Who is Maud Dixon? Page 10

  “Their barbeque chicken isn’t that bad,” Florence mumbled.

  “Oh, Florence.” Helen smiled at her with something verging on pity. “I’m sure it is. I’m sure it’s very, very bad.” Florence tried not to wince as Helen patted her injured hand.

  That night at dinner, Florence peered into her dish of coq au vin and noticed several of the mushrooms she’d bled all over bobbing on the surface. She wondered if Helen had even bothered to rinse them off before tossing them in the pot. She also realized that she still had no idea how to make coq au vin.

  17.

  In the first week of April, the cherry blossom tree outside Florence’s window bloomed, and she finally met one of Helen’s neighbors. She had taken to walking in the woods behind the house most evenings before dinner. Despite covering only a couple dozen acres, these woods felt limitless to her. Every time she crossed the threshold from the grassy, dusk-lit field into the darkened wood she got a flutter of foreboding. Deeper inside, she sometimes wondered if she’d ever find her way out. But she loved being in there, completely alone, encountering the same landscape an eighteenth-century settler might have seen. She’d once come across a Cheetos wrapper in the dirt and felt as startled and dismayed as if it had been a dead body.

  Her life in Florida had always felt claustrophobic. The small apartment. The dingy classrooms. Even the places that must have once, centuries ago, offered a sense of expansiveness were ruined now. The harbor clogged with boats, the beaches strewn with bodies.

  New York had been even worse.

  The only place she had ever gotten a sense of the world’s beauty and magnitude was in books. She’d been obsessed with The Lord of the Rings in middle school. She’d loved escaping into a universe entirely unlike her own. It was part of what made her want to be a writer. She wanted to hold that immensity in her hand. To mold entire worlds according to her vision.

  On that chilly April evening, during her regular stroll, she sensed a rustling behind her in the woods. She paused to listen more closely. At first she heard only the sound of her own heavy breathing, but then another set of ragged breaths joined in, followed by the pounding of footsteps getting louder. She told herself to run, or hide, but she couldn’t move. It was like one of those dreams where something is coming after you but you’re frozen in place, helpless to change your fate. She was terrified.

  Just then a bush in front of her parted, and a yellow blur shot out, coming right for her. She put her hands up in front of her, and a low, involuntary whimper escaped her throat.

  It was a golden retriever.

  He loped toward her excitedly, his wagging backside pulling him off course every few steps. He shoved his snout gleefully into her crotch. His tail swooshed back and forth in broad strokes, picking up leaves and twigs from the ground.

  Florence exhaled a phlegmy, manic-sounding laugh of relief and reached out her hands to scratch his ears.

  A man in his sixties came running after the dog. “Bentley! Down, boy!” he shouted. “I’m so sorry, miss. Bentley, down!”

  Florence waved off his apologies. She rubbed the dog’s head and neck vigorously. He raised his eyes toward the sky in ecstasy.

  “Looks like he likes you,” the man said, slowing to a stop in front of her. He was wearing a blue golf shirt tucked into cargo shorts and panting lightly. In his hand was one of those plastic toys that hurl tennis balls great distances. “Bentley can smell a dog person from a mile off.”

  “Hi, Bentley,” said Florence quietly. “Hi, buddy.”

  The man watched them for a moment with a fond smile on his face. Then he said, “You staying at the old house down the road?” nodding in the direction of Helen’s. Florence said she was.

  “So she didn’t warn you about big, ferocious Bentley?” he asked with a chuckle.

  “No, she’s never mentioned him.” Bentley was licking her hands with his wet, sandpaper tongue.

  “He got into her garden once or twice, and she nearly lost her mind. Now whenever Bentley sees her his tail goes right between his legs.”

  Florence felt obliged to defend Helen. “Maybe she’s just not a dog person.”

  “Oh no, she is definitely not that. But I guess she’s a dog-person person and that counts for something. You’re her second visitor in as many months who Bentley’s gone nuts for.”

  Florence looked up in surprise. “Second? When was the first?”

  “Oh, I don’t know—maybe it was longer ago, come to think of it. There was definitely snow on the ground.”

  Bentley suddenly froze and cocked his ears. A second later, he disappeared into the brush as abruptly as he’d arrived.

  “Oh boy, there he goes again,” the man said, shaking his head. He headed after the dog with a wave goodbye at Florence.

  Later that night at dinner, Florence related the encounter to Helen and asked who her visitor had been.

  “I have no idea,” said Helen. “Must have been someone staying at another house. No one’s been here.”

  “Huh.”

  “God, that dog’s a terror.”

  “Bentley? He was so sweet.”

  “Talk to me after he’s dug up all your roses.”

  Suddenly the silence was pierced by what sounded like a woman shrieking.

  Florence looked up at Helen in alarm. “What was that?”

  Helen shrugged. “Probably just an animal.”

  “Probably?”

  Florence walked to the window and looked out. She saw only her own rippled reflection. Then she heard it again coming from somewhere in the direction of the road.

  She said, “I’ll just go see.”

  She walked out into the cold night. After the brightness of the house, it was like slipping on a black hood. She approached the edge of the driveway and peered out into the darkness. She heard the shriek again and walked toward it.

  An owl lay on the ground, peering up at her with panic in its large yellow eyes, its pupils like liquid drops of ink. There was no blood or sign of injury. He screeched again, insistently.

  She walked back to the house.

  “It’s an owl,” she said. “He’s in bad shape. Do you have a towel or something I could use?”

  “For what?”

  “To carry him inside. Do you know if there’s a vet in town we can call?”

  “You’re not bringing that thing into my house.”

  “I think he’s going to die if we don’t help him.”

  “It happens fairly often. They eat mice that have ingested rat poison.”

  “What? That’s horrible.”

  “So is finding mouse pellets in your pillowcase,” said Helen with one of her grim, toothless smiles.

  Florence looked intently at her.

  “Oh for god’s sake, Florence, it’s an owl,” Helen said in exasperation. “I can barely muster up enough empathy to cover the humans I know. Every day we’re asked to feel sorry for refugees from Syria and gay men in Chechnya and Muslims in Myanmar. It’s too much. The human mind wasn’t built to assimilate so much suffering. It was designed to produce just enough empathy to cover its own little community. So please don’t ask me to expend my dwindling reserves on an owl.”

  “Okay, sorry,” said Florence quietly. She sat back down. Then she said: “It’s just that I feel like the owl is a part of our community. He’s right there.” She gestured weakly toward the door.

  “You misunderstood me, Florence. I said nothing about any actual community. Haven’t you heard? We killed them all off. My community is me. And I don’t feel accountable to anyone outside of it—human, avian, or otherwise.”

  Florence was taken aback. Was that really something you could just decide? That you didn’t owe anything to anyone? She could never tell when Helen was taking a position just to add a little jolt to the conversation and when she actually believed what she was saying.

  She tried to imagine what her life would look like if she abdicated all responsibility.

  She couldn’t picture it
. And after a few minutes, the shrieking stopped.

  18.

  By mid-April, about a month into the job, Florence had started doing something that she knew she really, really, should not be doing.

  The more she read of Helen’s new novel, the less impressed she was. The sentences were well written, and the plot was compelling, but for all that it lacked the spark, the life, of Mississippi Foxtrot.

  When that book first came out, Florence had still been working at the bookstore in Gainesville. A coworker had bestowed it on her with closed-eyed reverence, as if it were Christ’s teenage diary. Later, at Forrester, Amanda had summed up Florence’s feelings exactly, saying of Maud Dixon: “I could kill her.” They were jealous, of course—jealousy being a natural corollary to ambition.

  Florence had been blown away by the confidence and vitality of the writing. She had tried typing out a few of its sentences because she’d read that Didion had done that with Hemingway. She’d felt transfigured, like she’d been writing her own work with arthritic fingers and had suddenly found the cure.

  But when she typed out Helen’s handwritten draft of her second novel, she felt none of that. In fact, she thought—with a different type of exhilaration—I could write this.

  That was how it started.

  When she couldn’t decipher a word that Helen had written, she made decisions more swiftly and surely. At first, it was just to avoid another terrifying encounter like the one in Helen’s study on her first day. But soon it became her favorite part of her job. Every time she chose a word to type into the manuscript, she got a small rush. She felt like Helen’s collaborator rather than just her assistant.

  From there, she grew bolder. She started adding words that she knew were not what Helen had written. But they made the book better, they just did. Surely if Helen noticed, she would agree. Maybe she would even thank Florence.

  But Helen did not notice. Every time she finished typing up more of Helen’s draft, Florence saved a new version of the manuscript on the laptop and emailed Helen the file. She assumed Helen was reading over it and making edits, but she never gave her back anything to retype, and she had yet to comment on any of Florence’s additions. Florence began to suspect that her own words might actually end up in the novel.

  One morning, she had just typed a word—catastrophic—that bore only a loose resemblance to the scrawl on the page when she heard tires crunching on the gravel. She sat up. They’d never had a visitor before.

  She stood and peered out the dining room window. A police car was in the driveway. She felt a brief and irrational suspicion that they’d found out what she was doing to Helen’s manuscript. She whipped around guiltily when she heard footsteps creaking down the staircase.

  “The police are here,” Florence told Helen.

  “What’d you do now?” Helen asked. “Rob a liquor store?”

  Helen walked calmly to the front door and slipped outside just as the car door slammed shut.

  Florence craned her neck to get a better view out the window. An overweight cop with gray skin and thinning hair hitched up his pants before waddling as authoritatively as one could waddle toward Helen’s erect figure at the foot of the steps. She was shielding her face from the sun, just as she’d done the first time Florence met her.

  Florence couldn’t hear what they were saying. The man gestured toward the house. Helen raised her eyebrows and laughed lightly. She turned then and gestured at the house too. As she did, she caught sight of Florence’s face in the window and rested her gaze on it for a brief moment. Florence stepped back. She sat down at the table again and tried to look absorbed in her work.

  Helen reentered the house a few minutes later.

  “Everything okay?” Florence asked.

  “Good god, if that is what I’m spending my taxes on, maybe I should be hiding my money in the Cayman Islands.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Oh, some foolishness about speeding tickets.”

  “He came to your house for speeding tickets?”

  “Well, I do have a lot of them.”

  Florence remembered the drive from the train station. She could believe it.

  “Do you want me to deal with them?”

  “Hm? No, that’s okay. I can handle it. I think they’re stuffed in my desk drawer somewhere.”

  Florence, feeling unusually chagrined, erased the word catastrophic letter by letter.

  19.

  The night after the policeman’s visit, Helen looked up from her dinner and put down her fork and knife. “Florence,” she said, “I’ve been meaning to ask you something.”

  Florence froze. She’d been caught; she knew it.

  What on earth had compelled her to tamper with Helen’s manuscript? It was beyond stupid.

  She was so hemmed in all the time by timidity and insecurity that every once in a while some self-destructive impulse in her demanded brash action. It was the same impulse that had made her send those photos to Simon. She had no control over it.

  There was a flavorless, over-chewed piece of lamb in her mouth that she couldn’t swallow. She’d braised the meat herself under Helen’s direction that afternoon. She lifted her napkin to her mouth and quietly spit it out.

  “Do you have a passport?” Helen asked.

  Florence was taken off guard. She shook her head.

  “Can you get one?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  Helen composed a perfectly proportioned bite of lamb, rice, and tomato confit with her knife and fork. She chewed it slowly and thoughtfully. It was a performance, Florence knew, designed to keep her waiting.

  “I thought you might like to join me on a research trip to Morocco. Would that interest you?”

  It took Florence a moment to regain her bearings. “Yes, absolutely.” She was flooded with relief.

  “Great. Why don’t you go to the passport office Monday and see if you can get it expedited. I’ll pay any fees, obviously.”

  “Why, when do you want to go?”

  “As soon as possible. I feel stuck on the novel, and I think being there will help. Besides, I’m getting a little sick of sitting around in cow country, aren’t you?”

  Florence didn’t answer. She had, in fact, never been happier. Every morning she woke up awash in pink sunlight filtering through the cherry blossom tree and thought that she had finally landed where she was meant to be. “Should I look into flights?”

  “Yes, do. Today is—what?—Saturday? Let’s go at the end of next week, maybe Wednesday or Thursday, if we can find seats.”

  “Wait, four days from now?”

  “Why not? What’s the point of waiting? We can fly into Marrakesh then drive out to Semat the next day.” Semat was the small town on the coast where Helen’s novel took place.

  “Should I book hotels too?”

  “Book any place that looks good to you in Marrakesh, but the hotels in Semat are a bit dicey. See if there are any villas available to rent. Something nice.”

  “For how long?”

  “Let’s say…two weeks?”

  Florence nodded.

  Just then her phone buzzed on the table next to her. She looked at the screen. It was another message from her mother: “CALL ME!!!!!” Ever since moving in with Helen, Florence had gotten into the habit of waiting two or three days before returning her mother’s calls. She’d started to find her mother’s flaws even more glaring now that she’d gotten to know women like Helen Wilcox and Greta Frost.

  “Sorry,” Florence said as she turned the phone over.

  “Feel free to take it.”

  “I’d rather not. It’s just my mother.”

  “Everything alright? You can talk to me, you know. I’m no stranger to family drama.”

  “I mean, nothing happened. I just—. Well, at first I was avoiding her calls because I didn’t want to tell her that I’d left Forrester. And then I started realizing how much happier I was not talking to her.” Florence let out a soft, uncomfortable laugh.<
br />
  Helen nodded. “I was in a similar position myself when I left Hindsville. I tried to keep in touch with my family, but they always felt like this weight that was dragging me down, pulling me backward. My mother was dead by then, but my father and my grandmother both resented me for leaving. They thought I’d become this hoity-toity city girl—in Oxford, Mississippi, of all places. I mean, it wasn’t like I had jetted off to Paris. So they picked and picked and picked, trying to bring me back down to size. It was the same thing every time I spoke to them. So finally I just stopped.”

  “You just stopped?”

  “I stopped calling. I stopped writing. I stopped visiting. And it felt like the weight had been lifted. I felt unshackled. And that’s when I was finally able to write Mississippi Foxtrot, when I stopped worrying about what they’d think. I stopped worrying about them at all. It created this wide open space that I was able to fill with something else. The words just erupted from me in a torrent.”

  Florence thought of the paralysis that beset her every time she tried to write. Could Vera be the problem?

  “Mark my words,” Helen said, gesturing with her fork, “cutting them off was the best decision I ever made. I wouldn’t be a writer today if I hadn’t done it.”

  That night Florence lay in bed and stared at the ceiling, which was only four feet away from her face up in the lofted bedroom.

  Could she do it? Could she cut her mother out of her life?

  What she’d told Helen was true—she had been happier since she’d stopped talking to her as much. The distance enabled her to see that every conversation they had left Florence feeling anxious and inadequate.

  It was almost as if there were two different Florences in her mother’s eyes: the potential Florence, the great one, whom Vera adored, and the real Florence, who constantly thwarted Vera’s hopes and dreams. Perhaps this was why her mother had never shown her much tenderness. Her language was warm—full of “honey”s and “darling”s—but she had always called her customers “honey” too, even after management asked her to stop. And all those empty “Who loves you?”s were worse than nothing at all.