White Ivy(22)

Ivy finished packing and performed her nightly inspection in the bathroom mirror. She thought she looked like a girl who was ready. Her life in America, which had felt so far away the past five weeks, returned so viscerally that the steel bars of Aunt Hong’s bathroom window, the hot steam fogging up the glass, the sound of a man hocking outside, now felt like the dream. Her heart beat quickly; she pressed a hand to her eyes. Everything’s different now, she consoled herself. Summer was over. She’d slept with a boy, kissed another, said I love you to a third and didn’t mean it. Still, still, the image of a certain blond-haired boy in a navy blazer, his back forever toward her, was the beacon that all her turbulent desires and hopes sailed toward.

Aunt Hong knocked on the door. “It’s your mama.”

Ivy came out and took the phone.

“Baba will be late to pick you up tomorrow at the airport,” Nan said without preamble. “The moving truck is delayed and now they’re arriving around the same time as you.”

“What moving truck?”

“Aunt Hong didn’t tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“We moved to New Jersey.”





6


NAN AND SHEN, AFTER REMOVING their daughter from the country, had taken out their first mortgage to purchase an old two-story colonial in Clarksville, New Jersey. Ivy was appalled. Her life was not her own. She would never see Gideon again! She cried for a week upon her return. Grief soon turned to disgust. The house, which her parents kept praising in smug, insouciant tones, was awful. The furniture slid toward the back wall, the waterlogged window frames were misshapen, the panes grimy, the kitchen and bathroom tiles yellow and grainy with limestone residue. The previous occupants, a Polish couple who’d priced the house below market, had raised their own chickens in the backyard, and every time Meifeng insisted on opening the windows to “air out” the rooms, a blast of dried feces, fetid earth, and rain-logged feathers made eating unbearable. And this was the pinnacle of Nan and Shen’s dreams! This chicken coop! The only upside was that she and Austin got their own bedrooms for the first time. Meifeng slept in a converted dining room on the first floor.

Nan had chosen Clarksville for its large Chinese population. Her sister, Ping, had recently enrolled her two children in weekend Chinese school. Ping said she’d never seen Feifei and Tong so well-behaved, surrounded and influenced by the exemplary behavior of their Chinese classmates. She said Nan should never have sent Ivy to that religious school with entitled Americans. Nan felt Ping was right—Ivy needed to be with her own kind: Chinese students who valued schoolwork and family duties. “A mother knows her own daughter,” Nan told her husband. “Ivy’s easily influenced by others. If she’s going to become a doctor, she needs to befriend other Chinese kids who have the same goals. They can push her to study more.”

Everything about Clarksville fit Nan’s criteria. On Ivy’s first day of high school, it seemed the entire hallway was a sea of black hair. Back at Grove, she’d tried so hard to fit in with the majority but here in Clarksville, she wanted nothing to do with her Asian classmates and their obsession with grades and AP classes and extra-credit homework, walking around school always in the same cliques, backpacks overflowing with math and science textbooks and impeccably organized pencil cases. In the few times a friendly soul would invite her to sit with them at lunch, Ivy would notice their Tupperwares of cold rice, beef and celery, lo mein with shrimp, the occasional boiled egg or canned sweet congee—variations of her own daily lunches—and she’d wither a little on the inside, thinking that others would look upon their group and see them all as the same. She became reticent, her gaze would drift over to the lacrosse players and their girlfriends laughing in the hallway behind the music rooms; she feared they were laughing at her.

In the second week of school, Ivy befriended the only white girl in her chemistry class, named Sarah Wilson. Sarah’s brother, Brett, was on the junior varsity lacrosse team.

By Thanksgiving, Ivy and Brett were fooling around in the back of the music rooms, and Ivy discovered why it was the prime lunch spot in school: you could lock the doors from inside one of the rooms and turn off the lights so no one could see inside the little glass panel. And the walls were soundproof.

By Christmas, the thrill of being a lacrosse player’s girlfriend had lost its appeal; Ivy longed for a refined boyfriend, one who spoke French, who’d lived in Europe, who read poetry, or—better yet—who wrote poetry, or composed song lyrics at the very least, one who would reveal beauty in hidden places and show her a new way of being in the world.

In the spring, she became involved with a thin, sensitive boy from the drama club who had memorized entire soliloquies of Hamlet and who could, with just one index finger, activate nerve sensors she hadn’t known existed. Ivy discovered that fooling around in the dark, dusty wings of the auditorium, the coarse rope from the pulley rubbing against her back, leaving pink tracks down her skin like a burn, was even more scintillating than the soundproof cocoon of the music rooms. Afterward, they’d sneak out the side doors and share a cigarette underneath a brushed-blue sky. While he ranted about his long-term girlfriend—a college freshman in Texas—she’d trace wings on his knee through the ripped hole of his jeans.

Sarah Wilson asked for a new lab partner. Ivy quickly realized it’d been Sarah who’d written their reports, drawn the diagrams, read aloud line-by-line instructions from the confusing manual during class. Ivy finished the year with a C+ in Chemistry. Her grade in Algebra was even worse.