The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [77]
At first Ursula felt cheated, as though she’d donated a kidney for a sick child and then spotted it a few days later in a pet-supply store being sold as an aquarium ornament. But in the ensuing weeks she’s come to be more philosophical about the trend. It’s true that as an artist she had a great deal more control over the substance of her creations. But as a marketer she commands a far greater audience. She pictures herself now as a kind of Godzilla in a beret, carving out Rushmores with the point of the Eiffel Tower, chiseling the man from the Moon for an encore. She has the powers of broadcasting, mass production, and corporate capital at her disposal. Already millions of people have taken her creation, Ivy the Savage Girl, into their lives, and surely, she figures, it can’t help but mean to them at least a little bit of what she meant it to mean. And even if it really does mean something entirely different to them all, what artist out there, no matter how serious or conscientious or committed, can dictate the personal uses to which his or her work will be put? No, it should be enough for Ursula that the savage girl is an image people value, one for which they have use, whatever that use may be.
The waitress appears. She has long black hair pulled back so tight it might be smoothing out the wrinkles of her forehead. Her white apron and powder-pink work dress are a little too crisply pressed for diner verisimilitude, but she smacks her regulation bubble gum like a pro.
“Bring me one of everything,” Ivy says to the waitress, reminding Ursula of the way Javier ordered “everything popular” that one time. But Ivy, in contrast, is not taken seriously.
“One of everything?” the waitress says, folding her arms. “Why not two?”
Ivy covers a grin with her knuckles, clearly tickled by the absurdity of the idea of having two of everything.
“She’ll have every scrap of food you’ve got in the place,” Ursula says. “Just cart it all over here.”
“Ten of everything!” Ivy shouts. “And a million of nothing.”
The waitress puts her hand on her hip. “Do you want the nothing served with the everything, or after?”
“Or nothing first,” Ursula says, “then everything?”
“Lunch is nothing,” Ivy declares. “Dessert is everything.”
A tourist family at the next table laughs, listening in. Others at nearby tables watch as well, their faces lit up with the sense of privilege they feel in being privy to the scene, ready to participate on cue with their own laughter.
The waitress, probably an aspiring model or actress herself, takes out her little white pad. “The usual, then?”
Ivy nods, smiling like a guilty child. All in all, her new degree of fame agrees with her. Whenever people give her star treatment, she shoots Ursula a secret, mischievous, happy look. Finally, the look seems to say, reality is beginning to live up to her grandiose delusions.
“And you, ma’am?”
“The portobello burger deluxe,” Ursula says. “And a latte.”
The waitress leaves, and Ivy puffs on her cigarette. “That,” she proclaims, watching an olive-colored pillbox hat chug by on the conveyor belt. She thinks something about the hat to herself and speaks no more about it. After a moment, her cell phone erupts in an insectile rendition of the soundtrack to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. She grabs it out of her purse.
“Hello? Sonja Sonja Sonja. Can’t talk now, kid. Be home later.”
She sticks the phone back in her purse. “She’s a good egg,” she muses. “I’m teaching her how to be a celebrity.” She taps a cylinder of ash contentedly into her glass. As the poster child for the savage look, Ivy herself has attained that odd, intermediate echelon of celebrity in which she has begun to be trailed by the lowest order of would-be paparazzi and called at all hours of the night by tabloid journalists from obscure countries. Her modeling agency, of which Ursula saw no evidence during Ivy