Bennington Girls Are Easy

by Charlotte Silver

  But Professor Sobel thought the same thing Sylvie did. All of the modern dancers at Bennington were so incredibly beautiful that after a while they all just blended together.

  “No,” he told Cassandra, “I don’t remember her. I don’t remember her at all.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Sylvie babysat every afternoon. That was what she was doing to make a living now: babysitting. Over the course of the last year, she had built up her own business among the wealthy families gobbling up the beautiful, tarnished old brownstones of Fort Greene, positioning herself perfectly to swoop in and make a winning impression on their children. And she did—make a winning impression. None of these parents ever suspected that beneath the sparkling brown eyes, smooth white skin, and upright, can-do carriage of this delightful young woman, the wheels, the wheels were turning. For instance, this one time while the girls were standing in line at the dry cleaner’s, Sylvie struck up a conversation with a Russian woman and her toddler. The toddler took an immediate shining to Sylvie. The mother then asked her if she would be available to babysit, adding that she was hoping to find somebody who was bilingual in English and Russian. Was there any chance that Sylvie spoke Russian? she wanted to know.

  Sylvie faltered and said: “Oh, that’s so too bad! Because I am fluent in Italian and French, actually, but my Russian is kind of middling.” In fact, Sylvie’s Italian and French were kind of middling and her Russian nonexistent, but no matter; she managed to imply, thanks to the gentle, apologetic dip in her voice, that the loss was all the woman’s own.

  Afterward, Cassandra chided her: “Oh my God, Sylvie, I can’t believe that you admitted that.”

  “What?”

  “Well, that you weren’t fluent in Russian. I mean, I thought for sure you would just pretend and then somehow get away with it.”

  “Goddamn it! You’re right, Cassandra. I so could have just pretended I spoke Russian and gotten away with it!”

  “You’re normally so much quicker on your feet than that, Sylvie,” said Cassandra admiringly.

  “Totally, totally!”

  Sylvie now relished the sway she held over these unsuspecting families of Fort Greene; a good nanny, much like a good man, is hard to find, and Sylvie was a good nanny. Children thought so, and children would know. Also, how egotistically gratifying was this turn of events, when for the better part of the last two years—commencing with the great economic collapse of the year 2008—Sylvie had been unemployed after being let go from her day job at the fashion agency in the meatpacking district and had fallen so behind on her rent that even so spineless a character as Pete the landlord, who was supposed to be a hippie for God’s sake, had been compelled to threaten her with eviction. (Sylvie, on coming home one day and discovering that she had been served with eviction papers, merely crumpled them up and hoped that this, too, would pass. It did.) The couple of jobs she did find during this desperate time lasted only briefly and were either corporate and in midtown and the only place to eat lunch was Chipotle, a fate that the girls agreed obviously was not to be endured, or else they were sketchy and out of people’s home offices in Brooklyn and the exact nature of one’s payment was not to be discussed.

  “What is being unemployed like?” Cassandra had wanted to know in that tone of radiant curiosity that people always use when inquiring about the misfortunes of others.

  “It’s like this. When you are unemployed, every twenty-four hours will feel like seventy-two.”

  “Wow,” said Cassandra, who would not have any reason to recall this particular insight of Sylvie’s until some time later when she was in similar circumstances herself.

  CHAPTER 14

  After having lunch with Professor Sobel, Cassandra got off the train to go meet Sylvie and some of her charges at a playground. Today she was watching a brother and sister named Quinn and Imogen. Part of the fun of having Sylvie babysit was that there was plenty of juicy human material in it: she and Cassandra loved discussing the kids and what problems they were doomed to have when they grew up. In the case of these two children—Quinn was four and Imogen seven—the verdict was in: Quinn was homosexual and Imogen a bitch.

  Quinn, it went without saying, the girls liked much better. He was a beautiful child with long, pale yellow ringlets and a face that, no matter what the situation, never dared convey any emotion beyond a wan, sulky boredom; Cassandra could well picture those sour lips smoking a Gauloises. His parents dressed him well, as was only the norm with four-year-olds in Brooklyn. How poignant his shoulders looked underneath his thin, hipsterish T-shirts; at this rate, he’d be wearing oversize glasses in no time. Quinn adored Sylvie, as children usually did, drawn to her physical energy and her noncondescending candor. The two of them did art projects, Quinn exquisitely sensitive to the colors he used in his watercolors. Like Sylvie, he gravitated toward a soft, sophisticated palette—pale blues and mushroom grays. No primaries! Ever. Primary colors were for other children with lesser taste.

  Today, Sylvie and Quinn were sitting together, doing pastel chalk drawings on the pavement. Cassandra, seeing them, thought: Oh God, am I going to have to sit on the ground? This babysitting business sometimes got a little too rugged for her, even as a spectator. She looked down at her shapely navy blue dress—much more chic than black on a spring afternoon—worn to show off her figure to Professor Sobel. It was going to be difficult to kneel in that dress without the fabric tugging.

  Quinn, seeing Sylvie’s friend coming, the blonde with the big boobs and the name he couldn’t be bothered to remember, thought: Oh no. She was going to spoil everything; she was going to take Sylvie away from him. And Sylvie was his babysitter. Sylvie was getting paid. Sylvie had to watch him and Imogen for money, which his parents had plenty of and Sylvie did not. Already, he and Imogen had these things all figured out; they were New York children and they knew the score.

  “Hello, Quinn,” said Cassandra, with the phony voice she always used when speaking to children. The girls didn’t know this, but Imogen, who was an excellent mimic, did a fantastic imitation of Cassandra behind her back, saying: Hello, Quinn. Hello, Imogen. How are you? The syrupy emphasis Imogen placed on that last word, you, was lethal. Whenever she imitated Cassandra, she could count on putting Quinn in stitches. She never did it in front of her parents, though. Her parents were such fools, they liked Cassandra; they actually fell for that voice the way no child ever would. Parents just thought she had good manners.

  “Hello, Quinn,” said Cassandra again, having failed to get even a perfunctory response the first time around. “How are you? Oh, and what are you doing? Drawing? Oh, I just love pastels, I remember those.”

  Now this was another annoying habit of Cassandra’s around children: she was always waxing nostalgic around them. Every banal detail—a stick of pink chalk, a child’s green galoshes—could send her, madeleine-like, into a frenzy of reminiscences. Whenever Cassandra began a sentence with the words “I remember,” it meant the death of the conversation in the eyes of any child. What did they care about some chick’s old party dress, or forgotten birthday cake? They did not care, for they had not yet learned what Cassandra had at far too young an age—that all could be lost; that these banal details would be remembered with an aching heart forever afterward.

  There are beautiful children and then there are beautiful children. Imogen belonged to the latter category. She had the kind of silky blond femininity, combined with a straight-backed confident carriage, that marked her already as the prettiest girl in the class. Even Sylvie was intimidated by the directness of her arctic blue gaze and had decided against telling her parents about the girl’s breathtaking tantrums. Like so many parents today, they considered their child flawless and would have considered the tantrums to be Sylvie’s fault.

  Right now, Imogen was in the midst of practicing cartwheels, or perhaps practicing is not the word, for Imogen’s cartwheeling technique had long since been perfected. Her long legs spun in gorgeous circles. She was demonstrating for
some other hapless little girl, who was rather on the chubby side and did not seem to get it. “Like this,” Imogen kept on insisting, bouncing up and down on the balls of her little blue Keds—Keds were an “in” sneaker this season, in Brooklyn, edging out even Converse. “Like this.” And then she’d do another cartwheel.

  “Clap for me, Sylvie! Clap for me!” she called once she was finished. “Why aren’t you clapping?”

  “I’m clapping, Imogen,” said Sylvie with great weariness, and then she did just that. Cassandra joined her, a little too late, which Imogen noticed, thinking: I hate Cassandra. Like her brother, she thought it was obnoxious that Sylvie let a friend of hers tag along when she should have been paying attention to them.

  Cassandra was looking at Imogen doing cartwheels and, as usual, making it all about her. She had been quite hopeless not only at cartwheels but also at hand-clapping games and four square and…well, you name it. She sighed, remembering. It was true that childhood was a kingdom of many lost pleasures. But it was also a kingdom populated by other children, and other children could be so cruel. Maybe there was something to be said for surviving into adulthood after all.

  Then Imogen, finally sick of doing cartwheels and hoping that Sylvie would cook up something exciting for her to do, threw her arms up in the air and ran toward the two young women. She braced herself for the inevitable, Cassandra saying: “Hello, Imogen. And how are you?”

  “Why is your face so red?” demanded Imogen. She had cool, soap-flake coloring herself and already wondered what was the matter with the skin of so many grown-ups, when hers was so perfect.

  Cassandra, whose naturally rosy skin was red from all of the champagne, put a demure hand to her burning cheek. God, she hated this kid. Imogen. No wonder Sylvie was so bone-tired these days, having to put up with her.

  “Actually…” said Sylvie, addressing Cassandra, “I was wondering that myself. Are you…?”

  “Drunk? Well. Tipsy anyway.”

  Imogen’s ears pricked up at the word drunk. Now this was getting interesting. One thing she did kind of like about Cassandra: once she got the phony hellos out of the way, she often forgot that children were there in the first place and started letting all kinds of adult tidbits drop. At times like that Cassandra was worth paying attention to, or you might miss out on something good. Imogen’s parents were careful never to say things like “drunk” in front of the children and that kind of attitude got pretty damn boring after a while.

  Quinn couldn’t be bothered to pay attention to any of this. He was deep in his drawing, massaging various tender shades of blue into the pavement, quite pleased with the results.

  “Oh, Cassandra!” exclaimed Sylvie. “Don’t tell me that you and Professor Sobel…”

  Aha! thought Imogen, picking up on the words Professor Sobel, almost as compelling and forbidden as drunk. So there was a man involved. This was going to be great.

  “No, no! Professor Sobel is very subtle. He thinks it’s sexy to prolong things, I have this feeling.”

  Imogen, having no idea just what it was this Professor Sobel fellow might want to prolong, listened to the two women hungrily.

  “Subtle! Subtle! Is that what you call it? This, about the man who once did a baboon impression in front of you? Sitting on top of his desk in the music building? Do you remember that, Cassandra, or have you blocked it out?”

  Cassandra now took a moment to recall the time when Professor Sobel, wearing a black cashmere sweater pitted with moth holes, hoisted himself up on top of his desk and crossed his legs. She had watched as Professor Sobel, still sitting cross-legged on top of the desk, started beating his chest and waving his arms and making these queer, animalistic, broken, moaning sounds. That episode lasted a good long time and had an almost operatic quality about it. Once he had finally stopped, he had looked long and hard at her with the I’ve got you gaze of the animal kingdom, and explained, “Every so often, a man just has to get in touch with his inner primate.”

  Afterward, he’d sighed and put on a Beethoven string quartet and the two of them had never discussed the incident ever again.

  “Oh that,” said Cassandra now. “Well, there is something kind of animalistic about the attraction between Professor Sobel and me—I’ve always felt that Professor Sobel has just a touch of this very male dominance and cruelty, combined with this veneer of verbal sophistication…”

  All this was lost on Imogen, but she did think a grown man doing a baboon imitation sounded pretty cool. She loved imitations, being so good at them herself.

  “If that’s a fantasy you have, you’d best be rid of it.”

  “Oh, but I agree! By acting it out, right?”

  “No, Cassandra, that is not what I—” Jesus. Sylvie stopped, realizing that she often found herself speaking to Cassandra in the same tone of voice she used on Quinn and Imogen. Quinn and Imogen! They were right there. They had heard everything, probably. She turned to the little girl and said: “Hey, Imogen, why don’t you show us your cartwheels again?”

  There it was, staring her down, the fearless arctic blue gaze. No way Imogen was going anywhere. Oh, the hell with it, Sylvie thought, remembering her own wretched childhood. Kids always figured out what was up with the adults anyway.

  So Sylvie turned to Cassandra and got to the point: “But Cassandra. You have a boyfriend, remember.”

  “Oh, Sylvie, you’re being awfully—unimaginative about this. You know I’ve never necessarily believed in monogamy. I think there can be far worse betrayals between people than that.”

  Monogamy. Imogen didn’t know what that meant, but even so, she was with Cassandra on this one: that didn’t sound too hot. Monogamy. It sounded like being forced to do something boring, like going to bed on time. Like something her stupid parents would believe in.

  “Infidelity can hurt people, Cassandra.”

  “Everything can hurt people,” Cassandra shot back, and Imogen, thinking, Well then, grown-ups must be wimps, because nothing ever hurt me, sighed and went back to doing her cartwheels.

  CHAPTER 15

  Cassandra’s boyfriend, Edward, lived in Philadelphia. When she first met him, she was still living in Boston, and for many months now, they had been having a glamorous long-distance love affair, featuring classical music concerts, regattas, why, even corsages and bouquets of long-stemmed white roses, which Edward was bold enough to send, from time to time, to Cassandra’s office. They also attended, the previous November, the storied Harvard-Yale game. Cassandra met Edward on the train platform in New Haven, just, as she related to Sylvie over the phone, “like something out of Franny and Zooey!”

  “Hey, wait a minute. Didn’t Franny go insane after the weekend of the Harvard-Yale game?”

  “Oh, Sylvie, Sylvie, must you be so unromantic?”

  “Yes, actually,” said Sylvie, and laughed. “If experience has taught me anything, yes.”

  There is no good time, really, for one’s friend to get a new boyfriend, unless you happen to have one yourself. And Sylvie didn’t, at the moment. She hadn’t been in love or had a torturous crush, even, in quite some time. Torturous crushes were fun; she missed them. Just recently Gala Gubelman, who, while she was on her computer at work, loved to stalk other people’s exes online, had discovered that Ludo Citron was now dating a washed-up nineties movie star who had her own clothing line of ungainly separates sold at Opening Ceremony and had expected Sylvie to be jealous. But she wasn’t—she only felt a remoteness from that part of her past. The days when she had been involved with guys like Ludo seemed a long, long time ago. The idea that she could have been attracted to an artist was preposterous to her now. Sylvie had come a long way since college, and she no longer believed in art. It wasn’t sacred anymore. Nothing was. Money, maybe. Yes, money to Sylvie was starting to feel sacred.

  As for Edward, he was an academic and handsome in a rather stiff, professorial style. He was several years older than Cassandra—in his thirties already—but Sylvie, upon hearing Cassa
ndra’s description of him, said, “Wait, wait, wait, I think I get the picture. He’s a guy of our generation, but he has more in common with someone who’s sixty?”

  “Yes!” exclaimed Cassandra, not in the least insulted. She just had that sweet, cozy feeling she got—that rush of serotonin—whenever Sylvie immediately understood what she was saying.

  Meanwhile, now that she was finally living in New York, Cassandra figured that living with Sylvie would be only temporary. The plan was that she would stay there for the summer, then move to Philadelphia, once Edward proposed. Being the old-fashioned type, he didn’t want them to live together before marriage. Sylvie disagreed with Cassandra’s plan. Sylvie thought that Cassandra should move to New York City for good.

  “And live with you?”

  At the back of Cassandra’s mind was the thought of the security deposit that she had given Sylvie so many years ago now: she didn’t expect to get it back but she did think that there would be a kind of justice—good karma accrued—in getting to move into the apartment for a while.

  Sylvie murmured her assent on the other end of the line, preoccupied with the evening ritual of rolling a joint.

  “That would be nice,” Cassandra said. “That would be great!”

  “Well, why not? We’ve always wanted to live together, and we haven’t, have we? Ever since college, I mean.”

  “Is there anything you need?” Cassandra asked her, eager to appear to not be a mooch. Sylvie was sensitive about people being mooches, she knew. She was swift to complain if roommates used her shaving cream or if they preferred to get takeout at the soul food joint down the street rather than split the groceries: Sylvie was always trying to save money by eating at home and, being the child of hippies, favored a healthy diet. That anybody should treat themselves to takeout, ever, was a personal affront to her values, particularly fatty, low-rent takeout. “And now the whole apartment smells like barbecued chicken wings!” she had thundered to Cassandra once, over the phone. I will be different, Cassandra vowed. I will be the ideal roommate. (There is no such person, in fact. They do not exist.) “I mean, is there anything you need for the apartment?”