The Education of Ivy Blake (6 page)

That afternoon
Ivy padded into her mother's bedroom. The blankets were pulled tight and the throw Aunt Connie had given her mom for Christmas one year—fleece with a print of pussycats all over it—was folded in half across the foot. That her mother always made her bed no matter what was one of the surprising things about her. Ivy sat on the edge of the mattress and dangled her feet, not very far. She was almost as tall as her mom now.

When a car pulled into the drive, Ivy jumped. Then there was a tapping on the door. Ivy got under Aunt Connie's cat blanket and pretended she was a girl who was too sick even to move.

She actually pretended this—as if she was a character in a movie, “a girl,” instead of herself, Ivy. It helped for about as long as the knocking lasted. When the car pulled away, she felt like she'd been flung to the farthest corner of the universe and would never find her way home. She let tears seep out of her eyes, and slowly, she reached out and lifted the bottle that was beside her mom's bed.

She twisted the lid off and smelled. Put a finger down in the bottle and tilted it until liquid sloshed onto her finger. She watched three minutes lurch by on her mother's bedside clock while she thought about trying it.

Then she put the bottle back exactly where it had been and rushed to the kitchen and washed her hands. Next she stuck her head under the tap and let the water run over her tongue even though she hadn't tasted from the bottle.

Sometime while the water gushed into her mouth and ran into her hair and splashed across her face, Ivy decided she was going to school Monday morning. She was going to have to face it all and get on with her life.

She called Prairie late on Sunday night. “I feel a lot better. It was
so
boring. All I did was sleep and watch TV. Ugh.”

“We stopped by—”

“Did you?” Ivy said brightly. “Wow, I didn't know. I slept a lot.”

“I knocked for a long time.”

“Huh.”

“You must've been pretty sick, not to hear it.”

“I was. It was no fun.”

“We ate at the Really Fine.”

Ivy froze like a mouse about to be snapped up by a copperhead.

“I had a cheeseburger. Of course.”

There was laughter in Prairie's voice and Ivy laughed too. She hoped Prairie wouldn't notice how shrilly it came out. “Of course!”

“Olympia waited on us. She asked where you were.”

“Uh-huh?” The mouse-at-the-end-of-its-life feeling swept over Ivy again.

“We told her you were sick and she tried to send a cup of tea home with us. She thought you were my sister.”

“Oh!”

“Which you are, of course, blood sisters, like we swore,” Prairie said. “It's just—she thought you lived with us.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I wish you did. I miss you.”

Tears rose in Ivy's eyes. “Me too.”

“Why don't you come home, then?”

Ivy's feelings did a tailspin. It was like when her mom apologized for throwing her notebook. One moment Ivy'd felt one way and known it was the right and only way. Then, a few words later, everything was changed. The situation was completely different, and yet there was something identical about it. “I
am
home.”

“You know what I mean.” Prairie's sigh was vexed. “I just mean that we all miss you. We want you here, when the baby comes and everything. You're ours, that's how we feel. Me and Grammy and Mom were talking about it last night and we all agreed. Even though you're not ours, of course, we know that. You're your own person. But you're
our
own person, if that makes any sense.”

“Thanks,” Ivy said thickly. She should add something more, but she couldn't. She didn't know what it would be. She thought of lying in bed with Aunt Connie's blanket pulled up, pretending to be “a girl.”
What girl
was the question she couldn't seem to answer.

“Well—I'm glad you're feeling better,” Prairie said after a few seconds had ticked by. “That's good.”

“It was a rotten weekend.”

“Should've let me bring you that ginger ale.”

“You're probably right,” Ivy said.

Monday morning,
Ivy scuffed down the front steps, her backpack heavy on her shoulders. The tulip in their yard had blown apart in all the rain, and the words Ms. Mackenzie said last week slid into Ivy's brain:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.
It sounded like poetry. She'd have to look it up next time she was in the library. She sighed and plodded onward.

All through the first half of the day Ivy kept her head down and her mouth shut and tried to think herself invisible. At lunchtime she headed for a table at the far side of the cafeteria. She sat with her back to the room and took her sandwich out of her sack. The peanut butter tasted like salty glue. The cherry jam her mom had brought home from the gas station tasted like corn syrup. Her lie that she'd been sick over the weekend seemed to be coming true. She didn't feel good at all. When the sandwich was half gone she took out her banana. It was soft. She pulled the peel halfway off, then sat looking at it glumly.

“Oh, yum.” Tate slid onto the bench across from her. “I love old bananas. I never get one. My grandma always turns them into banana bread, which I hate. Isn't that dumb?”

“Um—no. You like what you like, everybody does.”

Tate took an apple out of her bag and polished it on her shirtsleeve. She was about to take a chomp out of it when she suddenly stuck it out toward Ivy. “Want to trade?”

Ivy's eyes widened. “Really?”

“If an apple a day keeps the doctor away, I should be set for life. It's all my mom ever puts in.”

Ivy held out the banana and took Tate's apple.

“Hurrah!” Tate took a bite, and said, still chewing, “Don't tell my grandma, she'll be mushing it up with walnuts and flour quicker than you can say spit.”

Ivy started. “My friend Prairie says that.”

“‘Quicker than you can say spit?' She must be good people, then.”

Ivy nodded and chomped into 4the apple, which was crispy and tart and perfect.

• • •

By the end of the day she thought life was going to go on more or less as usual despite what had happened at the diner. But as she was walking past Ms. Mackenzie's desk, Ms. Mackenzie said, “Ivy, I'd like to talk to you.”

Ivy stared at the three small pottery jugs that sat on a corner of the desk. Ms. Mackenzie had pencils in the orange one, pens in the blue, and dry-erase markers in the green. The jugs were curvy and squat and their colors were bright but not too glaringly bright. They were nice.

“It won't take long.”

Ivy wondered how you'd draw the pots to show how the light caught their curved edges.

“Ivy?”

The room smelled of the glue they'd been using to paste up their geography projects before the bell rang. Ivy's was a collage about the Himalayan mountains. Cutting the pictures out of magazines, looking for the right shapes and colors, she had felt like she'd left one room of herself and entered another, a bright airy room. She was back in the first room now, though. The dark, stuffy one. Out in the hall, someone in heels clicked by.

“Very seventies, don't you think?”

Ivy looked up. “What?”

“The jugs. They're from a chip-dip set my parents got when I was a kid. They sat in the center of a wire basket. You put your chips in the basket and your dips in the tubs, and voilà, you were the hostess with the mostest.”

“Oh.” Ivy tugged on her braid.

Ms. Mackenzie swung the chair beside her desk around so it was facing her own, and motioned Ivy into it. “Sit,” she said.

Ivy sat.

“If you need me to call your mom and explain why you're staying after, I will. If you need a ride home, I'll arrange it.”

Ivy stared at her shoes. She was wearing the black granny boots she'd found the same day she found all the dresses and long johns shirts with Mom Evers and Prairie. The boots were too big, but she'd told herself that just meant she'd grow into them and get to wear them longer.

“Ivy?”

Her mom wouldn't like being called from school. Also Ivy didn't need a ride. She bumped one toe against the other.

“Do you need me to call anyone or arrange a ride home?”

Ivy shook her head. “I walk to school.”

“All right, then.” Ms. Mackenzie furrowed her forehead and studied Ivy like Ivy was a painting, or a math problem. Ivy squirmed, then made herself sit still. Soon Ms. Mackenzie would start asking sympathetic questions that Ivy did not want to answer, like
how often was her mom's temper so bad,
and
did she always throw things when she got angry
(no, not always; sometimes she did even worse things), and
did Ivy want to talk about it.

The answer to that would also be no.

But Ms. Mackenzie didn't say any of that. Instead she opened her desk drawer and pulled Ivy's sketchbook out and handed it to her.

Ivy gasped, then grabbed the book and held it tight against herself.

“I picked it up right away. No one else even touched it.”

A great heaviness lifted out of Ivy.

“I have to admit something to you, however.”

Ivy gazed at her, waiting.

“No one else looked at it, but I did.”

The sick feeling roared back. Ms. Mackenzie had seen her attempts to draw a twist of ribbon until one actually
looked
like a ribbon, which had taken pages and pages. She'd seen the drawing of Ivy's and Prairie's legs and feet and grocery bags, which Ivy had done while riding in the way back of the station wagon. You might not expect that four grocery bags and two sets of legs and two pairs of holey tennis shoes could be interesting, but they were. The drawing always brought the day back: the smell of peaches, the leafy green of the big bunch of parsley hanging out of the bag, the peaceful feeling Ivy had inside, the song Prairie hummed to herself—
Oh, my darling, oh, my darling, oh, my daaar-ling Clementine.
Now she didn't know why she'd been so pleased with it—a lopsided drawing of groceries!

Worst of all were the pictures she'd drawn of Ms. Mackenzie, and the one of herself as a movie director. That dumb, dumb beret; that ridiculous megaphone; that awful chair with her name on it.

Ms. Mackenzie folded her hands and looked solemn. “I apologize for doing that. I shouldn't have, but I couldn't stop myself.”

Despite Ivy's resolve, a tear, a stupid, stupid tear, brimmed.

Ms. Mackenzie touched Ivy's shoulder. “Ivy, your drawings are great. They really are.”

Ivy flicked a quick questioning glance at her.

“I didn't read anything after the first few words—I could see it was private—but I looked at the pictures. They're
so
good. Ivy—wow!”

Ivy closed her eyes; a shiver ran over her.

“Look at me.”

Despite herself, Ivy opened one eye and then the other. Ms. Mackenzie was gazing at her, her expression intent. “Listen. You're interesting, and you're smart and strong. You're going to go far. You are. You just must never give up.”

Goose bumps raised on Ivy's arms. She flicked her eyes back to the toes of her boots. Round black toes with scuff marks. They were friendly in the same way as the little pots.

“Ivy. I want you to know this. You can do something with your life, no matter what may've come before.”

So all her hoping that here no one would know her history had been foolish. Of course they knew. It was in her records.

“Ivy.”

Ivy jumped.

“
Listen.
You can make something of your life, and you will. You already have.”

“Right,” Ivy said.

“It's true. You can do whatever you want to. Don't let anything defeat you. Do you hear me?”

Ivy sat as still as a wild animal in the woods.

Ms. Mackenzie gave a great booming laugh then, a laugh like you'd expect out of Santa Claus on his best day ever, Santa on vacation in Florida, basking in the sun on some secluded beach where he could let his hair down instead of driving all over in a cold sleigh delivering heavy packages. “I know you do hear me. And there's something I want you to do for me this summer.”

Ivy shook her head, like she had water in her ear. “Summer?”

“You know—summer. Sun, sleeping in, no school, that whole scenario?”

After a pause, Ivy nodded. Summer with the Everses would probably have been like that. Not exactly—there was a lot of work on the farm in the summer, a lot of markets to pack up for and unpack from—but similar. It would have felt safe and carefree in a way in which life with her mom mostly didn't. Actually, always didn't, even when things were going all right. Once you began to distrust something, the wariness was always there, waiting to leap out.

“There's only a couple weeks of school left, vacation's almost upon us. I want you to amaze yourself. Follow your dreams. That's the answer.”

“I didn't ask a question,” Ivy dared to say, though she was looking at her hands and said it quietly and politely.

“Yes, you did. You most certainly did.”

Ivy's eyes inched up. Ms. Mackenzie wiggled her brows. “Promise me.”

Slowly, Ivy nodded.

• • •

She stopped when she was almost out the classroom door. “How?”

Ms. Mackenzie tilted her head.

“How do I amaze myself? What do I do, how do I start?”

Ms. Mackenzie tapped her pen on her blotter. “Start anywhere, you already have.” She pointed at the sketchbook. “There's the evidence. You're great at seeing things. That's a gift.”

Ivy squinted at Ms. Mackenzie. “Just—seeing? That's a thing? A special thing, I mean?”

“Trust me. It's like breathing. Everybody thinks it's so easy, but it really isn't. It's a talent. And you have it.”

“So—”

“Draw more pictures, make a movie, whatever you want. Just, whatever you do,
don't quit.
”

Ivy nodded.

“I liked that picture of you as a director. Pretend your eyes are a camera. Turn them on and let them roll: lights, camera, action.”