The Wangs vs. the World(10)
She was supposed to be packing—“Quickly!” Charles had said, clapping his stubby hands together. “Quickly!”—but she didn’t feel like it. Barbra pulled out the little upholstered stool she’d always loved for its brass claw feet and sat down in front of the mirror. She closed her eyes and let the crisp 68° air settle into her skin, then raised her eyelids and held her own gaze for a long moment.
First, the forehead.
Good, still good. One thin line just barely etched across, just enough to show that she wasn’t using Botox.
The eyes. They’d always been too round, but now she skipped over that thought. The eyelids were beginning to look loose, but not so much that eye shadow disappeared in the folds. A few wrinkles on the edges and one curved line under her right eye because, though she had been trying for years, Barbra simply could not fall asleep unless she was lying on her right side. Cheekbones still high. Nose, same as always. Small and upturned. All those white women a generation older who went and got nose jobs that ended up looking like her own lamented-over nose made her laugh. How had that become their chosen shape? Her tiny little skull nose?
Her lips were undeniably starting to thin, and lipstick had started bleeding into the fine wrinkles that edged out from them on all sides like tiny tributaries of age, sapping her of the best semblance of youth.
And those naso-labial lines that dropped down either side of her nose and skipped a beat before continuing along the sides of her mouth, dragging it down into a disapproving bulldog frown. “What are you doing on my face?” she whispered at them.
Barbra placed her fingers gently on her hairline, encircling her forehead, and tugged up. Then she reached her thumbs down onto either side of her cheeks, softly, slowly, and pulled the skin back, stopping just before her nose began to splay out. There. This was the face she should be looking at. Like this, she looked better than young—she looked ageless.
“Ah bao! Are you almost done?” Charles called from the bedroom door. Barbra dropped her hands and the years came rushing back—five, ten, fifteen, twenty, until here she was again, a fifty-year-old woman married to a ruined man, sitting in a world that she had built up only to toss away again. Seeing her rumpled jawline reemerge, losing the image of her real, ageless self, was almost worse than knowing that she was going to lose the world she had put together so carefully. The venal optimism that had enabled her to immigrate to America and scoop up Charles and his almost empire as soon as she heard about the helicopter crash that killed his first wife was limited to desperate island girls with no fear or knowledge of the world.
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.
δΊ”
Bel-Air, CA
CHARLES’S CONVERSATION with Ama had been humiliating.
In the Mandarin that they shared: