Bennington Girls Are Easy by Charlotte Silver Read Free Book Online

charmless, neon-lit squares; the faster you get the hell out of them the better. But Sylvie’s bathroom, ah Sylvie’s bathroom, it was a most romantic spot, with that lavender-honey light streaming in through long windows overlooking one of the ramshackle gardens of Brooklyn. The sink was an old-world shade of terra-cotta, and luxuriously deep. But for all that Sylvie’s bathroom was beautiful it was also, in a way, lonely; tinged with decay, or the foreboding of decay.
    A decay that could only be feminine.
    A bathroom where, washing one’s face late at night or in the cool thin light of morning, Sylvie sometimes would look at her reflection staring back at her in the mirror and suddenly have the presence of mind to remember that she was getting older after all.

CHAPTER 9
    D uring these years, the years right after Bennington, Cassandra spent many weekends in New York. How she looked forward to the adventure of hailing a Fung Wah bus on a side street in Chinatown on a Friday night, armed with the navy blue L.L.Bean Boat and Tote she’d had ever since freshman year. She didn’t, however, look forward to the experience of taking the Fung Wah itself; nobody in his or her right mind could have looked forward to that.
    The inconveniences of the Fung Wah were many, and bemoaned not only by Sylvie and Cassandra but by the young and the poor the whole East Coast over. Every couple of months, it seemed, a brand-new article appeared in
The Boston Globe
about the latest scandal: one of their buses bursting into flames, a number of others failing inspections. It was true, as Sylvie once remarked to Cassandra, that the people who worked for the Fung Wah spoke English only when it suited them, and that was rarely. Otherwise, it was all Chinese, all the time. The girls, coming off a hammering onslaught of this least melodic of languages, had a terrifying thought, which they dared voice only to each other:
What if Chinese becomes the universal language?
    “Why Chinese, when it could be, you know, Italian?”
    “Because that’s not where the money is.”
    “What isn’t where the money is?”
    “Italy, you idiot. Hadn’t you heard? The future belongs to the Chinese.”
    On Sunday afternoons in New York, when she was supposed to be going back to Boston, Cassandra used to get this knot in her stomach. Sylvie and she, both familiar with this feeling, called it the Fung Wah Blues, as in, “Oh, no, I feel sick to my stomach, I must be coming down with the Fung Wah Blues…”
    Then they would laugh and order another twelve-dollar cocktail neither one of them could afford, though often Cassandra, having more money, paid quite happily for Sylvie. Back then, twelve-dollar drinks with numerous, not necessarily complementary ingredients were still a lot of fun to splurge on, and they hadn’t yet woken up enough mornings with splitting hangovers to learn to distrust sugary cocktails. Even the overpriced, sometimes white trash–inspired comfort food on the menus of Brooklyn restaurants was still cunning, back then.
    —
    One Saturday afternoon right around Christmastime when Cassandra was visiting, they met up with Gala Gubelman, famous campus beauty and kleptomaniac. Alphie the security guard had once caught her red-handed stealing the tip jar from the Upstairs Cafe, but one look at Gala’s lascivious baby face and he let it drop. This resulted in a nearly mythic bout of campus drama when, sometime afterward, Gala pinned the abduction of the tip jar on the notorious Lanie Tobacco, she of the wine-stained bathrobe and halo of fruit flies over her head, suspecting, correctly, that people would believe Lanie capable of just about anything. (One of Lanie’s feats of mastery had been selling coke to this hot young Italian professor, Marcella Davini, the night before the midterm exam; she passed out in Lanie’s room and forgot to give the exam entirely.) Lanie had then confronted and blackmailed poor Gala in the game room, luring her into