White Ivy(23)

Nan was beside herself. Even Meifeng didn’t take her granddaughter’s side, saying hypocritically, “Your mother’s in charge of your education.” There were scoldings, threats, countless trips to the library for additional workbooks. Ivy complied for the most part. She, too, felt despondent over her mediocre grades. She wanted to be the effortlessly intelligent type, like Sunrin, but instead, she found herself at the bottom of the Asian barrel, like Jojo. Nan always told her to work harder but Ivy felt she was working hard, or at least she cared about working hard, even if the dread of a certain quiz or exam made it hard to focus sometimes. She made the mistake of saying this to Nan one afternoon and her mother’s nostrils flared out, her voice rising through the slanted house: “You don’t know what hard work is! You American kids have no responsibility. You’re lazy! You think you can just live in this house forever.”

“I hate this house,” said Austin between bites of fried pork steak. “It smells like poop.”

“You silly boy,” Nan snapped. “You don’t have the capability to live on your own. Your grades are worse than your sister’s. If you don’t get into college, you’ll end up on the streets once Mama and Baba are dead.” This was always the inevitable end waiting for the Lin children should they fail: homelessness, starvation.

On the first morning of summer break, Nan barged into Ivy’s room at half past seven. “Your cousin Feifei has been helping your aunt Ping pay the bills since she was eleven.” She dropped a towering stack of mail on the nightstand. “Look through these letters. Your grandmother was right. I need to let you handle more around the house. You can manage our money from now on.”

Ivy was used to these kinds of bizarre stealth attacks by now, but she still opened the envelopes with an elaborate slowness, fuming. Bank statements, phone bills, gas and electric, car insurance bills. There were many dollar signs and numbers.

“And don’t forget these.” Nan pointed to the colorful coupon books on the bottom of the stack. “Look for a filter for our refrigerator. You’ll also start grocery shopping with me. Then you’ll learn how much it costs to feed this family. This here”—she pulled out a thick square envelope—“is your father’s paycheck. It comes twice a month. You can keep track of everything in this.” She handed Ivy a checkbook, bound in a transparent case, with a little plastic calculator attached to the lining. “Go on,” said Nan.

But Ivy did not touch the calculator. How dinky it looked, like a cheap toy even Austin wouldn’t want, and how sad the peeling numbers looked on the rubber buttons, the 6 turning into a 0, the 4 missing entirely.

“It’s not easy to shoulder responsibility,” Nan conceded. “Mathematics is important in all areas of life, not just for school.” She gave Ivy a sidelong, insinuating glance before dropping her gaze.

It was the worst summer of Ivy’s life. She was forced to accompany Nan to the China Star supermarket, the bank, the gas station, the post office. She reported back on the weekly deals at the butcher’s too short counter, phoned telecom providers to complain of an extra dollar charged, asked for refunds at customer service counters, translated Nan’s indignant accusations into polite English questions. Each night, under Nan’s watchful eye, she collected the day’s receipts and recorded them in the ledger. On Saturday mornings, she paid the new bills that’d been arriving all week in the mail. Nan would triple-check Ivy’s handwriting, pausing her index finger under each number and letter as if they might, without constant vigilance, magically rearrange themselves.

Fueled by a determination to never again be “taught” by her mother, Ivy kept her grades up during her sophomore year. She studied more than she studied the previous year, but not as much as Nan believed her to be studying, a weakness that Ivy immediately exploited. When she spoke for hours on the phone with her boyfriend, she told her mother it was her study group. Nan didn’t know about Brett Wilson or the sensitive drama club boy or the green-eyed class president or any of the rest. She only saw that Ivy was always in her room, reading what Nan assumed were assigned textbooks, scribbling page after page of what Nan assumed to be homework. As Ivy had rightly grasped, Nan had no method, no confidence, to guide her daughter’s academics. Meifeng, relegated to another floor, was no longer privy to Ivy’s habits. Shen was no help either. He’d been laid off at the insurance company. He spent all day at the library browsing the jobs sections of the newspapers and playing Go on the library’s free Internet. Nan had not been able to find work since the move. Meifeng stopped bringing Austin to McDonald’s, no matter how much Austin cried about his hateful new school, his lack of friends, the bullies in the neighborhood who’d called him fatso and pushed his bike into a dumpster. But now the spokes of the wheel were bent, said Austin, and congealed banana goo had seeped into the rubber, and could he get another bike, please? No, said Nan. Why not? Baba lost his job. “Freddie Abernathy’s father got fired,” said Austin over dinner, “and he found another job in a week.”

Shen turned and backhanded Austin across the face. Ivy cried, “Baba!” Meifeng said. “Let the boy eat.”

Chin trembling, Austin shoveled spoonful after spoonful of rice into his mouth, and Shen, tight-throated, said, “Look at him. A Chinese boy. Doesn’t even know how to use chopsticks.”