Mary Martha and the chicken salad

I made a chicken salad fit for an American debutante, but gave it a French accent. What have you done this week?

In my second year at university in a small, seaside town, I shared a flat with Mary Martha. She was clever, funny, always beautifully dressed, but walked on the backs of her soft leather loafers, pressing them flat into the sole.

Back home in Virginia, her father was a judge and her mother ran the lives of her six children and, at that point, two grandch…