The Wangs vs. the World (24 page)

“I’m thrilled,” says the stunning twenty-eight-year-old, grinning as she holds an Araucana—the artisanal hens lay bright blue eggs that match the shutters on the eighteenth-century barn she converted to a studio. Wang talks to us about chickens and eggs, the birds and the bees (wink, wink!), and doing her best work yet.

Some parts of it were true. She was twenty-eight, and she had painted the shutters on the barn bright blue, but she’d never know for sure if they matched the tufted bird’s eggs because it turned out that baby chicks, no matter how heritage, can freeze to death even in sixty-degree weather. It also turned out that chopping wood was impossibly hard. On the first attempt the ax slipped from her hands and went flying, the second time she kept a vise grip on the ax and it was the wood that flipped off the stump. Convinced that the third try would cost her a toe, Saina draped a tarp back over the woodpile and hid the ax in the broom closet.

It wasn’t just the buried chicks and the pile of unchopped wood. It was the vegetable garden that wouldn’t grow despite the manure she heaped over the soil, the flowers that budded but never blossomed, the neighbor who inched his fence over her property line, the gang of neighboring goats that made a daily escape from their enclosure and pillaged her stunted garden. The countryside was refusing to live up to her pastoral fantasy, just like the rest of her life. Inside the house, where money could reliably fix most problems, things were nearly perfect, but outside, butch nature trampled all over wimpy nurture.

When she interrupted them, Leo and his friend Graham, the owner-bartender-chef-occasional-butcher, were putting together a new cocktail menu for G Street, Graham’s restaurant-bar-occasional-town-hall.

Herbs from Leo’s farm were piled all around them, spilling out of torn-open paper bags with the Fatboy Farms logo. Leo was pounding sprigs of rosemary in an oversize mortar and pestle. Graham was sifting freshly ground nutmeg together with turbinado sugar and white pepper. The smells came at her like Christmas and Thanksgiving over the chemical lemon of the floor cleaner. The men had invited her to join in—“We need to temper the testosterone a little”—and the three of them spent the next hour infusing simple syrups over a portable burner and trying to put together the most herb-intensive cocktails they could think of.

“I want something
burly.
Bitter. Pungent. A gut punch. But, you know, suave,” said Graham.

“A
man’s
drink,” said Saina.

“Mixology: The New Bespoke Tailoring.” Leo, it turned out, sometimes spoke in pronouncements.

As the sunlight faded, Leo edged closer to Saina, balancing a foot against her stool, placing his lips precisely over the spot where she’d sipped from a glass of basil-cucumber-cayenne-gin-and-ginger. Soon it was just the two of them sitting and drinking in the half dark. The restaurant was officially open, but no one had ventured in. Graham was in the kitchen, drunkenly calling out instructions to his prep-cook-waiter-accountant and Leo leaned towards her, conspiratorial.

“Let’s surprise Graham.”

“By raiding his cash register?”

“I have a better idea.” He stepped off the stool and picked up the discarded mop. “Do you know how to do a three-corner fold?”

Saina shook her head. “But I can make it up.”

He tossed her the package of freshly laundered napkins. She tore open the plastic and pulled out a bright white cloth. As she folded, she watched him swab the tiles until they were shiny, and then they put the chairs in place and ripped long sheets of butcher paper to drape over the tabletops.

Leo held up a napkin, inspecting the fold. “Very impressive. Precision and beauty.”

Saina felt her cheeks get hot.
Who was this guy?
This greens-growing, Catskills-living, yeshiva-named black man whose first drunken instinct was to do sweet favors for his friends? Who wielded a mop with balletic swoops and wore his T-shirt tight and loose in all the right places?

The kitchen door swung open to reveal Graham, a chef’s hat on his head and a giant zucchini in his hand. “Dudes! You’re my magic mice! Cinderelly! Cinder—ouch!” Before the second “elly,” the door swung back and smacked him in the nose, then opened again. “Where’s
my
prince?”

Saina and Leo smiled at each other. They smiled and smiled and didn’t stop until a couple walked in and asked to be seated. As Leo settled them at a table and brought over glasses of water, she stayed in place, watching him.

Her just-wounded heart might have been on hiatus, but it turned out that the rest of her was still alert, ready to bloom in the direction of any new sun.

That was six months ago. Enough time to fall halfway in love, once. To betray someone, once. To be betrayed, once. And, maybe, to win someone back, once.

二十六
I-10 East

BY THE TIME they crossed the border into Louisiana, Andrew started to feel like they’d live out the rest of their lives in the backseat of this car. There was no way to really get comfortable. He and Grace tried opening the windows and sticking their feet out in the open air, tried taking turns lying down, but no matter what, every position felt awkward.

Thanks to some unspoken mutual agreement, they didn’t talk about the pictures Grace had taped up around her seat—especially not the picture of their mother that Andrew didn’t remember ever having seen before. Instead, he let Grace lay her head in his lap and told her what was going on outside the window.

“This is so weird. There’s a guy on a skateboard pushing a guy in a wheelchair right now, and they’re, like,
flying
down the street.”

“Mmm . . . what’s the guy in the wheelchair like?”

“White guy, scraggly beard, Hawaiian shirt.”

Ama had been in a wheelchair once, back when she’d sprained her ankle chasing their dog Lady down the stairs. Would he ever see her again?

Andrew turned to Grace. “What’s Ama’s name?”

“Isn’t it Ama?”

“No, that’s what she
is,
an
ama.
It’s like a nanny.”

“What?”

“Yeah. You’ve basically been calling her ‘caretaker’ all your life.”

“Well, you have, too!”

“I know. It’s terrible. We’re terrible people. Dad—what’s Ama’s name?”

Their father looked at them in the rearview mirror. “Why do you wonder?”

“Because she’s a
person,
Dad!”

“Okay, Gracie, okay . . .” Charles thought hard. What was Ama’s name? It was lost somewhere in the past, when Ama was pretty and young and she carried him everywhere on her back. “I think she was from Lu family, and then she have to come live with us, come take care of your baba. Maybe she tell Jiejie?”

Grace was doubtful. “Why would Saina know if we don’t?”

“Let’s call,” said Andrew.

“I want to call.”

“We’ll conference. If she picks up.”

Ring.
Ring. Ring. Ring.

“I was just about to call you guys,” said Saina.

“We have a family dispute to resolve.”

Grace kicked him and waved her cell phone in his face. “Wait, I’m being abused. What are you supposed to do when you’re in an abusive relationship?”

“Rehabilitate them with love.”

“Kill them with kindness?”

“Kill’s a little extreme. Maybe just maim.”

“Hold on.” Andrew dialed Grace’s number.

“Finally! Saina, this is important. Do you know Ama’s name?” She kicked against Barbra’s seat, dislodging the Diane Arbus photograph.

“Doesn’t Dad know it?”

“No.” Grace glared at her father, but his eyes were on the road. “All he knows is her last name even though he’s known her all his life.”

“You’ve known her all your life, too,” said Saina.

“Yeah, but I’ve known her for the shortest amount of time compared to everyone else, so you guys have been assholes for longer.”

“What made you think of it?” Saina asked.

“Andrew did. I don’t know.”

He felt silly, suddenly, for insisting on this piece of knowledge. Of course they’d be able to find her. “Dad! Do you know Ama’s daughter’s phone number? Kathy’s number?”

Charles, busy unfolding a map, shook his head.

“But then how do we call Ama if we need to? I didn’t say goodbye to her!” said Andrew.

“You mean we won’t see her again?” Grace thought back to their escape from Kathy’s house. It had been a hurried, uncomfortable exit, and she’d only given Ama a quick hug. They’d abandoned Ama as if she were a puppy, an off-season sweater, this woman who had changed their shitty diapers and bandaged their skinned knees and spooned porridge into their baby-bird mouths. She would never have done it if she’d known. Never. This was her father’s fault, and Barbra’s. Grace kicked Barbra’s seat again, but still her stepmother did nothing.
Nothing.
What did she ever do besides get her nails done and organize her closet and buy sunglasses? Babs had
so many
pairs of sunglasses. The only worthwhile thing she’d ever taught Grace was how to apply lipstick without looking in a mirror.

“Hold on, I’m checking Facebook,” said Saina over the phone. “Where are you guys stopping next?”

“Remember Uncle Nash? We’re going to stay with him in New Orleans.”

“That guy? He always had such a crush on Mom. Oh wait, here, Kathy’s on Facebook!”

Andrew reached over and touched his little sister’s leg. “See, we found her. It’s okay.”

Suddenly, finding Ama didn’t matter as much to Grace. “Hold up, Uncle Nash had a crush on Mom? How did you know?” Worried, she looked at her father in the rearview mirror, and whispered, “Does Dad know?”

Saina laughed. “I don’t think it was that big of a deal. He just used to always compliment her and open doors for her and stuff.”

“I guess it makes sense,” said Grace. “She was so beautiful.”

“Do you want me to message Kathy?” asked Saina.

“I don’t know,” said Grace. “What do we write? ‘Dear Kathy, sorry we kept your mom for so long. But at least we gave her back. Love, the Wangs. PS. Um, BTW, what’s her name?’ You guys didn’t see how mad Kathy was. She’s never going to talk to us unless maybe we tell her that we’re coming to give the car back.”

“What do you mean?”

Andrew and Grace rolled their eyes at each other. “Saina, what car do you think we’re driving?” he asked.

For a long minute, she was quiet. Andrew pictured her sitting in one of the weird invisible plastic chairs that were in the pictures she’d emailed of her new house. Once she moved out to the Catskills, the house was pretty much all she talked about anymore. Wood flooring and contractors and something called subway tiles—for a while it had seemed cool and grown-up, like everything that Saina did, like she was some sort of New Age pioneer, but now it all sounded pointless to him. She’d isolated herself in a lonely outpost, and now they were all going to live there, too. It was as if she’d been building a prison for them. A pretty, pretty prison.

“I didn’t think about it,” said Saina. “Yours? Wait, is Dad driving the whole way? You guys should split it up.”

“Yeah, like he’s going to let anyone else take the wheel—we tried. And nope. Not mine. Ama’s.”

Grace looked at him as she replied. “You know,
our mother’s.
”

“Across country?”

They both nodded, and then Grace said, “Yeah, if we make it.”

They were driving her mother’s old car? What else had she missed? Saina picked up her bottle of beer and took a long swig. Leo was in the kitchen, rendering duck fat that they would later stir into a vat of rice, making each of the grains glisten. “But it’s ancient! I didn’t know that we still had it, even.”

“You’d remember if you came home last Christmas.”

She glanced towards the kitchen, not wanting Leo to overhear. “Gracie, you know why I didn’t come home.”

“Yeah. Because sitting in a room and crying was more important than seeing your family.”

Yoga breath. Yoga breath. “I couldn’t even brush my teeth. There was no way I could have gotten on a plane and flown to L.A.” Yoga breath.

“We would have still loved you with gunky teeth,” said Andrew.

“And smelly feet,” added Grace.

“And greasy hair.”

“And hairy legs.”

Saina laughed. Grace and Andrew, bumping around in the backseat of the old station wagon, probably hurtling down the highway at ninety miles an hour—her dad had always been a fast driver—drinking Slurpees and eating Cheetos, falling asleep leaning against each other.

Leo called out from the stove: “Hey, which bottle do you want to open? The red or the white?” Before she could even respond, Grace pounced.

“Saina! That was a boy! Who is that? Do you have a new boyfriend?”

Leo was in the doorway now, holding the wooden spoon between his teeth and waving both bottles in the air. She smiled at him. “Leo, my sister wants to know who you are.”

“Who’s Leo?”

He raised an eyebrow and spoke with the spoon still clenched. “She doesn’t know?”

“Who’s Leo?”

“I wasn’t sure if you were ready to meet the kids.”

“Saina! Who’s Leo?”

“And now?”

“Saina! C’mon!”

“Guys,” she said into the phone, her eyes locked with his. “There’s something I haven’t told you. I like a boy.” Saina wanted to hook a finger through one of his belt loops and pull him towards her. She winked at Leo and nodded towards the bottle of red.

Her boyfriend turned back to the kitchen with the Malbec held aloft as Grace whispered something Saina couldn’t quite hear.

“What?”

“I said, can we tell Dad? He just asked who Leo was.”

“Yeah, because you kept screaming it!”

“Well, you were ignoring me.”

“It’s oka—”

Before Saina finished, Grace was saying, “Daddy, Saina has a new
boy
friend! Leo’s the new
boy
friend.”

“Is it serious?” asked Andrew.

“I think so. You guys will meet him. You’ll like him—he has a farm.”

“Like, a real one?”

“Crop rotations, fertilizer, harvests, the whole shebang. He even has a tractor. But it’s organic.”