by Susan Shreve
If she held on to the closet door to keep her balance in the narrow, spiky shoes so she wouldn’t tumble when her left leg gave out — then her feet, hidden in the blue satin shoes, looked almost normal, like the feet of a regular fourteen-year-old girl, small for her age.
The blue satins were Franny’s favorite of her mother’s shoes. The toe round like the toes of the patent leather Mary Janes she’d never been able to wear as a child, the heel wide at the top thinning to the width of a pencil, and the satin the pure blue of summer skies.
In the next room, her mother was talking as usual with her aunt Estelle about the problems Franny was having in the ninth grade. Trials and tribulations were her mother’s words for problems and that afternoon the subject was the Valentine’s Dance.
“I don’t have problems,” Franny had told her mother in the first weeks of ninth grade at Easterbrook High.
“But you’re not like your old self,” her mother said.
“Maybe I’m getting a new self to fit high school,” Franny had said lightly, but she didn’t want to talk to her mother about her daily life, not the way she used to talk to Margaret about almost everything.
It was February, the kind of sullen, gray day that colored every winter afternoon in northwest Ohio, and the snow, already dirty with soot, was banked up to the front porch.
“Franny and I are going to Cleveland this afternoon to buy a formal dress for the dance,” her mother was saying to Estelle, full of her usual high spirits.
As if Franny would ever be willing to go to a formal dance in the gymnasium of Easterbrook High.
She had worried about high school dances ever since the night at the Knights of Columbus Hall, when she’d fallen in the dark and the phantom boy had leaned over, whispering in her face.
Sometimes unable to sleep, a general agitation spinning her brain like a top, she lay in bed thinking of what she might have said to him, what she might have done, her back stiffening, her arms tight, ready to swing at the air.
“I can’t go to school dances,” Franny had said in October after the first dance at the high school. “I look too stupid in the shoes I have to wear.”
“We’ll fix it,” Margaret Hall had said.
“You can’t fix it!” Franny said. “This problem is permanent.”
“I will find a way.”
“Don’t bother,” Franny said, occasionally bad-tempered since she’d started ninth grade, bothered by her friends at school, irritated by her mother’s irrepressible high spirits.
“I only want you to be happy,” Margaret Hall said.
“I am happy,” Franny said sharply, a burning in her throat. It made her ill on the rare occasions she was angry at her mother, who wanted more than anything for Franny to be normal, to have a life like every other girl in Easterbrook, Ohio, to grow up and go to college and marry a man who lived maybe in New York City or Chicago or San Francisco, some big city close to an ocean or a lake so Margaret could visit her there.
Franny did not believe she would ever be normal. That was her life as she saw it, no matter how much her mother wished it could be different.
Thanksgiving had been at Eleanor’s house that year with all the Hall family gathered in the dining room as they did every Thanksgiving, either at Eleanor’s house or Franny’s, sitting at the long candlelit table with too much food and conversation about Easterbrook and the neighbors and what the children were doing that year, the grown-ups talking and talking, the children wishing for dessert. When the subject of high school came up, the dishes had been cleared, the pies lined up in front of Aunt Gabbie, Eleanor’s unpleasant mother, Zeke sleeping, his face against the starchy tablecloth.
“So, Franny.” Aunt Gabbie began cutting the dreadful mincemeat pie. “I understand that you’re not very happy at Easterbrook High School.”
“Well, Gabbie,” Margaret broke in quickly. “Not that Franny isn’t happy …”
“That’s just what I heard from Eleanor.” Gabbie passed a plate of pie. “Small or large mincemeat, Franny?”
“Neither,” Franny said.
“We have apple as well.”
“No, thank you.”
“Franny …” Margaret began.
“If she doesn’t want pie, she doesn’t want pie. It’s not a requirement,” her father said, but already Franny had gotten up from the table, put her napkin down, and glanced at Zeke in the hope that he might follow her, but he was still sleeping.
She walked out of the dining room, down the hall to the vestibule, and before anyone at the table realized that she had not left to go to the bathroom, she had opened the front door.
Her mother caught up with her halfway down the block.
“Franny, what are you doing?”
“I’m going home.”
“But what about dinner, darling?”
“I finished dinner, I hate Aunt Gabbie’s pies, and I hate Aunt Gabbie.”
She continued walking.
“I’ll come with you then.”
“I don’t want you to come with me,” Franny said with a certainty that surprised her. “If the subject comes up again, I am perfectly happy in high school.”
Franny closed the closet door in her parents’ bedroom and flopped on their bed, facedown.
She had no interest in the Valentine’s Dance. Or even in Valentine’s Day since she didn’t have a boyfriend to declare his love forever with a tiny box of Whitman’s chocolate-covered cherries or a lacy valentine with “I love you, a bushel and a peck / A bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck….”
By the time a girl got to freshman year in Easterbrook, Ohio, a boyfriend was necessary. All the girls that Franny knew, except Boots and Eleanor, had boyfriends. Each Monday morning a new couple would arrive at the high school building holding hands, hooking up the night before on the telephone or at the counter of the Sweet Shoppe or the cemetery where the high school students met to make out. By recess that day, the freshmen would serenade the new couple on the grassy hill behind the school, singing, “Tom and Sylvie, sittin’ in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g / First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes Sylvie with a baby carriage.”
Franny had no one. Not this year. Maybe not ever.
Every other girl in the ninth grade except maybe Boots had been thinking about the Valentine’s Dance since the morning after the Christmas Dance, which Franny didn’t attend.
Even Esther Sams came to the dances in leg braces from polio and sat on the sidelines, and Chrissy Freemont who had no friends at all, neither boys nor girls, was there, and Betsy Frame who was so enormous, she was likely to fall on her face if she tried to dance.
“Let’s go to the Valentine’s Dance together,” Eleanor had said.
Franny shook her head.
“I don’t like dances.”
“But maybe if we go as a group.”
“I hate the way I look.”
“I hate the way I look.” She said it again to her mother one winter afternoon sitting in the kitchen drinking hot chocolate with whipped cream.
“You’re going to be beautiful, Franny,” Margaret Hall said, as if “going to be” meant anything to Franny now.
Franny rolled her eyes.
“You’re very pretty now but you will be beautiful. No one gets to be beautiful until she is older and wiser.”
“And when is that?”
“Soon,” her mother said. “I promise.”
The problem for Franny was how she felt, which was self-conscious, as if everyone at Easterbrook High was passing judgment.
Her mother was beautiful. Sometimes Franny’s breath caught in her throat just watching Margaret Hall fly around the kitchen making dinner, her black curls laced with perspiration, half-glasses balancing on her nose just beneath her wide-set silver-blue eyes, clicking across the linoleum floor in high, high heels, her calves perfectly curved.
Margaret Hall was Danish, born in Copenhagen where she grew up with her older sister, Estelle. She might even have married her
boyfriend in Copenhagen and had Danish children instead of Franny and Zeke if it were not for a year she spent in New York City when she was eighteen, living with Estelle and Estelle’s American husband, Uncle Douglas.
But that year in New York City turned into twenty after she met Franny’s father, Henry Hall, on a snowy December evening waiting for the uptown Lexington Avenue subway. Dr. Henry Hall had swished his Danish sweetheart back to his hometown of Easterbrook, in the corner of Ohio where he had grown up and planned to spend the rest of his life taking care of Easterbrook’s children.
“If I had not left Copenhagen in the first place, I never would have had you, my joy,” her mother used to say to Franny when she was young.
“Or Zeke either,” Franny would add and her mother would nod her head.
Zeke, born eight years after Franny, was an angel of a boy with cherry red cheeks and yellow hair. “Easy as pie, my Zeke,” Margaret would say of her little boy. “Sugar and spice and everything nice, just like a girl, only he’s not one.”
She didn’t mean for Franny to feel bad about the perfect Zeke but in her secret heart, Franny knew she had been a “problem” ever since she was born at Mercy Hospital at four in the morning on January 1, 1942.
It was 1956 and Franny had turned fourteen on New Year’s Day. General Eisenhower was president of the United States and most of the girls she knew were in love with Elvis Presley. Even Franny practiced sticking out one hip bone, opening her mouth just so, half closing her eyes, and in the lowest register possible belting out “Love me tender / Love me sweet / Never let me go.” There was an Elvis fan club at Easterbrook High called the Real Gone Teen Gals, and Boots had joined and even Eleanor. People in Easterbrook were convinced the Americans would be blown up by the Russians, but Margaret Hall, who knew more about war since she had grown up in Denmark next door to Germany before the Second World War, had said that no one would be blowing up Ohio any time soon.
People’s lives in Easterbrook were ordinary, even dull, and the only trouble that Franny could remember that year was the time Boots’s brother Blue drove his father’s car into La Mama’s Italian Restaurant on Christmas Day.
Easterbrook was located on Route 46 halfway between Toledo and Cleveland, not close enough to either city to be anything but a blip on the Ohio map, surrounded by farmland with houses so far off the road you might think only cows lived there, and communities of Amish families who traveled the roads in their horse-drawn buggies but mainly stuck to themselves. The Halls lived in a large white clapboard house with turrets and shutters and a wraparound front porch at the end of College Street next to the Episcopal church.
Nothing of particular interest happened to capture the attention of a high-tempered girl like Franny Hall except church on Sundays, which the Halls did not attend, and high school couples making out on Friday nights behind the tombstones at the Oakdale Cemetery, and dances after the football or basketball or baseball games, depending on the season.
And occasionally, Saturday trips to Cleveland to shop in the department stores.
On this Saturday morning, it was beginning to look as if Franny would be going on the Greyhound bus to Cleveland as soon as her mother hung up the telephone with Aunt Estelle.
Franny put the blue satin high heels back on the shelf, slipped down the corridor, past Zeke’s room where he was lying on his back playing with race cars on his belly, past the office where her mother was still talking on the phone, to her own bedroom where she pulled the door almost shut.
“You can’t find a dress worth wearing in Easterbrook,” Margaret Hall was saying to Estelle as Franny put her ear to the crack in the door.
“She doesn’t want to go to the dance because of her shoes,” her mother said after a pause, “but maybe she will change her mind if we find a remarkable dress, long enough to cover her feet.”
Franny could imagine Aunt Estelle’s reply. Sensible Estelle, less beautiful than Franny’s mother, less patient with children and much less fun, would click her tongue against the roof of her mouth, clear her throat like she did when she wanted to say something important, and in a low, judgmental tone of voice, would remark, “If Francine won’t go to the dance in the shoes she’s got, that’s her choice.”
The shoes to which Aunt Estelle would have been referring were the high-top brown orthopedic oxfords that Franny had worn every day of her life since she could remember, the kind that babies wear to support their tiny ankles while they are learning to walk. Franny’s shoes were so wide and clunky that they hid the evidence of her crippled foot, which looked a little like a sand crab when Franny walked barefoot.
“Not to worry about funny little feet,” her mother had told her. “Everyone has some kind of adversity — a little of this is wrong, a little of that. Something troubling comes in every life. Like Aunt Estelle has teeth like the teeth of a dinosaur and Daddy lost some of the sight in his left eye and I have asthma which gets worse in cold, damp Ohio.”
When she was small, Franny had actually believed what her mother said about the fair distribution of problems, imagining that God sitting in his heavenly chair was distributing bad news like Halloween candy, one for you and one for you and one for you. So she considered herself lucky not to be profoundly deaf like Alyssa Burns in the grade below her or stained by a beige birthmark on her cheek like Sue Ellen Laster. Things happened to people, good and bad, was what she used to think, just like her mother had told her.
In elementary school, Franny had even been one of the liked girls, not too smart or too girly or too much of a teacher’s pet. Not a teacher’s pet at all. Just a funny, high-spirited, happy-go-lucky kind of girl with a heart patch on her jeans, a high ponytail, and clunky leather shoes that she wore like a badge of honor. You could hear her coming when she walked the corridors of the elementary school.
Everyone in town knew Franny Hall, whether they really knew her or not. At least they knew who she was, the girl with mismatched legs who walked with a hitch in her gait so her hips twirled.
And for a while that felt like popular to Franny.
Things began to change for real, as Zeke would say, as soon as she started ninth grade at Easterbrook High School. One Monday in October, the week of the Harvest Dance, she had arrived at school, surprised to find the rest of her homeroom clustered in the hall talking about the dance. She hesitated, wondering whether to join the group, when Sandy Frost turned to her and said in an aside but loud enough for others near her to hear: “Going to the dance, Franny?” and before she had a chance to answer, Sandy replied for her, saying, “I guess it’d be too hard for you to dance.”
“I can dance fine,” Franny said. “I’m not coming for other reasons.”
She leaned against the wall, light-headed, tears stinging just behind her eyelids, waiting for a chance to slip away unnoticed from the group of girls before the others realized her feelings had been hurt.
Sitting in the back row of homeroom, pretending to write in her composition book, she wished she had said nothing at all, simply passed by Sandy Frost as if she had heard her question but it wasn’t worth answering, as if Sandy didn’t even exist. During recess, she had gone to the library, turning the pages of Huckleberry Finn without really looking at the words. At the end of classes, she stopped in the girls’ room and waited until everyone else had left school for the Sweet Shoppe or the drugstore soda fountain and then walked home the back way along Allison Road. Twice during the next week, she’d gone to the infirmary with a threatened stomach flu that never materialized.
She didn’t mention high school to her mother. She didn’t need to.
“You don’t seem to like high school,” her mother said wistfully one evening after dinner as they were drying dishes in the kitchen. “At least not in the way you used to like school when you came home bubbling with news.”
“I like it well enough,” Franny said. “But I don’t like dances.”
“I wish you’d try. You will look so lovely in a gown. Sometimes I lie
in bed at night thinking about you with your black hair, in a long silvery blue dress, maybe strapless.”
Franny could imagine her mother staring out the window of her study, where she worked as an illustrator for medical books, drawing intricate pictures of the inside layers of a human body and thinking of her only daughter in a long silk gown — Margaret called them gowns, not dresses — Franny’s black hair piled on her head in a loose bun, dancing in the arms of a handsome boy.
Tall and handsome, sometimes tall, dark, and handsome was the description Margaret Hall gave of every man she liked, including Henry Hall, who was not particularly handsome, although boyish — “cute” her cousin Eleanor said of Dr. Hall, but certainly not dark — his hair laced with gray, his complexion ruddy.
Lying in her bed next to the window overlooking the back garden and the steeple of St. James Episcopal Church, the lights out, the night bright with stars, Franny could also imagine herself in a long strapless dress, probably periwinkle blue, her black hair in curls done by Ethel’s Hairstylist on Main Street, dancing in the arms of Mikey Houston.
SILVER SHOES
Franny sat in the front seat next to her mother on a Greyhound bus, traveling the highway to Cleveland. It had started to snow. She loved to travel with her mother, loved sitting next to her, watching the pleasure on the faces of passengers boarding the bus in the small towns between Easterbrook and Cleveland when they saw Margaret Hall, thinking how beautiful she was, how elegant, dressed off the pages of fashion magazines.
That particular day, her mother was wearing black trousers and a tight black crewneck sweater, with a red silk square tied around her neck. Her hair, dark like Franny’s but curly, with a white stripe across the front — dyed white. “Skunk fashion,” Margaret said. None of the women in Easterbrook wore trousers, probably not even the women in Cleveland, and no one dyed her hair unless it had already turned gray, which Margaret’s had not. On that Saturday, she was wearing a gray fedora, her favorite of the many hats she owned, and even in trousers, she wore very high heels, red ones to match the red scarf. No makeup except mascara. She never wore lipstick.