White Ivy(11)
“Bye, kiddo,” said Mr. Speyer. “Hope we’ll see you back here soon.”
Ivy couldn’t look at either father or son. This isn’t real, she thought. I’m in the bathtub world. Indeed, everything about that walk to her father’s car had that languorous underwater quality: the sprinkler’s metronomic ticks, the bright emerald grass beneath her flip-flops, the smell of honeysuckle that would permeate her dreams for years to come.
The second they arrived home and the front door closed, Meifeng tried to block Nan’s arm from its attempt to seize Ivy’s ear—“Go. Hurry up. Go”—but this method backfired as Nan, unable to reach Ivy directly herself, picked up an orange from the fruit bowl and threw it at her daughter’s retreating figure. Ivy turned at the wrong second and the orange smacked her in the middle of the forehead. Something cold trickled down her nose. She thought at first it was blood but when she felt her skin and then looked at her fingers, she saw that the liquid was clear. The orange had split open.
* * *
“I’M GOING TO teach you a lesson,” said Nan.
Ivy braced herself. She felt a whoosh of air as her mother strode down the hallway to Ivy and Meifeng’s room and pushed the door open. In a flash, Ivy understood. “No! Don’t!” She ran in front of Nan and attempted to barricade herself in front of her dresser. But Nan pushed her aside and pulled open all the drawers, flinging out clothes in heaping armfuls. She reached her hand and withdrew a black Walkman, the worn headphones still plugged into the jack. She spun around toward Meifeng. “Did you buy her this?”
Loyally, Meifeng hung her head, complicit liar, complicit thief. “Yes.”
Nan plunged her hand back in. Her movements quickened. A two-piece bikini. Black pantyhose. Ripped denim shorts. Silver rings. A pencil case filled with smudged, half-used makeup. Three overdue library books. A stack of cassette tapes. The spaghetti strap dress Ivy had been saving for some future school dance caught on the corner of the dresser as it was tossed down, splayed out in midair as if impaled at the heart.
“I always knew you were a sly child,” panted Nan, “but I never dreamed you were hiding this much—” She broke off, seemingly too overcome to speak. Even Shen, slipping into the room with cautious fortitude, could not stop his wife’s possessed plunder. When Nan got to the leather-bound diary, Ivy was jolted out of her mesmerized state by her mother’s insect-like fingers scrabbling at the cover.
“Stop it! That’s private!” She lunged forward and attempted to swipe the diary away from Nan’s hands, feeling the tear of soft flesh underneath her fingernails as she pulled back, empty-handed.
“Look what you’ve done!” Shen shouted, grabbing Ivy by her upper arm. “You—never—talk—back—to your mother!”
Through the haze of rage, Ivy could barely make out the jagged red line on her mother’s skin, like an accusing finger pointed in her direction.
Nan turned and left the room. Moments later, she returned with a large trash bag. Ivy noticed, with both trepidation and relief, that her diary was not inside. Nan paced around the room, picking things up off the floor and bed and placing them into the bag in a methodical and orderly fashion.
“Nan?” Shen said cautiously after a while.
“Don’t just stand there, help me. Bring this bag to the dumpster. Take Austin with you.”
Shen did as he was told.
“Did any boy—touch you last night?” said Nan.
“No,” said Ivy.
“She’s a child,” said Meifeng.
“She’s a harlot,” said Nan.
“It was just a party,” said Ivy.
“I don’t believe that even you would buy her all this disgusting junk. Which means she’s been buying this stuff on her own. I told you to stop giving her money.”
“She’ll be in high school,” said Meifeng. “She should have her own allowance, learn to budget. It would help her mature.”
Nan snorted. “Mature? You’ve raised a girl who’s vain and frivolous. She lies to us about everything…”
Ivy squeezed her eyes shut and clamped the back of her throat and eardrums to stimulate the sensation of yawning, a trick she used often to tune out Nan’s shrill screams. But it was hard to sustain this almost-yawn for long and each time she unclenched her temples, she once again heard Nan’s accusations boomerang across the silent room: —parades around half-naked at that American boy’s house, in front of his parents!—She idolizes them—She hates us… Nan finished scraping the last drawer clean, wiped her eyes, walked out into the living room.
Meifeng, never one for letting someone else get the last word, followed after Nan, shouting insults at her back: Oh, NOW you want to take charge?… You were too poor to raise your own children… look at you now, so stupid you can’t learn English… Bah! With what money?… It’s no wonder she doesn’t listen to you, she doesn’t respect you…
“I didn’t do anything,” Ivy whispered to an empty room. What sin had she committed that was so deplorable to be deserving of this punishment? Not a single superfluous item had been spared from the monstrous trash bag into which her mother had deposited her entire life. She’d once accused Roux and his friends of being poor trash. See who was the trash now. She had nothing. She was nothing. Except—