Amy drummed her knife impatiently on the edge of her plate. “Earth to Rose.”
“Right here,” said Rose, and waved weakly. Later that morning, she pulled her bike up to a pay phone, dug a fistful of change out of her pocket, and dialed her sister’s cell phone again. One ring, then two. “Hello?” Maggie demanded, her voice brash and bossy. “Hello, who’s this?”
Rose hung up, wondering if Maggie would see the 215 area code and wonder if it was her, and if she’d care.
THIRTY-FIVE
If Maggie Feller had learned one thing in her fourteen years of dealing with members of the opposite sex, it was this: your bad hookups will always come back to haunt you. There could be a guy you’d never seen before in your life, and all you had to do in order to guarantee that you’d be seeing him everywhere was spend a few quality minutes alone with him in the backseat, the bedroom, or behind a locked bathroom door. Then he’d be popping up in the cafeteria, in the halls, sitting behind the counter of the diner where you’d just started work, and holding some other girl’s hand at the next Friday night party. It was the Murphy’s Law of relationships—the guy you never want to see again was the guy you’d never be able to avoid. And Josh, from her first night on campus, was, unfortunately, no exception.
She wasn’t sure he’d even recognize her—he’d been so completely drunk, and it had been late, and she’d been fresh off the train, without a chance to perfect her Princeton camouflage. But Josh was everywhere, looking as if he was just on the verge of attaching her face to his missing money, sleeping bag, camping lantern, and clothes.
She’d look up from her book in the library and catch a glimpse of his sweatshirt, and the side of his face. She’d be refilling her mug with coffee in the dining hall and he’d be standing behind the salad bar, studying her. He actually started talking to her the Saturday night she dragged a stolen pillowcase full of her laundry into the laundry room, operating under the mistaken assumption that absolutely nobody would be doing their laundry on a Saturday night.
“Hey,” he said casually, while peering at her bras and panties as she stuffed them into the machine.
“Hi,” she said, keeping her head down.
“What’s going on?” he asked. Maggie gave a small shrug, dumping detergent on top of the laundry from one of those little cardboard packets she’d bought from the vending machine.
“You want some fabric softener?” He lofted his jug at her, and smiled. But his eyes weren’t smiling. His eyes were taking a careful inventory of her face, her hair, her body, measuring what he saw against what he remembered from that one night in his bed.
“No thanks. I’m fine,” she said. She pushed her quarters into the slot. Just then, her cell phone rang. Her father, she figured—he’d called before, and she’d never answered, but now she grabbed at the phone as if it were a life buoy and she was drowning. “Hello!” she said cheerfully, turning her face and her body away from Josh’s scrutiny.
There was no answer, just breathing. “Hello!” Maggie said again, hurrying up the stairs, past a group of students who were passing around a bottle of champagne and singing some kind of football fight song. “Who’s this?” No answer. Just a click, then silence. She shrugged, put the phone in her pocket, and hurried out into the cool spring air. There were lamps illuminating the path at regular intervals, and there were carved wooden benches along the path and alongside the buildings. Maggie selected a bench away from the light, and sat down in a corner. Time to go, she was thinking. It’s not a big campus, and you’re seeing that guy everywhere, and it’s only a matter of time before he figures out who you are and what you did, if he hasn’t figured it out already. Time to cash in your chips, time to put the cards down, time to get on the next bus to somewhere.
Except, the weird thing was, she didn’t want to leave. She was having . . . what? Maggie tucked her legs up against her chest and stared up at the tree branches, heavy with tight green buds, and the starry night sky. Fun. Well, not fun exactly, not fun like a party was fun, not fun like getting dressed up and looking great and feeling people’s jealous eyes moving over her was fun. It was a challenge—the kind of challenge that her series of dead-end minimum-wage jobs never gave her. It was like being the star of her own detective show.
And it wasn’t just a question of not letting anyone notice. These were the smart kids, the honors-course kids, the National Merit Finalist kids, the cream of the crop, the pick of the litter. If Maggie could move invisibly among them, didn’t it prove what Mrs. Fried had always told her? If she could survive Princeton, if she could sit in the back row of a dozen different classes and actually follow what was being taught, didn’t it mean that she was smart, too?
Maggie brushed dew off the seat of her jeans and got to her feet. Plus, there was Charles’s play, his directorial debut, a Beckett oneact at Theatre Intime. And she was the star. She’d been meeting with him every few days for rehearsal, running her lines in the Student Center, or in an empty classroom in the arts building down on Nassau Street.
“I’m over in Lockhart,” he’d told her the last time they’d met, walking her back from 185 Nassau. “I stay up late. I’ve got two roommates,” he added, before Maggie had a chance to lift an eyebrow. “I guarantee that your virtue is safe with me.”
Well, it was late now. She wondered if he’d be up. She wondered, wrapping her arms around herself, if he’d possibly be willing to lend her a sweatshirt. She hurried across the campus. Lockhart, if she remembered right, was right next to the University Store. Charles’s room was on the first floor, and when Maggie tapped on the window, he pulled back the shade and smiled, and hurried around to let her in.
Charles’s room was like nothing she could have imagined. It was like walking into another country. Every inch of wall space, and the ceiling, too, was covered with Indian-print tapestries and dozens of silver-framed mirrors. An Oriental rug, crimson and gold and blue, covered the floor, and instead of a coffee table in the center, there was an old, battered trunk—a treasure chest, Maggie thought. He and his roommates had pushed their desks against the walls and surrounded the chest with piles of cushions—red with gold fringe, purple with red fringe, a sage-green one embroidered with gold thread and beads.
“Have a seat,” said Charles, indicating the cushions. “Do you want something to drink?” There was a tiny refrigerator in the corner, a cappuccino machine on top of it.
“Wow,” said Maggie. “Are you running a harem?”
Charles laughed and shook his head. “Nah,” he said. “We just like to play around. Last semester Jasper went to Africa, and we had kind of a safari theme going, but the animal heads on the walls freaked me out. This is better.”
“Very nice,” said Maggie, walking a slow circle of the room, checking it out. There was a small, fancy-looking stereo in the corner, with compact discs organized by genre—jazz, rock, world beat, classical—and then alphabetically. In another corner there was a small, high table stacked with travel books—Tibet, Senegal, Machu Picchu. When she breathed deeply, she could catch the scent of incense and cologne and cigarettes. The half-sized refrigerator contained bottled water, lemons, apples, and apricot jam. Not a single beer or bottle of condiment.
Gay, Maggie decided, closing the refrigerator door. Gay, she thought, with a certain degree of relief. Gay without a doubt. She picked up a framed photograph from Charles’s desk. It was him, with his arm slung over the shoulders of a laughing girl.
“Your sister?” she asked.
“Ex-girlfriend,” he said. Huh, Maggie thought.
“I’m not gay,” Charles said. Then he laughed a little apologetically. “It’s just that everyone who comes over here thinks that. And then I have to spend three months acting as heterosexual as possible.”
“So what, you have to scratch yourself every five minutes instead of every ten? That’s not hard work,” said Maggie, plopping herself back onto the cushions, and flipping through a book about Mexico. Whitewashed houses stark against that
piercing blue sky, weeping Madonnas in tiled courtyards, white-tipped waves curling onto golden sand. She was disappointed. She’d only known three kinds of guys in her entire life—those who were gay, those who were old, and the third category, a hundred times larger than the first two, those who wanted her. If Charles wasn’t gay, and he certainly wasn’t old, then he probably wanted her. Which made Maggie feel sad, and a little cheated. She’d never had a guy who was just a friend before, and she’d spent enough time with Charles that he liked her for her brains and her quickness, her resourcefulness, instead of the one thing that every other guy in the world usually liked her for.
“Well, I’m glad we got that cleared up. And I’m glad you’re here. I’ve got a poem for you.”
“For me? Did you write it?”
“No. We had it last week in my History of Poetry class.” He flipped open a Norton Anthology and began to read:
“ ‘Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, líke the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Áh! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.’ ”
He closed the book. Maggie took a deep breath. Her arms had broken out into goose bumps. “Whoa,” she said. “Dark. But I’m not Margaret.”
“Oh, no?”
“No,” she said. “I’m just Maggie. Maggie May, actually.” She gave an embarrassed laugh. “From the noted poet, Rod Stewart. My mother liked the song.”
“What’s your mother like?” Charles asked.
Maggie looked at him, then away. Usually, at this moment of the back-and-forth with her guy of the hour, this would be the point where Maggie would produce her own version of the tragic tale of her mother’s death, and lay it in the guy’s lap like a gaily wrapped package. Sometimes she’d have her mother dying of breast cancer, and sometimes she’d stick to car wreck, but always she’d lavish the story with detail and drama. The chemotherapy! The cop at the door! The funeral, with the two little girls crying over the coffin! But she didn’t feel like telling Charles that version of the story. She felt like telling him something closer to the truth, which scared her, because if she told him the truth about this, what else would she be tempted to blurt out?
“Not much to tell,” she said lightly.
“Oh, I know that’s not true,” he said. She felt his eyes on her. She knew what was coming. Why don’t you come a little closer? Or, Can I pour you a drink? And soon she’d feel his lips on her neck or his arm around her shoulders, with his hand edging toward her breast. It was a dance she’d done too many times.
Except the words never came, and his lips never came. Instead, Charles stayed just where he was. “Fine. Hold out on me,” he said, and smiled at her—a friendly smile, she thought, and felt relieved. Maggie glanced at the antique-looking clock on his desk. It was after one. “I should go,” she said. “Got to get my laundry.”
“I’ll walk you,” said Charles.
“No, that’s okay.”
But he was shaking his head and picking up his backpack. “It isn’t safe to walk around by yourself.”
Maggie almost laughed at him. Princeton was the safest place she’d ever been. It was safer than a kiddie pool, safer than a child’s car seat. The only thing she’d ever seen go wrong was when somebody dropped their tray in the dining hall.
“No, really. I’m actually hungry. Have you ever been to P.J.’s?”
Maggie shook her head. Charles affected a look of absolute horror. “It’s a Princeton tradition. Excellent chocolate chip pancakes. Come on,” he said, holding the door for her, “my treat.”
THIRTY-SIX
Rose Feller figured that the day would come.
After three months of dog-walking and dry-cleaning pickups, trips to the drugstore and the grocery store and the video store, she figured she was overdue to run into some of the familiar faces from her less-than-halcyon days at Lewis, Dommel, and Fenick. So on a sunny, sixty-degree day in April, when Shirley, Petunia’s owner, handed her an envelope with the familiar address printed on the outside and said, like it was no big deal, “Could you drop this off at my attorney’s office?” Rose had just swallowed hard, tucked the envelope into her shoulder bag, and got on her bike, pedaling toward Arch Street and the tall, gleaming tower where she’d once worked.
It could be, she reasoned as she rode, that nobody would even recognize her. She’d spent her days at Lewis, Dommel, and Fenick in pantsuits and heels (and in love, her tattletale brain insisted on reminding her). Today she was wearing shorts, a pair of ankle-high socks decorated with skillets, fried eggs, and coffee cups (a little something Maggie had left behind), and hard-soled bicycling shoes. Her hair had grown out past her shoulders and was braided in two pigtails—Rose had learned through trial and error that it was one of the only styles that worked underneath a bicycle helmet. And although she hadn’t lost any weight since her untoward departure from the world of litigation, her body looked different. Days of biking and walking had given her muscles in her arms and legs, and her office-drone pallor had been replaced by a tan. Her cheeks glowed pink, her hair, bound in its pigtails, was shiny. So she had that going for her, at least. Get through it, she told herself, as she walked off the elevator and over to the reception desk, her bare brown calves flashing, her shoes clattering on the tiled floor. Get through it. It wouldn’t be hard. She’d drop off the package, get a signature, and . . .
“Rose?”
She held her breath, half hoping that what she’d heard had issued from her imagination rather than from an office across the lobby. She turned, and standing there was Simon Stein, instigator of intramural softball, his gingery hair garish under the overhead lights, and his muted red-and-gold tie highlighting the gentle swell of his belly.
“Rose Feller?”
Well, she thought, giving him a half-smile and a quick wave, it could be worse. It could be Jim. Now, if she could just dump her envelope and get out of here . . .
“How are you?” asked Simon, who’d hustled across the lobby and was now standing right beside her, looking her up and down as if she’d mutated into some previously unknown species. Maybe she had, she thought grimly. The Former Lawyer. How many of those had Simon Stein ever seen?
“I’m fine,” she said quietly, and handed the envelope to the receptionist, who was looking at Rose with undisguised curiosity, trying to match the tanned girl in shorts with the sober young woman in suits.
“They told us you were on leave,” said Simon.
“I am,” she said shortly, collecting the signed receipt from the receptionist and turning toward the door. Simon followed after her, even as Rose willed him to go away.
“Hey,” he said, “have you had lunch?”
“I should really get going,” she said, as one of the elevators opened and a crowd of partners came pouring out. Rose peeked up surreptitiously, looking for Jim’s face, and didn’t start breathing again until she didn’t see it.
“Free food,” said Simon Stein, and gave her a charming grin. “Come on. You’ve got to eat anyhow. We’ll go somewhere fancy and pretend that we’re important.”
Rose laughed. “Not with me dressed like this, we can’t.”
“Nobody’s going to say anything,” said Simon, and followed Rose onto the elevator as if he was one of the dogs she walked each day. “It’s going to be fine.”
Ten minutes later, they were sitting at a table for two at the Sansom Street Oyster House, where, just as Rose had feared, she was the
only woman who wasn’t wearing hose and heels. “Two iced teas,” said Simon Stein, loosening his tie and rolling his sleeves up over his freckled forearms. “Do you like clam chowder? Do you eat fried food?”
“Sure and sometimes,” said Rose, who’d unfastened her pigtails and was trying to casually rearrange her hair.
“Two bowls of New England clam chowder, and the mixed seafood platter,” he said to the waitress, who nodded approvingly.
“Do you always order for strangers?” asked Rose, who’d decided that her hair was a lost cause and was now trying to tug her shorts down over the scabs on her right knee.
Simon Stein nodded and looked pleased with himself. “Whenever I can,” he said. “Did you ever get food envy?”
“What’s that?” asked Rose.
“When you go to a restaurant and order something, and then you’ll see them bring someone else’s food and it’ll look, like, ten times better than what you ordered?”
Rose nodded. “Of course. Happens all the time.”
Simon looked smug. Actually, given his curly red hair and his grin, he looked sort of like Ronald McDonald. “Well, it never happens to me,” he said.
Rose stared at him. “Never?”
“Well, hardly ever,” said Simon. “I’m an expert orderer. A master of the menu.”
“A master of the menu,” Rose repeated. “You should be on TV. Cable, at least.”
“I know it sounds crazy,” said Simon, “but it’s true. Ask anyone I’ve ever been out with. I’m never wrong.”
“Okay,” said Rose, rising to the challenge, and thinking of the best restaurant she’d been to recently, with ‘recently’ defined as six months ago, when she’d gone with Jim late one night after work, when they were both certain they wouldn’t see anyone he knew. “London.”
“The city or the restaurant?”
Rose resisted the urge to roll her eyes. “The restaurant. It’s in the art museum neighborhood.”
In Her Shoes Page 25