinner that Hermès sponsored for Saina’s last show in New York, the one with all those refugee women and scarves that had gotten Saina in so much trouble. They were turned towards each other, smiling, Charles’s eyes half hidden behind the giant Porsche Carrera frames that he’d insisted on getting when he started developing cataracts—how unfair that every middle-aged Asian man in glasses now gave the impression of looking vaguely like Kim Jong-il—her own eyes opened wide, still looking at him flirtatiously after all these years. Well. Maybe she’d feel that way again, but she doubted it would happen packed in an aging car with Ama, Grace, and dunce-headed Andrew.
五
Bel-Air, CA
CHARLES’S CONVERSATION with Ama had been humiliating.
In the Mandarin that they shared:
“Rong-rong,” she said, calling him by the pet name she’d given him when he was a downy little baby wrapped in a fur blanket, “it is good that we have daughters and that they have homes. I am going to go to my daughter’s house.”
“Oh, Ama, it’s nothing. We’ll be fine. But perhaps it would be best if you did go stay with Kathy for a little while. Until things blow over.”
“But I am an old woman, and I cannot get there on my own. I have the car you gave me, but I don’t drive it anymore.”
“Maybe Kathy can—”
“No, no, Kathy has too much work. You drive me, and then you are already on your way to your daughter’s house, too.”
And that was how she gave him the car, the powder-blue Mercedes station wagon he’d bought for his first wife when she’d gotten pregnant with Saina. It was the only car that hadn’t been repossessed because he’d sold it to Ama for a dollar sixteen years ago; she drove it once a fortnight to a mah-jongg game in the San Gabriel Valley.
And that was how she told him that she knew he’d lost everything and would be running into his own daughter’s reluctant arms. The worst part is that he’d known that she would turn over the old Merc, counted on it.
Charles couldn’t have been more embarrassed if he’d woken up to find that he’d regressed half a century and was sucking on her nipple again, a grown man in Armani trying to draw milk out of her wizened breast.
六
Bel-Air, CA
SO HERE THEY WERE, the three of them. Barbra, Charles, and his Ama. No longer so young.
And here was the car, a 1980 model, both bumpers intact, gleaming still from the weekly wash and wax that Jeffie, the gardener’s son, gave all the Wang family cars.
Cleaned more than she was ever driven, this car was a lady. Her cream-colored seats and sky-blue carpeting made her impractical for anything beyond a polite spin around the block or a tootle over to a neighborhood association meeting four estates down. She might, might consent to a weekend spree down the coast, provided an air-conditioned garage at a La Jolla villa was waiting on the other end. Even after nearly thirty years, her perforated leather interiors remained uncracked and the wood burl along her dash still shone. Her only blemish, really, was one little carpet stain, a resolute Angelyne pink, where Charles’s first wife, May Lee, had once let an open tube of lipstick melt in the bright white L.A. sun.
Never, not once, had the gears of her clockwork German engine been asked to cogitate on the notion of driving all the way across the country, rear end sagging with baggage, oil lines choked with cheap Valvoline. But, like the family, she suited herself to her circumstances.