The Love Song of Ivy K. Harlowe

by Hannah Moskowitz

  But at home we’re quiet. And so’s Ivy.

  Elizabeth and I get back from a date one night about a week before Christmas. We shake snow off our boots and head into the kitchen for some coffee, and after a little while, Ivy and Dot wander down from upstairs, about as sex-haired and half dressed as you’d expect. Elizabeth says hi to them both and pours the coffee and asks Dot how things are with school, and I just…admire her for a minute, how she remembers little details about people’s lives.

  “Getting better,” she says. “All thanks to Andie’s mom.”

  Yeah, so my mom’s still helping Dot with a bunch of assignments. And, in the world’s most bizarre twist, in the process of schlepping stuff back and forth between here and Dot’s house, she’s become friends with Dot’s mom, Hai. She doesn’t speak much English, but there is nothing in the world that can get between my mom and making a friend, once she’s decided she’s doing it. They go to Vietnamese church together, for God’s sake.

  I don’t know how much Hai knows about Dot and Ivy’s relationship, but according to my mom, Dot’s parents say she’s allowed over here as long as she’s “always supervised.” Obviously Mom is treating that mandate with all the strictness you’d expect from her, and now Ivy and Dot are always walking around freshly fucked, thanking my mom for keeping such a diligent watch. Dot’s her perky self as always, flitting around my house like a sprite, and okay, if sleeping with Dot makes Ivy happy, I’m not really inclined to mess with that right now, so it’s fine. Besides, I have a girlfriend.

  “I still tell her I’m at my friend’s house a lot instead,” Dot says. “I think she knows exactly where I am and what I’m doing but is afraid that if she calls me out, I’ll, like, run away or something.”

  “Ahh, the possibility of getting rid of you,” Ivy says. “I know that optimism well.”

  “I’m sticky,” Dot says. “Like bubble gum.”

  Elizabeth sips her coffee and looks around the kitchen. “You know, I would have expected this place to be all decked out for Christmas by now,” she says to me. “Your mom isn’t exactly the low-key type.” She finally met them about a week ago, when I had her over for dinner. She was lovely and my parents sort of behaved themselves and my mom high-fived me after Elizabeth left.

  Ivy shrinks into her shirt a little, and Dot stands on her toes to root through a cabinet and doesn’t notice. “Is there any of that French vanilla stuff left?” Dot says, and Ivy goes into the living room and sits cross-legged on the couch.

  I mouth Ivy doesn’t like Christmas to Elizabeth, who shrugs and gives a little nod.

  “Hey, where’d you go?” Dot says, and she brings her coffee into the living room, but Ivy shakes her head when Dot tries to sit down.

  “I think it’s time for you to go home,” Ivy says.

  “Yeah?”

  “Your mom’s waiting up. Go home.”

  Dot shrugs and goes to get dressed, and Ivy and I look at each other and don’t say anything.

  …

  Ivy wakes me up bright and early the next day. Well, “bright” might be an overstatement, both because the sun’s barely up and it looks like it’s going to be another day of snow and because Ivy herself is dark and stormy, with a glare on her face and a beer dangling from her hand.

  I sit up and stretch. “Early start.”

  “Seize the day,” she mutters.

  You can never predict when exactly Ivy will go off the rails, and sometimes it happens for no good reason at all, or at least no reason she shares with me, but for the past three years there’s always been a point in December where she cracks. She pulls herself back together, puts the mask back on, transforms back into her sexy, aloof alter ego that she wants so badly to be the real her, but for a day in December every year…I get to see her, and I hate that she has to be miserable for me to get that.

  I stand up and give her a hug, and she hugs me back, the beer bottle cold against my back.

  “Come on,” she says, giving me a squeeze.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Christmas.”

  Okay. Christmas. I bundle up and get my keys and stuff some granola bars in my backpack while Ivy fills hers with more beer and a handle of whiskey, in case I had any questions about where her head is at. Thankfully, she walks right past the driveway and toward the bus stop, and on our way she hands me a beer.

  “Catch up.” She slings her arm over my neck. “It’ll keep you warm.”

  It starts snowing while we’re waiting for the bus, fat, sticky flakes, and Ivy turns her face up and lets them cling to her eyelashes. She’s gorgeous, her lips and cheeks stung pink in the cold, her hair coming down in waves under her black hat.

  The bus comes pretty quickly, and we board and slide into an empty seat.

  “I wish I had some coke,” Ivy says.

  “It’s eight in the morning.”

  “Okay, so I wish I had a lot of coke.”

  “Have you heard from your mom at all?” I say gently.

  Ivy doesn’t answer me, but a minute later she says, “Remember when we used to make plans in chemistry class to run away?”

  “Yeah.” We’d print out bus schedules to get out of town and draw up way-more-complicated-than-necessary escape plans. Money-making ideas. Packing lists. Dream houses.

  “We should have done that,” Ivy says. “Should have gotten the fuck out of here when we had the chance.”

  I don’t know what made us have the chance when we were sixteen more than we do now, but it feels like I’m not supposed to question Ivy today, so I don’t. She’s here, and she’s raw, and she’s real. My job isn’t to participate. I’m a witness.

  We get off at College Hill and walk to this hole-in-the-wall place with really good crepes. It’s a Tuesday, and Ivy’s school has let off for break, but I guess Brown and RISD haven’t yet, because there’s a long table full of college kids laughing and talking over one another, backpacks and textbooks strewn around them.

  It’s weird that I automatically think they’re older than I am, when for all I know they’re freshmen. College still seems far away, sophisticated, even though I grew up right around the corner from the fucking Ivy League.

  Maybe Ivy’s thinking something similar, because after we order and we’re sitting at the counter, she says abruptly, “College isn’t what I thought it would be.”

  “No?”

  She shrugs. “I used to dream about living in the dorm, going to parties. And then you realize that shit costs money and you have a perfectly good shack with your deadbeat mom, when it’s not on fire. I just drive in and out every day. Everyone else is living some big college experience and I’m just doing high school with a longer commute.”

  “Well, I’m not,” I say.

  “You never wanted to go to college.”

  “Neither did you. The plan was to run away to Paris, remember? You’d design and I’d write.” All the pictures I’ve had tucked away in my head come back. Ivy and me at a café. Ivy and me at the Louvre. Ivy and me, holding hands and looking up at the Eiffel Tower.

  She nods vaguely. “In the villa.”

  “Yeah.”

  Our food comes, and she doesn’t say anything more for a while.

  …

  We walk College Hill even though it’s freezing, wandering Thayer Street and cutting through the frozen quads on Brown’s campus. All the buildings look ancient and important, and the students brace themselves against the wind. “Do you think we’ll ever get out of here?” Ivy says.

  “You will,” I say. “I won’t.” It’s maybe the first time I’ve said that out loud.

  “Don’t be stupid,” Ivy says. “You’re going wherever I go.”

  I smile a little. “Okay.”

  Ivy’s getting darker as the day goes on, though, and while we’re waiting for the bus, she sucks on her vap
e pen for a while and then says, “Remember when my dad took us to that…what even was that. That thing on the campus here. That opera shit.” Here it comes.

  “Yeah.” It wasn’t her dad, actually; my parents suggested it to him as a fun outing for us when we were about twelve, but then he ended up doing something with his friends and my parents took us themselves. But that’s not the point of the story that Ivy’s in right now, so I don’t correct her.

  “What the fuck was that? Some pirate thing?”

  “Gilbert and Sullivan.” You don’t get raised by theater people without knowing Pirates of Penzance. That was not my first time seeing it.

  “God. And they had to project the lyrics up above the stage, ’cause otherwise how would you know what the fuck anyone was saying.” She shakes her head and takes another pull on the vape. “Someone had to come up with that. That was someone’s idea.”

  “I guess.”

  “That was a part of someone’s life,” she insists. “That’s part of their story, coming up with those captions.” She’s starting to sound drunk. “And now it’s part of our story, sitting there looking at them. Those stupid captions were part of my dad’s story. Isn’t that fucking pathetic?”

  It’s been years and I still never know what to say. “Um…”

  “Thirty-eight years and part of it is sitting in that crappy auditorium, watching Gilbert and Sullivan.”

  So I say, “I don’t think it was him. I think my parents ended up taking us.” Because maybe it will help. Or maybe it will make her stop saying things I can’t fix.

  Ivy doesn’t react for a minute; then she nods slowly.

  “So I know even less about him than a minute ago,” she says. “That’s right. That seems right.”

  …

  Ivy cracks another beer open on the bus and looks out the window for a while. We’re passing by the railroad tracks now, and two men are loading cargo onto the back of a train.

  “So,” she says with that kind of sarcastic brightness. “How’s your relationship going?”

  I roll my eyes. “We don’t have to talk about that.” I feel like it’ll break the only thing holding us together today—the magic of Ivy and Andie—to bring Elizabeth into it.

  “Come on. I want to hear about the happy couple.”

  She’s mocking me. “My relationship is good,” I say. “How’s yours?”

  She scoffs. “I am not in a relationship.”

  “Oh, okay, so what do you call what you’re doing?”

  “What I’m doing with who?”

  She’s so exhausting. “Dot.”

  She waves her hand. “We’re sleeping together.”

  “And that’s all it is,” I say. Interrogating. Hoping.

  And she looks at me like I’m crazy. “You know me,” she says. “I don’t do relationships.” She rests her head on my shoulder. “Except with you.”

  Her hair smells like peppermint, and I close my eyes for a minute and just get lost. God. I have to say something before it gets awkward. “Why don’t you like her?” I say.

  “I do like her.”

  “You do? You always talk shit about her.”

  Ivy laughs and sits up. “Elizabeth. I thought you meant Dot.”

  “To be fair, you talk shit about her, too.”

  “I do not. And I just don’t like that all Elizabeth’s opinions automatically become yours, too. You have your own opinions.”

  “You mean I have your opinions.”

  She looks at me, her eyes big and green and magnificent. “No, Andie. I don’t.” For just a second, she doesn’t seem drunk at all, and I feel like I’m floating.

  A minute later, she pushes the button for our stop, and I take a deep breath and get ready.

  We always end up at either the gravesite or the road where it happened. This year it’s the road. I follow Ivy off the bus at a stop outside the city without a word and walk the three blocks to the curve I know well now, that never feels as haunted as it should. It just feels like a road to me, but I’m not Ivy, and my father didn’t die here.

  I stand next to her, a little behind her, and when she speaks, finally, I can tell she’s crying a little, and it hurts somewhere between my throat and my chest. My hands start shaking.

  “I just want to know why,” she says. “Was he on something? Was he changing the CD? Did he get a phone call? Was it important?”

  “It doesn’t matter, baby.”

  “Where was he going? Some girl he was sleeping with? Was he coming home? It was Christmas. We hadn’t seen him in weeks. Was he even going to come home?”

  This is the Ivy nobody but me gets to see.

  And this, right here, this is the problem with Dot. This is why it isn’t right. I want to go back in time and explain it to my mom. Ivy might have, God forbid, some kind of feelings for her, but Dot doesn’t know the real Ivy. She knows sexy, fierce, razor-sharp Ivy. She doesn’t know this, because Ivy will never let her see this. She’s never let anyone see it but me.

  “And now my mom’s not even going to come home?” she says. “It’s the fucking anniversary of when he died, she’s not coming home?”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “I’m an orphan,” she says. “That’s what I am, I’m a fucking orphan.” She breathes in unsteadily. “I swear to God if I ever see her again—”

  I put my hand on her shoulder and she turns around and fits herself into my arms, shaking a little bit while she cries quietly, and it’s cold, but she’s so warm, and I would do absolutely anything in the world for this girl.

  “Don’t let go,” she whispers.

  “I won’t. Not ever.”

  …

  We get back to the house late, after I’ve force-fed Ivy some fast food to try to get something non-alcoholic going through her system. I sit her down on her bed and tug off her boots.

  “I want to go out,” she says.

  “I know you do.” Ivy, despite school and the internship and her not-girlfriend or whatever, still goes out all the time and still hooks up with everyone she wants to, but I’ve cut back from every weekend without fail to once in the past month. It’s just not Elizabeth’s thing.

  “Find your keys; I can’t drive. This is what you get for staying sober. I told you not to.”

  “We are not going out.”

  Ivy gets up and starts changing her clothes.

  “We are not going out,” I say again.

  Yeah, I’m sure you can guess how this one ends. Fifteen minutes later, I’m in the car, driving Ivy to Kinetic while she screams along to ten-year-old pop songs on the radio.

  God, I get so fucking sick of myself.

  We walk into Kinetic and it could be any night in the past few years. Nothing ever changes, and maybe for the first time I feel the kind of desperation to get out of this town that I’ve been pretending I understood since chemistry class. It’s the same fucking thing here all the time. I can’t be thirty or forty or seventy-five and standing by the bar while Ivy picks up some new girl.

  I just don’t know what else there is for me to do.

  Ivy makes a beeline for the dance floor as soon as we get in. At first I’m just grateful she’s not drinking anymore, and then I see Dot on the dance floor, some young-looking girl wrapped around her. Dot, obviously, dislodges herself from her as soon as she sees Ivy, who leans into Dot’s ear and says something and then rests her hand on her shoulder and leans in while Dot stands on her toes to meet their lips.

  Everyone in the club keeps grinding and writhing, except for Ivy and Dot, slow-dancing with their foreheads together and their eyes closed, and except for me. Witnessing.

  January

  “So she has, like, a policy?” Alyssa says as we come through my front door. She’s in town for the weekend, avoiding some sort of massive hetero extravaganza happening at
BU, and we had cheap and amazing seafood and a few beers, and now we’re coming home for a few of my mom’s triple-chocolate brownies. Sometimes living at home has its perks.

  “I don’t know that it’s a policy,” I say. “She just, like…historically hasn’t been involved with them. But she didn’t ask me about it until tonight. And I don’t think she would have broken up with me or something if I’d said yes.”

  “Said yes to what?” my mom asks. She’s sitting on the couch, watching British Bake Off and icing her feet. She worked a double shift today, and nursing is a full-body workout.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I say. The last thing I need is to ask my mother’s opinion on queer culture. God knows I get enough of it already.

  But of course Alyssa goes to the kitchen and gets a brownie and says, “Elizabeth doesn’t date bisexuals.” I smack her shoulder when she gets back.

  “Mmm,” my mother says, with a sage nod. “I’ve heard that’s a common bias.”

  “What’s wrong with bisexuals?” Ivy says lazily. She’s at the kitchen table with a stack of paper and a pen, reading something with her eyebrows furrowed.

  “Nothing’s wrong with them,” I say. “I think she just worries about girls…experimenting.”

  “Biphobic,” Ivy says.

  “It’s not biphobic. She’s not saying they’re not valid or they don’t exist; she just doesn’t want to date them. You don’t have to date everyone. I don’t date people who live out of state. Alyssa doesn’t date girls who are shorter than she is.”

  Ivy crosses something out on the page. “Biphobic.”

  “What are you reading, anyway?” I ask Ivy. She waves me away.

  Dot comes out of the bathroom, wiping her hands on her sweatpants. I’m not even surprised to see her nowadays.

  Alyssa says, “Dot, you’re bi.”

  “Yyyyes?”

  “What would you call someone who doesn’t date bisexuals?”

  “Uh, unfortunate.” She goes over to the kitchen table and looks over Ivy’s shoulder. “How is it?”

  Ivy nods without taking her eyes off the page she’s reading. “Better. You’re still a little wordy in the second support.”