Free City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert

because everybody around them was also struggling, these people will often report that they were not aware as children that their deprivations were unusual.
    You will often hear such people say: “I didn’t even know I was poor!”
    I was the opposite, Angela: I didn’t know I was rich.

FIVE
    Within a week, Celia and I had established our own little routine. Every night after the show was finished, she would throw on an evening gown (usually something that, in other circles, would’ve qualified as lingerie) and head out on the town for a night of debauchery and excitement. Meanwhile, I would eat a late dinner with Aunt Peg, listen to the radio, do some sewing, go to a movie,or go to sleep—all the while wishing I were doing something more exciting.
    Then at some ungodly hour in the middle of the night I’d feel the bump on my shoulder, and the familiar command to “scoot.” I’d scoot, and Celia would collapse onto the bed, devouring all my space, pillows, and sheets. Sometimes she would conk right out, but other nights she’d stay up chatting boozily until she droppedoff in midsentence. Sometimes I would wake up and find that she was holding my hand in her sleep.
    In the mornings, we would linger in bed, and she would tell me about the men she’d been with. There were the men who took her upto Harlem for dancing. The men who took her out to the midnight movies. The men who had gotten her to the front of the line to see Gene Krupa at the Paramount. The menwho had introduced her to Maurice Chevalier. The men who paid for her meals of lobster thermidor and baked Alaska. (There was nothing Celia would not do—nothing she had not done—for the sake of lobster thermidor and baked Alaska.) She spoke about these men as if they were meaningless to her, but only because they were meaningless to her. Once they paid the bill, she often had a tough time rememberingtheir names. She used them much the same way she used my hand lotions and my stockings—freely and carelessly.
    “A girl must create her own opportunities,” she used to say.
    As for her background, I soon learned her story:
    Born in the Bronx, Celia had been christened Maria Theresa Beneventi. While you’d never guess it from the name, she was Italian. Or at least her father was Italian. From him,she’d inherited the glossy black hair and those sublime dark eyes. From her Polish mother, she’d inherited the pale skin and the height.
    She had exactly one year of high school education. She left school at age fourteen, after having a scandalous affair with a friend’s father. (“Affair” may not be the accurate word to describe what transpires sexually between a forty-year-old man and a fourteen-year-oldgirl, but that’s the word Celia used.) Her “affair” had gotten her thrown out of her home, and had also gotten her pregnant. This situation, her gentleman suitor had graciously “took care of” by paying for an abortion. After her abortion, her paramour had no wish to further engage with her, so he returned his devotions to his wife and family, leaving Maria Theresa Beneventi all on herown, to make do in the world as best she could.
    She worked in an industrial bakery for a while, where the owner gave her a job and offered her a place to stay in exchange for frequent“J.O.’s”—a term that I’d never heard before, but which Celia helpfully explained to me were “jerk offs.” (This is the image that I think of, Angela, whenever I hear people talk about how the past was a more innocenttime. I think of fourteen-year-old Maria Theresa Beneventi, fresh off her first abortion, with no roof over her head, masturbating the owner of an industrial bakery so that she could keep her job and have somewhere safe to sleep. Yes, folks—those were the days .)
    Soon young Maria Theresa discovered she could earn more money as a dime-a-dance girl than by baking dinner rolls for a pervert. Shechanged her name to Celia Ray, moved in with a few other dancers, and