The Wangs vs. the World(5)
“Everything. Now we come to New York.”
Her father’s English sounded more broken than usual. Not that he’d ever bothered to perfect it in the first place—the rules of grammar were beneath him, bylaws for a silly club that he had no intention of joining. Why should he spend any energy on English, he’d explained once, when soon the whole world would be speaking Chinese? Now, though, he sounded like a sweet-’n’-sour-chicken delivery boy who’d missed out on America and instead taken up residence in a new country called Chinatown.
“What do you mean you’re coming to New York?”
“We have no home, Jiejie. We come live with you now.”
“The house? But why was that tied up with everything else? I just . . . Baba, I don’t understand. How could there be nothing left? What about your savings? What about your other clients?”
There was a long, humid silence. Finally, he spoke again. “Daddy make a mistake. I think that if I can just hold on for long enough, then everything is okay again. So I just throw it all in, like throwing in a hole.”
“Oh. Daddy. I’m sorry.”
“No point in sorry now.”
“Okay.” What should she do? What could she do?
“How long it take to drive across country? Maybe eight day? Ten day?” He sounded small. Wounded.
Saina looked around her house, panic creeping in. It wasn’t even a house, really. Not in any way that her father would understand or approve of. Not a Bel-Air Georgian or a rehabbed modernist gem—not even a downtown New York loft. It was a Catskills farmhouse three generations away from any kind of respectability perched on the edge of a town abandoned by Lubavitchers and just beginning to be occupied by weekending gay couples and Third Wave farmers carrying blue-eyed babies in batik slings.
When Saina sold her New York apartment out from under her cheating boyfriend, all she could think of was retreat. Their entire bright white loft had been arranged around a slightly hysterical pair of Biedermeier chairs that they bought at an auction back when he still thought it was important to suggest that his family had as much ready cash as hers. The pair, scallop edged and velvet upholstered, held court in front of a twenty-two-foot-high blank wall that backdropped his confession about Sabrina. Lovely, pregnant Sabrina. He’d whispered it to Saina, whispered it, and then tiptoed out the door like a thief.
Her first thought was that she’d always hated those chairs. Her second thought was that all the letters of her name were contained in Sabrina’s, as if Sabrina encompassed everything that she herself was and then, in all her goldness, offered up even more.
Saina couldn’t do anything to Sabrina and her maybe baby, so she’d gotten rid of the chairs instead. Just picked them up and placed them on the curb, where they’d at least have the chance to become part of someone else’s good-luck story. Soon, though, she couldn’t even stand looking at the empty wall where they once were; she started to wish them back, to wish him back. It hadn’t been enough to cast out the only piece of furniture they’d ever bought together, she had to strike the entire set on which they’d acted out their lives. So Saina had sold the whole damn thing and now here she was, manufacturing domestic bliss all by herself. Except. Well, except.
“Baba, really? All of you? What about Meimei gen Didi?”
“Daddy will go pick them up.”
“You’re going to make them drop out of school? You can’t do that!”
“What are they learning in those schools anyway? Arizona State. Not even a school—party school only. And Gracie, she can go to high school in your town. They have high school there?”
“But what about their tuitions? They should be okay for at least the semester, right?”
He was quiet.
Saina had a terrible thought. “Is everyone’s money lost?”
“Not you,” said her father. “You are old enough to be separate.”
At least there was that. But with it came an unexpected sensation: Responsibility. Saina’s instinct was to abdicate it.
“I’ll give the money all to you! It’s not mine anyways, it’s yours, you made it! Take it and buy another house.”
Her father laughed.
“You old enough to be separate, but it is all Wang?jia de already. All of ours. Family, Jiejie.”
Saina pictured her father, near dead from a million tiny cuts, oozing a glistening mercury blood. She didn’t want them to come, but there was no question as to whether or not she would receive them, find space for their things, buy enough food for five, and put fresh flowers in all the guest bathrooms. There were four bedrooms in this house. Exactly enough for her father, her stepmother, her brother, her sister, and herself. As if she had always known that it would be a refuge for the entire Wang family.
δΈ‰
Santa Barbara, CA
“SERIOUSLY, DAD?”
“You can’t talk to Baba that way, Grace.”
“But they’re kicking me out of school!” she hissed into the phone, embarrassed. “I told you you should have gotten me a car!”
“Gracie, we coming to pick you up tonight, okay?”
“Who’s we?”
“With your ah yi.”
“Oh her. Okay. But what happened? Dad, I’m being kicked out of school! It’s like they think I’m a criminal or something.”