“I don’t think you’ll find the work too difficult,” said Corinne, taking careful birdlike sips from a cup of coffee in a lemon-yellow mug. “The floors need to be swept and mopped,” she began, ticking off the tasks on her fingers. “I’d like you to organize the recycling, the glass and paper in particular. The laundry should be sorted, the dishwasher needs to be emptied, and . . .”
Maggie waited. “Yes?” she finally asked.
“Flowers,” said Corinne, and tilted her chin up defiantly. “I’d like you to buy some flowers.”
“Okay,” said Maggie.
“I’m sure you’re wondering why I want them,” said Corinne.
Maggie, who hadn’t been wondering, said nothing.
“Because I can’t see them,” said Corinne. “But I know what flowers look like. And I can smell them, too.”
“Oh,” said Maggie. And then, because “Oh” seemed somehow insufficient, “Wow.”
“The last girl said she brought flowers,” said Corinne, pursing her lips. “But they weren’t real ones.” Her lip curled. “Plastic. She thought it wouldn’t matter.”
“I’ll find some real flowers,” said Maggie.
Corinne nodded. “I would appreciate that,” she said.
It took Maggie less than four hours to do everything Corinne had asked. She wasn’t an experienced housekeeper, because Sydelle had never trusted the girls to do anything right and had employed an anonymous army of housekeepers to maintain the pristine state of her glass-and-metal-filled rooms. But Maggie did a good job, sweeping every mote of dust from the floors, then folding the laundry and returning dishes and silverware to their shelves and drawers.
“My parents left me this house,” Corinne said while Maggie worked. “It’s the house I grew up in.”
“It’s beautiful,” said Maggie, which was true. But it was also sad. Six bedrooms, three bathrooms, a vast staircase that curved through the center of the house, and the only resident a blind woman who slept in a single narrow bed with a single flat pillow, who would never appreciate all of the space or how the sun looked as it spilled through the wide windows and pooled on the hardwood floors.
“Are you ready to go to the market?” Corinne asked.
Maggie nodded, then remembered that nodding would do her no good. “All set,” she said.
Corinne used her fingertips to extract a single bill from her wallet. “This is twenty dollars?” she asked.
Maggie inspected the bill and said that yes, it was a twenty.
“That’s all the money machine gives out,” said Corinne. Then why are you asking me? thought Maggie. Then she realized that it was possibly a test. And, for once, she’d managed to pass on her first try. “You can go to Davidson’s market. It’s right up the street.”
“Do you want a flower with a smell?” asked Maggie. “Like lilacs or something?”
Corinne shook her head. “No smell will be necessary,” she said. “Use your discretion.”
“Do you need anything else while I’m there?”
Corinne seemed to consider this. “Yes. You can surprise me,” she said.
Maggie walked to the market, thinking of what she might buy. Daisies, for starters, and she was lucky to find bunches of them clustered in a green plastic tub out front. She wandered the aisles, considering and rejecting plums, a pint of strawberries, a bundle of green-smelling spinach, a half-gallon of milk in a heavy glass bottle. What would Corinne like? Something that smelled seemed too obvious, especially since she’d been so quick to reject scented flowers, but Maggie wanted something . . . She groped for the word, and grinned when she found it—sensual. Something that had a feel to it, a weight, a heft, like the glass milk bottle, or the satiny feel of the daisy’s petals. And suddenly, there it was, right in front of her, another glass jar, only this one glowing amber. Honey. “Orange Blossom Honey. Locally Produced,” read the label. And even though it was $6.99 for even the smallest jar, Maggie added it to her basket, along with a bumpy-looking loaf of twelve-grain bread. Later, back in the large, clean house, when Corinne sat across from Maggie at the kitchen table, slowly munching a slice of the toasted bread spread thick with honey and then pronouncing it perfect, Maggie knew that she wasn’t just paying her an empty compliment. She’d passed her second test of the day by finding exactly the right thing.
THIRTY-ONE
“I’m worried about your sister,” Michael Feller said without preamble. Rose sighed and stared at her cup of coffee, as if Maggie’s face might appear inside of it. So what else was new?
“It’s been eight weeks,” her father continued, as if Rose had somehow lost track of time. His face looked as pale and vulnerable as a peeled hard-boiled egg, all high, wide forehead and sad little eyes above his standard-issue gray banker’s suit and subdued maroon tie. “We haven’t heard from her. You haven’t heard from her,” he said, his voice rising at the end of the sentence, turning it into a question.
“No, Dad, I haven’t,” said Rose.
Her father sighed—a typical Michael Feller sigh—and poked at his dish of melting ice cream. “Well, what do you think we should do?”
Meaning, what do you think I should do, thought Rose. “Did you try all of her ex-boyfriends? That should have taken you a week or two,” she said. Her father was silent, but Rose could hear reproach in what he wasn’t saying.
“Did you call her cell phone?” she asked.
“Of course,” said Michael. “Her voice mail’s working. I leave messages, but she doesn’t call back.”
Rose rolled her eyes. Her father pretended not to notice.
“I’m really worried,” Michael continued. “This is a long time for us not to hear anything. I wonder ...” His voice trailed off.
“If she’s dead?” Rose supplied. “I don’t think we’re going to get that lucky.”
“Rose!”
“Sorry,” she said, not very sincerely. She didn’t care if Maggie was dead. Well . . . Rose pulled a handful of napkins out of the dispensers. That wasn’t true. She didn’t want her awful little sister to be dead, but she thought she’d be perfectly happy if she never saw or heard from her again.
“And, Rose, I’m worried about you, too.”
“Nothing to worry about,” Rose said, and started to fold one of the napkins into a pleated fan. “Everything’s fine.”
Her father’s voice was dubious as he raised his gray eyebrows. “Are you sure? You’re okay? You’re not having . . .”
“Having what?”
Her father paused. Rose waited. “Having what?” she asked again.
“Some kind of trouble? You don’t want to, um, talk to someone or something?”
“I’m not nuts,” Rose said bluntly. “You don’t have to worry about that.”
Her father raised his hands, looking helpless and upset. “Rose, that wasn’t what I meant ...”
But of course, Rose thought, it was exactly what he meant. Their father never talked about it, but she knew it had been on his mind as he’d watched his daughters—especially Maggie—make their way toward womanhood. Are you cracking up, are you losing your mind, are those bad strands of DNA starting to speak up, are you looking into taking a short fast drive around a tight, slippery curve? “I’m fine,” Rose said. “I just wasn’t happy at that particular law firm, so I’m taking some time to figure out what I want to do next. Lots of people do it. It’s very common.”
“Well, if you’re sure,” her father said, and turned his attention back to his ice cream—a special treat, Rose knew, as Sydelle hadn’t allowed anything more caloric than ice milk and Tofutti into their house since the early 1990s.
“I’m fine,” said Rose. “You don’t have to worry about me.” With heavy emphasis on the me, to make it clear who her father did have to worry about.
“Could you call her?” Michael asked.
“And say what?”
“She won’t talk to me,” he said sadly. “Maybe she’ll talk to you.”
“I don’t ha
ve anything to say to her.”
“Rose. Please?”
“Fine,” Rose grumbled. That night, she set her alarm for one in the morning, and when it went off she groped through the darkness for her telephone and punched in Maggie’s cell phone number.
One ring. Two. And then her sister’s voice, loud and cheerful. “Hello?”
Jesus! Rose made a disgusted noise. She could hear party sounds in the background—music, other voices. “Hel-lo!” Maggie trilled. “Who’s this?”
Rose hung up. Her sister was like a fucking Weeble, she thought. She’d wobble, she’d screw up, she’d steal your shoes and your cash and your guy, but she’d absolutely never fall down.
The next morning, after her first round of dog walks, she called her father at his office. “She’s alive,” she reported.
“Oh, thank goodness!” her father said, sounding absurdly relieved. “Where is she? What did she say?”
“I didn’t speak to her,” Rose said. “I just heard her voice. The prodigal daughter is alive and well, and has lived to party another day.”
Her father was silent. “We should try to find her,” he said.
“Feel free,” said Rose. “And give her my best when you do.” She hung up the phone. Let her father try to track down his wayward daughter. Let Michael and Sydelle try to sucker her into coming home. Let Maggie Feller be someone else’s problem for once.
She walked out the door and into a world she’d only discovered since defecting from full-time employment and spending her days traversing the city’s streets, often with a bouquet of leashes in her hands. The city from nine to five was hardly the ghost world she’d been imagining. There was an entirely different population, a secret city of mothers and babies, shift workers, students and deliverymen, the retired and unemployed, moving through streets and corners of the city that she’d never even known about, in spite of her years at law school and her years at the firm. Why would an unmarried, childless lawyer have known about Three Bears Park, a tiny pocket of a playground between Spruce and Pine Streets? Would a woman who took the same route to work every day have known that on the five hundred block of Delancey every house flew a different flag? How could she have suspected that the shops and grocery stores would be bustling at one in the afternoon, filled with people in khakis and sweaters instead of business suits and briefcases? Who knew that she could easily fill her hours with the stuff she used to cram into mere minutes of spare time?
Her days began with dogs. She had her own key to the Elegant Paw, and each morning at the time she’d normally be buying her large black coffee and heading to the office, she’d be unlocking the door to the kennel, leashing two or three or four dogs, stuffing her pockets with biscuits and plastic poop bags, and heading toward Rittenhouse Square. She’d spend forty-five minutes there, in the square of the park, surrounded by dress shops and bookstores and fancy restaurants and high-rise apartment buildings, letting her charges sniff at bushes and hedges and other dogs. Then she’d spend her morning running errands. Drop-offs at the drugstore, pickups at the dry cleaners, zipping along sidewalks and side streets with her pockets heavy with keys, opening up doors for decorators, landscapers, exterminators, personal chefs, even chimney sweeps.
In the afternoons, she’d go on another round of walks, heading back to Rittenhouse Square for her daily date with the little girl, the spotted dog, and the woman who was with them.
Over her eight weeks as a dog-walker she’d become fascinated with the little girl, Joy, the dog Nifkin, and the woman she guessed was the girl’s mother. They came to the park between four and four-thirty every afternoon. Rose would spend an hour tossing the tennis ball for her afternoon dogs and inventing a life for the woman and the girl and the dog. She imagined a husband, handsome in a regular-guy kind of way. She gave them a big house with fireplaces and bright woven rugs, a wooden chest full of every kind of toy and stuffed animal for the little girl. She sent them on family trips to the shore, hiking in the Poconos. She imagined them getting off an airplane—the father pulling a big wheeled suitcase, the mother pulling a medium one, the little girl with an appropriately small bag. Papa Bear, Mama Bear, Baby Bear, and the dog trotting jauntily behind them. In her mind, she gave them a quiet, happy life—good jobs, enough money, dinners at home on weeknights, just the three of them, the parents urging the little girl to drink her milk, the little girl surreptitiously sneaking her vegetables to the dog named Nifkin.
She’d already progressed from nodding hello to waving hello to actually saying “Hi.” Given enough time, Rose thought, things might blossom into actual conversation. She sat and watched as the little girl chased the spotted dog toward the fountain, and the mother, who was tall, broad-shouldered, and heavy hipped, talked on her cell phone.
“No, I don’t like liverwurst,” she overheard the woman saying. “That’s Lucy. Remember? The other daughter?” She rolled her eyes at Rose and mouthed My mother. Rose gave what she hoped was an understanding nod and a little wave. “No, I don’t think Joy likes liverwurst either, Ma.” She paused, listening, then shook her head. “No, Peter does not like liverwurst. In fact, I don’t think anyone really likes liverwurst. I don’t even know why they make it anymore.” Rose laughed. The woman smiled at her, still listening. “Nifkin likes liverwurst,” she said. “We can give it to him!” Another pause. “Well, I don’t know what you should do with it. That was my one suggestion. Put it on crackers or something. Tell your book club it’s paté. Okay. Right. We’ll see you then. Okay. Bye.”
She hung up the phone and put it in her pocket. “My mother thinks I’m unemployed,” she began.
“Oh,” said Rose, and cursed her rusty conversational skills.
“I’m not,” said the woman. “But I work at home. Which, to my mother, seems to mean that I don’t work at all, so she can call me whenever she wants to and ask me about liverwurst.”
Rose laughed. “I’m Rose Feller,” she said.
The woman extended her hand. “I’m Candace Shapiro. Cannie.”
“Mom!” The little girl had suddenly reappeared, holding Nifkin’s leash.
Cannie laughed. “Excuse me,” she said. “I’m Candace Shapiro soon-to-be Krushelevansky.” She made a funny face. “Try fitting that on a business card.”
“So you’re married?” asked Rose. She winced, shut her mouth, and wondered what had happened to her. Two months out of the office, two months with mostly dogs and deliverymen, and she’d forgotten how to talk to people.
But Cannie didn’t act as though she’d noticed anything strange. “Engaged,” she said. “We’re doing the deed in June.”
Huh, Rose thought. Well, if Hollywood stars could have babies before they got married, she supposed regular Philadelphians could, too. “Are you having a big wedding?”
Cannie shook her head. “Nope. Small. In our living room. Rabbi, family, a few friends, my mother, her life partner, their softball team. Nifkin’s going to be the ring dog, and Joy will be the best baby.”
“Oh,” said Rose. “Um . . .” That didn’t sound like any of the nuptials she’d seen on TV. “How,” Rose began, and then stopped, unsure of herself, before starting again with the most banal of cocktail-party questions. “How did you meet your husband-tobe?”
Cannie laughed and flipped her hair over her shoulders. “Now that,” she said, “is a long and involved story. It started with a diet.”
Rose snuck a glance at Cannie and decided that it couldn’t have been a very successful diet.
“I actually met Peter when I was pregnant with Joy, but I didn’t know I was pregnant yet. He was running this weight-loss study, and I thought that if I lost weight this guy who I’d broken up with would want me back.” She smiled at Rose. “But you know how it goes. You chase after the wrong guy until the final reel and then find out the right one was there waiting all along. Love works in mysterious ways. Or is that the Lord? I can never remember.”
“The Lord, I think,” said Rose.
“If
you say so,” said Cannie. “So how about you? Are you married?”
“No!” said Rose emphatically. “I mean, no,” she said, in a more modulated tone. “It’s just that . . . well, I just ended a relationship. Well, I didn’t end it exactly. My sister . . . anyhow. Long story.” She looked down at her hands, then at Petunia, curled at her feet, then over at Joy and Nifkin, who were playing fetch with a red mitten, then over at half a dozen dogs standing in the middle of a triangle of grass. “I guess I’m trying to figure out what’s next.”
“Do you like what you’re doing now?” Cannie asked.
Rose looked at Petunia, at the other dogs in the park, at the grayish tennis ball in her hand, and the bunch of plastic poop bags beside her. “Yes,” she said. It was true. She liked all of her dogs—the disdainful, snorty Petunia; the golden retriever who was always so glad to see her that he whirled in circles of joy when he heard her key in the door; the grave bulldogs; the fractious schnauzers; the narcoleptic cocker spaniel named Sport who’d occasionally fall asleep at red lights.
“And what else do you like?” Cannie prompted.
Rose shook her head, smiling ruefully. She knew what made her sister happy—size two leather pants, sixty-dollar French skin cream, men telling her she was beautiful. She knew what made her father happy—a bear market, dividend checks, a crisp new copy of The Wall Street Journal, the infrequent occasions when Maggie’d managed to hold a job. And what made Amy happy—Jill Scott records, Sean Jean pants, and the movie Fear of a Black Hat. She knew what Sydelle Feller loved—My Marcia, organic grains, Botox shots, and feeding fourteen-year-old Rose dietetic Jell-O for dessert while everyone else got ice cream. Once upon a time, she’d even known the things that made her mother happy, like clean sheets and bright red lipstick, and the costume-jewelry pins that she and Maggie would pick out for her birthday. But what did Rose herself like, besides shoes, and Jim, and foods that were bad for her?
In Her Shoes Page 23