In the mornings, Sylvie babysat a delectable little toddler named Clementine, Clementine of the black ringlets and fat cheeks the color of French radishes. Sylvie said she was in love with Clementine; she said Clementine was her soul mate. She said that Clementine was her good luck charm and that ever since meeting the little girl, her life had started to turn around for the better.
Cassandra tagged along with Sylvie when she babysat, for something to do. Anyone could see that as children go Clementine was delightful, but still—Cassandra had no natural tenderness with, or for, children. She feared that Edward, being so traditional, would want to have them. She didn’t. She wanted to have French breakfasts and make love on the living room floor forever and ever, no children waking up and waddling in.
The way Sylvie acted with Clementine was beginning to disturb Cassandra. She felt that the attention she paid her was excessive. Was this her way of detecting that the unconditional love that was once her due had shifted, as in a love triangle, to Clementine? For here was Sylvie, no longer paying attention to her but to Clementine—feeding her snap peas (“Clementine already eats all of her vegetables”) out of a plastic bag, picking her up out of her stroller and hugging her at what were to Cassandra quite random intervals, singing her songs in French. “Alouette,” she sang, “gentille alouette,” which once upon a time Sylvie and Cassandra had sung together in high school French class.
Sylvie needs to get laid, Cassandra was thinking; it had been quite a while, hadn’t it? Sometimes, giving in to ennui, Sylvie had one-night stands, not that she ever seemed to enjoy them all that much. It had been a long time now since the giddy, reckless era of the silver eyeliner, of Jasper and Angus and Bertram and Max…Sex wasn’t sacred, either. In fact, Sylvie had found, it was often more trouble than it was worth, and then! And then there was the fact that all of the guys she met in New York were so lame.
Cassandra and Sylvie wheeled Clementine in her stroller all over the neighborhood: to get pain au chocolats for her and lattes for them (which, hoping to turn her into an avid coffee drinker later on in life, they encouraged her to take tiny sips of); to florist shops (See, Clementine, tulips, yellow tulips, can you say tulip?); and, inevitably, to the Brooklyn Flea, where they whittled away whole Saturdays sorting through old wooden boxes of vintage buttons. Would Clementine like this one, or would Clementine like that one? Buttons were a passion of hers, little red ones especially. Button! she would exclaim. Button!
Clementine’s voice was absolutely delicious. Bouncy and bell-like, the cartoon voice of a beautiful child. “Clementine is so lyrical,” Sylvie said. And so, when Clementine said the word Button!, that sound, like the plaintive chords of a string quartet, sent silvery shivers of recognition down Cassandra’s spine.
“It’s sad,” said Cassandra.
“What’s sad?”
“Clementine’s voice. It’s sad.”
“No, it isn’t,” insisted Sylvie.
“It is. It’s so…mournful.”
“Jesus, Cassandra, Clementine’s voice is not sad. Clementine is not sad. Clementine is a beautiful little girl and it’s a beautiful spring day and anyway I make her happy.” She got down on her knees and wiggled her nose against Clementine’s: “Don’t I? Don’t I? Doesn’t Sylvie make you happy?”
“Sylvie,” repeated Clementine, giggling.
“But happiness is the saddest thing in the world. And as an adult to try to recapture happiness—”
Then all of a sudden Clementine was crying—Clementine, who, according to Sylvie, never cried. Sylvie thought: Cassandra really is lousy with kids. She’s going to have to come up with a hell of a good excuse when Edward wants to start having them. And he will, she thought, the stuck-up preppie bastard. Sometimes Sylvie thought that Cassandra’s relationship would stand a chance only if Cassandra could continue to conceal her real self—that being the self she had no shame in revealing to Sylvie.
“Oh, look what you’ve done, Cassandra!” Sylvie stooped down again and flooded the child with the daintiest of kisses, on her forehead, her lashes, her nose. “Alouette,” she sang to her darling Clementine, “gentille alouette…”
“Oh my God. Sylvie? Sylvie Furst!”
The girls looked up only to see a dim, honey-blond creature squinting at them from behind her spectacles. A pang of recognition startled Sylvie—then, fear: some old, unrealized fear that, although long past the point of logic, still carried a powerful emotional charge.
It was Vicky Lalage.
Sylvie hadn’t laid eyes on Vicky Lalage since the disastrous series of events beginning with letting her mother’s dog die on her watch and being exiled to the nursery with her father’s ashes (“Contents: Marc Lalage”). Since then, Sylvie had hightailed it to Brooklyn and never looked back. She was twenty-two years old then and twenty-eight now. It came to Sylvie, looking at this young woman who she had once been friends with and who was now a stranger, that it felt like not six years but whole decades had passed.
I was so young then, she thought, remembering her first year in New York.
“Vicky!” she exclaimed. The two women hugged. Vicky, after recognizing Cassandra, too, gestured to Clementine and then to Sylvie, saying: “Oh my God, is she—”
“Mine? Oh no.”
“You wish,” said Cassandra, and the three of them laughed, on innocent ground because the presence of Clementine erased the thorny past and put everybody in a good mood.
“Everybody does say we look alike,” said Sylvie, to whom nothing could have been a greater compliment. “But no, I’m just her babysitter.”
They do kind of look alike, Vicky was thinking, but Sylvie seemed so different. She seemed like a whole other person. She couldn’t put her finger on it at first, then she realized what it was. Her haircut. Vicky stopped for a second to recall the carelessly gorgeous, brown-skinned girl on the nude beach at Martha’s Vineyard: the one with the black Italian pixie cut. But Sylvie was wearing her hair long now and Vicky thought that it weighed her down. Vicky thought that she looked tired.
“What are you up to these days?” Cassandra asked Vicky, feeling that it was only good manners to do so.
“Oh, I’ve been running this studio for this artist…” Cassandra here recalled that Vicky had been a fine arts major—ceramics or something frumpy like that. She saw flakes of plaster dotting the honey-blond hair. Vicky rambled on a bit, and then the girls heard her say: “And! I just moved into an apartment in Boerum Hill with my girlfriend. Actually…” She singled out Sylvie. “My girlfriend. Tess Fox. You know her.”
Afterward:
“Oh my God. Tess Fox. That’s that anorexic slut from Bryn Mawr!”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“The one who used to date Gala, right? The one you got into that screaming match with on the ferry coming back from the Vineyard?”
“Uh-huh. Oh my God. I’m going to text Gala and tell her right now.” Sylvie reached for her BlackBerry and began tapping away. “Also, I know that was totally harmless, but I’ve been dreading running into Vicky Lalage for years.”
“Well? You two are out and about in New York City. It had to happen sometime.”
That song, Cassandra thought, later that night when she was lying in bed unable to fall asleep. She couldn’t get it out of her head. She tried to resurrect her rusty French to translate the lyrics. It wasn’t a very nice song, was it? But then children’s songs so often weren’t nice. Childhood was a brutal kingdom, where only the fit and the selfish survived. “Skylark, nice skylark / Skylark, I shall pluck you / I shall pluck your head…”