Close Your Eyes (12 page)

3

When Sylvia was six, her father had written a large check to her mother. The money was to be used for Sylvia’s schooling. Sylvia’s father explained to Pauline that the money should cover school tuition, uniforms, supplies, and incidentals. For the next thirteen years. Until she went to college. He told Pauline he felt that with this check, he had fulfilled his responsibilities. He was, he pointed out, a good man. But he had never wanted a child with Pauline, she knew it as well as he did, and he was moving on with his life.

By the time Pauline returned home, she was hysterical, crying, holding out the check with a shaking hand, saying, “A good man! A good man!” and sort of laughing, too, and Sylvia turned off the cartoons her mother had left to babysit her. She helped Pauline into bed, then stared at the check, finally knowing her father’s full name, anyway.

Pauline enrolled Sylvia at the exclusive Lark Academy for Girls. On the first morning of school, Sylvia’s alarm clock went off at five. Her mother curled her hair with a curling iron, gave her a charm bracelet from her large jewelry box, and even let her have a touch of Chanel No. 5 on each wrist and behind each knee.

They rode the subway into midtown together. At Grand Central, Pauline disembarked, giving Sylvia a tight squeeze and saying, “This is the first day of the rest of your life.”

Sylvia knew it was unusual for a six-year-old to ride the subway alone, but Pauline didn’t seem to worry the way other mothers did. Sylvia kept her head down, so as not to attract notice.

At Eighty-sixth Street, Sylvia stepped off the car, as her mother had instructed. Even the air smelled cleaner on the Upper East Side. Sylvia saw herself in a store window: velvet headband, wool coat with brass buttons. At P.S. 94, she had worn jeans, a parka, and thrift-store sneakers. Her new penny loafers were stiff and hurt her feet.

A row of Lincoln Town Cars idled in front of Lark Academy. Sylvia stared at the building. She just needed to walk in and go to the Grade I classroom. (They used Roman numerals at Lark Academy, Pauline had noted, impressed, as she flipped through the school catalog. Sylvia wondered what was wrong with the regular numbers used at her public school.)

Everything would be fine if Sylvia could just find the place she was supposed to be, a chair where she could sit quietly. But she couldn’t do it; she was nailed to the sidewalk. It was a beautiful fall day, the sun glinting coldly in the trees. Sylvia felt tears behind her eyes.
Go inside
, she told herself,
just step forward
. But she was motionless.

“Honey?” A black woman in a pink cardigan sweater had spotted Sylvia. “Honey?” she said again.

Run away
, said a voice in Sylvia’s brain. It was her own voice, interestingly. But Sylvia was, if nothing else, obedient. “Yes?” she said.

“Come here, sweetheart,” said the woman. Her name, Sylvia would learn later, was Mrs. Horning. She was the school guidance counselor and could spot a lost girl a mile away.

“Okay,” said Sylvia. She walked toward the woman.

“Are you a new Lark?” asked Mrs. Horning, peering through glasses that could use some cleaning.

“I am a new Lark,” said Sylvia.

“Well, then, come on in,” said Mrs. Horning. Still Sylvia could not move. She fidgeted on the sidewalk, literally paralyzed with fear, until Mrs. Horning came and took her arm. And then, in the dorkiest manner possible, she walked into her new school.

They passed through the Upper School on their way to the Lower. Sylvia felt as if she were dreaming: an entire hallway of long-haired girls much older than Sylvia stretched before her, talking frenetically, tossing expensive handbags into lockers. The girls were thinner, angrier, more lovely than any Sylvia had seen in her previous life on the Lower East Side. (The school itself was spotless; Sylvia’s shoes—the wrong shoes, of course, though they were expensive loafers from Saks Fifth Avenue—made an awful whining sound.) A ferocious floral smell filled the hallway. The scent, Sylvia thought, of money. Later, she discovered it was simply perfume: Opium by Yves Saint Laurent.

In the Lower School, girls Sylvia’s age swarmed, creating a terrifying din. They shrieked each other’s names, embraced, whispered secrets, cupping their hands to hide their words. Sylvia thought about the twister in
The Wizard of Oz
, the way it sucked houses and Dorothy into its merciless path of destruction.

“What’s your name, dear?” asked Mrs. Horning.

“Um, Sylvia,” she said.

“Sylvia what?”

“Sylvia Hall,” she said in a whisper.

Mrs. Horning clapped her hands. The hallway noise lessened considerably, and Mrs. Horning announced, “Girls, you have a
new classmate
!” The girls turned toward Sylvia with adult expressions, surveying her like a sandwich they might choose to purchase or discard.

“Are you French?” a sarcastic voice yelled.

Wordlessly, Sylvia shook her head.

“Come with me,” said Mrs. Horning.

As Sylvia followed, head down, another girl yelled, “Are you from Dorky Town?” When this comment was met with catcalls and hysterical laughter, Sylvia knew she was doomed.

The next three weeks were arguably the most stressful of her life. Besides the sad weirdness of her mother, there were the early-morning subway rides, days filled with fear and loneliness, then afternoons by herself in the apartment.

The Lark girls weren’t mean to Sylvia, exactly, just dismissive and quietly cruel. Sylvia learned she was the only new student in Grade I. Everyone seemed to know she was weak, of no real importance. They peppered her with oblique questions about her old school, her address, her mother’s job at Tiffany & Co. She answered, as her mother had instructed, that she lived in the Eldorado on Ninetieth and Central Park West. Her mother’s job was “for fun.” She lay awake at night planning out her strategy, what she could say, wear, or do to make someone like her.

Lunchtime was the worst. There seemed to be unspoken rules about who sat where and with whom, and Sylvia couldn’t fathom where she belonged. The popular girls had lunch boxes filled with deli-meat sandwiches and packages of cookies or chips. Pauline didn’t have time to pack a damn lunch, she said, and she told Sylvia that if she wanted to wrap up dinner leftovers, she should feel free, but Pauline wasn’t putting overpriced turkey slices on the shopping list.

Sylvia stood with her paper bag (she’d made a butter sandwich and rehearsed a story about food allergies), blinking fast to keep from crying, not knowing where to walk, terrified to sit down. The first week she put her bag in the trash can without eating at all, then hid in the bathroom, holding her feet up off the floor so no one would see her. She was hungry, but hunger could be managed.

One day a popular girl named Victoria walked up to Sylvia, stopped, and folded her arms over her rib cage. Sylvia’s stomach ached, anticipating a new humiliation. But Victoria smiled, and Sylvia nervously smiled back. “Do you want to come over?” Victoria asked.

“What?” said Sylvia.

“I have a bed with a top on it,” said Victoria. “And I have a fish named Kennebunkport.”

“Oh,” said Sylvia. Hope shot through her, as painful as needles. “I don’t have a fish.”

“You can come feed my fish,” said Victoria.

“I live in the Eldorado,” said Sylvia.

“I don’t know what that is. Do you want to come over?”

Sylvia nodded. “Yes,” she whispered.

“Okay, your mom can write a note to my mom,” said Victoria. “You can be my new best friend.” As she spoke, she looked over her shoulder at Chelsea Davenport, her former best friend, who watched with naked sorrow, biting one of her pigtails.

Why had Victoria chosen Sylvia? Maybe she was bored. Maybe she smelled Sylvia’s longing and wanted someone to control. Maybe it was the lucky penny Sylvia had found that morning on the subway and put in her pocket, squishing her eyes closed and praying,
Please let someone help me
.

Underneath the Lark Academy cafeteria table, Victoria would take hold of Sylvia’s hand. Sometimes she rested her head on Sylvia’s shoulder, and Sylvia tilted her head slightly to fit the curve of Victoria’s head into the hollow of her cheek. Victoria smelled of expensive shampoo, a strong, synthetic scent of flowers and cheese.

Sylvia loved Victoria’s laugh, her dismissive snort, the way she peered up at Sylvia when someone said something stupid, something they could make fun of later, when they were alone. Victoria’s gaze caught Sylvia’s and sent her the same message always:
We are better than everyone else
.

As soon as they could write, they began passing each other notes. They had so much to say to each other, it never ended, a river of scrawled words, hearts, exclamation points. They made up jokes, mean names for their classmates, calling Cynthia “Sin City” and Penelope “Penny Pincher.”

One afternoon Sylvia unfolded a sheet of notepaper that read,
Truth or Dare??? Check one
.

Sylvia checked the box next to
Truth
. Victoria’s dares were always terrifying—
Steal something from Miss Hovland’s desk
or
Don’t wear any underwear tomorrow
.

Victoria raised her eyebrows at the answer, then wrote quickly. While Miss Hovland, their teacher, taught them a song about apples in the apple tree, Sylvia unfolded the paper again:
Where do you really live?

Sylvia felt her face grow red. Victoria had asked about Sylvia’s parents, but she had hoped murmured responses would put off the inevitable. Sylvia looked at Victoria, who mouthed,
Tell me
.

Sylvia wrote,
306 East 11th
.

Victoria responded,
Take me
.

After school, they stood close on the subway platform. Sylvia was scared of what Victoria would think, but she had begun to realize that Victoria was attracted to dark things, dangerous things. And in the late seventies, Sylvia’s street was seedy, frequented by drug addicts and homeless people. There was a junkie sleeping on the ground a block away from Sylvia’s apartment. Victoria stopped to stare.

Unlike Victoria’s entranceway, manned by a staff of uniformed doormen, Sylvia’s lobby was dirty and empty, lined with rusty mailboxes. On the steps to her floor, as they passed Mr. Roberts sitting in a bathrobe in the hallway having a cigarette, when the warbling voice of a drag queen practicing her show rang through the stairwell, when Sylvia paused outside her own badly painted doorway, Victoria was silent.

Sylvia unlocked the three locks and shoved the door open. She saw her tiny apartment through Victoria’s point of view: the dining room filled with clothes, the cheap blinds on the windows, the light the color of dishwater even after Sylvia turned on all three lamps. A phone began to ring shrilly, and Victoria said, “Do you need to get that?”

Sylvia shook her head, too embarrassed to inform her friend that it was the phone next door, audible through the thin walls. “Where’s your mom?” said Victoria.

“She’s at work,” said Sylvia.

“Do you have any graham crackers?”

Sylvia nodded and led Victoria into the kitchen. She found a box of stale crackers and pulled milk from the refrigerator. She opened the carton and smelled that the milk had turned—Pauline and Sylvia could never finish the milk in time. “Where’s your room?” said Victoria.

Sylvia opened the closet and pulled the string to turn on the light. Victoria paused for a moment. Then she said, “Come on.”

She crawled on top of Sylvia’s bedding, crossed her legs Indian-style. “We can have a graham-cracker picnic,” said Victoria. Sylvia sat next to her friend, feeling exposed as Victoria looked at the maps and pictures of glamorous places that Sylvia had taped to the wall.

“Don’t be ashamed,” said Victoria, meeting Sylvia’s gaze and putting her hand on Sylvia’s bare knee. “It’s not your fault you have to live like this.”

4

In Chicago, Sylvia had a forty-five-minute layover. She found a pay phone inside a McDonald’s and dialed Victoria’s cell again, breathing in the smell of french fries and ammonia. A large man in a cowboy hat ate a salad in the booth next to the phone. He sipped an extra-large soda through a straw. The mouth sounds nauseated Sylvia.

Victoria answered on the first ring. “Sylvie!”

“Hey,” said Sylvia, her whole body relaxing at the sound of her friend’s voice.

“Sylvie,” said Victoria. “What’s shakin’, bacon?”

“I’m coming to New York,” blurted Sylvia.

“What?” said Victoria.

Sylvia said nervously, “I left Ray. I finally did it. I’m coming to New York.” She giggled, a girl’s laughter. “Can you believe it?”

“Wow,” said Victoria. “Yes, left on Fourteenth. Sorry, Sylvie, I’m in a taxi.”

“Victoria?” said Sylvia.

“This is a bad time for me. I have a lot going on right now.”

“Victoria,” said Sylvia. “You always said—”

“I know, I totally know,” said Victoria. “You are the
best
friend. You’re so,
so
good to me. You came when I was at Hazelden, and Betty Ford, too.”

“And Passages,” said Sylvia, who had been trying to help Victoria get sober for years. “And I took care of your girls …”

“You’re so awesome,” said Victoria.

“I watched your daughters for ten days while you and Uli went to France,” Sylvia soldiered on. “Well, now I need you. It’s a long story. But I’m actually on my way. I was hoping I could maybe, just until I get on my feet, you know … I could maybe …” She pressed her lips together. It appeared that Victoria was going to make her grovel. “Vee,” she said, “I’m in a bad spot. I’m going to need somewhere to stay.”

“Shit, sorry. Here! Pastis!” said Victoria to the cabbie. “Let me call you tomorrow, Sylvie. I’m late for an appointment. A doctor’s appointment.”

“At Pastis?” said Sylvia angrily, recognizing the name of a hip restaurant. She had read the
New York Times
in the club library for years, idiotically making note of eateries she wanted to try and off-Broadway shows she wanted to see. In a leather chair, she would circle all the things she wanted to do in Manhattan, and then she would hang the newspaper back up on the wooden rod so some dot-com millionaire could page through it while enjoying an après-ski drink.