The Wangs vs. the World(49)
Behind her, she could hear his oof and then a scrabble on the concrete as he struggled up after her.
He reached the door a step behind her and waved the beige key card in her face.
“Tell me what’s going on,” he said. “Are you just upset about things?”
“Don’t talk to me.” She snatched at the key. He pulled it away. She reached again and he did the same thing. This dance. She hated it. “Don’t make me do this now, Andrew. Please.”
Andrew relented and slid the card into the door. The adults lay huddled in one bed, two soft lumps, breathing too lightly to really be asleep. He headed towards the empty bed, tired now, and slipped in without bothering to change clothes or brush his teeth.
Andrew closed his eyes. He could hear Grace unzipping her suitcase, banging the lid against wall, storming into the bathroom and turning up the water. It was freezing in the room, the air conditioner anchored next to the door fanned gusts of cold air back and forth. Andrew burrowed himself into the pillows and pulled the scratchy coverlet up to his neck. He was just starting to drift off into sleep when Grace swiped a pillow out from the pile and tossed it onto the foot of the bed. She yanked the sheets out from under the mattress and got in, kicking her feet towards Andrew’s face.
He was disappointed. Andrew realized that he’d been looking forward to the familiar comfort of sharing physical space with someone who wasn’t going to drive him crazy with repressed desire, but Grace made it into a war instead. Her dirty feet were tucked under his pillow now, one grimy heel, blackened by running up to the room barefoot, inches away from his nose. He could smell them. They didn’t smell bad, really, just like a sweaty T-shirt left too long in the backseat of a car. Sharing a bed should have been like watching movies with his sisters when they were kids, before Saina left, before Grace was sent away, when they would all just pile together like puppies, Grace’s legs kicked across his lap, his head resting on Saina’s shoulder, Saina doling out snacks from their father’s stash: roasted melon seeds, walnut-studded date cakes wrapped in edible rice paper, little rolls of coin-shaped haw flakes, sticks of dried squid sandwiching a thin layer of black sesame. Andrew reached over and squeezed one of Grace’s toes, trying to be friendly. She thrashed out at the touch. Fine then. Andrew turned and pushed himself all the way to the very edge of the bed, pulling the sheets with him, making an empty tent between their two bodies.
二十二
I-10 East
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.