Who is Maud Dixon?(30)
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 cut. 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.”
“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.