“You’re welcome,” Florence said cautiously. Greta was treating her with a deference that had been entirely absent from their first meeting.
“So listen, I wanted to let you know that I read your stories, and I think you have a lot of potential. I don’t think they’re quite where they need to be yet, but we could work on them together, if you’re interested.”
We?
Greta went on, “As I’m sure you know, story collections—particularly by unknown writers—are incredibly difficult to sell, but that’s not to say impossible.”
“I know,” Florence hurried to explain. “My plan is to write a novel. That’s what I’m going to do up here while I’m working for Helen.”
“Wonderful. Maybe you’d like to send me a draft when you have it.”
“Really?”
“Absolutely. Call Lauren and set up a time to talk when you feel like you’re ready. But listen, Florence, while I have you here, there’s something you can do for me in return.”
Florence frowned. What did she have to offer Greta Frost?
“I have no doubt that the novel Helen is working on is going to be brilliant, but she’s being incredibly secretive about it and that is making it very difficult for me to do my job.
“I understand that this book is demanding more research than the first one, which is part of the reason she wanted an assistant. But she won’t tell me how much research, or what kind or how long it’s going to take or even what is being researched. I know next to nothing. I realize that Helen finds some parts of the author’s job tedious—the typing, the interviews, the marketing—and for the most part I’m happy to leave her to the actual writing, but someone needs to take care of the other, less exciting details. Do you understand?”
“I think so…”
“What I’m saying is that I’d like to invite you to join me on the strategy side of things. I know you’ll find it helpful for your own career in the future.”
“The strategy side of things?”
“Basically what we can do to make the book a success, beyond the actual words on the page. Communicating with Helen’s editor and various other stakeholders; coming up with the best timeline for submission and publication; putting together a marketing plan. For instance, it would be ideal if the second book were published around when the Mississippi Foxtrot mini-series premieres. But of course to do any of this, I need to actually know what the second book is about, and how far along she is in the process. That’s where you come in.”
Florence didn’t say anything.
“Of course, I wouldn’t ask you if it weren’t in Helen’s best interest,” Greta said smoothly.
Florence stalled for time. “Well, I don’t know much yet. I’ve only read a couple of chapters.”
“That’s okay. Why don’t you just email me whatever you’ve typed up so far.”
Florence chewed on her lip. “Umm. I’m not sure I feel comfortable doing that.”
“Okay, forget that idea. We’ll keep it casual. Can you tell me the gist?”
Florence lowered her voice. “Helen’s upstairs right now. She could overhear.”
“Ahh, I see.” Greta paused. “How about this, why don’t you just give me a ring tonight. We can talk about your novel too. This isn’t just for Helen’s benefit. I can’t imagine you want to be a writer’s assistant forever.”
Florence wasn’t a fool. She knew that Greta was playing her. But that didn’t change the fact that Greta was right: In the grand scheme of things, Greta could do more for Florence than Helen could. And anyway, Greta and Helen were on the same side.
“I’m happy to help,” she finally said.
“Wonderful. I knew you were a smart young woman. You know, you actually remind me a lot of Helen when we first met. Did she tell you about that?”
“She said she sent her manuscript to dozens of agents and she couldn’t believe her luck when you took her on.”
Greta let out a short bark of a laugh. “Yes, I imagine that is the story she’d tell. The truth is slightly more complicated. I initially wrote back to her and said her book was incredibly powerful and well told, but ultimately it was just too rough around the edges. I also told her that I didn’t really take on this type of work; there were other agents who would be better suited to it. I think I even suggested a few names.
“A few weeks later, I heard my assistant, Rachel—this was before Lauren—arguing loudly with someone outside my office. I stepped out to investigate, and there was this steely-eyed woman with the strongest Southern accent I’d ever heard; I thought at first she was putting it on. This woman—Helen, obviously—kept saying she’d made an appointment and she wasn’t leaving until I met with her.
“Rachel explained what had happened: Helen had phoned earlier in the week pretending to work for one of my well-known clients in order to make an appointment in that writer’s name. Then she simply showed up as herself, convinced she’d be let in anyway.
“Well, I guess her confidence was warranted because I did ultimately invite her into my office. Mostly because I could tell that Rachel was starting to panic.
“Helen dropped her manuscript on my desk and told me she’d revised it based on my feedback, and she’d like me to read it again. Then she plopped down in a chair and said—I can still hear her twang—‘I’ll wait.’
“I didn’t know whether to laugh or call security. Long story short, I eventually got her out of my office with a promise that I’d read it over the weekend, and I did, obviously, end up taking her on as a client. As you know, Helen can be quite…compelling. In fact, I see some of that same grit and ambition in you.”
“Thanks,” Florence said, unsure whether she was actually being complimented. She’d rather be known for her talent than her ambition.
“So listen, take another look through the manuscript this afternoon, and call me on my cell tonight. I’m always up late.”
Florence said she would, feeling a mixture of elation and shame.
* * *
That evening, Florence struggled to give Greta answers that wouldn’t disappoint. She’d only seen a portion of the work, and many of the sections weren’t even in chronological order.
“I think she’s probably written, like, sixty pages?” she said. “It’s about a woman who travels to Morocco to work with a childhood friend. So far, not much has happened. I think something bad is going to happen though. The tone is very dark and foreboding. It feels like she’s building to something, but I have no idea what. I don’t think she even knows what it is yet. She gets really frustrated when she writes. I can hear her throwing stuff in her office and cursing.”
“Well, Helen has never been what you would call placid.”
“Few great writers are.”
Greta paused. “Don’t stroke her ego too much, Florence. It does her no favors.” Then she seemed to check her tone. “How are you doing up there, by the way? Believe me, I know Helen can be a difficult person to work with. I can only imagine what she’s like to live with, especially out there in the middle of nowhere.”
“Actually,” Florence said, “I love it.”
She was telling the truth. The seclusion was a relief. She had grown up in an apartment whose door was constantly flying open or slamming shut. Her mother always had on the TV or the radio or both. And she was never quiet. She sang, she hummed, she talked to herself, she talked to Florence, she talked on the phone, she talked to the radio, to the TV, to her neighbors, to her frequent visitors. And what she talked about more than anything else was her daughter, her brilliant daughter.
Florence’s sanctuary had been their small shared bathroom, which was covered in teal tiles and crowded with Vera’s beauty products. Florence liked to take long baths in there. She would lie with her head underwater and her knees jutting up so she could relish the heavy, enveloping silence, shivering slightly with the beat of her heart.
Here, deep in the woods, there was silence all the time, except when Helen played music. But
the opera didn’t bother Florence the way her mother’s radio did, with its car dealership ads and traffic reports and caustic DJs. If anything, opera was like a very noisy form of silence.
Florence found Helen’s relationship with opera fascinating. How had she gone from Hindsville, Mississippi—population 3,200 (she’d Googled it)—to knowing the words to Verdi? Or what they call tomatoes in France?
When Florence had arrived in New York, she’d been overwhelmed by the diffuse, esoteric, truly foreign knowledge that had been accrued by seemingly everyone but her. She tried to look things up online, but the sheer volume of information the Internet provided—the combative free-for-all spirit of it—overwhelmed her. She didn’t want everyone’s opinions. She wanted the right opinions. She wanted to know that red roses were tacky. She wanted to know how to pronounce mores. People like Amanda Lincoln and Ingrid Thorne would never understand the innumerable advantages they had over others. This was how the social order was maintained. Someone who grew up with parents who read Philip Roth and went to the theater and told their children where to put their knife and fork when they were done eating could dismiss others as uncultured or impolite, and it accomplished the same thing as calling them white trash without the same taint of classism. But if your mother wore tight clothes and slathered on tanning oil and thought Philip Roth was a discount furniture store in Jacksonville, where did that leave you? What if you wanted a different life? How did you get from A to B? How did you become the type of person who belonged in B?
Florence didn’t know.
But Helen did. Somehow, she had learned the rules.
Florence finally mustered up the courage to ask Helen how she’d done it, not sure whether Helen would understand the question or, if she did, be offended. But she had responded candidly.
“Exactly as you’d expect,” she said. “I watched very closely and then I played the part. If you pretend for long enough, anything can become natural. And I mean truly natural. I wouldn’t listen to opera or drink expensive wine if I didn’t genuinely enjoy them.”
Florence was reminded of a brief stint in her childhood when her mother had decided that she ought to be an actress. She’d signed Florence up for acting lessons and dragged her to countless auditions.
Florence had hated nearly every part of it—the ridiculous games they played in class, the hammy staginess of the other children, the attention—but she’d loved pretending to be someone else. She’d strip away all her own quirks and become clean and pure and empty. That’s when she first realized that she could build herself into someone new. Someone better.
Living in near-isolation in upstate New York, Florence was starting to accomplish the first half of that process: the demolition. Her interactions with other people had always been the scaffolding by which she’d constructed her personality. Since those interactions had dwindled to nearly nothing, the old Florence, with no outlet for expression, seemed to be disintegrating day by day.
She was happy to encourage the process. She threw out clothes that didn’t look like Helen would wear them, which meant most of her wardrobe had to go. Certainly anything bright or flouncy. With few exceptions, Helen wore clean silhouettes in shades of navy, black, and white. Occasionally she would throw on a discreetly patterned scarf or sculptural jewelry, but most of the time she went unadorned. Florence couldn’t afford the labels Helen wore, but she ordered rip-offs from Zara and H&M online. She went through Helen’s Amazon order history and took note of the books Helen had bought and the movies she had watched. She devised a kind of curriculum for self-improvement. She even asked Helen to teach her how to cook.
She felt a strong desire to fade out of view, to ease off screen and then return, triumphant, in a new guise. She didn’t want anyone to witness the process. It would be like showing someone a rough draft of her writing, which she—contrary to Helen—would never do.
* * *
Florence’s first cooking lesson was coq au vin.
The two women stood side by side in Helen’s kitchen, the pale, late-March sun filtering weakly through the window. Helen had poured them both a glass of red wine even though it was only 4 p.m.
“Okay, where’s our beautiful little bird?” Helen asked. “Let’s give him a little rinse.”
Florence retrieved the chicken from the refrigerator and manhandled it into the sink. She shuddered as she felt the bones shift under the skin. “He feels alive,” she said, realizing that now she was calling it a “he” too.
“You’re lucky he isn’t. My grandmother had me chopping heads off chickens by the time I was eight years old.”
Florence glanced skeptically at Helen; that seemed like something that might have happened in rural Mississippi in 1945, not 1995. But Helen gave no indication that she’d been joking.
Florence placed the slippery bird on the cutting board, and Helen picked up a sharp, heavy knife with a scarred black handle.
“We’ve got to cut him up into parts,” she said. “First, you slice through the skin that connects the leg to the body and then you just sort of—” She wrenched the chicken’s leg back with such force that it popped off with a snap. “Here, you do the other one.” She held out the knife for Florence.
Florence cut the skin, but when she pulled back on the leg nothing happened.
“Yank it,” Helen ordered. “Half-measures won’t get you anywhere.”
“Seems like they might get you halfway,” Florence joked.
“Well, who the hell wants to be there?” Helen asked as she put her cold, wet hands on top of Florence’s and jerked the thighbone out of the socket.
Florence repeated the process with the wings, then Helen went at the body with a few loud thwacks of the knife to remove the breasts from the back and separate them in two. She dumped all the chicken pieces into a large bowl, washed her hands, and started pouring wine from the bottle they were drinking directly over the meat.
“How much wine is that?” Florence asked, picking up her pen to take notes.
“I don’t know. How many times did it glug? Three?”
Florence tentatively wrote down “three glugs.” She couldn’t imagine that would be all that helpful if she ever attempted to make coq au vin on her own.
Helen took out a thyme stem and pulled it between her thumb and index finger so that the tiny leaves tumbled off into the bowl.
“Wait, how much thyme was that?” Florence asked.
Helen rolled her eyes. “One point three grams.”
Florence started to write that down.
“Florence. I’m joking. I didn’t weigh the herbs.”
Florence set the pen down on the counter and closed her notebook, feeling stupid. But how was she supposed to learn if Helen just improvised everything? She needed some sort of framework.
“You seriously don’t use recipes?”
“I can barely stand to read them. ‘Caramelize the onions until they’re golden and jammy.’ ‘Puree until silky.’” She rolled her eyes. “They’re so pretentious, even when they’re trying to be folksy and down to earth. If I’m told one more time to serve my dish with some good, crusty bread and a schmear of butter, I’ll scream. I usually just glance at the ingredients and instructions, then figure out the rest on my own. If I mess up, I mess up. I find that people in general are way too scared of making mistakes. Sure, make a plan and do some research, but when it’s time to act, my god, just act.”
Florence, looking to prove herself, grabbed the knife and abruptly cleaved a mushroom in half. She barely paused before going at the rest of the pile with wild abandon. Suddenly, there was blood everywhere. She held up her finger in surprise. It had a deep, half-inch gouge in it, right above the knuckle.
Helen burst out laughing. “My god, I didn’t know you were going to take my advice so literally.” She tossed Florence a roll of paper towels. “Do you need a Band-Aid?”
Florence looked down at her finger. Blood was already seeping through the wad of paper towels she was pressing into the c
ut. It seemed pretty obvious that she needed a Band-Aid, if not stitches.
“Maybe?” she said.
“There are some in the upstairs bathroom cabinet, I think. Holler if you can’t find them.”
“The bathroom in your room?” She still hadn’t been invited to the second floor.
“That’s the only one there is.”
Upstairs, Florence pushed open Helen’s bedroom door tentatively, still nervous that she’d somehow misunderstood Helen’s directions. The walls were painted deep indigo, nearly black. There was another worn, Turkish-looking carpet in shades of orange on the floor in front of a fireplace. On the queen-size bed, a thick white comforter had been halfheartedly pulled up and straightened. Florence tiptoed over to look at Helen’s bedside table. A pair of reading glasses rested open on top of a stack of books and a yellow legal pad. The notepad was blank, but Florence could just make out the ghostly indentations left by Helen’s pen on the page above. The book on the top of the pile was Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey.
Florence went into Helen’s bathroom and opened the cabinet. She saw the box of Band-Aids, but her hand went straight to the prescription bottle next to it. According to the label, it contained .5-mg pills of clonazepam. Florence recognized the name; Lucy took it for anxiety. She was surprised. Helen did not seem like someone prone to nervousness. She hastily replaced the bottle and proceeded to bandage her bloody finger.
When Florence returned to the kitchen, a blue Le Creuset pot was simmering on the stove and Helen was at the table drinking her wine. She patted the seat next to her.
“Your mother doesn’t cook?” she asked when Florence sat down.
Florence shook her head. “She works at a restaurant. She says she couldn’t bear to spend a minute of her own time in another kitchen.”
“What did you eat growing up then?”
“I don’t know. A lot of Lean Cuisine, I guess. My mom is always on a diet.”
“Lean Cuisine?” Helen grimaced. “That’s bleak.”
Who is Maud Dixon? Page 9
