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

it was just easier to leave the college. She’d found a boyfriend again, this time in New York, and she would leave the Barbizon late, just before midnight, because he worked so late, and she liked to fix him some supper at his place. She’d hang a DO NOT DISTURB sign on her door when she left, and so far she seemed to have gotten away with it. “Sometimes I think there must be something the matter with me. I mean, I was brought up to be a nice girl—just like anyone else. Nice girl—whatever that is.… I’m a very nice girl. I never go to bed with two men in the same night. Principles.” She had always believed that even nice girls could have sex as long as they weren’t promiscuous, but even so there were obstacles of all kinds: “It always turns out they’re married and have five children or suddenly get transferred to Seattle or—just disappear completely.” She’d recently been seeing a lovely young man who bought her a bunch of violets as they were walking down the street together. But after that, he never called again.

Leaving Billy Jo, who had taken flight from her boy troubles under her bedcovers, Gael went to see if Lois wanted to have dinner in the coffee shop. Lois was a slender and attractive brunette with thick-lensed cat glasses behind which there were large hazel eyes. She carried herself well, her back straight, and her outfits always looked as if fresh from the dry cleaners: it was the very opposite of her room, which was “a rat’s nest of empty cigaret [sic] packs, piles of newspapers and magazines and half-eaten food in delicatessen containers.” She was twenty-eight, a college graduate, and was watching everyone around her get married: her younger sisters, her friends back home, her former apartment roommates in New York. She had found herself back at the Barbizon because she ran out of single roommates. As they stepped off the elevator along with a bevy of young girls whose dates were already waiting for them in the lobby, Lois grasped Gael’s arm: “Look. It isn’t fair. I’m not ugly. I’m not dumb. My clothes are as pretty as anyone else’s. Prettier. What is it?… Perhaps if I were beautiful? When I was 18, I always told myself I’d be beautiful by the time I was 22. I would day-dream about what a pretty girl I’d be. When I reached 22, I promised myself I’d be beautiful for sure at 25. But when I got to be 25, I was too old to play the game. It’s crazy. But I actually believed it.” Lois changed her mind and headed back up the stairs to the TV room.

Gael enjoyed the Barbizon’s teatime, if not the TV room. From 5:00 to 6:00 p.m. every day, after a day of searching for a job, or taking classes, or withstanding the “aluminum and florescence [sic] of the commercial world,” there was always tea. It took place in the mahogany-paneled room with burgundy velvet drapes up on the mezzanine, where a plump lady in a pastel knit dress played the organ. In between numbers, she would go sit with the other elderly residents huddled in one corner of the lounge. On this particular late afternoon, Halloween, it was cider and doughnuts instead of tea and cookies, and the lounge was bursting full. Eleanor, who worked for an advertising executive, was doing one of her impromptu marketing surveys. Today it was paper towels. Margaret noted that last night she’d opened too many drawers on her dresser and it all came tumbling down, including the glass top, which shattered at her feet. Linda wanted to know if anyone would go with her to the theater that night; she had a free ticket. She looked around and wistfully noted that she no longer enjoyed the theater now that she studied acting. Roberta, who had on a trench coat with just her swimsuit underneath, planned to head to the swimming pool down in the basement after she’d had her share of cider and doughnuts.

Gael went to wash her hair, but Anna, the Barbizon’s unofficial social director with the notebook, tracked her down. She called to tell her that she was in Annette’s room and Gael should join them. Annette was an art student, and she was handing out chocolates sent to her by an admirer gone overseas. Anna had just been to see a fortune-teller at “Bide a While Gypsy Tea Room,” who told her “next year will be her lucky year: she will marry and have two children.” Helen now insisted that they all go, especially with it being Halloween, and while Gael was none too happy, she tagged along, as did Jacqueline, the English club singer, and Helen, her “little sister” and neighbor. They arrived at a place that looked like “a thousand cheap diners in Manhattan,” and were led into separate booths for their readings, where they were all told exactly what they wanted to hear. On their way out, three kids in monster masks passed by demanding pennies: “Trick or treat!” Helen, Anna, and Gael walked Jacqueline to her cocktail lounge, where she hurried in to get ready for her show, and then they returned to the Barbizon, outside of which Anna spotted three men in a parked car, and warned everyone to walk slowly but not turn their heads in the car’s direction. When Anna’s sister joined them in Gael’s room, she said a strange man had put his hand on her knee that afternoon at the movies. Helen, still angry at the old resident who had called Jacqueline’s singing noise, picked up the phone and asked the operator for room 582: “Hello. Is this room 582? It is? Your broom is waiting downstairs.” A pause. “Your BROOM. Good night.”

In her series on the lone women of the Barbizon for the New York Post, Gael Greene did not broach the subject head-on,