Page 5 of Persephone's Curse
“I have changed my goddamn opinion of school, Evelyn,” she said.
Todd’s packed tables in like sardines, and a gray-haired lady next to us sighed loudly at that, and said to Bernadette, “Can youpleasemind your language?”
“I don’t mind my language at all,” Bernie replied, and she flashed a smile so big and catching that the woman actually laughed.
“So you’re just going to live with us again?” Clara asked.
“Do you not want me to, Cece?” Only Bernadette ever called ClaraCece.
“Of course I want you to,” Clara said, her cheeks reddening with delight. I thought she was probably the one who missed Bernadette the most, because despite initially claiming she would never change a diaper, Bernadette had ended up being very fond of her third younger sister, and vice versa.
“Are you going to get a job?” I asked.
Bernadette raised an eyebrow. “I’ve been home for twelve hours and you want me to get a job? What are you,Dad?”
“She’s just asking,” Evelyn said. The peacemaker. But Bernadette wasn’t really annoyed; I could tell because she was still eating, and she never ate when she was annoyed, she always rested her fork down on the side of her plate and just waited.
“Well, I’m glad you’re back,” Clara said.
“I’m glad you’re back, too,” I said.
“OfcourseI’m glad you’re back,” Evelyn said.
“I’m glad I’m back, too. When are Mom and Dad getting home?”
“Tomorrow,” I said. They were in the Berkshires, a place they went often because they had friends with a house there and didn’t have to pay for a hotel. Our family wasn’t particularly wealthy, more luck-touched. Our brownstone had been in the family for generations (and was, of course, paid off), and we all went to private schools on funds set aside by our father’s parents (except for Clara, who hadn’t wanted to).
Everything else was aggressively budgeted by our parents, and some months I caught them giving someveryskeptical looks to a stack of pale red bills.
(“Persephone didn’t have to pay bills,” my mother would sometimes mumble, petulant and snooty, and my father would nod his head in a mollifying way and say, “Yes, darling, it’s so hard to be cast off Mount Olympus, isn’t it?” in a tone that implied that perhaps he didn’t believe that particular old Farthing yarn.)
“I miss the Berkshires,” Clara said. “So green. There isn’t any green in the city.”
“We live two blocks from Central Park,” Bernie pointed out. “How much green do you want?”
“It’s not the same,” Clara said. “You know it’s not the same. There isn’t anywhere in Central Park you can go where you don’t hear cars.”
Clara was the only one of us who hadn’t gone to a private all-girls school on the other side of the park. She was oddly practical, for a fourteen-year-old, and she’d negotiated a deal with our parents—she took the money they would have spent on private school and had them put it in a trust fund she could access when she was twenty-five. I had a feeling, in about ten years, we’d all be pissed with ourselves for not going to her for financial advice.
Evelyn and I left the house every morning at seven and walked across the park together to get to our school on the Upper East Side. Evelyn was a senior now. She’d been offered a spot at a prestigious music conservatory next year. She hadn’t given them an answer yet.
I was sixteen and thought I would go to college for something unexpected and strange—like a classics course at a small liberal arts school in Vermont (I’d readThe Secret Historyrecently and won’t admit just how much it had altered my brain chemistry).
The art Clara made was dark and violent and strange. Disembodied heads and fifty shades of black piled meticulously on top of each other and open, bleeding wounds leaking from the canvas like someone had cut it open from the outside. It wasn’t anything like what you thought she would make, if you heard she was an artist. Our parents had hung an enormous piece over the fireplace on the ground floor. It kind of creeped us all out to look at it, butalso, we loved her, and it was beautiful, if you didn’t have a weak stomach.
Bernadette had gone to school for an undecided major. We all knew she’d have to declare soon, and we were wondering if that was why she was here now, and it was what we were all thinking about as we ate our breakfast and realized, with a start, that she was suddenly sobbing. Deep heaving sobs that wracked her shoulders and made the woman next to her, the one who’d scolded her about her language, jump with fright.
Evelyn didn’t say anything. She wrapped her arms around Bernadette and Bernadette turned her body and melted into Evie’s side. Clara and I looked at each other. Neither of us were good at nurturing; open displays of emotion made the insides of my wrists itch. I could feel the other diners looking at us, some of them neighborhood people, faces I had seen all my life but couldn’t put names to, and some of them strangers, visiting the American Museum of Natural History, tourists who’d taken the subway up from Union Square and stumbled into the first place they saw that saidBREAKFASTin the window.
Clara took my hand, and I knew when I looked at her that she’d done something she shouldn’t have; her eyes had gotten very wide and she wasn’t looking at me, she was lookingpastme, and when I turned around my breath caught in my throat, because there were Mom and Dad, looking frazzled and car rumpled. For a moment they didn’t see us, and then their eyes landed on me, and Mom practically launched herself across the room, pushing Bernadette’s butt over in her seat as she sat next to her and hugged her.
“I called Mom and Dad,” Clara whispered into my ear, as ourfather hung back awkwardly, even now, after all these years of practice, never quite knowing what to do with a table full of women.
“No shit,” I replied.
“She has ablack eye,” Clara said.
“No shit.”
