Blue Shoe

by Anne Lamott

  The choir sang her favorite songs, “Just As I Am” and “Softly and Tenderly.” Mattie heard the desperation and generosity beneath the notes. She listened with her eyes closed to the sermon, which was about letting God into your worst drawers and closets, and how healing could not happen if you let God into a living room that had been cleaned for the occasion. If you wanted the healing, you had to show God the mess.

  “I loved it,” Daniel told her afterward. “Can I come again?”

  • • •

  “Hey, cutie,” a man said over static when she picked up the phone the next day. For a brief moment she thought it was Daniel, and her heart jumped. She flushed when she realized it was her brother.

  “How are you?” she asked.

  “Well, I’m fine, honey chile,” Al said, “but you’re not going to believe what I saw this morning. I found Daddy’s old car, our old VW.”

  “No you didn’t. That car doesn’t exist anymore.”

  “Yes I did, miss. It passed me in front of the library. A-I-M eight-five-two.”

  “Holy cow.” Hearing the license plate number triggered the adrenaline in her—A-I-M, Alfred or Al, Isa, Mattie, 852.

  “Did it . . . recognize you?”

  “Yes, I think it did. I think it gave me a furtive little wave.”

  Mattie quieted her mind. “Didn’t Dad sell it to Neil?” Neil Grann had been her father’s best friend when Mattie and Al were growing up. He lived out near the coast with his only child, Abby, who was about Mattie’s age, and his girlfriend, Yvonne Lang. They hosted afternoon gatherings every few weeks, with wine and the newest jazz recordings, and people always brought their kids, who played in the woodsy backyard while the grown-ups drank and talked.

  “He sold it to Abby for a thousand dollars, the year he bought the Mazda. After Neil died. A-I-M eight-five-two. Abby smashed it up almost immediately, and that’s the last I’d heard.”

  Mattie saw the car herself a few days later, in the parking lot at Albertsons. She waited for the driver to come out, not knowing what she would say if he did. No one came during the fifteen minutes she waited. But not long afterward, while she was crossing the street from the post office, she saw the Volkswagen begin to pull away in front of her, and she’d pounded on the side. The driver stopped.

  She stepped to the window, smiling at the shaggy old man behind the wheel. He rolled down the window.

  “This is my old family car,” she said. “I learned to drive in it.”

  “I’ll be damned.” The man patted the steering wheel. “This is the best car I ever owned. I bought it from Sam Ray back in the seventies, after Neil Grann’s daughter nearly totaled it.”

  “Abby.”

  “Right, Abby,” the man said. “Wait, let me pull over.” He eased the Volkswagen to the curb, and Mattie walked slowly over. She remembered Abby so well, running like a colt behind Neil’s ramshackle house. She had long reddish-blond hair and smooth fair skin, delicate features, long legs, knobby knees, a quick mind. Neil, Yvonne, Alfred, and other friends sat on the porch drinking when it was warm, or around the fire in winter, listening to jazz on the hi-fi, dancing when they were inside, reading poems aloud, planning revolution and saying sexy things, laughing so loud at their own stories you could hear from the fort the children would be building behind the house, until one of the women, usually Yvonne, would call everyone in for dinner.

  “Wait, which one was your dad?” the man asked.

  “Alfred Ryder. Did you know him? Dark shaggy hair, kind of handsome? With big, slightly buck teeth?”

  “I never actually met him. But when the guy undented the glove box, I found a few odds and ends, some IDs of your father’s, a library card, an old registration. There was a bracelet, a funny little blue rubber shoe, a paint-can key, like, you know, you’d pry open the lid off a can of paint with? My wife made me save it all in a Ziploc bag. I’m sure we still have it somewhere. Here’s my number, if you ever want the stuff.”

  • • •

  Mattie handed Al the paint-can key. It was flecked with dried paint, winter-sky blue. The daisy bracelet was one she had made twenty-five years before, lavender and light blue, with a rose border, her favorite colors, and she put it on now, while Al turned the splattered key over in his hand. Their father’s signature on the library card and car registration made Al double over with only slightly exaggerated grief—those small, precise letters, straight up and down like fence slats. There was a bottle opener from the bait shop in Marshall, the kind Alfred called a church key. And the odd blue shoe, an inch and a half long, soft rubber, a turquoise high-top sneaker with finely detailed laces, complete with a toe guard. The blue shoe fit perfectly in the space where her fingers met the palm of her hand. She curled her fingers around it and held on. Mattie and Al looked at each other.

  • • •

  She asked if she could keep the shoe, and he said, “Of course you can.” Maybe she was just missing her dad, maybe she was losing her mind, but for whatever reason she found herself unable to put it down. She held it while pushing the shopping cart with Ella in the front; she shoved it in her pocket when she thought someone might see her, but then took it out and made sure not to wash it with the laundry. She kept it overnight on the mantel above the fireplace and in the mornings stuffed it back in her pocket when she walked Harry to the bus stop and Ella to day care. She took it out when she got home. She had it all the way through December, her least favorite month. She took it when she went Christmas shopping, placed it on the mantel on Christmas Eve while she filled the children’s stockings with chocolates and trinkets and tangerines, had it in the pocket of her jeans when she handed the kids over to Nicky at lunchtime—he and Lee got the children for Christmas dinner. Al and Katherine, Isa and Lewis came to Mattie’s that night, bearing side dishes to eat with the turkey she had cooked, the blue shoe beside the cutting board like a tiny enchanted creature from the Brothers Grimm. She held the shoe inside the crook of her fingers while she pushed the vacuum cleaner around, held it when she talked on the phone, unfurling her fingers to take in the intricate details, the laces, the toe guard. She hid it in her fist when Nicky stopped by for the children, and it made her feel powerful again, as if there were parts of her he didn’t know about. Nicky looked at her curiously these days, and she smiled, as mysteriously as she could, back at him, at his beautiful eyes, his thick, curly hair. She no longer ached to see him, no longer hoped he would stay over. She bustled Harry and Ella off with exuberant kisses when he came to pick them up, calling out that she loved them, would see them the next day, and then she’d go inside, to putter or put away things that were still unpacked, or stretch on the couch with whatever she was reading. No matter what she was doing, she almost always held the little shoe in her hand. It felt good to have something to hold on to.

  She’d read somewhere that after World War II ended in Europe, lost children wandered around until they were gathered in camps run by the Allies. There they were fed and cared for while relatives were located or new families found who could take them in. In one camp it was discovered that none of the children were sleeping well. Their nerves were shot, the memories fresh and haunting. Then a social worker determined that if the children were each given a piece of bread to hold at night, they could fall asleep. This was not bread to eat—there was plenty of that when the children were hungry. No, this piece of bread was just to hold on to, to reassure the children through the night that they were safe now, that there would be bread to eat in the morning.

  • • •

  She saw Daniel at church the following Sunday and asked if he could come work again. When he came by two days later, she showed him the little shoe.

  “Very interesting,” he said. He had brought her more bread, black with seeds, still warm.

  “When do I get to meet Pauline?” Mattie asked. She felt she should meet his wife.

  “She’s picking me up today at five. My car’s in the shop.”

  Pauline was beautifu
l. Mattie was amazed. Daniel had never mentioned this. She was small and slight on top, with a large, round bottom, and her features were too big for her frame—her long nose, lips, hazel eyes, chin, her cheekbones. Ropes and tendrils of curly blond hair were piled high on her head. She wore rings on every finger, a silver anklet, a velvet skirt, and an antique lace blouse. She spoke in warm, vigorous tones. She moved like a dancer, and in fact had trained for ballet until college, when it became clear she would never be great. She had a lovely laugh, and paid very close attention whenever anyone spoke, actually cocking her head to listen.

  Mattie had a puzzling and immediate aversion to her.

  Ella fell instantly in love, with the velvet and lace, the apricot nail polish, the tinkling of all that silver. Within minutes, Pauline was dandling her on her knees, asking her questions about the cats, who milled around the floor at her feet as if Ella were their queen.

  “Did you like her? What’s she like?” Al asked Mattie on the phone that night.

  “She looks like an aging teenage hooker.”

  “Would you give her my number?” he asked.

  Mattie considered, smiling. “Where’s Katherine?”

  Al paused too. “She’s in Vermont. She went to see her parents, and decided to stay for a few weeks. She’s sort of mad at me.”

  “The bad news for you is that Pauline clearly adores Daniel. She’s a bit dramatic for my blood. She told me she’s in therapy twice a week. So maybe she’s cuckoo. Like I should talk.”

  Mattie still felt shaky these days. She was okay in church, or doing certain things with the children—playing with blocks was helpful, and reading to them in bed was even better—but her head was often filled with terrible thoughts, sadistic and vengeful, usually directed at her mother, or Nicky, or his girlfriend, cute little Scottish Lee. Mattie had dented her own car twice, and then gouged the fender on a rental; she told Al and Isa that if they saw her coming, they should pull off the road and assume the crash position. Mattie didn’t know who was still friends with her since the divorce—the couples Nicky had introduced her to from the college were mostly his friends now, friendly to her but belonging to him. She wasn’t in the mood to make new ones. Encounters of more than a few minutes made her long to be home with the kids and the animals. Other people grated on her nerves. Life grated on her nerves. She was getting a little funny. She felt out of body, drifting and alone, with only the children and her mother and Al to tether her to the dock.

  • • •

  Lee, pretty enough to be an actress, liked to drop mentions of auditions and movie roles into her infrequent conversations with Mattie. “And what would some of your bigger credits include?” Mattie wanted to ask. Lee had a straight nose, dark eyes, good teeth, and the beautiful Scottish accent. It was all too much. “I want to kill myself,” Mattie told Angela one night on the phone. “And then get on with my life.”

  “Honey,” Angela replied, “you don’t know yourself well enough right now to commit suicide. So it would be considered a homicide.”

  One Saturday, Lee showed up to get the kids. Mattie smiled warmly as she opened the door for her, but inwardly, a vile kaleidoscope of feelings spun slowly—pangs of shame, even though Lee had almost certainly slept with Nicky while Mattie was still married to him, and then calm, erotic power, and then hatred for Nicky, and then hatred for herself. Ella began to cry when she saw Lee. Mattie carried her into the kitchen, and Lee followed. Ella needed to be held in Mattie’s arms at the table for a few minutes before she would agree to leave. Lee tried to interest her in all the marvelous things they would be doing that day—they’d go to the park until Nicky was done with his meeting, and then drive to Olema. But Ella wasn’t having any of it. She rocked back and forth in her mother’s arms, rubbing her cheek against Mattie’s sweater, Mattie nuzzling the top of her head. Harry said hello to Lee in a high, earnest voice, but sat next to Mattie at the table, holding the package of pens Isa had given him. He arranged them gravely in the order in which they’d first arrived, the spectrum of the rainbow, while Lee looked to Mattie for help. Harry dug in, putting each pen’s stamped logo into alignment inside the plastic sleeve.

  • • •

  Mattie hated the idea that her kids would wake up with Nicky and Lee, when the children would be at their sleepiest and sweetest, unarmored and snuggly. She prayed, but it was hopeless. When she wasn’t in bed with him—and sometimes when she was—she wished Nicky would die, badly. Cancer, murder, even—right after he had left late one night—Lou Gehrig’s disease. She buried her face in her hands at stoplights and prayed for healing, and then she’d imagine a torrid movie of Nicky and Lee in bed, screaming first in erotic joy, then in terror when Mattie appeared in their doorway to toss a rattlesnake at them. Nicky thrived, grew handsomer, while Mattie looked wizened. She did not believe she would ever stop hating Nicky and Lee, until her pastor told her that when God was going to do something wonderful, it started with something hard, and when God was going to do something exquisite, He or She started with an impossibility.

  Daniel called her every few days, or she called him. It was fun to have a new friend. He met her at church every Sunday, and it seemed natural that they would start driving there together. One afternoon they went for a walk out to the beach on the Tennessee Valley Trail. Mattie had made a point of inviting Pauline along.

  “I’m not a hiker, Mattie,” Pauline told her. “But Daniel loves to. You go without me.”

  And so Mattie and Daniel had gone for a walk alone.

  “My bedroom smells like cat pee,” she said as they walked toward the salt and roar of the ocean. “My mother had a cat disorder. I’ve tried everything. Odormute. Nature’s Miracle. I even rented a steam cleaner.”

  “We may have to pull up the whole rug,” he said. “And toss it.”

  “I would pay you fifteen bucks an hour.”

  “You can if you want, but you don’t need to,” he said.

  The following weekend they carried the mattress together into the living room, the mattress as boneless as a drunk, so that they staggered under its weight. It buckled in half and they tripped, but they managed to lug it out through two doorways and onto the floor by the fireplace. In her mind she saw them flop down on the mattress and lie there breathless, staring at the ceiling, catching their breath, and then growing still, like in the movies. But in the visible world, they dusted off their hands and returned to the bedroom for the night tables, the dresser, the bookshelf. Pauline called a couple of hours into their work, and Daniel talked to her warmly for a few minutes. Mattie strained to listen.

  When everything was out of the room, they took X-acto knives, chisels, and screwdrivers and pried up sections of rug. Mattie felt as embarrassed as if she herself had peed on the rug over the years, but when she alluded to this, Daniel shrugged and said, “Let’s just do it. We’ll get this monstrosity up and figure out what we have on our hands. Then we’ll take it from there.” They listened to CDs, and talked about their marriages, Pauline’s depressions, Mattie’s children. It took hours to pull up the carpet and padding, tufts embedded in all the staples on the floorboards. There were urine stains on the boards, and Daniel said, “We’ll pry these up too.”

  When Pauline called again, Daniel held his hand over the receiver and asked Mattie if they could take a ten-minute break. “Sure,” she said enthusiastically, and he sprawled on the floor and asked his wife about her day.

  Later, while they removed staples from the floor and cleaned away fibers and dust like smudges off a child’s face, Daniel looked so happy and proud that Mattie was reminded of someone. It took a while for her to remember who it was he reminded her of. Finally she recalled a magazine photograph she had torn out and saved because she loved it so: the picture of a joyful East Indian, with rocks tied up in a net hanging from his penis. He shone with the power of the weight, and of bearing the weight, and he didn’t need more power than that.

  She worked as long as she could, but her eyelids gre
w heavy and she couldn’t fight her exhaustion. “I didn’t sleep last night,” she said. “I have to go lie down.”

  She dropped off to sleep for an hour on Ella’s bed.

  Daniel was still at work when she got up. “Now what?” she asked.

  “Now we clean up, and figure out how to buy some new flooring.”

  She got them glasses of cold apple juice, and they sat on the bare wood side by side. “So. Tell me how you met Pauline,” she said.

  Daniel smiled. “I met her at a party. It was at her house, on her twenty-fifth birthday. Some mutual friends brought me along. They wanted us to meet, although they warned me she was coming out of a bad depression. So I went with them to dinner at her house the following weekend. I liked the way she looked. I was so sick of these skinny girls who wouldn’t eat with me—and boy, Pauline would eat with me. And then—this is what did me in—her cat came in, this big orange male, and she took him in her lap and began stroking him, kneading him, working him over, and he was slavering, and she just worked him, like she’d been sent over from the escort service. And I thought, Boy, I’d love to let her have a go at me.”

  “So now what?”

  “Now we do the best we can. Some days go better than others.”

  “I mean, how do we get money for a floor?”

  Daniel turned red. “Oh!” They looked away from each other. “We can do it cheaply—put in parquet. We’ll have a garage sale next weekend,” he said. “It’ll give us all a chance to clean our closets.”

  And they did. They held it in front of Daniel and Pauline’s house, and raised nearly three hundred dollars, which they split. Mattie bought some cheap parquet. She and Daniel put it down over several days when Harry was at school and Ella at day care. Mattie borrowed a hundred dollars from Isa to give to Daniel.

  The new floor transformed Mattie, both the look of it and the marvelous absence of cat urine. Now there were sweet new smells, flowers from her garden in a vase, fresh air wafting through the windows. It looked and smelled like a miracle. Mattie decided to celebrate. It was time for a housewarming party: they had been here long enough.