Free Enter Helen by Brooke Hauser Page B

find their perfect fit. In her neat cardigan and high heels, Helen looked so sophisticated at work, Lou couldn’t help but feel good when Helen sought her out back at the house. Helen used to ask Lou to wake her up in the mornings before school so that she could see her outfits. “Now turn around,” she would say, admiring whatever was her choice. “You ironed and starched that blouse. Must have taken you all morning!”
    During one of those visits, Lou stood in shorts in front of the full-length mirror to show Helen her legs. “They’re deformed,”she said despondently. Her skinny legs didn’t touch at the places they were supposed to—thighs, knees, calves. Only her knees touched. Helen laughed and laughed. Then she told Lou that if her legs touched at age fourteen, she would be fat by the time she was twenty.
    Lou’s mother told her she was pretty, but her compliments seemed vague in comparison, reflecting a mother’s love rather than the truth. Helen knew how to make you believe you were special. She found one feature that made you different and zeroed in on it. Looking past Lou’s glasses, Helen told her that she had the prettiest hair in the family.
    When they started writing letters to each other, Lou was still a kid who wore Peter Pan collars and loved nothing more than her parents, books, and horses. She and Helen were different in so many ways, but they both loved to write letters, and no one was better at it than Helen, who had a way of making any missive sound like a fan letter—and making you feel you were the most interesting and important person in the world. When Helen’s letters arrived, Lou would pore over them. She always asked for details about Lou’s life, rarely sharing any details of her own. “Helen’s really busy,” her mother would say; “don’t write her right back because she’s so good to write to you.” But Lou couldn’t help it; she just had so many questions. Sometimes she felt bad because she would lose her temper with her mother or she would tell a white lie about being at a friend’s house when she was really going out. She was obsessed with making good grades. Helen was always so reassuring. “You don’t have to be perfect,” she’d say, or, “I think you need to quit worrying about being a good girl.” Lou instantly felt better; if Helen said it was okay, it probably was.
    Now the woman who had written her all those letters was the author of a bestselling book. Lou had learned what she could fromfamily members. Other than Cleo and Mary, most of the family hadn’t read it, because of the racy title alone;the friends and relatives who had read it were shocked. It wasn’t just the sex: It was the fact that Helen had written about her own mother and sister, about their being poor and needy. One just didn’t air dirty laundry in public like that, they said to each other; one didn’t expose the family. Cleo, in particular, took offense at how Helen had portrayed them all as backwoods hillbillies. (“She sold her family down the river,” she later vented to relatives at Mary’s house.)
    Since she had arrived, Lou had been eyeing the boxes of books in the den. One day, before she left, she asked Helen for her own copy of Sex and the Single Girl .
    â€œWould your mother mind if you read it?” Helen asked her in return.
    â€œNo,” Lou said. “I’m allowed to read what I want to read.”
    â€œWell, Cleo certainly wasn’t happy about it,” Helen said, giving Lou a copy.
    Back in her room, Lou stayed up all night reading. She was riveted. But she couldn’t help but wonder if Helen really believed everything she had written about life as a single girl—how it’s okay to sleep with guys before you get married, or have affairs with married men.
    â€œDo you really believe that?” Lou asked Helen the next