Bennington Girls Are Easy

by Charlotte Silver

  After the little boy and his father left, Sylvie turned to her friends and announced: “Well, that was very useful market research.”

  “What was?” asked Cassandra.

  “What he said about coming back later, to get that kid a cupcake. Maybe the problem is we set up shop too early. It’s in the afternoon when your blood sugar crashes and you need a pick-me-up. I should have thought of that earlier. I think things are going to pick up after lunch! Now. How are we doing on those signs? Gala. You can’t just keep crumpling up the paper. Art supplies cost money, you know.”

  “But I’m not happy with the way my drawings are turning out. I don’t think I’ve done an art project since Bennington.”

  “I didn’t even do them at Bennington,” said Cassandra. “I was an English major.”

  Christ, thought Sylvie, reaching for a piece of paper and starting to make a sign herself. Was she going to have to do absolutely everything around here?

  After lunch, the day got hot and business picked up. Sylvie, sniffing a profit, announced: “Okay, you two. I’m going to stay here and watch the lemonade. I want you to go stand at that corner with a tray of cupcakes.” She pointed. “I feel like we need to diversify our locations.”

  “Diversify our locations” was eerie language to Cassandra, to whom business-speak of any kind was utterly foreign. Was Sylvie, like, serious about this thing? she wondered. But if that was the case, would she expect her to stand on a street corner in Brooklyn wearing a vintage apron and hawking lemonade every goddamn Saturday? But so many weekends would find her in Philadelphia with Edward, attending black-tie events and concerts on his arm. Didn’t Sylvie understand? The lemonade stand was cute and all, and it would be heaven if it brought in a little bit of cash flow. Lingerie money, Cassandra was thinking, remembering Edward.

  But nevertheless Cassandra and Gala went and stood on the corner, clutching trays of cupcakes in their hands with rather frozen-looking smiles on their faces. Sylvie had been right to diversify their locations. Business was good, so good that Gala had to run to get change at a bodega across the street. As it happened, the owner of the bodega had spent the better part of the afternoon taking a smoke break outside and lapping up the pleasant sight of the two buxom girls, especially the brunette in the red patent-leather platforms, standing there with the trays of cupcakes. Now here was a view he could get used to. When he saw the brunette coming, he went inside and got behind the counter.

  “Hey, could we have change?” asked Gala, handing him a couple of twenties.

  He made change and slowly surveying her deep cleavage asked her: “So. How is business going today?”

  “Great!” exclaimed Gala, suddenly excited to be caught up in a rogue operation like the lemonade stand. Plus, the bodega-guy was Guatemalan, and not for nothing had she learned to speak Spanish. She just loved the feeling of hitting it off with people from other cultures. It made her feel like such a nice person. “My friends and I just started this lemonade and cupcake business. I’ll bring you a cupcake later on, promise.”

  Gala left the bodega and joined Cassandra back on the corner. A big rattling old electric blue shit-box of a car drove by and stopped. The girls smelled pot. Gala, being, like Sylvie, a pothead, stopped to breathe it in.

  “Hey, those cupcakes you got there?” asked the driver.

  “Yes!”

  “How much?”

  “Two-fifty.”

  “All right, give me two.” He took out his wallet. “No, make that four.”

  After he was gone, Gala said, “Well, someone has the munchies! God, I really could go for some pot myself.”

  “We’ll have to tell Sylvie. That’s a new business angle.”

  “What?”

  “Car sales! Drive-through!”

  The girls laughed. There were more sales, mostly to parents with children. Then another car stopped at the curb and the driver rolled down the window, only to call out: “Hey! Do you have a lemonade stand, too?”

  “Oh, yes,” Cassandra piped up. “It’s just down—”

  “I was joking,” the man said flatly, and drove away.

  “Asshole,” said Gala, who could always be counted on to get on the bandwagon of hating any man. Hatred was so sexy. That guy had been pretty cute, actually. It occurred to her that the lemonade stand might be a cool way to meet guys. It was getting kind of old, letting them pick her up on the subway.

  Business slowed down again, and the girls took the break in activity as the perfect opportunity to start gossiping about their old classmates.

  “Oh my God, I forgot to tell you!” announced Cassandra. “Pansy Chapin is getting a boob job. She’s engaged to this hedge-fund guy and he’s paying.”

  “Well, if he’s a hedge-fund guy, he’d better be! Wait—I thought she got engaged our senior year, to that other rich, preppie guy. Did they get divorced already?”

  “Oh, him. Oh, no. He broke off the engagement, when he found out she was sleeping with Kojo. There was this big to-do about it. Anyway—I feel like no self-respecting Bennington girl should get a boob job. I feel like Bennington girls are supposed to have, like, this natural, bohemian beauty, you know?”

  And then Cassandra and Gala, both secure in their own naturally beautiful, naturally generous breasts, god-given full C and D cups respectively, took a moment of silence to contemplate the grave horror that Pansy was inflicting on her own rather more austere body type.

  “That sucks,” said Gala. “That she doesn’t love herself the way she is. And she’s so hot, too!”

  “Elegant,” added Cassandra, her highest word of praise.

  “But still. Think of going to bed with a new guy for the very first time and not having any boobs. I just feel like you’d get so sick of the guy always being disappointed with what he had to work with. Can you imagine?”

  “No,” Cassandra admitted. “I can’t.”

  “Oh, hey. Have you been to that really great sex store in SoHo? I was going to go there this week, if you wanted to come along.”

  “Oh no. I mean, I’m adventurous but not in that way, Gala. I don’t like the idea of—toys.”

  “But wait. Sylvie said you like being tied up. Me, I like tying guys up. Trust me. They go crazy…”

  No wonder she went for those skinny Brooklyn boys, Cassandra was thinking, and said: “Yeah, but being tied up is an expression of, like, ancient hostility. You don’t need toys for that.”

  “What do you use, though? I’m curious. To be tied up?”

  “Oh, we use—Oh, hello!” Cassandra turned to see a little girl standing there with her mother. “And how are you today? My name is Cassandra and this is my friend Gala. What a pretty dress you have on! Would you like a cupcake?”

  Why is this lady talking to me in that phony voice? the little girl wondered to herself. And why are she and her friend standing out on the sidewalk and selling cupcakes? They were grown-ups.

  When the girls went back to check in with Sylvie, she was thrilled to see the fat wad of money they’d made and immediately began to count the twenties.

  Cassandra, realizing that she was thirsty after hours of standing out in the sunshine, helped herself to some of the lavender-flavored lemonade.

  But Sylvie saw what she was doing and admonished her: “Hey, Cassandra, please don’t use the plastic cups! Those things cost money, you know. They’re going to add up.”

  Cassandra just wasn’t getting it, Sylvie thought. Getting it about the lemonade stand, and how incredibly important it was to her. Every time someone handed her a dollar bill that day, she felt this warm, safe feeling such as she so seldom felt anymore. Maybe with Clementine. Yeah, with Clementine, but that was it. The touch of dollar bills—the straightforward power of them, the incontestable relief of finally having them after so many lean years—was the next best thing.

  “Sorry,” said Cassandra rather prissily, stopping in mid-sip. Then she looked at it and thought: What the hell? She’d already used the damn cup, she might as
well finish the beverage. She had to hand it to Sylvie, though. The lavender-flavored lemonade was absolutely delicious.

  “Oh, Sylvie, that reminds me!” said Gala. “I told the guy at the bodega I’d bring him a cupcake. Do we have any of the red velvet ones left?”

  This was the day Sylvie finally came to understand the meaning of the words a cranberry is a cranberry. Tish, the woman who first uttered those immortal words, was a grown-up, she thought. Cassandra and Gala were still acting like girls.

  That was the difference.

  CHAPTER 22

  “Hey, next time do you think that you could remember to turn your phone off?”

  Edward rolled away from Cassandra. His disapproval of her, though she could not recognize it, was starting to be a hallmark of their relationship. They had just finished having sex on the staircase. The whole time, Cassandra’s phone had been ringing in her purse, which was downstairs in the living room.

  “Sorry.” Cassandra rubbed his head and drew him close to her again. “I’d better go and check it, though. It’s probably Sylvie.”

  “Sylvie…” muttered Edward. He’d never met her but he didn’t much like her. Sylvie would have been most delighted to assure him that the feeling was mutual.

  “God, four times she called. I hope everything’s all right.”

  Edward got up and put on his Brooks Brothers boxers, bracing himself for having to listen to Cassandra gab on the phone to a female friend, which was not his favorite sound in the world, to tell you the truth. He much preferred her dreamy and docile and murmuring sweet nothings in bed. When he tied her up, she didn’t speak at all and that was fantastic. She just kind of lay back and moaned.

  “So I’m serious,” Sylvie began, and from the tone of her voice Cassandra could tell she was hopped up on iced Americanos and that it wouldn’t be easy to get off the phone anytime soon. And then Edward would get all annoyed. He didn’t like Sylvie; she could tell.

  “Cassandra, I’m serious,” Sylvie repeated. “I’m starting a business, a real business. How much do you think I should hire people for?”

  “Hire people?”

  “People to help run the stand and sell stuff. What do you think, ten bucks an hour? Is that too high? Could I get away with eight, do you think? We’re in a recession, remember.”

  “I don’t know, Sylvie. Nine? Look. Edward’s here and we’re about to get dressed to go to the club.”

  They were totally just fucking right now, Sylvie thought, disgusted. So that’s why she didn’t pick up the phone when I kept calling! And asked: “Which club?” Cassandra was too self-absorbed to recognize that by asking this question Sylvie was making fun of her. Edward belonged to many different clubs and Sylvie was getting sick of hearing about them.

  “Oh, there’s this lecture on Degas at the Rittenhouse Club tonight! With a cocktail hour beforehand. You know how I just love Degas! I always have.”

  Cassandra had been famous at Bennington for her stoical indifference to contemporary art. A striking stance, that.

  “So,” Sylvie went on. Her voice was snappish. “Here’s another thing I wanted to ask you. What do you think about muffins?”

  “Muffins?”

  “For people to buy in the morning. Like, I make these really good pear-bran ones…”

  “I don’t know, Sylvie. I wouldn’t go out of my way to stop for a bran anything muffin, but maybe that’s just me. I think it has to be something people really can’t resist.”

  Why are they discussing muffins? Edward wondered. What could two grown women possibly have to say to each other about muffins? And would they ever get off the phone?

  “But I make amazing muffins!” said Sylvie. She was almost screaming, and Cassandra thought, Goodness, such emotion about a little thing like muffins. “My muffins are amazing. God, this is going to be great, I’m going to make so much money.”

  Cassandra couldn’t help but note the change of the pronoun we to the pronoun I: I’m starting a business. I’m going to make so much money. But she was in a magical postsex haze and so none of this mattered.

  “Everything you make tastes really good, Sylvie,” was all she said. “You’re a wonderful cook.”

  After she got off the phone, she went and lay down in Edward’s arms.

  “Sorry about that. It’s Sylvie. She’s starting this little, I don’t know, lemonade stand thing.”

  Bennington girls, Edward thought. They were so hot but so damn flaky! Sylvie was starting a lemonade stand? He sure hoped that Cassandra wouldn’t get mixed up in a thing like that. How was it that none of her friends ever seemed to have real careers?

  —

  When Cassandra got back to Brooklyn, the apartment was in even more of a state of chaos than usual, pitchers of sticky-smelling floral teas steeping on the kitchen counter, spoons crusty with pastel frosting, and a tower of plastic containers filled with dozens and dozens of unfrosted cupcakes. Out in the hallway there were bags and bags full of rotting lemons.

  “Are those—cupcakes?” Cassandra asked.

  “Yes. But don’t have one!” There was panic in Sylvie’s voice. “They’re for sale.”

  “When?”

  “I’m going to sell them on Saturday.”

  “It’s Tuesday.”

  “They’ll keep,” said Sylvie darkly.

  CHAPTER 23

  The following afternoon, Cassandra accompanied Sylvie while she babysat Imogen. Quinn, meanwhile, had a play-date with a friend of his, Julius, and his nanny, a twenty-four-year-old linguistics major from Smith named Hannah. “That Julius is a bastard,” Sylvie remarked to Cassandra, in full view of clever little Imogen, on whom not a single word was lost. “Do you know what he told Hannah, after he met me? He said: ‘I wish Quinn’s nanny was my nanny. She’s so much prettier than you!’ Do you believe that?”

  “You are prettier than Hannah,” chimed in Imogen, not because she wanted to compliment Sylvie but because it was the truth and Imogen was a great believer in speaking the truth. “Hannah’s not pretty at all.”

  “Julius!” said Cassandra. “What kind of parents name their child Julius? It’s such a jerky name for a little boy. You know? Julius.” She rolled her eyes

  “What are we going to do today?” asked Imogen, getting down to business. If she didn’t keep them on track, Sylvie and Cassandra were likely to just sit there for hours talking and talking. Imogen, not being the introspective type, was big on “doing” things. Cassandra dreaded what might be coming, so before the little girl could suggest something kid-friendly and appropriate, she said, “I have an idea.”

  “Oh yeah?” said Imogen, prepared not to be impressed.

  “How would you like to go lingerie shopping?”

  “Cassandra!” said Sylvie.

  “Oh, come on, Sylvie, I want to stock up. I feel like Edward’s getting sick of all of the stuff I have. I’d like to surprise him with something.”

  “Who’s Edward?” asked Imogen.

  “My boyfriend.”

  “Oh. Well, so what? What does he have to do with it?”

  “With what?”

  “With lingerie shopping.”

  “Oh—” Cassandra began. Sylvie cut in to stop her, saying: “Where did you want to go anyway?”

  “I got this postcard in the mail saying that Agent Provocateur is having a sample sale. Let’s go!”

  “Oh my God, a sample sale!” Now Sylvie was persuaded, if bargains were to be had.

  “What’s a sample sale?”

  “Oh, Imogen,” said Cassandra, almost with tenderness, “the things I’m going to teach you.”

  “I think Edward is a stupid name. It sounds old.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Sylvie. “He is.”

  “You think Edward is a stupid name? What about Julius?”

  Or Quinn for that matter, thought Sylvie grimly.

  “I go to school with this kid named Bear.”

  “Bear?” said Cassandra. “Bear? Does he have a brother name
d Cub?”

  “No, Orlando.”

  “Orlando? Bear and Orlando? Christ.”

  “I want to be named Francesca. I have this friend named Francesca. But she’s not even that pretty and a Francesca should be pretty. A Francesca should be beautiful! Don’t you think so? Will you call me Francesca?”

  “Okay, Francesca,” said Cassandra.

  “Can I call you Cassie?”

  “Fuck, no!”

  “Cassandra.”

  “Cassie! Cassie! Over my dead body you’ll call me Cassie.”

  “Okay, Cassie.”

  “If you call me Cassie ever again, I won’t take you lingerie shopping.”

  “So? I’ll get my mother to take me lingerie shopping.”

  “Oh, no you won’t.”

  “Your mother doesn’t wear lingerie. And I should know. I do her laundry.” And then Sylvie whispered to Cassandra: “She wears those, you know, passion-killers.”

  “Oh dear. Those kind of saggy cotton deals with the high waists?”

  “Passion what?” asked Imogen.

  “Never you mind,” said Sylvie.

  They got on the train and got off in SoHo. Once they were inside the Agent Provocateur on Mercer Street, Imogen went straight for the whips. She picked up a tiny black feathered one and rubbed it between her hands. She was in love. She must own this whip or she would die.

  “Oh God,” said Sylvie, noticing what Imogen was doing. Cassandra was too busy scooping up fistfuls of frothy, candy-colored garter belts.

  “Can I get this, Sylvie? Can I, can I? If you buy it for me, my parents will pay you back. I promise.”

  “Now, Imogen—”

  “Francesca! Today I’m Francesca.” Assuming this new, splendid identity, she struck a pose with the whip in the mirror. My, but blondes look well in black. The effect was very striking. She’d have to get a whole new wardrobe. She looked down at her peach-colored organic cotton blouse with deepest displeasure.

  “What? My parents are rich! Why are you so worried, Sylvie? They’ll pay you back.”