Bennington Girls Are Easy

by Charlotte Silver

  Later that afternoon, Sylvie got home from work to find Cassandra sitting at the kitchen table in a pale blue baby-doll nightie, her plumpish white legs bare and blond hair rather naughtily tousled. Had she spent the whole day like this? Sylvie wondered.

  “Oh my God, I’m so hungry,” she said. “Quinn made me come into the bathroom and wipe him today. He’s four.”

  Cassandra shuddered. It wasn’t the talk of bodily functions that upset her. It was the talk of children. Children! How she hoped that Edward wouldn’t want them.

  Sylvie went into the bathroom, where she was overwhelmed by the baroque splendor of Cassandra’s lingerie going drip, drop, drip into the famous claw-foot bathtub. And at the foot of the bathtub was a white French champagne bucket, which the girls had been so delighted to find for a steal at Marshalls, and which they took turns using to handwash their underthings. But the bucket, tonight, was full to the brim with an indeterminate garment of pink-and-apricot lace and rich with the scent of hyacinth soapsuds. So no way Sylvie would be using it anytime soon, even though she was running low on clean underwear.

  Then she discovered that they were out of toilet paper. That figured, the way the day was going. She’d have to remember to steal some. In Sylvie’s opinion, only suckers ever bought something you could steal so easily in a restaurant or a train station or even from other people’s houses. She was forever cramming rolls into her tote bags and nobody ever noticed. Keeping the apartment in paper towels, which had given her so much grief, was harder because you couldn’t steal them quite so easily as you could toilet paper. You usually had no choice but to pay for them, damn it.

  “Cassandra,” she called from the bathroom, “the next time you go out, remember to steal us some toilet paper, if you happen to think of it.”

  “Oh yeah, I keep meaning to. But I just don’t feel comfortable stealing from local businesses and you know how I pretty much never go to chains.” Cassandra was still, at heart, a sweet, diligent, well-trained Cambridge girl who said things like that.

  But Sylvie laughed and said: “Oh, I got over that years ago. It’s a jungle out there! It’s every man for himself.”

  She came out of the bathroom and opened the door to the refrigerator.

  “Have you bought any groceries yet?”

  Groceries, thought Cassandra. Groceries, rather like children, a word she dreaded. They smacked to her of the same granola-colored domesticity, the same death of the soul.

  “Didn’t we talk about you buying groceries? I thought we made a list the other day, didn’t we?”

  Cassandra recalled the crumpled list, which, earlier today, she had thrown into the trash hoping that Sylvie wouldn’t remember. It had listed the usual single girl suspects: dried cranberries, Wasa crisps, ginger tea (good for menstrual cramps), and hummus. Sylvie was actually expecting her to pay for the likes of this? If one was going to spend money, much better to go out to dinner and enjoy it, Cassandra thought.

  Sylvie was thinking: I could really go for some hummus right now. Sylvie was thinking, of her best friend, Cassandra: Fuck you.

  “Oh, let’s go out,” said Cassandra, stretching her arms. They were looking especially creamy and touchable right now, she couldn’t help but notice, pleasantly filled with the thought of her own ripe, late-twenties beauty. I am just entering my sexual peak right now, she often reminded herself, for, like all lovely things, it would not last for long in this world. The supreme softness of her arms could be attributed to her having rubbed her entire body earlier that afternoon with a concoction of brown sugar and baby oil: a beauty tip of Pansy Chapin’s, first passed on to her at Bennington and filed away in her memory with deathly seriousness ever since. Pansy used to do that before departing campus for assignations with her fiancé on Central Park South. I’m primping, she would announce, and then vanish from the dining hall for days before the visit, cocooning herself in the luscious temple of Santa Maria Novella floral waters and monogrammed Swiss linens that was her dorm room. “I’ll go and put something on. What do you feel like?”

  “Something Mediterranean sounds good.”

  “Oh, I’d like some of those yummy Greek dips! You know. Taramosalata, tzatziki…”

  She was thinking as she said this of that day—but it was years ago now, it was the day they found the Madeline coats, it was the day of the first snowfall, the day they drank mugs of Valrhona hot chocolate and, thus fortified, trudged out to Orpheus McCloud’s place in Astoria—when she, Sylvie, and Gala Gubelman had ended up at a Greek restaurant for that midnight snack of taramosalata and warm pita bread, and those heavenly deep blue bowls of avgolemono soup. She had felt so close to Sylvie that day and somehow did not feel so close to her right now. Was it possible to feel more close to someone when you did not, in fact, live with them? Cassandra wondered. When the two of you were not in the same city, even?

  “Tzatziki!” she heard Sylvie saying. “And that’s so easy to make. Let’s go to the store and pick up cucumbers and stuff.”

  Groceries again! But Sylvie insisted, and off they went. Cassandra paid. She thought that maybe since she was always paying for things, Sylvie would do the cooking, at least. But when they got back to the apartment, Sylvie put a knife in Cassandra’s hand and instructed her to start chopping the cucumbers.

  “Do you think it’s really cheaper buying groceries?” she asked. Groceries in Fort Greene never did come cheap, was one thing she had discovered. “I feel like, just picking up a carton of tzatziki would have been—”

  “Cassandra! I’ve been living in New York City for years. I know how to manage a food budget. You can’t go out to eat all the time. You just can’t.”

  “But I feel like New York actually has a lot of good cheap food, too, if you just—”

  “That’s not really true. Not if you like to eat healthfully anyway. You eat a lot more meat and fatty stuff than I do, I guess. What I mostly eat are fresh vegetables. Oh! That reminds me. How would you feel about buying us a juicer?”

  A juicer? She could think of nothing she would like less.

  “What do you want a juicer for?”

  “I was thinking we might do a cleanse one of these days. And now that summer’s coming, we can get such great stuff to juice at the farmers’ market. We can make, like, beet juice, carrot, kale…”

  Kale? Kale juice? Now this, this was to Cassandra the death of the soul.

  “Would kale juice actually taste good, do you think?”

  “Why wouldn’t it?”

  “Because it’s fucking kale juice.”

  “I love kale. I make really good kale.”

  “Kale is not delicious. It’s just one of those things that simply isn’t. Kale is anti-delicious. If you ask me.”

  “Well, I didn’t ask you.”

  “But you did ask me to pay for the juicer that’s supposed to juice the said kale.”

  “Well, Jesus, Cassandra! We can use it to make fruit juices, too. I’ll drink the kale juice and you can drink, like, peach juice or something when peaches are in season. Don’t you think that fresh peach juice sounds delicious?”

  “Not if I have to go through a bunch of effort to juice a bunch of damn peaches to get, like, a thimble full of liquid…And anyway! I just drink coffee. I’m a coffee drinker and proud of it. So are you! Whatever happened to your iced Americanos?”

  “I was thinking I’d replace them with juice.”

  “Going from coffee to juice! That’s like replacing fucking with cuddling. Isn’t that, like, what lesbians are supposed to do? Lesbian bed-death and whatnot. There’s no comparison.”

  Sylvie tried again, seeking this time to appeal to Cassandra’s vanity, which she knew to be a soft spot.

  “But we’re pushing thirty now! Don’t you want to stay in breeding condition?”

  “Breeding condition?”

  “Don’t you want to stay healthy and—well, fertile?”

  “Fertile? Fertile, Sylvie? I don’t like to think of myself as fertile. It�
�s such a gassy old word, somehow. Fertile. I hate it! Anyway. I don’t want to have children.”

  “No, but you want to get laid.”

  “I am getting laid.”

  There followed a long silence between the two women. Afraid to look into the eyes of her best friend, Cassandra found herself staring intently at the Chinese paper lantern hanging from the ceiling, which seemed to her as good a way to avoid confrontation as any. The delicate, whimsical girl who had splurged on that lantern at Pearl River Mart during her first year in New York and proudly shown it to Cassandra when she came to visit—Cassandra exclaiming: Oh my God, Sylvie, it’s magical!—seemed but a memory right now.

  “I’ve been thinking…” said Sylvie at last.

  “Thinking what?”

  “I’ve been thinking I drink way too much coffee. We both do. I’ve been thinking…”

  “What?”

  “I’ve been thinking that there are going to be some changes around here. Changes in my life.”

  When she said this, Sylvie’s eyes sharpened like big brown jewels in her pale face, so much more hungry and haggard now than it had been when she was younger. She was still a good-looking young woman by anybody’s standards—her body still yogic and firm and capable of turning heads on the streets of the city—but Cassandra noticed that her face was beginning to show the toll of hours spent running after other people’s children and lifting their strollers; of years without steady income and health insurance and balanced meals; it was beginning to show, in short, the toll of spending one’s youth in, or perhaps one should say on, New York City.

  Sylvie was wearing a pair of black leggings underneath a Norwegian fisherman’s sweater of her grandfather’s; this look on her was appealingly gamine, or ought to have been. But the pair of leggings she had on today was streaked through with desperate-looking runs at the seams, runs so big even a casual observer could see them. Cassandra sighed. She looked at a lemon chiffon cocktail dress of hers hanging on her bedroom door, crystallized in the April light. She owned so many beautiful pieces of clothing, and Sylvie so few.

  “Oh, I’ll buy us the damn juicer,” said Cassandra airily, too convinced of the richness of her life, compared to Sylvie’s, to begrudge her anything.

  CHAPTER 18

  Sylvie was always thinking ahead and, in fact, there was an ulterior motive behind her asking Cassandra to buy them a juicer. The following week, they were having lunch at a fashionable restaurant claiming to be on the local foods bandwagon, which she thought was a most excellent setting in which to announce her latest money-making scheme, in which the juicer, she hoped, was going to play no small part.

  Sylvie liked this place but Cassandra didn’t, even though she was the one who was paying. She sometimes thought she didn’t like any of the restaurants in Fort Greene all that much and yet they were all so expensive. There was just this meagerness to them. Here was her rule of thumb, and it had never yet failed her: if a restroom had a bottle of Mrs. Meyer’s geranium hand soap sitting on the sink, the food would not have enough salt in it. She looked down at the curried chicken salad sandwich she had ordered. Fourteen dollars it was going to cost her, and yet the kitchen did not know enough to toast the bread, apparently.

  Sylvie, meanwhile, was tucking into a nice big peppery green salad with gusto, in high spirits today because her latest plan had given her an adrenaline rush.

  “What is it?” asked Cassandra.

  “A lemonade stand.”

  “Huh?”

  “A lemonade stand. For grown-ups.”

  “Oh!” Now this was getting intriguing.

  “Brilliant? Right? I am fucking brilliant and I am going to make so much money.”

  “Sylvie! I love you. You’re brilliant!”

  “I’ve even come up with the perfect location. We’ll set up shop on the corner across from the park, where the farmers’ market is. So we’ll get all the foot traffic, see.”

  “Do we need a permit or anything?”

  “Oh, probably, but this is an illegal operation. We’re up to it. Say somebody says something, say a cop comes. We can just pick up and move to another corner. It’ll be fun.”

  A wonderful sense of adventure started to stir in Cassandra, and she felt alive and happy all over. Sylvie was feeling this, too.

  “We’ll have to make it all pretty,” Cassandra said.

  “Oh, very.”

  “Not just pretty, chic.”

  “Oh, very chic.”

  “Sophisticated.”

  “Well, right. That’s the whole idea. A sophisticated lemonade stand, crafty yet stylish.”

  “Cozy but cosmopolitan…”

  “Right! And of course we’ll milk the whole local foods thing for everything it’s worth. That’s so trendy right now. Like I said! It’s brilliant.”

  “What I especially like about this idea is the whole recaptured innocence angle.”

  “Hmm. How so?”

  “Well, like I was thinking,” Cassandra began, “of the time I visited you last year during Halloween weekend. And we were having lunch at that Cuban place in Carroll Gardens, but, like upscale Cuban, you know the one? They have those delicious, kind of caramelized coffee drinks. Anyway—remember that outside there was this Halloween parade? And the parents were all wearing costumes, too. That was the thing that caught my attention. Actually, I thought it was totally lame, all of those shrimpy little Brooklyn dads looking all smug in their perfectly ironical costumes, I couldn’t even catch what the hell most of them were supposed to be.”

  “Yeah, but what do Halloween costumes have to do with lemonade stands?”

  “Oh, Sylvie, everything! Can’t you see? It’s this whole thing about recaptured childhood, recaptured innocence. It’s like, maybe they didn’t have cool Halloween costumes when they were kids, so they get to make up for it later. And they make sure their kids have cool costumes, too. It’s all a kind of desperate overcompensation for something. And if you think about a lemonade stand—lemonade is, like, the essence of childhood and summertime and happiness. Those same bozos with the Halloween costumes are going to see our lemonade stand and get exactly the same fuzzy, nostalgic feeling.”

  “You mean those suckers are going to eat this shit up?”

  “Exactly. Why do you think cupcakes took over New York City? It has to be because they make people think of bake sales and birthday parties and all of that sentimental bullshit.”

  “Oh, cupcakes! I make really good cupcakes! And I did used to work at Petunia, remember?”

  “I remember.” Cassandra laughed, recalling that period of their youth.

  “I even totally know how to make those red velvet ones. People love those.”

  “But are cupcakes still all the rage in New York? I feel like I’ve heard rumors that the new big thing is the macaroon. Like maybe I read that recently in the food section or somewhere.”

  But Sylvie, with her customary shrewdness around the value of a dollar, said that macaroons would be far too expensive to make.

  “What do you think we should name it?”

  “What?”

  “Our business!”

  Is it really what you would call a business exactly? Cassandra wondered to herself, and said aloud: “Hmm.”

  “I was thinking—I’d like to name it after Clementine.”

  “Oh, I like that! I’ve always just loved the name Clementine. Let me see. Clementine…”

  “Clementine and Friends? No.”

  “Clementine’s Party?”

  “Clementine’s Larder?”

  “Clementine’s Picnic!”

  Sylvie snapped her fingers. “I like that. Clementine’s Picnic! It’s really pretty. It sounds kind of French, almost.”

  “It makes me think of a scene out of a Renoir painting or something. Young girls in white pinafores eating bread and cheese on the banks of the river…”

  The girls she had in mind were Sylvie and herself, their hair in long, thick plaits, Sylvie’s black
and Cassandra’s golden, picnicking on the banks of the Charles back when they were teenagers.

  CHAPTER 19

  They agreed to test out the lemonade stand the following Saturday and prayed for good weather. And so for the next several days, the girls dashed all around the city buying stuff, Sylvie desperate to turn a profit on their investments as they collected, at Marshalls, more of those white French champagne buckets and blue gingham napkins.

  At a cake supply store downtown, they got hopped up sniffing tiny bottled potions of flavorings: lavender, orange, peppermint, rose. Their heads pounding from drinking in all that oozy sweetness, they got hopped up some more on caffeine, their third iced Americanos of the day. They wandered the streets of Manhattan deep in their usual activities: fast walking, fast talking. But today, because they were on a mission, these activities had to them a glitter, an edge.

  “So,” Sylvie asked. “How much do you think we can get away with charging for cupcakes?”

  Cassandra, to whom no subject in the world was worth less consideration than numbers, said, “One-fifty?”

  “Under two dollars, no fucking way! The people who live in Fort Greene now are loaded. I should know, I babysit all of their kids, I’m folding laundry for them in their five-story brownstones day after day! These people will think that the more you charge for your product, the more value it has, see. I say two-fifty, to start.”

  They went to Chinatown to buy teas and herbs because “Chinatown’s the cheapest,” explained Sylvie.

  “You know, these are kind of yummy looking actually,” said Cassandra, pointing to a package containing four suspiciously smooth orange-colored custards. All four custards could be had for three dollars.

  “Hey! You’re right. That kind of soft orange would look great with the blue of the napkins, right? We could buy those and mark them up and say we made them.”

  “We could say they were—mango pots de crème!”