White Ivy(96)
“Only good things, I hope,” said Ivy.
The girl lit up. “You should hear the way Taitai brags! I’m so sorry to hear about Grandma. Taitai said she’d be okay. I’m so relieved. Congratulations, by the way.”
“For what?”
“Your engagement.”
“Oh!… Thank you.”
“I just bought my dress the other day… I can’t wait for your wedding. Taitai says there’ll be two hundred guests, and that your fiancé’s dad was a senator… I’ve seen photos of you two. Your fiancé is so handsome, he looks like Brad Pitt… I heard you two went to Hawaii on vacation. How romantic!”
Ivy had not known this girl, Mimi, had existed until that morning, and yet this girl knew everything about her and Gideon, she was a guest of Ivy’s wedding, she called Meifeng “Grandma.”
Shen asked Mimi to show Ivy the workstation where items were photographed and cataloged. They headed to a small room where a fancy tripod camera was set up in front of a green screen on one side of the wall. “Taitai would stay here working all night if she could,” Mimi confided. “Your dad installed a camera system so she can feel safe working here alone. See?” She pointed at the little screen showing the various exit doors and sidewalks. “Taitai has an eye for angles. She knows how to place and style each item so it looks brand-new in the photos. Her personal taste is so elegant as well. Your house is decorated exquisitely.”
Ivy could tell Mimi wanted to impress her with her intimacy with the Lins; this only brought out in Ivy the instinct to withhold. She smiled tepidly, a little twitch of her cheekbones that could hardly be called a smile, and looked somewhere to the left of Mimi’s earlobe. I guess I’ve learned a little from Sylvia, she thought.
“I’m getting hungry,” she said to Shen when they returned.
“Should we get some hamburgers on the way back to the hospital?”
“I brought some dishes over to your house yesterday,” Mimi jumped in. “Not that fancy though,” she added, blushing again.
“Mimi is a great cook,” said Shen. “She often brings dinner to our house. Your mom and I get home so late, sometimes around midnight, and you know your mother—she never liked cooking. She doesn’t even have time for housework anymore.”
“So who does it then,” Ivy said bluntly.
“One of the women in your grandmother’s mahjong group comes once a week to clean. We pay her twenty dollars an hour, and she always stays for tea.”
So along with an employee and accountant, the Lins could also afford a housekeeper. A stranger, not Nan, had been dusting Ivy’s glass dog. Ivy thought of the designer clothes her family had worn to Thanksgiving at the Speyers’ house, a display that had horrified her at the time as a gaudy attempt to impress. But the new clothes, the upgraded, barely recognizable house, the credit card that Austin used indiscriminately, the checks Nan had sent Ivy to pay her rent and the wedding—it was clear now that none of these things had been face-saving gestures, as Ivy had assumed, but simply her parents’ real lives.
Mimi embraced Ivy when saying goodbye. “You’re even prettier than your photos,” she said.
Ivy recognized in the girl’s wistful voice a bad case of family crush. She was the object of a family crush.
Somewhere along the way, Shen and Nan had become businesspeople with a bit of wealth and power. The lie Ivy had been telling all along had come true.
* * *
STILL NO RESPONSE from Roux. Strange how one could get used to anything. The blind panic of before had receded, leaving behind a muted detachment. It was not resignation but a kind of gearing up. A feeling she was familiar with. She’d first felt it, at fourteen, rapping on Roux’s window with an orange-sized bruise on her head.
Meifeng was discharged on Tuesday morning. To celebrate, Nan ordered from the local Sichuan restaurant a feast of the Lins’ favorites: braised pork ribs with sweet potato, cold eggplant soaked in garlic and fresh chili peppers, marinated beef tongue, little oval slices of glutinous rice cakes glistening with oil atop a bed of leeks. Austin was coaxed down to dinner by the combined pressure of the entire family. He made an effort to shower and shave, arriving at the table wearing a pin-striped suit, silk tie and all, as if the clothes would trigger him into a different mode of living. Ivy had never seen anything so feeble in all her life. Nan smiled hopefully and Shen spoke in hearty tones about how much weight Austin had lost. None of them commented on the impracticality of eating oily food dressed in one’s best suit. Shen drank too much. Nan heaped meat into her children’s rice bowls. In other words, nothing had changed. At least on the surface. And yet Ivy saw that her father was drinking expensive liquor, not generic beer, and Nan wore a thin gold necklace over her turtleneck. Nan never used to wear jewelry. This new jewelry-wearing Nan ordered eighty-dollar takeout meals instead of scolding Meifeng for buying Austin a McDonald’s Happy Meal. There were a host of other flyers and coupons for Chinese restaurants clipped on the fridge, suggesting this was a usual occurrence. What luxury. Maybe she and Austin would have been different people if they’d grown up eating eighty-dollar Chinese takeout meals. Maybe this. Maybe that. Who knew what made you you. Ivy wished she knew.
She could hardly eat. She watched as Shen chuckled to himself over something Nan said. When Nan complained of a headache, he got up and went to fetch her a glass of water. They snapped at each other over various past grievances, not in a serious way, it was just how they talked, without awareness of the other person as other but only as an extension of speaking to themselves. Ivy wondered if she and Gideon would ever learn that intimate language of marriage. Would they have fights about laundry and cooking, pee in front of each other, argue about where to go on vacation? She could not imagine such a life with Gideon. Happiness with him had always been like an impressionist painting—one had to take a step back to appreciate the scene. Their marriage, if they married, would be like the peonies floating in the water bowl back in Ivy’s room at Finn Oaks: tranquil, elegant, unmarred by strife. What did it matter if she never experienced the mundane familiarity of the sort between her parents? She had never wanted that kind of love anyway. She had only ever wanted the picturesque, the heroic.