In Her Shoes Page 6

  “You’re going to have to pay!” Rose was shouting at Sean Perigini, holding her broken glasses and probably with no idea that everyone could see her underwear. The laughter built. Rose’s eyes swept the playground, past the kickball game, past the kids on the swing sets and jungle gym, through the big kids, the fifth and sixth graders shrieking and clutching each other as they laughed at her, until finally she caught sight of Maggie, standing between Kim and Marissa on the little section of grass beside the flower bed that was, by unspoken consent, reserved for the most popular girls. Rose squinted at Maggie, and Maggie could read the hatred and misery in her sister’s eyes as clearly as if Rose had walked over and shouted in her face.

  I should help, a voice inside of her whispered again. But Maggie just stood there, watching, listening to the other kids laugh, thinking that this was somehow some dark part of the bargain that had made her the pretty one.

  She was safe, Maggie thought fiercely, as Rose wiped her face, gathered her books, and, ignoring the taunts and laughter and the singsonged catcalls of “Hol-ly! Hob-bie!” that a few of the fifth-grade girls had already taken up, walked slowly back into the school. Maggie’d never make the mistake of wandering through a dodgeball game and she’d certainly never wear cartoon-character underwear. She was safe, she thought, as Rose pushed through the double glass doors and headed inside—to the principal’s office, no doubt. “Do you think she’s okay?” Kim had asked, and Maggie had tossed her head scornfully. “I think she’s adopted,” she’d said, and Kim and Marissa had giggled, and Maggie had laughed, too, even though the laughter felt like gravel in her chest.

  And then, as fast as a dodgeball flying through the air to whack her unsuspecting head, everything changed. When, exactly? Her fourteenth year, at the tail end of eighth grade, in the gap between junior high, where she’d ruled, and high school, where everything had fallen apart.

  It had started with the standardized assessment test. “Nothing to worry about!” Mrs. Fried’s junior-high replacement had said in a falsely cheerful voice. The new “enrichment” teacher was ugly, with caked-on makeup and a wart next to her nose. She’d told Maggie that she could take an untimed version of the test. “You’ll do fine!” But Maggie stared at the page of blank bubbles that she was supposed to fill in with her number two pencil, feeling her heart sink, knowing that it wasn’t going to be fine. You’re a smart girl, Mrs. Fried had told her a dozen times. But Mrs. Fried was gone, back in the elementary school. High school was going to be different. And that test—“just for our records! Results kept confidential!”—had somehow tripped her up and ruined everything. She wasn’t supposed to have seen her scores, but her teacher had left a copy on the desk, and Maggie had peeked, first trying to read the words upside down and then just grabbing the thing and flipping it around so that she could read it. The words hit her like a hammer. “Dyslexic,” it said. “Learning disabled.” It might as well have read, “You’re dead,” Maggie thought, because that was what those words really meant.

  “Now, Maggie, let’s not get hysterical,” Sydelle had said that night, after the teacher had called to share the “confidential” results. “We’ll get you a tutor!”

  “I don’t need a tutor,” Maggie had said furiously, feeling tears scalding her throat.

  Rose, sitting in the corner of Sydelle’s white-on-white living room, had looked up from Watership Down. “It might help, you know.”

  “Shut up!” Maggie had said, the forbidden words flying out of her mouth. “I’m not stupid, Rose, so just shut up!”

  “Maggie,” their father had said, “nobody’s saying you’re stupid. . . .”

  “That test said I was stupid,” said Maggie. “And you know what? I don’t even care. And why’d you have to tell her?” she demanded, pointing her finger at Sydelle. “And her?” Maggie continued, pointing at Rose. “It’s none of her business!”

  “We all want to help,” Michael Feller had said, and Maggie had ranted that she didn’t need help, she didn’t care what the dumb test said, she was smart just like Mrs. Fried had always said. No, she didn’t need a tutor, no she didn’t want to go to private school, she had friends, unlike some people she could name, she had friends and she wasn’t stupid no matter what the test said, and plus even if she was stupid, she’d rather be stupid than ugly like four-eyes in the corner, even if she was stupid, that was okay, it was no biggie, she’d be fine.

  But she wasn’t fine. When she started high school, her friends were placed in the honors-level courses, and Maggie had been sent to the remedial classes, with no friendly Mrs. Fried to tell her that she wasn’t a dummy or a retard, that her brain just worked a little differently, and that they’d figure out tricks to get her through. She got stuck with the indifferent teachers—the burned-out older ones who just wanted to be left alone, like Mrs. Cavetti, who wore cock-eyed wigs and too much perfume, or Mrs. Learey, who’d give them in-class reading assignments and then spend the entire period filling photo albums with endless pictures of her grandchildren.

  Maggie figured it out fast—the worst teachers got the worst kids as punishment, for being bad teachers. The worst kids got the worst teachers as punishment for being poor—or dumb. Which in this fancy town were often interpreted as the same thing. Well, Maggie figured, if she was someone’s punishment, she’d act like punishment. She stopped bringing her books to class and started toting a toolbox-sized makeup kit instead. She’d take polish off her nails during the lectures, reapply a different shade during the pop quiz, after she’d answered all of the questions with the same letter—A for one class, B for the next. Multiple-choice quizzes were all these teachers ever came up with. “Maggie, please come to the blackboard,” one of the crappy teachers would drone. Maggie would shake her head without lifting her eyes from her makeup mirror. “Sorry, can’t help,” she’d call, fluttering her fingertips. “I’m drying.”

  She should have flunked everything, should have been left back in every grade. But the teachers kept passing her—probably because they didn’t want to see her again the next year. And her friends moved farther and farther away from her with each new school year. She tried for a while, and Kim and Marissa tried, too, but eventually the gap got too wide. They were playing field hockey, they were joining student council, they were taking SAT prep courses and visiting colleges, and she’d been left behind.

  By sophomore year, Maggie decided that if the girls were going to ignore her, the guys certainly wouldn’t. She started wearing her hair piled high and her cleavage leveraged higher by lace underwire bras that peeked through her shirts. She’d arrived for the first day of school in low-slung jeans that barely clung to the ridge of her hips, high-heeled black leather boots, and a consignment-store lace bustier beneath the army jacket she’d swiped from her father. Lipstick, nail polish, enough eye shadow to paint a small wall with, an armful of black rubber bracelets, and big, floppy fabric bows in her hair. She took her cues from Madonna, whom she idolized, Madonna, who was just starting to have her videos played on MTV. Maggie devoured every scrap of information about the singer she could find—every magazine interview, every newspaper profile—and marveled at the similarities. They both had dead mothers. They were both beautiful, both talented dancers who’d studied tap and jazz since they were little girls. They were both street-smart, with sex appeal to spare. Boys buzzed around Maggie like flies, buying her packs of cigarettes, inviting her to parties where no parents were present, keeping her cup filled, holding her hand, walking her into an unused bedroom or the backseat of a car when it got late.

  It took a while for Maggie to notice that they weren’t calling, or asking her to dances, or even saying hello to her in the halls. She’d cried about it—late at night, when Rose was asleep, when nobody could hear her—and then she’d decided not to cry. None of them were worth her tears. And they’d all be sorry, ten years down the road, when she was famous and they were nothings, stranded in this shitty little town, fat and ugly and unfamous, not special at all.r />
  So that was high school. Cringing around the edges of the popular crowd like some kicked dog still holding on to the memories of the days when they’d petted and praised her. Parties on weekends at the house of whoever’s parents were away. Beer and wine, joints or pills, and they’d be drunk and, eventually, she figured it was easier if she was drunk, too, if things were a little blurry around the edges and she could imagine seeing what she wanted in their eyes.

  And Rose . . . well, Rose hadn’t gone through the kind of John Hughes metamorphosis where she shed her glasses, got a good haircut, and the football captain fell in love with her at the prom. But she did change in smaller ways. She stopped having dandruff, for one thing, thanks to Maggie’s not-so-subtle trick of leaving large bottles of Head and Shoulders in the shower. She still wore glasses, still dressed like a geek, but somewhere along the line she’d acquired a friend—Amy, who was, in Maggie’s opinion, just as weird as Rose was—and didn’t seem bothered by the fact that the pretty girls still laughed at her, or ignored her, and still occasionally referred to her as Holly Hobbie. Rose was in the honors classes, Rose got straight A’s. Maggie would have dismissed all of those things as further signs of her sister’s social hopelessness except that those accomplishments had started to matter.

  “Princeton!” Sydelle had said, over and over, when Rose was a senior and her acceptance letter had come in the mail. “Well, Rose, this is quite an achievement!” She’d actually cooked Rose’s favorite foods for dinner—fried chicken and biscuits and honey—and she hadn’t said a word when Rose reached for seconds. “Maggie, you must be very proud of your sister!” she’d said. Maggie had just rolled her eyes in an unspoken “whatever.” Like Princeton was such a big deal. Like Rose was the only person who’d ever succeeded in spite of a dead mother. Well, Maggie had a dead mother, too, but did she get extra points for that? No, she did not. She just got questions. From neighbors. From teachers. From everyone who knew her sister. “Can we expect great things from you?” Well, obviously, they couldn’t, Maggie thought, inking an emphatic red circle around an ad for waitresses at a “busy, successful Center City restaurant.” She’d got the body, Rose had gotten the brains, and now it was looking like brains might count for more.

  So Rose graduated from Princeton while Maggie put in a few half-hearted semesters at the local community college. Rose had gone to law school, and Maggie had waitressed at a pizza parlor, done baby-sitting and housecleaning, dropped out of bartending school when the instructor tried to stick his tongue in her ear after the lesson on martinis. Rose was plain, and fat, and frumpy, and up until this morning Maggie had never known her to have a boyfriend except for, like, ten minutes in law school. Yet somehow she was the one with the great apartment (well, the apartment that could have been great if Maggie had decorated it), and with money and friends, the one people looked at with respect. And this guy, Jim Whatever, was cute in a semi-nerdy way, and Maggie just bet that he was rich, too.

  It wasn’t fair, thought Maggie, stalking back to the kitchen. It wasn’t fair their mother had died. It wasn’t fair that she’d somehow used up her handful of good years by junior high and was now living in her sister’s shadow, doomed to watch Rose get everything she wanted, while she got nothing at all. She crumpled up the empty container of ice cream, gathered the newspaper, and was getting ready to toss them both when something in the paper caught her eye. It was the magic word: auditions. Maggie dropped the ice-cream carton and turned her full attention to the newspaper. “MTV Announces Auditions for VJs,” she read. Excitement rose within her like a balloon, along with panic—what if she’d missed it? She scanned the story as rapidly as she could. December 1. Open call. In New York. She could be there! She’d tell Rose she had a job interview, which was technically sort of the truth, and she’d get Rose to lend her money for a bus ticket, and clothes. She’d need an outfit. She’d have to buy something new; she could see that instantly; nothing she had was even remotely right. Maggie folded the newspaper carefully and hurried to her sister’s closet to see which shoes she’d wear to the Big Apple.

  FIVE

  Lewis Feldman ushered Mrs. Sobel into his office—a converted closet with the words Golden Acres Gazette stenciled on the glass—and closed the door behind them.

  “Thank you for coming,” he said, pulling the red grease copyediting pencil from behind his ear and setting it on his desk. Mrs. Sobel perched on a chair, crossed her ankles, and clasped her hands in her lap. She was a tiny woman with blue hair and a blue wool cardigan sweater and blue veins pulsing in her hands. He gave her what he hoped was a reassuring smile. She gave him a tentative nod.

  “Let me just begin by saying how grateful I am for your help,” he said. “We were really in a pinch.” Which was true—ever since the Gazette’s previous food critic, the Noshing Gourmet, had suffered a heart attack that had landed him facedown in a western omelet, Lewis had been stuck recycling old reviews, and the natives had been getting restless, not to mention tired of reading about the Rascal House yet again.

  “This was a very fine first effort,” he said, spreading the tear sheet on his desk, so Mrs. Sobel could see what her review looked like, laid out on the page. “Italian Restaurant Tempts Tastebuds,” read the headline, beneath a drawing of a winking little bird—the Early Bird, of course—with a cartoon worm clutched in its beak. “I had just a few suggestions,” said Lewis, as Mrs. Sobel gave another trembly little nod. He braced himself—running hardware stores hadn’t been nearly as tough as taking the fragile egos of retired women in his hands on a biweekly basis—and began to read.

  “‘Mangiamo’s Italian Restaurant is located in the shopping mall on Powerline Road, next to where the Marshall’s used to be, and across from the frozen yogurt shop. It looks like it should be easy to get to, but my husband, Irving, had a very difficult time making the left-hand turn.’ ”

  Mrs. Sobel gave another nod, this one slightly more assertive. Lewis kept reading.

  “‘The restaurant has red carpet, white tablecloths with small candles on them. The air conditioner is turned up very high, so you should bring a sweater if you go to Mangiamo’s. The minestrone soup was not the way I make it. It had kidney beans, which neither I nor Irving enjoy. The Caesar salad was good, but it is made with anchovies, so if you are allergic to fish, you should get the house salad instead.’ “And now Mrs. Sobel was leaning forward eagerly, nodding along, repeating the words in a low, breathless whisper.

  “‘For entrees, Irving wanted the chicken parmesan, even though cheese does not agree with him. I had the spaghetti and meatballs, because I thought Irving would eat that. Sure enough, the chicken was hard for him to chew, so he had my meatballs, which were soft.’ “Lewis looked at Mrs. Sobel, who was leaning forward, eyes bright.

  “See, here’s the thing,” he said, wondering whether Ben Bradlee and William Shawn had ever had problems like this. “What we’re trying to do is be objective.”

  “Objective,” Mrs. Sobel repeated.

  “We’re trying to give a snapshot of what it’s like to eat at Mangiamo’s.”

  She nodded again, confusion replacing the eagerness in her eyes.

  “So when you talk about the left-hand turn, and how it was difficult to make, or how the way they make their soup isn’t the way you make yours ...” Be careful, Lewis, he told himself, picking up his pencil and tucking it securely behind his ear again. “Well, those are interesting things, and very nicely written, but they might not be exactly helpful to other people who are going to be reading this and using it to decide whether they want to go there.”

  Now Mrs. Sobel drew herself up straight, a trembling reed of indignation. “But those things are true!” she said.

  “Of course they’re true,” Lewis soothed her. “I’m just wondering whether they’re useful. Like, the air-conditioning, and telling people to bring a sweater. That’s a very, very useful detail. But the section on the soup . . . not every reader needs to see the restaurant’s soup placed in the
context of your soup.” And then he smiled, and hoped the smile would work. He thought it probably would. His wife, Sharla—Sharla of blessed memory, dead for two years—had always told him he could get away with anything because of his smile. He wasn’t a handsome man, he knew. He had a mirror, and while his eyes weren’t so great anymore, he could still tell that he was much more Walter Matthau than Paul Newman. Even his ear-lobes had wrinkles. But the smile was still working. “I’m sure that any soup would suffer, being compared to your soup.”

  Mrs. Sobel sniffed. But she was looking decidedly less offended.

  “Why don’t you take this home with you, take another look at it, and try to ask yourself, with everything you’re writing, whether it’s going to help”—he thought for a minute, then pulled a name out of the air—“Mr. and Mrs. Rabinowitz decide whether to go there for dinner.”

  “Oh, the Rabinowitzes would never go there,” said Mrs. Sobel. “He’s very cheap.” And then, when Lewis was still sitting behind his desk, utterly nonplussed, she gathered her purse and cardigan and the copy of her story and marched grandly out the door, past Ella Hirsch, who was on her way in.

  Ella, Lewis noticed with great relief, neither trembled or nodded. She wasn’t nearly as ancient, or fragile, as Mrs. Sobel. She had clear brown eyes and reddish hair that she wore pulled back in a twist, and he’d never once seen her in polyester pants, which were preferred by most of the Acres’s female residents.

  “How are you?” she asked.

  Lewis shook his head. “Honestly, I’m not quite sure,” he told her.

  “That doesn’t sound good,” she said, handing him her neatly typed poem. Would he have had a little bit of a crush on Ella even if she wasn’t the best writer at the Golden Acres Gazette? Probably, Lewis decided. Except he didn’t think she was interested. The times he’d invited her for coffee to talk about story ideas, she’d seemed happy to come along, and just as happy when the coffee was gone and she could tell him good-bye.