Fly Away Home Read Free

to her ear. “Hi!”
    “Oh my God,” Ceil whispered. “Are you watching?”
    “Watching what?” Sylvie felt the first genuine smile of the afternoon on her face. There was probably some gossip about a star whose sex tape had leaked to the Internet or who’d been photographed exiting a limo, sans panties, or maybe more news about the Academy Award–winning actress whose husband was fooling around with a tattooed white-supremacist stripper, and her best friend couldn’t wait to discuss it.
    When they’d met at Barnard all those years ago, Ceil Farraday had had a Mia Farrow pixie cut and a face as round and sweet as a bowl of rice pudding. She’d arrived at the dorm with a trunk full of Fair Isle sweaters and pleated plaid skirts that she’d taken to the nearest consignment shop as soon as her parents’ station wagon had pulled onto the West Side Highway. She’d spent the hundred dollars she’d gotten to buy black leggings, black turtlenecks, a pair of fringed suede boots, a woven Mexican poncho, and an eighth of an ounce of excellent pot.
    At Barnard, Ceil had been a drama major who’d spent large portions of her college career pretending to be a tree, or the wind, or the embodiment of feminine anima. (“Or maybe I’m supposed to be Eve,” she’d told Sylvie, perched on the window seat, blowing Virginia Slims smoke out into the night. “The director says he’ll let me know Monday.”)
    The two of them had bonded instantly. “You’re so exotic,” Ceil had said, taking in Sylvie’s tousled dark curls, her olive-tinged-with-honey skin, her hazel eyes and prominent nose. “Does exotic mean Jewish?” Sylvie had asked, bemused, and Ceil had beamed, clapping her hands in delight. “Are you Jewish? Well, that’s excellent! Come on,” she said, dragging Sylvie toward the bottom bunk, which her mother had made up with a flowered comforter and down pillows that smelled of sachet. “Sit down and tell me all about it!”
    Sylvie had given her an abbreviated version of her life story, with Ceil’s wide eyes getting wider with every revelation. “Your mom’s a judge?” she said. “Wow. My mom ran for the PTA once, and she didn’t even win.” Sylvie told her roommate that her parents had both grown up working-class, in Brooklyn, both of them the children of immigrants—her father’s family from Russia, her mother’s from the Ukraine. They’d met at Bronx Science High School, two smart, fast-talking strivers who’d spent their childhoods translating for their Yiddish-speaking parents wherever English was needed—at the bank or the post office or the department store. Both Dave and Selma had been told, since they were old enough to hear and understand, that they were destined for great things in the New World—with the implication being, of course, that their children would do even better.
    Selma had gone to Barnard, then Yale, and Dave had gone to Columbia on a full scholarship, then Wharton for business school. He’d made his first million in commercial real estate by the time he turned thirty, and he and Selma had made Sylvie the year after that. Sylvie was their only child, the repository of all their hopes and dreams, which were detailed and extensive. If Selma and Dave had been expected to succeed, to go to college and then graduate school, to become professionals, then Sylvie, her parents intimated, should at least be president by her forty-fifth birthday, if she hadn’t already been named empress for life. In the apartment on West Eighty-second Street where she’d grown up, expectation was like oxygen. It filled every breath she took, every particle of the atmosphere. Sylvie could have no more announced that she didn’t want to be a lawyer than she could have told her parents that she planned on growing a second head.
    “So you’re rich?” Ceil had asked, in her guileless way.
    Sylvie winced. Ceil’s mother, elegant and blond in a Lilly Pulitzer shift and pearls, and her hearty