Helen nodded. “I was in a similar position myself when I left Hindsville. I tried to keep in touch with my family, but they always felt like this weight that was dragging me down, pulling me backward. My mother was dead by then, but my father and my grandmother both resented me for leaving. They thought I’d become this hoity-toity city girl—in Oxford, Mississippi, of all places. I mean, it wasn’t like I had jetted off to Paris. So they picked and picked and picked, trying to bring me back down to size. It was the same thing every time I spoke to them. So finally I just stopped.”
“You just stopped?”
“I stopped calling. I stopped writing. I stopped visiting. And it felt like the weight had been lifted. I felt unshackled. And that’s when I was finally able to write Mississippi Foxtrot, when I stopped worrying about what they’d think. I stopped worrying about them at all. It created this wide open space that I was able to fill with something else. The words just erupted from me in a torrent.”
Florence thought of the paralysis that beset her every time she tried to write. Could Vera be the problem?
“Mark my words,” Helen said, gesturing with her fork, “cutting them off was the best decision I ever made. I wouldn’t be a writer today if I hadn’t done it.”
That night Florence lay in bed and stared at the ceiling, which was only four feet away from her face up in the lofted bedroom.
Could she do it? Could she cut her mother out of her life?
What she’d told Helen was true—she had been happier since she’d stopped talking to her as much. The distance enabled her to see that every conversation they had left Florence feeling anxious and inadequate.
It was almost as if there were two different Florences in her mother’s eyes: the potential Florence, the great one, whom Vera adored, and the real Florence, who constantly thwarted Vera’s hopes and dreams. Perhaps this was why her mother had never shown her much tenderness. Her language was warm—full of “honey”s and “darling”s—but she had always called her customers “honey” too, even after management asked her to stop. And all those empty “Who loves you?”s were worse than nothing at all.
What Florence wanted to do was prove to her mother that this Florence, the one she really was, could be great on her own terms: as a writer; as an artist. She was sick of being made to feel like she was falling short of Vera’s ideal.
Perhaps this was a test. If she could cast off her mother, her reward would be the same as Helen’s: an unblocking. A violent unleashing of her talent, a torrent of brilliance. Her own version of Mississippi Foxtrot.
Mark my words, Helen had said. I wouldn’t be a writer today if I hadn’t done it.
Florence looked at her phone, glowing in the darkness of her room. She held it in her hands briefly like an amulet. Then she wrote a message to her mother: I’m going out of the country for a while for work. I won’t be in touch while I’m traveling. It was nothing final, she told herself. Just a trial separation.
Almost immediately after she sent it, her mother called.
She silenced the ring and turned off the phone.
20.
On Monday afternoon, Florence stood outside the Dunkin’ Donuts a block from the Forrester office, chewing on the straw of her iced coffee. She’d just taken the train into Manhattan from upstate. The closest place to expedite a passport was the US passport office on Hudson Street—which happened to sit directly across the street from Forrester’s building. According to Simon’s restraining order, she wasn’t allowed within five hundred feet of it, but this risk, she’d decided, was worth taking.
She studied the building and tried to find his window. Was it five hundred feet as the crow flies? Simon’s office was on the fourteenth floor, so the elevator ride would take up nearly a third of that distance.
“Florence?”
She turned. Amanda Lincoln was walking toward her, smiling in amazement.
“I thought that was you. What are you doing here? Are you back at Forrester?”
“No. I have a meeting nearby,” Florence said automatically. She gestured vaguely toward the west side. The only thing that lay west of Forrester was the UPS plant, she realized.
“Are you still living in the city then? You disappeared so completely we thought maybe you’d left.”
Amanda was clearly fishing for some piece of gossip she could relate breathlessly to her colleagues upstairs. （“You guys won’t believe who I just ran into.”） Florence couldn’t imagine what they’d said about her when she was fired. She knew the story about the photographs had gotten out because Lucy had made a vague reference to it in one of her voicemails.
“No. I’m up near Hudson now. I love it. It’s such a relief to be out of the city. To be honest, I always found New York slightly overrated.” And then, recklessly: “You should come up to visit.”
“I’d love that.” They maintained eye contact in silence, each aware that such an outcome was absurd. They had never been friends. They were playing a game of chicken.
Florence broke first. “I can’t put you up, unfortunately—I’m in a guesthouse that belongs to a sort of mentor of mine, but it’s really small.”
“That sounds amazing. I need to get a mentor with a guesthouse,” said Amanda with a laugh. “How do you know him?”
“Her.”
“Oh, sorry, I just assumed.”
Florence felt a familiar prickling in her fingers, the heat in her gut. She wanted desperately to humiliate Amanda. To make her feel ridiculous. Amanda had probably never felt ridiculous a day in her life. She dug the fingernails on her left hand into her palm. They weren’t sharp enough.
“I have to go,” Florence said. “I’m going to be late.”
“Oh no. Well it was so good to see you!”
Amanda leaned in to kiss her on the cheek as Florence awkwardly responded with a hug. She ended up with a mouthful of Amanda’s hair.
Later, in line at the passport office, she replayed the encounter in her mind. Amanda could report her to the police for violating the restraining order. Or to Simon. Yes, that’s what she would do. Florence supposed she could deny it. Anyway, she was leaving the country in a few days.
She had never traveled farther than LA, where she’d flown for an audition when she was nine. Her mother had been giddy with excitement on the way there, then grim with disappointment on the way home.
Florence had a sense that she, too, would return a different person, that travel would change her. Change is never a smooth curve; it comes in leaps and jolts, plateaus and remissions. And in the periods after an old identity fades away but before a new one is fully installed, there is a certain sense of impunity. As if nothing quite matters. You are not quite yourself. You’re not quite anyone.
She was running out the clock on Florence, on the person she currently was. It was a pleasant thought. She was sick to death of herself. That was one of the problems of always being stuck in your own head; the outside world isn’t loud enough to drown out the constant monologue on the inside. The same shit, day after day. Does she like me? Do I look okay? Will I ever be happy? Will I ever be successful? It was like listening to the same song over and over every day for years. Didn’t they torture people that way?