The Lovely Shoes

by Susan Shreve

  Franny took off the silver shoes, dropped the remaining toilet paper into the toilet, stood on the toilet seat, and tossed the shoes in the trash can by the sink, waiting for the music to stop, for the dance to be over, for the gymnasium to empty out of people.

  ISOLATION WARD

  Franny sat on her unmade bed painting her fingernails with the cherry red polish that she got in her stocking from Saint Nicholas. It was Sunday. Until that morning, she had never had a desire to paint her ragged nails, which were ugly from years of nervous biting. Now, sitting on her bed the morning after the Valentine’s Dance, the door to her room locked, she decided cherry red would improve the nasty little stubs of nail. It made her feel better to be doing something, anything at all to keep from thinking about the dance.

  She had locked herself in her bedroom for the rest of her life. That was her plan when she woke up in darkness in the middle of the night and couldn’t fall back to sleep, grateful when the darkness paled and she could hear her family getting ready for the day.

  The house was old and drafty and thin walled, so it was easy to overhear her mother on the telephone with Aunt Estelle before the sun came up. Her father and mother had an argument outside her bedroom and Franny had heard her father say, “You’ve got to stop trying so hard with Franny. She’ll do what she does in her own time.”

  Zeke sat outside her bedroom door knocking every few minutes.

  “Fraaaaanny,” he’d call. “Please open the door.”

  But she didn’t answer.

  “I know you’re in there,” he said, his mouth around the keyhole or under the door where there was a space.

  Franny had no intention of speaking to any of her family. She held every one of them responsible for her humiliation because they were related to her by blood and lived in the house with her and were supposed to understand her better than anyone else in the world.

  But mainly she blamed her mother.

  In her English notebook, she wrote a note to Zeke.

  Dear Ezekiel,

  Please tell your mother that I threw the silver shoes into the trash can in the girls’ room beside the gymnasium in case she wants to find them and get her money back from Eldridges.

  Franny

  She slipped the note under the door and Zeke must have snatched it.

  “Mamaaaaa,” he called, slapping barefoot down the steps. “We got a letter from Franny!”

  She didn’t have a plan, although she doubted she would be going to school for a long time. She would refuse to talk to Boots or to Eleanor who had been witnesses to what had happened at the dance. She hoped never to see Kirk Salt again and if she caught sight of Mikey Houston, most likely she would die.

  But she was perfectly happy in her room. It was almost pleasant to imagine remaining there for weeks. Everything she needed was there, including her own bathroom and twelve windows on three sides of the room from which to watch the town of Easterbrook.

  The walls were painted pale blue, her bedspread white, and there was a small chair, a reading chair her mother called it, covered in blue and white stripes, a desk that had belonged to her grandmother Hall, and a dresser that had belonged to her great-aunt Florence, and photographs of all of her Danish relatives including her dead grandmother, the mother her own mother never knew. The blue and white was cool in summer and bright in winter against the steady gray blanketing the landscape outside her windows.

  She was getting hungry.

  Hunger was going to present a problem, she was thinking, when Zeke called, “Franny! Boots is here with Eleanor.”

  Franny leaned back in her bed and closed her eyes, listening to the annoying click, click, click of her mother’s high-heeled shoes on the hardwood floor stairs.

  “Darling,” Margaret Hall called from the other side of the door, which Franny had locked. “Boots and Eleanor are here to see you.”

  Franny didn’t open her eyes, listening to hear if Boots or Eleanor would tell what had happened at the dance the night before.

  “Could you come out and talk to them?” her mother asked.

  “Franny isn’t going to talk to them,” Zeke said. “I promise.”

  “Should I tell them to leave, Franny?”

  And after a few long moments of silence, Margaret Hall spoke again, more quietly.

  “I will tell them to come back another time,” she said, and Franny listened for her high heels on the wooden stairs.

  “Would you like toast and jam, Franny?” Zeke whispered through the door when they had left.

  Franny very much wanted toast and jam, actually toast slathered in butter with a little raspberry jam from the berries her mother had put up in the fall.

  “I would.”

  “I’ll get it for you,” Zeke said. “I’ll make the toast all by myself in the toaster. Two pieces. Do you want ice cream?”

  “No thank you, Ezekiel. Just toast.”

  Minutes later, Zeke was back knocking on the door.

  “The toast is ready,” he said.

  “Leave it outside. I’m not going to open the door until you’re downstairs, Zeke. Until I hear your feet on the wood steps.”

  “How come?”

  “I don’t want anyone to see me at all.”

  “How do you look?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I look how I look and don’t want anyone to see that. You understand?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t want you to see me ever again.”

  “In my life?”

  “That’s right but we can talk between the doors. We can talk whenever you want. Okay?”

  “No.” And his voice was full of tears. “It’s not okay.”

  On Monday morning, the second day after the dance, Franny was up early before the sun, writing a letter to Zeke. It was her thirteenth letter to Zeke since Sunday morning, most of them short.

  Dear Ezekiel,

  I’d like a bologna sandwich for lunch and a Coke and a dill pickle.

  Your former sister, Francine, 10 a.m. Feb. 12

  Or

  Dear Ezekiel,

  Would you please let your mother, Margaret Hall, know that whenever she talks to her sister, Estelle, on the telephone, I can hear every word she says. Every stupid word she says.

  Your former sister, Francine, 2 p.m. Feb. 12

  Or

  Dear Ezekiel,

  I don’t want lamb patties and creamed spinach for dinner. I’d like a bowl of chocolate ice cream and another dill pickle.

  Your former sister, Francine, 6:30 p.m. Feb. 12

  Or the last letter before she turned out her light on Sunday night.

  Dear Ezekiel,

  Thank you for your help and I know you can’t read very well, but I assume that someone in the Hall household is still capable of reading the English language and your job with these letters is simply to be a messenger. Give them to Dr. Henry Hall or Margaret Hall.

  Sincerely yours, F., 9:30 p.m. Feb. 12

  Franny’s mother knocked on the door to her bedroom at six-thirty in the morning on Monday. Already Franny was wide awake writing a letter to Zeke.

  “Darling? Six-thirty. Time to get up for school.”

  Franny leaned back against the pillow. She couldn’t believe that her mother actually thought that she had any intention of going to school.

  Was Margaret Hall simply following Dr. Henry Hall’s recommendation that the best defense is a good offense? Was she actually thinking that Franny believed her cheerful voice pretending everything is just fine, normal as usual, we’re happy as clams at the Hall house located smack in the middle of Easterbrook, Ohio?

  Was her mother crazy?

  Dear Ezekiel,

  What you need to understand now at six years old is that YOU should be the judge of your own actions. You may not understand that now but you better get started. I COMPLETELY trusted Margaret Hall, formerly my mother, to have my best interest in mind when she dressed me up like a clown to go to the Valentine’s Dance at Easterbrook High
. And I was wrong.

  I’m telling you this because it’s Monday morning and I am NOT going to school but I AM thinking that I owe it to you as your former sister to warn you against my former parents, particularly Margaret.

  Please remind your parents about my decision regarding school and ask that they take care of their own problems and leave mine to me.

  Thank you. YFS (meaning Your Former Sister), Francine

  Just after her mother knocked on her door, about the same time her father usually left for the hospital unless there was an emergency, Franny could hear Dr. Hall stomping up the steps to the second floor. Other families had carpet on their steps, wall-to-wall carpet in every room but the kitchen, usually the same color for every room. For instance Eleanor’s parents, who were after all related to Franny, had a Williamsburg blue carpet even in the bathrooms, and Boots’s family, who didn’t really have enough money for wall-to-wall carpet, had thin brown carpet everywhere in the house except the kitchen.

  “Daddy’s coming upstairs to talk to you,” Zeke announced through the keyhole.

  Franny didn’t respond, waiting with only the slightest anxiety for her former father to bang, bang, bang on her door as he was inclined to do when he was angry.

  Which he did. Bang, bang, bang, followed by “FRANCINE.”

  “She won’t talk, Daddy,” Zeke said. “I promise.” “She’s going to talk to me if I have to break the door down.”

  Franny stood up to check how she looked in the mirror just in case her father was able to break down the door. Her hair was tangled, her face a little pale, but otherwise she looked exactly the way she had always looked. Which surprised her because she was a changed girl since the Valentine’s Dance on Saturday night. Even her blood seemed to be flowing faster and warmer and in another direction.

  “FRANCINE.” Bang, bang, bang.

  Downstairs, Franny could clearly hear her mother’s high heels skittering across the floor from the kitchen to the hall, up the steps, and stopping outside her door.

  “Please, Henry.”

  “She’s going to school, Margaret. She’s a perfectly healthy fourteen-year-old girl in a bad humor and a bad humor is not sufficient reason to skip school.”

  “She’s had a sadness, Henry.”

  “A what? A sadness? Pull yourself together, Margaret. Sadness is not, according to my medical books, a terminal illness.”

  Franny pulled her knees up under her chin, wrapped her arms around her legs, and listened with a certain pleasure, a certain inescapable satisfaction not equal to the embarrassment of the Valentine’s Dance but at least some compensation for the helplessness she had felt.

  Zeke screamed “STOP.” Margaret Hall clicked, clicked down the steps and Dr. Henry Hall said nothing.

  But Franny heard the car start underneath her window and supposed that he was off to work, turning on the radio to the classical music station, considering his only daughter’s failure as an agreeable girl, no longer good as gold.

  Later, Franny, still locked in her bedroom, started the first murder mystery story of what might be her writing career, The Terror of the Missing Silver Shoes, which began with her father’s statement:

  “According to the medical books, sadness is not a terminal illness.”

  On Tuesday and Wednesday, it snowed, a little sun filtering through the snow clouds, and Franny stretched out on the comforter, thinking.

  Her life in her bedroom was simple. Every morning she got up, took a shower, dressed in jeans and her pajama top, opened her bedroom door just long enough to get the breakfast which had been left on a tray on the floor, and sat down at her desk to write.

  The Terror of the Missing Silver Shoes kept her from thinking about Mikey Houston and the toilet paper streaming along the gymnasium floor, about her mother’s betrayal, about the future of her life in Easterbrook, Ohio.

  But days in her bedroom began to seem long.

  She had started writing philosophical notes to Zeke since the practical matters, primarily food, had been taken care of and three meals a day were delivered on time, along with snacks and an occasional missive from her mother.

  Dear Ezekiel,

  I wish we were closer to the same age. Eight years is a long time now. When I am twenty and free to move to China where I plan to go work with Chinese orphans, you will only be twelve and in the eighth grade and I’ll be an adult. I could get married at eighteen. Certainly after China, I’ll go to college. But by the time you’re twenty-one and I’m twenty-nine, we’ll be more or less the same age and we will be able to talk at the same level of understanding.

  Now I feel a responsibility to protect you from things your father and mother failed to protect you from. Toughness is important. The other day when Ernie Sang beat you up in the Sangs’ backyard, your mother flew over and swooped you up and said some unpleasant things to Mrs. Sang and brought you home for a chocolate sundae. Most children have to fend for themselves. That’s what I mean by toughness. Your parents are overprotective.

  Sometimes I think it’s a good thing that I’m crippled. I’ve known bad things since I was born, most especially that people can be very unkind and you have to ignore it.

  That’s all for now. YFS, Francine

  It was about ten in the morning and Zeke was at school, Dr. Henry Hall at the hospital, and Margaret in her study drawing the curly noodles of an elephant’s brain for a new book on elephants from Chicago University Press. The house was quiet, Franny was sleepy and bored, the book she was planning to write had not started to unravel in her imagination.

  She heard the door to her mother’s study open and the click of her high heels.

  A manila envelope was slipped under her bedroom door.

  “Franny, are you there?” she asked in her cheery voice. “I have something for you.”

  “No, I’m not here,” Franny said.

  “Well, when you come back, I’ve put an article you might enjoy under your door.”

  Franny smiled in spite of herself.

  Margaret Hall had stopped asking questions about the dance and inquiring after Franny’s state of mind, had stopped asking her to call Boots and Eleanor and some other girls in her class who kept calling asking after her. Now she only asked simple questions, with simple answers, no complications.

  Sometimes Franny was urgent to talk to her mother, to tell her about the mystery she was writing, to report the story of what had really happened at the Valentine’s Dance, to tell her that Mikey Houston had actually asked her to dance and then the toilet paper thing happened and she fled to the girls’ room, locking herself in a cubicle. But those moments of longing for her mother’s conversation were fleeting, overcome by the small hot ball of fury Franny was still nursing.

  SALVATORE FERRAGAMO: SHOEMAKER TO THE STARS

  The story — clipped from the February issue of Vogue magazine, Margaret Hall’s very favorite fashion magazine, which she read every month cover to cover — was a color photographic essay with some text. Salvatore Ferragamo, a small, delicate Italian man, was pictured in his shoe factory outside of Florence. In another photograph he was with his wife and grown children in the showroom in Florence, kneeling among his shoes, holding one scarlet and black high-heeled shoe up for a tall, bony, flat-chested blonde to examine. There were all kinds of shoes, beautiful shoes with high heels and even higher heels in every color, every material. And beautiful women, actresses and artists, countesses and wealthy Americans, trying on Salvatore Ferragamo’s shoes, admiring reflections of their feet and legs in the low gilt-framed mirrors, in the full-size mirrors. In the final picture, Salvatore Ferragamo stood in the center with a young woman, her arm laced through his.

  FERRAGAMO WITH HIS BELOVED DAUGHTER, FLAVIA.

  Franny folded the article and put it on her desk, starting another letter to Zeke who would be coming home from school soon, a Thursday, dismissal at two. It was almost two and snowing again in long white sheets outside her window.

  Dear Ezekiel, she wro
te. I don’t know what is going on with your mother, something to worry about certainly, but NOW she has pushed an article about a shoemaker under my door as if I would have an interest in shoemakers. I wonder if I could trouble you to tell her to Stop the Shoe Pressure. SSP. Stop the Shoe Pressure. I have all the shoes I need. Tell her that. Two pairs, one black leather and one brown leather, high-tops, laces, heavy lift on the left shoe. That’s ME. Francine, Your Former Sister

  “Frannnnnnnny.” Zeke galloped up the stairs, stopping just short of Franny’s bedroom. “Are you still there?”

  Franny got up, dropped the Ferragamo article in the drawer of her desk where she kept the chewing gum she wasn’t allowed to chew in public, and pushed the letter to Zeke under her door.

  “Guess what,” Zeke called. “Guess what, Franny?”

  She opened her desk drawer, took out a stick of Wrigley’s Spearmint, and popped it in her mouth.

  “I don’t know, Ezekiel. What? I guess you better tell me.”

  “I saw Mikey Houston picking up his little brother at school and he asked where you were and were you sick because you’d disappeared right in the middle of dancing with him and so I said you were under the weather. That’s what Mama is telling people. Franny is actually under the weather is what she says.”

  Franny took out another piece of paper, writing:

  I’m not under the weather. I’m in a bad humor. You can tell people that. F.

  She folded the paper, wrote Margaret Hall, and slipped the note under her bedroom door.

  Her heart was beating in her mouth with the news that Mikey Houston had inquired about her. She flopped on her back on the bed, a little giddy, and closed her eyes.

  She believed her little brother. Why would a six-year-old boy like Ezekiel Hall make up something like that? But it was also possible that Mikey H. had been laughing with his friends all week about the train of toilet paper following Franny to the girls’ room, laughing about her lumpy feet. He probably was glad to have some interesting news to tell the boys in the ninth grade so he could say, “Guys, wanna know about Franny Hall?” and they’d say, “Yeah!” laughing along, and Mikey Houston would say, “Well I have it straight from her brother Ezekiel that Franny’s under the weather!” and they’d laugh themselves silly, slapping their thighs, making cripple jokes one after the other.