“Your apartment is a one-bedroom, and we want kids. We’d outgrow it in a year. This is a no-brainer, Sasha. My parents are giving us a four-story house to live in.”
She could tell he really wanted to live there, she could tell he loved the place, so even though it killed her to leave her glass box in the sky, she said yes.
Right away she sensed it caused tension with Darley and Georgiana. She couldn’t tell if they were mad that Chip and Tilda had moved out or that she, an outsider, had moved in, but there was a decided chill in the air whenever they talked about the move. At first Sasha was sympathetic, but it started to wear on her. Yes, they had grown up there, but they each had an apartment of their own. They had their country house on Spyglass Lane. Now they had the maisonette on Orange Street. Through Chip and Cord’s company they owned half of Downtown Brooklyn and Dumbo. The family was lousy with property, and they were going to put up a stink about her living in a place that felt like an expensive mash-up of Antiques Roadshow and Hoarders? They were spoiled. There was no other way to say it.
She didn’t resent them for growing up with money—Sasha had led a lucky life herself. She had never skipped a class field trip, she had taken piano lessons and gymnastics and played softball in the town league. But she also vacuumed her own bedroom, loaded the dishwasher after dinner, took out the trash on her night. Cord never even wiped out the sink after he shaved, so sure someone else would be along to do it. As a teenager, Sasha also worked jobs after school and in the summers. She sold trees at the garden supply store, she answered phones at the electric company, her brothers had paper routes and delivered boat parts to the marina. Meanwhile Cord and his sisters played sports, went to summer camp, and then graduated to internships. Their summers were designed to enrich their minds and bodies, while her summers were meant to pay for college.
The weird thing was, though, Sasha wouldn’t have traded places with them. She loved working at the garden store （the electric company was less picturesque）， and even when it sucked, it had taught her how to work. Sasha wanted to be successful, and she understood that if she wanted to do anything of significance it was on her to make it happen. She had a career as a graphic designer, she could support herself, and she did it all on her own. And yet, here she was, living in the limestone on Pineapple Street, feeling like an interloper, watching Georgiana pile dinghy after dinghy on her tiny scrap of shoreline.
Sasha pushed her bike up the steep hill from Dumbo, and when she reached the house she carried it down the steps to the basement and locked the door behind her. She dropped her keys on the table in the parlor, fighting a strange mood that had overtaken her. But she heard quiet jazz music playing. She could smell garlic and tomatoes in the kitchen and realized that she was starving. Cord came out of the kitchen holding a fistful of silverware, and when he saw her his eyes lit up. “My little Van Gogh!” he cried, wrapping her in his arms. “How is the ear?” He pretended to examine her as he kissed her neck. It wasn’t home, it wasn’t Red Hook, but as Cord fed her pasta and then took her to bed, it wasn’t a blue paintbrush either.
EIGHT
Georgiana
If Georgiana’s mother had one weakness it was for clothing. And wine. And for hitting to the alley when she played doubles. And repression. And gossip. And for buying things late at night on the computer. And once Georgiana had seen her try to take a puff on a cigar at a party, and it was like watching a blowfish try to whistle, but that was neither here nor there. The point was that her mother had an absolutely humongous collection of clothing, and whenever Georgiana was invited to a costume party she headed straight to her closet.
From the depths of her mother’s walk-in Georgiana had exhumed the following looks: “Yummy Mummy” （a white bandage dress piled with candy necklaces, a baby-bump pillow shoved down the front）， “Sexy Pope” （a gold pashmina tied like a bandeau and paired with flared white trousers and a hat made from a King Arthur flour sack）， and “Ruth Baby Ginsburg” （her mother actually had a lace collar for some unimaginable reason, but the pacifier came from CVS）。 When Georgiana heard that the theme for her high school friend Sebastian’s birthday was Oligarch Chic, she was nearly overwhelmed with the possibilities. Her mother owned more fur than the Bronx Zoo, had multiple dresses with feathers, and even had a tiara in a box. （She had tried to make Darley wear the tiara for her wedding but was unceremoniously shut down.）
Georgiana invited herself over after work on Wednesday to rummage through her choices. Her parents were home, Berta was cooking duck with jasmine rice, and her mother poured them each a glass of red wine while she supervised the pillage of her wardrobe. （Tilda offered her a straw so Georgiana might avoid tooth staining, but she preferred to slug it like a heathen.） There was a floor-length black sequined gown that would have been perfect had it not been so warm. There was a cropped white rabbit-fur jacket that was so soft she couldn’t stop petting it. There were even diamond earrings in the shape of panthers that were so wonderfully gaudy Georgiana would have made fun of them if they hadn’t been real and worth the cost of a midpriced sedan.
“Will your friend be at the party?” her mother asked nonchalantly, pulling out a white silk jumpsuit and laying it on the ottoman.
“No, it’s just people from school. Lena and Kristin and everyone.” Georgiana slithered into a leather dress and immediately started sweating. People talked a lot about white shoes after Labor Day, but leather dresses after April Fool’s Day were even less practical. She shucked it onto the floor and rummaged through the sequined dresses in back. She wore a bra and underwear, aware of being mostly naked in front of her mother. It was funny to think about how similar their bodies were, while also how different. She knew from watching her mother on the beach, watching her mother try on clothing, how she would look in forty years. They had the same frame, tall with the same slim hips, broad shoulders, the same small breasts. Her mother’s stomach was soft and wrinkled; the place where three babies had grown looked slightly puckered, while Georgiana’s was flat, any softness from drinking too much beer on weekends. Georgiana was stronger, but she knew her mother was in remarkably good shape for her age, and the fact that she was still so trim was an act of sheer will, mostly motivated by her refusal to give up a forty-year collection of clothing.
She finally settled on a low-cut gold dress, studded strappy heels, big Chanel sunglasses, and a leopard-print hat. She wanted to borrow some jewelry—there was a ring with a ruby the size of a gumdrop—but her mom had limits on her generosity.
* * *
—
Sebastian had everyone meet at his apartment in the East Village before the dinner so that they could ride out to Brighton Beach in a party bus. They were going to a Russian dance hall, and Georgiana had to admire her friends’ commitment to the theme. The guys were wearing shirts unbuttoned to reveal half their chests, layers of thick gold necklaces on display. The women wore all manner of fur and leather, heat be damned, but somehow Oligarch Chic had morphed into a more general nineties club look, their eyes winged with liquid liner, their hair huge, their heels five inches high.
There was a bar in the back of the bus with vodka, mixers, and big magnums of champagne, and when the driver turned on flashing colored lights Georgiana felt like she was wasted at seven p.m., the road bumping beneath them. Along with Lena and Kristin, Sebastian had invited their usual circle plus his freshman-year roommate, Curtis McCoy. Georgiana didn’t know Curtis well, but she remembered visiting his family home on Martha’s Vineyard with Lena once and realizing that they owned an entire gated compound, that the Clintons and the Obamas had spent summers in houses on their property. He was next-level rich. Curtis’s father was the CEO of a defense company and that had somehow always made her feel nervous around Curtis, like the fact that his family made Tomahawk missiles gave him an inherent dangerous power that she should steer clear of.