City of Girls

We headed to the back of the theater, where a wide staircase led to the upstairs of the Lily. As we climbed the stairs, I could not stop staring at those two showgirls. Celia and Gladys. I’d never seen such beauties. I’d been around theater girls back at boarding school, but this was different. The theater girls at Emma Willard tended to be the sort of females who never washed their hair, and always wore thick black leotards, and every single one of them thought she was Medea, at all times. I simply couldn’t bear them. But Gladys and Celia—this was a different category. This was a different species. I was mesmerized by their glamour, their accents, their makeup, the swing of their silk-wrapped rear ends. And as for Roland, he moved his body just the same way. He, too, was a fluid, swinging creature. How fast they all talked! And how alluringly they threw out abbreviated hints of gossip, like bits of bright confetti.

“She just gets by on her looks!” Gladys was saying, about some girl or another.

“Not even on her looks!” Roland added. “Just on her legs!”

“Well, that ain’t enough!” said Gladys.

“For one more season it is,” said Celia. “Maybe.”

“That boyfriend of hers don’t help matters.”

“That lamebrain!”

“He keeps lapping up that champagne, though.”

“She should up and tell him!”

“He’s not exactly panting for it!”

“How long can a girl make a living as a movie usher?”

“Walking around with that nice-looking diamond, though.”

“She should try to think more reasonable.”

“She should get herself a butter-and-egg man.”

Who were these people that were being talked about? What was this life that was being suggested? And who was this poor girl being discussed in the stairwell? How was she ever going to advance past being a mere movie usher, if she didn’t start thinking more reasonable? Who’d given her the diamond? Who was paying for all the champagne that was being lapped up? I cared about all these things! These things mattered! And what in the world was a butter-and-egg man?

I’d never been more desperate to know how a story ended, and this story didn’t even have a plot—it just had unnamed characters, hints of wild action, and a sense of looming crisis. My heart was racing with excitement—and yours would have been, too, if you were a frivolous nineteen-year-old girl like me, who’d never had a serious thought in her life.

—

We reached a dimly lit landing, and Peg unlocked a door and let us all in.

“Welcome home, kiddo,” Peg said.

“Home” in my Aunt Peg’s world consisted of the third and fourth floors of the Lily Playhouse. These were the living quarters. The second floor of the building—as I would find out later—was office space. The ground floor, of course, was the theater itself, which I’ve already described for you. But the third and fourth floors were home, and now we had arrived.

Peg did not have a talent for interior design, I could instantly see. Her taste (if you could call it that) ran toward heavy, outdated antiques, and mismatched chairs, and a lot of apparent confusion about what belonged where. I could see that Peg had the same sort of dark, unhappy paintings on her walls as my parents had (inherited from the same relatives, no doubt). It was all faded prints of horses and portraits of crusty old Quakers. There was a fair amount of familiar-looking old silver and china spread around the place as well—candlesticks and tea sets, and such—and some of it looked valuable, but who knew? None of it look used or loved. (There were ashtrays on every surface, though, and those certainly looked used and loved.)

I don’t want to say that the place was a hovel. It wasn’t dirty; it just wasn’t arranged. I caught a glance of a formal dining room—or, rather, what might have been a formal dining room in anyone else’s home, except that a Ping-Pong table had been placed right in the middle of the room. Even more curiously, the Ping-Pong table was directly situated beneath a low-hanging chandelier, which must have made it difficult to play a game.

We landed in a generously sized living room—a big enough space that it could be overstuffed with furniture while also containing a grand piano, which was jammed unceremoniously against the wall.

“Who needs something from the bottle and jug department?” asked Peg, heading to a bar in the corner. “Martinis? Anyone? Everyone?”

The resounding answer seemed to be: Yes! Everyone!

Well, almost everyone. Olive declined a drink and frowned as Peg poured the martinis. It looked as though Olive were calculating the price of each cocktail down to the halfpenny—which she probably was doing.

My aunt handed me my martini as casually as if she and I had been drinking together for ages. This was a delight. I felt quite adult. My parents drank (of course they drank; they were WASPs) but they never drank with me. I’d always had to execute my drinking on the sly. Not anymore, it seemed.

Cheers!

“Let me show you to your rooms,” Olive said.