My Mrs. Brown

by William Norwich

  Just having these ideas made her feel optimistic. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way, isn’t there, Alice?” Mrs. Brown asked.

  Alice sounded absolutely and perfectly convincing when she answered, “Yes, Mrs. Brown, you’re right!”

  Later that night, when Alice was getting ready for bed, and even past lights-out, her evening’s visit with Mrs. Brown remained very much on her mind.

  I may not always understand Mrs. Brown, I mean, really not understand her, but I guess that’s okay? I guess that’s just Mrs. Brown, she thought.

  Alice smiled. And she’s my Mrs. Brown.

  A quiet sense of happiness came to Alice then. Tonight she had belonged somewhere, even as unlikely as it was given the difference in their ages and lifestyles. She’d been helpful, and kind, and the courtesy, and concern, had been reciprocated. Was there any need, any pressing need, to wonder why or how or what it meant?

  Alice didn’t think so. Not tonight. Acceptance and understanding were plenty explanation enough, at least for now.

  FEAR IS CRIMINAL. IT steals from life. In the planning and plotting for her perfect dress, Mrs. Brown remembered a story she’d heard told in church many, many years ago.

  The pastor, who was given to referencing the early-twentieth-century spiritual leader Emmet Fox, no relation to her friend and neighbor Sarah Fox that she was aware of, was preaching that one needed to realize that fear is a bluffer. “Call its bluff, and it collapses,” he exclaimed, and continued quoting Fox verbatim.

  He described an amusing incident that allegedly took place at a town in the countryside in Holland. A lion escaped from a traveling circus. Not far away a housewife was sewing near the open window of her living room. The animal suddenly sprang in, dashed by her like a flash, rushed into the hall, and took refuge in the triangular cupboard under the staircase. The startled woman supposed it to be a donkey and, indignant at the muddy prints it left on her clean floor, pursued it into the dark closet among the brooms and pans, and proceeded to thrash it unmercifully with a broom. The animal shook with terror, and the angry woman redoubled the force of her blows. Then four men arrived with guns and nets and recaptured the animal. The terrified lion gave himself up quietly, only too glad to escape that woman torturing him.

  When the woman discovered that she had been beating a lion, she fainted dead away.

  She had dominion over him for as long as she thought he was a donkey, and as long as she treated him as a donkey, the lion was in abject fear of her. When she discovered her mistake, the old preconditioned fear returned and she responded according to the fear, not her faith.

  This anecdote proved a galvanizing recollection for Mrs. Brown. She needed its encouragement because nearly four months and one long cold winter since declaring her intention to turn lions into donkeys, her ideas for earning extra money were pretty much a bust.

  She made $132 taking in some sewing from the dry cleaners. Yes, she broke her rule about not buying lottery tickets, not once, but twice, and lost her money.

  Meanwhile, every day was business as usual at Bonnie’s beauty parlor, well, that is until it wasn’t. On a Tuesday afternoon in late March something, or someone, you might say, rather extraordinary happened.

  Just before five, the door to the salon opened and alighting in the entrance was a woman who took all by total surprise. Except when they’d visited Mrs. Groton back in the day, celebrities were unusual in Ashville.

  Even Mrs. Brown knew who this was. When she was cleaning and a cover of one of the celebrity magazines Bonnie subscribed to caught her eye, she’d have a look.

  Sailing through the doorway of the salon, long, tawny brownish hair flicking over her shoulders as if airborne in a sultry Caribbean breeze, her skin as luscious as French chestnuts . . .

  What was the supermodel Florida Noble doing in Ashville? Really? At Bonnie’s Beauty Salon?

  It took a lot to bring Bonnie’s to a full stop, but this did it. Florida Noble wore impossibly tight but chic, not vulgar, white jeans—legs as long as highways, waist smaller than a shot glass. Below them she wore sandy khaki-colored strappy sandals with a five-inch stiletto heel. Above them she wore a paper-thin black cashmere T-shirt and a brown suede blazer. Florida Noble, supermodel—Dolce & Gabbana, Virgin Atlantic airlines, Louis Vuitton—magnificent mare, was in need of some beauty assistance.

  Bonnie’s sandpaper voice—she was chanting to excess morning, noon, and night for money, and the herbal cigarettes weren’t helping—trembled.

  “What are you doing here? I mean, oh, that’s rude. Hello. Hello! Come in. Come in. I’m Bonnie. This is my salon. What brings you to Ashville, Miss Noble? May I offer you some coffee? Tea? Water?”

  Florida shook Bonnie’s hand. “Call me Florida, please. And, yes, do you have coffee? Oh, I would just absolutely love some. I was looking for a Starbucks but couldn’t find one this morning. I guess there isn’t Starbucks in Ashville? How extraordinary, the only part of the world I have ever been to without a Starbucks!” she said, her cadence a cultured singsong.

  She rested her extra-large, navy blue Hermès Birkin bag on the counter near Bonnie’s cash register.

  Florida was embarrassed when Bonnie shooed Mrs. Brown into the kitchen to get the coffee. Mrs. Brown returned with the hot beverage in a white mug, a small pitcher of cream, and a sugar bowl on a faux-silver tray.

  Florida took the mug. Something about the decency of this scrawny but gracious woman had instantly touched her heart.

  “I’m Florida,” she said, extending her hand.

  Mrs. Brown bowed her head slightly.

  “And you are?”

  “Emilia Brown,” Mrs. Brown said, taking Florida’s hand.

  “Now, now, Mrs. Brown, you mustn’t monopolize our esteemed guest,” Bonnie said. And to Florida: “You must be lost?”

  Mrs. Brown retreated with her tray to the kitchen and returned with her broom.

  Florida explained what had brought her to Ashville. “I am in what is the equivalent of my senior year at Guilford,” she said, referring to the college just on the outskirts of town. “I’ve been able to do the entire four years in three by studying during the summers and corresponding with my professors, but I’m required to spend the better part of my last semester on campus for my final exams and orals. So . . .”

  She opened her pocketbook and rummaged through it. “I just arrived yesterday in New York from Paris, where I was shooting, and just got up here to Ashville today and have to get back to New York tonight and shoot in the morning and then come back to Ashville Sunday night in time for a meeting with my adviser Monday morning and by the following Monday I have to be in residence here”—she spoke as fast as some photographers shoot film—“but I am going to commute to and from New York—I mean, a woman has to work her way through school the best she can—so what I need is quickly to have one of you please put this color rinse in my hair for my job tomorrow.” Finally, she found the plastic bottle of hair elixir she was looking for in her bag. “Thank God I found it. That would have been a disaster if I left it in New York . . .

  “Oh, and I also am looking for, starting this weekend, a furnished apartment somewhere convenient, or a bed-and-breakfast, or something, a guest room . . . the local hotel is closed for remodeling!”

  This was indeed true. The Ashville Inn, established in 1774, had just closed until the Fourth of July. It was being refurbished in time for the annual Rose Festival.

  Before anyone else could, Bonnie took the bottle of color rinse and led Florida to her chair in the salon. (She wouldn’t admit until weeks later how terrified she was to touch Florida’s hair for fear of overprocessing it or doing anything that might upset the famous, million-dollar mane.)

  Conversation centered on where Florida might live while she was in Ashville.

  The inn really was the best place, but it was closed. There was a motel on the other side of town, but it was not very attractive. A place for transients and “one-night, more like one-hour st
ands, you know what I mean? I mean of course you don’t know, what am I saying?” Bonnie said.

  No one had ever seen her interacting so nervously with anyone. It was fun to watch.

  “You could stay at my house,” said Francie. “Praise the Lord, my teenage boy, Tony, would think his old mother was finally good for something—you know how teenagers are—if I brought you home.” She didn’t mention that Tony had a poster-size photo of Florida in a swimsuit on his bedroom wall.

  Florida, her head in Bonnie’s nervous hands, thanked Francie for the kind praise.

  When a host of other ideas were exhausted, Mrs. Brown said: “I have a spare room and you’d be welcome to it.” She couldn’t believe the words had come out of her mouth!

  No one else could either. Bonnie was so stunned by Mrs. Brown’s audacity that she nearly dropped the bottle with Florida’s hair color. Duly noted, reprimand Mrs. Brown later.

  The supermodel sat forward in Bonnie’s chair, her hair still soaking in bottle color, and craned her swan-like neck in Mrs. Brown’s direction. “Do you really have a spare room, Mrs. Brown? Oh, I’d love to see it when we’re done here.”

  “It isn’t really ready to be seen; it needs some sprucing up,” Mrs. Brown said. “I’m done here by seven, and if you give me about an hour I’ll go home and clean up a bit and then please come by around eight?”

  “I have to get back to New York tonight; it’s at least a four-hour drive,” Florida said. “Bonnie, would you mind if Mrs. Brown took me round to see the room when you’re done with my color?” Bonnie leaned in to Florida’s ear and whispered: “You don’t have to be so kind, dear. Our old Mrs. Brown is a tough bird. You can say no and not waste your time.”

  Florida whispered back: “I may only be a haphazardly educated college senior, dear, but I, too, am a tough bird who can make her own decisions and rarely wastes her time.”

  Freud said anatomy is destiny? Maybe hair is, too, or hair salons.

  If looks could kill, Mrs. Brown would have been six feet under, dead and buried, when she went off in Florida Noble’s emerald-green Jaguar convertible, leaving her coworkers aghast, their mouths open, but for once in their lives with nothing to say—for now.

  THE FIRST THINGS FLORIDA noticed at Mrs. Brown’s house were the smells of wood polish, strong tea, geraniums in their pots, the cat food, and, as Mrs. Brown went through the place opening windows, the brackish scents from the Fogg River nearby.

  The bright overhead kitchen light made her squint. The kitchen table was so clean it practically sparkled. Instead of precious decorator color in the living room it was instead a wash of grays and browns. The dignity of the unremarkable pieces of furniture and the surprise of one: a light-color wood hutch with handsomely carved details.

  A glass-paneled door opened to a narrow hall, where she saw two doors leading to two small rooms. To the left was Mrs. Brown’s bedroom, to the right was a bathroom. Upstairs was a spare bedroom for Florida, if she liked it. They climbed the narrow stairs, Florida’s high heels F-sharp on the red oak staircase. Mrs. Brown opened the door to the spare room and gestured for Florida to have a look.

  The white blinds were drawn, the walls were papered in a kind of forest green, the bed was covered with a camel-colored corduroy spread, on top of which was an aged teddy bear with a sad, bemused expression that suggested he’d lost his best friend, or his best friend’s balloon, a long time ago. Three small hooked rugs covered a spotted-pattern linoleum floor, and a maple desk with a maple chair and a brass lamp with a yellow-white shade completed the room. On the bookshelf was a football with several signatures, a Webster’s dictionary, and an atlas.

  “You are welcome to stay here while you finish school,” Mrs. Brown said.

  Florida entered. Santo jumped on the bed and raised his chin for Florida to pet.

  “I’d love it,” Florida told Mrs. Brown. “I feel at home already. I promise I won’t be a pest—I’ll stay out of your kitchen and in my room because I’ll have so much studying to do—but Lord knows I’d rather be here so cozy and all and not in some hotel or apartment alone. Solitude is one thing, and very good for you sometimes, but being alone is quite another thing.”

  Returning to the kitchen Mrs. Brown put the teakettle on and opened the tin of Scandinavian butter cookies. There were a few left.

  Florida, all legs and arms, sat at the kitchen table and stared at the cookies. “For every bite I’ll lose a booking,” she said, laughing.

  “Booking?”

  “A modeling job, they’re called bookings,” she explained.

  Mrs. Brown nodded.

  Florida smiled. She sat back, sipping her tea. The butter cookie she was eating was certainly the most delicious thing she’d ever had, and Santo in her lap the softest, sweetest cat. She felt so comfortable in her own skin tonight, which unfortunately was rare, even for such highly paid skin. The thought of what her friends would say, or the press, if they saw these humble digs, never entered her mind. The little lady with hands callused from manual labor at whose table she sat was kindness and courtesy personified. That is all that mattered.

  “About money, Mrs. Brown. How is, say, two hundred and fifty dollars a week for, well, we’d better do the room through the summer term just in case I have to get an extension on my work or anything . . . so that would be—” She looked in her bag for her phone, putting a green leather notebook, folded pieces of paper, a lipstick in a gold case, and a pair of sunglasses on the table until she found her phone. Florida clicked away on the phone’s calendar-calculator and counted the weeks—nineteen weeks. “Four thousand and seven hundred and fifty dollars. But let’s say an even five thousand dollars, okay?”

  It was a tremendous sum and would almost pay for her dress! Mrs. Brown was speechless.

  “You’re right,” Florida said, misunderstanding her silence. “I’d be paying much more at the Ashville Inn, rooms there are two hundred a night. Seven fifty a week is more accurate.”

  “No,” Mrs. Brown exclaimed.

  “Five hundred?”

  “No, no . . . that isn’t what I meant. I mean, even two hundred and fifty is too much. I couldn’t accept that.”

  Florida laughed. “Oh, Mrs. Brown, but it isn’t. Not for what I am getting. And not for what I am used to paying at hotels these days, like the Ritz in Paris, the Four Seasons in New York, the Berkeley and Claridge’s in London, the Sunset Tower in L.A.”

  Florida continued: “Even bed-and-breakfasts are charging over three hundred dollars a night in places like Vermont or the Sonoma Valley. . . . I’m just so grateful to have met you. There are no coincidences, are there? Isn’t life wonderful when you get out of the way and just let it unfold?”

  She didn’t know what to say. They settled on two hundred and fifty dollars a week. Mrs. Brown wouldn’t accept more. “What do you like for breakfast? I will make sure it is in the house,” she said when she had regained her composure.

  Florida Noble wrote Mrs. Brown a check in the amount of one thousand dollars as a deposit on the room.

  Mrs. Brown said a deposit wasn’t necessary.

  Florida insisted, saying she wanted to do things the “big city way,” and then left, thanking Mrs. Brown profusely and making her gilded way back to New York, promising to return in five days’ time, on Sunday night.

  “FLORIDA NOBLE AND THE cleaning lady! I mean, Florida Noble and a cleaning woman! What’s the world coming to? We can’t let this happen!” Francie declared the next morning.

  It was Cinderella Central at Bonnie’s Beauty Salon, and the news of the supermodel taking a room at Emilia Brown’s house wasn’t going down without envy and comment.

  Fortunately, Mrs. Brown was not there to hear this. She was running errands for Bonnie.

  “Bonnie, you should pay old Brown cow less while Florida is bunking with her,” Hillie said emphatically. “She is making a fortune thanks to you. It’s because of you she met Florida. She owes you some commission. That’s how real estate works.”<
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  Bonnie decided she would try to remain neutral. Although she, too, was envious of Mrs. Brown’s inexplicable good fortune, she also was shrewd enough to realize that she should stay on her cleaning lady’s good side. This would assure that Florida Noble returned to her salon, and often, during her time in Ashville.

  “Nice things happen to good people,” Bonnie said, perched at the cash register, counting her receipts. “Mrs. Brown is a hard worker who asks for very little.”

  “Oh, please,” Francie said over her shoulder while she washed hair combs in her sink, “she is a manipulative little backstabber. She stole Florida right out from under us. My mother always said, ‘Watch out for those little brown wrens,’ course she meant they’d steal your husband, but whatever, she was right. Nowadays, they’ll steal your job. And besides, what is she going to do with the money? She doesn’t have a family to feed and we do.”

  Bonnie shot her a look that said that it was time to change the subject. But Francie continued.

  “I give it one night, if she can last that long,” Francie said. “One night in Brown’s dull shithole, and that supermodel—honey, I don’t care how much charity is on her brain—will be running for the hills. I’d make up your guest room, Bonnie, and be ready.”

  Meanwhile, Mrs. Brown, oblivious to the nattering chorus back at the salon, was finishing up Bonnie’s shopping—paper towels, lemon-scented dishwashing liquid—and had proceeded to the dry cleaners. After having exchanged pleasantries with the proprietor, Vladimir Brzezinski—Vladimir had been one of Mrs. Brown’s classmates at the Ashville High School—she was walking along Main Street with Bonnie’s sweaters and pants in plastic wrapping when something new caught her eye.

  Off Main Street in Ashville was a string of narrow streets with late-nineteenth-century three- or four-story brick buildings with offices, storefronts, and apartments. In some buildings, there were loft spaces that the more artistic constituency from the nearby college leased for working space.