The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [14]
In retrospect there was something more than a little monomaniacal about her last four years, spent painting and repainting the same theme in dozens of variations. They were all triptychs, some actually consisting of three separate panels, some divided in more subtle ways, but all presenting three distinct views of the subject at hand: in every painting there was an idealized world and an infernalized world and the everyday world in between—three takes on the same objects, or people, or landscapes, or even abstract geometries. It was odd stuff, it now seems to her, but she sent it out into the world full of hope of understanding and ambition for recognition. She allowed herself to imagine that her paintings would be accessible to and even resonate deeply with people, but for one reason or another her work never caught the attention of more than a handful of minor galleries, and only a couple of the pieces ever sold. And meanwhile, her kid sister moved to Middle City and began peddling her own little triptych: of wide-set eyes, perky tits, and long, skinny legs. This was the visual art, it seemed, that the world had use for. In the few brief phone conversations they had in the year before her breakdown, Ivy told her about all the work she was getting—she was slated to be on every runway, in every magazine, she bragged and bragged. The boastfulness was something new, uncharacteristic, but Ursula was too full of resentment and self-loathing to question it, and when Ivy stopped calling, it only fed Ursula’s bitterness even more, and she herself made no effort to renew their contact. Had she known that Ivy, in all her time in Mid City, had gotten just one major print ad and other than that only an intermittent stream of less glamorous jobs, mostly for foreign clothing catalogs, and that furthermore she was losing her protracted struggle to hold on to her sanity, Ursula would have acted differently, of course. But this doesn’t make her feel any better now. She knew there was no one else in the world to look after Ivy, certainly not their parents, and that alone should have been reason enough for her to keep tabs on her sister.
Looking after Ivy has pretty much always been Ursula’s job. Even before the divorce their father was never really a part of the family, and as for their mother, motherhood just never ranked among her various engrossing interests. So Ivy ended up mostly in Ursula’s charge, and despite their substantial age difference, they did what they could together. They walked to school and home from school. They entertained each other with storytellings and games of make-believe for which Ursula was a little too old and Ivy a little too young. They sat under a tree in the backyard and made marathon courses for bugs. In time it would fall to Ursula to answer all the body questions—when and what to shave, what to do about menstruation. Ursula took her job as surrogate parent seriously, as she took everything seriously. She was diligent in schoolwork and sports and hobbies, responsible to a fault, carving out self-imposed rules and parameters to which she would arduously adhere in an attempt to counteract the chaos of her largely parentless childhood. Her expectations of Ivy were likewise exactingly high, as was her disappointment when Ivy failed to live up to them. At a time when Ursula had enrolled herself in drawing classes and was spending two hours a day afterward working on her sketches, Ivy would sit on her own in an unused corner of the room, making drawings as well. To Ursula’s consternation, Ivy’s drawings were all the same drawing, the same exact cartoon mouse, over and over again. She filled book after book with this mouse, or rather mostly just fragmentary beginnings of it, sometimes just a line or two, the curved side of a face, a couple of eyelashes, a solitary whisker, at which point she’d abandon the drawing because something about it just wasn’t right,