White Ivy(25)

* * *




IVY LONGED TO return north, to Massachusetts or Vermont or Maine, places that in her mind were eternally autumn, drenched in smells of chestnuts and rain, the orange and red foliage crackling under her leather soles; or pristine winter, where she pictured log cabins, silky hair tucked under fuzzy white earmuffs, fresh snow shimmering on steeple roofs and stained-glass windows. In all her years in Clarksville, she’d thought of Massachusetts as her real home, and she spoke often of Grove—“a small private school, so stuffy, we had to wear these uncomfortable uniforms…”—to her rapt boyfriends with an air of assumed modesty that betrayed her secret pride. “I’m from Massachusetts,” she’d say. “I still get homesick all the time.” Of course, she never once uttered the words West Maplebury or Fox Hill. In fact, she described so vividly the quiet tree-lined neighborhoods, the dreamy buzzing of cicadas, seaside vacations where frothy white waves licked pebbled beaches, stone-and-glass manors that smelled of honeysuckle, that she really believed this was the world from which she came and the one she longed to return to.

Her grades guaranteed her admission to a state school with a partial scholarship. Shen and Nan spoke of this as the best, inevitable option. “A mother knows her own daughter,” Nan told her husband. “Ivy’s strengths don’t lie in studying. She’s good at social things. Always talking on the phone. So many friends. Ping says social skills are more important than grades in America.” By social skills, Nan meant boy skills. She wasn’t as blind as Ivy thought. Nan’s aspiration for her daughter to become a doctor had long been abandoned. Her new hope was that Ivy marry a doctor. A Chinese doctor who’d earn a six-figure income and provide Ivy with a house, two children, a boy and a girl; they’d settle in New Jersey and keep a spare bedroom for the sets of grandparents, who would alternate years of babysitting.

Ivy had different ideas. She applied and got admitted to a small women’s college outside Boston. Like most girls whose lives revolved around boys, she romanticized chastity and often put herself through elaborate rituals of prudishness (or the appearance of it), as she felt martyrdom was the only purifying agent for her heedless choices. Tuition at this private college was exorbitant. From managing Nan’s ledger the past two years, Ivy knew her parents couldn’t afford it. She took out a loan.

When she broke the news to her family that she would not be living at home to attend state college after all, and, more disastrously, she had taken on debt, there ensued the biggest fight yet between mother and daughter. Ivy was too strong now for Nan to physically thrash but her mother threatened everything else under the sun. “I’ll kill myself if you don’t ting hua,” Nan shouted at the end, death being her final trump card.

“You’re already dead,” Ivy screamed back. “You died with that boyfriend of yours back in China. We’re just your replacement family.”

Nan’s face went slack. Her mouth opened, closed, opened. “You think I’m dead? You don’t want a mother? Fine. Go. It won’t change anything. One day you’ll see. It’s not me you hate.”



* * *




“I DIDN’T DO anything wrong,” Ivy said to Meifeng, sweat pouring beneath her blue and silver robes at her graduation ceremony, which Nan had elected not to attend. The ceremony had been held in the football stadium, four hours melting in the beating sun. She tried to put her arm around Austin’s thick shoulders, then drew back, startled to discover that he was now taller than she was. The siblings winced for Shen’s camera.

“Your mother worries that you’ve ruined your future,” Meifeng said for the umpteenth time. “Do you know how much interest these rotten banks charge stupid students like you? Debt is like a pile of rocks on a turtle’s—”

“I’ve always been in debt,” Ivy snapped, “to her. She thinks Austin and I are her slaves just by being born from her womb.”

Meifeng sighed. She handed Ivy a card she had purchased from the dollar store. In front of the Congratulations Class of 2000 she had taped a hundred-dollar bill.

In August, Ivy packed two old suitcases and a few table lamps in the back of her father’s car. Austin said a sullen “Bye.” Meifeng pressed a small item, wrapped in newspaper, into Ivy’s hand. It was a figurine of a little glass dog sitting on its haunches. Ivy had been born in the Year of the Dog. “Remember to call once in a while,” Meifeng said gruffly before turning away.

Shen drove Ivy to Boston, seven hours in standstill traffic. Rain poured down around them. Her father deposited her things in a barren dorm room covered with wall-to-wall brown carpet. “I’ve never given you much guidance,” he said as his parting words, “but if there’s one piece of advice I want you to remember, it’s this: Be humble and grateful for what you have. Don’t expect too much from life. If you go looking, you’ll always find people who are better than you.”

Resentment prickled Ivy’s skin. She said placidly: “Yes, Baba.”

“And your mother will forgive you,” he added. “Don’t worry.”

But Ivy wasn’t worried. She was free. Determination, an old ally, sprung forth once more. Her senior year quote had been: The best is yet to come. She truly believed it.