*
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.”
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.