The Wangs vs. the World (28 page)

No. Oh no.

Wait.

He must be inside her right now.

Years of determined denial willed him to stop, to still his hips, but she kept on moving on top of him.

Her slim legs were stronger than he ever would have guessed and she clung on, locking him in place, grinding deeper against him, driving her palms into his armpits, biting the side of his neck until her saliva drooled down onto his shoulder and he felt himself release inside of her, an explosion of white light behind his eyes and a slow, silent ebb.

Later, when she’d unlocked the handcuffs and untied her shirt and they both lay naked in the gray morning light, Dorrie had turned to him, something like apology in her eyes.

“Do you want to love me?” she asked.

And he’d nodded and fallen asleep.

二十九
New Orleans, LA

WHY WAS THE SCREEN on her phone always dirty? Grace pulled up her sleeve and wiped off the smudges, then went straight to her own site, Style + Grace. Everything around her smelled like grilled cheese sandwiches and french fries. She looked down at her screen again. It had already acquired a sheen of grease, but at least the feed was finally loading.

Response to her Whataburger post was strong, even though it kind of felt like a lazy image to her—just a shadowy shot of her painted toes against the green glow of the motel pool, the Whataburger roof in the distance. Still, fifty-three comments! The last one was from SmileSteez:
Name of polish! Must know ASAP LOL!
The polish was from her dad’s failed line. Quickly, she responded:
Sorry, it’s a limited edish! A gurl’s gotta keep some secrets!

Grace looked down at her breakfast. A half-eaten western omelet and a pile of french fries, ketchup squirted over everything. They were sitting in a diner in Uptown that Uncle Nash said they had to go to. If the Fountain Coffee Room in the Beverly Hills Hotel—her absolute favorite place to go as a kid—had a vile evil twin, this place would be it. The Camellia Grill sign outside was a cheesy hot-pink neon, which was especially weird because the building looked like a church, and then inside it was pink walls and green stools, the same pink and green of the Fountain’s perfect palm wallpaper. If she was going to run away to a place, like the kids who hid out in the Met, that’s where she would have gone. She loved the takeout that came in pink and white striped boxes, she loved the platters of tiny silver-dollar pancakes, she even loved the old people who ate truly weird combinations of things, like a hamburger patty with a scoop of cottage cheese.

As soon as Saina got her driver’s license, the three of them went there by themselves all the time, sat three in a row, and watched the hotel workers in their pink shirts and the ladies who went to the spa in their pink robes climb up and down the staircase that spiraled past the glass wall. The line cooks all had stars cut out of the tops of their tall paper chef’s hats. When they stood at the griddle making perfect mounds of hash browns, the overhead lights cast star-shaped patterns that swirled and danced on the sides of their white caps. Saina and Andrew had convinced her as a little kid that it was magic, and she still kind of believed that it was, as much as anything else in the world was magic.

“You done with that, hon?”

Grace looked up at the waitress. She seemed so nice. Why did she have to work here, instead of at a magic place in Beverly Hills? Life was so unfair. She nodded, and her half-eaten plate was whisked away, but the adults were all still eating and arguing over something boring, her father waving a piece of bacon in the air, taking bites of it as he talked.

Time to text Andrew again.

We’ve been here for an hour already. Where are u?

He replied immediately.

On way.

Andrew. She was still mad at him, but having him here was better than being alone with Dad and Babs. Grace peeled open another creamer and poured it into her coffee. It was almost white now, like a toasted marshmallow. As she waited for an earlier Style + Grace post to load, she listened to Uncle Nash, who liked to talk even more than her father did.

“But we must admit that Taiwan has done just fine without China’s intervention,” he said. “You know that Taiwan’s per capita income is higher than Portugal’s, Saudi Arabia’s, and Liechtenstein’s and exactly twice as high as China—”

“Higher than new China,” her father broke in, “but that because it has many people from old China. Many people who run away from Communist, who know that study is important and money is important, who all too smart to work in fields!”

“So you think the Taiwanese people had no impact on the Taiwan Miracle? Surely you have to at least admire their lack of violence. Cambodia and Vietnam were in similar circumstances after World War II, and look at what happened there.”

“Can’t compare. Cambodia and Vietnam, whole different people. Wild. Not cultured. The Taiwanese people all just Chinese anyways.”

“Charles! You can’t just call them Chinese when it’s convenient for you and then denigrate them when it’s not! Barbra, back me up here.”

Barbra took a bite of her pancake before replying. “I say if you try to make the case that the good economy only is because of
da lu ren,
then you have also to say that it is because of
ri ben ren.
”

Uncle Nash laughed. “What about that, Charles? Are you willing to admit that it was the Japanese occupation that primed Taiwan for economic success?”

“Nonsense! What the Japanese do? They build a lot of Japanese-style houses, okay, not so bad—”

“Hi, guys.”

Everyone looked up. “Andrew! Finally!” said Grace, relieved. Except that he was wearing some ugly button-down shirt with little harps printed on it or something.

“Have you eaten yet? Sit down, sit down, order food.” Her father pulled him towards an empty stool as Uncle Nash shoved a menu at him.

“Why are you wearing that shirt?” Grace asked.

“Oh, just changing up my style a little bit. I decided to go southern gentleman.”

“Shut up! No, really.”

He shot her a look. “Gracie, give it up. I’m just wearing it. It’s just a shirt, don’t worry about it.”

“I thought I cared about you not looking ridiculous, but I guess I won’t.”

“No fighting! We all together again, almost whole family. Andrew, did you spend night with that ugly woman?”

Andrew flinched. “Dad, she’s beautiful.”

“Who are you guys even talking about? That lady with the red hair?”

“Dorrie,” said Andrew.

Protective. That’s how he sounded. Which was totally weird, but kind of understandable coming from Andrew. Andrew, who got to go off with some older lady without any questioning from Dad. It was so unfair—if she’d wanted to spend the night with one of those cute boys from the wedding, it would have been a federal case. “Isn’t she kind of old?”

“No! Why does age matter?”

Their father put a hand on Andrew’s shoulder. “No worry. Andrew not going to marry her or something. Not so serious, just fun.”

“Well, actually . . .”

All four of them waited, wondering what he was going to say. God, Andrew really did look stupid in that shirt. Was it a girl’s shirt? Was he going to marry that lady?

“Actually, I think I’m going to stay here for a while. With Dorrie.”

“What? You’d leave me alone?” asked Grace.

He looked down at the counter. “I’m sorry, I just, I think I might be—”

Their father stood over him, protesting. “No, no, no. Is this because of what you say last night? Now you think that you are in love? So you have sex, so what? It is okay!” He looked over at Grace. “Not okay for you. Different for boy.”

And Babs, too. “Andrew! Don’t be so stubborn. Don’t throw away your life on an old woman just because she sleep with you!”

Even Uncle Nash joined in. “I’ve known Dorrie since she was a girl, Andrew, and she’s not the person you think she is. You should stay with your family.”

They talked at him, and Andrew protested, and Grace registered it all, but she couldn’t say anything. It was like there was a drumbeat in her head, except that each beat was a pulse of blood that just said,
Gone. Gone. Gone
. She’d never see him again. She was thrown in school and now she was yanked out of school and whatever adults wanted just happened. Nobody cared and she was alone and Saina never even answered the phone. She was going to be an adult soon and then could do whatever she wanted without any of them.

The talking turned to shouting, but finally Andrew ended it by just walking out the door, with the adults following him, without even saying goodbye to her. Without even seeing her. It didn’t matter. He was gone anyway. There was Dorrie, sitting in an old sports car with the frizziest hair Grace had ever seen, not looking at her father or Babs or Uncle Nash as Andrew got in the front seat. Uncle Nash ran around to the driver’s side of the car and yelled, but Dorrie, who was supposed to be his niece or second cousin or something, smiled and stared straight ahead and zoomed off like the Snow Queen.

The three old people just stood there in the sun, and Andrew was gone. Useless. Everyone was useless. Suddenly, Grace just wanted to go to
sleep.
Forget taking up arms against a sea of troubles—what was wrong with just lying down and going to invisible sleep?

三十
Helios, NY

LOVE SAYS YOU. That’s the thing no one told Saina. Or maybe they’d tried, and she’d been too preoccupied with learning that an unconventional life was the only option to hear it. Maybe that’s what crazy Republicans meant when they talked about liberal brainwashing and ivory-tower schools that created unrealistic expectations.

Because this was what she’d been taught: To choose marriage and babies over a glamorous career as an artist would be an unthinkable failure. Love was supposed to be a by-product of a life well lived, not the goal.

And this is what she’d realized: Everything she’d been taught was wrong.

Sometimes, Saina blamed her mother. It wasn’t just that May Lee had died so suddenly and ridiculously, it was that she’d lived that way, too. Even as a child, Saina had felt that there was something wrong in the way that her mother’s mood had shifted based solely on her father’s attentions. In second grade, when the class was learning how to tell time, Saina remembered a worksheet that asked you to write down what your parents did all day. Her Father chart was jammed with entries.

6 a.m. to 7 a.m.—He plays tennis.

7 a.m. to 8 a.m.—He talks on the phone.

8 a.m.—He leaves for work.

8 a.m. to 7 p.m.—He makes makeup at his factory.

7 p.m.—He comes home.

7 p.m. to 10 p.m.—He plays with me and we all eat.

Her Mother chart barely had two.

6 a.m. to 11 a.m.—Sleeping.

11 a.m. to 7 p.m.—Shopping. Wait for Daddy.

She hadn’t realized that other people’s mothers had hobbies and charities and jobs. That they didn’t just wait, inert, for their husbands to come home and bring them back to life.

Love saves you, as long as there’s a you to be saved.

Saina tilted her head so that it rested against the rough pillow of Leo’s hair and closed her eyes to the sun. They were sitting back to back on a long bench out behind Graham’s restaurant, sharing the
New York Times
and mugs of tea, waiting for their friend to finish lunch service so that he could join them on an afternoon hike through the dells to an abandoned farmhouse that Saina had heard about.

“You know, this relationship has really been hard on poor Gabo,” said Leo, knocking his head against hers. “He ended up doing all of the basil yesterday.”

“Leo, why are you a farmer?”

“Why?”

“Yeah, I mean I know it was your job in high school, but did you just love growing things?”

He moved his head rhythmically against hers as he considered. “I do like growing things, but that’s not it. I’m interested in systems. Did you know that plants can recognize each other and will share resources with other plants in the same family? Plants are networked the way our brains are networked.” Saina smiled at his excitement. “And I liked the challenge of creating a system to work with that system, and to profit from it. And I like being outdoors.” She could feel his low tenor buzzing through her chest.

“Talk some more. I like the way it feels.”

“Like we’re sharing a voice box?”

She laughed. “Like you’re talking inside of me. Can you feel me? Or is my voice too high?”

“Talk again.”

“You’re so dreamy,” she squeaked. “Hee hee hee!”

He laughed a low, booming laugh that reverberated in her ribs and lungs, and made her crack up in response.

The restaurant door swung open. “Hey, gigglers!”

Saina wiped a tear from her eye and Leo beckoned Graham—still in his dirty chef’s whites—over. “Here, let’s see what happens with a threesome.”

“I thought you’d never ask!” He ran over, ginger beard bouncing, tripping a bit on his rubber shoes. “What game are we playing?”

Saina and Leo scooched sideways and made a space for Graham. “Okay,” she said, “lean against us and see if we can both feel you talking.”

“My ass is going to edge you guys off this thing,” he said, turning and sitting. As he did, they all felt a buzz. “I’m magic! Is it like static electricity?”

“Actually, that’s my phone.” Thinking it was Grace again, Saina moved to shut off the buzzing when she saw the number. “Sorry, guys.” She jumped up and answered as Graham called after her: “I thought we were a threesome! What’s so secret that you don’t want us to echo it?” In that split second, she also registered Leo’s worried turn towards her. He thought it was Grayson, of course. He thought that she was still susceptible. That would have to wait.

“Hello?”

“Can I speak to Saina, please?”