Bennington Girls Are Easy

by Charlotte Silver

  Everything, Sylvie thought to herself. I need everything. She had a bare, ragtag collection of silverware and dishes, none of which matched. She still didn’t own a toaster. Or facecloths; she took her mascara off with paper towels at the end of the night. That is, assuming she had a roll of paper towels on hand in the apartment. Sometimes she didn’t. Paper towels are expensive, too. Everything is expensive, Sylvie had found. Even things, like paper towels, that in her considered opinion had no right to be.

  “Well…I could use more cooking stuff,” she said carefully, thinking that cooking stuff was only the beginning. Cassandra was known by her friends to be generous and a soft touch with money, and Sylvie felt that she might be convinced to spring for just about anything.

  “How about a Le Creuset pan? My mother gave me this really beautiful old Le Creuset pan. It’s kind of a mustard color, on the bottom. Would you use it?”

  “Oh, definitely!”

  “All right then, I’ll bring it.”

  “Can I ask you a question, Cassandra? It isn’t about the Le Creuset pan.”

  Smoking pot had made Sylvie contemplative.

  “Sure.”

  “It’s about Edward.”

  “Edward…?”

  “Do you like him?” asked Sylvie, because she wasn’t convinced, from the way Cassandra talked about him, that she did.

  “Like? Like…Well, that depends. Do you think it’s possible to like a man and be in love with him?”

  “Of course it is!” shrieked Sylvie, to whom even the suggestion of such a contradiction was outrageous.

  “Hmm. I’m starting to wonder. The sex is much better, I think, without all of that just hanging out and trying to be best friends with each other stuff. Because I don’t think I like Edward all that much, actually, but I am in love with him. And he’s in love with me.”

  “Oh, so does that mean he doesn’t like you, either?”

  “Maybe!”

  The girls laughed.

  Cassandra had this orange suitcase. Hermès orange, she called it. It was a very fancy suitcase and exactly the kind of thing that Sylvie, leading her threadbare twenty-something life, didn’t own. Cassandra first got that suitcase when she started dating Edward and it was the most potent symbol of her happiness. It was her vehicle out of the past and into the future—everything that the poor, discarded Madeline coat had failed to symbolize to Cassandra, the orange suitcase did.

  Another symbol of her happiness was that ever since meeting Edward she no longer stooped to taking the Fung Wah bus; those greasy, perilous days of her youth were over. The first time she visited him in Philadelphia, she had mentioned the possibility of taking it. With his detached academic’s eye, he had compared traveling by the Fung Wah to traveling by steerage class, not that he had ever taken the bus himself.

  “But, Cassandra! The Fung Wah was good enough for you to take when you came to see me.”

  “But Sylvie, just imagine it…”

  “What?”

  “Just imagine traveling by the Fung Wah to go see a lover. Remember that weekend when my hair smelled like chicken vindaloo?”

  “Oh God! Well, now that you mention it. Or you could end up smelling like McDonald’s…”

  “Pork fried rice…”

  “One time I was on this bus they were totally using to transport dried fish.”

  “Not really!”

  “Yes, really! Did I ever tell you about this one time, we pulled off at that hideous bus stop in Connecticut, you know the one, the one with the McDonald’s. I was sitting up front that time. So the driver turns to me and says— in English—apparently he actually could speak English when it suited him: “ ‘Hey, I’m going to take a smoke. Do you mind pumping gas?’ ”

  “Oh my God! What did you say?”

  “I pumped the gas.”

  “You did?”

  “Cassandra! Think about it. What if I didn’t do it, and the guy took his smoke break and forgot or something? Would you have wanted to run out of gas on the highway?”

  Cassandra thought that was like Sylvie all over—petite but indomitable, pumping gas on a lonesome stretch of Connecticut highway.

  “See, Sylvie. I have to go see Edward by Amtrak. I have to. And taking the train is so nice! I always go to the club car and order myself a Scotch and soda and potato chips. It’s the perfect combination.”

  Scotch, thought Sylvie. Drinking Scotch on the train. Cassandra really was living it up, these days.

  She had left Boston on April 1. That day, it had been raining, but then, as she might well have remarked to Sylvie, it always seemed to be raining in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Cambridge was a melancholy town. She wheeled her orange suitcase across the streets of Harvard Square, a young blond woman in a trench coat making, she fancied, an Umbrellas of Cherbourg type exit. Oh, the songs she might have sung! The child, the young girl she used to be!

  That night, Cassandra and her orange suitcase—as well as her monogrammed navy L.L.Bean Boat and Tote, at the bottom of which, weighing it down, was the wonderful old mustard-colored Le Creuset pan of her mother’s—traveled by Amtrak to Philadelphia. It rained, and rained. Good-bye Massachusetts, good-bye Rhode Island, good-bye Connecticut…Outside Cassandra’s window, the Connecticut shoreline was shrouded in gray. When the conductor announced that soon they would be at Penn Station, Cassandra rubbed sleep from her eyes and thought, Good-bye, New England.

  She got in so late that Edward did not come meet her at the station, something that a woman who was not in love—the pragmatic Sylvie, for instance—might have recognized as a very bad sign. What it might have told her was that Edward did not understand what an immense night this was in her life. When she got out of the cab at his apartment, though, he apparently didn’t think it was too late to go upstairs and have vigorous sex right away.

  But Cassandra just wasn’t into it, that night. She remembered how, in the days of more simple, drowsy lovemaking with her very first boyfriend, she used to doze in the crook of his long arm; something not necessarily sexual but soothing. Something more in that mode was what she wanted right now. She was going to have to remember all of this to tell Sylvie; they were both fascinated by how different sex was with different people, or even with the same person, depending on the way you were feeling. Sex is so textured, Cassandra would say. I know, it’s amazing, Sylvie would say, smoking a joint.

  The next morning, it was clear and beautiful. To someone who had grown up in Boston, spring came early to Philadelphia. The magnolia blossoms were out on the well-groomed streets of Rittenhouse Square. Cassandra put on a pale blue shirtwaist and moccasins and she and Edward went for a long, leisurely breakfast, reading sections of The New York Times like a real adult couple, at their favorite French café. Afterward, they went back to his apartment and had sex on the original Colonial floors of the living room. It was fantastic. Cassandra adored him. This was her new life and it was going to be splendid.

  When she got back to Brooklyn, Sylvie asked her: “Do you think you’ll get married? He seems like the marrying kind.”

  “Oh, yes.” Cassandra sighed sumptuously. “Absolutely.”

  “But then, you might end up getting divorced.”

  “Sylvie!”

  “Well? Don’t pretend like it doesn’t eventually happen. Just look at my parents.”

  “Yeah.”

  At this point in their lives, Sylvie and Cassandra were both big on judging the messes their parents had made of their lives because they still believed that they, themselves, would do no such thing.

  “I wonder what it’s really like,” Sylvie went on. “Divorce. Loving someone and then not loving them, and how with divorce you have to make it so official. You know. I’ve never been able to forget this. My mother once told me that the day she had to sign the divorce papers was the saddest day of her whole life.”

  Cassandra never forgot that, either.

  CHAPTER 16

  In the mornings, Sylvie babysat a delectable litt
le toddler named Clementine, Clementine of the black ringlets and fat cheeks the color of French radishes. Sylvie said she was in love with Clementine; she said Clementine was her soul mate. She said that Clementine was her good luck charm and that ever since meeting the little girl, her life had started to turn around for the better.

  Cassandra tagged along with Sylvie when she babysat, for something to do. Anyone could see that as children go Clementine was delightful, but still—Cassandra had no natural tenderness with, or for, children. She feared that Edward, being so traditional, would want to have them. She didn’t. She wanted to have French breakfasts and make love on the living room floor forever and ever, no children waking up and waddling in.

  The way Sylvie acted with Clementine was beginning to disturb Cassandra. She felt that the attention she paid her was excessive. Was this her way of detecting that the unconditional love that was once her due had shifted, as in a love triangle, to Clementine? For here was Sylvie, no longer paying attention to her but to Clementine—feeding her snap peas (“Clementine already eats all of her vegetables”) out of a plastic bag, picking her up out of her stroller and hugging her at what were to Cassandra quite random intervals, singing her songs in French. “Alouette,” she sang, “gentille alouette,” which once upon a time Sylvie and Cassandra had sung together in high school French class.

  Sylvie needs to get laid, Cassandra was thinking; it had been quite a while, hadn’t it? Sometimes, giving in to ennui, Sylvie had one-night stands, not that she ever seemed to enjoy them all that much. It had been a long time now since the giddy, reckless era of the silver eyeliner, of Jasper and Angus and Bertram and Max…Sex wasn’t sacred, either. In fact, Sylvie had found, it was often more trouble than it was worth, and then! And then there was the fact that all of the guys she met in New York were so lame.

  Cassandra and Sylvie wheeled Clementine in her stroller all over the neighborhood: to get pain au chocolats for her and lattes for them (which, hoping to turn her into an avid coffee drinker later on in life, they encouraged her to take tiny sips of); to florist shops (See, Clementine, tulips, yellow tulips, can you say tulip?); and, inevitably, to the Brooklyn Flea, where they whittled away whole Saturdays sorting through old wooden boxes of vintage buttons. Would Clementine like this one, or would Clementine like that one? Buttons were a passion of hers, little red ones especially. Button! she would exclaim. Button!

  Clementine’s voice was absolutely delicious. Bouncy and bell-like, the cartoon voice of a beautiful child. “Clementine is so lyrical,” Sylvie said. And so, when Clementine said the word Button!, that sound, like the plaintive chords of a string quartet, sent silvery shivers of recognition down Cassandra’s spine.

  “It’s sad,” said Cassandra.

  “What’s sad?”

  “Clementine’s voice. It’s sad.”

  “No, it isn’t,” insisted Sylvie.

  “It is. It’s so…mournful.”

  “Jesus, Cassandra, Clementine’s voice is not sad. Clementine is not sad. Clementine is a beautiful little girl and it’s a beautiful spring day and anyway I make her happy.” She got down on her knees and wiggled her nose against Clementine’s: “Don’t I? Don’t I? Doesn’t Sylvie make you happy?”

  “Sylvie,” repeated Clementine, giggling.

  “But happiness is the saddest thing in the world. And as an adult to try to recapture happiness—”

  Then all of a sudden Clementine was crying—Clementine, who, according to Sylvie, never cried. Sylvie thought: Cassandra really is lousy with kids. She’s going to have to come up with a hell of a good excuse when Edward wants to start having them. And he will, she thought, the stuck-up preppie bastard. Sometimes Sylvie thought that Cassandra’s relationship would stand a chance only if Cassandra could continue to conceal her real self—that being the self she had no shame in revealing to Sylvie.

  “Oh, look what you’ve done, Cassandra!” Sylvie stooped down again and flooded the child with the daintiest of kisses, on her forehead, her lashes, her nose. “Alouette,” she sang to her darling Clementine, “gentille alouette…”

  “Oh my God. Sylvie? Sylvie Furst!”

  The girls looked up only to see a dim, honey-blond creature squinting at them from behind her spectacles. A pang of recognition startled Sylvie—then, fear: some old, unrealized fear that, although long past the point of logic, still carried a powerful emotional charge.

  It was Vicky Lalage.

  Sylvie hadn’t laid eyes on Vicky Lalage since the disastrous series of events beginning with letting her mother’s dog die on her watch and being exiled to the nursery with her father’s ashes (“Contents: Marc Lalage”). Since then, Sylvie had hightailed it to Brooklyn and never looked back. She was twenty-two years old then and twenty-eight now. It came to Sylvie, looking at this young woman who she had once been friends with and who was now a stranger, that it felt like not six years but whole decades had passed.

  I was so young then, she thought, remembering her first year in New York.

  “Vicky!” she exclaimed. The two women hugged. Vicky, after recognizing Cassandra, too, gestured to Clementine and then to Sylvie, saying: “Oh my God, is she—”

  “Mine? Oh no.”

  “You wish,” said Cassandra, and the three of them laughed, on innocent ground because the presence of Clementine erased the thorny past and put everybody in a good mood.

  “Everybody does say we look alike,” said Sylvie, to whom nothing could have been a greater compliment. “But no, I’m just her babysitter.”

  They do kind of look alike, Vicky was thinking, but Sylvie seemed so different. She seemed like a whole other person. She couldn’t put her finger on it at first, then she realized what it was. Her haircut. Vicky stopped for a second to recall the carelessly gorgeous, brown-skinned girl on the nude beach at Martha’s Vineyard: the one with the black Italian pixie cut. But Sylvie was wearing her hair long now and Vicky thought that it weighed her down. Vicky thought that she looked tired.

  “What are you up to these days?” Cassandra asked Vicky, feeling that it was only good manners to do so.

  “Oh, I’ve been running this studio for this artist…” Cassandra here recalled that Vicky had been a fine arts major—ceramics or something frumpy like that. She saw flakes of plaster dotting the honey-blond hair. Vicky rambled on a bit, and then the girls heard her say: “And! I just moved into an apartment in Boerum Hill with my girlfriend. Actually…” She singled out Sylvie. “My girlfriend. Tess Fox. You know her.”

  Afterward:

  “Oh my God. Tess Fox. That’s that anorexic slut from Bryn Mawr!”

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  “The one who used to date Gala, right? The one you got into that screaming match with on the ferry coming back from the Vineyard?”

  “Uh-huh. Oh my God. I’m going to text Gala and tell her right now.” Sylvie reached for her BlackBerry and began tapping away. “Also, I know that was totally harmless, but I’ve been dreading running into Vicky Lalage for years.”

  “Well? You two are out and about in New York City. It had to happen sometime.”

  That song, Cassandra thought, later that night when she was lying in bed unable to fall asleep. She couldn’t get it out of her head. She tried to resurrect her rusty French to translate the lyrics. It wasn’t a very nice song, was it? But then children’s songs so often weren’t nice. Childhood was a brutal kingdom, where only the fit and the selfish survived. “Skylark, nice skylark / Skylark, I shall pluck you / I shall pluck your head…”

  CHAPTER 17

  Cassandra picked up her cell phone to call Sylvie, as in the old days when they were living in different cities and loved more than anything to talk on the phone to each other. Sylvie was off babysitting, and Cassandra had just woken up and was drinking coffee alone, savoring the angelic light of Sylvie’s apartment, thinking: How good life is.

  “Oh my God, guess what?”

  In the background, children were shrieking. Sylvie sai
d: “Can I call you—”

  “No, no, I wanted to tell you. I’ve been thinking about it. I can handle it now.”

  “Handle what?”

  “Having an affair with Professor Sobel. I’ve decided that I can handle it.”

  “Well, I don’t know what to—I’m coming, Quinn, I’m coming. It’s a friend of mine, she needs my help, too. Okay! Hold on a sec. Cassandra. Are we talking about the same man who knocked up Penelope Entenmann?”

  “Oh, whatever, Sylvie! I’m on the pill.”

  “That’s not the point. The point is—”

  “And anyway, she’s the heiress to the coffee cake fortune! She could afford to keep the baby.”

  “You couldn’t, Cassandra! You couldn’t afford to keep a baby if you got knocked up and neither could I.”

  “Enough about Penelope Entenmann, I beg of you! Are you actually comparing me to a girl who used to give Reiki to butterflies? I’ve been sitting here drinking coffee and figuring it all out. What with me having Edward in Philadelphia—”

  “That isn’t a plus, Cassandra. That’s a complication. And anyway—that’s terrible! You love Edward. Why would you want to cheat on him?”

  “You’re being so uptight about this, Sylvie!”

  “You know what, Cassandra? I don’t think you do love Edward. And another thing! I don’t think he really loves you. You two don’t know each other; you’re not even close! All you ever do is have a ton of sex and dress up and go to black-tie events! That’s one hell of a basis for a relationship.”

  Cassandra, to whom it seemed a most excellent basis for a relationship, hung up the phone feeling pissed and thought for the first time in her life that Sylvie was jealous of her. It was so sad, Sylvie not having a boyfriend right now. But why? Sylvie was so pretty. Sylvie was beautiful! Cassandra recalled the sight of her arriving back home in Cambridge in a little black dress and white lace tights, shaking snowflakes from her cap of dark hair…