The Education of Ivy Blake (12 page)

Ivy cruised up
to her house on her bike one muggy afternoon, her book bag pulling at her shoulder, and frowned when she saw the Mustang in the drive. She jiggled the key in the lock and slipped inside. There was a sound of chopping from the kitchen. Water ran and a pot banged on a stove burner. Something crashed to the floor and her mom said
dang
softly, the way you said things to yourself when you thought you were alone. Ivy tugged on her braid and headed for the kitchen.

She opened her eyes wide when she got there, like she hadn't noticed the car outside. “Mom! I thought you had to work.” Her mom's boss had kept her on even after she'd had the police come. She'd said she knew Ivy's mom had a child to support, and that she'd let it go as long as it never happened again. That had made her mom mad because nothing
had
happened as far as she was concerned. She'd only done what Lindsey told her was okay to do.

“Yeah, well. Not today.”

Her mother stood looking down into a pot; the room smelled of boiling potatoes. Ivy poured herself a glass of tea, added ice cubes, and took a tentative sip as if the amount of ice compared to tea was the only thing on her mind. “How come?”

Her mom didn't answer and Ivy went back to the chair where she'd dropped her bag. She began stacking books on the table:
Making Movies, Filmmaking for Teens, The Hero's Journey.

“What's all that?”

“Books.” Ivy had spent the afternoon at the library. Mrs. Grizzby was right. It wasn't so easy to figure out how to make a movie.

“It's summer vacation and you still can't get enough of books?”

“Nope.” Ivy smiled to take the shortness out of her answer.

Her mom leafed through
The Hero's Journey,
then went back to the first page
.
“‘There are only two or three human stories,'” she read. Ivy took a sip of her tea as her mom finished the quote: “‘and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.'”

Ivy studied her mom from behind the safety of her tea glass. If there were only a few human stories, she wondered why her mom had to star in such a sad one. And whether her own had to be the same. Ms. Mackenzie had said no. Ivy hoped she was right.

Her mother put her finger on the line of text. “Willa Cather. Sounds like catheter.”

“She's a famous writer, Mom.”

“Famous, huh? Is that what you want to be? Famous?”

Ivy ran her thumb up and down the sweaty outside of her tea glass. Nothing she said would be right, but the answer was no. Famous wasn't the point.

Her mother picked up
Making Movies
and riffled the pages so fast that Ivy was afraid she'd tear them. “Pretty swanky stuff there, Ives. Isn't it too old for you?”

“It's just a book, Mom.”

Her mother took
Filmmaking for Teens
off the stack. She flipped through a few pages and then let it fall closed too. “You're not exactly a teen yet.”

Ivy shrugged one shoulder. She pretty often felt a hundred years older than she was. That was part of the reason she loved Prairie so much. With Prairie, she felt like a regular eleven-year-old kid. Or maybe it was that with Prairie, it seemed okay to be whatever she was. Ivy missed her with a sudden hard pang.

“So how come you haven't been on the phone with the great girlfriend since she got back from down south?”

Ivy glanced up sharply at her mom. She could go for ages without seeming like she was paying any attention to Ivy at all, and then zip in like a hawk on her exact thoughts. “I don't know.”

“What about the farmers' market? I notice you didn't go last Saturday.”

Ivy shrugged. The phone had rung on Friday while her mom was at work, and for reasons Ivy didn't completely understand, she'd let the answering machine get it. It had been Prairie. Ivy hadn't picked up, and Prairie hadn't called back. Yet.

“She dump you, that what it is?”

“No!”

“You get tired of her?”

“
No.
She's my best friend.”

“You don't act like it lately.”

“Well, she is.” Ivy thought of the postcards tucked into her sketchbook, mountain scenes from North Carolina, all of them a little faded. They'd been coming in the mail all week; every one had been the best part of Ivy's day. Ivy could imagine Prairie taking them out of a dusty rack in a far corner of the Vine's Cove General Store, and grinning to herself as she wrote the messages.

The first two had come on the same day. SO MAD, was written in Prairie's firm printing on one. In the bottom right corner, in small letters, she'd written 3/6. The other card said, LOVE, PRAIRIE. The numbers on that one were 6/6. The next day a card that said, I GOT arrived, with a 2/6 in the corner, and the day after that the message read, WERE HERE (5/6). Then there was nothing until yesterday when there'd been one more. WISH YOU, it said, and 4/6.

Ivy wished too. She wished everything was simpler. She wished she didn't have so much to hide and that she wasn't so mad deep inside over what she'd heard the Everses say. That they were sad for her. That she needed to be cut some slack.

On the stove, the potato water boiled high and lifted the pot lid. Foam cascaded over the edge of the kettle and hissed onto the burner. Her mom whipped around and yanked the lid off. She yelped as the steam burned her wrist.

“Are you all right?”

Her mom held her wrist under the tap. She looked exhausted suddenly and Ivy's heart went soft. Her mom turned the tap off and studied her wrist, then peered into the kettle and shook it slightly. “I was going to make mashed potatoes for supper, but not now I guess. They're all stuck to the bottom.”

“It's all right. We can use the good parts.”

Her mom made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh. “Scraping off the burnt parts. That's about as good as it gets for people like us.”

Ivy began scooping unburned potatoes into a bowl. “How come you're not at work?”

Her mother's shoulders sagged. “I got fired today. The boss still thinks I'm stealing, which is bull. I never stole anything.”

Ivy nodded. Her mom was a lot of things, but a thief had never been one of them. She probably
hadn't
taken the batteries. They probably had been on sale. They were almost expired, after all.

“I worked hard at that station. I was never late, I never took off early, I never slacked around like Lindsey does.”

Ivy gave her mom a sympathetic look. Her mom did always take pride in being a good employee even when she hated her jobs. It was one of those surprising things about her, like making her bed.

“I think Lindsey set me up.”

Ivy's eyes went wide. “How?”

“Telling me to take the popcorn and jam—Lindsey said it was okay, but it wasn't okay with the boss and it made me look bad. That was small potatoes, because now it's liquor and cigarettes that're missing. There's money in that. I think Lindsey's reselling them, but she told the boss it's me doing it. Plus she's mad because Dave's always flirting with me. Not that I asked him to.”

“Dave? Yuck.”

Her mom smiled for the first time. “I know. Not my type.”

• • •

Ivy woke up late that night to hear her mom talking to someone. She tiptoed out of her room and stood in the hall.

“Yeah, you were right about her,” her mother said sadly.

There was a pause. Then she said, “I'm sorry too, George. I just—I have a temper, I always have. It's the way I am, I can't help it.”

Another silence.

Her mom laughed softly. “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe we could.”

Ivy went back to bed and put her pillow over her head.

Ivy sat
on the floor in front of the computer, her legs numb from sitting cross-legged so long. Her mom sat on the couch behind her, watching
The Price Is Right.
The show's theme song blared.

Ivy fiddled with the fade-in on the shots she'd downloaded, making the transitions slower, then faster, then slower again. The computer Aunt Connie had bought on sale years ago sat on the coffee table between the couch and TV and it was a noisy spot when her mom was home. The movie was more of a movie-ette, really, only a hundred and fifty seconds long, but it was a start. She was getting better with the camera, anyway.

Today's shots were of doors, which Ivy'd always liked. She loved the door to the Everses' house the first time she saw it. It had faded, friendly paint that was the same red as the barn, and a shiny black porcelain knob. It seemed to promise something nice lay within, and it did. Of course, sometimes doors promised one thing and delivered another, but they all seemed to hint at something. That's what she liked about them—the story on the other side.

Ivy pushed a key and the movie began to play. It included a blue door at a bakery across town, Quail Middle School's big glass doors, the small sage-green doors of the old Senate House, and the gate of the wrought-iron fence at the house she liked so much. That one wasn't technically a door, but it was an entrance. Right now the movie ended with their own door and Ivy couldn't decide about that, whether to leave it in or take it out. She tapped a few keys and the their door was gone. She tapped again and it was back.

“You want to watch
Jeopardy!
?” her mom asked.

Ivy shook her head. An ad for the summer carnival down on the river came on and Ivy blocked the sound out. When her mom left the room, Ivy ignored that too. She turned off the computer and opened up her sketchbook. Lately she'd been thinking she could turn the story she'd been working on, about a girl named Heather Lake, into a movie script. It had started out as a story in her sketchbook before she ever left the Everses, and now it was the best idea she had for a movie. In the story, Heather had been kidnapped as a toddler by a woman she thought was her mother.

SCENE ONE she wrote in big block letters at the top of a new page. SETTING:
A small bedroom with one window, a single bed, and a desk. A cat is curled up on the bed. A girl sits at the desk, reading.

Ivy gazed at the word
reading,
then erased it.
Writing in a notebook,
she put down instead.

Her mom came back in, dressed in her favorite jeans and her sandals with the high-stacked heels. She held her T-R-A-C-Y key chain in one hand. “Come on. Let's go out.”

Ivy looked up. “What?”

“You've been working long enough, you're going to ruin your eyes, to say nothing about your back. How can you sit slouched over like that so long? It can't be good for you.”

Ivy sat up straight. Her back did ache.

“We'll go to the carnival. Get something to eat, a corn dog or whatever. Can't sit around the house moping forever.”

Ivy scrambled to her feet and yanked her T-shirt straight. The shirt was red with a picture of a laughing atom on it, and it had reminded her of Jacob when she saw it at a garage sale down the street last week. The caption under the picture said
Never trust an atom, they make up everything,
and it had instantly become her official
I'm-working-on-my-movie
shirt, her lucky charm. She always felt good wearing it. Hopeful, and full of possibilities.

• • •

In the parking lot at the carnival, Ivy and her mom slammed their doors at the same time. Her mom rapped the roof of the Mustang. “Jinx.” Ivy grinned. Her mom threw her arm over Ivy's shoulders as they headed for the park.

The Ferris wheel curved against the sky and tinny oompah music floated toward them.

Her mother paid the entry fee and they put their hands out to be stamped with a purple-ink clown face, and then they were swallowed by the crowd. Ivy smelled candy apples, French fries, caramel corn, and hamburgers. The rides blared music, the games buzzed and honked, the barkers cried out insistently. Her mom walked to the booth where you bought tickets for the rides, then handed Ivy twenty tickets and took twenty for herself.

“Wow, are you sure? I don't need so many—”

“Don't worry about it, it's a splurge. You only live once, right?”

“Yeah, but, Mom—” Ivy didn't want to finish the sentence—
you haven't been working.

“No worries.” Her mom smiled crookedly. “It's twenty bucks, it won't make or break us. I never did take you out for your birthday, so consider it a belated present.”

“Wow. Okay.”

“What do you want to ride first? What about the Gravitron? You up for it?”

“Yeah.”
Ivy buttoned her tickets into the pocket of her shorts and hurried after her mother.

• • •

An hour later they sat side by side in the Ferris wheel. The wheel had stopped when they were almost to the top, and their seat swung slightly. Ivy gripped the safety bar and gazed out over the river. It was almost dark. Below them the festival galloped on. A fierce, sailing joy filled her chest. Her mom touched her knee. “Your dad and I used to always go to all the fairs around. Play the games, ride the rides.” She grimaced. “Back in the day. It was a good time.”

Ivy's mom never talked about her dad. She probably wished she hadn't said anything now, because her leg started jiggling, which made their seat swing. Ivy studied the lights of the town across the river, pretending that nothing strange had just happened, but she snuck a look at her mom when the wheel started slowly moving again. Her mom tapped her unlit cigarette on the safety bar. “I'm doing pretty good with this quitting thing, hey? Almost two weeks without falling off the wagon. Who'd of thought I'd quit before Walt Evers?”

Ivy frowned. Dad Evers's name was Walton, not Walt, but her mom never would remember that. The wheel began clanking around again. When their car reached the bottom, the man running the ride reached to unhook their bar and Ivy leaned forward to leave, but her mom put her hand out with more tickets.

“What do you say we go around again?” she asked the carnival worker.

“You gotta get out, get back in line.” His voice was bored.

Ivy's mom tapped his wrist with the tickets and gave him a playful smile. “C'mon. Give a girl a break.”

He shrugged and took the tickets and pulled the lever to make their car move on. “
Step
right up,” he yelled to the next people in line. “
Ride
the Ferris wheel,
see
the city from on high.”

“So I'm going to give George another shot after all,” her mom said as the wheel began to turn. “We're going to try dating again, see how it goes.”

Ivy frowned. “You are? Why?”

Her mom shrugged. “I don't know—I guess I just don't like being single.”

Ivy stared at the crowd below.

• • •

When the wheel stopped again with them at the top, her mom spread her hands flat on the bar and studied them like she was looking for chips in her nail polish.

“Listen, Ives. There's something else I want to say to you.”

“Oh?” Ivy's foot began to jiggle nervously. She made it go still. “What?”

“You work so hard, Ives. At school and all. It's kind of amazing. I never was any good at school, I wouldn't have thought you'd be either.”

“Well, but I like school. I want to, maybe, go to college.”

“College?” Her mom laughed.

Ivy wove her fingers together and tried to feel each one individually: these were her fingers, each one was distinct.

“I mean, it's good I guess. It's not
bad.
But you work too hard, Ives. You try too hard. I don't think that part of it's a good thing. Not for you.”

The last of the happiness Ivy had felt since they pulled up at the carnival leaked away. The hole she so often felt inside herself was really there.

“I see how much you want to win this contest thing. And I admire your grit, Ives, I do. But you're putting too much into it. You know you can't win. Right? Don't you?”

Ivy opened her mouth. Nothing came out.

Her mother tapped the bar. “Hon. You've got to remember who you are.”

The blood drained from Ivy's head; her feet felt cast in concrete. It was amazing she didn't tip the Ferris wheel over, she was so heavy. She said, slowly, “Who is that, Mom? Who am I?”

Her mom leaned close and looked into her eyes. “You're a Blake. And people like us don't get happy endings. That's why I'm giving George another go.”

“Oh? What do you mean?” Ivy's voice sounded flatter than one of Mom Evers's pancakes. She felt the weight of an entire ocean pressing down on her.

“Yeah. Because, you know, he's better than nothing. Better than being alone.”

Ivy's heart swam in her chest, a sad fish in a lonely fishbowl. She gazed out at the carnival without seeing anything.
You're not alone,
she wanted to say.
I'm right here. I'm not nothing.
She didn't say anything at all for the whole rest of the evening. Her mom didn't seem to notice.