Jobs, even back when Sylvie and Cassandra graduated, were getting hard to come by. But it was not yet impossible to find one, as it would be for the Bennington girls who followed after them in just a couple years’ time. Cassandra managed to find employment before Sylvie did, in some vague administrative capacity, untaxing to her fragile mental health, at a cultural nonprofit in Harvard Square: the less said of the specifics of this job, like most jobs, the better. Because most jobs are boring. After graduation, Sylvie also landed back in Cambridge, but only temporarily, she sincerely hoped. Because for as long as she could remember, she had hated the city of Boston. Many years ago now, her grandmother had taken her to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, long lauded as one of the crown jewels of Boston but, to the discriminating Sylvie, nothing all that special; she sniffed in its grand and gloomy rooms a certain fustiness, a residual, mothy scent, perhaps, of the city’s Puritan legacy in spite of the gallant efforts of the more flamboyant Mrs. Gardner herself. “Make a wish,” Sylvie’s grandmother had commanded, handing her a penny and pointing to the fountain in the middle of the Venetian-style courtyard. Sylvie braced herself and closed her eyes and tossed the penny into the fountain. Then announced:
“I wish I wasn’t here.”
She was six years old at the time.
Still, sometime over the course of that first summer after college, she announced to Cassandra, “So, I found a job.”
There was a note of gloomy caution, nothing resembling elation certainly, in her voice.
“Oh, Sylvie, that’s wonderful!” Cassandra said, refusing to listen to it and trying her best to be encouraging.
“No, it isn’t. It isn’t wonderful at all. It’s at Black Currant.”
“Oh.”
And now Cassandra was the one who sounded gloomy.
Black Currant was a bakery in Harvard Square, generally held to be the crème de la crème of such establishments among the dreary postdoc and professorial set of which Cambridge society consisted. Cassandra often went there for coffee and the very excellent raisin-pecan rolls they had—not that she would have been caught dead working there. But best to keep that to oneself right now; Sylvie needed her support, obviously. So she tried to change her tone, hoping that it wasn’t too obvious. It was, of course. Sylvie picked up on it immediately and felt faintly condescended to. Sylvie hated feeling condescended to! And she was forced to listen to the inanity of Cassandra prattling on:
“Oh my God! I’m so happy about this. That means that you’ll be working in Harvard Square, too, Sylvie. So we can have lunch, like, every day together!”
But already Sylvie was thinking: Like hell I’m happy about this. I’m getting out of town.
From her very first day on the job at Black Currant, she began to plot her escape. The wheels, the wheels in her head were turning. Which was worse, she wondered, the staff or the customers? The two groups coexisted in a state of low-level hostility in which there was seldom any actual yelling but plenty of complex anger clotting the atmosphere. Maybe the customers resented the staff for the indignity of a place where you had to pay a full seven bucks for a slice of vanilla-bean pound cake. There was no bathroom, and if you asked where the bathroom was, you were sure to get a really dirty look. Maybe the staff, making $7.50 an hour, resented the customers for spending a full seven bucks for a slice of vanilla-bean pound cake. (A whole pound cake cost twenty-three dollars.) All Sylvie could take away from the situation was: these people are fucking miserable. An ex-convict, having taken a job as the night baker, confessed to Sylvie that being in the clink was nothing compared to the likes of this.
But I could do this, thought Sylvie. She meant that maybe one day she could run a bakery, though not here in Cambridge—no way. But maybe someday in New York…For, of the many things that Sylvie was naturally good at, one of them was being an excellent cook; Cassandra had often marveled at how she could turn something as mundane as a tuna fish sandwich into something absolutely delicious. The girl was born knowing how to dress a salad in the correct amount of French olive oil and how to toss off a perfectly silky chocolate soufflé.
And so, I could make these jams, Sylvie was thinking, looking at the stout glass bottles of chunky apricot preserves selling for seventeen dollars a pop. I could write out those labels. She imagined her pretty, sloping handwriting; she imagined tying a white grosgrain ribbon around the lid…
This place must be making a killing, thought Sylvie, trying to crunch the numbers in her head. She and Cassandra had first become friends back in high school while skipping out on geometry class together. She wasn’t good at math, but she was shrewd with numbers on a practical level, and she could grasp how they broke down in a business. This one broke down entirely to the owner’s advantage and not to the staff’s—why, they didn’t even get free coffee!
But in those days, Sylvie was young and idealistic and given to making people feel good; she hadn’t yet learned to want to take things away from people. But she soon did learn that hospitality in any form was to be distrusted at Black Currant, as when she gave an elderly sculptress an extra scoop of cranberries on top of her eight-dollar oatmeal and afterward was reprimanded by Tish, her manager.
“Sylvie,” said Tish in the weak, trailing voice that never varied, no matter what the emotional pitch of the situation, for perhaps in Tish’s diminished universe there was only one. “Sylvie, we don’t give away freebies here. Of any kind.”
“Oh, I know,” began Sylvie, tossing her shiny black head with its glamorous, Italian pixie cut and figuring that she personally could get away with anything because she was young and because she was beautiful, “but I just thought, it was this nice old lady, and she’s a regular, and it was only a couple of cranberries, so—”
“A cranberry is a cranberry,” said Tish, and from then on this became a phrase of hilarity between Sylvie and Cassandra: A cranberry is a cranberry. How appropriate, remarked Cassandra, that Tish should hold dear this most bitter of fruits, for the two of them, with the glittering callousness of twenty-two, thought she was the last word in grimness: something of a withered fruit herself.
“Now most of the time she never smiles,” said Sylvie. “A frown is, like, her default expression. She already has these frown lines and you know what I found out—she’s only twenty-eight! You’d think she was forty-two already.” Sylvie pressed her hand to her own satiny brown cheek and continued, “But what I wanted to say is, when she does smile, and it isn’t often, it’s actually really creepy. It makes you more uncomfortable when she smiles than when she scowls, you know?”
Later on, the girls howled when they discovered a Yelp review in which Tish was described by a disgruntled customer as “the I See Dead People manager.” There really was something rather haunted about her pinched white face and the dusty black pigtails, which by now she was far too old to be wearing.
Before Sylvie met Tish—not to mention all of the regulars at Black Currant—she had always assumed that you grew up and had a sex life. Of course there were unfortunate cases who didn’t, but they were the exceptions. Now, however, it occurred to her that there might be a whole seedy underclass of people to whom nothing sexual ever happened; life went on without even the possibility of magnetic eye contact or melting touch. She felt, in general, that living in Cambridge past a certain age threatened to enclose her and her still-beautiful flesh in a gray crust of sexlessness. She felt that to stay there too long might prove fatal.
The sad, mauve-colored streets of Cambridge were thronged with women who had, to Sylvie’s mind, just plain given up. She wanted to go and shake them. She wanted to ask them point-blank: What happened to you? Did you wake up one morning and just decide that there was no damn point in pretending anymore?
And then there was her family. That didn’t help. All of Sylvie’s relatives had been born in and elected to stay in Cambridge for reasons that were to her frankly bewildering. One afternoon that summer, when the girls were taking their lunch breaks, she announced to Cassandra:
“Oh my God. Get this. My mother told me last night that Aunt Lydia and Uncle Billy and my grandparents have pooled their money together and bought a plot at Mount Auburn! Turns out they don’t come cheap either. Nothing does in this town. That’s another strike against it! Cambridge: incredibly boring and incredibly expensive, to boot. But seriously, Cassandra, can you imagine? Aunt Lydia and Uncle Billy and my grandparents laid away in a tomb for all eternity! A plot in Mount Auburn! Talk about never getting out of Cambridge! I ask you. Is that all those idiots have to look forward to?”
Cassandra’s reaction to this bombshell was not quite as Sylvie had hoped.
“Do we want to get out of Cambridge?” she asked.
“Absolutely,” said Sylvie flatly. There could be no question of that.