The Barbizon by Paulina Bren (ebook reader browser TXT) 📕

As they chatted, sizing each other up, geography was on everyone’s mind. In the 1950s, air travel was still expensive enough to be rare, and until they were invited to New York by Mademoiselle, most GEs from the West and the South had never set foot in New York. In the national imagination, it was understood that the East Coast was the country’s intellectual hub while the rest of the country remained its backwater. Guest editor Dinny Lain, who would become the writer Diane Johnson, author of Le Divorce among other novels, was then a sophomore at a women’s college in Missouri. She had grown up on the banks of the Mississippi and had never been anywhere, let alone New York. Hotels were strictly places to dine for special occasions; just like Sylvia, she had never actually stayed in one. Yet Sylvia, the Smith girl from Wellesley, Massachusetts, commanded a much higher status. Sylvia was East Coast; Dinny was backwater.

Geography could be made up for, however, and the Barbizon was a potent site of reinvention for young women. It offered an alternative imagined life, even if it was as short-lived as one’s room rental. A young woman who had abandoned Wellesley College to come to New York to become a writer observed, “It is the place where you go when you leave something—college, your family, your old life. And for that it’s perfect—as long as you don’t stay too long.”

While Sylvia Plath arrived with the full recognition that she was at the top of the heap, and Dinny Lain arrived relatively ignorant of what this opportunity meant, Neva Nelson arrived that evening from San Jose, California, with determination. On the plane, during the last leg of the trip from Texas to New York, she had had the good luck to be seated next to a Mr. Ross, the CEO of the Neiman Marcus department store. Neva had not put much thought into how she would get from the airport to the Barbizon, half expecting a welcoming committee that never arrived. Mr. Ross rescued her by declaring she should share his cab. Clearly taken by this girl from San Jose, he had the cabbie drive a circuitous route so he could show Neva the paradoxes of the city. The cab crisscrossed Manhattan under Mr. Ross’s direction as he pointed out not the sights of New York but its demographics, the ways in which wealth existed side by side—separated by a block or two—with New York’s poor, how race was clearly demarcated across the short stretch of the Manhattan island.

Neva could not believe her luck in having Mr. Ross show her the lay of the land. Yet she had recently had a string of adventures, and this seemed just one more to add to the list. The year before, Neva had been part of a geology course in Death Valley, where they rushed to the top of a mountain at 4:00 a.m. to watch the atomic bomb test sixty miles away. The explosion burned her face, creating small, angry red spots that she would have to hide under makeup for the next seven years. Then, on a dare, and before the professor could rush over to stop her, she had swallowed, whole, a shimmering sardine-size fish from a two-thousand-year-old inland sea. Tanned, laughing, she posed for a photograph with the little fish, now saturated with atomic fallout, dangling over her open mouth, moments before its destructive entry. (Neva would later blame the radioactive fish for her thyroid cancer.) And now here was another adventure, set at the Barbizon, so soon after.

Neva Nelson swallowing the small and now radioactive fish.

By Neva’s standards, her room at the Barbizon, number 1536, was magnificent, even as it looked out on a back alley. There was a sink immediately on the right as she entered, a narrow bed on the left, as well as a closet, dresser, desk, and even a comfy chair by the window. She loved the radio over the bed, which piped in music that could be interrupted any minute by the front desk with a personal message. She would have been less excited if she had known that the Barbizon bill would be arriving shortly, even though the GEs were only paid after the first two weeks of work, and Neva’s check would in fact be held up even longer, until the third week, because of a mix-up with the airline ticket reimbursement.

That first night, and in other nights to follow, as the guest editors gathered for late-night discussions, Neva, who had forgotten her pajamas, would sit in a T-shirt with her reversible raincoat flung over her like a cape. Sylvia, fully prepared and meticulously packed, with preparatory shopping sprees prior to arrival, had two sets of blue pajamas, a nightgown, and a robe. But Neva was used to making do. She had come from Stanford but would return home to attend San José State University because the Mademoiselle opportunity also meant she could not take up her usual summer job at the cannery. But even with that reliable summer paycheck, Stanford’s tuition was only piling on debt, and she had arrived in New York already knowing she could not go back there. Her parents were alive but erratic; she had been a ward of the state since she was a baby. By high school, she was living in an efficiency motel by herself, fighting off the presumption that only prostitutes were forced into such accommodations.

As the GEs stayed up past midnight on that first day, sitting in Grace MacLeod’s room, awake but barely so, they discussed many things, such as their surprise to find college editor Marybeth Little, their “house mother” who would shepherd them through New York, was so very visibly pregnant. Someone suddenly asked: “Who here is a virgin?” No one was really sure who had asked the question, but everyone now waited to see the show of hands. Not a single hand