Bennington Girls Are Easy

by Charlotte Silver

  Cassandra rang up the sale in silence. Sylvie, fishing through a porcelain candy dish of star barrettes next to the register, picked out a red one for Clementine and added it to her purchase. She loved styling Clementine’s hair, which was getting thicker now and soon would be long enough for Sylvie to do up in a French braid.

  She wanted to tell Cassandra all about Clementine’s Picnic; she wanted Cassandra, more than anyone in the world, to know what a success she’d made of the lemonade stand that had come between them. It should have been so easy, letting it drop. But somehow—even Sylvie, whose native quickness was the defining quality of her personality—couldn’t pull this off.

  And if Cassandra had been able to tell Sylvie things anymore, if on this beautiful, champagnelike afternoon they had let go of old resentments and loathing and if golden words had poured forth between them, if they had dashed out of the store, girls again, looping arms down the sun-kissed avenue, she might have told her all about the abortion she’d had not long after she started working at Forget-Me-Not. The child might have been Edward’s, or it might have been somebody else’s, somebody who didn’t matter. Gala’s prophecy had come true: Everybody sleeps with so many new guys their first year in New York. She had now been there for two, and had slept with many.

  And in the end none of it had mattered, for she’d gone by herself to a clinic far out in some blasted, treeless nameless section of Queens, where the operation was performed by a harried woman speaking butchered English in that least melodic of accents, Chinese. Cassandra to Sylvie, so many years ago: What if Chinese becomes the universal language?

  The night she discovered that she was pregnant, Cassandra had gone to an art opening in TriBeCa at which she’d run into none other than Angelica Rocky-Divine, just back in the States after years of dancing for a burlesque troupe in Vienna and sporting a black velvet le smoking jacket with peacock blue satin tails.

  “The doctors all say I’ll never dance again,” sighed Angelica in the moonlight. Cassandra had joined her outside on the stoop of the gallery for a smoke break. Apparently she’d brought back from Europe assorted injuries—fractures and such. “So fuck it, I might just have to become a yoga instructor like everybody else.”

  “Oh, no,” said Cassandra, recalling Angelica’s bright, unshackled beauty and the way she used to spin naked at the End of the World.

  “But enough about me!” Angelica stubbed out her cigarette with a spike heel, gorgeous and predatory all over again. In spite of the injuries she still refused to submit to practical footwear. “How are you, Cassandra?”

  “Pregnant.”

  “Oh, is that all? Well, not to worry! I know this dear, dear man who’s an abortionist on Park Avenue. My senior year at Nightingale-Bamford, I don’t know what I would have done without him! Did I ever tell you? I was having this totally torrid affair with our beekeeper.”

  “Hey, wait, Nightingale-Bamford, did you just say? I always thought you went to Spence!”

  “Oh no, you must be confusing me with Bitsy Citron. Vicky Lalage, she went to Chapin.”

  “Oh, right.”

  Cassandra still had an outsider’s eagerness to place these things.

  But even with Angelica’s referral the Park Avenue abortionist turned out to be far too expensive. Cassandra had thought of calling Gala for advice, then decided against it because she’d remained friends with Sylvie and Cassandra hadn’t wanted Gala to gossip. It was Fern Morgenthal, of all people, who’d directed Cassandra to the place in Queens; Fern had been knocked up by the older artist she was sleeping with, her first winter in New York. The artist kept the abortionist on retainer, not that this meant that he ever paid for his services of course. The girls he bedded were perfectly willing to pay for other things, he couldn’t help but notice, so why not expect them to pay for their own abortions, too?

  But now, she realized, there were so many things that Cassandra might have discussed for hours and hours about the abortion with Sylvie: how, if the child had been Edward’s, she was most certainly the only woman in that waiting room who had been knocked up by a Harvard graduate; how, because she still didn’t have any health insurance, she hadn’t gotten a checkup since then, and because the Chinese woman had been so brutal, she feared that she might now never be able to bear children—not that she wanted them exactly, but still. But still, she could picture herself saying to Sylvie, over pieces of burned toast slathered with Nutella, I’d still like to think I had a choice in the matter.

  Breeding condition, she sometimes wondered, thinking back to that queer phrase of Sylvie’s. Was she still in breeding condition?

  She would have told Sylvie the story of what had happened to her just days after she’d had the abortion and found herself back behind the counter at Forget-Me-Not. It was a Sunday afternoon and the store was full of young mothers and babies in strollers, so full of strollers, in fact, that they kept on knocking into one another. Cassandra, first feeling self-pity and melancholy, then felt—rage! And, thus compelled, spoke right up to one of the mothers.

  “Why don’t you leave your baby on the stoop? Nobody’s going to take it.”

  That was the exact moment she got over the abortion, she realized later on, because one can draw strength from rage but almost never from sadness alone.

  But no, Sylvie and Cassandra didn’t say any of this to each other; they didn’t succumb to the languor of the weather. Cassandra finished ringing up the sale and handed Sylvie Clementine’s birthday presents in a Forget-Me-Not bag. She thought of saying “Good-bye,” but then decided against it, for it occurred to her that they had already said that word to each other in no uncertain terms. So all she volunteered was:

  “Well, anyway. I hope that Clementine likes the shoes.”

  “She will,” Sylvie said, and turned to walk toward the door.

  Crushing some numbers in her head, she thought: So Cassandra must not have given me her employee discount. Oh, well, fuck it. She could afford things now, and anyway, this was just further proof that neither of them owed each other anything anymore.

  —

  But then, just as she was about to leave, the sight of that pink tutu swaying in the window and shimmering in the April light filled her with a sudden, splintering sadness. Why, on such a lovely afternoon, things going well, bills paid, credit restored, the check from Shallot snug in her pocket, her dreams come true, damn it, should Sylvie feel nothing but smallness and ingratitude? Why should it take a toddler’s tutu to make her see a kind of innocence—a capacity for dazzlement—that had long gone missing from her life, and that no sense of earthly security could compensate for?

  It wasn’t that she missed Cassandra. No. She still believed that she was well rid of her, and she was proud, too, of all that she’d accomplished in the last year on her own. So it must be something else that she missed, something else that was lost.

  Suddenly, she remembered herself that first year in New York City, the girl with the glamorous Italian haircut and the expertly applied wings of silver eyeliner, wheeling down some street flashing with lights late at night. She still went into Manhattan then; she went everywhere. She was up for anything. What struck her was the same revelation she’d had on running into Vicky Lalage that day on the sidewalk of Fort Greene: I was so young then. She was so young and so beautiful. She could say that now with perfect composure, without even sounding conceited, because that girl was a stranger to her and she knew that now.

  Something funny had happened to Sylvie ever since she’d gotten health insurance. Although she was grateful to finally have it, she couldn’t help but notice: the world didn’t seem quite so jagged and wild anymore, once you were insured, which also meant that it didn’t seem quite so alive. When you had health insurance, and after so many years of fending for yourself without it, the blades of knives had all turned dull, the taxis didn’t hurtle down the streets quite so fast. Why, they weren’t even quite so yellow anymore, that gorgeous, iconic yellow one associates, almost more than a
ny other color, with the streets of New York City.

  She wanted that feeling back, that rounded softness in the eyes, dew in the pores, hope in the soul—all those telltale signs that those Mount Holyoke girls, Ellie and Abigail, had not yet lost. This was the same virgin quality that Cassandra had sniffed and found so provoking in Fern and the same quality that those other young women, the modern dancers, Chelsea Hayden-Smith and Beverly Tinker-Jones, in plummeting to their early deaths from the windows of the dance studio of the performing arts building, would never, ever have stolen from them. They flew, quite literally, out of this world with it intact.

  Sylvie, remembering that she prided herself on being a realist, rallied to her senses. To hell with this droopy, mournful feeling, she thought. Aha! She got an idea…

  (Also, she decided, she would text Gala back and say yes to happy hour tonight. She would regale Gala with how pitiful Cassandra was, and she would get drunk and be light and witty and cruel.)

  What she was picturing, now, was not her younger self in New York but in Cambridge, the sweet, dreary hamlet of her vanished girlhood, that place that in its curious, cobwebby mixture of intellectualism and innocence was so remote to her that she seldom even thought of it anymore, in Cambridge one purplish gray winter morning with Cassandra beside her: standing at the counter of Black Currant and tormenting poor, hobbled Tish, aslant on that mysterious pair of crutches, by asking her with a big smile on her face for extra cranberries on her oatmeal. That girl! That girl with the beautiful, clear skin, beautiful, compact body, black leggings, and motorcycle boots! That girl, with the glittering callousness of youth upon her! That was the girl who she wanted, for the purposes of today’s encounter, to pretend to continue to be.

  Sylvie straightened her spine and pivoted her body back toward the register.

  “Hey, Cassandra,” she announced. “I’m so sorry, I must have forgotten to ask! Do you think that I could have this gift-wrapped?”

  CHAPTER 45

  In later years it sometimes seemed to Cassandra that her life as a grown woman had only officially commenced with leaving Sylvie’s apartment that fateful Saturday morning and with moving into Pansy Chapin’s. It also seemed that it was much easier, in her life as a grown woman, to fall in love than it was to make friends. This was one of the revelations of adult life that most surprised her; others were more easily accepted. And yet after Edward, she met somebody else. Then, when that fell apart, too, she met somebody after him, eventually. But she never did dare to call any other woman in her life by those words, so blameless on the surface, but so dangerous underneath, my best friend.

  Pansy Chapin, too, evaporated: she eloped with her latest fiancé in Torcello, surrounded by a canopy of fruit trees, oleander, and roses in the exact same spot where she had been proposed to by the first of her fiancés, and the only one of them she ever truly loved, her senior year at Bennington. For even Pansy Chapin, when she was young, had had a heart. Even Pansy Chapin, when she was young, had had it broken. And then one night Pansy Chapin made her husband the perfect duck a l’orange and the perfect vermouth and water with the perfect lemon twist for his dinner and looked around her perfect house and at her perfect antiques and wept and wept. She and Cassandra were never to speak again after that fiasco they had over breaking the lease on that place on Seventy-Ninth and Second, which had resulted in the catastrophe of Cassandra having to pawn her great-grandmother’s wedding silver, the lowest point of her life, lower even than that horrible day she had to schlep out to the end of the 7 train in Queens to go and get an abortion.

  But still, Pansy Chapin had taught her things. It was Pansy, after all, who first had opened Cassandra’s more virgin eyes to the rapture of sex positions that actually work in the shower, it was Pansy who had passed down to her the narcotic beauty ritual of rubbing one’s entire body with a mixture of brown sugar and baby oil just before a rendezvous with a lover: something that Cassandra was to do throughout her life and the very scent of which stirred in her all of the agonies of desire.

  And it was Pansy, too, silky, calculating little Pansy, out from such a tender age to nab a rich husband, who had possessed the wisdom to recognize that the only good reason to go to Bennington is to have something interesting to talk about at cocktail parties on Fifth Avenue later on. Even when she was long past the age when she should have dared to flaunt black leotards without a bra underneath but insisted nevertheless on doing exactly that, Cassandra noticed that she had only to mention having gone to Bennington in order to tickle in the average male animal of a certain generation and social class a reliable quickening of interest. This was the only legacy of her education that could be put to any practical use to speak of.

  “Cassandra is a prostitute.”

  Thus spoke Gala Gubelman to Sylvie Furst. This was some years later at brunch.

  “Not really!”

  “Well, all right, not really. Not exactly. But I thought that word would get your attention.”

  “What now?”

  “Well! She doesn’t pay her own rent. Some old guy’s been paying it for her. Also! He gives her jewelry. Sapphire earrings. She had them on. The last time I saw her.”

  “Hmph!”

  “Big sapphires, too. Jumbo. Swaying. Absolutely fucking huge.”

  Sylvie was thinking, as she had the morning she bulldozed down the flaking blue staircase of her apartment in her tiny floral underpants, bringing to Cassandra’s mind Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, for one’s liberal arts education comes floating back to one at the strangest of times, that money is better than sex. But this was interesting, commendable, even, what Cassandra had done, in apparently combining the two. At this period in her life, Sylvie was beginning to seek an exit strategy from her exit strategy, because Clementine’s Picnic was struggling. The market for artisanal syrups was glutted, the “made in Brooklyn” model was getting overexposed. Sylvie had seen the future and it was in rooftop gardening. Her very first client was Vicky’s mother, Rosa Lalage. And from there she was launched on another wondrous career, Sylvie Furst, Urban Landscaper. Right around this time, she also took up self-care and returned to Zumba dancing.

  “Also!” Gala relished being up on all the alumni news. “Pansy Chapin is pregnant.”

  “No!”

  “Yes!”

  “That bitch.”

  They clinked glasses and asked for the check.

  “Fuck,” Gala fumed, tapping her forehead. “Fuck! Is this place cash only?”

  “Yup,” said Sylvie complacently, but did not offer to cover for her. Better not to, Sylvie had decided as a matter of principle. People ought to be able to look out for themselves. Dependency got sticky.

  This meant that Gala had to run, huffing and puffing, to the nearest ATM. Bennington girls were not the cross-country type, and furthermore, now that she was in her thirties Gala had to watch her figure; she had started to get a little out of shape around the middle and was no longer as ripely, lavishly beautiful as she had been in college. None of them were.

  When she got back from the ATM, she put cash down on the table and announced:

  “Do you know that we’ve been out of college now for ten years?”

  “Jesus. Ten years! Seriously?”

  “Yes, seriously! Didn’t you get the postcard in the mail about the ten-year reunion?”

  “Oh, you know what? Probably not. I bet they have my old address on file.”

  “Oh, right, right. That explains it.”

  Sylvie no longer lived in the apartment in Fort Greene. The previous year Pete the landlord had sold the building for millions. The new owners had fixed it right up. She never went back. Though sometimes, sometimes that apartment and especially its bathroom, that old-world bathroom with its terra-cotta sink and its lavender-honey light, floated back to her in dreams, as it sometimes floated, unbeknownst to her, into Cassandra’s. Both Sylvie and Cassandra went on to live in places with far better and certainly more comfortable bathrooms than that
one, bathrooms that had decent water pressure, not to mention other modern amenities. And yet they missed it. That bathroom, ornamental, outdated, practically useless for the unromantic purposes a bathroom is meant to serve, was the one that they missed.

  “I wouldn’t go anyway,” Sylvie said, of the reunion. “Are you going?”

  “I don’t know, honestly. Orpheus went back there to play a show last year and he said it’s not the same.”

  “What’s not the same?”

  “Well, for one thing”—Gala revealed the following bombshell in a conspiratorial whisper—“Bennington is now a non-smoking campus.”

  “Get out!”

  “I know! Outrageous! That’s what Orpheus and I thought.”

  “This entire conversation is making me feel old.”

  “Me, too. And you know what else Orpheus said? He said he didn’t even think that the girls they’re letting in now are as hot as they used to be, either. He said they’re just letting in, like, these boring preppy girls who weren’t smart enough to get into Middlebury. They don’t wear leotards. They don’t do art…”

  Neither Gala nor Sylvie had done anything resembling art in quite some time either, but this went unremarked. One didn’t after college. Or only the very lucky or the very disciplined or, failing that, the very delusional ones still did. You had to grow up and accept this.

  “The Bennington girl is a dying breed,” said Sylvie sadly.

  “I know! And we’re the last of the species,” Gala agreed with her, as, going Dutch, they settled the check.

  CHAPTER 46

  It was not altogether untrue what Gala had said. Cassandra did live off this man for a time until one day she didn’t, anymore, and she had to go and pawn those sapphire earrings. Worse than that, much worse, she had to get a job. This was how she eventually ended up as a coat-check girl at a steakhouse in midtown. One night she checked the coat of Pansy Chapin’s husband, Jock, who was dining there on business but did not have any reason to recognize her or to know that this member of the subservient classes and his cosseted wife had once been girls together on a hilltop in Vermont.