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.