Who is Maud Dixon?(29)
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.”