Just like those two ill-fated young women, Chelsea Hayden-Smith and Beverly Tinker-Jones, Cassandra Puffin and Sylvie Furst were best friends. Before ending up at Bennington together, both girls had grown up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Right from the beginning, in high school, theirs was a fast, fiery friendship, a brief, beautiful phenomenon particular to the golden-green wilds of adolescence. Cassandra fell in love with Sylvie—for romantic love is the forte of teenage girls. It happened one afternoon after school, as they were sipping raspberry lime rickeys in the Sunken Garden at Radcliffe in the first, bewitching hours of getting to know each other when they were just fourteen years old. They learned in that single afternoon what it would have taken two grown women to learn in a year: the elaborate subtleties of tortured family dynamics, traumatic holidays, and, this being Cambridge, shrinks, medications, and so on. They didn’t tell each other any sexual secrets that afternoon because there were none, yet; those came later.
One night that spring, the spring the dancers died, Cassandra was lying in bed in her dorm room when she got a phone call from the security booth. It was Alphie, the avuncular head of campus security, whose primary job responsibility appeared to be passing out candy canes in the dining hall during the holidays and who knew every student by name, saying: “Cassandra, Sylvie is here.”
Sylvie? thought Cassandra, waking up from a nice, long nap. Sylvie? As far as she knew, Sylvie was supposed to be still abroad in Florence. Or was she in Madrid or Barcelona by now? Maybe. She’d had plans to travel all over Europe by train after her program ran out. Also, she craved a change of scenery in order to get over the tumultuous affair she’d been having with the photography TA, the spellbinding saga of which Cassandra had been privy to over a series of outrageously expensive international phone calls.
“But if you’re in Italy, then for God’s sake why aren’t you sleeping with an Italian?” Cassandra had wanted to know, and Sylvie had laughed and said, “Good question! I guess I’m just being perverse that way.”
Well, in any event, Florence or Barcelona or whatever, Sylvie was supposed to be off in Europe. And now here she was, appearing quite without warning in Bennington, Vermont?
Still lying on her twin bed—the exact spot where she had spent the better part of her ruinously expensive education—Cassandra sighed and looked out her window. It was one of those enchanted mid-May evenings, that time of year when the fragrance of the roses is beginning to drown out that of the lilacs. On the lawn, students were doing all of the usual unchallenging outdoor activities: tai chi, Ultimate Frisbee, topless sunbathing—though the sun, at this point, was beginning to set. No matter; certain Bennington girls could be counted on to take their tops off in any weather short of a blizzard. And there was no need, by the way, for even a blizzard to stop them: it was a “clothing-optional” campus. Beyond the lawn was the view of the Green Mountains spoken of with dark, all-knowing irony as “the End of the World.”
Oh! I’m going to miss this place, thought Cassandra with one of the sweet pangs of nostalgia that were so becoming to her melodramatic sense of herself. She got up and brushed out her hair, which she was still wearing, in those days, quite long. Then she walked across the lawn to meet Sylvie at the security booth. On her way over, she passed a beautiful redhead pedaling a blue Schwinn bicycle. On closer inspection, it was none other than the bisexual, cross-dressing ringleader of the modern dancers, Angelica Rocky-Divine, whose long, indolent white body could frequently be glimpsed entirely unclothed in all its plush splendor while doing cartwheels at the End of the World.
Angelica’s bright, unshackled beauty, redolent of the meadows themselves, seemed to Cassandra to evoke the original spirit of the college when it was founded in the year 1932 as a suitable refuge for the wayward daughters of good families. Bennington girls even today were proud of their saucy reputation, and not one of them on the entire campus could have failed to be familiar with Salinger’s description in Franny and Zooey of a Bennington-type chick on her way to New Haven for a Yale football game who “looked like she’d spent the whole train ride in the john, sculpting or painting or something, or as though she had a leotard on under her dress.” Angelica had gone so far as to trump that fictional girl, having once had boisterous sex in the john of an Amtrak train on a jaunt to New York City to see some show at the Guggenheim with her architecture class, the object of her flamboyantly predatory designs being a short, yet somehow still Lawrencian, wood-making student, whose consistently upright cock she thought was very, very good-looking, a real piece of aesthetic human construction.
Oh! thought Cassandra again. This place is just so charming, like something out of a Salinger story. Was she ready for the Real World?
The answer came to her in a snap. The answer was not at all.
Even then, and this was several years before the world economy collapsed, Bennington alumni were a remarkably nonresilient lot. The boys lucky enough to be dating students a couple years younger than them could be found squatting in their girlfriend’s dorm rooms; these saintly young women could be seen, at mealtimes, packing up bananas and oatmeal cookies to bring back to them.
In the distance, Cassandra could finally make out Sylvie, a small brunette figure in a white dress waving from the foot of the security booth. They squealed and hugged, as girls will do. It had been almost a year now since they had seen each other, the longest they had ever been apart.
“You could have called! I had no idea. I thought you were still in Europe.”
“You know me, Cassandra. I don’t call,” said Sylvie. It was true, and that was part of her charm—the way she thrived on the drama of the last minute. But the most delightful thing about Sylvie was that she was always up for anything.
It was then that Cassandra did a double take and stepped back to look at her best friend. Until recently, Sylvie had been pretty but underdeveloped. Her voluptuous, Victorian-era dark hair had overwhelmed her tiny body; she was like a little brown velveteen mouse. A late bloomer—coming back from Italy, that tiny body had ripened and was filling out a white peasant dress with red rickrack trim. Cassandra complimented her on the dress immediately.
“Oh this,” said Sylvie, glancing down at her firm brown breasts set like two precious jewels in the sloping white neckline, “yeah, I picked it up at this market in Barcelona.”
“Oh, so you did make it to Spain then?”
“Oh yeah. I went all over.” Then she touched the top of her head and said, “Oh my God, Cassandra, you haven’t said anything! My haircut! I was hoping you’d like it.”
Sylvie’s haircut—so that explained it: shorn and gone, that black, horselike plait of hers. Now she had a pixie cut, a style that Cassandra upon closer inspection decided became Sylvie’s petite style of beauty better than any other. And, on the right girl, a good pixie cut can be incredibly sexy. Sylvie was the right girl. Her skin took the sun well and her arms were strong and brown.
Cassandra, in contrast, was the peaches-and-cream type, soft around the edges. She was pretty but klutzy and there was a certain failure of carriage that prevented her from being, like so many other girls at Bennington, what is ruthlessly known as “hot.” She had this foggy, underwater look in her big blue eyes: a look that marked her as someone who had spent entirely too much of her childhood alone. Perhaps it was because, as she and Sylvie had discussed at length, her father had died when she was a little girl. They both agreed that girls who had grown up without fathers often bore this rather crippled air.
Tonight, Sylvie was carrying a vintage set of watercolors in a blue waxed-cotton tote bag with a pattern of California oranges. She might have been in a catalog, Cassandra thought: the beautiful American art-school girl, back from time abroad, the beneficiary of a magnificent sentimental education—sex and sunshine and red wine and pasta and a good European haircut. That photography TA must have been pretty good in the sack, she decided, even if he wasn’t Italian.
“I love your haircut!” she insisted to Sylvie, hugging her again. “Oh my God, it’s just so chic! You look,” she said, with what Sylvie noticed was actually rather a mournful expression on her face, “absolutely beautiful.”
And the two young women walked arm in arm out onto the lawn, breathing in the roses and what remained of the lilacs.