The Barbizon by Paulina Bren (best novels to read for students .TXT) 📗

exactly as she had imagined it: she could pick out her college dorm as they flew over Tucson and “the rockies looked like a salt and soda map, the midwest like a gigantic patchwork quilt, and lake michigan like an ocean.” But just as happened to Joan Didion, the mask that Janet had carefully prepared fell away as soon as the plane touched down in New York. Janet had planned to look “cold and beautiful,” but upon arriving at the airport she was sure “that arizona was stamped in neon letter[s] on my forehead.” Like countless arrivals to New York before her, she immediately felt “ALONE.” She stood bewildered in the middle of the terminal, unsure of where to go, standing in the way of others who did. Finally, she spied a young woman with a hatbox, and confident that anyone with a hatbox knew where they were going, she simply followed her through the concourse and onto a bus heading into Manhattan. It was only once she was on the bus, sitting across the aisle from her, that Janet saw her luggage tags: Ames, Iowa.

The bus eventually emerged from what Didion had called “the wastes of Queens” and deposited its passengers in Manhattan. Janet hailed a cab. As she sat in bumper-to-bumper traffic, the cabbie eyed her through the rearview mirror. Perhaps he saw that “Arizona” stamp on her forehead.

“New York,” he said, turning around to face her, “is like a big ice cream soda—try to eat it all at once, it nauseates you: a little at a time, it’s wonderful.”

She would soon learn just how right he was. Once checked in at the Barbizon along with all the other GEs, she took one of the hotel postcards out from the desk drawer in her room and wrote home: “Rm 1426—pretty far from the pavement.” The next day she elaborated, dismissing the Barbizon’s “typical room” as it was featured on the postcard; it was bogus, a lie. Her room—a real Barbizon room—was in fact “brother’s-size and old.” She called it brother’s size because back home, in the middle-class, sunlit ranch house in Arizona, it was Janet who had the largest bedroom of everyone and she was used to space to move around in. Still, she had to admit the Barbizon itself was “beautiful, very impressive.” And even if one was quick to judge, as Janet Burroway was, it was impossible to deny the hotel’s pull, its mythology.

Peggy LaViolette met Janet, and immediately pegged her for a greenhorn. Janet had arrived wearing Indian moccasins and other colorful things that Peggy suspected might very well be everyday wear in Arizona, but certainly not in New York. One outfit in particular deserved to have been left in Arizona, she believed: a very gathered and flared turquoise cotton skirt. That said, there were things Peggy admired about Janet. Peggy thought she was probably the kind of fun-loving Western gal who could jump on a horse at a moment’s notice. Janet was not particularly wowed by any of the other guest editors either, Peggy included. She wrote home that she had found them to be “nice but so far not spectacular.” A few days later, however, things were looking up and three or four were now “wonderful,” two or three were “absolute drips,” and “the rest o.k. but not as outstanding as I’d expected.”

Where the future writer Gael Greene stood within this hierarchy in the early days of June 1955 is hard to say, but by the end of the month she was not about to win any popularity contest. Gael Greene was a senior at the University of Michigan when she applied for the Mademoiselle contest. With graduation looming and nothing yet in place, she set to work, as Nanette Emery had done ten years earlier, jumping through the various hoops for a coveted guest editor spot. She worked on her application while assorted friends and people traipsed in and out of her kitchen, where there was a free-flowing keg on twenty-four-hour standby: “Beer suds flowed, somebody’s favorite professor cooked up a batch of manicotti in the kitchen, the phonograph played Pakistani love songs and voodoo rain chants while I—slouch-hatted for inspiration as well as privacy—sat at the typewriter preparing replies to MLLE queries.” When she received the telegram inviting her to New York (not surprised by it, because “I knew I was good”), she fussed over her wardrobe, much like Sylvia Plath had done. Gael solved the problem by raiding her dad’s dress shop in Detroit, though she’d later regret she had not arrived a few pounds lighter to fit the photographed fashions better.

Perhaps to compensate for her few extra pounds, perhaps to mimic the intrepid reporter she planned to be, Gael Greene wore a trench coat: “a great big girl in a great big trench,” recalled one guest editor. At Michigan, Gael had been a campus stringer for Time magazine, and now she lorded it over the rest of the 1955 GEs. When Gael would mention Time, Joan and Peggy would just roll their eyes and back off. Gael gave the impression that she did not like any of the other nineteen GEs—and, in fact, she did not particularly like them: she had no time for their half-hearted ambitions, as she saw them. She suspected that while they might well have come out all the way to New York, their final dream destination was a suburb with white picket fences and a house full of children. Gael, on the other hand, was unabashed in her disdain for such things. She wanted a career, and she was not afraid to say so.

Regardless of what the GEs thought of one another, these were the ambitious girls of their generation, the crème de la crème of their campuses. The day after arriving at the Barbizon, the twenty guest editors gathered nervously at the Mademoiselle offices: among them, Joan Didion, her friend and confidante Peggy LaViolette, and the future writers Gael Greene and Janet