In Her Shoes

by Jennifer Weiner

  “What a cute little pug!” said a dark-haired woman, kneeling to let the dog sniff her hand. Pug, Rose said to herself. Okay, so the dog was a pug. That was a start.

  “Come,” Rose said, wrapping the scarf around her hand, and the dog walked sedately by her left heel as they made their way to the convenience store. “Stay,” said Rose, and tied her scarf around a meter. The dog—the pug—looked up at her like a dinner guest waiting for the soup course. “I’ll be back,” said Rose. She went inside and spent ten minutes staring at the bewildering array of pet food before purchasing a bag of kibble for small adult dogs. She also bought a plastic bowl to pour the food into, two jelly doughnuts, coffee, two pints of ice cream, and a bag of cheese curls she’d grabbed from a display promising that they’d be the most CheeseRageous thing she’d ever eaten. The cashier raised his eyebrows at her haul. Rose came in here a lot, but all she ever purchased were newspapers, black coffee, and the occasional can of Slim-Fast.

  “I’m on vacation,” she explained, wondering why she felt the need to explain anything to a guy who worked the cash register at the Wawa. But he gave her a nice smile, and snuck a square of Bazooka gum into her bag, along with her receipt.

  “Enjoy,” he said. Rose returned his smile weakly, and went outside, where the dog was still sitting, tethered to its parking meter.

  “What’s your name?” Rose wondered out loud.

  The dog just stared.

  “I’m Rose,” said Rose. “I’m a lawyer.” The dog walked beside her. There was something in the set of her head, the way her ears were cocked, that suggested she might actually be listening. “I’m thirty years old. I graduated summa cum laude from Princeton, then I went to the University of Pennsylvania law school, where I was a Law Review editor, and ...”

  Why was she giving the dog her résumé? This was silly. The dog wasn’t going to hire her. Probably neither was anyone else. Word would get out about her and Jim. It had probably started already, Rose realized bleakly. It was probably going on while she was at the firm and she was too dumb and doped up with love to see it.

  “I was having an affair,” said Rose, as she and the dog paused for a red light. The teenage girl with the gold hoop through her lip standing next to her on the sidewalk stared at Rose curiously, then started walking faster. “There was this guy.” She paused. “Well, isn’t there always. He was kind of my boss, actually, and he turned out to be ...” She swallowed hard. “Bad. Very, very bad.”

  The dog gave a single sharp bark—of despair? Affirmation? Rose wasn’t sure. She wanted to call Amy, but she didn’t think she could cope with the sting of having to tell her best friend that she’d been right, that Jim had been as big a jerk as Amy had imagined . . . and that Maggie, her sister, who she’d opened her house to, her sister who she’d tried to help, had been worse still. The light turned green. The dog barked again, and tugged gently against the scarf. “It’s over,” said Rose—just to say something, just to end the story somehow, even if she was just talking to a dog, and the dog wasn’t listening. “Over,” she repeated, and crossed the street. The dog looked at her, then looked back down.

  “So the girl who was taking care of you. That was Maggie. My sister,” she continued, as they walked closer to her apartment building. “We’ll have to feed you, and get you a leash, and figure out where you came from. Have to take you back.” She stopped at a corner and considered the dog again—small, coffee-colored, harmless, she supposed. The dog looked up at her, then gave a brisk and, Rose thought, dismissive snort. “Fine,” she said, “don’t be grateful.” She crossed the street and walked herself home.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Who ever told the truth about a marriage? Certainly Ella never had. She and her friends would talk about their husbands like they were children, or pets—some strange species responsible for bad smells and strange noises and messes they’d have to clean up. They turned their husbands into punch lines. They spoke of them in shorthand, a code of rolled eyes and pronouns. He. Him. He doesn’t eat green vegetables, so how am I supposed to make the kids do it? I’d love to go on that cruise, but of course I’ll have to ask him.

  Ella used to contribute from her own small stock of anecdotes, the stories that would make Ira appear as simple as a child’s cartoon drawn in broad lines. She’d have the ladies howling around the bridge table with stories of how he wouldn’t go on a trip longer than twenty miles without a mayonnaise jar in case he didn’t like the looks of the gas station rest rooms, or the eighty dollars he’d spent on a do-it-yourself yogurt-making kit. Not ice cream, not beer, she’d say, as the ladies laughed so hard they had to wipe tears from their cheeks, not something you’d actually want, but yogurt. Ira the yogurt king.

  Those were the stories she told, but she never told the truth about her marriage. Never told the ladies how it felt to live with someone who’d become more like a roommate than a husband, like someone who’d been assigned to share your living quarters for the duration of a trip. Never told them about the bruising politeness, the way Ira would thank her when she poured his coffee, or the way he’d take her arm when they were out in public, at weddings or his company’s Christmas party, how he’d hold her arm and guide her from the car out to the sidewalk, as if she were made of glass. As if she were a stranger. And she’d certainly never mentioned the way they’d quietly moved into separate beds after Caroline started school, and how Ira had relocated to the guest room the week their daughter had gone off to college. Things like that were never spoken of, and Ella wouldn’t have even known how to begin the conversation.

  The sound of banging startled her from her reverie. Mrs. Lefkowitz was pounding at the door. “Ass Master? You in there?” Ella hurried to let her in, hoping that none of her neighbors had overheard. Mrs. Lefkowitz shuffled into Ella’s kitchen, reaching into her oversized pink crocheted purse and setting a glass bottle on the countertop.

  “Pickles,” she announced. Ella stifled a smile and emptied the jar of Claussen’s finest into a serving dish, as her guest peered into her living room and sniffed. “He’s not here yet?”

  “Not yet,” Ella called, peering into the oven. She’d never figured out Florida cuisine, if there was such a thing, and on the infrequent occasions when she had to cook for someone other than herself, she found herself relying on the same handful of company meals she’d cooked during her years of marriage. Tonight she’d be serving a brisket, potato pancakes, a tsimmes of carrots and prunes, with challah from the bakery, and Mrs. Lefkowitz’s pickles, and two kinds of cake and a pie. Too much food, she thought, too much for just the three of them, and too heavy for these hot Florida nights, but when she’d been running to the grocery store or bustling around in her too-small kitchen, the work had kept her mind off how nervous she was.

  “I’d like to meet your friends,” Lewis had said, and how could Ella tell him that she didn’t really have friends here? He’d think that she was crazy, or that there was something wrong with her. And Mrs. Lefkowitz had been, if anything, even more insistent. “A gentleman caller!” she’d cackled, after Ella had made the mistake of letting Lewis drop her off for Meals on Wheels duty, and she’d followed Ella around the kitchen, thumping the floors with her cane. “Is he handsome? Good income? A widower, or divorced? Toupee? Pacemaker? Does he drive? Does he drive at night?”

  “Enough!” Ella had said, laughing, with her hands in the air in the universal gesture of surrender.

  “Then it’s settled,” said Mrs. Lefkowitz, with a crooked grin that made her look like a lopsided Cheshire cat.

  “What’s settled?” Ella asked.

  “You’ll have me over for dinner. It’ll be good for me to get out,” Mrs. Lefkowitz said airily. “My doctor says so.” She picked up what she’d told Ella was a PalmPilot from the coffee table. “Should we say five o’clock?”

  That had been three days ago. Ella glanced at her watch. It was five after five. “Late!” Mrs. Lefkowitz observed helpfully from the living room couch. Lewis knocked on the
door.

  “Hello, ladies,” he said. He had an armful of tulips, a bottle of wine, and something in a square cardboard box tucked underneath his arm. “Smells delicious!”

  “I made too much,” Ella said weakly.

  “So you’ll have leftovers,” he said, and held out his hands to Mrs. Lefkowitz, who, Ella saw, had applied a fresh streak of geranium pink lipstick.

  “Hello, hello!” she cooed, looking him over as he helped her to her feet.

  “You must be Mrs. Lefkowitz,” he said. In the kitchen, Ella held her breath, hoping that she’d finally learn Mrs. Lefkowitz’s first name. Instead, Mrs. Lefkowitz gave a coquettish giggle and allowed Lewis to walk her to the table.

  After dinner and dessert and coffee in the living room, Mrs. Lefkowitz gave a contented sigh and a small burp. “My trolley’s coming,” she announced, and limped out into the night. Lewis and Ella exchanged a smile.

  “I brought you something,” Lewis said.

  “Oh, you shouldn’t have,” Ella said reflexively, as Lewis retrieved his cardboard box. She felt her heart contract into an icy ball as she saw what he’d brought. A photo album.

  “I was telling you about my family the other night, so I thought maybe you’d want to see some pictures,” Lewis said, settling himself on her couch as if this wasn’t unusual or terrifying at all. As if anyone could do this—open a photo album, look the past right in the face. Ella’s face felt frozen, but she made herself smile, and sit next to him.

  Lewis flipped his album open. There were pictures of his parents, first, standing stiffly in their old-fashioned clothes, and Lewis and his brothers. And here was Sharla, wearing orange or bright pink or turquoise (and, sometimes, all three together), and their son. There were shots of Lewis and Sharla’s house in Utica, a ranch with pots of roses beside the front door. “That was John’s high-school graduation, or was it college? . . . there we are at the Grand Canyon, which you probably could recognize without me. . . . That was my retirement dinner.” Wedding pictures, bar mitzvah parties, the beach, the mountains; the babies. Ella endured them all, smiling and nodding and saying the right things until finally, blessedly, Lewis closed the book.

  “How about you?”

  “How about me what?” she asked.

  “Could I see pictures of you?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t have many,” she told him. And it was the truth. When she and Ira had sold their house in Michigan and moved down here, they’d put all kinds of things into storage—furniture and winter coats, boxes and boxes of books. And all of their pictures. It hurt too much to see them. But maybe . . .

  “Wait here,” Ella said. She went to the closet in the back bedroom and reached past the boxes of clothes and extra towels, and felt for an old purse that contained a plain white envelope, with a handful of snapshots inside. She came back to the couch and showed Lewis the first in the stack, a shot of her and Ira, standing in the spray of Niagara Falls on their honeymoon.

  Lewis studied the photograph carefully, tilting it from side to side beneath the lamp on the side table.

  “You look worried,” he finally said.

  “Maybe I was,” said Ella, shuffling through the snapshots. There was Ira, posing beside a “Sold” sign in front of their house in Michigan, Ira behind the wheel of their first new car. And finally, at the bottom of the stack, was a shot of Ella and Caroline.

  “Here,” she said, and passed Lewis the picture. Their next-door neighbor had taken it the day they’d come home from the hospital. Ella was in the background, with her small suitcase, and Ira was by the door, with Caroline, three days old, wrapped in a pink blanket, peering out suspiciously from his arms. “My daughter,” she said, steeling herself for what was coming next. “Caroline.”

  “She was a beautiful baby,” said Lewis.

  “She had black hair. A head full of black hair,” Ella remembered. “And she cried for what felt like a year, nonstop.”

  She flipped to the last two pictures. Caroline and her father, posing in a rowboat, wearing matching caps and fisherman’s vests. And finally, Caroline on her wedding day, with Ella standing above her, arranging the folds of her veil.

  “What a beautiful girl,” said Lewis. Ella said nothing. There was silence. “I didn’t want to talk about Sharla for months,” Lewis said. “So I’ll understand if you don’t. But sometimes it’s nice just to talk. To remember the good times.”

  Had there been good times with Caroline? It felt as if all she could remember was the heartache and endless nights of worry, waiting wide-eyed in the dark listening for the door (or the window, if Caroline had been grounded) to creak open. She remembered sitting on the gold velvet love seat in the living room, a tiny coffin too narrow to lie down in, waiting for her daughter to come home.

  “She was,” Ella began. “She was so beautiful. Tall, with brown hair, lovely skin, and she was . . . lively. Funny.” Crazy, her mind whispered. “Mentally ill,” she said instead. “She was manic-depressive. Bipolar, they call it now. We found out when she was in high school. She’d been having . . . episodes.” Ella shut her eyes, remembering how Caroline had barricaded herself in her bedroom for three days, refusing to eat, screaming through the door that there were ants in her hair and she could feel them when she slept.

  Lewis made a sympathetic noise. Ella kept talking, the words spilling out over each other like she’d kept them dammed up too long.

  “We saw doctors. All kinds of doctors. And they gave her medicine, and it made her better in some ways, but it slowed her down, too. It was hard for her to think, she said.” Ella could remember Caroline on lithium, how her face had bloated into a pale circle, and how her hands had swollen like cartoon mittens, how she’d yawned all day long. “She’d take it sometimes, and stop taking it, and tell us she was taking it. She went to college, and did all right for a while, and then . . .” Ella drew a shuddering breath. “She got married, and seemed to be doing well. She had two daughters. And she died when she was twenty-nine.”

  Lewis’s voice was gentle. “What happened?”

  “Car accident,” said Ella. Which was the truth. Or a truth. Caroline was in a car. The car had crashed. She had died. But what had happened before that was also the truth, which was that Ella hadn’t stepped in when she should have. She had given in to her daughter’s repeated pleas to be left alone, to live her life, feeling resignation and sadness and also a great, shameful relief that she couldn’t ever talk about—not to Ira, not to anyone. She’d called Caroline every week, but she’d visited only twice a year, for weekends. In the place of facts, she’d created fiction—the Daughter, to go along with the Husband. She’d display her snapshots like a winning poker hand—Caroline and her husband, Caroline and Rose, Caroline and Maggie. Her lady friends would ooh and aah, and all along, Ella knew the truth—the pictures were pretty, but the reality of Caroline’s life was something else. It was jagged rocks hiding beneath the pretty curls of the waves, it was black ice on the pavement.

  “Car accident,” she said again, as if Lewis had questioned her, because “car accident” was enough of the truth, and never mind the letter that had come in the mail the day after the funeral, the letter sent from Hartford the day Caroline had died, the letter that was two lines long, written on a wide-ruled page ripped out of a schoolgirl’s notebook in faint, wavering letters. “I Can’t Anymore. Take Care of my Girls.”

  “And the granddaughters?” he asked gently.

  Ella pressed her hands against her eyes. “I don’t know them,” she said.

  Lewis’s hand moved in warm circles on her back. “We don’t have to talk about it anymore,” he said. Oh, but he didn’t know, and she couldn’t explain it. How could he ever understand Caroline’s dying wish, and how over the years avoidance became easier and easier. Caroline said, “Leave me alone,” so she’d left her alone, and Michael Feller had said, “We’re better off without you,” and Ella had let him push her away, feeling sadness mixed with that secret, shameful relief.
And now she’d never know her own granddaughters. And it was exactly what she deserved.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Rose woke up on Monday morning, then on Tuesday, and on Wednesday and Thursday, too, thinking that this would be the day—the day she took a shower, brushed her teeth, snuck the dog out the front door for her walk, came back home, then donned her suit and panty hose, pulled her briefcase out of the hall closet, and went to work like the rest of the world.

  Every morning she’d wake up, full of good intentions and high energy. She’d lecture herself in the shower about how the Chinese symbol for crisis was the same as the one for opportunity. She’d walk the dog to Rittenhouse Square, and she’d look to the south, to where the gleaming glass face of the high-rise that housed Dommel, Lewis, and Fenick stood like a fifty-two story reproach, and her heart would sink. Really, everything would sink—all of her internal organs, kidney and liver and whatever else was down there, all of it joining in a universal cringe, all of it thinking, “No” and “Can’t” and “Not today.”

  So she’d go home and call Lisa, her secretary, and explain that she was still sick. “I think it’s the flu,” she’d croaked on Monday.

  “No prob,” Lisa had said—Lisa, who never wasted an entire word on Rose when a portion of a word would do. But by the end of the week Lisa wasn’t sounding quite so tolerant, and had actually granted Rose a full sentence. “You’ll be back Monday, right?”

  “Right,” Rose had said, trying to sound crisp and competent and sure of herself. “Certainly,” she said. “Of course.” Then she’d plopped down on the couch and watched A Wedding Story. In her week away from work, Rose had become completely addicted to the show. A Wedding Story lasted half an hour and was as carefully structured as a sonnet, or a geometry proof. First segment: Meet the Bride and Groom (yesterday the bride had been Fern, a clerk at a drugstore, and the groom had been Dave, a heavily bearded long-distance trucker twenty years her senior). Second segment: How They Met (“I walked in for Pepto-Bismol,” Dave had rumbled, “and there she was, behind the counter. Prettiest girl I’d ever seen.”) Part Three: Wedding Plans (Fern and Dave were getting hitched at the Radisson. Dinner and dancing to follow, with Dave’s two sons from two previous marriages serving as best men.) Final segment: The Big Day. (Fern walked down the aisle, a vision in off-white. Dave had cried. Rose had, too).