The Lovely Shoes

by Susan Shreve

  Two seats back, Mrs. Arnold Clifford, the grandmother of Lucia in Franny’s class, and Miss Esther Clifford, the grown-up, unmarried daughter with whom Mrs. Clifford lived on North Main in Easterbrook, were chatting about Margaret Hall. Franny had seen them when she got on the bus and said hello and they had smiled an Episcopalian smile, as her mother would have described it, the kind of unnatural smile you have to give whether you’re glad to see someone or not.

  Franny held her breath so she could hear them above the low roar of the bus. Gossip was serious entertainment in Easterbrook, chatting back and forth about other people in town.

  “Not enough happens in Easterbrook, so people need to talk about each other,” her mother had told Franny.

  “Margaret comes from Copenhagen,” Mrs. Clifford was saying.

  “I know, Mother,” Miss Esther Clifford said. “That’s why she dresses in pants the way she does.”

  “Women do that in Copenhagen.”

  “And she doesn’t go to church. I see her on her front porch reading the paper every Sunday morning when we walk to church, even in the winter. Have you noticed?” Miss Clifford asked.

  “I’ve noticed,” Mrs. Clifford said. “People in Denmark don’t believe in God. At least that’s what I’ve heard. They may believe in something but certainly not in Christianity.”

  “I read in National Geographic that Scandinavia is very liberal,” Miss Clifford agreed.

  Franny turned to her mother, who had a funny smile on her face.

  “Say something to them,” Franny whispered.

  Margaret put her finger to her lips.

  “But it’s not true what they’re saying,” Franny said.

  “It’s not important what they’re saying.”

  Margaret was counting her money, $127.50 from the stash she kept in her underwear drawer for luxuries. She saved the money she made from the medical books she illustrated for unnecessary things, luxuries like formal dresses for the Valentine’s Dance or the rhinestone drop earrings she was wearing on the trip to Cleveland.

  “I have saved up quite a lot for us to spend this afternoon,” she said.

  The bus stopped in Gainesville to pick up passengers, a boy about eighteen, a young man, a mother with a baby.

  Franny was aware that they were looking at her mother as they walked down the aisle of the bus. People did. She could feel their eyes. The young man staring at Margaret Hall stopped next to them, put his hand on the seat in front for balance when the bus started up.

  “You look just like this girl I had a crush on at Wooster,” he said. “Mary Jo Rider.”

  “That’s not me,” Margaret said and she was smiling. “And I’m a lot older than you are.”

  “Well, I’d never guess,” the man said, and he would have stayed there trying to make conversation if the bus driver had not asked him to please take a seat.

  “So it’s fifty percent off regular prices in the formal gown section on the third floor of Marcus and Sons department store,” Margaret said, tearing the ad out of the Saturday edition of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “We can get two or even three dresses with the money I’ve saved. You’ll need one dress for spring and one for winter. Maybe I’ll even buy one.”

  “I’m not necessarily going to the Valentine’s Dance, Mama,” Franny said softly, choosing the word necessarily with care, knowing how important her happiness was to her mother and not wishing to disappoint her, especially after she had saved all that money.

  “But if you do decide at the last minute to go to the dance, then you’ll have the perfect dress, darling, and if you decide no, then we’ve had a lovely day in Cleveland together.”

  Franny looked out the window at the passing farms, the thin sheet of snow, the bare trees bending just so with the wind.

  “I have so many dreams for you, Franny,” her mother whispered conspiratorially. “And now that you’re almost grown-up, some of them will come true.”

  “I know,” Franny replied, her heart heavy just thinking of all those dreams bearing down on her like heat.

  Not that she felt hopeless about her life. She had dreams too, about her future with Mikey Houston and turning into someone important, like an orthopedic surgeon taking care of crippled children like her.

  Unlike her mother, her father expected very little of Franny’s romantic future. He was a brusque, straightforward man without illusions.

  “A doctor has to tell the truth,” he said, “and that’s what I do.”

  “Marriage isn’t for everyone,” he’d tell Franny when her mother spun magical possibilities for her life. “You’ll be wise to find a profession.”

  When her father advised Franny to find a profession, she understood him to mean that it was possible no one would want to marry her.

  “Don’t be such a pessimist, Henry,” her mother had said to him crossly.

  “I’m a realist, Margaret,” her father said. “And you’re an optimist.”

  “I’m sorry your father is so difficult,” her mother said later that evening.

  “It’s okay. That’s the way he is,” Franny said.

  The girls in Franny’s class at Easterbrook were at war with their mothers sometime between elementary and high school, as if at the end of eighth grade, mothers took a bitter pill that turned them into monsters. Even Boots’s mother, who taught seventh-grade history and English and had a reputation for being the best teacher at Easterbrook Elementary, transformed overnight into an agent of pain inflicting misery on her daughters, particularly Boots.

  “What’s the matter with her?” Franny asked.

  “Mothers get to be annoying like they’ve caught a disease.” Boots shrugged. “I hate the way she talks in that teacher voice. It sends shivers down my spine.”

  “It hasn’t happened to me with my mother.”

  “Don’t hold your breath hoping for something different,” Boots said, listing a litany of maternal sins.

  Marianna Ward’s mother wouldn’t let her go to the movies and Joanne Bird’s mother had actually belted Joanne for kissing Paul Clement at the entrance to Oakdale Cemetery in full view of the passing traffic and Brigette hadn’t spoken to her mother for seven weeks as of February first, which included Christmas Day.

  “It’ll happen to you too,” Boots said.

  The bus crossed the city limits into Cleveland, and Margaret Hall took down her coat and put it on, wrapped a red woolly scarf around her neck.

  “We’re almost there,” she said, handing Franny her coat.

  At the first stop in downtown Cleveland, Miss Clifford and Mrs. Clifford got off, patting Franny on the head as they passed.

  “Why, Margaret,” Mrs. Clifford said as she angled her ample hips down the aisle, “you look so fashionable today.”

  “Going clothes shopping?” Miss Clifford asked, and she didn’t mean it nicely.

  “No, actually, we have friends in Cleveland,” Margaret said, not willing to let the Clifford family in on her shopping plans. “Relatives from Copenhagen where I grew up.”

  “I wasn’t aware that you had grown up in Copenhagen,” Miss Clifford said, and Franny gave her mother a knowing look. “Very nice place to grow up, yes?”

  “Very interesting,” Mrs. Clifford added. “I haven’t gotten to Copenhagen yet in my travels, but I plan to go maybe this summer.”

  And they stepped off the bus with a little wave, the doors closing behind them.

  “I don’t think Mrs. Clifford has traveled beyond Cleveland,” Margaret said, standing for the next stop, which was Marcus and Sons.

  Franny followed her mother, weaving in and out of the Saturday crowds and through the revolving doors into the store.

  “So first to the third-floor formal dress sale,” Margaret said.

  Marcus and Sons was a huge department store, covering two city blocks with seven floors, from makeup on the ground floor to furniture on the seventh and an elegant restaurant on the second floor where Franny and her mother always ordered fruit cup w
ith a maraschino cherry, a toasted cheese sandwich with a sour pickle, and maybe chocolate marshmallow ice cream with a macaroon for dessert.

  “Why did you tell Miss Clifford we were visiting friends in Cleveland?” Franny asked as they were going up the escalator side by side.

  “Because …” Margaret Hall paused. “I didn’t want them going back to Easterbrook tut-tutting about our shopping trip.”

  “Is there something wrong with shopping?”

  “They would think it’s frivolous,” her mother said, linking her arm through Franny’s.

  It surprised Franny when her mother told what she called a white lie, a small lie of convenience to avoid trouble. She thought of her mother as fearless — at least she wished to think of her as fearless, but it was her father, her serious, sometimes gloomy and severe father, who always told the literal truth.

  “What I mean by one dress for winter and one for spring,” Margaret Hall was saying, hurrying through the third floor to formal dresses, “is that your winter dress, maybe purple velvet or even black, is perfect for Christmas through February.”

  “I’m NOT going to dances,” Franny said with sudden irritation.

  Her mother laughed.

  “Don’t worry. You don’t have to go to any dances. This is half pretend just for the fun of it,” she went on. “Maybe a black velvet strapless?”

  “And black mascara,” Franny added. “I’d like to do something with my bushy eyebrows so they look bold like Audrey Hepburn’s.”

  “Perfect,” her mother said, leaning against Franny as they rode up the wooden escalator to the third floor. “I think I’d like to get extra thick mascara and we’ll share.”

  In the dressing room, Franny sat on a Victorian arm chair with a puffy brocade seat, avoiding the image of herself reproduced in triplicate in the three-way mirror.

  Hanging on a hook were the dresses her mother had picked from the lines of sale items on the rack.

  “An A-line red velvet tea-length,” she said. “What do you think?”

  “Okay,” Franny replied, less resistant when she saw the dresses accumulated on the hooks in the dressing room, wishing it was time for lunch.

  “And this glittery taffeta, kind of a brownish gold, for fall probably, also strapless though I could make some little sleeves.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “I think you’re big enough to hold this dress up so it doesn’t slip down to your waist.”

  Margaret had picked out a royal blue silk with a straight skirt, a V-neck, and cap sleeves. She held it up next to Franny.

  “The color’s great with your hair, but maybe the dress is too old for you with these little sleeves, and I don’t know about a straight skirt.”

  Franny slipped out of her skirt and crewneck sweater, took off the high-top orthopedic shoes with the hunky lift, and kicked them out of the way.

  “Remember, it doesn’t mean anything if I try this thing on,” she warned, expecting that whatever she said would make no difference. They would still leave the midwinter sales with two formal dresses — one for spring and one for winter. Her mother would never give up.

  “Just in case you change your mind about the dance,” her mother said, crossing her long legs.

  Franny tried on the red velvet first. $25.00 marked down from $37.50.

  “Too big.” Margaret tilted her head to the side.

  She helped Franny into a pink taffeta dress with a tulip skirt and a strapless cornflower blue thing with boning in the bra that jabbed Franny’s ribs and made her stick out like the pointy end of an ice-cream cone.

  A saleswoman knocked on the door, holding a hanger with a long black velvet strapless dress.

  “Maybe this one?” she asked.

  Margaret took the dress and held it in front of her, eyeing herself in the mirror.

  “Try it on,” she said, handing it to Franny.

  “Aren’t I too young for black?”

  “It’s very grown-up but maybe,” Margaret said.

  Franny stood in front of the long three-way mirror while her mother zipped the dress up the back, pulled her hair into a high bun, brushed her bangs so they fell in a swoop across her forehead, removed a magenta flower from one of the dresses on the hook, and with a bobby pin attached the flower just above Franny’s ear, a splash of color on black.

  “Oh, Franny, you look just beautiful!”

  In the mirror, she looked at herself straight on. Everyone had always told Franny that she was going to look like her mother when she grew up, and this time seeing her mother reflected behind her, Franny could see her own future in the glass.

  And her heart leapt.

  “I think I like it,” she said.

  At home that afternoon, Zeke was sitting on his parents’ bed, his Matchbox cars stuffed under the pillow where Pickle, the cat, was sleeping. He watched his sister walk across the room in the black velvet dress.

  “Gorgeous, don’t you think, Zekey?” Margaret asked.

  “S’okay,” Zeke said. “I mean, I don’t know how Franny’s supposed to look.”

  “Do I look like I’m limping?”

  “You always limp, Franny,” Zeke said truthfully. “That’s how you walk.”

  “A little limp,” Margaret Hall said. “Not noticeable.”

  “That’s not true. It is noticeable,” Franny said. “It’s always noticeable. Right, Zekey?”

  “Right,” Zeke said, zooming his car up the wall.

  “Well.” Margaret Hall began as she often did with a pause. She was sitting in an armchair, her feet on the bed, a familiar expression Franny recognized on her face.

  “Franny,” she said softly, almost a whisper.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I have a plan.”

  Eldridges Shoes and Trinkets on the main square of Easterbrook was just about to lock the doors to business at five o’clock when Franny and Margaret and an unhappy Zeke Hall walked in.

  “We’re about to close, Mrs. Hall.” Miss Fritchie, the store owner, looked up from the cash register. “You can come back on Monday when we open at ten.”

  Franny’s mother leaned over the counter, touching Miss Fritchie very lightly on the wrist.

  “I need your help, Miss Fritchie,” she said. “I see you have a sale on shoes.”

  “We do, Mrs. Hall, but it’s five o’clock.”

  “I know, Miss Fritchie, but Franny has no shoes for the Valentine’s Dance next weekend.”

  “I don’t know whether we have anything here that will work for Franny,” Miss Fritchie said.

  “We got a beautiful dress in Cleveland this morning and I hate to think of her in those heavy oxfords with a gorgeous black velvet dress. Strapless. I’m going to lend her my pearls.”

  Miss Fritchie was softening.

  “I’ll be very quick,” Margaret Hall said.

  Franny stepped onto the X-ray machine to look at the bones of her feet through the X-ray lens which showed bones without flesh. She stood on the rectangular box, used to measure the size of the feet exactly, stuck her feet into the two holes, turned on the machine, and peered through a window at the top of the box. She already knew that she had one foot that fit into a size five women’s shoe and another foot that fit into a size thirteen children’s shoe.

  “If you can hurry, I’ll stay open a few more minutes,” Miss Fritchie said, closing the cash register.

  “It’s not my idea to be here in the first place,” Franny said pleasantly as Miss Fritchie hurried past the X-ray machine on her way to lock the front door.

  “Me neither,” Zeke agreed, sitting glumly on the floor.

  Margaret was searching through the shoes to find one size five and one size four, since the manufacturers didn’t make high heels in children’s size thirteen.

  “Let’s try these,” her mother said, rolling up the pants leg of Franny’s blue jeans, fitting her little foot into the smaller shoe.

  Zeke had climbed onto the X-ray box and turned it on but he
was too short to look down at his own feet in the box.

  “That shoe is too big,” Franny said.

  “Of course it’s too big.”

  “So?”

  “So watch this.”

  Margaret took a package of Kleenex out of her purse, wadded up a bunch of it, and stuck it in the toe of the shoe.

  “Now try it.”

  “It’s still too big,” Franny said, losing patience.

  “There,” Margaret said, adding a few more tissues. “Now stand up and see if you can walk.”

  “She doesn’t want to do it, Mama,” Zeke said.

  Franny had never walked in high-heeled shoes, even ones with very small heels like the pair she was wearing.

  “I’d have fallen over in those blue satin shoes of yours I tried on this morning,” she said to warn her mother that she might fall over now.

  “You won’t fall,” Margaret said, getting up from the floor, leaning against the wall, folding her arms across her chest.

  “I want to go home,” Zeke said, turning off the machine. “I couldn’t see my feet.”

  But Margaret wasn’t listening.

  “They’re very pretty shoes, darling. Pretty on you.”

  Franny took a step and then another. The heels were short and though she’d never walked in any shoes but orthopedic ones with the big lift, she was actually walking across the hardwood floor at Eldridges, and the shoes felt surprisingly fine. Not perfect and she was limping even more than usual, but the left shoe stuffed with Kleenex wasn’t falling off and the right one felt almost normal. She looked at her feet in the square mirror on the floor of the shop.

  Maybe, she thought, the shoes would work just for a short time, a couple of hours, long enough to last the dance.

  She walked to the end of the store and back.

  Miss Fritchie was putting on her winter coat and galoshes.

  “Okay,” she agreed. “I’ll try it even though I hate silver shoes.”

  “I hate shopping,” Zeke said.

  She sat down on the bench, took the shoes off, took out the Kleenex, and examined them. The price marked on the sole was $5.95.

  “Have a nice time at the dance,” Miss Fritchie said, dropping the shoes, one pair size four and one pair size five, in a bag, unlocking the door for them to leave.