The Wangs vs. the World(11)

“Rong-rong,” she said, calling him by the pet name she’d given him when he was a downy little baby wrapped in a fur blanket, “it is good that we have daughters and that they have homes. I am going to go to my daughter’s house.”

“Oh, Ama, it’s nothing. We’ll be fine. But perhaps it would be best if you did go stay with Kathy for a little while. Until things blow over.”

“But I am an old woman, and I cannot get there on my own. I have the car you gave me, but I don’t drive it anymore.”

“Maybe Kathy can—”

“No, no, Kathy has too much work. You drive me, and then you are already on your way to your daughter’s house, too.”

And that was how she gave him the car, the powder-blue Mercedes station wagon he’d bought for his first wife when she’d gotten pregnant with Saina. It was the only car that hadn’t been repossessed because he’d sold it to Ama for a dollar sixteen years ago; she drove it once a fortnight to a mah-jongg game in the San Gabriel Valley.

And that was how she told him that she knew he’d lost everything and would be running into his own daughter’s reluctant arms. The worst part is that he’d known that she would turn over the old Merc, counted on it.

Charles couldn’t have been more embarrassed if he’d woken up to find that he’d regressed half a century and was sucking on her nipple again, a grown man in Armani trying to draw milk out of her wizened breast.





六

Bel-Air, CA


SO HERE THEY WERE, the three of them. Barbra, Charles, and his Ama. No longer so young.

And here was the car, a 1980 model, both bumpers intact, gleaming still from the weekly wash and wax that Jeffie, the gardener’s son, gave all the Wang family cars.

Cleaned more than she was ever driven, this car was a lady. Her cream-colored seats and sky-blue carpeting made her impractical for anything beyond a polite spin around the block or a tootle over to a neighborhood association meeting four estates down. She might, might consent to a weekend spree down the coast, provided an air-conditioned garage at a La Jolla villa was waiting on the other end. Even after nearly thirty years, her perforated leather interiors remained uncracked and the wood burl along her dash still shone. Her only blemish, really, was one little carpet stain, a resolute Angelyne pink, where Charles’s first wife, May Lee, had once let an open tube of lipstick melt in the bright white L.A. sun.

Never, not once, had the gears of her clockwork German engine been asked to cogitate on the notion of driving all the way across the country, rear end sagging with baggage, oil lines choked with cheap Valvoline. But, like the family, she suited herself to her circumstances.



Barbra lugged her own bags down the steps and waited for Charles to come open the back. He was behind her, grunting as he tried to lift the last of Ama’s suitcases—a matched pair of classic Vuitton wheelies that had also once belonged to May Lee—over the threshold. Barbra didn’t want to help. Let him do it. Ama shouldn’t even be here with them. How much was she still being paid, Barbra wondered, and for what?

It was early still. Seven thirty. The quiet time after the dawn joggers had put in their miles and just before the housekeepers started their long walk from the Sunset and Beverly Glen bus stop. A weathered white pickup full of gardeners and lawnmowers sputtered up the street, spewing exhaust onto the same topiaries that they watered and trimmed daily.

Housekeepers and gardeners, dog walkers and pool men, they were the front lines, the foot soldiers. Later would come the private Pilates instructors and the personal chefs, the assistants sent from the office to pick up a forgotten cuff link or script. A home theater consultant, a wine cellar specialist, a saltwater fish tank curator—necessities all.

Charles and Barbra had never understood their neighbors’ obsession with bringing services into the home. Why have some masseuse carry in a table when you could just go to the Four Seasons? Why open your life up to more strangers than you had to? Now, of course, there was no need to think about any of that. Luisa and Big Pano and Gordon and Rainie had all been let go, fired, weeks ago. Barbra hadn’t told them why. Let them think that she had finally turned into a crazy, demanding Westside wife, unsatisfied with Luisa’s immaculately ironed sheets and Gordon’s bright, abundant blooms, maybe even pathetically sure that her husband was eyeing Rainie’s swinging breasts. She was positive that they’d be rehired immediately, even in these unhappy times. She was equally certain that her former household help had already jointly developed some theory of the Wangs’ downfall, something scandalous and unflattering that would doubtless be pried out of them by each of their new employers.



The worst moment for Barbra and Charles was the reveal. The Reveal. That’s how she thought about it in the days after—like they were on one of those makeover shows, but instead of finding that their house was beautifully revamped, the hosts had removed their blindfolds and made their whole charmed life disappear.



“Why?” Barbra had asked.

“What why?”

“All our everything?”

At that moment the word our rankled. Charles had never had a problem with generosity—he’d cultivated a casual way of picking up the check before he’d even made his first million—but just then the way that his wife said our brought out something small and sour that he forced himself to swallow, along with the true word: Mine. Barbra had given nothing but her bullish charm to this family—she hadn’t made the money or borne the children or even decorated the house or cooked the food. He’d done the first, his dead first wife had done the second, and they’d hired people to do the rest. Nothing was our.