White Ivy(2)
Sometimes, Nan would put her hands around Ivy’s waist. Other times, she’d pet her head in an absent, fitful way, as if she wasn’t aware of doing it. Ivy would try to stay as still as possible. It was a frightful, stolen pleasure, but how she craved the touch of a bosom, a fleshy lap to rest on. She’d always thought she was being exceedingly clever, that her mother hadn’t a clue what was going on. But when she was six years old, she did the same maneuver, only this time, Nan’s body stiffened. “Aren’t you a little old for this now?”
Ivy froze. The adults around her chuckled. “Look how ni-ah your daughter is,” they exclaimed. Ni-ah was Sichuan dialect for clingy. Ivy forced her eyes open as wide as they would go. It was no use. She could taste the salt on her lips.
“Look at you,” Nan chastised. “They’re just teasing! I can’t believe how thin-skinned you are. You’re an older sister now, you should be braver. Now be good and ting hua. Go wipe your nose.”
To her dying day, Ivy would remember this feeling: shame, confusion, hurt, defiance, and a terrible loneliness that turned her permanently inward, so that when Meifeng later told her she had been a trusting and affectionate baby, she thought her grandmother was confusing her with Austin.
* * *
IVY BECAME A secretive child, sharing her inner life with no one, except on occasion, Austin, whose approval, unlike everyone else’s in the family, came unconditionally. Suffice it to say, neither of Ivy’s parents provided any resources for her fanciful imagination—what kind of life would she have, what kind of love and excitement awaited her in her future? These finer details Ivy filled in with books.
She learned English easily—indeed, she could not remember a time she had not understood English—and became a precocious reader. The tiny, unkempt West Maplebury Library, staffed by a half-deaf librarian, was Nan’s version of free babysitting. It was Ivy’s favorite place in the whole world. She was drawn to books with bleak circumstances: orphans, star-crossed lovers, captives of lecherous uncles and evil stepmothers, the anorexic cheerleader, the lonely misfit. In every story, she saw herself. All these heroines had one thing in common, which was that they were beautiful. It seemed to Ivy that outward beauty was the fountain from which all other desirable traits sprung: intelligence, courage, willpower, purity of heart.
She cruised through elementary school, neither at the top of her class nor the bottom, neither popular nor unpopular, but it wasn’t until she transferred to Grove Preparatory Day School in sixth grade—her father was hired as the computer technician there, which meant her tuition was free—that she found the central object of her aspirational life: a certain type of clean-cut, all-American boy, hitherto unknown to her; the type of boy who attended Sunday school and plucked daisies for his mother on Mother’s Day. His name was Gideon Speyer.
Ivy soon grasped the colossal miracle it would take for a boy like Gideon to notice her. He was friendly toward her, they’d even exchanged phone numbers once, for a project in American Lit, but the other Grove girls who swarmed around Gideon wore brown penny loafers with white cotton knee socks while Ivy was clothed in old-fashioned black stockings and Nan’s clunky rubber-soled lace-ups. She tried to emulate her classmates’ dress and behaviors as best she could with her limited resources: she pulled her hair back with a headband sewn from an old silk scarf, tossed green pennies onto the ivy-covered statue of St. Mark in the courtyard, ate her low-fat yogurt and Skittles under the poplar trees in the springtime—still she could not fit in.
How could she ever get what she wanted from life when she was shy, poor, and homely?
Her parents’ mantra: The harder you work, the luckier you are.
Her teachers’ mantra: Treat others the way you want to be treated.
The only person who taught her any practical skills was Meifeng. Ivy’s beloved grandmother finally received her US green card when Ivy turned seven. Two years of childhood is a decade of adulthood. Ivy still loved Meifeng, but the love had become the abstract kind, born of nostalgic memories, tear-soaked pillows, and yearning. Ivy found this flesh-and-blood Meifeng intimidating, brisk, and loud, too loud. Having forgotten much of her Chinese vocabulary, Ivy was slow and fumbling when answering her grandmother’s incessant questions; when she wasn’t at the library, she was curled up on the couch like a snail, reading cross-eyed.
Meifeng saw that she had no time to lose. She felt it her duty to instill in her granddaughter the two qualities necessary for survival: self-reliance and opportunism.
Back in China, this had meant fixing the books at her job as a clerk for a well-to-do merchant who sold leather gloves and shoes. The merchant swindled his customers by upcharging every item, even the fake leather products; his customers made up the difference with counterfeit money and sleight of hand. Even the merchant’s wife pilfered money from his cash register to give to her own parents and siblings. And it was Meifeng who jotted down all these numbers, adding four-digit figures in her head as quick as any calculator, a penny or two going into her own paycheck with each transaction.
Once in Massachusetts, unable to find work yet stewing with enterprising restlessness, Meifeng applied the same skills she had previously used as a clerk toward saving money. She began shoplifting, price swapping, and requesting discounts on items for self-inflicted defects. She would hide multiple items in a single package and only pay for one.