Her eyes fell on an older man in a gray three-piece suit sprouting a purple handkerchief from its pocket. He was watching her. When their eyes met, he pushed himself up from his chair with effort and shambled over.
He leaned in close. He smelled of liquor and cologne. “Jew or misanthrope?” he asked in a crumbly growl.
She looked at him with distaste but said nothing. They maintained eye contact in silence. He broke first.
“Aw, don’t be like that, honey. I meant no offense. I’m both, you know. I’m double the fun.” He let out a hacking laugh that turned into a cough. He pulled out his handkerchief and held it to his mouth. Something wet settled in its folds.
Florence’s waitress walked over and put a hand on his lower back. “Alright, let’s let this nice lady enjoy her drink in peace, shall we?” She led him gently back to his seat by the fireplace while he mumbled, “She’s no lady. Not that one.”
Florence downed the rest of her drink and went to the bathroom. She looked at herself in the mirror. There were two spigots, one for hot water and one for cold. She held her hand under the hot one until she couldn’t bear it anymore. She’d discovered in college that this particular ritual was the best remedy for anger and despair. Then she went back to her table, left a twenty, and started back to the subway.
*
Vera spent Christmas with her best friend, Gloria, and Gloria’s two children. She told Florence about it that night:
“I’m sure they weren’t thrilled about little old me hanging around all day but of course Gloria wasn’t going to let me spend the day alone. Not that I blame you for not coming home. But, you know, Gloria doesn’t want to see anyone suffer. And Grace, her oldest! You wouldn’t believe it. She’s the manager of the entire Tampa office at Gold Coast Realty. I mean, think about that: They’re a national conglomerate. Plus four kids.”
“I’m pretty sure Gold Coast Realty isn’t a national conglomerate,” Florence replied. “If it’s called Gold Coast.”
Vera exhaled loudly. “Alright. I guess that isn’t impressive enough for you. Four kids and a six-figure job. Meanwhile she still found time to buy me a Christmas present.”
“I got you a Christmas present,” Florence cut in, sounding defensive. She’d sent her mother the collected stories of Lydia Davis. She knew her mother would probably never crack the spine, but there was still a part of Florence that desperately hoped Vera would change. It wasn’t like Florence liked being ashamed of her.
“Well, honey, you’re family, of course you did. Anyway, you’ll never guess what she got me.”
“What?”
“A zoodler!”
“I don’t know what that is,” Florence said in a flat voice.
“You do. You know. Zoodles.”
“I promise you, I do not know what that word is.”
Vera sighed again. “Alright honey, I’ll let you go back to your fabulous New York lifestyle.”
Florence rubbed her face roughly. She didn’t want to act this way with her mother, but she had trouble controlling herself. “I’m sorry, Mom. I’m sure it’s a great gift.”
Her mother was appeased. It didn’t take much. “It really is. The next time you come home I’ll make you zoodles. They taste just like real pasta. It’s incredible.”
“Neat.”
“Oh! And do you know who I ran into the other day? Trevor. What a nice boy. He came right up and said hello to me at the mall.”
Florence’s sense of contrition evaporated. “Mom, you literally despised him.” Trevor was the high school boyfriend Vera had repeatedly encouraged Florence to break up with. Half the reason she’d stayed with him for over two years was to deny her mother the satisfaction. The only thing she and Trevor had really had in common was a deeply felt, if rarely voiced, conviction that they were smarter than everyone else. Not surprisingly, that bond had ended up being too weak to sustain them once they left home.
“Oh hush, I did no such thing,” Vera said. “Anyway, he’s some big deal engineer at Verizon, and he was asking all about you. He couldn’t believe you were in New York.”
“Yet here I am,” Florence said dryly.
“You should give him a call.”
“Why?”
“It’d be nice, that’s all.”
Florence knew that wasn’t all, but she let it go. Not taking the bait would be her real Christmas gift to Vera. “Alright, Mom, maybe I will. I love you. Merry Christmas.”
“Love you more, baby.”
*
The Forrester office was closed between Christmas and New Year’s, and Florence had planned to use the time to work on her own fiction. But for the entire week, she found herself beset by the same problem she’d had since moving to New York nearly two years ago: She couldn’t write. Not a single word.
It was her first experience with writer’s block. After college, she’d stayed in Gainesville and worked at a bookstore to devote herself fully to writing. Every minute she wasn’t at the shop, she was typing feverishly at her computer. She often wrote through the night, sipping cup after cup of microwaved ramen. In college she had discovered Robert Coover and Donald Barthelme and Julio Cortázar. Reading them made her feel like she could step into another world where the strictures of normal life were loosened; the bonds between cause and effect were snipped; and all that lay ahead was freedom. She found the idea thrilling—a reality where she wrote the rules.
She finished several strange, unsettling stories during this period. Her favorite was about a woman who ate her husband bit by bit over many years until she’d consumed him entirely. When Vera read it, she pointed out what was, to her, a fatal lapse in logic: “Wouldn’t the husband realize his wife was eating him and call 911?”
During this post-college stint, her mother had urged her nearly every day to get a real job. After almost two years and countless rejection slips from various literary magazines, Florence had complied. She sent in applications to every publishing opening she could find and accepted the first offer that came her way: editorial assistant at Forrester Books.
Soon after this, her productivity came to an abrupt end. She could trace the origins of her condition to a single night during her first week in New York. Most of the younger staff members at Forrester gathered for drinks every Friday at the Red Lark, a bar near the entrance to the Holland Tunnel. It was a grimy place whose sticky counters assured the wealthy financiers who lived in Tribeca that, despite their suits and their nutritionists and the playrooms in their high-rise luxury condos, they were still cool. The junior staffers went because they had five-dollar pitchers from five to eight.
On Florence’s first Friday, a group heading to the Red Lark had gathered at the elevators at six, and she and Lucy had silently appended themselves to its perimeter. As much as Florence hated to admit it, she was as intimidated as Lucy was. Their new coworkers were confident and well-read. They felt at ease at literary parties with brand-name writers. They wore sheath dresses and vintage jewelry. Among them, Florence felt like an imposter.
Amanda Lincoln was their self-appointed leader. She’d grown up in New York, the daughter of a New York Times columnist and a successful literary agent who sat on the board of the New York Public Library. After Dalton, she’d gone to Yale, followed by an internship at The Paris Review. Her pedigree, in other words, was immaculate. She’d probably never stepped foot in a place like Port Orange in her life.