She took her hand back and folded it neatly in her lap. With any luck, Charles would forget this birthday. Barbra couldn’t bear the thought of a makeshift celebration, cheeseburgers and a bottle of cheap champagne. The children probably remembered, but neither of them had said a word; it was unlikely that they would do any more than whisper about it to each other. Besides, tonight there was witless Andrew’s comedy performance. Barbra wondered if she could claim a headache and stay in the hotel room, which would, at the very least, be air-conditioned. And quiet.
“How come ‘You Don’t Bring Me Flowers,’” she heard Andrew say to Grace in the backseat, quiet.
Barbra suppressed a sigh.
After a moment, Grace gave in, and replied, “Because ‘A House Is Not a Home.’”
“Oh! You know what we’re heading towards? A ‘New York State of Mind.’”
A pause from Grace. “But what about ‘The Way We Were’?”
“‘Send in the Clowns,’” whispered Andrew, hushing Grace when she giggled.
This juvenile game. They thought she didn’t understand it, that after all this time she was still too fresh off the boat to know that they were mocking her, but they were wrong. Saina, of course, had been the one to start it.
“You spell it B-A-R-B-R-A?” she’d asked, surprised. “Like Barbra Streisand?”
“Yes, from Streisand-u,” Barbra had replied, hoping that Saina wouldn’t ask any other questions. In truth, it was the first American name that had sprung to mind when she’d purchased her one-way ticket to Los Angeles from a uniformed girl her own age at the China Airlines office jammed between the noodle shops on Zhongshan Road in Taipei. The night before, when she was still Hu Yue Ling, she’d attended a university showing of The Way We Were and dreamed of Charles as Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford fell in and out of love on-screen. As she shuffled out with the crowd, crumpling up her package of shrimp chips, the boy in front of her said to his friend, “Well, Streisand-u is definitely ugly enough.” It had surprised her. Somehow you didn’t notice that she was ugly unless it was pointed out to you, ugly and determined, which Barbra herself found infinitely reassuring. Ugly, determined, and rich. A worthy namesake.
But Saina, of course, hadn’t seen it that way. “You named yourself after Barbra Streisand??” she’d asked, incredulous. “But can you sing? Or are you just a total fan or something? I mean, Barbra Streisand? That is so weird.” Barbra had watched the words come out of her stepdaughter’s perfectly glossed young lips, which rested underneath an aquiline nose that gave her a faintly Native American air, as if Saina were descended from some noble, nearly extinct tribe rather than two crooked branches of a billion-person Chinese tree. It would have been unthinkable to tell that hateful little beauty that she had chosen the name because she admired the singer’s apparent disregard of her own odd looks, so in the end, Barbra had merely shrugged, and said, “Good English practice.” Except at the time it had probably sounded more like “Good-u Eng-u-reesh pu-lac-u-tis-u.” And now it seemed like the sum of her sixteen years in America was her hard-won ability to say that sentence flawlessly. Nothing more. And sometimes not even that.
For a minute, Barbra was deaf to Andrew and Grace’s backseat mockery as her own anger pulsed and swelled, threatening to blow out the windows of the ancient car.
One must do something with one’s life, so she had done this, and now, even though it was all falling apart, it could not be undone. Charles. She couldn’t take another minute of Charles. Barbra sat like this, in a private stew of rage and regret, frozen in place by blasts of air-conditioning and her own lying face until they pulled up to a W hotel.
“What are we doing here?” asked Grace. “Aren’t we supposed to be poor?”
Charles laughed, uncomfortable. “I figure out that I still have some hotel point left that not part of credit card, so we come here for special occasion.” He said all of this towards Barbra, voice hopeful, but didn’t have the courage to look into her eyes or touch her shoulder.
“Guys! Can we get a move on? Um, does anyone want to come with me?” said Andrew.
“I’m coming!”
“Oh, Grace. I’m sorry, I just checked, it’s twenty-one and over. You can’t come.”
“That’s so unfair! What if you were headlining? You wouldn’t be able to bring your kids?”
“I don’t know,” said Andrew, who never knew anything. “I guess not. But I really have to go, like right now.”
Barbra finally turned to Charles. “Wo qu. Ni ying gai pei Grace zai lu guan.”
Not what he was expecting, she thought triumphantly. He tried to look mischievous as he said, “Ke shi wo shi xiang wo men ke yi . . .”
Barbra shook her head, an emphatic no. As if she would even consider having sex with him at this moment. It would have been pathetic, sprawled on the coverlet of this midrange hotel, clothes tossed atop the children’s luggage, groping at each other’s flaccid bodies as some sort of nod to her birthday. Absolutely not.
“I will go with Andrew,” she said again, this time for the children’s benefit. “You stay, keep Grace company.”
“I don’t need a babysitter,” said Grace, as Barbra had known she would.
“I’m not babysitter; I am Daddy!” said Charles, as Barbra had known he would.
And Andrew, of course, had no choice but to acquiesce and they drove off, leaving Charles and Grace in the lobby on either side of a giant white chair.