Cannie smiled at Rose, and got to her feet. “You’ll figure it out,” she said cheerfully. She whistled for Nifkin, and the dog came running, with Joy trailing behind him, her cheeks pink and her hair coming loose from its ponytail. “Will we see you tomorrow?”
“Sure,” said Rose. She pocketed the tennis ball and began gathering her charges, holding five leashes in her left hand and the leash of a single renegade greyhound in her right. She dropped dogs off until she was left with just Petunia. The pug trotted a few steps ahead of her like a plump croissant with legs. Petunia made her happy, even though she’d had to relinquish Petunia to her owner, Shirley, a no-nonsense seventy-two-year-old woman who lived downtown and who luckily consented to let Rose walk the pug every day. What else? Not clothes, really. Not money, because all she’d ever done with her exorbitant six-figure salary was pay her rent and her student loans, sock away a prudent percentage for her retirement, and let the rest gather interest in a money market account, per Michael Feller’s explicit instructions.
So what?
“Yo!” called a bicycle messenger. Rose scooped Petunia into her arms and jumped aside as the bike whizzed past them. Its rider had a bag slung over his shoulder and a walkie-talkie, bleating static, on his hip. Rose watched him pedal off down the street, remembering that she’d had a bike, when she was a girl. A blue Schwinn, with a blue-and-white seat and a white straw basket and pink and white plastic tassels on the handlebars. There had been a bike path that ran behind her parents’ house in Connecticut, a trail that led to the town golf course and soccer fields. It also wove through a crab apple orchard, and in the fall, Rose used to ride her bike there, her wheels crunching through the fallen crab apples, whispering over the red and gold leaves. Sometimes her mother would come with her, on her own bike, which was the grown-up version of Rose’s, a Schwinn three-speed with a baby seat over the rear wheel, a seat that had once held Rose and Maggie.
What had happened to her bike? Rose tried to remember. When they’d moved to New Jersey, they’d lived in a rented condominium just off the highway, which meant parking lots and roads with no sidewalks or shoulders. She’d probably outgrown the bike while they’d lived there, and when they’d moved to Sydelle’s, she’d never gotten a new one. She’d gotten her driver’s license instead, three days after she turned sixteen, and she’d been excited, at first, about the prospect of freedom, until she realized that most of her driving would consist of dropping her sister off at parties, picking her up after dance lessons, and going grocery shopping.
She dropped Petunia off in Shirley’s apartment and decided that over the weekend she’d buy herself a bike—a used one, to start with, so she could see if she liked it. She’d buy one, and maybe put a Petunia-sized basket on the handlebars, and she’d ride it . . . somewhere. She’d heard that there were bike trails in Fairmount Park and a towpath that ran all the way from the art museum out to Valley Forge. She’d buy a bike, she thought, smiling now and walking with a bounce to her step. She’d buy a bike, she’d get a map, she’d pack a picnic of bread and cheese and grapes and brownies and a can of gourmet dog food for Petunia. She’d have an adventure.
THIRTY-TWO
Mrs. Lefkowitz hadn’t wanted to go for their weekly walk. “I can get my exercise in here,” she’d told Ella, waving her cane at the tenby-sixteen-foot expanse of her living room, into which she had crammed a couch, two love seats, an armchair with doilies decorating the arms, and an enormous wide-screen TV.
“Not the way you need to,” Ella had said patiently.
“The View is on,” she said, gesturing at the television set, where four women on the television screen were yelling at each other. “Don’t you like The View?”
“You mean the ocean?” Ella asked innocently. “I love the view of the ocean. Let’s go outside and have a look.”
“Also, I’ve got a proposal for you,” said Mrs. Lefkowitz, playing what was clearly her last card. “I’ve been thinking about you. Your predicament.”
“Later,” Ella said firmly.
“Agh, I give up,” Mrs. Lefkowitz said. She put on gigantic square-lensed sunglasses, smeared zinc over her nose, and knotted the laces of her Nikes. “Come on, Bruce Jenner. Let’s get this over with.”
They walked down the drive toward the tennis courts, where, last month, someone had hit Drive instead of Reverse and plowed right through the fence, right through the net, and right into an unfortunate woman named Frieda Mandell, who’d been playing a desultory game of doubles and ended up splayed on the hood of a Cadillac, with her racquet still in hand. This, Mrs. Lefkowitz had announced mordantly, was clear evidence that sports and exercise—tennis in particular—could kill you if you weren’t careful.
But her doctor had insisted she walk, and so every Tuesday at ten, Ella and her charge walked slowly to the clubhouse, had lunch, and took the trolley back home. Somewhere along the line, Ella had even started to enjoy the older woman’s company.
Mrs. Lefkowitz’s walk had a rhythm. She’d plant the cane, sigh, step forward with her right foot, then drag her left foot behind it. Plant, sigh, stomp, shuffle. It was soothing, really, Ella thought.
“So what’s new?” asked Mrs. Lefkowitz. “You still seeing that one?”
“Lewis,” said Ella.
Mrs. Lefkowitz nodded. “He’s a good one. Reminds me of my first husband.”
Ella was puzzled. “Your first husband? Did you have two?”
Plant, sigh, stomp, shuffle. “Oh, no. I just call Leonard my first husband. It makes me sound more worldly.”
Ella bit back her laughter and kept a light hand on Mrs. Lefkowitz’s elbow as she negotiated a crack in the sidewalk.
“Does Lewis have a good income?”
“Fine, I think,” said Ella.
“You think? You think?” Mrs. Lefkowitz demanded. “Don’t think. Find out! You could be left with nothing! Like that Charles Kuralt!”
Ella was confused. “He was left with nothing?”
“No, no, no. Not him. But he had, remember, the other girlfriend. And she was left with nothing.”
“Not even the Winnebago?”
“Sure. Laugh,” said Mrs. Lefkowitz darkly. “You won’t be laughing when you’re eating the cheese the government gives out.”
“Keep walking,” said Ella.
“And his children,” Ella said. “Do they know about you?”
“I think so,” said Ella.
“Make sure,” said Mrs. Lefkowitz. “You know about Florence Goodstein, right?’
Ella shook her head.
“Well,” Mrs. Lefkowitz began, “she and Abe Meltzer were keeping company. They’d go to movies, and dinner, and Flo would drive Abe to his doctors’ appointments. One day his kids called her to check up on their father, see how he was doing, and Flo happened to mention that she was tired. Well, they heard ‘tired’ and thought she didn’t want to take care of him anymore. And the very next day,” said Mrs. Lefkowitz, pausing as the story reached its crescendo, “they flew down here, packed up his apartment, and moved him to assisted living in New York.”
“Oh, my,” said Ella.
“Flo was beside herself,” said Mrs. Lefkowitz. “It was like the raid on Entebbe.”
“I’m sorry for her. Keep walking,” Ella said.
Mrs. Lefkowitz lifted her sunglasses and peered at Ella. “Are you ready to hear my proposal?”
“Sure,” said Ella. “What’s it about?”
“Your granddaughters,” said Mrs. Lefkowitz, and resumed her shuffling walk.
Ella groaned inwardly. She couldn’t believe she’d told Mrs. Lefkowitz about her lost granddaughters. Then again, a year ago she’d never have believed she’d be able to tell the story to anyone. Now, it seemed, she couldn’t keep her mouth shut.
“Do they have the Emil?” Mrs. Lefkowitz asked.
“Emil?” Ella repeated.
“Emil, Emil,” said Mrs. Lefkowitz impatiently. “On the computer.”
“Oh, e-mail,” said
Ella.
“What I said,” said Mrs. Lefkowitz, with a long-suffering sigh.
“I don’t know.”
“Well, we could find out. On the Internet. We could find out all kinds of things about them.”
Ella’s heart lurched. “Do you have a computer?” she asked, barely daring to hope.
Mrs. Lefkowitz gave a dismissive wave with her good hand. “Sure, who doesn’t?” she asked. “My son got me an iMac for my birthday. Tangerine. Guilt,” she said, apparently in response to Ella’s unspoken questions of What color? and Why? “He doesn’t visit too much, so he sends the computer, e-mails me pictures of my grandbabies. You want we should go back and look up your granddaughters?” she asked hopefully.
Ella bit her lip. She could hear the voice inside of her crying, Look them up! at war with the much more familiar, much more insistent voice that said, Let them go, could feel anticipation and fragile hope shot through with pure terror. “Let me think about it,” she finally said.
“Don’t think,” said Mrs. Lefkowitz, drawing herself up to her four feet eleven inches and whacking at the ground with her cane, narrowly missing Ella’s left foot. “There is no think, only do.”
“What?”
“Yoda,” said Mrs. Lefkowitz, and began the laborious process of turning herself around. “Let’s go.”
THIRTY-THREE
“Step out the front door like a ghost into the fog,” said a guy in a rumpled white linen shirt, as Maggie walked through Firestone Library’s doors at ten o’clock on a not-at-all foggy morning.
Maggie looked at him as he fell into step beside her, his own backpack slung loosely—slung stylishly, somehow—over his shoulders. He had a long, pale face, brown hair curling past his ears, and what he wore—the linen shirt with pressed oatmeal-colored linen pants—was a significant deviation from the unofficial campus uniform of jeans and a T-shirt.
“It’s not foggy out,” she said. “And isn’t that from a song?”
“Notwithstanding,” he said. He pointed at the copy of My Antonia that Maggie had tucked under her arm. “Women in Literature?”
Maggie gave a shrug that could have been either a yes or a no, figuring the less she said, the better. In her weeks on campus, excepting her first night at the party, she hadn’t been saying much more than “Thank you” or “Excuse me” to the other students. Which was fine, Maggie thought. She had Corinne to talk to. She had books. She had a comfortable chair in the library’s sunny reading room staked out, a favorite little table in the Student Center when she felt like a change of scenery. She’d finished the Zora Neale Hurston, finished Great Expectations, and was now working her way through A Tale of Two Cities, rereading My Antonia, and plowing through Romeo and Juliet, which was much harder going than the Baz Luhrmann movie had made it out to be. Conversation with students could only lead to questions, and questions could only lead to trouble.
“I’ll walk you,” said the guy.
“That’s okay,” said Maggie, and tried to edge away.
“Not a problem,” the guy said cheerfully. “It’s in McCosh, right?”
Maggie had no idea where Women in Literature met or where McCosh might be located, but she nodded again, and picked up her pace. The guy kept up with her easily. Long legs, Maggie observed with dismay.
“I’m Charles,” said the guy.
“I’m sorry,” she finally said, “I’m not interested, okay?”
Charles stopped and smiled at her. He looked a little bit like a picture of Lord Byron that Maggie’d seen in one of her purloined books—a long blade of a nose, an amused curl to his lips. No six-pack, she was sure, no biceps to hang on to. Not her type. “You haven’t even heard my pitch yet,” he said.
“There’s a pitch?” asked Maggie unhappily.
“Absolutely,” said Charles. “I. Um. This is awkward. But it happens that I have need of a woman.”
“Don’t you all,” said Maggie, slowing her pace so that her feet were practically dragging, figuring that if she couldn’t run away from him, she could perhaps make him hurry away from her and off to his own class.
“No, no, not like that,” he said, smiling and matching her pace again. “I’m in a playwriting class, and we have to present scenes, and I need a woman—an ingenue type—to do my scene for me.”
Maggie looked at him. “You mean acting?” She stopped walking and stared up at him. He was tall, she saw. With nice gray eyes, too.
Charles nodded. “The very thing. I’m hoping,” he said, as he and Maggie continued toward McCosh Hall, “to do a one-act at Theatre Intime in the spring.” He pronounced it Ohn-Team, and for a moment Maggie wasn’t sure what he meant. She’d walked by that building a hundred times and she’d always figured it sounded like it was spelled: In Time. Which scared her—how many other things had she been getting wrong, even if she was only getting them wrong in the privacy of her own head? “So if the scene goes well, it’ll be, you know, a good first step. So,” he concluded, “want to help a brother out?”
“You’re not my brother,” said Maggie. “And how do you even know that I can act?”
“You can, though, can’t you?” asked Charles. “You have that look.”
“What look is that?”
“Dramatic,” he said promptly. “But I’m getting ahead of myself. I don’t even know your name.”
“It’s Maggie,” said Maggie, momentarily forgetting her desire to be known as M.
“I’m Charles Vilinch. And I’m right, aren’t I?” asked the guy. “You’re an actress, right?”
Maggie simply nodded, hoping he wouldn’t ask for specifics, as she didn’t think that either her stint singing backup for Whiskered Biscuit or her hip’s appearance in the Will Smith video would impress him much. “Look, I’d like to help you, but . . . well, I don’t think I can,” said Maggie, with real regret, because starring in a play—even if it was just some lousy student one-act—was extremely appealing. It could, she thought, be a start. Princeton wasn’t that far from New York. Maybe word of the play, and its star, would reach the city. Maybe a casting agent or director would take a train down for a look. Maybe ...
“Why don’t you take today to think about it?” said Charles. “I’ll call you tonight.”
“No,” said Maggie, thinking quickly. “No, um, my phone’s not working.”
“Then meet me for coffee,” he said easily.
“I can’t . . .”
“Decaffeinated tea, then,” said Charles. “Nine o’clock in the Student Center. I’ll see you there.” And he loped off, leaving Maggie at the entrance to the lecture hall, where students—women, mostly, with a few holding her very same My Antonia—were streaming through the doors. Maggie stood for a minute, thinking Why not? as the bodies poured around her. It would be more trouble to turn around than to simply follow the crowd inside. She’d sit in the back, she figured. Nobody would notice. Plus, she was curious as to what the professor would say about the book. Maybe she’d even learn something.
THIRTY-FOUR
“Are you doing okay?” Amy had asked Rose one morning over blueberry pancakes at the Morning Glory Diner. Amy, in fitted black pants and a midnight-blue blouse, was on her way to the airport and a business trip that would take her to rural Georgia and deepest Kentucky, where she’d be lecturing at waste-water treatment facilities (“which smell,” she’d told Rose, “about how you’d imagine they would”). Rose, in her now-customary loose-fitting Army-Navy surplus khaki pants, was on her way to take ten recently read romances to the Book Trader, in exchange for ten more, and then walk a schipperke named Skip.
Rose chewed and thought about it. “I’m good,” she answered slowly, as Amy’s spidery fingers snagged a piece of bacon off her plate.
“You don’t miss work?”
“I miss Maggie,” Rose mumbled into a mouthful of pancake. It was the truth. The Morning Glory was in Maggie’s old neighborhood, right around the corner from the apartment she’d been kicked out of just before she’d moved
in with Rose. While Rose was in college, and then in law school, Maggie would come to stay for a weekend once or twice a semester, and then, once Rose started working, she’d come to South Philadelphia and meet Maggie for brunch, or drinks, or pick her sister up for a trip to the King of Prussia Mall. Rose had fond memories of Maggie’s series of apartments. No matter where she was living, the walls would wind up painted pink, and Maggie would park her antique hair dryer in the corner, set up a makeshift bar somewhere, with a thrift-shop martini shaker standing perpetually at the ready.
“So where is she?” asked Amy, wiping a butter knife with a napkin and using it to inspect her lipstick.
Rose shook her head, feeling the familiar Maggie-induced sensations of anger, frustration, fury, and sympathy rising up in her throat. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know if I want to know.”
“Well, knowing Maggie, she’ll turn up,” said Amy. “She’ll need money, or a car, or a car full of money. Your phone will ring and there she’ll be.”
“I know,” said Rose, and sighed. She did miss her sister . . . except miss wasn’t quite the right word. Sure, she missed having a companion, having someone to share breakfasts and pedicures and trips to the mall with. She even found that she missed Maggie’s noise, Maggie’s clutter, the way she’d turned the thermostat up to eighty degrees, until her apartment felt like a trip to the tropics, and how, in Maggie’s hands, even the most mundane story would turn into a three-act adventure. She remembered Maggie trying to flush a wad of makeup-caked Kleenex down Rose’s recalcitrant toilet, yelling, “Take it all, bitch!” at the bowl; Maggie throwing a fit in the Shampoo and Soap aisle of the drugstore because they were out of her particular-colored-hair-specific brand of conditioner; the flicking, go-away motion she’d make with her fingertips when she wanted Rose to give her more room on the couch; the song her sister would sing in the shower. “It had to be me . . . it had to be me . . .”
In Her Shoes Page 24