Who is Maud Dixon?(11)
Her sense of self slipped from her as easily as a coat slips off the back of a chair. She’d outgrown the girl she’d been in Florida, but how did one go about building up someone new? She tried on moods and personalities like outfits. One day she was interested in ruthlessness. The next, she wanted to be an object of adoration. She put her faith in the transformative power of new boots, liquid eyeliner, and once—terrifyingly—a beret, as if an identity could seep in from the outside, like nicotine from a patch.
By the time she encountered Simon Reed at the Forrester holiday party, she had been in New York for two years and still a true self had not begun to solidify. She was a ship without ballast, tilting wildly in the waves. This very quality of unfixedness had probably attracted him to her in the first place. He was one of those men helplessly drawn to these young, shifting forms—for she was hardly the only twenty-six-year-old woman to find herself grasping in the dark for an identity.
He must have known that sleeping with a young assistant who worked for him had the potential to destroy both his career and his family. Why did he do it? Florence didn’t flatter herself with illusions of her own irresistibility. She suspected, instead, that he had a pathological addiction, not necessarily to sex, but to the sight of his own reflection—powerful, confident, desired—in an insecure young woman’s eyes. Plus, a nobody is less likely to kick up a fuss.
And he was right. She hadn’t.
7.
The Forrester office reopened on January second. A few days after that Agatha sent Florence to deliver a bag of books she’d recently edited to an author she was trying to woo. The writer lived up on Eighty-Seventh Street, all the way east. It was an unseasonably warm day for January, and Florence was happy for an excuse to get out of the office.
After she’d dropped off the books, she took her time heading back to work. She turned south and walked the perimeter of a pretty park running along the East River.
She stopped at Eighty-Fourth Street, where a crowd of people were gathered outside a large mansion on the opposite side of the street. They were all women, most of them dark-skinned. One wore a gray maid’s uniform under her parka, like a character in a play. The handful of white women among them chatted with one another or checked their phones.
The mansion’s double doors opened and a stream of girls in red plaid skirts poured out like a nosebleed. Florence read the gold plaque mounted above the door: The Harwick School. Simon’s daughters went here—she’d read it in a Vanity Fair profile of his wife. She looked back at the crowd of waiting mothers with more interest, but Ingrid wasn’t among them. Florence stayed to watch, perching on a bench across the street.
Most of the children were herded into waiting buses; not the yellow school buses Florence had ridden in Florida, but the kind with velveteen upholstery and a bathroom in the back. According to a heavyset teacher with a whistle around her neck, they weren’t even buses; they were coaches. “Coach One leaves in five minutes, girls!” she bellowed. “Let’s go, let’s go!”
Only after the coaches had pulled away, the nannies and mothers had walked off with their charges, and the teachers had been reabsorbed into the school did Florence stand up to begin her trek to the subway.
*
Back at the office, Florence was picking at her soggy, overdressed salad when Agatha called out, “Florence!”
Florence scooted to the door of Agatha’s office. “Yes?”
“Are you sure this is extra chickpeas?” Agatha gestured skeptically with her fork to the bowl Florence had just picked up from the Sweetgreen down the block.
“Um, yep.” She had, in fact, forgotten to ask for extra chickpeas.
“Clara is not happy about this,” Agatha said. “Clara needs her chickpeas. Clara’s going to force her mommy to mainline hummus when she gets home.”
Florence nodded and smiled. Then, when Agatha seemed to be waiting for more, she asked, “Sorry, who’s Clara?”
“Did I forget to tell you? Josh and I finally settled on a name.”
“Clara? That’s pretty.”
Agatha smiled.
“I think that was Hitler’s mother’s name,” Florence added.
Agatha froze, a piece of lettuce quivering on her plastic fork. “What?”
Florence tried to backtrack. “Oh, well, actually I think she spelled it with a K. Being Austrian and all…”
Agatha kept staring at her in silent perplexity.
“Or are you spelling it with a K? Because I like that too.”
Agatha shook her head slowly. “No…a C.”
Florence was silent for a moment. Then she said, “Yeah, pregnancy cravings are so weird. My mother said she couldn’t get enough Filet-O-Fish when she was pregnant with me.”
Agatha started nodding slowly. “Yes.” This was a topic she could warm to. “Yes, well they say that eating fish makes your child smarter, especially salmon, as long as you watch your mercury levels. That’s obviously why she was craving it. Mother Nature knows what she’s doing.”
“Or she’s shilling for McDonald’s,” said Florence with a laugh.
“McDonald’s?”
“Filet-O-Fish? From McDonald’s?”
“Oh, I thought you were just talking about fillets of fish. I’ve never actually been to McDonald’s.”