Ivy, meanwhile, fell into despair, feeling bereft not just of her parents but of Doc, now so newly responsible. Doc was fascinated by his sister, and he’d always been a willing audience for her every mad turn and dizzy spell. I’d long felt that Ivy’s incapacity for everyday life was put on for Doc’s benefit. She was mesmerized by his sympathy.
Ivy mourned her parents by falling in love, dangerously so, with a man beautiful but demented, and she then became pregnant. Tiff doesn’t now even have a photo of her father because Ivy burned any pictures to an ash that she then spread ceremoniously across the dirt of the teacup roses she’d planted in memory of her mother.
In Ivy’s sudden absence, seven-year-old Tiff showed all the classic signs of abandonment—bed-wetting, sleepwalking, heartbreaking crying jags. But Doc, in my very biased opinion, quickly took her mother’s place. Ivy never called, never remembered a birthday. Once a postcard from Avignon arrived with a melodramatically illegible scrawl—“Tiff, Please never forget me,” she’d written, so clearly engrossed in her own fiction of herself. I wanted to write back to her to tell her we’d all laughed. We hadn’t laughed, though. We’d wandered around in a funk for days, saddened that we’d had to be reminded of her and her indifference.
Doc and Tiff established their own traditions, and even now they still sit in the yard on Sundays, in sunglasses, on a blanket, reading aloud to each other, intensely, from books of instruction for magicians. Through catalogs, online sites, and road trips to estate auctions, they amassed closets full of tricks and a basement of magic cabinets. They had capes with hidden pockets and a magician’s assistant’s skimpy, feathery getup, its pink plumage mangy, having been nibbled away to sticks by dust mites. They stalked the yard’s doves and rabbits in order to test their false-bottomed birdcages and collapsible top hats. They played poker with decks with five aces, lit firecrackers to produce silk carnations with an innocuous pop. They plucked coins from each other’s nostrils, rubber mice from their ears, and miles of knotted-up scarves from their comically gaping mouths.
It had been Doc’s dream, since his childhood, to open a magic shop. As a boy, he’d had no interest in working for the newspaper; rather, he’d pictured himself in a city of theaters. Whenever an illusionist needed a new fake thumb for his finger hatchet or a mirrored box for the segmenting of his assistant, Doc would be the supplier in this dream city of his. He’d have insights into all the sturdiest accoutrements of professional trickery, but he’d also serve the novice, the hobbyist, by offering the most convincing spyglasses, the foulest pepper gum.
In Tiff he’d found a worthy acolyte. She was fellow magician, assistant, and randomly selected audience member, all in one. By the time her mother returned from France, Tiff had mastered skills of invisibility. Tiff could still herself with an eerie precision, softening her heartbeats and stopping her breath. She’d go fetal in order to curl herself into the narrowest nook or cranny.
It was the summer Lenore went missing that our Ivy returned. With inheritance and insurance money that she’d miraculously avoided squandering, Ivy bought a house a few blocks from our houses. She painted it pink, as Tiff had requested, though Tiff had been mostly joking when she’d suggested it. At the café, where we would go for roast-beef sandwiches and cups of strong coffee, Ivy would order in French, then giggle before correcting herself.
“You can move back in with me whenever you’re ready,” she told Tiff the day she arrived with gifts of new dresses, much too small, which Tiff dutifully modeled, leaving the buttons undone up the back or shrugging her shoulders to give her arms the appearance of not being too long for the sleeves.
Ivy fashioned a bedroom for Tiff, gluing glow-in-the-dark stars to the ceiling and painting clouds on the walls, all in her approximation of what she thought a girl like Tiff might like. “I’ll let you know the second it’s ready,” she told Tiff, and we waited, curious about ourselves, wondering what we’d all do once the room was finished.
· 10 ·
Tiff stopped eating then, and none of us noticed. We spent the summer, as usual, devoted to gluttony, grilling steaks and pillaging our vegetable gardens—frying green beans in bacon and grease, roasting sweet corn. I sliced cucumbers and onions and let them soak in sugar and vinegar, and Ivy used fresh beet juice to bloody the red velvet cakes she baked.
Then, into this summer idyll, the lifeguard of the swimming pool, a spunky, slight teenaged girl probably no stranger to anorexia herself, stopped by Doc’s to ask him if he’d noticed how sharp Tiff’s shoulder blades were looking lately, and how knobby her knees.
“I eat!” Tiff shouted, protesting beyond all reason when we confronted her at dinner. “I eat like a pig!” She oinked noisily, puffing out her cheeks, a childishness that was unlike her. As we looked at her then, we saw what we hadn’t been seeing—our girl turning skeletal. We’d been so distracted by our own obsessing over what was best for Tiff that we’d let her drop from our sights. Whenever Ivy had been at the table with us, which had been often that summer, we’d been embarrassed by her clumsy, coquettish pursuit of her daughter’s affections, and we’d looked everywhere but at each other, tracing our fingers over the monograms stitched into our napkins or watching the funhouse stretch of our reflections in the bowls of our spoons.
The night we accused her of starving herself, I asked her if she’d walk me to my door across the street. I linked my arm with hers, but she snatched hers back when she sensed me weighing the extent of her scrawniness, my fingertips considering the bone of her elbow.
“My sister, Lydia, quit eating one summer,” I recalled. “She insisted only on watermelon so she could pee it all away.” I hadn’t thought about it in years. Lydia had been a teenager, and though there’d been only five years’ difference between us, she’d seemed, in her distance and mystery, far more sophisticated than I’d sensed I’d ever be. The starvation had lent Lydia even more gravity and refinement, despite how peaked and sunken-cheeked she’d grown by August. “The only reason my father worried was because he thought no one would marry her because ‘Who wants to marry a girl who looks like an old lady already?’ Back then, nobody thought a girl like that might need some help. We just thought she was being stubborn. Nobody knew what anorexia was, or anything like that.”
Tiff stopped in the middle of the street, closed her eyes tight, and grabbed her head. “Oh. My. Gawwwwww-duh,” she wailed. “I am not anorexic.”
“No, no, no, I know, I know you’re not, sweetie,” I said, but I swiftly ended with my denial, uncertain whether I might be making matters worse. You can always make matters worse these days, no matter where your heart is. When I was a young parent, we never used the word parenting. The only bad parents were parents with bad children. Now a parent can be doing the wrong thing even when she’s doing the right thing. We’ve all come to know too well the psychology of childhood.
“I just get a stomachache sometimes,” she said. She sighed. “A firefly,” she said then, reaching up with her fingertip as if she might be able to tap its light back on.
“They’re as thick as mosquitoes this summer,” I said, and certainly, there they all were as we looked up and down the street, the insects’ slow, delicate sparks giving the evening its character. “I’m a terrible cook,” I said. “It’s as simple as that. That’s why you can’t