The Wangs vs. the World Page 15

  “No, Dad, no one else is here.”

  Oh. He couldn’t hug them like this, hand still slick with ketchup and sweat, dick barely tucked back into his jeans.

  “I have to go to the bathroom—it’ll just take a second.” He put a hand over his stomach. “Bad food.”

  Backing into the hallway, he narrowly avoided bumping into the RA, spun around, and ran to the coed bathroom, praying that no one would be in there.

  Coast clear. Andrew splashed water on a stack of brown paper towels and ducked into a stall. The ketchup was starting to burn. Nervous, quick, he scrubbed at himself roughly until the damp wodge of barky smelling towel started to shred down his pants. He plunked it in the toilet and flushed, but the mass wouldn’t go down. Whatever. He was leaving. He’d never use this toilet again. Let it be someone else’s problem.

  Slam. Soap. A blast of hot water, a blast of hot air, and he was back out the door, ready to be a son, a brother, a stepson, a middle child.

  “Andrew!” Grace barreled down the hallway and threw her arms around him, squeezing him so tight that he felt sharply aware of how much he was loved. It was enough to make tears pool in his eyes, which he tried to flick away by picking her up and whirling her around.

  “Gracie! How’s the road trip been going?”

  “Terrible. Terrible! We dropped Ama off at her daughter’s weird place in the desert and the kids were cute but she fed us hot dogs, Andrew, and the whole place was so weird and creepy and I know you’re going to say that I have no sense of adventure but that’s just not the kind of adventure I want to have and I don’t care. Stop laughing at me!”

  Andrew tugged on her ponytail. “It’ll be better now. I’ll be with you guys.”

  Grace smirked at him. “So, what were you doing when we got here?”

  “I told you! I was just eating! Anyways, listen. I have an idea—this is going to be my first comedy tour!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I have a set. We’re going on the road. So I figured I could, you know, take my act on the road!”

  “Did you book things?”

  “No, I’m thinking open mics. I talked to Dad about the route that we were taking—”

  “What? When?”

  “A couple days ago.”

  “But I didn’t even know that we were leaving until a couple of days ago! No one tells me anything.”

  “It was all one conversation—we’re leaving, your car is being repossessed, I’m not paying your tuition, I’m going to get back all the land the Communists took, oh, and by the way, what’s the best way to get out of Tempe?”

  “Well, I don’t understand why he tells you everything.”

  Andrew’s father stepped out of the dorm room just then, carrying Andrew’s giant duffel bag.

  “Okay, we ready? You say hello to auntie?”

  Andrew leaned over and gave Babs a kiss, and then, at the last minute, he reached his arms around her in an embrace. It would have been nice to have a mom right now, if they were going to go somewhere as a whole family. But he didn’t. He had a dad and an auntie, a Baba and a Babs, and that was better than nothing.

  The last time Andrew had ridden in this station wagon he’d been strapped to a car seat and his mom had been behind the steering wheel, wearing a giant pair of sunglasses, hands encased in white gloves. She’d hated the sun. She would have hated Tempe, where every sun-bleached building was the same dusty pueblo color and the city felt bright even after dark. Andrew had spent most of his college career in sunglasses, terra-cotta roofs and palm trees mirrored across his shielded eyes.

  He had them on now, hiding another well of wholly unexpected tears. Andrew opened his lids wide, trying to will the tears back inside their ducts, but that just made his eyes sting so that he had to blink, sending a tiny salt waterfall spilling down his cheeks. He didn’t even really know why he was crying. He didn’t think that he felt all that sad to be leaving school. Maybe he was just a pussy. They were driving by Grady Gammage Auditorium now, its weird circle of curtained arches reflecting in the pond. See ya later, Tempe. Was there a GED for college that he could take? Or maybe it wouldn’t matter once he was on the road.

  “Baba,” called Andrew up to the front.

  “Hmm?”

  “So, you know how I want to be a comedian?”

  Andrew’s father glanced back at him in the rearview mirror and didn’t say anything. Sometimes Andrew felt like his father didn’t understand anything he said, like Charles Wang wished that he had a different son altogether.

  Maybe if he said it in Chinese. “Shuo xiao hua?”

  His father nodded.

  “So, I have to practice. A lot. With, like, different audiences.” Andrew pulled out his phone. “So we’re going to be in some cities with open mic nights. I thought I could sign up and, you know, do my set.”

  “Are you funny?” asked Grace.

  “You know I am! Remember I told you about the thing at school? We put on that show? People loved it.”

  Charles shrugged. “You go to party school. They think everything funny funny, everything party party.”

  “I’m not saying I’m like Steve Martin or, uh, Bob Newhart or anything yet,” said Andrew, trying to think of a comedian his father might respect, “but I can be good. You come watch me, you’ll see. So, can we do it? We can get to Austin by Sunday. I called a club there already, and they said that they’d let amateurs go on if I came in and signed up early enough. Okay?”

  Andrew could see his father’s reflection pursing its mouth and glancing towards Barbra. She would never say anything. He tried again.

  “I mean, if I’m not going to go to college, I have to do something, right?”

  His father’s head jerked back. “Ben dan ya? Ni yi ding yao huei xue.”

  “I know, I will, but I’m not right now, right? So what’s wrong with comedy? You’re proud that Saina’s an artist, aren’t you?”

  But that was different, Andrew knew. More right, somehow. Less embarrassing. The sort of thing a girl could do. Also, she was crazy successful pretty much immediately, so that made a difference, too. Well, he’d let it drop for now, but when they were near a club, he’d just go. They couldn’t stop him. Grace would help create a diversion, and they’d leave the parents at the hotel or motel or wherever they were going to start sleeping now that they were on the road.

  二十一

  El Paso, TX

  1,038 Miles

  GRACE POINTED her foot and dipped a toe in the acid-green pool. The water was hot. The night air smelled like gasoline and burnt sagebrush. All around them the flat desert streets lay still; just out of reach, a cicada spun itself in circles, drowning.

  “We should rescue it,” said Andrew, not moving.

  “It’ll just die later.”

  “Still.”

  “‘Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.’”

  “What?”

  “It’s Virginia Woolf.” She tipped the little airplane bottle of Jack Daniel’s to her lips, waiting for the last drops to drain out as she stared at the striped roof of the Whataburger across the street. The layered Ws of the sign looked like a Missoni-ish chevron pattern. Maybe she could start a website that found fashion influences in fast food places. She’d name it Couture Road Trip. Or Couture by Car. And then some designer would call her his muse and make a pattern out of Whataburger signs and then she’d be famous and could do a shoe collaboration and wouldn’t need to inherit any money anyway.

  Because she probably wasn’t going to. Somewhere between driving away from Kathy’s house in Ama’s car like a family of thieves—her stolen laptop banging against her knees in the backseat, the U-Haul filled with lifted merchandise rumbling along behind them—and walking in on Andrew playing with himself, Grace had admitted that she was lying to herself. There was no show, no party. Instead, this was the end. It couldn’t be, but maybe it was.

  Checking into this crappy Texas motel had someho
w clinched it. They had gone up to the room, the four of them, standing still as the hollow door creaked shut. Barbra had taken out a handkerchief and used it to pull aside the plastic-backed drapes and then their father had looked at the two queen beds, and said, “One for boys, one for girls?” She and Andrew had been horrified. What did he think would happen if they shared a bed? Grace had looked at Andrew, who nodded at her, and said, “You guys take your own bed. We’re going to go out to the pool.” Andrew grabbed his backpack and one of the key cards, and they ran out, leaving the grown-ups to figure it out for themselves. A narrow escape.

  “Gracie, do you think they’re asleep yet?”

  “What if they’re having sex?”

  “Oh god, why would you say that? Brain! Burning!”

  “Does it really gross you out that much? It’s just sex.”

  “Yeah, but it’s Dad and Babs! I don’t want to picture them all naked and saggy on a motel bed!”

  “I don’t know . . . it kind of doesn’t gross me out. I can picture pretty much anyone doing it without getting grossed out.”

  “But your own father!”

  “I know! Logically, it’s gross, but when I picture it, it’s like picturing someone eating or something. You know, just like a normal, everyday thing.”

  “That you do with someone else. Naked.”

  “Yeah . . .”

  “And sweaty.”

  “Eew! Okay, now it’s gross!”

  “Thank god, I was starting to think you were some kind of perv.”

  Grace waggled her eyebrows at him. “I could picture you and some lovely young coed.”

  “Grace, stop it! Seriously! Maybe I’m too innocent to share a bed with you after all!”

  “Oh, I blur out all the private parts in my mind.”

  “God, I can’t even picture me having sex.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I just can’t. I mean I can, I do picture it, but then I kind of can’t, you know?”

  “Wait, have you not?”

  “You have?”

  “Well, yeah. But what about you and Eunice? I just thought for sure . . .”

  “You know how religious she was.”

  Grace shrugged. “I haven’t seen that matter much with other people.”

  “Wait, you’re kind of skipping over the more important revelation here.”

  “Andrew, I’m sixteen! It’s not a big deal. You just think it’s a big deal because I’m your little sister.”

  Andrew looked at her for a second the way some other guy might. She was pretty, of course. When she was a kid, she’d looked like a doll, with her pink cheeks and rosy little lips. But now, though Andrew hated to even think it, little Gracie was kind of sexy. Oh god. She was. He knew that guys liked Saina, but that was different. She was his older sister, which meant that she was always part of a vague, adult world that swirled just slightly above his head, alluring and unreachable. Even when he’d hit sixteen, and then eighteen, and now twenty-one, all the ages that had seemed so wise and fun when Saina occupied them, it felt as if he were failing to tap into all the adventure those years promised. Road trips! Cigarettes! Drunken adventures! Saina had done all that with abandon, and now Grace seemed to be following her easy lead in a way he’d somehow talked himself out of doing.

  “Hey, big brother,” Grace singsonged, “are you ruined forever? Have I blown your mind by admitting that I’ve blown other things?”

  “Oh my god, Grace! Stop it!”

  “Okay, okay! I’m sorry, that was too much—I just kind of couldn’t resist. C’mon, it was a good joke, right? Like, from a professional standpoint?”

  “It was a terrible, terrible thing to say from any standpoint.”

  Grace kicked at his submerged leg, splashing the chemically charged water up onto the tile, which was still hot even though the sun had been down for hours. “Do you think I’m a slut now?”

  “No! Why does everyone keep asking me that?”

  “If I’m a slut?”

  “Oh no, no. It’s just this girl that I was involved with. I really liked her but she—” Andrew paused and looked at his sister. Well, why not? “She wanted to sleep with me, but I just wasn’t sure.”

  “Was she hot?”

  “Grace, is that really all you think it’s about? Was she hot? Is that what you do? Just fuck anyone you think is hot?”

  She looked up from braiding a strand of hair, shocked. Behind her winged eyeliner and baby hipster layers of necklaces and bracelets, his little sister was still so young. A pinprick of anger broke through his heat-heavy torpor.

  “Have you fucked a lot of guys?”

  “I’m not telling you!”

  Okay. Andrew would have to change tack. The important thing now was to save her from becoming one of those girls that everyone wanted to sleep with and no one wanted to take out to dinner. “Grace, look, I’m not trying to shame you. It’s your choice, right? I mean, it should always be your choice. But you don’t have to choose . . . to, uh, do it with a lot of people.”

  “You are so condescending.”

  “You don’t know what guys are like—”

  “No, you don’t know what guys are like because you’re deciding that you have to be a virgin for some reason. Dude, why is it such a big deal? Are you a Republican or something?”

  “I don’t care what other people do, I just . . . I just think that things like sex matter. It’s your connection with another person. It should mean something.” He looked at her, underlit by the glow of the pool. Should he tell her about their father and his unfaithfulness? He hesitated. “Just . . . just don’t be stupid, Grace.”

  Grace scraped back on the concrete and jumped up, kicking a spray of pool water in his face. She stood, looming above him, furious now. “Why are you being like this, Andrew?”

  “Like what?”

  “All judgy, like you’re my dad or something. Are you going to try to send me off to boarding school, too?”

  Contrite, Andrew leaned over and grabbed at her ankle. “No! Hey. No. Look, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you feel bad.”

  “Well, you did.”

  “Don’t be Gracie mad! Be my friend again.” He held up the empty minibottle of Jack. “Say hello to my little friend?”

  “It’s not going to work, Andrew. Guys can just quote things from movies and everything’s cool, but it’s not going to work with me.”

  It was always like that, thought Andrew. Any time Grace felt like someone was disapproving of her, even the slightest bit, it became an all-out battle. Youngest child syndrome. That had made so much sense when he first read about it. He was always in the middle, bringing Grace and Saina together, giving in to their dad, being nice to Barbra. He felt like Rodney King sometimes, arms outstretched, asking for everybody to just get along.

  “So is this all real?” asked Grace.

  “You being mad at me for no reason? I hope not.”God. Andrew. He should be a stupid comedian—he always tried to make everything a joke. Grace briefly considered the possibility of both of her siblings being famous. If that happened, then she’d have to be famous, too, which she was planning on anyway. It wouldn’t be fair if she was the only one who wasn’t.

  “No, asshole. All of this. Us staying in this piece of shit place, Dad not having money for our tuitions, our house being gone. Is that all real?”

  For a minute, Grace still expected the answer to be no. She looked for a flicker in Andrew’s face, a hidden smile, a creased eye, something that would congratulate her for stumbling on the secret. And then a hail of balloons would fall out of nowhere and all her friends would run out from behind the Dumpsters and the whole place would erupt like an episode of My Super Sweet 16, but instead of giving her a car, her father would give her a giant check and tell her that no one ever expected her to pass all the tests as quickly as she did.

  “Grace—”

  “It is, isn’t it?”

  “Well, yeah,” he said, gently. “What did
you think it was?”

  She curled up her toes, scratching them against the concrete, breathing in the throat-searing chlorine, closing her eyes to the harsh fluorescents that cut through the hazy moonlight. She licked her lips. They were salty with sweat. How could she have been so completely, utterly, nonsensically, next-level idiotic? Of course it wasn’t like The Game. Her father would never have gone to so much trouble for something that wouldn’t make money. Her stepmother would never have agreed to drive with all of them to Saina’s house just to teach her some sort of lesson. Grace looked down at her brother’s face. Open. Concerned. Andrew was so fucking sweet. He would have done it. He would always do anything for her.

  “What did you think it was?” he asked again. So worried.

  “Nothing,” she said, dully. And then she kicked him in the chest, hard, her bare foot leaving a wet imprint in the middle of his T-shirt, and took off, running back towards the room.

  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.