Evelyn tightened the cap on the vodka flask. New York when you’re young, everyone in her hometown of Bibville said with reverence when they heard where she lived, having never lived in New York when they were young. Evelyn tried to love it, and sometimes did, when she was wearing heels and perfume and hailing a cab on Park on a crisp fall night, or when the fountain at Lincoln Center danced in the night light, or when she watched Alfred Molina as Tevye sing “Sunrise, Sunset” from her seat in the second balcony and felt her brain go still. The city hummed in a way Bibville never had, and the taxis were hard to get because everyone had somewhere to go, and it was invigorating. And then it became grating: the taxis just became hard to get.
She’d learned how to live in New York. She knew now never to eat lunch from the hot bar at Korean delis, never to buy shoes from the brandless leather joints that popped up in glass storefronts in Midtown, that there was more space in the middle of subway cars than at the ends, and that the flowers sold at bodegas were usually sourced from funerals. Yet she wasn’t living a New York life. Despite her grand plans, she’d spent most days plodding to work and home from work without moving her life ahead. It was crowded, and loud, and dirty, and too hot, then too cold. It required an enormous amount of energy and time just to do errands like getting groceries. She was always sweaty after she got groceries.
She had expected to feel more at ease now that Charlotte and Preston were both back in New York. She thought the three of them would hang out all the time, a merry band of Sondheim characters working at love and life from their tiny apartments, all getting together on Sundays to punch each other up and drink wine on the roofs of their buildings. Instead, Charlotte, after working as a Goldman Sachs analyst—a year in which Evelyn saw her friend maybe once every two weeks and all Char talked about was how much she was working—had gone back to Harvard for business school. Charlotte had been back in the city almost a year, working for the intense private-equity firm Graystone, which meant her nights and weekends were mostly spoken for. Preston, meanwhile, had submerged himself into his preppy set upon his return from London. Evelyn had kept up with the few friends from Davidson College that had moved to the city, but their lives were starting to take wildly divergent directions. One was an actress and had just moved to Bushwick, and it would take three subways and, probably, the purchase of a shiv for Evelyn to navigate there safely. A second had gotten engaged and was moving to Garden City, Long Island.
The four years since her Davidson graduation had gone by at once too slowly and too quickly, and Evelyn found herself in her mid-twenties without the life she had expected to have. Girls her age were either forging ahead in their careers or in serious relationships that would soon produce rings and engagement parties. Her mother had offered to pay for Evelyn to freeze her eggs, and she hadn’t turned down the offer right away. It wasn’t so much that she wanted a husband and babies. But it would be nice to have a place for once, to have people look at her and think she was interesting and worth talking to, not to have them politely fumble for details about her life and instantly forget her. (Murray Hill, right? No, the Upper East Side. Ah, and Bucknell? No, Davidson.)
People Like Us could be her chance, even if her parents didn’t see it that way. Her father said that that group hardly needed another way to cut itself off from everyone else. And her mother’s response when Evelyn had told her about it was, “So rather than bothering to get to know the interesting social set in New York, you’re now acting as a sort of paid concierge to them? This is why we sent you to Sheffield?”
She conceded she’d long been intimidated by the group of people she was now supposed to recruit. Earlier at the game, she had scouted out some of them, wondering if this social set would get its comeuppance as time went on, the guys devolving into thick-stomached drinkers, the girls becoming haggard. That would prove that her mother hadn’t been right about the appeal of this group. Yet the girls looked great, easy and free with just the tiniest hint of private-beach tan, enamel Hermès bracelets clinking on their wrists, and the guys looked handsome and self-assured, bankers and lawyers and politicians-in-training. Eavesdropping, she’d overheard them dissecting an etiquette violation at a San Francisco private club and had initially backed away, worried they would pass her over and make her feel like nothing. Given her new job, though, she forced herself to talk to a couple of them whom she knew through Preston, and she’d managed to line up a few candidates for PLU. Evelyn was determined to make this work, to prove to her parents and to the people who’d overlooked her that she was someone. The city thought she wasn’t going to make it. The city was wrong.
Preston had been sidelined by a friend of his father’s, and Evelyn and Charlotte started heading toward the stadium. Another cheer started, and the girls did their accompanying hand motions in unison:
When - we fight - we fight - with literary
Tropes - and themes - and leit - motifs because we
Are - the school - that’s known - for melancholy
Wri - ter types - and po - et laureates and
If - lacrosse - is not - our forte then we
Urge - the oth - er team - to try composing
I-ambic - penta - meters, allusions,
Ripostes, similes
And puns!