In Her Shoes

by Jennifer Weiner

  “Pretentious ones,” Amy said, affixing an ankle-length veil shimmering with tiny crystals to Rose’s head. “Ooh, pretty!” She found a matching veil and put it on her own head. “Come along,” she said, and tugged Rose toward a mirror.

  Rose looked at herself in the seventh and final dress she’d selected. Yards of lace swirled around her legs. A glittering bodice, stiff with sparkling crystals, encased approximately two-thirds of her midriff and gaped open in back. Stiff embroidered sleeves choked her arms. Rose stared at herself miserably. “Oh, God,” she said, “I’m a Mardi Gras float!”

  Amy burst out laughing. The saleslady stared at both of them. “Would shoes help?” she asked.

  “I think a lighter would help,” Amy murmured.

  “I think,” Rose began. God, she needed a mother. A mother would be able to take the situation in hand, to look at the dress and dismiss it with a brief but undeniable shake of her head. A mother would say, “My daughter likes things that are simple,” or, “I see her in an A-line”—or a ballgown, a basque waist, one of those bewildering types of dresses. Even after weeks of study, Rose hadn’t been able to puzzle out the differences between them, let alone figure out which one would look best on her. A mother would get her out of this itchy tornado of a dress, out of the iron-lung girdle, out of the showers and teas and cocktail parties and dinners that Rose could no more navigate than she could paddle single-handed up the Schuylkill. And surely a mother would know how to politely tell Sydelle Feller to take her two dozen suggestions and shove them up her tiny, tight ass.

  “It’s awful,” Rose finally blurted.

  “Well, I’m sorry,” said the saleslady, whose feelings Rose had obviously hurt.

  “Maybe something a little less fussy?” Amy suggested. The saleslady pursed her lips and disappeared into the store’s back room. Rose slumped into a chair, hearing a sighing noise as the dress deflated around her.

  “We should elope,” she said.

  “Well, I have always loved you, but not in that way,” said Amy. “And there’s no way I’m letting you elope. You’d deprive me of my butt bow.” The day after Rose had told her best friend that she was getting married—before Sydelle had issued her edict on navy—Amy had made a pilgrimage to Philadelphia’s premiere thrift shop and procured a frothy salmon-colored frock with tiered layers of tulle, oversized rhinestone buckles at the shoulder, and a butt bow as wide as a city bus, plus, as an engagement gift, a six-inch-thick ivory candle studded with fake plastic pearls and the words Today I Marry My Best Friend curling around the sides in gold gilt. “You’re not serious,” Rose had said, and Amy had shrugged and said that she understood her role as maid of honor, that it was the bride’s day to shine, and that if she bought this dress (with shoes dyed salmon to match), she’d be the shoo-in victor at Philadelphia’s annual Bridesmaids’ Ball, where the women competed to see who had the worst dress. “Plus, as it happens,” she’d said, “I look fierce in a butt bow.”

  Now she wrapped her arms around Rose’s shoulders. “Don’t worry,” she said. “We’ll find it. We’re just getting started! If it was supposed to be easy, do you think they’d publish thirty million magazines about how to find the dress?”

  Rose sighed and got to her feet. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the saleslady approaching, her arms overflowing with silk and satin. “Maybe this dress isn’t so bad,” she muttered.

  “No,” said Amy, looking her up and down, “no, it is indeed awful.”

  “In here, please,” the saleslady said curtly, and Rose picked up her skirt and dragged her train in behind her.

  FORTY-THREE

  Ella Hirsh had endured almost an entire summer of her grand-daughter’s silence before deciding that she wouldn’t take one moment more.

  Maggie had arrived in May, the day after that first tortured, stop-and-start conversation, during which Ella had to keep asking her to repeat herself to make sure that she understood what her long-lost granddaughter was telling her, that this was Maggie, not Rose, and that she was at Princeton, but not really there. Yes, said Maggie, Rose and her father were fine, but she couldn’t call them. No, she wasn’t hurt, or sick, but she needed a place to go. She didn’t have a job at the moment, but she was a hard worker, and she’d find something. Ella wouldn’t have to worry about supporting her. There were a thousand things more that Ella wanted to ask her, but she stuck to the basics, the who and what and where, and the mechanics of how to get Maggie from the New Jersey supermarket parking lot down to Florida. “Can you get to Newark?” she asked, somehow extracting the name of New Jersey’s major airport from her head. “Call me when you get there. I’ll call the airlines, figure out who’s got a direct flight, and there’ll be a ticket waiting for you at the gate.”

  Eight hours later, Ella and Lewis had driven to the Fort Lauderdale airport, and there, clutching a backpack and looking weary and bedraggled and scared, was Caroline.

  Ella had gasped and squeezed her eyes shut, and when she’d opened them, she saw that she was wrong. This girl wasn’t Caroline, not really. Ella saw that as soon as she blinked . . . but the resemblance was very strong. This girl’s brown eyes, the way her hair fell over her forehead, her cheeks and her hands and even, somehow, her collarbones, were all Caroline’s. But the determined look on her face, the pugnacious set of her chin, the way her eyes had moved over them quickly, sizing them up, told a different story, and certainly forecast a different ending than the one her own daughter had come to. This girl, Ella saw, would not succumb to the lure of a rain-slicked road. This girl would keep her hands on the wheel.

  There was an early awkward moment—would they hug?—which Maggie had solved by shifting her backpack into her arms and holding it like a baby, as Ella stumbled through the introductions. Maggie hadn’t said much on the way out to short-term parking. She’d refused Ella’s offer of the front seat, and sat up straight in the backseat as Lewis drove and Ella tried hard not to pester her with too many questions. Still, she had to know, for her own safety, her own peace of mind, if nothing else. “If you’ll tell me what kind of trouble you’re in, I’m sure we can figure it out,” said Ella.

  Maggie had sighed. “I was . . .” She paused. Ella stared at her in the rearview mirror as Maggie groped for the name of her transgression. “I was living with Rose, and it didn’t work out, and I’ve been staying on campus for a few months . . .”

  “Staying with friends?” Lewis guessed.

  “Staying in the library,” said Maggie. “Living there. I was . . .” She stared out the window. “I was like a stowaway. Stowaway,” she repeated, which made her sound like she’d been having a grand adventure on the high seas. “Only there was someone watching me, and he was going to get me in a lot of trouble. So I had to leave.”

  “Do you want to go back to Philadelphia?” asked Ella. “Back to Rose?”

  “No!” said Maggie, so vehemently that Ella jumped a little in her seat, and Lewis accidentally hit the horn. “No,” she repeated. “I don’t know where I want to go. I don’t really have a place in Philadelphia. I was in an apartment, but I got evicted from there, and I can’t go back with my father, because his wife hates me, and I can’t go back with Rose . . .” And she’d sighed a piteous sigh and wrapped her arms around her knees, throwing in a small shiver for dramatic effect. “I guess maybe I could go to New York. I’ll get a job and save up my money, and I’ll go New York. Find a roommate or . . . something,” she’d concluded.

  “You can stay with me as long as you need to,” said Ella. The words were out of her mouth before she’d considered them, before she’d thought to wonder whether it was a good idea or not. Judging from the look on Lewis’s face, the answer was probably “not.” Maggie had been evicted. Then she’d been living with her sister, which, for some reason, hadn’t worked out. She didn’t feel welcome at her father’s house. She was stowing away—whatever that meant—in a school where she wasn’t enrolled, living in the library. How could that add up to anything but
trouble?

  As Lewis steered them through the airport traffic, back toward Golden Acres, Maggie had sighed, cupped her chin in her palm, staring out the window as the palm trees and traffic rolled by. “Florida,” she said. “I’ve never been here before.”

  “How is . . .” Ella began. “Can you tell me about your sister?”

  Maggie was quiet. Ella pressed on. “I looked Rose up on the Internet, at her law firm . . .”

  Maggie shook her head, staring out the window, as if envisioning her sister’s face reflected in the glass. “Is that, like, the worst picture in the world? I kept telling her to make them take another one, and she kept saying, ‘It doesn’t matter, Maggie. Don’t be so superficial.’ And I said, ‘That picture’s out there for the whole world to see, and it isn’t superficial to want to look your best,’ but of course she didn’t listen. She never listens to me,” said Maggie, and then closed her mouth as if worried that she’d said too much. “Where are we going, exactly? Where do you live?”

  “We live in a place called Golden Acres. It’s . . .”

  “. . . a retirement community for active seniors,” she and Lewis recited together.

  In the rearview mirror, Maggie’s eyes widened in alarm. “A nursing home?”

  “No, no,” said Lewis. “Don’t worry. It’s just a place for older people.”

  “Condominiums,” added Ella. “And there are stores, and a clubhouse, and a trolley that runs for people who don’t drive anymore . . .”

  “Sounds great,” said Maggie, obviously not meaning it. “So what do you do all day?”

  “I volunteer,” said Ella.

  “Where?”

  “Oh, all over. The hospital, the pet shelter, the thrift store, Meals on Wheels, and there’s this woman I’m helping, she had a stroke last year. . . . I keep busy.”

  “Do you think I could find a job here?”

  “What kind of job?” asked Ella.

  “I’ve done everything,” said Maggie. “Waitressing, dog grooming, hostessing . . .”

  Hostessing? Ella wondered what that meant.

  “Barista, bartender,” Maggie continued, “baby-sitting, working in an ice-cream shop, working at a fried-dough stand . . .”

  “Wow,” said Ella. Maggie wasn’t through.

  “I sang in a band for a while.” Maggie thought better of telling the grandmother the name of the band, on the off chance that she’d know what a whiskered biscuit even was. “Telemarketing, spraying people with perfume, T.J.Maxx, the Gap, the Limited . . .” Maggie paused and yawned hugely. “And at Princeton I helped out this blind lady. I cleaned her house. I brought her things.”

  “That’s . . .” Again, Ella was out of words.

  “So I guess this will be okay,” Maggie said. She yawned, redid her ponytail, then curled up on the backseat and fell instantly asleep. At the next red light, Lewis looked over at Ella.

  “Okay?” he asked.

  Ella gave him a small shrug, then a smile. Maggie was here, and no matter what the truth turned out to be, that was something.

  When Lewis pulled into his parking space, Maggie was still asleep in the backseat, with a lock of brown hair stuck to her sweaty cheek. Her bitten fingernails were so precisely like Caroline’s fingers that Ella felt her heart lurch hard against her rib cage. Maggie opened her eyes, stretched, grabbed her backpack, and stepped out of the car, blinking. Ella followed her gaze. There was Irene Siegel, pushing her walker across the parking lot, and Albert Gantz, slowly unloading an oxygen tank from his trunk.

  “It is the blight man was born for,” Maggie said in a low, resigned voice.

  “What was that, dear?” asked Lewis.

  “Nothing,” Maggie said. She shouldered her backpack and followed Ella inside.

  True to her word, Maggie got a job at a bagel shop half a mile from Golden Acres. She’d work the early shift, creeping out of the apartment at five in the morning, working through breakfast and lunch. And then what? Ella had asked, because Maggie rarely reappeared at the apartment before eight or nine. Her granddaughter had shrugged. “I go to the beach,” she said. “Or the movies. Or the library.” For weeks, Ella had offered dinner. Each time, Maggie refused. “I already ate,” she’d say—although, skinny as she was, Ella sometimes wondered whether Maggie ate anything at all. She’d decline Ella’s offers to watch TV, to go to a movie, to join her at the Clubhouse for a bingo game. The only thing that had gotten even a flicker of interest was Ella’s offer of a library card. Maggie had accompanied her grandmother to the small, one-story library, filled out her forms with Ella’s address, then disappeared into the Fiction and Literature shelves, emerging an hour later with her arms full of poetry books.

  And that was that. For May. For June. For July and August. At night, Maggie would come home, nod hello, and disappear. She’d emerge for a shower, then slip silently into the back bedroom, easing the door closed behind her, carrying her single towel, her shampoo, her toothbrush and toothpaste, with her as if she were an overnight guest, even though Ella had told her that she was welcome to leave her things wherever she wanted. There was a small television set in Maggie’s bedroom, but Ella never heard it go on. There was a telephone, too, but Maggie never called anyone. She read, Ella knew—every three or four days she’d notice a new library book in Maggie’s bag, thick novels, biographies, books of poetry, the kind of odd, fragmented, non-rhyming poems that never made sense to Ella—but Maggie never seemed to talk to anyone, and Ella was starting to worry that she never would.

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she said. It was eight in the morning, almost eighty-five degrees, and she’d fled to Lewis’s apartment after Maggie had glided past her and out the door again.

  “About the weather? Just wait. It can’t last.”

  “About her,” said Ella. “Maggie. She doesn’t talk to me! She doesn’t even look at me. She pads around on her bare feet . . . I never hear her coming. . . . She’s out until all hours, she’s gone when I wake up. . . .” Ella paused, took a deep breath, and shook her head.

  “Well, normally I’d say to give her time . . .”

  “Lewis, it’s been months, and I don’t even know the story with her sister, or her father. I don’t even know what she likes for dinner! You’ve got grandchildren . . .”

  “Grandsons,” Lewis said. “But I think you’re right. This calls for drastic measures.” He nodded, and got to his feet. “We need to call in the big guns.”

  Luckily, Mrs. Lefkowitz was home. “Let’s start out with a few questions,” she said, moving back and forth across her cluttered living room in her familiar plant, sigh, shuffle, stomp. “Do you have prunes in your refrigerator?”

  Ella stared at her.

  “Prunes,” Mrs. Lefkowitz prompted.

  “Yes,” said Ella.

  Mrs. Lefkowitz nodded. “You got Metamucil on the kitchen counter?”

  Ella nodded. Didn’t everyone?

  “What magazines do you subscribe to?”

  Ella thought. “Prevention, the thing the AARP sends . . .”

  “Do you get the HBO and the MTV?”

  Ella shook her head. “I don’t have cable.”

  Mrs. Lefkowitz rolled her eyes and plopped down on an overstuffed armchair, on top of a needlepoint pillow that announced, “I’m the Princess.” “Young people have their own things. Their own music, their own TV programs, their own . . .”

  “Culture?” Lewis supplied.

  Mrs. Lefkowitz nodded. “There’s nobody here for her,” she said. “Nobody her own age. How’d you like to be twenty-eight and stuck in a place like this?”

  “She didn’t have anywhere else to go,” said Ella.

  “Neither do prisoners,” said Mrs. Lefkowitz. “It doesn’t mean they have to like being in jail.”

  “So what should we do?” Ella asked.

  Mrs. Lefkowitz struggled to her feet. “You got money?” she demanded.

  Ella nodded.

  “Then let’s go,” she sa
id. “You drive,” she said, pointing her chin at Lewis. “We’re going shopping.”

  Coaxing Maggie out of her room proved to be a costly proposition. First, there were the magazines, almost fifty dollars’ worth, each one fatter and glossier and more crammed with perfume samples and subscription-card come-ons than the last. “How do you know about all of this?” Ella asked, as Mrs. Lefkowitz stacked an issue of Movieline on top of the latest Vanity Fair. Her friend waved her good arm carelessly. “What’s to know?” she asked.

  Their next stop was a gigantic electronics store. “Flat screen, flat screen,” Mrs. Lefkowitz recited as she zipped down the aisles in the motorized scooter she used for her shopping expeditions. Two hours and several thousand dollars later, Lewis’s car was packed with a flat-screen TV, a DVD player, and a dozen videos, including the first season of Sex and the City, which Mrs. Lefkowitz guaranteed that all the young women were raving about. “I read about it in Time,” she boasted, lifting herself into the passenger’s seat. “Turn left up here,” she told Lewis. “We’re going to the supermarket and liquor store,” she said, and smiled to herself. “We’re going to have a party.” At the liquor store, she accosted the pimply-faced clerk in a polyester pinny. “Do you know how to make a cosmopolitan?” she demanded.

  “Cointreau . . .” the clerk ventured.

  Mrs. Lefkowitz pointed at Lewis. “You heard the man!” she said. Later, their arms laden with cointreau and vodka, cheese puffs and corn chips, miniature hot dogs and frozen egg rolls, plus two bottles of nail polish (one red, one pink), and cardboard boxes full of electronics. Ella and Lewis and Mrs. Lefkowitz piled into the elevator up to Ella’s apartment.

  “Do you really think this will work?” she asked, as Lewis put the frozen foods in her freezer.

  Mrs. Lefkowitz pulled up a seat at the kitchen table and shook her head. “No guarantees,” she said, pulling a hot-pink piece of paper out of her purse. “You’re Invited!” it read in silver letters across the top.

  “Where’s that from?” Ella asked, peering over her shoulder.