In Her Shoes Page 3

  Chanel, the golden retriever—Sydelle the Stepmonster’s dog—turned in wild circles up and down the length of the yard as Rose drove up the driveway. A light went on in an upstairs bedroom, and another light appeared in the downstairs hall as Rose grabbed Maggie by her straps and hauled her onto her feet.

  “Get up,” she ordered.

  Maggie stumbled in her sister’s grasp, weaving up the driveway until she arrived at the front door of the oddly shaped modern house that their father and stepmother called home. The hedges were pruned into tortured curlicues, per Sydelle’s instructions, and the doormat read, “Welcome Friends!” Rose had always figured the mat had come with the house, as their stepmother was neither particularly welcoming nor especially friendly. Maggie staggered up the path and bent over. Rose thought she was throwing up until she saw Maggie flip over one of the flagstones and fish out a key.

  “You can go now,” said Maggie, leaning against the door and fumbling with the lock. She waved good-bye without turning around. “Thanks for the ride; now, get lost.”

  The front door flew open as Sydelle Levine Feller stepped out into the night, lips pursed, bathrobe belted tightly around her five foot figure, face gleaming with skin cream. In spite of hours of exercise and thousands of dollars’ worth of Botox shots and the recent addition of tattooed eyeliner, Sydelle Levine Feller was not a pretty woman. For one thing, she had tiny, dull brown eyes. For another, she had enormous, flaring nostrils—the kind of thing Rose always figured that the surgeons couldn’t correct, because surely Sydelle had to have noticed that she could easily fit a Hebrew National salami up each one.

  “She’s drunk,” Sydelle said, her nostrils flaring. “What a surprise.” As always, she addressed her most hurtful remarks to the air three inches to the left of the recipient’s face, as if she were directing her observation to some invisible onlooker who would undoubtedly see her side of things. Rose could remember dozens—no, hundreds—of those catty observations zinging past her own left ear . . . and Maggie’s. Maggie, you need to apply yourself to your school-work. Rose, I don’t think you need a second helping.

  “Can’t get anything by you, can I, Sydelle?” asked Maggie. Rose snorted in spite of herself, and for a moment, the two of them were a team again, united against a common, formidable enemy.

  “Sydelle, I need to talk to my father,” said Rose.

  “And I,” Maggie announced, “need to use the facilities.”

  Rose looked up and saw the glint of her father’s glasses through the bedroom window. His tall, thin, slightly stooped frame was floating in pajama bottoms and an old T-shirt, and his fine gray hair drifted up around his bald spot. When did he get so old? Rose thought. He looked like a ghost. In the years since they’d been married, Sydelle had gotten more vivid—her lipstick increasingly brighter, her highlights ever more golden—and her father had faded, like a photograph left in the sun. “Hey, Dad!” she called. Her father turned toward her voice and started to open the window.

  “Darling, I’ll take care of this,” Sydelle called up toward the bedroom window. Her words were sweet. Her tone was icy. Michael Feller paused with his hands at the bottom of the window, and Rose could imagine his face crumpling into its familiar expression of sadness and defeat. An instant later, the light flicked off, and her father vanished from view. “Shit,” Rose muttered, although she wasn’t surprised. “Dad!” she yelled again, helplessly.

  Sydelle shook her head. “No,” she said. “No, no, no.”

  “This episode brought to you by the word No,” said Maggie, and Rose laughed, then returned her attention to her stepmother. She remembered the first day Sydelle had showed up at their apartment. Their father had been dating her for two months and had gotten dressed up for this occasion. Rose recalled him tugging at the sleeves of his sport jacket, readjusting the knot of his tie. “She’s very excited about meeting both of you,” he told Rose, who was then twelve, and Maggie, who was ten. Rose remembered thinking that Sydelle was the most glamorous woman she’d ever seen. She’d worn gold bracelets and gold earrings and shiny gold sandals. Her hair was streaked with ash and copper, her eyebrows were plucked to thin golden parentheses. Even her lipstick had a golden tinge. Rose was dazzled. It wasn’t until later that she noticed Sydelle’s less-lovely features—the way that her mouth fell naturally into a frown, how her eyes were the color of a muddy puddle, the nostrils that loomed like twin Lincoln Tunnels in the center of her face.

  At dinner, Sydelle slid the bread basket out of her reach. “None for us!” she’d simpered, with what Rose thought was supposed to be a conspiratorial wink. “We girls need to watch our figures!” She pulled the same trick with the butter. When Rose made the mistake of reaching for a second helping of potatoes, Sydelle pursed her lips. “It takes the stomach twenty minutes to send a message to the brain that it is full,” she lectured. “Why don’t you wait a while and see if you really want those?” Her father and Maggie got ice cream for dessert. Rose got a dish of grapes. Sydelle had nothing. “I don’t care for sweets,” she said. The whole performance made Rose feel like throwing up . . . throwing up, and then sneaking back to the refrigerator for a belated bowl of ice cream. Which, if she remembered correctly, was exactly what she’d done.

  Now she stared at Sydelle, imploring, wanting desperately to be done with this task, to drop Maggie off and hurry back to Jim . . . if he was even still there.

  “I’m very sorry,” Sydelle said, in a tone indicating that she was really anything but sorry. “If she’s been drinking, she can’t come in.”

  “Well, I haven’t been drinking. Let me talk to my father.”

  Sydelle shook her head again. “Maggie is not your responsibility,” she recited, parroting the speech she’d no doubt memorized from a Tough Love book. Or, more likely, a Tough Love pamphlet. Sydelle wasn’t much of a reader.

  “Let me talk to him,” Rose said again, knowing it was hopeless.

  Sydelle turned her body so that she was blocking the doorway, as if Rose and Maggie might try to sneak in past her. And Maggie wasn’t improving the situation.

  “Hey, Sydelle!” she cawed, shoving her sister aside. “You look great!” She squinted at her stepmother’s face. “You did something new, right? Chin lift? Cheek implant? Li’l Botox? What’s your secret?”

  “Maggie,” Rose whispered, grabbing her sister’s shoulders and telepathically begging her to shut up. Which Maggie didn’t do.

  “Way to spend our inheritance!” she howled.

  Sydelle finally looked right at them, instead of at the space between the two girls. Rose could practically hear what she was thinking, which was that her daughter, the much-vaunted Marcia, would never behave in such a fashion. Marcia—or My Marcia, as she was commonly called—was eighteen and a freshman at Syracuse by the time Sydelle and her father had wed. My Marcia, as Sydelle never tired of reminding Rose and Maggie, wore a perfect size six. My Marcia had been a member of the National Honor Society and the homecoming court. My Marcia had joined the best sorority at Syracuse, had graduated with honors, had worked for three years as an assistant to one of the top interior decorators in New York City before marrying a dot-com gazillionaire and gracefully retreating into motherhood and a seven-bedroom showplace in Short Hills.

  “You both need to leave,” said Sydelle, and closed the door, leaving Maggie and Rose out in the cold.

  Maggie stared up at the bedroom window, perhaps hoping that their father would toss his wallet down. Finally, she turned and headed to the driveway, pausing only to yank one of Sydelle’s curlicued hedges out of the ground and throw it at the doorstep, where it landed in a rattling shower of dirt. As Rose watched, Maggie pulled off the purloined high heels and hurled them at her sister on the lawn. “Here you go,” she said.

  Rose’s hands curled into fists. She should have been in her apartment, in bed with Jim. Instead, here she was, in the middle of the night, in the middle of a frozen lawn in New Jersey, trying to help her sister, who didn’t even want
to be helped.

  Maggie crossed the lawn on her bare feet and began limping down the road. “Where do you think you’re going?” Rose called.

  “Somewhere. Anywhere.” Maggie said. “Don’t worry about me, I’ll be okay.” She’d made it almost to the corner before Rose caught up.

  “Let’s go,” Rose said roughly. “You can stay with me.” Even as the words were exiting her lips, her internal alarms were sounding shrieking whoops of warning. Inviting Maggie to stay was like offering to host a hurricane, which she’d learned the hard way five years ago when Maggie had moved in with her for three horrible weeks. Maggie in your house meant that money would go missing along with your best lipstick, favorite pair of earrings, and costliest shoes. Your car would vanish for days at a time and reappear with an empty gas tank and brimming ashtrays. Your house keys would disappear, and your clothes would waltz off their hangers, never to be seen again. Maggie in residence meant mess and confusion, dramatic scenes, tears and fights and hurt feelings. It meant the end of any peace and quiet she might have been foolish enough to hope for. Quite possibly, she thought with a shudder, it meant the end of Jim.

  “Come on,” Rose said again.

  Maggie shook her head back and forth, a child’s exaggerated no.

  Rose sighed. “It’ll only be for the night,” she said. But at the touch of Rose’s hand on her shoulder, Maggie whirled around. “No it won’t,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Because I got evicted again, all right?”

  “What happened?” asked Rose, and restrained herself from adding, “this time.”

  “I got mixed up,” Maggie muttered.

  Mixed up, Rose had long ago learned, was Maggie’s shorthand for the ways the world confounded her, the ways that her learning disabilities had her hamstrung and crippled. Numbers tripped her up, fractions and directions and balancing a checkbook were absolute impossibilities. Tell her to double a recipe and she couldn’t. Ask her to find her way from Point A to Point B and Maggie would usually wind up at Point K, where she’d unfailingly locate a bar and have a few guys clustered around her by the time Rose showed up to retrieve her.

  “Fine,” said Rose. “We’ll figure it out in the morning.”

  Maggie wrapped her arms around herself, and stood, skinny and shivering. She really should have been an actress, Rose thought. It was a shame all of this dramatic ability never got put to better use than extracting cash, shoes, and temporary housing from her family.

  “I’ll be fine,” said Maggie. “I’ll just stay here until it gets light, and then . . .” She sniffled. Goose bumps dotted her arms and shoulders. “I’ll find somewhere to go.”

  “Come on,” said Rose.

  “You don’t want me,” Maggie repeated sadly. “Nobody does.”

  “Just get in the car.” Rose turned and started walking toward the driveway, and she wasn’t a bit surprised when, after a moment, Maggie followed. There were some things in life you could always count on, and Maggie needing help, Maggie needing money, Maggie just plain needing was one of them.

  Maggie was quiet during the twenty-minute ride to Philadelphia, while Rose tried to decide how she was going to keep her sister from noticing that there was a pantsless partner in her bed. “You take the couch,” she whispered once they were in her apartment, hurrying to snatch Jim’s suit off the floor. Maggie didn’t miss a thing.

  “My, my,” she drawled. “What have we here?” Her hand darted into the bundle of clothing in Rose’s arms and emerged, seconds later, triumphantly clutching Jim’s wallet. Rose grabbed for it, but Maggie jerked it away. So it begins, thought Rose.

  “Give that back,” she whispered. Maggie flipped the wallet open.

  “James R. Danvers,” she recited loudly. “Society Hill Towers, Philadelphia, Pee-Aye. Very nice.”

  “Shh!” Rose whispered, casting an alarmed glance at the wall behind which James R. Danvers presumably slumbered.

  “Nineteen sixty-four,” Maggie read in a stentorian voice. Rose could practically hear the gears turning as Maggie struggled to do the math. “He’s thirty-five?” she finally asked. Rose grabbed the wallet from Maggie’s hand.

  “Go to sleep,” she hissed.

  Maggie selected a T-shirt from the clothes draped over Rose’s treadmill and pulled her dress over her head. “Don’t say it,” she warned.

  “You’re too thin,” Rose blurted, shocked by the sight of the prominent sweep of Maggie’s collarbone and the individual bumps of her vertebra, made all the more pathetic by her ridiculous store-bought breasts.

  “And you haven’t been using the Ab Master I bought you,” Maggie retorted, yanking the shirt over her head and snuggling into the couch.

  Rose opened her mouth, then shut it. Just get her to sleep, she told herself.

  “Your boyfriend looks cute, though,” Maggie said, and yawned. “Could you bring me a glass of water and two Advils, please?”

  Rose ground her teeth, but fetched the medication and the water, and watched Maggie gulp the pills, chug the water, and close her eyes without so much as a “thank you.” In her bedroom, Jim still lay on his side, snoring softly. She rested one hand lightly on his arm.

  “Jim?” she whispered. He didn’t move. Rose contemplated crawling into bed with him, dragging the blankets up over her head and handling the morning in the morning. She glanced back at the door, looked down at Jim, and realized that she couldn’t. She couldn’t sleep with a naked man with her sister in the next room. Her job was, and had always been, to set an example for Maggie. Shacking up with a man who was sort of her boss didn’t qualify. And what if he wanted sex again? Maggie would overhear, or worse, walk in, and stare. And laugh.

  Instead, Rose pulled an extra blanket from the foot of the bed, grabbed a pillow from the floor, tiptoed back into the living room, and arranged herself on the armchair, thinking that in the annals of romantic history, this was probably the worst way a night like hers could end. She shut her eyes and listened for Maggie’s breathing, the way she always had through all the years they’d shared a bedroom. Then she rolled over, trying to stretch out as much as she could. Why didn’t she at least get the couch? Why had she invited Maggie over at all? Just then, Maggie started talking.

  “Remember Honey Bun?”

  Rose closed her eyes in the darkness. “Yes,” she said. “I remember.”

  Honey Bun had come to them in the spring, when Rose was eight and Maggie was six. Their mother, Caroline, had woken them up early on a Thursday morning. “Shh, don’t tell!” she’d whispered, hurrying them both into their best party dresses, then having them put on sweaters and coats on top. “It’s a special surprise!” They’d called good-bye to their father, still lingering over coffee and the business section, hustled past the kitchen where the countertops were crammed with boxes of chocolate and the sink was filled with dirty dishes, and climbed into the station wagon. Instead of turning into the school entrance, the way she did most mornings, Caroline steered right past it, and kept going.

  “Mom, you missed the turn!” called Rose.

  “No school today, honey,” their mother singsonged over her shoulder. “Today’s a special day!”

  “Yay!” said Maggie, who’d gotten the coveted front seat.

  “Why?” asked Rose, who’d been looking forward to the day at school because it was Library Day and she’d get to pick out more books.

  “Because something very exciting has happened,” their mother said. Rose could remember exactly how her mother looked that day, the way her brown eyes glowed, and the gauzy turquoise scarf she’d wrapped around her neck. Caroline started talking very quickly, her words tumbling over each other, looking over her shoulder to tell Rose the big news. “It’s candy,” she said. “Fudge, really. Well, different than fudge. Better than fudge. Like divinity. Have you girls ever had that?”

  Rose and Maggie shook their heads.

  “I was reading in Newsweek about this woman who made cheesecakes,” Caroline ramble
d, speeding around a curve and lurching to a stop at a traffic light. “And all of her friends raved about the cheesecakes, and first she got one supermarket in her neighborhood to carry them, and then she got a distributor, and now her cheesecakes are carried in eleven states. Eleven!”

  A chorus of honks came from behind them. “Mom,” said Rose. “Green light.”

  “Oh, right, right,” said Caroline, stepping on the gas. “So last night I was thinking, well, I can’t make cheesecake, but I can make fudge. My mother made the best fudge in the world, with walnuts and marshmallows, so I called her for the recipe and I was up all night, making batches and batches, had to go to the supermarket twice for ingredients, but here!” And she jerked the wheel sideways, pulling into a gas station. Rose noticed that her mother’s fingernails were broken and sooty brown, as if she’d been digging through dirt. “Here! Try!” She reached into her purse and came up with two wax-paper-wrapped squares. “R and M Fudge,” they read, in what looked to Rose like eyeliner.

  “I had to improvise, of course, the packaging will change, but taste it and tell me whether that’s not the best fudge you’ve ever had in your life!”

  Rose and Maggie unwrapped the fudge. “Delicious!” said Maggie, with her mouth full.

  “Ooh, yum,” said Rose, struggling to swallow the lump of fudge, which was sticking in her throat.

  “R and M for Rose and Maggie!” said their mother, starting to drive again.

  “Why can’t it be M and R?” asked Maggie.

  “Where are we going?” asked Rose.

  “To Lord and Taylor,” their mother said gaily. “I thought about supermarkets, of course, but what I decided is that this is really a gourmet product, not a grocery item, and it should be sold in boutiques and department stores.”

  “Does Dad know about this?” asked Rose.

  “We’re going to surprise him,” said Caroline. “Take off those sweaters and make sure your faces are clean. We’re making a sales call, girls!”

  Rose turned on her side, remembering the rest of the day—the manager’s polite smile when her mother had upended her handbag on the costume jewelry counter and dumped out two dozen squares of wax-paper-wrapped R and M fudge (and two squares reading “M and R,” which Maggie had changed in the car). How their mother had whisked them up to the girls’ department and bought them matching rabbit-fur muffs. How they’d had lunch in the Lord and Taylor tearoom, cream-cheese-and-olive sandwiches with the crusts cut off, tiny pickles barely longer than Rose’s baby finger, slices of angel food cake with strawberries and whipped cream. How beautiful their mother looked, her cheeks flaring pink, her eyes sparkling, her hands fluttering like birds, ignoring her own lunch as she described her sales ideas, her marketing plans, how R and M Fudge would be as popular as Keebler or Nabisco. “We’re starting small, girls, but everyone has to start somewhere,” she’d said. Maggie nodded and told Caroline how good the fudge was and asked for seconds on sandwiches and cake, and Rose sat there, trying to force down a few bites of her lunch and wondering whether she’d been the only one to notice the manager’s raised eyebrows and overly polite smile when all that candy came cascading onto the countertop.