In Her Shoes Page 9

  “Hello,” he said. There. That was a start.

  A furrow appeared between Ella’s eyebrows. “Was the poem too long?”

  “No, no, the poem was fine. I’m here because . . . well, I was wondering if . . .” Come on, old man! he told himself. He’d been in a war; he’d buried a wife; he’d watched his son become a Republican with a Rush Limbaugh bumper sticker on the back of his minivan. He’d survived worse things than this. “Would you like to have dinner with me?”

  He could see her getting ready to shake her head even before it happened. “I . . . I don’t think so.”

  “Why not?” It came out louder than he’d intended.

  Ella sighed. Lewis took advantage of her momentary silence. “Okay if I come in?” he asked.

  She looked reluctant as she opened the door and ushered him inside. Her apartment wasn’t cluttered, as so many of the smallish rooms at Golden Acres tended to become, when tenants tried to cram a lifetime’s worth of possessions into space that was never meant to hold very much. Ella’s apartment had tiled floors, cream-colored walls, the kind of white sofa that, in Lewis’s experience, was much better in theory than in practice, especially if you had grandchildren, and the grandchildren liked grape juice.

  He sat at one end of the couch. Ella sat at the other, looking flustered as she tucked her bare feet underneath her.

  “Lewis,” she began.

  He got to his feet.

  “Please don’t leave. Let me explain,” she said.

  “I’m not leaving, I’m finding a vase,” he told her.

  “Wait,” she said, sounding alarmed at the thought of him going through her things. “I’ll do it.” She hurried into the kitchen and produced a vase from a cabinet. Lewis filled it with water, put the tulips inside, came back to the living room, and set it in the center of her coffee table.

  “There,” he said. “Now, if you’re going to say no, you’ll have to look at those tulips every day and feel guilty,” he said.

  She looked, for an instant, as if she might be getting ready to smile . . . then the look was gone, as if he’d imagined it.

  “The thing of it is,” she started.

  “Hold on,” he said. He opened the box of candy. “You go first,” he said.

  She waved the box away. “Really, I can’t ...”

  He put on his glasses and unfolded the candy map. “The dark chocolate hearts have cherry cordial inside,” he reported. “And those roundish ones are nougat.”

  “Lewis,” she said firmly. “You’re a wonderful person, and ...”

  “But,” he said. “I hear a but coming.” He got up again, went to her kitchen, put water on to boil. “Where’s your good china?” he called.

  “Oh,” she said, hurrying after him.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m just making us a cup of tea.”

  Ella looked at him, then at the kettle. “Okay,” she said, and pulled two mugs advertising the Broward County Public Library from a shelf. Lewis dropped tea bags into the mugs, located her sugar bowl (filled with packets of Sweet ’n Low), and set it on the table, alongside a pint of lactose-free milk.

  “Are you always this handy?” she asked.

  “I wasn’t always,” he said. He opened the refrigerator, found a lemon in back of her vegetable crisper, and sliced it as he talked. “Then my wife got sick, and she knew . . . well. She knew. So she gave me lessons.”

  “Do you miss her?” Ella asked.

  “Every day,” he said. “I miss her every day.” He set her cup on a saucer and carried it over to the table. “How about you?”

  “Well, I never met your wife, so I can’t say that I miss her ...”

  “A joke!” He applauded, and sat down beside her and studied the table. “I think it still needs something,” he said. He opened Ella’s freezer. “May I?”

  She nodded, looking slightly dazed. He dug around until he found a familiar-shaped object that he instantly recognized as frozen Sara Lee pound cake. It had been a favorite of Sharla’s. More than once he’d woken up in the middle of the night to find her in front of the television set, watching infomercials and munching on a hunk of thawed pound cake. Usually those nights signaled the conclusion of one of her twice-yearly grapefruit-and-tuna-fish diets, and she’d come back to bed with a guilty smile and a mouth that tasted like butter. Kiss me, she’d whisper, sliding her nightgown over her shoulders. Let’s burn off some of those bad old calories.

  He handed the cake to Ella. “Okay?”

  She nodded, and put the cake into the microwave. Lewis sipped his tea and watched her move. Her hips looked original, he thought, and laughed at himself for noticing something like that. Adam, one of his grandsons, had told him during his last visit that he could tell just by looking whether a woman’s chest was real or not, and Lewis had decided that he had the same talent for hip joints.

  “What are you smiling about?”

  He gave a small shrug. “My grandson.”

  Her face crumpled like a paper bag. She quickly smoothed it back again, so fast he wasn’t sure he’d seen what he’d seen, which was despair. He wanted to reach over and hold her hands, hold her hands and ask her to tell him what was wrong, what hurt enough to make her look that way. He actually started to move his hands across the table when he noticed she was staring down as if a roach had just crawled out of the pound cake.

  “What?”

  She pointed at the cuffs of his shirt. Lewis looked down. One cuff was missing a button, and the other one was badly frayed and slightly browned.

  “Did you burn that?” Ella asked.

  “I guess I must have,” Lewis said. “I’m not so great with the iron.”

  “Oh,” said Ella. “I could . . .” She closed her mouth abruptly and smoothed her hair, looking flustered. Lewis saw his chance, an inflatable raft bobbing in the waves, and grabbed for it with all his might.

  “Give me some lessons?” he asked humbly. Forgive me, Sharla, he thought, imagining he’d have to hide all the notes she’d left him, the boxes and bottles carefully labeled “for colors” and “for whites.”

  Ella was wavering. “Well,” she said. The microwave chirped. Lewis fetched the cake. He served Ella a slice, then cut one for himself.

  “I know it’s an imposition,” he said, “and I know how busy you are. But since my wife died, I’m kind of at loose ends. Last week I actually tried to figure out whether it would be easier to just buy new clothes every month or so ...”

  “Oh, don’t do that!” said Ella. “I’ll help you.” He could tell that her assent had come at a cost, that there was a battle going on behind her eyes, her sense of obligation and sympathy warring with her fierce desire to be alone. “Just let me get my book.”

  Her book turned out to be a four-inch-thick marvel of scheduling, a half-illegible maze of scribbles and arrows and phone numbers and Post-it notes. “Let’s see,” said Ella, scrutinizing each page. “Wednesday I’m at the hospital ...”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I rock babies,” Ella said. “Thursday’s the soup kitchen, then the hospice, Friday is Meals on Wheels ...”

  “Saturday?” Lewis asked. “Not to frighten you, but I’m almost out of underwear.”

  Ella made a noise in the back of her throat that sounded almost like laughter. “Saturday,” she agreed.

  “Good,” he told her. “Five o’clock? I’ll take you to dinner once we’re done.”

  He was out the door before she could think to say anything to him, and as he whistled his way down the hall, he was unsurprised to see Mavis Gold, who claimed that she was on her way to the laundry room, in spite of the visible absence of her laundry.

  “How’d it go?” she whispered. He gave her a thumbs-up and smiled as she clapped her hands. Then he hurried home to spill ink on his pants and pull a few buttons off his favorite shirt.

  NINE

  “Okay,” Rose called from her seat in front of her computer. “Name, got that. Address, you can use mine
.” Her fingers flew over the keyboard. “Objective?”

  “To get a job,” said Maggie, who was sprawled on the couch with her face buried under half an inch of what she’d informed her sister was a pore-reducing clay mask.

  “How about if we say ‘a position in retail’?” asked Rose.

  “Whatever,” said Maggie, flicking on the TV. It was Saturday morning, five days after her ignominious audition, and MTV was introducing the winner of the VJ contest—a pretty, bubbly brunette with a pierced eyebrow. “Coming up next, we’ll have the debut of the Spice Girls’s latest video!” the girl burbled. Maggie flipped quickly away.

  “Listen,” said Rose. “I’m trying to help you. Could you please pay attention?”

  Maggie made a huffing noise and clicked the TV off.

  “Employment history,” Rose prompted.

  “Huh?”

  “You know, your other jobs. Maggie, haven’t you ever done a résumé before?”

  “Oh, sure,” said Maggie. “All the time. You know, just like you go to the gym.”

  “Other jobs,” Rose repeated.

  Maggie stared longingly at the cigarettes in her purse, but she knew that lighting up would result in either Rose’s lung-cancer lecture or her my-house-my-rules rap. “Okay,” she said, and closed her eyes. “T.J.Maxx,” she began. “For six weeks. October through right before Thanksgiving.” She sighed. She’d actually liked that job. She’d been good at it, too. When she worked the dressing room, she wouldn’t just give her customers the plastic tag and point them toward the dressing room. She’d take the clothes, lead them in, open a cubicle, and hang each garment neatly, the way they did it at the fancy department stores and boutiques downtown. And when the women came out to spin and squint in front of the three-way mirror, tightening a belt or untucking a shirt, Maggie would be there, offering suggestions, telling them honestly (but carefully) when an outfit didn’t flatter, hurrying back to the racks to find another size or another color, or something else entirely, something totally different, something they’d never even imagined themselves wearing, but something that Maggie could see. “You’re a jewel!” she could remember one of her ladies saying, a tall, sleek, black-haired woman who would have looked great in anything, but looked especially great in the outfit Maggie’d put together—a little black dress with the perfect black leather bag and black slingback pumps, plus a belt of gold links that she’d rescued from the clearance bin. “I’m going to tell the manager how much help you’ve been!”

  “What happened?” asked Rose.

  Maggie kept her eyes shut. “I quit,” she mumbled. In fact, what had happened was what usually happened with her jobs—things would be going fine until she ran up against something. There was always something. In this case, it was the cash register. She’d scanned a coupon for ten percent off, and it hadn’t gone through. “Well, can’t you just do it manually?” the customer had demanded. Maggie had scowled at her, and stared at the total. One hundred and forty-two dollars. So ten percent was . . . She bit her lip. “Fourteen dollars!” said the woman. “Come on!” At which point Maggie had straightened up slowly, paged the manager, and turned to the next customer in line with a sweet smile.

  “Can I help you?”

  “Hey!” the ten-percent woman had said. “You didn’t finish me!”

  Maggie ignored her as the next customer in line piled her sweaters and jeans onto the belt and Maggie flicked open a plastic bag. She knew what was going to happen. The woman was going to call her stupid. And there was no way Maggie was going to stand for that. She didn’t even want to be here. Her talents were wasted on the cash register, her time was better spent in the dressing room, where she could actually help people instead of just work the scanner like a robot.

  The supervisor came hurrying over, register keys jingling against her chest. “What’s the problem?”

  The ten-percent woman pointed a finger at Maggie. “She couldn’t ring up my coupon.”

  “Maggie, what’s the problem?”

  “It wouldn’t go through,” Maggie had muttered.

  “Well, ten percent,” said the supervisor. “Fourteen dollars!”

  “Sorry,” Maggie muttered, staring at the floor, as the customer had rolled her eyes. At the end of her shift, when the supervisor had started to say something about how there was a calculator available or how she could always ask for help, Maggie had taken off her polyester pinny, dropped her name tag onto the floor, and walked out the door.

  “Okay,” said Rose. “But if they ask, tell them you didn’t find it challenging enough.”

  “Fine,” said Maggie, and stared at the ceiling as if the highlights of her employment history were inscribed there, a retail-and-fast-food version of the Sistine Chapel. “Before T.J.Maxx, I was at the Gap, and before that I was at Pomodoro Pizza, and before that was the Starbucks on Walnut Street, and then I was at the Limited—no, wait, that’s wrong. I was at Urban Outfitters first, and the Limited before that, and ...”

  Rose was typing madly.

  “Banana Republic,” Maggie continued. “Macy’s accessories, Macy’s fragrance, Cinnabon, Chik-fil-A, Baskin-Robbins ...”

  “What about that restaurant? The Canal House?”

  Maggie winced. She’d been doing fine at the Canal House until Conrad, the Sunday manager, had gotten all over her case. MargarET, the salt shakers aren’t full. MargarET, I need you to give the busboy a hand. She’d told him over and over that her name wasn’t even Margaret—just Maggie—but he’d ignored her for an entire month until she’d conceived of her revenge. Late one night in May, she and her then-sort-of-boyfriend had scaled the roof and wrenched the C free from the restaurant’s sign. Which meant that dozens of women in corsages had shown up for Mother’s Day brunch at the Anal House.

  “I quit,” said Maggie. Before they could fire me, she thought.

  “Fine,” said Rose, staring at the screen. “We’re going to have to edit.”

  “Whatever,” said Maggie, and stomped into the bathroom, where she washed the clay off her face. So her work history wasn’t the greatest, she thought furiously. It didn’t mean she wasn’t a hard worker! It didn’t mean she didn’t try!

  Her sister banged on the door. “Maggie, are you almost done in there? I need to take a shower.”

  Maggie wiped off her face and went back to the living room, flicked the television set back on, before sitting down in front of the computer. While Rose took a shower, Maggie stored her résumé, opened a new window, and started typing a list for Rose. Exercise regularly (aerobics and weights), she typed. Get regular facials. Join Jenny Craig (they are running a special!) She typed, grinning, and then added a helpful link to an article about Carnie Wilson’s weight-loss surgery. She shoved a cigarette between her lips and tripped out the door, leaving the printed-out list on Rose’s seat and the article (“Star Sheds Half Her Body Weight!”) on Rose’s screen, so that it would be the first thing her sister saw when she came home from work.

  “Lock the door behind you!” Rose called from her bedroom. Maggie ignored her. If she was so smart, let her lock her own door, she thought, and headed out into the hall.

  “A lawyer?” The guy with the beard squinted at Rose. “Hey, what do you call six lawyers at the bottom of the ocean?”

  Rose gave a small shrug and looked longingly toward Amy’s front door, hoping that Jim would soon come through it.

  “A good start!” the bearded guy bellowed.

  Rose blinked at him. “I don’t get it,” she said.

  He stared, unsure if she was kidding.

  “I don’t understand. I mean, why are the lawyers at the bottom of the ocean? Are they snorkeling or something?”

  Now the guy was looking decidedly uncomfortable. Rose furrowed her forehead. “Wait . . . are they at the bottom of the ocean because they drowned?”

  “Well, yeah,” said the guy, using one fingernail to pry the label off his beer.

  “Okay,” said Rose slowly. “So there’s six dead
, drowned lawyers at the bottom of the ocean . . .” She paused and looked at the guy expectantly.

  “It was just a joke,” he said.

  “But I don’t understand why it’s funny,” she said.

  The guy took two steps backward.

  “Wait,” said Rose. “Wait! You have to finish explaining this to me!”

  “I’ll be . . . um,” said the guy. He sidled off toward the bar. Amy shot her a dirty look across the room and shook her head. Bad girl, Amy mouthed, wagging her index finger. Rose shrugged. She wasn’t normally so mean, but Jim’s tardiness—combined with Maggie’s three-weeks-and-counting residence—had put her in a foul mood.

  Rose stared at her best friend, thinking that at least one of them had changed since the misery of junior high. By ninth grade, Amy had grown to six feet tall, weighing in at perhaps a hundred and ten pounds, and the boys in the class called her Ichabod Crane—just Ick for short. But she’d gotten comfortable with her gangly frame. Now she wore her knobby wrists like expensive bracelets and wielded the fine bones of her face and hips like unusual pieces of art. She’d had dreadlocks in college, but after graduation she hacked her hair off and dyed it a dark red. She wore tight black tops and long black boot-cut jeans, and she looked fabulous. Exotic, and mysterious, and sexy, even when she opened her mouth and her thick, unreconstructed Jersey-girl accent came out. Amy always had at least half a dozen boyfriends, former boyfriends, and would-be boyfriends lining up for the privilege of buying her deep-dish pizza and listening to her dissect the state of hip-hop music in America.

  Plus, Amy was a chemical engineer—an occupation that typically garnered at least a few interested questions from strangers she’d meet at parties—while Rose was a lawyer, which usually drew one of two responses: the first, typified by Mr. Lawyer Joke, and the second, Rose was pretty sure, soon to be elucidated by the tall, pale fellow in glasses who’d parked himself on the couch beside her, interrupting her special private time with the bowl of cheese curls.