“Brilliant. Cassandra, that’s brilliant. I’m going to decorate them with mint leaves on top.”
“If somebody asks you the recipe, do you think you can bullshit?”
“Oh, don’t you worry. I can bullshit.”
They were walking down Grand Street when there appeared, in all her broken, downtown glory, a mythic figure from their pasts. Cassandra spotted her first.
“Oh my God, it’s Lanie Tobacco!”
“No!”
But there she was, fabulously, disdainfully nonchalant in a pair of busted black wedges and a leather jacket, dragging with pouty wine-stained lips on a Marlboro Red, to boot.
“Lanie!” called Sylvie.
“Lanie!” called Cassandra.
“Rough night” was all the notorious Lanie Tobacco had to say for herself after all these years; neither of them had seen her since graduation. “I fucked a hippie.”
“Jesus.” Both girls were immediately sympathetic on principle. So sympathetic was the overimaginative Cassandra that she could practically smell the patchouli.
Lanie tried to undo the zipper of her leather jacket, struggling wildly, hurling ashes everywhere. Finally, after giving up altogether, she said, “Ah well, I guess you get what you deserve when you buy Dolce & Gabbana in Beijing.”
Back at the apartment that night, Sylvie tasted one of the orange custards, only to spit it out.
“Oh my God! No way can we sell these. These taste awful. Okay, Cassandra, you owe me three dollars.”
Cassandra laughed.
“No, seriously.”
“Seriously?” She laughed again, but more weakly this time.
“Well, I wouldn’t have bought these things. They were your idea.”
“Okay,” said Cassandra as, with a twinge of worry, she reached into her wallet and forked over the money.
That Friday, they went to the Marshalls at Atlantic Center to see if they could get more glass pitchers. But Sylvie was annoyed to see that Cassandra went straight for the personal products section. It had long been one of the girls’ secrets to stock up on discounted beauty products there. You often could find some nice things.
“Oh my God, look, white almond talcum powder! Smell, Sylvie, smell! I like that, and look, the bottle looks practically Italian.”
“We can get products some other day. What I was thinking we need, is—”
“Bluebell and hyacinth hand soap! I love bluebells, just the word bluebell is lovely, don’t you think?” Cassandra sighed, no doubt remembering some English children’s book from her childhood in which bluebells had been mentioned.
“Okay, you stay here. I’m going to go to home goods to look for more pitchers.”
“But Sylvie! Look at this stuff. This is a really, really good day at Marshalls, I can tell. You’ve got to stock up on stuff when they have it. Oh my God! Look at all those Italian soaps.” Cassandra’s eyes lit on a shelf full of prettily papered soaps. Sylvie, hands on her hips, stormed off. Ten minutes later, she came back to find Cassandra dreamily wheeling a shopping cart of products around the aisles of the personal products section.
“Come on, let’s get out of here. There aren’t any pitchers.”
“Okay, but let me do one more sweep through these Italian soaps. I don’t want to miss any really good ones.”
“Cassandra! Do you see that line?”
“Yeah, but. It’s Marshalls. It moves fast.”
“No, it’s Marshalls and they have complete and total idiots running the registers. It moves slow.”
“But look at all this stuff I found!”
“We’ll come back. We’ll come back on Monday.”
“You want me to leave this stuff here all weekend? Sylvie! These Italian soaps are two dollars each! You want me to just walk away and leave them? Other people will get them!”
“Marshalls gets Italian soaps all the time, Cassandra.”
“Not like this, they don’t!”
“And anyway. We have to get home and start squeezing the lemons.”
Cassandra dreaded the prospect of manual labor, and she felt a queer intensity of loss at the thought of leaving all of those beautiful soaps with their exotic scents (lavender sage, rose peppercorn, lemon mint) behind for other people with lesser taste to collect. But, in spite of her misgivings, she let them go.
Back at the apartment she began to cut and squeeze lemons while Sylvie steeped elaborate floral teas. While she was doing this, she started humming some vague tune to herself. Something French, Cassandra thought. Then it dawned on her that Sylvie was singing: “Alouette, gentille Alouette / Alouette, je te plumerai / Je te plumerai la tête / Je te plumerai…”
“That song. Cut it out, Sylvie. It gives me the creeps for some reason.”
“This song? Why? I sing it all the time to Clementine. She’s crazy about it!”
“I shall pluck your feathers, I shall pluck your head…Some song to sing to a little girl. I don’t know why but there’s something about that song. It disturbs me.”
Jesus, thought Sylvie, and stopped singing. Then, noticing that Cassandra, who had never been good with her hands, was doing her task rather too slowly for Sylvie’s taste, she said, “Oh, here, let me cut you a bunch of them so you can just put them in the juicer and go.”
Before Cassandra could say anything, Sylvie took the knife from her hands and started slicing lemon after lemon open in single bold, deep cuts.
And then, “Ow!” she cried. She had cut a thin flap of skin off her thumb. Blood started to gush from it.
“Oh, no!” said Cassandra, and looked for something to give Sylvie to mop up the blood. But there were no paper towels in the kitchen, because Sylvie never spent money on things like paper towels on principle and Cassandra hadn’t thought to buy them. And in the bathroom, too, Cassandra couldn’t find any toilet paper to spare because they kept on forgetting to steal some. Finally, with a woeful absence of comfort or conviction, she handed her a dirty tea towel. Sylvie stood at the counter weeping, not so much because her thumb hurt, though of course, it did, but because this was getting ridiculous. She was sick of taking care of Cassandra and Cassandra never taking care of her.
Actually, she thought, nobody ever takes care of me. It’s not just Cassandra. She had been taking care of herself for years. And then she started bawling even more wildly than before.
“Oh my God, Sylvie,” said Cassandra, who winced at the sight of blood and did not fancy herself to be an able nurse, “is it really bad? Should I call an ambulance or something?”
“Don’t call an ambulance, goddamn it! Whatever you do, don’t call an ambulance! Jesus Christ, Cassandra. How the hell could you forget? I don’t have any health insurance!”
This sounded, to Cassandra, a dim bell of doom, since for the first time in her life, she didn’t have any health insurance either. And then, one year later, just as she was stepping out of Grand Central Terminal and not looking where she was going, she collapsed flat on her hands and knees on the frantic intersection of East Forty-Second and Lexington. The first thought, though her tights were torn and her knees richly bloodied, was not It hurts but I don’t have any health insurance.
She wanted to tell Sylvie all about it, but by then it was too late for Cassandra to tell Sylvie anything at all.
CHAPTER 20
At six o’clock sharp, the alarm clock rang. Cassandra got out of bed first. Sylvie, sans iced Americano and nursing her now-bandaged thumb, refused to budge. Finally: “You go,” she commanded Cassandra. “You go drag the table down to the corner and start setting up. I’ll join you.”
Drag the table? Drag the table on her own? This was not, so far, a promising start to the day. But I have to do it, she told herself regretfully. I promised Sylvie I would help.
So Cassandra dragged the table all the way down DeKalb Avenue, until she got to the corner of Fort Greene Park. She set up the table and draped one of Sylvie’s vintage tablecloths over it. The tablecloth was gray velveteen laced with a
pattern of coral-colored roses and, the girls had agreed, very chic.
Some time passed, and Sylvie appeared struggling with untold numbers of Whole Foods tote bags. For such a small person, Cassandra never failed to marvel at how much stuff she could carry.
“Let me decorate,” said Sylvie, budging Cassandra out of the way and beginning to readjust the tablecloth. “I have this really specific vision in mind.”
“Maybe I’ll go get us coffee then,” Cassandra suggested, yawning.
Ordinarily this would have appealed to Sylvie, except that she had gotten an iced Americano for herself and polished it off already. So instead it irritated her that this early in the day Cassandra already was asking to take a break and she worried about the quality of her work ethic.
“Yeah, but I was thinking you could make us some signage, like to post around the neighborhood. I brought some paper and some pastel charcoals. Don’t you think that’ll be pretty? Here.” And then, much to Cassandra’s dismay, she reached into one of the tote bags and procured arts-and-crafts supplies. Even as a child, Cassandra had been deathly bored by such things.
“You can draw, like, cupcakes or something. Be creative. Whatever you do, just make sure it’s really pretty!”
Glumly Cassandra took a piece of paper and a stick of pink chalk and tried to draw a cupcake. God, it was all coming back to her now, she thought, remembering the dusty, dismal art classes of elementary school. She had always hated getting her hands dirty. At this rate, her fingers were going to have pink chalk on them all day.
And Sylvie, glancing down at Cassandra’s drawing, thought: Next time she’d hire some unemployed art school students to make signs. Clementine can draw a more realistic-looking cupcake than that. Clementine was two.
“When is Gala coming again?” asked Cassandra. Gala Gubelman also lived in Fort Greene these days and had said that she would help out.
“Oh God, that reminds me, I have to text her to remind her. You know how it is with Gala. She’ll probably wake up in some random guy’s scuzzy bed out in Bushwick or somewhere and forget all about it.”
“Bushwick. Christ! Are people living in Bushwick now, too?”
“Cassandra! People are living everywhere.”
“I guess.”
“Speaking of Gala, I was doing some calculations in my head, and if, like, every other guy she’s had sex with in Brooklyn bought a glass of lemonade from us, we’d be making a killing.”
“By the way. Is Gala sex-positive or just plain slutty, do you think? I’ve never quite gotten a handle on the distinction, myself.”
“I think that the idea behind being sex-positive is, you own being slutty. Like, you reclaim the word.”
“Oh. Kind of like black people reclaiming the n-word.”
“Uh—kind of.”
“But I hate the words sex-positive. To me they’re not even sexy.”
“That’s because you don’t think anything positive is sexy, Cassandra. You’re a fatalist, Cassandra.”
“I am a fatalist! I’m a romantic fatalist. And I’m proud of it.”
“Well, there you have it. And Gala’s proud of being a slut, so you two are even.”
The morning passed with a discouraging absence of briskness. There were only a handful of sales. Sylvie fretted to Cassandra about “making a return on my investment.” Gala, at long last, appeared around noon, and Cassandra was happy to see her because for some reason it seemed to be tough going today, talking to Sylvie. She was acting so serious all of a sudden.
“Oh my God,” breathed Gala, obviously hungover and wobbling on a pair of red patent-leather platforms, far better suited to Friday night than Saturday morning, “that guy was such an asshole.”
“What guy?” asked Cassandra.
“The guy I spent the night with, stupid. I never did catch his name. But he was really bad in bed because I didn’t even get off and—”
“And you get off with everybody,” supplied Sylvie.
“Really, like everybody! With me, it doesn’t take all that much. But this guy! Well, what was I thinking? I let him pick me up on the G train.”
“Oh,” said Sylvie and Cassandra together, in sympathy, “the G train.”
They exchanged a private glance, both of them thinking how much fun it was going to be to gossip and complain about Gala’s antics afterward.
“But he was kind of cute in that, like, sensitive Brooklyn way I go for…”
“Why do you go for that?” Cassandra wanted to know. “Why do you think that is cute?”
“I just do! I always have.”
“That’s right. I guess that’s why you were one of the few girls who always got laid at Bennington.”
“All the time!”
“And she even got off,” added Sylvie.
“Yup.”
Cassandra asked her: “Did you ever go to bed with Kojo?”
“Who?”
“The black guy. The one who played Mercutio in Romeo in the Hood.”
“Oh, no, I didn’t go to bed with him. I went to bed with the other one.”
“The other what?” asked Sylvie, starting to think that Cassandra and Gala, in tandem, were rather a trying combination. It was not lost on her that the two of them had this in common: both high-strung by nature, they were unusually sensitive to having migraines and multiple orgasms.
“The other black guy at Bennington,” Gala said. “There were two of them, remember? The one I had a thing with was called Manu. I think that’s a Ghanian name or something, but I don’t know, I’m pretty sure he was only from the Bronx. They, like, bussed him and Kojo in. Have either of you ever been with a black guy?”
“No,” said Sylvie.
“No,” echoed Cassandra.
“Cassandra here only ever goes for sadistic upper-class assholes. All is forgiven assuming they went to Harvard.”
“Oh,” said Gala sorrowfully, “preppies.” And then: “Oh God, where are the cupcakes? Do you think I could have one for breakfast, Sylvie? I’m sooo hungry,” she moaned.
And then Cassandra, drinking in the glorious sight of the easily orgasmic Gala eating one of Sylvie’s red velvet cupcakes and licking pink frosting from her fingertips, wondered not for the first time why such a piece of woman should be wasted on the skinny lads of this outer borough. This morning she was stuffed into a purple leotard dress from American Apparel. Sylvie, checking out her boobs, seized on the idea that another way to make money might be to hold a wet T-shirt contest with all of her hottest friends in it and charge admission…
She handed Gala a piece of paper and some pastels and told her to get to work making signs. Hers would be sure to be better than Cassandra’s, at least. But Gala, after a few bored strokes of chalk, crumpled up the piece of paper and turned to Cassandra and said: “So. How many guys do you think you’re going to sleep with during your first year in New York? Everybody sleeps with so many new guys their first year in New York.”
“Oh. Do they? But I have a boyfriend, remember.”
“Whatever, Cassandra,” piped in Sylvie. “Listen to you! I thought you didn’t believe in monogamy.”
“It’s never worked out for me. And guys have a way of being, like, so possessive. Remember when I slept with the bass player in Orpheus’s band?” Gala asked, tapping Sylvie on the arm. “And he peed on my pillow.”
“How very animal kingdom,” said Cassandra, impressed.
“It was!”
“Well, in theory I don’t necessarily believe in monogamy. But in practice…Actually there is someone I’m thinking of having an affair with.”
“An affair? Nobody has affairs anymore.”
“They don’t?”
“No, they just hook up.”
“Oh, so it’s just my language you’re saying is old-fashioned—”
“I feel like it’s the whole idea, too. Affair just sounds so formal or something. Sex today is so casual. There’s none of that, Oh my darling, let me send you a dozen red roses and meet you i
n a midtown hotel bullshit. You want someone, you just text them. It’s, like, instant.”
“You think this development is a good thing, though? I want red roses! I want to meet up in a hotel in midtown!”
“Midtown? Midtown, Cassandra? I was just saying that to make fun of how outdated the whole idea is. I wouldn’t be caught dead. Anyway. There’re really not that many reasons left to go into Manhattan at all anymore. I’m happier staying in Brooklyn.”
“Oh, so you’d be above meeting a man at the Pierre, would you?”
“What the hell is the Pierre?”
“Well. Maybe you’ve heard of the Plaza?”
“Of course I have, but come on now, Cassandra. How romantic could it be? Everyone knows it’s owned by Donald Trump!”
Then Sylvie, ever alert to her surroundings, saw a father and his little boy approaching and whispered, “Oh my God, customers!”
CHAPTER 21
All three young women now rose and straightened their shoulders.
“Hello,” said Sylvie firmly.
“Good morning,” said Cassandra more firmly still, though it was not, technically, the morning anymore.
“Hey,” was all Gala could manage, in a thick, silky purr.
“Do you have sandwiches?” the father asked.
The girls were crestfallen. Sylvie began to run through the other options briskly.
“Daddy, I want a cupcake,” whimpered the little boy.
“But, August, it’s lunchtime. First I have to find you a sandwich or something. Your mother would kill me.”
“Cupcake, cupcake—”
“We’ll be back,” the father said, scooping the little boy up into his arms. “But hey, I think I’ll have one of those iced teas. You have hibiscus? Oh, good.”
An impulse buy, thought Sylvie. Good! I was counting on those.
But all Cassandra could think, getting bored with the lemonade stand already, was: What grown man gets so excited about hibiscus?
She was starting to grow weary of Brooklyn, in its present-day faux-folksy incarnation. Since no way could she afford to live in Manhattan, she sure hoped that Edward would propose soon and then she could go and live in Philadelphia, where you could get someplace elegant in Rittenhouse Square for, comparatively speaking, very little money.
Bennington Girls Are Easy Page 10
