Who is Maud Dixon?(6)
A collar stay is a smooth, rigid strip of metal, horn, baleen, mother of pearl, or plastic that one inserts into a specially made pocket on the underside of a shirt collar to stabilize the collar’s point.
Florence thought about tiny pockets on the undersides of shirt collars. She thought about men like Simon who worried about the stability of their collar’s point. The men Florence usually slept with—bartenders and low-level office drones she met on Tinder—were all transplants to New York who seemed as lost as she was. The only guy she’d gone on more than two dates with since she’d arrived had asked to borrow fifty dollars on their third and last. She doubted he knew what a collar stay was either.
There was a world beyond her world, Florence knew, that was entirely foreign to her. Every once in a while, someone took this other world in their hands and rattled it, dislodging a small piece that fell at her feet with a plink. She gathered up these fragments like an entomologist gathers rare bugs to pin to a board. They were clues that would one day cohere into something larger, she didn’t know yet what. A disguise; an answer; a life.
She looked up Simon’s wife next. Ingrid Thorne starred mainly in independent films with the occasional foray onto Broadway. She wasn’t the type of actress whose picture appeared in People or InTouch—most of their readers wouldn’t know who she was—but she had been on the cover of Paper magazine, as Florence discovered. The grande dame of avant-garde cinema, the interviewer had called her.
Ingrid’s background was an unlikely incubator for avant-garde anything. She’d grown up in a small, wealthy town in Connecticut, the child of a successful lawyer and a homemaker. “Connecticult,” she called it in the Paper interview: “They worship at the twin altars of gin and chintz.” She and Simon now lived on the Upper East Side and sent their children to a prestigious private school, but somehow she managed to make those choices seem radical.
Ingrid was no longer young, and she wasn’t classically beautiful, but her features had a fascinating complexity to them. She had a face you wanted to look at for a long time, which is precisely what Florence was doing when her phone buzzed beside her. She glanced at the screen and watched the phone shimmy on the quilt for a moment before picking it up.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Listen,” her mother started in with a confidential air. “Keith told me last night that hedge funds is what you want to be in.” Keith was the bartender at the P.F. Chang’s where her mother worked. For reasons Florence couldn’t quite glean, the entire waitstaff credited him with almost supernatural powers of intelligence.
“I don’t really have the qualifications for that,” Florence said.
“You graduated summa cum laude! I know you think I’m some simple-minded hick, but I do know that summa means best. I’m not sure what other qualification you could need.”
“Mom, I don’t think you’re a hick, but—”
“Oh, I see, I’m just simple-minded.”
“No, that’s not what I said. But I’m not good with numbers, you know that.”
“I do not know that, Florence. I do not know that at all. In fact, now that you mention it, I remember you being very strong with numbers. Very strong.” Her mother spoke with the cartoonish cadence of a preacher or newscaster, an affectation absorbed perhaps by the hours she spent tuned in to both every week.
Florence said nothing for a moment. “I guess I just don’t really want to work in finance. I like my job.” This wasn’t entirely true, but she had learned that it was best to communicate with her mother in stark black-and-white terms. Shades of gray offered her a foothold.
“You like being at someone’s beck and call all day long? I’ve been at someone’s beck and call for the past twenty-six years for one reason and one reason only: so that my only child could tell anyone who tried to beck and call her where to put it.”
Florence sighed. “I’m sorry, Mom.”
“Don’t apologize to me, honey. God’s the one who gave you your gifts. He doesn’t like to see you squander them any more than I do.”
“Alright, I’m sorry, God.”
“Oh, no. Don’t get smart with Him, Florence. Not with Him.”
Florence said nothing.
After a beat, her mother asked, “Who loves you?”
“You do.”
“Who’s the best girl in the whole world?”
Florence glanced toward her door as if to ensure that no one would overhear her. “I am,” she said quickly.
“That’s right.” Florence knew her mother was nodding forcefully on the other end. “You’re not small fry, baby. Don’t act like it. That’s disrespecting me, and it’s disrespecting your Maker.”
“Okay.”
“Love you, baby.”
“You too.”
Florence hung up the phone and closed her eyes. Her mother’s bloated and wildly imprecise flattery had the unintended effect of making Florence feel utterly insignificant. All through high school, her mother had kept up the fiction that Florence was the most beautiful and popular girl in her class when in reality she was a lost soul clinging to a small group of friends held together more by mutual desperation than any particular affinity. The only thing she’d really had in common with her closest friend, Whitney, was a 4.0 GPA. “Don’t you see me?” Florence had wanted to shout.