The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [27]
Continuum
A squad car creeps along the paths of Banister Park, its headlights slowly sweeping around, sparking along the fence bars. The police lock the gates now at midnight, a Pyrrhic victory for the neighborhood landowners, who must have hoped the homeless would spontaneously vanish instead of merely shuffling out through the exits and settling on the surrounding sidewalks with their bedrolls, overcoats, garbage bags, and carefully laid newspapers. Ursula treads along lightly, breathing minimally, the way people walk through graveyards.
It’s getting harder, visiting Ivy; the frantic haze of Ivythink takes longer to wear off every time. She’s been wandering for hours now, and her thoughts are still jumbled, unfamiliar—half frightening, half funny. One of her favorite phrases of Ivy’s—the glamour continuum—has been bouncing around in her head. It’s such a good phrase she half suspects it came to Ivy before and not after its definition, whatever that may be. Possibly that glamour is a zero-sum game, that the creation of a single Hollywood celebrity requires the squalidification of hundreds, maybe even thousands, of inner-city dwellers—a thousand warts on a thousand noses, a thousand ill-fitting knockoff jeans, ten thousand lamentable haircuts, dinners at McDonald’s, greasy complexions, pounds of fat. In which case these homeless people’s problem boils down not to poverty per se but more essentially to a desperate, terminal lack of glamour. Perhaps Ivy anticipates the establishment of charities for the redistribution of this commodity. Celebrities could donate designer gowns and invitations to awards ceremonies. Society matrons could donate money for the homeless to attend fund-raisers where they in turn could donate it to other charitable causes—the opera house, the botanical garden, the Exeter lacrosse team.
Ursula stops, having found the human mound she’s looking for: the savage girl, swaddled in a bedroll sewn together from old leather and suede coats. She is curled up like a question mark, with Ursula’s own feet forming the dot. Her stiff platinum Mohican sets off her head like a lunar eclipse—dim moon, corona of jagged light. She looks so peaceful asleep that the sparkling sidewalk beneath her could be hewn from a cloud. Ursula herself feels a wave of drowsiness. She could curl up next to her. It might not be that much less comfortable than the lumpy futon mattress in her cramped apartment. But of course it would, she corrects herself—a reflex of guilt or simple self-hatred, she’s no longer sure which. Of course she’s lucky to have that futon and that apartment and this cushy job, and all the other privileges that more often than not just feel like burdens to her. Splitting the difference between sidewalk and futon, she crosses the street and sits down in a doorway, turning up the not-so-tall collar of her trenchcoat and watching the savage girl through the space between two parked cars.
She opens her book and begins to sketch, trying to remember the look of calm determination on the girl’s face the day she observed her stitching pieces of hide. The expression is elusive, and soon Ursula is drawing her sister instead, the way she looks in the afternoons, hunched over, bony-backed, the plane of her oval face angled toward the circular tabletop, reflecting its blankness. In the background, the disembodied, unfinished face of the savage girl continues to float like it does in Ursula’s mind, like the abandoned beginning of an idea. In the empty space above Ivy’s right shoulder, Ursula begins penciling in her own face, emphasizing and even exaggerating those features