JUST THREE DAYS on the road and already her powder-blue exterior was covered in a thin veil of drab dust that made her look grimy and uncared for. Across her windshield, a smattering of bugs. Squished into the tread of her tires: gravel, garbage, gum. On her roof, an avian bomb site with white splatters ringing shrapnel turds. And hitched to her lovely chrome bumper, a horrible box on wheels, so heavy that it pulled at her screws, loosening them thread by thread.
Gone were the days of May Lee and her neat, gloved hands steering the two of them through the palm-lined streets of Beverly Hills. Gone, even, were the days of conveying Ama, who drove as if she were in a wrestling match, all the way to the San Gabriel Valley via an interminable series of surface streets. Gone was the gardener’s son, who had washed and polished her along with all the other cars, and never mind that she wasn’t used nearly as often.
Inside, things were even worse.
Charles, knees akimbo, farting constantly into the upholstery, was always in her driver’s seat. He had stuffed her door pocket full of ancient maps that must trace their way across some forgotten America and was constantly jamming his giant sunglasses into her visor, where they’d fall and hit him on the head over and over again.
Behind him was Andrew, so much bigger now than when he’d last been in that same seat. He scrubbed at her lovely carpet with his dirty sneakered feet and scattered bits of paper inked all over with nonsensical notes. And every time, as soon as he got inside, he placed his metal-cased phone directly on her seat, not caring that the little devil box got hotter and hotter as he continued to use it.
Next to Andrew, in her right rear seat, was the worst of all—his little sister, Grace. The girl was the one who started the abuse, using some sort of tacky blue substance to stick torn magazine pages onto her pristine doors and mashing the glue right into the holes in her perforated leather upholstery. It would probably never come out, even if by some miracle Jeffie reappeared and took a needle to it, as he once had when a baby Andrew spilled his bottle of formula across her entire rear flank.
She supposed that they had to make a home out of her somehow. That they—
Wait. She had almost forgotten what was in the front passenger seat clouding her air with some sort of cloying scent: the interloper, the carpetbagger, the stepmother. The one self-named Barbra, who had covered her window with a scarf, though a bit of darkening in the sun could only have improved that ugly face.
This was her lot now. Disgrace, meted out in asphalt miles. Her engine shuddered once, twice, but, ever loyal, she continued eastward, onward, always forward, with Charles’s heavy foot depressing her gas pedal and draining her insides.
二十三
I-10 East
“KAI CHE bu yao ting dian hua,” said Barbra.
Charles ignored her and stabbed at the voicemail button on his phone. He wasn’t a child. He could hold a phone and drive at the same time. He could eat and drive, read the paper and drive, shave and drive. He could even pat his head and rub his belly at the same time, something that used to send Andrew and Grace into shrieks of laughter when they were little, though he wasn’t sure why the activity was in such high demand.
The first message: “Hello, Charles, hello.” (Pause.) “It’s Lydia. Grant spoke to me, I’m very sorry to hear about your company’s (pause) difficulties. I do hope it hasn’t been too (pause) difficult for the family. And I hope that we’ll see you and your wife next week at our fall dinner.” (Pause.) “And I’d like to thank you for your generous support of the Gardens over the years, and your continued generous support. It’s very kind.” (Pause.) “OkaywellIhopethewholefamily’sdoingwellgoodbyenowgoodbye.”
Oh, the anxious, aging wives of his white business associates, fingers weighted down with diamonds, constantly tittering on about how busy they were with this committee meeting and that school event, all the while shedding pretty tears for dark-skinned children in distant countries. Charles loved being around them. They flattered him like concubines, wheedling checks for orphans in Burma or wells in Namibia, angling for ever-larger donations of cosmetics to put on the block at one of the endless silent auctions for their children’s private schools. Nothing made him feel better than tossing off a check that elicited a breathy gasp of pleasure from one of the wives. Charles remembered the one he’d written for Liddy’s dinner. $5,000 a plate. $10,000 for Barbra and him. Well, someone else was going to eat his share of ahi poke or steak roulade or summer trifle or whatever the absurdly fashionable food of the moment happened to be.