All three young women now rose and straightened their shoulders.
“Hello,” said Sylvie firmly.
“Good morning,” said Cassandra more firmly still, though it was not, technically, the morning anymore.
“Hey,” was all Gala could manage, in a thick, silky purr.
“Do you have sandwiches?” the father asked.
The girls were crestfallen. Sylvie began to run through the other options briskly.
“Daddy, I want a cupcake,” whimpered the little boy.
“But, August, it’s lunchtime. First I have to find you a sandwich or something. Your mother would kill me.”
“Cupcake, cupcake—”
“We’ll be back,” the father said, scooping the little boy up into his arms. “But hey, I think I’ll have one of those iced teas. You have hibiscus? Oh, good.”
An impulse buy, thought Sylvie. Good! I was counting on those.
But all Cassandra could think, getting bored with the lemonade stand already, was: What grown man gets so excited about hibiscus?
She was starting to grow weary of Brooklyn, in its present-day faux-folksy incarnation. Since no way could she afford to live in Manhattan, she sure hoped that Edward would propose soon and then she could go and live in Philadelphia, where you could get someplace elegant in Rittenhouse Square for, comparatively speaking, very little money.
After the little boy and his father left, Sylvie turned to her friends and announced: “Well, that was very useful market research.”
“What was?” asked Cassandra.
“What he said about coming back later, to get that kid a cupcake. Maybe the problem is we set up shop too early. It’s in the afternoon when your blood sugar crashes and you need a pick-me-up. I should have thought of that earlier. I think things are going to pick up after lunch! Now. How are we doing on those signs? Gala. You can’t just keep crumpling up the paper. Art supplies cost money, you know.”
“But I’m not happy with the way my drawings are turning out. I don’t think I’ve done an art project since Bennington.”
“I didn’t even do them at Bennington,” said Cassandra. “I was an English major.”
Christ, thought Sylvie, reaching for a piece of paper and starting to make a sign herself. Was she going to have to do absolutely everything around here?
After lunch, the day got hot and business picked up. Sylvie, sniffing a profit, announced: “Okay, you two. I’m going to stay here and watch the lemonade. I want you to go stand at that corner with a tray of cupcakes.” She pointed. “I feel like we need to diversify our locations.”
“Diversify our locations” was eerie language to Cassandra, to whom business-speak of any kind was utterly foreign. Was Sylvie, like, serious about this thing? she wondered. But if that was the case, would she expect her to stand on a street corner in Brooklyn wearing a vintage apron and hawking lemonade every goddamn Saturday? But so many weekends would find her in Philadelphia with Edward, attending black-tie events and concerts on his arm. Didn’t Sylvie understand? The lemonade stand was cute and all, and it would be heaven if it brought in a little bit of cash flow. Lingerie money, Cassandra was thinking, remembering Edward.
But nevertheless Cassandra and Gala went and stood on the corner, clutching trays of cupcakes in their hands with rather frozen-looking smiles on their faces. Sylvie had been right to diversify their locations. Business was good, so good that Gala had to run to get change at a bodega across the street. As it happened, the owner of the bodega had spent the better part of the afternoon taking a smoke break outside and lapping up the pleasant sight of the two buxom girls, especially the brunette in the red patent-leather platforms, standing there with the trays of cupcakes. Now here was a view he could get used to. When he saw the brunette coming, he went inside and got behind the counter.
“Hey, could we have change?” asked Gala, handing him a couple of twenties.
He made change and slowly surveying her deep cleavage asked her: “So. How is business going today?”
“Great!” exclaimed Gala, suddenly excited to be caught up in a rogue operation like the lemonade stand. Plus, the bodega-guy was Guatemalan, and not for nothing had she learned to speak Spanish. She just loved the feeling of hitting it off with people from other cultures. It made her feel like such a nice person. “My friends and I just started this lemonade and cupcake business. I’ll bring you a cupcake later on, promise.”
Gala left the bodega and joined Cassandra back on the corner. A big rattling old electric blue shit-box of a car drove by and stopped. The girls smelled pot. Gala, being, like Sylvie, a pothead, stopped to breathe it in.
“Hey, those cupcakes you got there?” asked the driver.
“Yes!”
“How much?”
“Two-fifty.”
“All right, give me two.” He took out his wallet. “No, make that four.”
After he was gone, Gala said, “Well, someone has the munchies! God, I really could go for some pot myself.”
“We’ll have to tell Sylvie. That’s a new business angle.”
“What?”
“Car sales! Drive-through!”
The girls laughed. There were more sales, mostly to parents with children. Then another car stopped at the curb and the driver rolled down the window, only to call out: “Hey! Do you have a lemonade stand, too?”
“Oh, yes,” Cassandra piped up. “It’s just down—”
“I was joking,” the man said flatly, and drove away.
“Asshole,” said Gala, who could always be counted on to get on the bandwagon of hating any man. Hatred was so sexy. That guy had been pretty cute, actually. It occurred to her that the lemonade stand might be a cool way to meet guys. It was getting kind of old, letting them pick her up on the subway.
Business slowed down again, and the girls took the break in activity as the perfect opportunity to start gossiping about their old classmates.
“Oh my God, I forgot to tell you!” announced Cassandra. “Pansy Chapin is getting a boob job. She’s engaged to this hedge-fund guy and he’s paying.”
“Well, if he’s a hedge-fund guy, he’d better be! Wait—I thought she got engaged our senior year, to that other rich, preppie guy. Did they get divorced already?”
“Oh, him. Oh, no. He broke off the engagement, when he found out she was sleeping with Kojo. There was this big to-do about it. Anyway—I feel like no self-respecting Bennington girl should get a boob job. I feel like Bennington girls are supposed to have, like, this natural, bohemian beauty, you know?”
And then Cassandra and Gala, both secure in their own naturally beautiful, naturally generous breasts, god-given full C and D cups respectively, took a moment of silence to contemplate the grave horror that Pansy was inflicting on her own rather more austere body type.
“That sucks,” said Gala. “That she doesn’t love herself the way she is. And she’s so hot, too!”
“Elegant,” added Cassandra, her highest word of praise.
“But still. Think of going to bed with a new guy for the very first time and not having any boobs. I just feel like you’d get so sick of the guy always being disappointed with what he had to work with. Can you imagine?”
“No,” Cassandra admitted. “I can’t.”
“Oh, hey. Have you been to that really great sex store in SoHo? I was going to go there this week, if you wanted to come along.”
“Oh no. I mean, I’m adventurous but not in that way, Gala. I don’t like the idea of—toys.”
“But wait. Sylvie said you like being tied up. Me, I like tying guys up. Trust me. They go crazy…”
No wonder she went for those skinny Brooklyn boys, Cassandra was thinking, and said: “Yeah, but being tied up is an expression of, like, ancient hostility. You don’t need toys for that.”
“What do you use, though? I’m curious. To be tied up?”
“Oh, we use—Oh, hello!” Cassandra turned to see a little girl standing there with her mother. “And how are you today? My name is Cassandra and this is my friend Gala. What a pretty dress you have on! Would you like a cupcake?”
Why is this lady talking to me in that phony voice? the little girl wondered to herself. And why are she and her friend standing out on the sidewalk and selling cupcakes? They were grown-ups.
When the girls went back to check in with Sylvie, she was thrilled to see the fat wad of money they’d made and immediately began to count the twenties.
Cassandra, realizing that she was thirsty after hours of standing out in the sunshine, helped herself to some of the lavender-flavored lemonade.
But Sylvie saw what she was doing and admonished her: “Hey, Cassandra, please don’t use the plastic cups! Those things cost money, you know. They’re going to add up.”
Cassandra just wasn’t getting it, Sylvie thought. Getting it about the lemonade stand, and how incredibly important it was to her. Every time someone handed her a dollar bill that day, she felt this warm, safe feeling such as she so seldom felt anymore. Maybe with Clementine. Yeah, with Clementine, but that was it. The touch of dollar bills—the straightforward power of them, the incontestable relief of finally having them after so many lean years—was the next best thing.
“Sorry,” said Cassandra rather prissily, stopping in mid-sip. Then she looked at it and thought: What the hell? She’d already used the damn cup, she might as well finish the beverage. She had to hand it to Sylvie, though. The lavender-flavored lemonade was absolutely delicious.
“Oh, Sylvie, that reminds me!” said Gala. “I told the guy at the bodega I’d bring him a cupcake. Do we have any of the red velvet ones left?”
This was the day Sylvie finally came to understand the meaning of the words a cranberry is a cranberry. Tish, the woman who first uttered those immortal words, was a grown-up, she thought. Cassandra and Gala were still acting like girls.
That was the difference.