The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [36]
“My mission,” she replies, “is to make the Mauritanian jungle flourish like it never has before.”
For a moment he seems suspicious, but she widens her eyes and doesn’t blink, and after a moment he nods.
“Good for you,” he says. “Good luck.”
“Good luck to you.”
She looks down at her clipboard and does some doodles as the young man rejoins the dazed procession bound for the baggage claim.
Good for you, Ursula.
She closes her eyes. The pressure of airport noise builds in her head: the hum of the peoplemover, the murmur of conversations, the steady succession of mispronounced names being paged. Who was she to make fun of him? He’s proud of those boots—so what? They make his life a little more bearable. Even though they’re only a surface, a stand-in for heroic adventure. Even though there are no jungles in Mauritania.
The Light Age.
The way Javier talks about it, he seems to think it will actually mean something, will actually give people great passions, loves, causes, will change more than the surfaces of things. She wonders about his momentary sadness when Ed Cabaj announced the plans for diet water; she wonders about Chas’s story of his crying in the supermarket. Chas was probably exaggerating. Javier’s eyes tear up sometimes, but so do her own; whose wouldn’t around Chas? Looking through the window at the planes curling off the runway, she draws a mental portrait of Javier against the sky, trying to assemble his odd medley of features, the quality of attention in his overlarge eyes, always accepting, never mocking, never judgmental. The way they look at everything as though everything were brand-spanking new. The way they look at everything with admiration, compassion, even love. The way they look: earnest, comical, passionate, sad, however it is they do when the tears that aren’t really crying appear.
Teeth
“Well,” she says dryly from behind the magazine, “looks like Ivy’s really taking to the new medication.”
“Hi, Gwennan,” Ursula replies. Other kids always thought it was strange that she and Ivy referred to their mother by her name, but that was what Gwennan preferred. It bespoke her hands-off approach to motherhood. She told her daughters that she didn’t particularly care for children, and that anyway childhood and adulthood were not factors of age but states of mind. With Ursula Gwennan at least went through most of the maternal motions, but by the time Ivy showed up, she made no further concessions to convention. She treated them like adults, which meant that half the time they simply had to pretend they knew what she was talking about, had to pretend they really had the full-blown personalities she bestowed on them to speed things along. Ursula would get to be the personification of Gwennan’s left brain—an eagle, sharp-eyed, world-weary, and proud—while Ivy would get to be the right: some shy, reef-dwelling creature, beautiful, overdelicate, dreamy, awkward.
“Hi, Ivy,” Ursula adds. Ivy doesn’t respond. She is catatonic. Ursula has never seen her like this, but Dr. Shivamurti has warned her that it’s happened with her a couple of times already—a medical rarity, especially in schizophrenics of the paranoid variety.
“I have to leave in a few minutes,” Gwennan says. “There’s a tournament. This magazine’s a piece of trash, incidentally.” She tosses it onto a pile of other magazines lying on the floor next to the chair.
Since her forced retirement twelve years ago, she’s become nationally ranked in bridge. Bridge and Buddhism continue to be her only interests in life, though even these are not so much interests as modes of impartiality. They provide her with respectively the distraction and the philosophical justification that allow her not to watch the news, not to keep up with old friends, not to pursue any career or cause, and not to feel guilty about any of it; with the aid of bridge and Buddhism she’s pretty much succeeded in washing her hands of the world, which may be another reason Ivy’s illness hasn’t fazed her all that much: withdrawing from an unpleasant world is, after