Grace opened her bag and flipped through the manila folder of images she’d pulled off her wall and slipped out the photo, laying it on her lap so her father wouldn’t be able to see it in the rearview mirror. There was still a little Blu-Tack left on the back of it, just enough to make it stick. Bending down slowly and shaking her hair over her left shoulder so that it made a sort of shield, Grace reached over and stuck the picture onto the bottom edge of the car door. Its ’80s colors faded now, the canyon a sepia wash behind her mother’s buoyant perm and snakeskin cowboy boots, her father behind the camera, clicking her mother into place, making her always thirty-two years old, the pregnant fullness forever just fading from her cheeks.
A hand reached out to tuck Grace’s hair behind her ear. Startled, she moved her leg to hide the photo and glanced up, but it was just Ama, old Ama, who smoothed Grace’s hair down and looked at her with watery eyes, irises faded and pupils yellowed.
十一
Grand Canyon National Park, AZ
MOST PEOPLE THOUGHT May Lee died on a mule. That was the worst part of it. Once they heard that it happened at the Grand Canyon, half of them just assumed that a mule was involved.
Charles Wang hated mules. Ugly, whimpering, misbegotten creatures; infertile beasts of burden. The only people who still used mules for anything other than entertainment were the mujahideen and the Amish, both lost tribes fighting for the useless past. Still, Charles let the misconception stand. After all, he could hardly go around reminding people that the mother of his children had ended her days in a fiery helicopter crash and not stumbling off the edge of a cliff on the back of a dusty gray excuse for a steed.
In truth, May Lee never stumbled. She was light and graceful and sweet, and by the time she died, Charles was thoroughly tired of spending his life with her.
Before that trip to the Grand Canyon, right after little Gracie was born, Charles had visited his lawyer to discuss initiating a divorce, but he hadn’t gone through with it.
He and May Lee had been married for a little more than ten years, without a prenup.
When Charles bundled May Lee off to city hall just three months after they’d met, in a rush of lust and tenderness that he’d mistaken for true love, the word prenup wasn’t even in his lexicon. And California, in its infinite wisdom, was a community-property state, which meant that he would lose half of everything he’d made in the years they’d been together because he’d been misled by a lopsided dimple and a well-applied swoop of eyeliner.
Mischief.
That’s what he’d been promised, but instead he received a dim bulb of goodness and passivity; it was a trade that a lesser man might have seen as a victory, but Charles Wang knew that he didn’t want to live out his life with goodness.
But the babies! Oh, the babies!
Charles was a man who loved children. His were small and soft and beautiful—God help the ugly babies!—with chubby little arms that always reached out to him. They were encased in sweet rosy skin that looked so perfect, so smooth and unblemished, that he wanted to roll them up in bales of cotton fluff and stuff them down his shirt like a kangaroo. He wished they could stay hidden away, with their damp, trusting little mouths, until they developed some sort of hard shell impenetrable to drugs or sex or disappointment or any of the thousand poison-tipped arrows the world might aim in their direction.
He could never trust May Lee to take care of them half the time. Or more. Those shortsighted judges would likely have awarded her and her dimple more custody of the children, more money of his, even though she had remained as resolutely empty-headed as she was the day they’d met.
The mother of his children was a beautiful woman who took her beauty for granted, who modeled only because a photographer had walked into Joy Loy, her parents’ Little Tokyo chop suey joint, and seen her standing there behind the counter, ready.
And why did she marry him?
Because he’d walked up to her at a party full of surfer-blond waiters in tuxedo shirts and stonewashed jeans passing trays of Wolfgang Puck’s first attempt at smoked salmon pizza to beturbaned Grace Jones wannabes and held his hand out to her, May Lee Lu.
May Lee. It meant beautiful in Chinese, though most immigrants would spell her name Meili. But May’s parents were third-generation Chinatown babies who tried to give their daughter a name that would go both ways, and it did. It spoke to Charles, who was lost in a sea of Jennys and Donnas, and it rolled off the tongues of the photographers and agents who kissed her cheeks and tried to ply her with champagne cocktails.
Charles had looked at her, the only other Chinese person in the room, and thought he recognized something fundamental in her. A deep kinship. An abiding drive that had landed them both in this strange room, at this strange moment. A willingness to dive into the whole wide world.
And May Lee looked at him, the only other Chinese person in the room, and thought about how much easier life would be if she was married.
Charles and May Lee Wang went to the Grand Canyon eight short weeks after the birth of their third child in order to do all the things that white people do with their marriages.
Try to reconnect! (Hint: Eyes are the windows to the soul—have a sexy staring contest!)
Have romantic dinners! (Hint: Oysters are aphrodisiacs!)
Talk about your feelings! (Hint: Men love to solve problems—let them!)