“What should I do?” she whispered.
Mrs. Lefkowitz backed up her scooter and drove it, full speed ahead, toward the entrance to the pool.
“Wait!” Ella cried. “Where are you going?”
Mrs. Lefkowitz didn’t turn, didn’t stop, and didn’t answer. Ella shot a helpless glance at Lewis.
“I’ll go . . .” he began.
“We better . . .” she said.
Ella’s pulse beat in her throat as she hurried after Mrs. Lefkowitz, who was speeding through the gates, straight toward Maggie, and didn’t show any signs of slowing down.
“Hey!” one of the old guys called as Mrs. Lefkowitz zipped past him, bumping into the table on which he’d spread a hand of cards. She ignored him and pulled her scooter up to Maggie’s lounge chair. Maggie lowered her sunglasses and stared. Breathing hard, Ella and Lewis hurried after Mrs. Lefkowitz, and for one bizarre moment Ella was reminded of a dozen spaghetti westerns and the scene each one of them had, where the good guys made their stand against the enemy on a conveniently deserted street or in the middle of an empty corral. All the scene needed, she thought, was for some tumbleweed to blow past Mrs. Lefkowitz’s scooter. Even the Water Babies had ceased their splashing and stood quietly in the shallow end, water dripping from their tanned, wrinkled arms, watching to see what would happen next.
Maggie stared at Mrs. Lefkowitz, and Maggie’s new friends eye-balled Ella and Lewis, and Ella made a careful study of the cracked concrete beneath her feet, wishing for a cowboy hat and, even more desperately, for a script. Was she the good guy or the bad guy here? Was she the hero, come to rescue the damsel in distress, or the villain, come to lash her to the train tracks?
Hero, she decided, just as Mrs. Lefkowitz rolled the scooter forward another six inches, nudging the edge of Maggie’s lounge. Ella was reminded of a puppy pushing its nose against a closed door.
“Maggie, dear,” Mrs. Lefkowitz said, “there’s something that maybe you can help me with.”
Maggie raised her eyebrows as one of the old men glared at Mrs. Lefkowitz.
“She’s tired,” he said belligerently, gripping his cane with two hands. “She had a very long day. And she was just getting ready to tell us about how she almost got a job at MTV.”
Mrs. Lefkowitz wasn’t moving. “So go ahead. Tell.”
Maggie looked over Mrs. Lefkowitz’s head and addressed herself to Ella. “What do you want?”
The words rose up, unbidden, to Ella’s mouth and threatened to spill over. I want you to love me. I want you to like me. I want you to stop running away.“I . . .” she managed.
“She’s busy,” the short, round, barrel-shaped man said, stepping in front of Maggie’s lounge chair protectively.
“Are you Maggie’s grandmother?” asked the woman in the pink bathing cap. “Oh, you must be so proud of her! Such a beautiful girl, and so accomplished . . .”
Maggie bit her lip, and the old man with the cane made an unpleasant noise as Lewis quietly pulled two chairs over to Maggie’s circle and motioned for Ella to sit.
“MTV?” Mrs. Lefkowitz asked, nodding knowledgeably, as if she’d invented the station. “Were you going to be a contestant on one of their game shows?”
“On-air talent,” Maggie muttered.
“Like the Carson Daly,” said Mrs. Lefkowitz, crossing her hands over her lumpy waist and tilting her square sunglasses toward the sun. “So handsome, that one.”
The two groups arranged themselves in an uneasy half-circle around Maggie’s lounge chair. Ella and Lewis and Mrs. Lefkowitz were on one side, Maggie’s new friends on the other. Maggie stared at one group, then the other. Then she gave an almost invisible shrug, reached into her backpack, and pulled out a notebook. Ella felt herself relax the tiniest bit. It wasn’t progress, exactly, but at least Maggie hadn’t bolted, or asked them to leave.
“It’s Jack, isn’t it?” Lewis asked the man who’d been gripping the cane. The man—Jack—gave an affirmative grunt. Lewis offered him his hand. The talkative woman began quizzing Mrs. Lefkowitz about her scooter. The two other men went back to their game of cards. Ella closed her eyes, and breathed quietly, and hoped.
In her lounge chair, Maggie also had her eyes closed, thinking about what to do and how to make things right, even when part of her protested that it wasn’t her job to fix things. Except nobody in Florida knew what was her job and what wasn’t. Nobody here knew what a mess she’d made of her life. Nobody here knew Rose, and how she was the one who took care of things, the same way they didn’t know that Maggie was always the one who needed saving, or fixing, or help. She had a job, a place to live, people who cared about her. Now it was time for her to start repairing the damage, starting with the one she’d hurt the worst—starting with Rose.
She squeezed her eyes shut, feeling afraid, part of her wanting to jump to her feet, hurry through the gate, jump behind the wheel of Lewis’s long car, and drive off someplace where nobody knew her, where nobody knew who she was, or what she’d done, or where she’d come from. But she’d already run to Princeton, and then she’d run here. She didn’t want to run anymore.
In the shallow end, the Water Babies began their cool-down. In the chair beside her, her grandmother cleared her throat. “I bet you miss people your age,” Ella said. “It must be hard for you, being the only young person here.”
“I’m okay,” said Maggie.
“She’s fine,” growled Jack.
Maggie opened her eyes, then opened her notebook. “Dear Rose,” she wrote. Ella looked at the page, then very quickly looked away. Dora, the woman in the pink bathing cap, had no such compunctions.
“Who’s Rose?” she asked.
“My sister,” said Maggie.
“You’ve got a sister? What’s she like?” Jack put down his cards, and Herman set aside his Mother Jones. “She’s got a sister!”
“She’s a lawyer in Philadelphia,” said Ella, and then closed her mouth and looked at Maggie for help. Maggie ignored her, closing her notebook, getting up and walking through the gauntlet of senior citizens to the edge of the pool, where she dangled her legs in the water.
“Is she married?” asked Dora.
“What kind of law?” asked Jack. “Does she do wills, by any chance?”
“Is she coming to visit?” demanded Herman. “Does she look like you? Does she have any tattoos?”
“She’s not married,” said Maggie. “She has a boyfriend . . .” Or at least, she used to have a boyfriend, until I fucked that up that for her. Maggie stared unhappily into the chlorinated depths of the deep end.
“Tell us more!” urged Dora.
“Does she have anything pierced?” asked Herman.
Maggie smiled and shook her head. “She doesn’t look like me. Well, a little bit, maybe. We have the same color eyes and hair, but she’s bigger than I am. And no tattoos, either. She’s very conservative. She wears her hair twisted up all the time.”
“Like you!” Ella said.
Maggie started to protest, then touched her ponytail and realized that it was true. She hopped into the water, flipped onto her back, and floated.
“Rose can be funny,” she said. Ella hurried to the edge of the pool to listen. The rest of Maggie’s pool friends followed after her, jostling for prime position along the deep end’s ledge. “And mean, sometimes. When we were girls, we had to share a room. We had twin beds, and there was a space in between them, and she’d lie there, reading, and I used to jump over her.” Maggie started to smile as she remembered. “She’d be lying there, and I’d jump back and forth, from one bed to the other, and I’d say, ‘The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog!’”
“So you were the quick brown fox,” said Ella.
Maggie gave her a “duh” look that was quickly repeated by Jack, Dora, and Herman. “I’d do it until she hit me,” she said.
“She hit you?” asked Ella.
“I’d jump back and forth, and I could see that she was getting really irri
tated, but I’d keep doing it until she’d stick her arm up in the air and bat me down when I was jumping.” Maggie nodded and pulled herself out of the water, looking strangely pleased with the memory of being hit by her sister, mid-leap.
“Tell us more about Rose,” Dora said, as Jack handed her a towel and her tube of Bain de Soleil.
“She doesn’t care that much about looks. And stuff,” said Maggie, resuming her sprawling position on her lounge chair, remembering Rose squinting at herself in the mirror, or Rose clumping mascara onto her lids, then heading out the door with half-moons of black on her cheeks.
“Oh, I’d like to meet her,” said Dora.
“Invite her for a visit,” said Jack, cutting his eyes toward Ella. “I’m sure your grandmother would love to have both of you.”
Maggie knew that he was right. Ella would love to meet Rose. What grandmother wouldn’t? A smart, successful granddaughter with a law degree. But Maggie wasn’t sure whether she was ready to see Rose again, even if Rose was willing to forgive her. Things were going better for her than they ever had, ever since she’d left Philadelphia that terrible night. For once in her life, she wasn’t in Rose’s shadow, she wasn’t the second sister, the one who wasn’t as smart, wasn’t as successful, the one who was just pretty in a time when pretty felt as if it mattered less and less. Corinne and Charles hadn’t known about her history, her struggles, the remedial classes, all the jobs she’d quit or been fired from, all the girls who used to be her friends. Dora and Jack and Herman didn’t think she was stupid or a slut. They liked her. They admired her. They listened to what she had to say. And Rose would show up and ruin everything. “A bagel shop?” she’d ask, in a tone suggesting that a bagel shop was the best Maggie could hope for—a bagel shop, a spare bedroom, a borrowed car, the kindness of strangers.
Maggie opened her notebook again. “Dear Rose,” she wrote once more, and then stopped. She couldn’t think of how to do this, of what she was going to say next.
“This is Maggie, in case you can’t tell from the handwriting,” she wrote. “I am in Florida with our grandmother. Her name is Ella Hirsch, and she was . . .” Agh. This was so hard. There was a word for what she wanted to say here. Maggie could almost catch it, could practically taste it on her tongue, and the feeling caused her heart to quicken, the way it had during the classes at Princeton, when she’d sat in the back with the right answers waiting to burst from her mouth. “What’s the word that means that someone wants to be with someone else, but they’re not, because of a fight or something?” she called.
“The Yiddish word?” asked Jack.
“Who’s she gonna write to in Yiddish?” asked Herman, returning his attention to Mother Jones.
“Not Yiddish,” said Maggie. “The word for where there’s two relatives, or something, but other people in the family are angry at each other about stuff, so the relatives never meet.”
“Estranged,” said Lewis. Jack glared at him. Maggie appeared not to notice.
“Thanks,” she said.
“Glad to be of use in my golden years,” said Lewis.
“Her name is Ella Hirsch, and she was estranged from us,” Maggie wrote, and stared at the page. This was the hard part . . . but she’d had practice at Princeton, working with words, picking out the best ones the way a careful cook chooses the best apples from the basket, the plumpest chicken from the butcher’s case.
“I’m sorry for what happened last winter,” she wrote, deciding that this was probably the best way to handle it—flat out, in the open. “I am sorry I hurt you. I want . . .” And she paused again, aware that everyone was staring at her, as if she were some rare aquatic creature recently brought into captivity, some animal at the zoo who’d just learned an amusing new trick.
“What’s the word for when you want to make something right?”
“Reconciliation,” Ella said quietly, and spelled it, and Maggie wrote it twice, just to be sure she got it right.
FORTY-EIGHT
“Okay,” said Rose, as she got into the passenger’s seat of her car, “okay, so you swear and affirm under penalty of perjury as defined by the Pennsylvania Code that there will be absolutely nobody else from Lewis, Dommel, and Fenick at this wedding?” This was important information. Of all the things she’d covered with Simon—dead mother, vanished sister, unspeakable stepmother—they’d never gotten around to the topic of Mr. Jim Danvers. And Rose was determined not to have to do it at the nuptials of two of Simon’s law-school classmates mere months before their own wedding.
“As far as I know,” said Simon, straightening his tie and starting the car.
“As far as you know,” Rose repeated. She flipped down the mirror, glanced at her makeup, and began swiping at an unblended patch of concealer beneath her right eye. “So I’ll just have to keep my eyes open for skateboards.”
“I didn’t tell you?” Simon asked innocently. “Don Dommel fell off his board and hit his head on a railing and saw God. No more extreme anything. He’s into meditation now. There’s yoga every afternoon at lunchtime. The whole place smells like incense, and the secretaries have to say Namaste when they answer the phone.’”
“Heh,” said Rose.
“Rose,” said Simon, “it’s a wedding, not a mob hit. Calm down.”
Rose began rooting in her purse for a lipstick, thinking that it was easy for Simon to say. He wasn’t the one who had to explain himself. She was starting to understand why Maggie had been so defensive. Moving through the world with a title—doctor, lawyer, college student—gave you armor. Having to continually try to find a way to tell people who you were—which really meant telling them what you did—was difficult when you didn’t fit into one of the world’s neat little cubes. Well, I’m an aspiring actress, but I’m waitressing right now, or, I used to be a lawyer, but for the last ten months I’ve been walking dogs.
“You’ll be fine, Rose,” said Simon. “You just have to be happy for my friends, and drink champagne, and dance with me . . .”
“You didn’t mention dancing,” said Rose, and gazed dismally at her feet, currently cramped in the first pair of high-heeled shoes she’d worn since her defection from big firm life. Courage, she told herself. “I’m sure this is going to be great!” She swallowed hard. She was sure it was going to be awful. She didn’t do well at large functions, which was one of the reasons she was semi-dreading her own nuptials. She had too many memories of bar and bat mitzvah parties, afternoons like these in synagogues and country-club ballrooms, where she’d always felt like the tallest, ugliest girl, and how she’d station herself in a corner close to the chopped liver and miniature hot dogs in puff pastry, reasoning that if nobody could see her, it wouldn’t hurt when nobody asked her to dance, and she’d spend hours alone, eating, and watching Maggie win the limbo contest.
Flash forward eighteen years, add one fiancé, and here she was again, she thought, following Simon through church doors festooned with giant tufts of lilies and white satin ribbons. Except instead of chopped liver and teeny weenies, there’d be crudités and champagne, and there’d be no limbo-ing little sister to distract her. Rose picked up a program. “The bride’s name is Penelope?”
“We actually call her Lopey,” said Simon.
“Lopey. Right,” said Rose.
“I’ll introduce you to some people,” Simon said. And, in short order, Rose met James, and Aidan, and Leslie, and Heather. James and Aidan were also law-school classmates of Simon’s. Leslie worked in publicity; Heather was a buyer at Macy’s. Both of them were tiny little things wearing linen sheaths (Heather’s was cream, Leslie’s was yellow) and cashmere wraps slung loosely over their shoulders. Rose looked around the room, despair welling in her chest as she realized that every single other woman—every single one of them!—was wearing a simply cut dress and a wrap, and delicate little sandals, and here she was, in the wrong outfit, in the wrong color, with pumps, not sandals, and chunky beads, not pearls, and her hair was probably a frizzy mess staging a j
ailbreak from the tortoiseshell combs she’d carefully positioned an hour ago. Shit. Maggie would have known what she was supposed to wear, Rose thought dismally. Where was her sister when she needed her?
“And what do you do?” asked Heather. Or maybe it was Leslie. They were both blondes; only, one of them had a pageboy and the other had her hair pinned into a graceful chignon; and they both had the kind of translucent skin that comes from excellent breeding and regular exposure to the air inside of Talbots’ dressing rooms.
Rose fiddled with her beads, wondering if anyone would notice if she slipped them into her purse during the service. “I’m an attorney.”
“Oh!” said Leslie. Or possibly Heather. “So do you work with Simon?”
“I’m . . . I’m actually . . .” Rose shot Simon a desperate look, but he was deep in conversation with the guys. She wiped at her damp forehead, realizing that she’d probably just removed her foundation. “I used to work at Lewis, Dommel, and Fenick, but I’m sort of taking a break for the time being.”
“Oh,” said Leslie.
“That’s nice,” said Heather. “And you’re getting married, right?”
“Right!” Rose agreed, too loudly, and wrapped her fingers around Simon’s forearm, taking care to make sure that her engagement ring was front and center, in case they’d think that she was lying.
“I took three months’ leave from work to plan my wedding,” said Heather. “Oh, I remember that time. All those meetings . . . the menus, the flowers . . .”
“I just worked part time,” chimed in Leslie. “I’d keep busy, of course, with the Junior League, but mostly it was all wedding, all the time.”
“Would you excuse me?” Rose murmured, knowing that any minute they were going to start talking dresses, and she’d be forced to reveal the truth, which was that she hadn’t been looking since her one disastrous afternoon with Amy. No dress, no job, their eyes would say, and no membership to the Junior League. What kind of a bride are you?
In Her Shoes Page 33