Bennington Girls Are Easy by Charlotte Silver Read Free Book Online Page B

now are those purple velvet pants. Honestly, if I saw a lineup of twelve naked male bodies, I wouldn’t have a clue which one of them was his.”
    Later on that same afternoon, Gala and Cassandra found a coat on sale that they both liked at a boutique in SoHo. Luckily, there were two of them left in just the right sizes.
    Cassandra turned to Gala and asked her: “Would it be okay do you think if we had the same coat? I mean—with you being in New York, and me being in Boston?”
    For Gala, a confident, pleasure-seeking creature, there had never been a question that both of them would buy the damn coat. She said: “It’s fine. I don’t care. In fact, we could wear them out of the store today, I wouldn’t mind.”
    After buying the matching coats, the three of them sprang into the campy spirit of the coincidence. The thought of Cassandra and Gala posing in their coats immediately brought to Sylvie’s mind Diane Arbus’s portraits of twins. It didn’t hurt that the coats in question verged on the outlandish, being royal blue felt with Peter Pan collars and black velveteen bows on the pockets.
    “You know what these remind me of?” exclaimed Cassandra. “
Madeline!
I’m going to call this my
Madeline
coat.”
    “Oh my God,
Madeline
!” Sylvie trilled.
    And then Gala was trilling, too: “Oh,
Madeline
, my sister and I used to love those books! She was our hero!”
    Everyone’s mood brightened at the nostalgic thought of
Made line
, the Parisian comfort food of their upper-middle-class childhoods, and Gala and Cassandra swirled out of the boutique in their matching coats, striking poses for Sylvie’s camera. People stopped to look at them on the street, these charming, round-faced young women looking years younger than they really were in these rather ridiculous coats of theirs, one with long chestnut hair, the other’s bobbed and golden. (Cassandra had cut hers after graduation.) Then, as if they truly were in a photo shoot for a catalog, snowflakes began to fall—the first snowfall of the year. And then several months later, a photograph of Gala roaming down Mercer Street in her
Madeline
coat and a leopard miniskirt appeared on the website of
Italian Vogue.
That figured, the girls complained. Gala got all the breaks.
    Soon, they passed the window of a woman’s clothing store called Endless Flax.
    Sylvie pointed at the sign and said: “Oh God, that place just looks so depressing. More like it should be in Cambridge than New York, right? And anyway—who would want to shop at a store named Endless Flax? I mean, come on.
Endless Flax.
Pretty fucking bleak already.”
    “Oh no,” said Gala, wrinkling her nose. “Is everything in there, like, hemp?”
    Oh, how she hated earth tones.
    With a sense of creeping horror, the three of them peeked in the window.
    “Imagine it coming to that,” said Cassandra, with a sad shake of the head.
    “What?”
    “Elastic-waist pants.”
    “Endless flax,” Sylvie repeated in sheer wonderment. “Endless flax!”
    For the three attractive young women standing in front of the window, those two words said only endless boredom, aging, disappointment, failure. They laughed for a good long while that afternoon, unable to conceive of their own lives ever being anything other than fantastical, beautiful, richly and expensively textured.

CHAPTER 10
    N ext, while warming themselves up over cups of Valrhona hot chocolate indoors, Gala asked her friends: “So. Feel like going over to Orpheus’s place with me? He invited me for this, like, little karaoke evening he’s having later on.”
    “Orpheus! Are you still hooking up with that hipster doofus?”
    “Hey! That’s not fair, Sylvie.”
    “Ah! So you are hooking up with him or you’d be perfectly fine admitting that he’s a hipster doofus.”
    “
Sylvie.
But you’re going to come with me, aren’t you?”
    “Where is his apartment again?” asked Sylvie, who considered all invitations from the vantage point of