The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [15]
From an early age Ivy was branded the spacey one. Other kids made fun of her for her indifference toward their games and their company, and Ursula, incensed, would stand up for her time and again, but Ivy herself never took offense. She never got upset, never defended herself, never seemed to care about anything deeply. She didn’t do sports, didn’t make friends, didn’t do well in class. Ivy’s behavior galled Ursula at the time, but over the years she would come to realize that it stemmed from the fact that deep down Ivy thought that nothing she did could possibly matter. Her self-esteem was so low that she was less a child than a pale, flitting ghost, both to herself and to everyone around her.
After Ursula graduated from high school, she decided to attend a local college and keep living at home so she could be there for Ivy, but over the next four years Ivy herself was there less and less. She made a couple of friends, a pair of precociously sophisticated and alienated girls from the neighborhood, and spent all her waking hours in one or the other of their homes. Over that time her body grew from scrawny to lithe; her wide-set eyes went from weird to exotic; and suddenly she was the prettiest girl in school. Wherever she went, boys tracked her motions with longing, and girls with jealousy. She visited Ursula’s campus once, and even the college-age guys couldn’t help themselves from staring, their desire pathetically plain on their flushed, confused faces, while Ivy, to Ursula’s rage and amazement, demurely encouraged them, flirting with shocking expertise. Her looks had given her something that, if it was not exactly confidence, at least resembled confidence from afar. She could playact any way she wanted now, and people would more or less follow along. She became almost inhumanly self-sufficient, her own best friend, doing and saying whatever she felt like and never thinking of the consequences. Back in the neighborhood, a mystique began to grow up around her. Kids would tell stories about her, mostly involving drugs, and after a while Ursula stopped refuting them. She doubted they were true, but she was no longer completely certain. Ivy slipped further and further from Ursula’s control, and fairly or not, Ursula felt unappreciated and even, in a way, betrayed, and finally she washed her hands of her sister altogether and left for grad school in another state.
From then on she would see Ivy only through the time lapse of summers and holidays, and the rest of the picture would be filled in through tales she’d hear from friends, about Ivy’s monthlong school absences, her failed classes, her nomination for homecoming queen and subsequent nonattendance of the ceremony. When Ivy told her that everyone said she should be a model and so that was what she was planning to do, Ursula made one last attempt to guide her, telling her she didn’t have to do that, necessarily, she was capable of other things in life. But by then Ursula was bitter about her own life, about her own lack of success of any kind, and her bitterness turned to jealousy when she saw Ivy’s Hugo Banzer ad in Glamour magazine—a cool, gorgeous, disaffected Ivy slouching on a Mid City subway car in a stretch silk slip dress with her knees haphazardly parted, next to a chiseled guy in a T-shirt and snakeskin pants. In that moment she decided that Ivy epitomized all the things about the culture that conspired to make people unhappy, all the glitz and shallowness and materialism and facile beauty worship. Underneath this lay a more personal sense of outrage at the idea that Ivy had coasted through life without making the slightest effort and was now a success, whereas she herself had always worked like a dog, and still there was no reward in sight for her. It took Ivy’s crack-up for Ursula’s