Bennington Girls Are Easy (20 page)

N
ow ordinarily, Sylvie wouldn’t have been caught dead in the likes of Williamsburg, having woken up there too many mornings in random, scuzzy lofts from one-night stands in her early twenties. But this afternoon she was there on business. It was a gentle, thawing, pale-yellow day at the beginning of April, one of those days at the turning of a season when people feel at their best, full of lightness and possibility, and even being in Williamsburg couldn’t put Sylvie in a bad mood. A new gourmet foods store, named Shallot, had just opened up on Bedford Avenue, with a made-in-Brooklyn theme, and wouldn’t you know, it was carrying Sylvie’s brand of homemade syrups and jams. She was going there today to drop off her new flavors for spring, for naturally, at Shallot everything had to be seasonal.

With this in mind, Sylvie was replacing the winter’s jars of brandied-cherry marmalade with bottles of rhubarb-rosewater syrup. The store’s owners, Annie and Laurel, were going to use it as a mix in their homemade ginger ale, as well as sell the individual bottles on their peeling white-painted wooden shelves. Shallot had been designed to look like a country store, and the fully restored, fat-bellied, blue-trimmed vintage refrigerator to the right of the door even had its own name, Lucien.

The girls behind the counter all wore chambray aprons and vintage scarves in their hair, and to Sylvie they all seemed extraordinarily young. Imagine being one of those girls, she thought. Imagine still working for somebody else. She shuddered, thinking back to the crummy jobs and tyrannical, idiot bosses of her youth.

See, she had been correct all along. She could run her own business and she could do better; she was a born entrepreneur. Sylvie’s business—named Clementine’s Picnic—was doing splendidly. Those suckers—among them Sylvie’s former employers—lapped this shit up: the joke never got old, with Sylvie. The corners of her quick black eyes crinkled in laughter, just to think of it. She’d shown them! She and her lemonade stand. She’d been right about everything. She’d said those morons would pay two-fifty a cupcake, and they did.

Come May, she planned to set up the lemonade stand again, hiring other people to work it so that she could focus on the big-picture business operations. Her plan was to hire only really hot girls, because they’d be sure to attract foot traffic, then regular male customers, who would come to buy lemonade and cupcakes as an excuse to flirt with them. Sylvie glanced again at the girls behind the Shallot counter. Were any of
them
hot enough? She wouldn’t be above poaching them from Annie and Laurel, if they were. But no. These girls were cute but, on the whole, too wholesome-looking, and Clementine’s Picnic had use for only complete and total babes. She’d make them wear, like, gingham hot pants or something…Yeah, gingham would go well with the whole “picnic” theme. Maybe she’d look into getting gingham tablecloths this year. A classic blue and white, maybe, or that soft, sherbetlike orange…

Sylvie still dearly loved a bargain and never saw any reason to spend more than she had to, but it was so nice, for the first time in her life, to be able to afford things. Not only for the good of the business, but for herself; ever since she’d started to make such a success of Clementine’s Picnic, she’d been able to pay off all of her back rent to Pete the landlord, and was even starting to build up her credit again.

And she was making enough money to pay for her own health insurance.

This
was Sylvie’s dream come true.

Annie and Laurel greeted her with pleasing fanfare, proclaiming her rhubarb-rosewater syrup “absolutely amazing.” They also had a check for her based on sales of her brandied-cherry marmalade, which they told her had been “a huge hit” around Valentine’s Day. So, wonder of wonders, the check was even bigger than expected.

“Excuse me,” said one of the girls behind the counter, for all the world as if Sylvie were a celebrity and she was about to ask for her autograph, “are you Sylvie Furst?”

“Yup.”

“
The
Sylvie Furst? The girl who started the lemonade stand?”

“Yup.”

“Like,
the
lemonade stand, the one that was on the corner of Fort Greene Park?”

“Yup. That’s the one.”

“God, we’d love to be able to afford to live in Fort Greene,” the girl said, gesturing to the other girl behind the counter. “This is my roommate, Ellie. And I’m Abigail.” Shyly, both girls put out their hands. “But we looked and looked, and we just couldn’t afford it, so now we live in Bed-Stuy.”

The poor things, thought Sylvie: girls named Ellie and Abigail in Bed-Stuy. What a racket New York City was, when you really thought about it.

“Oh, but lots of people are living there now,” said Sylvie, for clearly the people who had lived there before, for generations and generations, did not count. “The fact is, I got in on the Fort Greene wave years ago. Really, I was one of the first. Just lucky, I guess.”

“That’s so cool,” said Ellie, “the way you just started a lemonade stand on the corner, just like that. And now—now, you’re like, this really cool businesswoman!”

Both of them had noted Sylvie’s products flying off the shelves at Shallot, and the sight had filled them with a wonderful, swelling feeling of hope they had seldom enjoyed since moving to the city after graduation last June.

“We love to bake,” said Abigail. “At Mount Holyoke, we had this cook club we used to host in our dorm every Friday night. Actually, Ellie’s gingerbread used to be sold at the South Hadley farmers’ market. We used to go and volunteer there on Saturday mornings. It was really cool.”

Mount Holyoke, thought Sylvie grimly to herself. So that explained it. They might have been a lesbian couple, these two, or maybe they just hadn’t gotten laid by a real man in a while, which was so frequently, and tragically, the case in Brooklyn, that she really couldn’t blame them for that. Perhaps that was what accounted for the rather neutered, folksy quality the two of them had, standing there in those silly chambray aprons. She bet they had a hell of a work ethic, so maybe she’d hire them to make jams or bottle the syrups or something. Why—a glorious inspiration struck her—girls like this were so desperate and dumb, maybe they’d even do it
for free.

Now that Sylvie herself was higher up on the New York City food chain, owning her own business, she was absolutely delighted that the economy made it so easy to exploit the young and willing workforce.

Sylvie left Shallot, promising to stay in touch with Ellie and Abigail. Afterward, Abigail turned to Ellie and said: “Oh my God, she’s so cool. Do you think maybe she’d ever hire us?”

“You know, she has such a great local business model, I think I’d even work for her for free.”

“Oh, totally,” said Abigail, and then she and Ellie, their futures now all aglitter with limitless opportunities, went back to restocking the orange-and-white-striped biodegradable paper straws made by a fashionable Brooklyn-based design company that also made cute stationery.

Sylvie had been planning to go back to Fort Greene after finishing up her errands at Shallot, but then she remembered that there was this really great baby boutique on one of the side streets. Clementine’s birthday was coming up in the first week of April. Maybe she’d stop by that store and pick her up a present.

Clementine was turning four years old and speaking in full, melodic sentences in her soap-bubble voice. Sylvie adored her as much as ever, and really did consider the little girl for whom she had named her business to be her good luck charm. Sometimes it seemed that her fortunes had turned around not only with meeting Clementine but—more recently—with getting rid of that bitch, Cassandra.

Sylvie turned down a side street off Bedford Avenue, walking toward where she remembered the baby boutique being. Oh yes, there it was, she recognized it by the pink tutu hanging in the window. Forget-Me-Not! Oh, Sylvie thought, her heart warming up at all things child-related, what a cute name for a store.

Sylvie, forever business-savvy, was wondering if Forget-Me-Not might be interested in stocking some of her products. Her syrups would go over so well at little girls’ birthday parties, or might even be enjoyed by grown women at baby showers: there was a potential market here. She made a note to herself to get the name of the store’s owner before she left.

It was Sylvie who recognized Cassandra first, for Cassandra, preoccupied with steaming a tiny cerise-colored pinafore with white rickrack trim, was too flustered to pay attention to customers at the same time, which was what the job description required. As a matter of fact, it was Cassandra’s inexpert style of steaming the pinafore that gave her away for certain. Otherwise, there were many other shopgirls in Williamsburg whom Cassandra in some general sense resembled. But no one but Cassandra would stare at the handle of the steamer from which the heat was escaping with such naked terror in her eyes, and furthermore, she was steaming the poor pinafore not with the firm, up-and-down motion Sylvie would have used but with desperate, random jerks. Sylvie stared, and stared, Cassandra still failing to look up at her. God, Sylvie thought to herself, it would be fun watching Cassandra steam clothing, if only it weren’t also so frightening. Since Cassandra wasn’t looking at her yet, Sylvie now took a second to slyly text Gala Gubelman:

OMG CASSANDRA!!! I RAN INTO CASSANDRA.

Gala was on the pulse and from her cubicle texted right back:

OMG. TELL, TELL!!! XOXO

Then Cassandra, apparently finished with the pinafore, took it off the hook of the steamer and put it on a clothing rack, though Sylvie and her gimlet eye could tell that it was still wrinkled. It was then that Cassandra, hanging the steamer handle on the hook at what was clearly the wrong angle, glanced up and saw her.

Sylvie.

W
ell. Cassandra had been expecting this encounter for some time. So had Sylvie, though never could she have predicted these particular circumstances. She’d gotten off too easy, Cassandra figured, not having run into Sylvie yet, since that morning at the apartment. So this comeuppance was only her due. After all, neither she nor Sylvie had ever believed in life letting them off the hook; they believed in worst-case scenarios, small and large humiliations, consequences. In their own words:
This would happen to us!

But they were no longer an us, and hadn’t been for quite some time. They might never use that word quite so casually ever again, though Sylvie still felt a kind of transcendent connection with Clementine that Cassandra, these days, had accepted no longer feeling with anyone.

Sylvie studied Cassandra. She had on a rather beatnik-style ensemble of black leotard and cigarette pants, unrelieved by any color or cutesy touches to speak of. But, Sylvie thought to herself with a twinge of betrayal, Cassandra wears dresses! It was unfair, her going beyond the bounds of what Sylvie would have predicted. Indeed, once Cassandra laid to rest the steamer and regained, relatively speaking, her composure, Sylvie noticed something altered about her appearance altogether. And then it came to her: she was no longer a genteel Cambridge girl who seldom strayed far from the outskirts of Brattle Street. She had gotten that look, that look that people had when they moved to New York and which Sylvie herself had had for years, the one that had to do with a certain fearless way of carrying yourself. Cassandra no longer looked like a girl, period. She looked like a woman and a woman who lived in New York City, at that.

And also: she’d gained a little bit of weight, Sylvie, who used to have her exact measurements memorized, couldn’t help but notice. Which must mean that she was single, because Cassandra wasn’t the type to let her figure go if she had a man.

Sylvie stood up straight and started to approach Cassandra with the indefatigable confidence so surprising in a woman of her petite stature. But then just as she did, Cassandra put out her hand and said hello first, even going so far as to say
Hello, Sylvie
, which was actually—Sylvie had to admit—a pretty classy move. She’d just been planning on saying
Hey
, and even that had seemed to her a far more gracious overture than the situation required.

But then hey, Cassandra was working! Sylvie was a customer. Cassandra had to be polite to her. Except, wait a minute—Cassandra was working in a baby boutique?
Cassandra hated babies. Cassandra had always hated babies.
If she had to stoop to a retail job, and in this economy even Sylvie couldn’t blame her for doing that, how did she end up here? Shouldn’t she be working at a store that sold French soaps and perfumes, or one of those pretentious downtown lingerie shops selling satin cat-eye sleeping masks and vibrators that looked like tiny, precious pieces of modern art and went by Italian names? She could definitely be a crazy lady in a vintage clothing shop. She could work at a bookstore. Anything but
this.
Sylvie was of the opinion that Cassandra, that lunatic, shouldn’t even be allowed near children. As if the girl’s sheer damaged nature could have contaminated the precious threads of gently rumpled fair-trade Indian cotton.

Here in Forget-Me-Not, a silence having clotted between the two women, Sylvie looked down at a display case and absently stroked the rounded toe of a red ballet slipper (handmade in Munich, Cassandra could have informed her, if only she’d asked). But instead Cassandra said the one magical word that was left in the English language, the one word that briefly, for Sylvie, erased years of disappointment and betrayal. That word was Cassandra gently asking: “Clementine?”

At this very moment, Gala was texting her:

SYLVIE, WHERE ARE YOU? I’M DYING TO HEAR EVERYTHING! HAPPY HOUR TONIGHT, YES?

But Sylvie ignored this and answered Cassandra: “Of course. Her birthday’s coming up. She’s going to be four.”

Like she’s her mother, thought Cassandra with the old, easy scorn, bragging about birthdays. So nothing had changed. Except that Sylvie did look older—more settled, less savage and hungry perhaps; hard to believe that this same woman who was now a stranger and must be treated like a customer once had chased her around an apartment littered with cupcake wrappers in her underwear. Funny. She rather missed that girl in her underwear, the sweet, pungent wildness of her; the white-hot intensity of her conviction.

Cassandra gestured to the red ballet slipper, and said, “I remembered that Clementine always liked deep pinks and reds.”

“And shoes, remember.”

“Oh, right. Shoes, too.”

They remembered other things, too, and might even have said them, but face-to-face, nothing came naturally. So Cassandra suggested that what Clementine would really like for her birthday was a pair of similar red ballet slippers with pink grosgrain bows on them (these shoes were made in Paris, which was far “more chic” in Cassandra’s mind than Munich). Sylvie was dying not to accept Cassandra’s recommendation, but had to admit she always did have great taste. Those shoes were just perfect for Clementine, and even Sylvie didn’t want to allow her spite toward Cassandra to get in the way of a gift for a child. Cassandra felt the same way, which said something, however small, for the moral development of these two young women.

Cassandra rang up the sale in silence. Sylvie, fishing through a porcelain candy dish of star barrettes next to the register, picked out a red one for Clementine and added it to her purchase. She loved styling Clementine’s hair, which was getting thicker now and soon would be long enough for Sylvie to do up in a French braid.

She wanted to tell Cassandra all about Clementine’s Picnic; she wanted Cassandra, more than anyone in the world, to know what a success she’d made of the lemonade stand that had come between them. It should have been so easy, letting it drop. But somehow—even Sylvie, whose native quickness was the defining quality of her personality—couldn’t pull this off.

And if Cassandra had been able to tell Sylvie things anymore, if on this beautiful, champagnelike afternoon they had let go of old resentments and loathing and if golden words had poured forth between them, if they had dashed out of the store, girls again, looping arms down the sun-kissed avenue, she might have told her all about the abortion she’d had not long after she started working at Forget-Me-Not. The child might have been Edward’s, or it might have been somebody else’s, somebody who didn’t matter. Gala’s prophecy had come true:
Everybody sleeps with so many new guys their first year in New York
. She had now been there for two, and had slept with many.

And in the end none of it had mattered, for she’d gone by herself to a clinic far out in some blasted, treeless nameless section of Queens, where the operation was performed by a harried woman speaking butchered English in that least melodic of accents, Chinese. Cassandra to Sylvie, so many years ago:
What if Chinese becomes the universal language?

The night she discovered that she was pregnant, Cassandra had gone to an art opening in TriBeCa at which she’d run into none other than Angelica Rocky-Divine, just back in the States after years of dancing for a burlesque troupe in Vienna and sporting a black velvet
le smoking
jacket with peacock blue satin tails.

“The doctors all say I’ll never dance again,” sighed Angelica in the moonlight. Cassandra had joined her outside on the stoop of the gallery for a smoke break. Apparently she’d brought back from Europe assorted injuries—fractures and such. “So fuck it, I might just have to become a
yoga instructor
like everybody else.”

“Oh, no,” said Cassandra, recalling Angelica’s bright, unshackled beauty and the way she used to spin naked at the End of the World.

“But enough about me!” Angelica stubbed out her cigarette with a spike heel, gorgeous and predatory all over again. In spite of the injuries she still refused to submit to practical footwear. “How are
you
, Cassandra?”

“Pregnant.”

“Oh, is that all? Well, not to worry! I know this
dear, dear man
who’s an abortionist on Park Avenue. My senior year at Nightingale-Bamford, I don’t know what I would have done without him! Did I ever tell you? I was having this totally torrid affair with
our beekeeper
.”

“Hey, wait,
Nightingale-Bamford
, did you just say? I always thought you went to Spence!”

“Oh no, you must be confusing me with Bitsy Citron. Vicky Lalage, she went to Chapin.”

“Oh, right.”

Cassandra still had an outsider’s eagerness to place these things.

But even with Angelica’s referral the Park Avenue abortionist turned out to be far too expensive. Cassandra had thought of calling Gala for advice, then decided against it because she’d remained friends with Sylvie and Cassandra hadn’t wanted Gala to gossip. It was Fern Morgenthal, of all people, who’d directed Cassandra to the place in Queens; Fern had been knocked up by the older artist she was sleeping with, her first winter in New York. The artist kept the abortionist on retainer, not that this meant that he ever paid for his services of course. The girls he bedded were perfectly willing to pay for other things, he couldn’t help but notice, so why not expect them to pay for their own abortions, too?

But now, she realized, there were so many things that Cassandra might have discussed for hours and hours about the abortion with Sylvie: how, if the child had been Edward’s, she was most certainly the only woman in
that
waiting room who had been knocked up by a Harvard graduate; how, because she still didn’t have any health insurance, she hadn’t gotten a checkup since then, and because the Chinese woman had been so brutal, she feared that she might now never be able to bear children—not that she wanted them exactly, but still. But still, she could picture herself saying to Sylvie, over pieces of burned toast slathered with Nutella, I’d still like to think I had a choice in the matter.

Breeding condition
, she sometimes wondered, thinking back to that queer phrase of Sylvie’s. Was she still in breeding condition?

She would have told Sylvie the story of what had happened to her just days after she’d had the abortion and found herself back behind the counter at Forget-Me-Not. It was a Sunday afternoon and the store was full of young mothers and babies in strollers, so full of strollers, in fact, that they kept on knocking into one another. Cassandra, first feeling self-pity and melancholy, then felt—rage! And, thus compelled, spoke right up to one of the mothers.

“Why don’t you leave your baby on the stoop? Nobody’s going to take it.”

That was the exact moment she got over the abortion, she realized later on, because one can draw strength from rage but almost never from sadness alone.

But no, Sylvie and Cassandra didn’t say any of this to each other; they didn’t succumb to the languor of the weather. Cassandra finished ringing up the sale and handed Sylvie Clementine’s birthday presents in a Forget-Me-Not bag. She thought of saying “Good-bye,” but then decided against it, for it occurred to her that they had already said that word to each other in no uncertain terms. So all she volunteered was:

“Well, anyway. I hope that Clementine likes the shoes.”

“She will,” Sylvie said, and turned to walk toward the door.

Crushing some numbers in her head, she thought: So Cassandra must
not
have given me her employee discount. Oh, well, fuck it. She could afford things now, and anyway, this was just further proof that neither of them owed each other anything anymore.

But then, just as she was about to leave, the sight of that pink tutu swaying in the window and shimmering in the April light filled her with a sudden, splintering sadness. Why, on such a lovely afternoon, things going well, bills paid, credit restored, the check from Shallot snug in her pocket,
her dreams come true
, damn it, should Sylvie feel nothing but smallness and ingratitude? Why should it take a toddler’s tutu to make her see a kind of innocence—a capacity for dazzlement—that had long gone missing from her life, and that no sense of earthly security could compensate for?

It wasn’t that she missed Cassandra. No. She still believed that she was well rid of her, and she was proud, too, of all that she’d accomplished in the last year on her own. So it must be something else that she missed, something else that was lost.

Suddenly, she remembered herself that first year in New York City, the girl with the glamorous Italian haircut and the expertly applied wings of silver eyeliner, wheeling down some street flashing with lights late at night. She still went into Manhattan then; she went everywhere. She was up for anything. What struck her was the same revelation she’d had on running into Vicky Lalage that day on the sidewalk of Fort Greene:
I was so young then.
She was so young and so beautiful. She could say that now with perfect composure, without even sounding conceited, because that girl was a stranger to her and she knew that now.

Something funny had happened to Sylvie ever since she’d gotten health insurance. Although she was grateful to finally have it, she couldn’t help but notice: the world didn’t seem quite so jagged and wild anymore, once you were insured, which also meant that it didn’t seem quite so alive. When you had health insurance, and after so many years of fending for yourself without it, the blades of knives had all turned dull, the taxis didn’t hurtle down the streets quite so fast. Why, they weren’t even quite so yellow anymore, that gorgeous, iconic yellow one associates, almost more than any other color, with the streets of New York City.

She wanted that feeling back, that rounded softness in the eyes, dew in the pores, hope in the soul—all those telltale signs that those Mount Holyoke girls, Ellie and Abigail, had not yet lost. This was the same virgin quality that Cassandra had sniffed and found so provoking in Fern and the same quality that those other young women, the modern dancers, Chelsea Hayden-Smith and Beverly Tinker-Jones, in plummeting to their early deaths from the windows of the dance studio of the performing arts building, would never, ever have stolen from them. They flew, quite literally, out of this world with it intact.