Who Is Maud Dixon?

by Alexandra Andrews

Florence sometimes suspected that Lucy’s mother had told her to find just one friend in New York and she’d be fine.

Lucy was used to being overlooked—in fact seemed to prefer it—but Florence had had just enough success with men to be disappointed when her charms went unnoticed.

Florence had never been able to reach the pitch of outrage the times seemed to require, and this immunity to communal indignation often left her on the outside of, well, everything. This outrage seemed to be the glue that held everyone else together: couples, friends, the target audience of most media conglomerates. Even the young petition hawkers on the street ignored Florence, as if they could sense her innate solipsism.

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.

“Everyone’s born with different amounts of living in them, and you can tell when someone’s run out. That man had none left. If I hadn’t of done it, he’d of died anyway.”

Here, deep in the woods, there was silence all the time, except when Helen played music. But the opera didn’t bother Florence the way her mother’s radio did, with its car dealership ads and traffic reports and caustic DJs. If anything, opera was like a very noisy form of silence.

Helen was talking but she seemed very far away. Everything felt very far away. Florence felt as if her whole self, her whole consciousness, had shrunk down to the size of a pebble and was knocking around inside her skull. Her insides felt dark and vast, the outer world too distant to matter, like a movie projected on a remote screen.

Death is the most transformative event in anyone’s existence, she thought, yet once it has happened, it doesn’t matter to that person anymore. There’s no person left. At that point, any significance it has fragments and scatters. Its impact is diffused among the survivors.

Disdain, after all, has always been a useful stepping-stone to confidence,

It was as if they were slowly moving toward the foreground of a picture, getting sharper and sharper, while everyone else receded into blurriness.

Her brush with death in Morocco had taught her that total isolation was its own form of vulnerability. It was dangerous to have nobody. Somebody needed to notice if you went missing.