Blue Shoe

by Anne Lamott

  Isa seemed relieved to discover that William was nice-looking, polite, and tall. But in the blink of an eye, she started to sway and her eyes went out of focus, and she was a dazed rhino. She lifted her arms to Mattie the way Ella did when she wanted her mother to pull her out of the pool.

  Everyone clustered around Isa to make sure she was okay, and the attention helped restore her. When the children finally arrived, Al met them at the door to thank Nicky for bringing them home—and to keep him from coming in. Mattie and Katherine put food on the table. Katherine had a knack for arranging things so they looked more beautiful; she served food inside wreaths of nasturtiums that she had picked in the garden, sprinkled a glitter of finely minced parsley on the salad, doodled a design in sour cream on the soup. William entertained the children. They were antsy and stuffed already from a late lunch of Lucky Charms and Coke that Nicky had fed them. William got out paper and drew them mazes.

  William and Al reminisced about junior high, and William got Katherine to talk about her own school days—she had gone to a prestigious boarding school for girls outside Boston—but did not pay much attention to Mattie. Things could have been a lot worse. Isa had a second glass of wine and got too loud but not obstreperous. Lewis fell asleep briefly in his chair and started to snore. Ella had a stomachache, and spent twenty minutes on the toilet, straining, grunting, mooing with discomfort. At least she did not need Mattie to keep her company. From Harry’s closed door came the steady thud of something being thrown against the wall, a black hole pulsing. Al and Isa got into a tiff about Al’s weight, which was undeniably on the rise. Mattie endured. She did not drink much, and looked over at William now and then to see what he was making of her family: Al and Isa quibbling, Lewis snoring softly, the rhythmic Edgar Allan Poe thumps from Harry’s room, Ella’s terrible trumpeting from the bathroom. William seemed fine. This is my beautiful screwed-up family, Mattie thought, and now you have met them all.

  • • •

  Several days later, Mattie headed out to the Cove to return the favor. William’s aunt Esther, his father’s elder sister, was throwing a party at her house in Sebastopol. Her daughter, William’s cousin Diana, had driven to the superette too, the plan being that William would drive everyone to Esther’s. Mattie sought out Ned when she arrived at the store, and he told her how pretty she looked. She had pinned a gardenia to her hair, and wore a linen shift that matched her eyes. “William’s in back,” he announced, “picking out a bottle of wine.” So she went to find him, and maybe neck for a moment or two.

  “Hey, Mattie, come back here a sec,” said Ned. She turned toward the register but stopped when she saw who was with him. “Noah”—Ned pointed at Mattie—“here’s the woman I was telling you about, your mother’s old friend.” Noah’s hair was shorter than it had been the first time she’d seen him. It fell only an inch or so past his ears. He had on a Mexican wedding shirt, worn jeans, scuffed huaraches. He looked up tentatively and pushed his wire-rimmed glasses up on his nose, appearing so much like Neil that Mattie’s heart sank. Could it be that Neil had really fathered his daughter’s child?

  But then Noah smiled at her, and she stepped back, as the room began to tilt: this was Alfred’s smile, this was her own father’s smile. She stared into Noah’s mouth, as if into a cave, at his big ivory teeth, slightly buck, like hers and Al’s before their braces, like Harry’s. “You okay?” Noah asked kindly, and she saw her father’s mouth, and grabbed the little blue shoe in her pocket as if it were a sturdy handrail.

  Noah called for Ned and reached out to Mattie as she started to faint. Ned called for William, who came out from the back room to greet her, only to find Noah and Ned holding her up, the three of them rooted to the old linoleum floor. “Oh, my gosh, honey. Are you okay?” William asked. “You stay right here. I’m going to get you some water.” Noah and Ned shored her up. Mattie turned slowly toward Noah, whose eyes were hazel like Neil’s, stricken behind the wire-rimmed glasses, but smiling her father’s encouraging smile. He steadied her, and she felt a rummy floating pain, a sudden memory of her father’s arms around her shoulders after an errant pitch had hit her in the head during a game of One Old Cat on the beach at Stinson.

  Noah and Ned stood beside her, not holding her up exactly but spotting her, like coaches spotting a gymnast. All she could think was that she needed to get to a phone to call Al, but she remembered that William had said to wait right there, so she did. The smells of the store made her think of her grandmother’s house, ancient, musty, and safe, where she could always find her grandmother’s smile or her very familiar scowl.

  Mattie reached out for the braid of smells, the floor, the parsley, the bread, and she held on. When William returned with a cup of water, Noah and Ned stepped back to let William take his place at Mattie’s side.

  seven

  Mattie got into bed in a white nightgown, somewhere between bridal and baptismal. She felt like a Victorian, vaporish, consumptive. Luckily the kids were at Nicky’s, so she could watch the news until Al arrived.

  When he did, he hurried in and pulled the rattan chair up to where she lay under the covers. “Noah is our brother,” she said, as if telling him something simple. Al studied her. “Daddy was his father. He has his teeth, exactly. Our teeth.”

  Al mulled this over. He went to stand at the window. He looked like someone with back trouble carrying the problems of the world. She thought he was crying, so she got herself out of bed and went to stand beside him. He was staring at the garden. They stood at the window with their arms around each other. Outside the sun played hide-and-seek through the rainclouds, dropping its light onto the grass and the garden, then ducking behind the gray clouds, bright, dark, bright, very dark, as if playing peek-a-boo with King Lear.

  They spent the day in conversation, Mattie in bed, Al alternately at the window and slouched in the chair. He wanted to drive to the Cove and introduce himself to Noah right away, but Mattie said no. What made him think they had the right to foist their need for discovery onto Noah? They went back and forth, Ping-Pong players defending their positions.

  “I’m not doing anything until I know what to do,” Mattie insisted.

  “I need to verify this, though,” Al said. “I’d like to see those teeth.”

  “So go see the teeth, then,” said Mattie. “You can see him at the library on Saturdays.”

  Al worried his hands like a fretful infant. “Do you think Isa knew all this time?”

  “Maybe, in some limbic way,” Mattie said. “But let’s not tell everyone else, Al.”

  “Nobody?”

  “Just Katherine, for you, and Daniel and Angela, for me. Till we know what we’re doing.”

  “What about William? You’ll have to tell him eventually.”

  Mattie considered this, and realized with a start how little she wanted to share with William. “He lives in the same town,” she said, “and he’s a terrible gossip. So’s Ned. He always says, ‘Promise not to tell?’ And Ned had some kind of friendly bond with Abby.”

  Mattie stayed in bed all Saturday with the cats and did not go to church the next day. She told Daniel she was coming down with something, and asked him to take Lewis to church. Daniel came over after the service with chicken soup from Whole Foods. “I’m worried about you. This is the first time you’ve missed church in I don’t know how long.”

  “I told you, I’m coming down with something.”

  “I’m not sure I believe you.”

  “You won’t believe what’s true either,” she said. And then she told him.

  He looked at her as if he had not heard right. “What?” She told him again, and his face crumpled. He pulled his chair closer to the bed so that he could take her hands in his. He bowed his head, and held their hands together as if in prayer. “God almighty,” he whispered.

  He heated the soup for them, opened a can of mandarin oranges, and brought it all on a tray with the little blue shoe, which had been on the kitchen table. They lay togeth
er on the bed most of the day and watched old movies on TV.

  “Your daddy had a big secret,” Daniel said. “I can’t imagine what that must have been like. My childhood was so different—me and my mom, and my iguanas, in our little apartment. Pretty curtains, toaster cozies, lots of plants, and cousins. But no dad. I always thought if my dad would come back, we’d be all right. But we actually were all right, more or less.”

  “Well, we had my dad around, but he had other women. I don’t know how Al and I knew that, but we did. My dad was a very sexy guy—maybe he was rapacious, I don’t know. So he never left, but he was never really there either.”

  “Is it okay to tell Pauline?”

  “Of course. Go ahead, and tell her I wanted her to know.”

  Isa called late Sunday afternoon. She did not notice how quiet and weak Mattie’s voice was. “Nobody loves me,” she sobbed. “Nobody returns my calls. No one has called me in a week.”

  “I called you this morning,” Mattie said. “I’m down with some sort of bug.”

  “You didn’t call me. I waited by the phone all day.”

  “Mom. I called. And Al talked to you at Lewis’s yesterday. Lewis made supper and took you downstairs to hear the Schubert quintet.”

  “Was that yesterday? Well. That doesn’t get you off the hook.”

  “What hook!” Mattie shouted. “I called! I’m sick!” She hung up.

  Isa called back an hour later. “Darling,” she said, breathlessly, “Lewis says you weren’t in church.”

  • • •

  The children came home after dinner that night and seemed happy to find their mother in bed. The three cats lay beside her. Harry and Ella kicked off their shoes and crawled in, mauling the cats.

  Mattie put the blue shoe, which she’d been clutching, on the nightstand, and hugged and kissed her dirty, marvelous children.

  Nicky appeared in the doorway. “You okay?” She nodded. “Can I get you anything?” She shook her head. Harry was thrusting papers at her. She reached for them. They were drawings of people, columns of numbers. “Mattie?” She looked up from the drawings. Nicky walked to a chair and sat down.

  “What is it, Nicky?” she implored, reaching for his arm.

  “Lee and I are expecting again.”

  “I’m going to have a little baby sister,” Ella announced. Mattie turned slowly toward the sound of her voice. Ella’s hair was clipped into sprouts with barrettes, fountains of sunlight. Her floral-frame glasses gave her the look of a secretarial kitten gone punk. Her nails were painted light pink, and then Mattie saw they had been chewed to the quick. Mattie heard Nicky say her name, but she reached for one of Ella’s hands, which had been chewed at like artichoke leaves, with pricks of blood. Ella balled her hand into a fist.

  “Oh, honey,” Mattie said. Ella looked at her, beseeching.

  “I’m going to name my baby sister Poem,” she cried.

  • • •

  Mattie had chewed her nails too as a child, but not at five years old. She watched with a kind of grief in the next few days as Ella’s habit took hold. She nibbled frequently and furtively at her nails, driving toward the vulnerable pink beneath. Mattie made herself not mention it. She remembered the look of disgust on Isa’s face when she first discovered Mattie’s mutilated nails: Poor Isa, Mattie thought ruefully now, her son blowing things up in the backyard, her daughter eating her own hands, her husband up to God knows what, with who knows who, this poor damaged, betrayed woman who did such good work for so many. Mattie remembered looking up at her mother from behind the fan of ruined fingers, how it hid her mouth, kept her from saying the wrong thing. She remembered also the animal pleasure, the trance and satisfaction of grooming, the nibble, the salty bead of blood, pleasure right on the edge of hurt.

  Couldn’t you go back to twiddling your belly button? she wanted to ask Ella, but she didn’t mention the nailbiting at all. The belly button had seemed so innocuous and tender, while the nailbiting made her cuticles bleed. Ella looked like she was slowly eating herself, trying to erase herself from the picture.

  Days passed. Mattie scared William into staying away by coughing whenever he called. She didn’t want to tell him the secret of Noah. Harry and Ella kept her company in bed. Ella colored in her Little Mermaid coloring books and Harry drew. His drawings were becoming more and more precise. He had already completed plans for a swimming pool submarine, a catapult, and a robot. The robot had two names, depending on his mood. When he and it were happy, it was Enon. When he was mad, it was Bruton.

  On Thursday morning Mattie woke up, got the children off to school, and then did not crawl back into bed. This she considered major progress. When she was dressed, she tucked the little shoe into the pocket of her jeans. She recoiled from images of her father, spat at his memory. She saw him now as irredeemable, a proven pedophile, even as she remembered standing on his wingtips while he waltzed her around the room, even as she remembered being on his shoulders, dressed in a panda costume, walking through this neighborhood on Halloween, with Al bounding ahead, door to door, Alfred’s hands holding her ankles firmly. Mattie felt a pang of anxious compassion for Isa: people must have known that Alfred was unfaithful. This was a town where telephone lines hummed with reports of affairs and divorces. They used to call it “wandering,” when it was another couple, as in, “Charlie’s wandering was always painful for Marcy.” “Painful” did not do it justice. When Nicky had been unfaithful with those students, it had felt like the jungles of Vietnam inside Mattie. Isa, on the phone years before, would glow with horrified pleasure at news of fresh scandals and subsequent divorce, while elsewhere in town people must have been getting off on the gossip about Alfred. Had people at the Cove known about Abby and Noah? Had people in the town? Had Isa?

  Mattie prayed about Noah, wishing she could welcome him into her family—she could call him Poem! Her children could have a brand-new uncle. But this would hurt them, set the mobile of their lives spinning and tangling.

  She never left the house anymore without the blue shoe. She was getting a little funny, dissociated, dreamy. The color of the shoe reminded her from time to time of a turquoise-blue washtub she’d seen on an altar near Oaxaca, before she got pregnant with Harry. She and Nicky had been camping on a beach beneath the stars, and one Sunday morning they’d wandered into the nearest town, with its low-slung huts, depressed dogs slinking around, and people dressed in their finest. “¿Iglesia?” Nicky asked an old woman selling mangoes on sticks, bright as torches against dust, and she pointed up the road. Mattie bought a mango from her, cut into tiers like an artichoke. She carried it in front of her like the Olympic flame, and then she and Nicky sat on the steps of the church and ate it together as they waited for the service to begin.

  Inside, during the mass, Spanish words and songs burbled over them like a brook. Midway through the service, the priest stopped and said something to his congregation that included an amused “anglos,” and people tittered and murmured. Turning to Mattie and Nicky, holding his hands to his heart, the priest said, in English, “One life, given for all.” Nicky, who was not a believer, wept. The woman sitting next to him, who was clutching a coffee-stained paper napkin, tore it carefully and handed half to Nicky. On the altar was a turquoise-blue plastic tub, the kind you would wash dishes in if you lived in a tiny apartment. At the end of the service, the priest carried the tub into the congregation and pulled out a bright red rose, wet from water in the tub. He dripped the rose in the water again and again, and baptized both of them: Nicky and Mattie.

  • • •

  Mattie took Isa to the doctor the day before she and Al planned to go out to the Cove again. Everyone had called her with concerns about Isa that week. Lewis, close to tears, said that Isa seemed drugged with confusion. The woman at the front desk at The Sequoias informed that she had wandered away one night. The social worker who looked after the lower-income seniors, who said she was used to the fogginess and foibles of her charges, had reported something �
�really off” with Isa. “Also, she’s incontinent. It could be a bladder infection,” said the social worker. “I would take her to the doctor.”

  Isa was weak and cross when Mattie picked her up. In the car, she referred to William as Phil, and claimed not to have spoken to Mattie in more than a week. But in the doctor’s office she was clear and animated, witty, coquettish. She remembered the name of the president, and the minutiae of that morning’s major news stories. It was as if she had memorized the front page of the paper.

  • • •

  Al greeted Noah at the front desk of the library when he and Mattie entered, and Noah gestured pleasantly to a man reading in an easy chair, so that Al would know to speak quietly. “Are you okay?” Noah asked Mattie, and she nodded, cringing at the memory of having nearly fainted at the superette.

  “I just had a little bug or something,” she whispered.

  “Good,” Noah said, nodding. “Well, let me know if you need anything.”

  Mattie noticed Al trying to sneak a glimpse into Noah’s mouth. But his full lips covered his teeth, so Al smiled awkwardly and walked to the fiction shelves. Mattie, who had covered her nose while saying hello, as if to stifle a sneeze, headed to history. She didn’t want Noah to notice her nose—his father’s nose—and yelp with recognition. Mattie spied on him through the stacks. Once they looked at each other at the same moment; he flushed, and looked down.

  He had big puppy hands, which he raked through his shaggy hair and with which he palmed his face when he spoke. When someone needed a book checked out or a question answered, he listened without making much eye contact, staring off with a look of grave attention into the middle distance, nodding so the person knew he was listening. A skateboard was propped against the wall behind his chair. When he got up to help a patron find something, Mattie noticed that he had small, almost dwarfish feet for such a tall, lanky man; he was wearing battered running shoes.