In Her Shoes Page 13

  “Oh, really?” said Felice. “What year? I was at Harvard. . . .”

  Rose grinned. And did she imagine it, or was Simon Stein smiling, too?

  “Let’s sit down,” he said, and the four of them relocated to a spindly-legged cocktail table. Felice was still yammering about Cambridge in the wintertime. Maggie gulped her martini. Rose thought longingly of a return trip to the buffet.

  “So you’ll think about softball?” asked Simon.

  “Oh, um . . . sure,” she said.

  “It’s really fun,” he said.

  “Isn’t it?” said Felice. “In college, I used to play intramural squash. Of course, not many schools have that, but luckily Harvard does.”

  And now she wasn’t imagining it. Simon Stein had definitely rolled his eyes.

  “We have happy hours, too,” he said.

  “Really?” asked Rose, just to be polite. “Where?”

  While Simon was running through the roster of bars that Motion Denied had visited, Maggie and Felice had somehow gotten onto the topic of television.

  “Oh, The Simpsons. I love The Simpsons! Do you know,” Felice asked, leaning forward as if imparting some valuable secret, “in the episode about Homer’s mother, where she has a fake driver’s license?”

  “No,” said Simon.

  “No,” said Rose.

  “I don’t like cartoons,” said Maggie.

  Felice ignored them. “The address on the license was forty-four Bow Street, which is the actual address of The Harvard Lampoon!”

  Maggie stared at Felice for a minute, then leaned toward her sister. “You know,” she stage-whispered, “I think Felice went to Harvard.”

  Simon started coughing and took a large gulp of his beer. “Excuse us,” Rose murmured, giving Maggie a swift kick, then dragging her toward the door.

  “Not nice,” Rose said.

  “Oh, please,” said Maggie. “Like she was such a treat.”

  “Not really,” said Rose. “She’s horrid.”

  “Horrid!” Maggie hooted. She tugged her sister toward the exit sign. “Come on, let’s go away from all this horridness.”

  “Home?” Rose asked hopefully.

  Maggie shook her head. “Somewhere much better than that.”

  Later—much, much later—the sisters sat across from each other in a booth at the International House of Pancakes.

  They’d been to a club. Then an after-hours club. Then an after-party. And then, unless Rose was desperately mistaken, or enduring some sort of vodka-fueled hallucination, there’d been karaoke. She shook her head to clear it, but the memory remained—standing on stage, her shoes kicked off, a crowd chanting her name as she wailed a not-quite-on-key rendition of “Midnight Train to Georgia” while Maggie cavorted behind her, her own personal Pips.

  “He’s leaving . . .” Rose sang experimentally.

  “All aboard! All aboard! All aboard!” Maggie chanted.

  Oh, God, Rose thought, slumping in the booth. So it was true. No more vodka, she told herself sternly, and bit her lip, remembering what had caused her to get so drunk in the first place. Jim, canceling on their trip to Chicago, leaving her with Simon Stein. “I think you’re more into this than he is,” Amy had said, and the evidence was certainly suggesting that Amy was right. What had she done wrong? How could she win him back?

  “You ladies ready?” asked the bored-looking waitress, pen poised over her pad.

  Rose ran her fingertips over the menu as if it were braille. “Pancakes,” she finally said.

  “What kind?” asked the waitress.

  “She’ll have the buttermilk pancakes,” said Maggie, taking the menu out of Rose’s hands. “I’ll have the same thing. And we’d like two large orange juices, and a pitcher of coffee, please.”

  The waitress walked away.

  “I didn’t know you could sing!” Maggie said as Rose began to hiccup.

  “I don’t sing,” Rose said, “I litigate.”

  Maggie dumped four packets of Sweet’n Low into the cup of coffee that the waitress had set before her. “Wasn’t that fun?”

  “Fun,” Rose repeated. She hiccupped again. The eyeliner and mascara that Maggie had carefully applied the night before had run and smeared. She looked like a raccoon. “So what are you gonna do?” she asked.

  “About what?” asked Maggie.

  “About your life,” said Rose.

  Maggie scowled. “Now I remember why we never go out together. You have half of a wine cooler and decide to come up with a ten-step plan to improve me.”

  “I just wanna help,” Rose said. “You need to have a goal.”

  The waitress arrived, dropped off the plates and a pitcher of hot maple syrup.

  “Wait,” asked Rose. She squinted tipsily at the waitress. “Are you guys hiring?”

  “I think so,” said the waitress. “I’ll bring an application by with your check.”

  “Don’t you think you’re a little overqualified?” asked Maggie. “I mean, college, law degree . . . do you really just want to serve pancakes?”

  “Not for me, for you,” said Rose.

  “Oh, you want me to serve pancakes,” said Maggie.

  “I want you to do something,” said Rose, gesturing with drunken grandeur. “I want you to pay for your phone bill. And maybe gimme some money for groceries.”

  “I don’t eat anything!” said Maggie, which was not quite true. She didn’t eat much—an English muffin here, some milk and cereal there. It wouldn’t add up to much. And it wasn’t like Rose didn’t have the money for it, either. She’d seen her sister’s bank statements, which were kept in chronological order in a manila folder labeled “Bank Statements.” Still, she could imagine Rose walking through the kitchen with a yellow legal pad, taking notes. One Lean Cuisine Oriental Chicken dinner! One-half cup orange juice! Two packets microwave popcorn! Three teaspoons salt!

  Maggie felt her face heating up. “I’ll give you some money,” she said, biting off each syllable furiously.

  “You don’t have any money,” said Rose.

  “So I’ll get some,” Maggie said.

  “When?” asked Rose. “When might this blessed event occur?”

  “I’ve got an interview.”

  “Which is great, but it isn’t a job.”

  “Fuck you. I’m leaving,” Maggie said, throwing down her napkin. “Sit down,” said Rose wearily. “Eat your breakfast. I’m going to the bathroom.”

  Rose left the table. Maggie sat down, stabbed at her food, and didn’t eat it. When the waitress came with the job application, Maggie filched a pen from her sister’s purse, plus twenty dollars from her wallet, and filled the thing out with Rose’s name, checking every possible “time available” slot and adding “I’ll Do Anything!” in the comment section. Then she gave the application to the waitress, dumped boysenberry syrup on her sister’s pancakes, knowing that Rose did not like colored syrups, and stomped out of the restaurant.

  Rose came back to the table and gave a puzzled look at the ruin of her breakfast.

  “Your friend left,” said the waitress.

  Rose shook her head slowly. “She’s not my friend, she’s my sister,” she said. She paid the bill, pulled on her jacket, wincing at her blistered feet, and limped out the door.

  SIXTEEN

  “No more,” said Ella, and passed her hand over the top of her wineglass. It was their first dinner out, their first official dinner-date, which she’d finally consented to after weeks of effort on Lewis’s part, and she’d agreed to share a bottle of wine with him, which was a mistake. It had been years—maybe even as long as a decade—since she’d had wine, and it had, predictably, gone straight to her head.

  Lewis set the bottle down, and wiped his mouth. “I hate the holidays,” he said, as casually as if he’d been telling her that he’d never liked artichokes.

  “What?” she’d said.

  “The holidays,” he continued. “Can’t stand them. Haven’t been able to for years.”


  “Why?”

  He poured himself another half-glass of wine. “Because my son doesn’t come to visit me,” he said shortly. “Which makes me the same as the rest of the yentas.”

  “He doesn’t come ever?” Ella asked hesitantly. “Are you . . . Is there ...”

  “He spends the holidays with his in-laws,” said Lewis, and from the halting way he spoke, Ella could tell that this was a painful topic. “They see me in February, when the kids have vacation from school.”

  “Well, that must be nice,” said Ella.

  “It’s very nice,” said Lewis. “I spoil them rotten. And I look forward to it, but the holidays are still not that great.” He shrugged a little, as if to say that it wasn’t the worst thing in the world, but Ella knew it had to be hard, being alone.

  “So how about you?” Lewis asked, the way she knew he would, because as nice as he was and as well as they were getting along, she couldn’t avoid this question forever. “Tell me about your family.”

  Ella forced herself to relax, reminding herself not to tense her shoulders or clench her hands into fists. She’d known that this was coming. It was only natural. “Well,” she began. “My husband, Ira, was a college professor. The history of economics, that was his specialty. We lived in Michigan. He died fifteen years ago. Stroke.” This was the acceptable Acres shorthand for a dead spouse: name, rank, how long they’d been gone, and what had carried them off, in generic terms (the ladies would, for example, not hesitate to whisper “cancer,” but nothing could drag the prefix “prostate” from their lips).

  “Was it a good marriage?” asked Lewis. “I know that it’s none of my business ...” And he trailed off and looked at Ella hopefully.

  “It was . . .” she began, toying with her butter knife. “It was a marriage of the time, I suppose. He worked, and I ran the house. Cooked, cleaned, did the entertaining . . .”

  “What was Ira like? What did he like to do?”

  The funny thing was, Ella could barely remember. And what rose in her mind finally was the word enough. Ira had been nice enough, smart enough, had made enough money, had cared for her and for Caroline enough. He’d been a little cheap (frugal was how he’d put it), and more than a little vain (Ella couldn’t help but cringe as she remembered the comb-over he’d maintained well past the point of plausibility), but for the most part he’d been . . . enough.

  “He was fine,” she said, knowing it was, at best, a tepid endorsement. “He was a good provider,” she added, aware of how old-fashioned that sounded. “He was a good father,” she concluded, although it hadn’t been quite true. Ira, with his economics textbooks and smell of chalk dust, had been mostly bewildered by Caroline—beautiful, fragile, strange, furious Caroline, who’d insisted on wearing her tutu on the first day of kindergarten and had announced, at age eight, that she wouldn’t answer to anything but Princess Maple Magnolia. Ira took her fishing and to ball games, and probably, secretly, wished that their one child had been a son, or at least a more normal sort of girl.

  “So you have children?” Lewis asked.

  Ella took a deep breath. “I had a daughter, Caroline. She died.” She’d broken with protocol here. There was a name and the fact of a death, but nothing else: what Caroline had been, when she’d died, and what had killed her.

  Lewis laid his hand on hers gently. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t imagine what that must have been like.”

  Ella said nothing, because there were no words for what it was like. Being the mother of a dead child was worse than all of the clichés said it was. It was the worst thing. It was so bad she could only think of Caroline’s death in snatches and snapshots, and not even many of those, a handful of memories, each one more painful than the last. She remembered the sleek mahogany stretch of the coffin, cool and solid under her hand. She could see the faces of Caroline’s girls in their navy dresses, dark-brown hair swept into identical ponytails, and how the older girl had held the younger one’s hand as they approached the coffin, and how the younger one was crying and the older one was not. “Say good-bye to Mommy,” Ella remembered the older sister saying in her husky voice, and the little sister just shook her head and cried. She could remember standing there, feeling utterly empty, as if a giant hand had scooped out everything inside of her—her guts, her heart—and left her looking the same, but not being the same at all. She could remember Ira leading her around as if she were crippled, or blind, his hand on her elbow, helping her into the car, out of the car, up the funeral parlor steps past Maggie and Rose. They don’t have a mother, she’d thought, and the thought had hit her like a bomb going off in her brain. She’d lost her daughter, which was a terrible thing and a tragedy, but these girls had lost a mother. And surely that was worse.

  “We should move here,” she’d told Ira that night, after he’d guided her into the chair in their hotel room. “We’ll sell the house, rent an apartment ...”

  He’d stood beside the bed, polishing his glasses with the end of his tie, and looked at her with pity in his eyes. “Don’t you think that would be locking the barn door after the horse has already gotten out?”

  “Barn!” she’d screamed. “Horse! Ira, our daughter is dead! Our granddaughters have no mother! We have to help! We have to be here!”

  He’d stared at her . . . and then, with the only piece of prescience she’d ever seen from him in almost thirty years of marriage, he’d said, “Maybe Michael doesn’t want us here.”

  “Ella?” Lewis asked.

  She swallowed hard, remembering how it had been raining the night she got the phone call, and how, days later, back at home, she’d dismantled the telephone: unscrewing the mouthpiece, detaching the coiled cord that joined the receiver to the phone itself, prying off the dial, unscrewing the bottom, and pulling out the telephone’s wires and circuits, breaking the telephone that had brought her such horrible news into its component parts, and then staring at it, breathing hard, thinking, irrationally, Can’t hurt me now, can’t hurt me now. She could tell him how this had soothed her for about five minutes, until she’d found herself at Ira’s dusty work-table in the basement, his hammer in her hand, smashing each of the pieces into a thousand shiny shards, and how she’d wanted to smash her own hands as punishment for believing what she’d wanted to believe—that Caroline was telling her the truth, that she was taking her medication, that everything was fine.

  Lewis was looking at her. “You okay?”

  Ella took a deep breath. “Fine,” she said faintly. “Just fine.”

  Lewis studied her, then got to his feet, and helped Ella up. Once she’d risen, he kept one hand warm upon her elbow, steering her toward the door. “Let’s go for a walk,” he said.

  SEVENTEEN

  Maggie Feller spent Sunday afternoon in Sydelle’s all-white fortress, playing Information.

  She had woken up with the phone shrilling through her hangover. “Rose, the phone!” she’d moaned, except Rose wasn’t answering. And Sydelle the Terrible kept calling until Maggie finally picked up and agreed to come over and get her things out of her bedroom. “We need the space,” Sydelle said.

  Stick it up your nose, Maggie thought. There’s plenty of room there. “Well, where am I supposed to put everything?” she asked instead.

  Sydelle had sighed. Maggie could practically see her step-mother—thin lips compressed to the width of a paper cut, nostrils flaring, strands of freshly colored ash-blond hair wagging stiffly as she shook her head. “You can move your things to the basement, I suppose,” said Sydelle, her tone indicating that this was a concession akin to letting her wayward stepdaughter set up a roller coaster on the front lawn.

  “That’s very generous of you,” Maggie said sarcastically. “I’ll be over this afternoon.”

  “We’ll be at a workshop,” Sydelle had said. “Macrobiotic cooking.” As if Maggie had asked. Maggie took a hot shower, helped herself to Rose’s car keys, and made the drive to New Jersey. The house was empty, except for the idiot dog
Chanel (whom Rose had nicknamed Knockoff), who, as usual, howled as if she were a burglar, then tried to hump her leg. Maggie shoved the dog outside and spent half an hour hauling boxes to the basement, which left her a whole hour for Information.

  She started with Sydelle’s desk, but didn’t find anything interesting—some bills, stacks of stationery, a sheet of wallet-sized pictures of My Marcia in her wedding gown, a framed eight-by-ten of My Marcia’s twins, Jason and Alexander—so she’d moved to the more fruitful hunting ground of the master bedroom’s walk-in closet, which had previously yielded one of her prize finds—a jewelry box made of carved wood. The box was empty except for a pair of gold hoop earrings and a bracelet of narrow gold links that rattled inside it. Her mother’s? Maybe, thought Maggie. It couldn’t be Sydelle’s because she knew where Sydelle kept her stuff. She’d considered pocketing the bracelets, but had decided not to. Maybe her father looked at these things, and would notice if they were gone, and Maggie didn’t like the thought of him reaching for the jewelry box and finding nothing there.

  She started at the first shelf. There was a rubber-banded stack of old tax returns that she picked up, flipped through, and replaced. My Marcia’s cheerleading trophies, Sydelle’s sweaters. Maggie stood on her tiptoes, reaching over rows of her father’s summer shirts and brushing her fingertips along the top of the shelf until they stopped at what felt like a shoe box.

  Maggie pulled the box off the shelf—it was pink, old-looking, crumpled around the corners. She brushed dust off the cover, carried it out of the closet, and sat down on the bed. It wasn’t Sydelle’s because Sydelle labeled her shoe boxes with a description of the shoes they contained (most of them very expensive, with painfully pointed toes). Plus, Sydelle wore a six narrow, and this box, according to the label, had once held a pair of pink Capezio ballet flats, girls’ size four. Little kids’ shoes. Maggie opened the box.

  Letters. It was full of letters, at least two dozen of them. Cards, really, in colored envelopes, and the first one she pulled out was addressed to her, Miss Maggie Feller, at their old apartment, the two-bedroom place they’d lived in until her father had moved them all into Sydelle’s house. The postmark read August 4, 1980, so it had been sent right around her eighth birthday (which, if she remembered right, had been a very glamorous affair at the local bowling alley, with pizza and ice cream afterward). There was a return-address sticker in the upper-left-hand corner. It said that the card came from someone named Ella Hirsch.