The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [9]
Ursula had spent the last four years on the outskirts of a small college town, trying without much success to be an artist, having sporadic friendships and relationships with transient grad students, often depressed and all but broke. In many respects her life had been organized around the principle of distrusting glamour. But her sister’s illness jarred something loose in her. Wandering the endless skein of Middle City streets after visiting hours, she felt completely disconnected from her past, as though she’d just woken up from a long slumber, a dream of a life that she was relieved to find was not her own—or at least not necessarily her own, she thought. It didn’t have to be. She could change it all, starting here and now. She could move to the city. She could have a career that was fashionable and relevant and exciting and financially rewarding. She could be successful, stable, secure—the kind of sister in a position to do Ivy some good, the kind who could be a positive presence in her life, who could take care of her, nurse her back to health.
She leans closer to Ivy, basking in the sudden brightness of her eyes.
“Why are the trendspotters your only hope?” she pleads, unable to contain her excitement. “How can they help you?”
Ivy points with the cigarette around the room. “The trendspotters see. They’ve got coder-sponders.” She points a pinkie at her right temple. Then she winces and clutches her head, moaning uncontrollably. Ursula jumps up and rushes around the table, bends over and hugs her sister, asks her what’s the matter, if she’s in pain, if she needs a doctor, but already the moaning has subsided into a very quiet, high-pitched noise, like a shriek heard from a great distance. Ursula rocks Ivy against her, feeling guilty for letting the conversation go this far again. She half wishes she could tell Ivy about her new job, let her know that she has the trendspotters close at hand, that whatever help they can possibly bring her, Ursula herself will obtain. But of course this would just nail Ivy’s delusions all the more firmly in place.
Gradually Ivy calms down, and Ursula pulls a chair around next to hers and sits down. After looking at the ice cream carton for a minute, Ivy reaches out and tears off the perforated strip, lifts the top, and gazes at the fat, pristine stripes of white, brown, and pink. Years ago Ivy declared that the three colors arranged in the box this way looked like the flag of Candyland.
“This is future ice cream,” she whispers. “Isn’t it?”
“I don’t know. What’s the difference?”
“Squibb-Bryer’s is the difference. They use the ideal ingredients.”
“What are those?”
“Breast milk and semen. Mummy cummy yummy.”
She picks up a spoon and grasps it by the base of its handle for leverage. The ice cream is still hard and comes off in small flakes. She works on it intently, excavating the band of chocolate, taking care not to disturb the other two flavors. Watching the tiny crease of concentration appear in the vast, milky expanse between Ivy’s eyes, Ursula is reminded of a game they used to play in which they’d act like robots, trying to get each other to smile while keeping their own faces serious and saying absurd things in expressionless voices. Being eight and a half years older, Ursula always had the upper hand, but even so, Ivy was exceptionally good; sometimes she’d hold out all day, even after Ursula had lost, even