In Her Shoes

by Jennifer Weiner

  Her father shook his head. “We drove up to visit last weekend and she had a big wreath on the door.”

  “Ho ho ho,” said Rose cheerlessly.

  “Rose,” her father said, a warning tone in his voice. Rose lifted her head and glared at him.

  “Now, moving on to more pertinent topics. My grandmother.”

  Michael Feller swallowed hard. “She called you? Ella?”

  “Maggie wrote to me,” said Rose. “She said she’s living with this . . . with Ella. So what’s the story?”

  Her father said nothing.

  “Dad?”

  “I’m ashamed of myself,” Michael finally said. “I should have told you about this—about Ella—a long time ago. He laced his hands around his knees and rocked back and forth, clearly wishing for an annual report or at the very least a Wall Street Journal to get him through this. “Your mother’s mother,” he began. “Ella Hirsch. She moved to Florida a long time ago. After . . .” He paused. “After your mother died.”

  “You told us she was in a home,” Rose prompted.

  Michael Feller curled his hands into fists, planted them on his thighs. “She was,” he said. “Just not the kind of home you probably thought.”

  Rose stared at her father. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, she was in a home. Her home.” He swallowed hard. “With Ira, I guess.”

  “You lied to us,” Rose said flatly.

  “It was a lie of omission,” her father said. Clearly, this was a line he’d thought of long ago, a line he’d been rehearsing in his head for years. Michael took a deep breath. “After your mother . . .” His voice trailed off.

  “Died,” Rose supplied.

  “Died,” said Michael. “After she died I was angry. I felt . . .” He paused, and stared at Sydelle’s glass-and-metal coffee table.

  “Angry at Mom’s parents? Angry at Ella?”

  “They tried to tell me about Caroline, but I didn’t want to listen. I was so in love with her . . .” Rose winced at the pain in her father’s voice. “I was so in love with her. And I was so angry at them. Your mother was on lithium when I met her. She was stable. But she hated the way the medicine made her feel. And I’d try to make her take it, and Ella, her mother, would, too, and for a while she’d be fine, and then . . .” He exhaled, pulling off his glasses as if he couldn’t bear their weight on his face. “She loved you. She loved all of us. But she couldn’t . . .” Michael’s voice caught in his throat. “And it didn’t matter. It didn’t change how I felt about her.”

  “What was she like?” asked Rose.

  Her father looked surprised. “You don’t remember?”

  “You didn’t exactly keep a shrine to her in our house or anything.” She swept her hands around Sydelle’s spotless living room—the white walls and white carpet, the bookshelves that had never held books, only glass objets and an eight-by-eleven framed shot of My Marcia’s wedding. “There aren’t any pictures of her. You never talked about her.”

  “It hurt.” said Michael. “It hurt to remember. It hurt to see her face. I thought it would hurt you and Maggie, too.”

  “I don’t know,” said Rose. “I wish . . .” She looked down at her feet in the woven white carpet. “I wish she hadn’t been a secret.”

  Michael was quiet. “I remember the first time I saw her. She was walking across the campus at the University of Michigan, pushing her bike, and she was laughing, and it was like a bell going off in my head. She was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. She had a pink scarf tied in her hair . . .” Her father’s voice drifted off.

  Rose could remember glimpses, snatches, pieces of stories, a sweet, chiming voice, a smooth cheek pressed against hers. Sweet dreams, dream girl. Sleep tight, honey bun. And everyone had lied by the things they’d told and the things they’d kept secret. Ella had lied to her father about Caroline—or, rather, she’d told him the truth, but he hadn’t wanted to listen. And her father had lied to the girls about Ella—or he’d told them a tiny piece of the truth and left the rest of it unsaid.

  She got to her feet, her hands clenched into fists. Lies, lies, lies, and where was the truth in all of this? Her mother had been crazy, then dead. Her father had yoked himself to a wicked witch and had given his daughters over to her care. Her grandmother had vanished down a rabbit hole, and Maggie had gone chasing after her. And Rose didn’t know anything, not anything at all.

  “You just got rid of her. All the time growing up, I don’t remember a single picture of her, or any of her things . . .”

  “It hurt too much,” Michael said simply. “It was bad enough having to look at the two of you.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  “Oh, no, I didn’t mean . . .” He took Rose’s hand, a move that shocked her into speechlessness. She couldn’t remember her father touching her at all except for the occasional peck on the cheek since that disastrous day when she was twelve and came out of the bathroom and whispered that her period had started. “It was just that you two reminded me of her so much. Everything you did, it was like having to remember Caroline all over again.”

  “And then you married her,” said Rose, nodding toward the foyer where, presumably, her stepmother lingered.

  Her father sighed. “Sydelle meant well.”

  Rose gave a short, barking laugh. “Oh, sure. She’s wonderful. She just hated me and Maggie.”

  “She was jealous,” said Michael.

  Rose was flabbergasted. “Jealous of what? Jealous of me? You have to be kidding. When My Marcia is superior in every way. And even if she was jealous, she was horrible. And you let her get away with it!”

  Her father cringed. “Rose . . .”

  “Rose, what?”

  “There’s something I need to give you. It’s too late, but still. . . .”

  He hurried upstairs and came down with a shoe box in his hands. “These are from her. Your grandmother,” he said. “She’s in Florida,” he said. “She tried to get in touch with me—with you and Maggie—for years. But I didn’t let her.” He reached into the box and pulled out a creased and faded envelope with “Miss Rose Feller” written on the outside. “This was the last card she sent.”

  Rose ran her thumb under the flap, which came loose easily from glue that was fifteen years old. Inside was a card with a bouquet of flowers on the front. The flowers were pink and purple, dusted with gold glitter that sparkled dimly on Rose’s fingertips. “HAPPY SWEET SIXTEEN,” read the silver script above the flowers. And inside . . . Rose opened the card. A twenty-dollar bill and a photograph fluttered into her lap. “TO MY GRANDDAUGHTER,” read the words in slanted script. “I WISH YOU LOVE AND EVERY HAPPINESS ON YOUR SPECIAL DAY.” Followed by a signature. Followed by an address. And a telephone number. And a P.S. that read, “Rose, I would love to hear from you. Please call me any time!!!” It was the three exclamation points, Rose thought, that broke her heart the most. She looked at the photograph. It was a picture of a little girl—round-faced, brown-eyed, with bangs and two neat pigtails tied with red yarn ribbon and a serious look on her face, sitting on an older woman’s lap. The woman was laughing. The little girl was not. Rose flipped the snapshot over. Rose and Grandma, 1975, it read, in the same blue ink, the same slanted script. Nineteen seventy-five. She would have been six.

  Rose got to her feet. “I have to go now,” she said.

  “Rose,” her father called, helplessly, toward her back. She ignored him, walking out of the house. Then she sat behind the wheel of her car, with the card still in her hands, and closed her eyes, remembering her mother’s voice, her mother’s pink-lipsticked smile, a tanned arm reaching out from behind a camera. Smile, honey! Why such a sourpuss? Smile for me, Rosie Posy. Smile pretty, baby doll.

  FORTY-NINE

  “Read more!” Maggie said.

  “I can’t,” Lewis insisted, and gave her an extremely dignified look across Ella’s dining room table. “It would be a breach of journalistic ethics.”

  “Oh, come on,�
� Ella pleaded. “Just the first few sentences. Please?”

  “It would be very, very wrong,” he said, and shook his head sadly. “Ella, I’m surprised that you’d even want me to do such a thing.”

  “I’m a bad influence,” Maggie said proudly. “At least tell us what Irving ordered.”

  Lewis threw his hands in the air in mock resignation. “Fine,” he said. “But you’re sworn to secrecy.” He cleared his throat. “‘Irving and I do not care for French food,’ “Mrs. Sobel’s latest began. “‘The dishes are much too rich for us. We have also found that many French restaurants are noisy and dim, which is supposed to be romantic, but makes it hard to read your menu, let alone see your meal.’ ”

  “Poor Mrs. Sobel,” Ella murmured.

  Lewis shook his head at her, then kept reading. “‘Most cooks do not know how an omelet should be made. An omelet should be fluffy and light, with the cheese just melted. And I am sorry to report that Bistro Bleu is no exception. My omelet was overcooked and rubbery. The potatoes were not as hot as they should have been, and they were made with rosemary, which Irving does not care for.’ ”

  “Again with Irving,” said Ella.

  “Irving’s trouble?” asked Maggie.

  “Irving’s allergic. To everything,” Lewis explained. “He’s allergic to things I didn’t know you could be allergic to. White flour, shellfish, all seeds, all nuts . . . half of that woman’s reviews are devoted to how long it took her to find Irving something to eat, and then there’s another quarter of the review reserved for the discussion of how whatever Irving ended up eating didn’t agree with him . . .”

  “This is Irving Sobel?” asked Mrs. Lefkowitz, shuffling toward the table. “Feh. He came to a party I had once and wouldn’t eat a bite!”

  Maggie rolled her eyes. Mrs. Lefkowitz, their dinner guest, was not in a good mood. She wore a pink sweatshirt, explaining that if she spilled her borscht, it would blend right in, and tan polyester pants. She didn’t explain her pants, but Maggie figured that if she spilled anything at all on them, it would only constitute an improvement.

  Mrs. Lefkowitz seated herself with a small groan, picked up a kosher dill pickle, and began expounding on the state of the nearby mall. “Hooligans!” she said, through a mouthful of pickle. Maggie relocated her textbooks from the Makeup for Theater class she’d enrolled in at the local community college and set dishes and silverware in their place.

  “I think it’s called Houlihan’s,” she said.

  “No, no, hooligans,” said Mrs. Lefkowitz. “Ruffians! Hoodlums! Teenagers! Everywhere! The mall is full of them, and all of the clothes are these teeny-tiny things with, with ruffled sleeves,” she said. “Miniskirts! Shirts that you can see right through! Pants,” she continued, glaring at Maggie, “that are made out of leather. Have you ever in your life heard of such a thing?”

  “Actually—” Maggie began. Ella bit back a smile. She knew for a fact that Maggie owned a pair of leather pants, and a leather miniskirt, too.

  “What’s the occasion?” Ella asked instead. “What were you shopping for?”

  Mrs. Lefkowitz waved a dismissive hand over the bowls of borscht. “My son. Remember him? The actuary? Mister Excitement? Well, he calls me up and says, ‘Ma, I’m getting married.’ I say, ‘At your age? You need a wife like I need tap-dancing shoes.’ He tells me that his mind’s made up, and that she’s a wonderful girl. I tell him that at fifty-three he’s got no business going with girls, and he tells me I’ve got nothing to worry about, she’s thirty-six, but a very mature thirty-six.” She glared at Ella and Maggie as if they were responsible for causing her son to fall in love with a very mature thirty-six-year-old. “This I should live to see,” she concluded, and helped herself to a piece of rye bread. “So now I need an outfit. Which of course I can’t find.”

  “What are you looking for?” asked Maggie.

  Mrs. Lefkowitz cocked a gray eyebrow. “The princess speaks!”

  “I talk!” cried Maggie, affronted. “And it just so happens that I am an expert shopper.”

  “Well, then, what would you suggest for my son’s third wedding?”

  Maggie considered Mrs. Lefkowitz carefully—her cap of tousled iron-gray curls, her eyes, bright blue and inquisitive, the pink lipstick she applied even to the drooping corner of her lips. She wasn’t fat, exactly, but she didn’t have much of a shape, either. Her waist had thickened, her breasts had drooped.

  “Hmm,” Maggie said out loud, considering possibilities.

  “Like a science project, she looks at me.”

  “Shh,” said Ella, who’d seen Maggie look this way before, curled on her couch at night, poring over her poetry books in a pool of lamplight with a concentration that almost made it seem as if she were hypnotizing herself.

  “What’s your favorite thing?” Maggie suddenly asked.

  “Hot-fudge sundaes,” said Mrs. Lefkowitz promptly. “But I’m not allowed to have them anymore. Only with frozen yogurt,” she said, wrinkling her face to demonstrate her feelings about frozen yogurt, “and that fat-free fudge topping, that they aren’t even allowed to call fudge, because it’s not. Fudge topping,” she said again, and shook her head, clearly prepared to deliver a speech on the failings of fake fudge topping. But Maggie stopped her.

  “Your favorite thing to wear.”

  “To wear?” Mrs. Lefkowitz looked down at herself as if she were surprised she was wearing anything at all. “Oh, I like what’s comfortable, I guess.”

  “Your favorite thing ever,” said Maggie, twisting her hair into a ponytail. Ella perched on the edge of a dining room chair, eager to see where this was going.

  Mrs. Lefkowitz opened her mouth. Maggie raised her hand. “Think about it first,” she said. “Think carefully. Think of all the outfits you ever wore, and tell me what you liked the very best.”

  Mrs. Lefkowitz closed her eyes. “My going-away suit,” she said.

  “What’s that?”

  “My going-away suit,” she repeated, as if Maggie hadn’t heard her.

  “Like you’d wear when you were leaving your wedding and going to the airport for your honeymoon,” Ella explained.

  “Right, right,” said Mrs. Lefkowitz, nodding. “It was a black-and-white-checked print, and the skirt was very fitted here,” she said, smoothing her hands along her hips. “I had black pumps . . .” She closed her eyes, remembering.

  “What was the jacket like?” Maggie prompted.

  “Oh, short, I think,” said Mrs. Lefkowitz, sounding almost dreamy. “With jet buttons down the front. It was so beautiful. I wonder what became of it?”

  “What if . . .” said Maggie. “What if we went shopping together?”

  Mrs. Lefkowitz made a face. “That mall again? I don’t think I could stand it.”

  Maggie wasn’t sure she’d be able to stand it, either, making her way through the stores at Mrs. Lefkowitz’s snail’s pace. “Or how about this?” she said. “You tell me your size . . .”

  “Oh, now she wants to get personal!”

  “. . . and you give me your credit card . . .”

  Ella could see Mrs. Lefkowitz getting ready to shake her head. She held her breath and hoped.

  “. . . and I’ll find you an outfit. A few outfits, even. I’ll give you a choice. We’ll have a fashion show here, you’ll try them on for us, and you’ll pick the one you like the best, and I’ll return the rest of them.”

  Now Mrs. Lefkowitz was looking at Maggie curiously. “Like a personal shopper?”

  “Just like that,” said Maggie, walking a slow circle around Mrs. Lefkowitz. “Do you have a budget?” she asked.

  Mrs. Lefkowitz sighed. “Two hundred dollars, maybe?”

  Maggie winced. “I’ll try,” she said.

  FIFTY

  Maggie spent two solid days searching for Mrs. Lefkowitz’s wedding finery. Which was good, she thought. It kept her from sitting by the telephone, wondering whether Rose had gotten her letter yet, and whether Rose would call.r />
  Mrs. Lefkowitz was a challenge—no doubt about it, Maggie thought. There was no way she could put her in the kind of fitted suit she’d described, but Maggie could, she thought, find something that would make Mrs. Lefkowitz feel like she was wearing that outfit again. A suit would work, and the skirt could even be on the short side—from what she’d seen of them, Mrs. Lefkowitz’s legs weren’t bad—but a short jacket was out of the question. Something long, maybe, hip-length, but with a trim to make it look dressy, something that suggested those jet-black buttons. Something she’d seen before. Macy’s? Saks? She finally remembered that it had been at neither of those places, but in Rose’s closet. Rose had a jacket like that.

  Maggie swallowed hard and kept shopping, visiting department stores, consignment stores, thrift shops, flea markets, and the community college’s costume department, after she’d promised the head of the department that she’d help with the makeup for an upcoming production of Hedda Gabler. In the end, she came up with three choices. The first was an outfit she’d found on sale at the Nordstrom’s outlet—a knee-length skirt, fitted but not too tight, in pale pink linen, heavily embroidered in hot pink and red thread, along with a modest matching tank top and an embroidered cardigan that went on top of that. Mrs. Lefkowitz fingered the fabric doubtfully. “This doesn’t look like my going-away suit,” she said. “And a skirt with a sweater? I don’t know. I was thinking a dress, maybe.”

  “It’s not the look we’re going for,” said Maggie. “It’s the sensation.”

  “Sensation?”

  “The feeling you had wearing your going-away suit,” she said. “You can’t wear the suit again, right?”

  Mrs. Lefkowitz nodded.

  “So what we’re going for is an outfit that gives you the same ...” She struggled for words. “. .. the same sense of yourself that the suit did.” She handed Mrs. Lefkowitz the outfit, still on hangers, plus a wide-brimmed pink hat she’d snatched from the college’s costume department. “Just try,” she said, and ushered Mrs. Lefkowitz back to her bedroom, where she’d set up a full-length mirror.