One weekend not long after this, Sylvie came home for a visit. On Saturday night she and Cassandra had stayed up so late talking at Sylvie’s mother’s house that Cassandra had ended up spending the night there, which had necessitated her using Sylvie’s toothbrush—pink, with Tom’s of Maine cinnamon toothpaste (Sylvie’s parents were hippies and had been using this stuff for years)—and having to borrow a pair of her underpants the following morning. They were slightly too small for her but mercifully clean and they even smelled of lavender sachets from the dryer: how sweet to share things with Sylvie, Cassandra thought, to wake up on the sheets of her childhood bedroom, strewn with faded buttercups. It was a purplish gray winter morning, faintly drizzling.
“Come on, let’s go to Black Currant,” Cassandra begged her.
“Cassandra.”
Sylvie did not relish the thought of returning to the site of her old workplace, ill-fated as her brief tenure there had been.
“Oh come on, you know that you haven’t worked there in ages.”
Cassandra was right, because when you are young, even a period of six months can feel like a lifetime. Sylvie was convinced. And also, she consoled herself, she would be sure to get an iced Americano as well as some of that wonderful creamy oatmeal with the cranberries, so long as Cassandra was paying. Cassandra was often in the habit of paying for things, Sylvie had noticed, and thought that this was a most useful quality to have in one’s best friend.
On arriving at Black Currant, they were struck by a most gratifying sight: Sylvie’s long-ago nemesis, the dreaded Tish, once upon a time described on Yelp as “the I See Dead People manager,” standing behind the counter, her tiny, ruined body aslant on a pair of crutches.
Tish! On crutches! The girls choked back a furious desire to laugh.
Sylvie regained her composure and strode up to the counter with a confident roll of her Zumba-toned hips and said, “Hey, Tish,” with a big smile on her face. And then Tish did something truly distressing and smiled herself. Cassandra saw right away what Sylvie meant about Tish’s scowl being preferable to her smile.
“Hey,” said Tish, her low-affect voice no match for Sylvie’s exuberant force of personality. For Tish was thinking: So she did go to New York, that hot, flaky girl with the pretentious French name. What was it: Sheri, or Sido, or something? Giving your American-born daughter a French name was just asking for trouble, Tish felt. She was sure to go through life with the most romantic and outlandish expectations. It never paid to hire girls like that. They had too many opportunities, those ones. They never stayed.
And furthermore, Tish could tell that Sylvie had gone to New York because she just had that look. You couldn’t miss it, in Harvard Square, where so few people had it. It had to do with a certain fearless way of carrying yourself that was hardly necessary in Cambridge, where nothing, except for boredom and a kind of quiet death of the soul, was to be feared. Tish noted with scorn Sylvie’s black leggings and motorcycle boots, and the deft way she’d tied her scarf. Also: her beautiful, clear skin and beautiful, compact body.
“So, how are things with you, Tish? And how’s business?”
Sylvie considered asking her about the crutches, but then decided against it. She thought it was more enraging actually not to, as though to meet Tish again in this wretched state was only to be expected.
“Fine. Fine.”
“You know what I’m in the mood for,” Sylvie went on shamelessly, “a large iced Americano, please, and also—a large oatmeal! You guys just have the best oatmeal, Tish. I’ve always said this bakery was so good, it could almost make it in New York City. So! A large oatmeal, with extra cranberries, if you don’t mind. Thanks, Tish.”
Now, ordinarily, Tish gave out extras and freebies under no circumstances. But there was no telling just what this Sido-Sheri girl might do; Tish recalled her unbecoming sense of self-respect back when she was an employee. So she gave her the damn extra cranberries, a wholly extravagant deluge of them on top. She did it because she just wanted to get her out of there as fast as she could.
“Oh my God, Sylvie, that was fabulous!” Cassandra applauded her afterward. “I’d never have thought of that little extra touch of asking for the cranberries. Do you remember—”
“A cranberry is a cranberry! Cassandra? How could I forget?”
“And another thing, you look really hot today, Sylvie. Your hair, the boots, everything. You just look so New York. I’m sure she noticed.”
Sylvie thought how nice it was to return to Cambridge once in a while, just for a boost to the ego. In New York, everyone was hot. In Cambridge, no one was.
She took this exact moment to ask Cassandra about something that had been on her mind recently. As a matter of fact, her coming home this particular weekend had not been random; she had come home in part because she wanted to ask Cassandra the following question in person.
“Hey, so there’s this really great apartment I found,” she said.
And then before Cassandra could say anything she proceeded to describe it in great detail, making sure she understood how darling it was before she got to her eventual point, which was to ask her for the security deposit; Cassandra could never resist anything that appealed to her sense of aesthetics.
“And it’s so cute,” Sylvie heard herself saying, “it has this really pretty molded white ceiling and oh! You’ll love this, when you come visit. The bathroom even has a claw-foot tub. The water pressure is really weak, though, but no big deal. Every apartment has to have something wrong with it.”
“Yeah, and especially in New York City. Oh Sylvie, Sylvie, I think it sounds practically perfect for you!”
“It used to be a studio, but the landlord just added a partition to make it a two-bedroom, so he could get more money.” Cassandra nodded, thinking how helpful it was of Sylvie to give her a crash course in the mercenary ways of New York City real estate. “So, after I sign the lease I’ll have to get a roommate.”
“Who are you thinking of?” Cassandra asked her, imagining that it would be one of their Bennington classmates.
“Oh, I’ll be sure to find someone,” said Sylvie with her typical aplomb, and in fact, over the years that she went on to live in that apartment, none of her many roommates would be former classmates but instead almost always strangers. Furthermore, as Sylvie would go on to discover, almost none of them were satisfactory. There was the cheap, slightly-older-than-Sylvie single woman—a veritable spinster—who worked for a human rights organization and after work would come home and make “bad, white-people Indian food” (thus did Sylvie describe said cuisine over the phone to Cassandra, who understood where she was coming from immediately). There was the overzealous, quite possibly manic-depressive theater girl who covered the refrigerator with magnets (“Magnets, Cassandra! Magnets”). There was the midwestern publishing girl who demanded that the apartment be absolutely quiet so that she could concentrate on reading manuscripts. Not to mention an NYU graduate student, from Tel Aviv, who served Sylvie with papers threatening to sue her over some vague misunderstanding about a mattress.
Sylvie decided here to drop the matter of the security deposit casually, without any alarming or predatory emphasis, in the blameless tones of a plucky young thing all alone in the big city. Cassandra thought: It’s for Sylvie. I love her. And that was that. She made up her mind that she would be happy to give her the money, and said so. Also, she thought to herself, if one of these days she ever did move to New York, as Sylvie was always begging her to do, it was just possible that she would move in with Sylvie in that very apartment. So why not help her to get it? It would be a shame to let it go over a little thing like the security deposit when she, Cassandra, had the money and her beloved Sylvie didn’t.
“Tomorrow,” she said firmly, and Sylvie’s heart leapt. Success! was what she was thinking. “I’ll write you a check tomorrow, before you go back to New York. I wish I had known! I don’t have my checkbook on me today.”
“Actually”—Sylvie hesitated—“I was thinking cash.”
“Cash?” echoed Cassandra uncomprehendingly. She was not in the habit of turning down people who were so kind as to offer one checks herself.
Sylvie reiterated that yes, if there was one thing she had learned so far in New York City, it was that it was always better to have cash; cash, Sylvie reported to Cassandra, was king.
“All right,” Cassandra said, prepared to take her word for it. “But”—she found herself suddenly curious about something—“I thought you said you started working for Bitsy’s brother at his studio. Has he not paid you yet, or what?”
“He’s not going to pay me, Cassandra. It’s just an unpaid internship, to start. You have to understand how it works. He’s such a big deal! Everybody wants to work for him.”
“Do you like his work?” Cassandra asked her, genuinely curious because she respected Sylvie’s opinions and because they were close enough to being out of college that they actually believed that art still mattered. That it was sacred, even.
“Not at all, actually,” said Sylvie promptly, but this had not prevented her from agreeing to work for him for free or from falling into bed with him, either. A regime of regular, highly aerobic sex, much of it taking place amid collapsed cardboard boxes and unfinished canvases, had contributed to her looking so radiant these days. She hadn’t told Cassandra about Ludo, thinking that she might be jealous and because Gala, so much more experienced than either of them, was her chosen sexual confidante; one of those was enough, Sylvie felt.
The following afternoon, Sylvie met up with Cassandra on her lunch break and the two of them went and drank raspberry lime rickeys in the Sunken Garden at Radcliffe. After that they walked across the square to Cassandra’s bank, Cambridge Trust. It was a wonderful, homey, trustworthy, shabby-prep old bank of the kind that doesn’t exist anymore. Cassandra had opened a modest savings account there a number of years ago now, when she was still in high school. This was the reason she had the money to give Sylvie now. The picture on her Cambridge Trust bank card showed her in a peppermint-striped sundress, her fine blond hair worn long and parted, rather virginally, in the middle. At the time that photograph was taken, she was fourteen years old.
Cassandra got Sylvie cash out of the bank. The security deposit was one thousand dollars. Sylvie, taking that amount of money with what would have been to anyone but Cassandra a disturbing sense of casualness, entitlement even, remarked, “You know, I just closed my account here.”
“Oh, so you opened up a bank account in New York?”
“Yeah, Bank of America. It’s a chain, but—” They were sweet, diligent, well-trained Cambridge girls, given to saying things like It’s a chain, but. Sylvie went on, “It’s a chain, but I mean, that’s the way the world works now. And I just figured, you know, it’s not like I’m ever coming back here again, so…”
“No,” said Cassandra, accepting this.
Years later, when they were both nearly thirty, Sylvie and Cassandra had a conversation in which they both remembered Cambridge Trust fondly. And Sylvie, sitting on the kitchen counter of her apartment in Fort Greene, took a puff of her joint and remarked, “Actually, I think that the day I closed my account at Cambridge Trust was the day my childhood ended. And you know something?” She laughed. “It’s been all downhill ever since.”
Then Cassandra laughed, too. They laughed, that night, until they cried.