The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [74]
After tracing the path of the conveyor belt as best she can all the way up, Ivy turns her attention to the items themselves, trundling by on the belt just below the window: an endless parade of scarves, hats, blouses, dresses, lingerie, bow ties, wallets, watches, and jewelry, each product riding on its own velvet pillow. She sits very erect, as any good fashion model should, a sign of progress on which the outpatient care staff takes care to compliment her at each bimonthly checkup. Ursula was never even aware that Ivy was taller than her until she became a model, straightening the familial slouch, levitating her head, stretching her neck like a ballerina. She’s wearing a low-cut maroon minidress that is really too dressy for daytime but looks good on her nonetheless, nicely contrasting with her skin, which is pale, luminous, and once more devoid of acne, thanks to her renewed regimen of glycolic acid and Retin-A. Today is Ivy’s twenty-first birthday, a fact Ursula had forgotten—repressed, possibly—until Ivy mentioned it a moment ago. In a few months Ursula herself will be thirty. The signs of age she sees in the mirror every day are made slightly more galling by the progress of Ivy’s body over time, for—though Ursula may only be imagining this—it seems like Ivy just keeps looking younger. The bloating effects of the medication seem thus far to be confined to her face, which in expanding has filled in the worry lines around her eyes and mouth, giving her the soft-focused expression of a much younger girl.
The ads that created her new fame first appeared two months ago, plastered across the sides of Mid City buses. They showed her sprawled out in a tenement entranceway, dressed in a one-shouldered hide minidress, with a back so low and a hemline so high that her bare back touched the moldering door frame and the backs of her bare thighs pressed against the cement stair on which she sat. Her jaggedly chopped hair was pressed down against her temples and forehead by a tight leather band, and her face was made up with slashes of bright-gold warpaint along her cheekbones, mauve eye shadow that gave her eyes a puffy, beaten look, and gold lipstick, sluttishly smudged. The scars on her arms and legs were left visible and unretouched. A wooden spear leaned against the door frame behind her. Beside her dirt-streaked, canted thighs stood the plastic liter bottle, erect and beaded with condensation. The copy bracketed her from above and below:
traveling lite
litewater
From the streets and sidewalks passengers and pedestrians gazed at the savage girl hunched between the wheels and the windows of the bus, her lovely, dirty, naked limbs in a heap, her heart-shaped, gold-painted face tilted to the side: a broken toy. They recognized her—the obscure model who’d gone nuts in that gruesome, titillating, highly entertaining manner a few months back. Those who wouldn’t have remembered on their own were helped out by the media which reminded them with a spate of infotainment stories on this daring use of a schizophrenic, the ethical dilemmas it raised, the lingering questions about her present condition. The campaign was a triumph in splitting the difference between irony and earnestness. Some chuckled at the implicit