Blue Shoe

by Anne Lamott

This time when Mattie walked up to the window of the shack, she saw motion inside. She stood at the door for a while, and finally knocked. Time passed. She did not knock again. Then Abby opened the door. She looked over Mattie’s shoulder, but stepped back so Mattie could come in.

  There was a chair now in the middle of the room, to the side of the doorposts. Mattie sat down. She knew not to look straight at Abby—so she glanced out to sea instead. Abby meanwhile circled the perimeter of the shack like a shark, as if spreading her scent to mark the place, while taking in what could be seen. She stopped in shadows with her back to Mattie. She was pale, a ghost in the house.

  The teakettle whistled. Abby took two cracked thick coffee cups, ivory with a dark green band, and poured boiling water into each. She picked up a used tea bag, dunked it into one cup, then the other, and wrung it out before putting it on its wrapper.

  Mattie got to her feet. It was seven-thirty. The days were still so long in September. She usually loved this, the length of the light, because the big dark always came after. But she was scared to death this evening, to be inside Abby’s timeless zone. She stood at the window nearest the sink. Abby did not seem to be intentionally ignoring her; she didn’t even seem to see her. She was just making tea, adding sugar, and the last drops of milk from the carton in the cold cupboard. The sun was still out but not shining on them any longer. Abby handed Mattie a cup of tea. Her neck seemed nearly as wrinkled as Isa’s. She sat with her back against the door to the tiny bathroom and lit a cigarette. They held their cups of sweet milky tea.

  Abby had an awful voice, from the other side of the grave, like Otis played on the wrong speed. “I can’t talk to you today,” she said.

  Mattie sipped her tea. “Okay. Then when? And how will I know?”

  “I’ll get in touch with you,” Abby said.

  “How?”

  Abby thought for a long time. She blew out smoke as if cooling a burn. “Through Ned.”

  • • •

  Harry had a night soccer game at school, and Al ended up coming along. Ella sat with Mattie and him in the bleachers, then squirmed away to play on nearby swings.

  “Stay where I can see you,” Mattie called. They watched Harry out on the field, strong and graceful, a natural leader, leading the charge, calling out encouragement, giving his all with every length, every kick. “All right, Harry,” Al shouted, making a megaphone of his hands.

  “How come you never had children?” Mattie asked rather abruptly.

  Al reared back as if she’d stung him. “I didn’t want them.”

  “How come?” Mattie asked.

  “I don’t like little kids. I love yours—but that’s about it.”

  Mattie looked around for Ella, who was not far away, prowling the border of the playing field, walking in her own world along a chain-link fence lined with weeds. She was singing to herself, and when she looked up at Mattie, checking in, she had a glint in her eye. They waved to each other, and Ella turned away.

  “I never knew that, Al.”

  “There are people who glisten when children are around, but not me. I love Harry and Ella, but it’s partly because I always get to leave. I’d last four minutes if I couldn’t.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I would raise reptiles more easily than kids.”

  Mattie smiled. She watched her son run down the field with gangly grace, like a gazelle. Ella was still walking along the fence, singing her song, picking tiny daisies, lost in her world, right where she wanted to be, on the edge and at the same time so safe.

  • • •

  Isa got much better after Lewis returned. He was often at her apartment when Mattie stopped by; she took him to church every Sunday.

  But one day he called from the medical center. Isa had done what everyone kept nagging her to do. She’d tried to take a shower—but she’d fallen, and hit her head so hard on the bathtub that she’d be in the medical center for at least a week. Dr. Brodkey urged Mattie and Al to consider admitting Isa to the convalescent hospital until she got stronger.

  “Neither of you can take care of her full-time, right?” the doctor asked them pointedly when they came to visit Isa.

  Al and Mattie both shook their heads slowly, but while driving home he told her, “This kills me. I don’t think I can do it.”

  “I understand.”

  “I know you do, but Mom gave up everything to get me help. So how can I even think of putting her away?”

  “She gave up me, to help you.” Neither could think of anything else to say. They drove along. Finally Mattie spoke: “Anyway, it’s just until she’s stronger.”

  “But what if she’s never stronger?”

  “We have to figure this out as we go. And I know this is the next right thing.”

  • • •

  Several days later, Mattie was at the airport to pick up Angela. Although Mattie had said, “Oh no, that’s too much trouble,” Angela had insisted on accompanying her and Al on a safari to The Willows. Now Mattie stood at the gate with Ella, watching as passengers filed off the plane. A vision in white appeared, in drawstring linen trousers and a flowing embroidered blouse. Above it all was Angela’s face, rounder than Mattie remembered, beaming. Mattie felt as if the medics had arrived.

  Harry had gone off to a sleepover, and the women had the house to themselves for once. Angela painted Ella’s nails while Mattie cooked spaghetti, and then Ella did Angela’s toenails. After dinner, Ella took Angela to each of her shrines, like the Stations of the Cross—the villages she had built in the dirt, a flower bed she and Daniel had planted, Marjorie’s burial ground, and inside the house, the laundry room, which Mattie and Daniel had painted a soft, buttery yellow. Angela and Ella unfolded the futon there. They stretched out on it and lay gazing at the ceiling like people waiting for an eclipse. The three cats appeared. They stepped gingerly onto the futon, walked around for a while, then jockeyed for position on the soft throne of Angela’s stomach. Later Ella snuggled between Mattie and Angela on Mattie’s bed until she fell asleep, and Mattie carried her to bed. The women lay on their sides facing each other and talked all night, like homesick beings from another planet who had been living among earthlings far too long.

  • • •

  The director of The Willows was warm and sympathetic and hearty. He gave them a sales pitch and then left them in the waiting room. Big-band music played softly, and framed photos of 1940s movie stars covered the walls. Mattie imagined the chandelier descending from the ceiling, and the antique table rising, and the walls moving closer together, until she was squished like a gigantic breast in a mammogram.

  “It’s like he’s trying to sell us a car,” Al whispered.

  “Boy, I tell you,” Angela said. “No matter how nice it looks, it’s all about urine. I can smell it from here.” The odor was strong and sharp.

  “You’re so wonderful to come with us,” Mattie told her. The big-band music played on. The director returned to show them around.

  Mattie’s heart sank lower with every step. This was an impossible place to put her mother—and it was as good as convalescent care got. It was a place inhabited by vacancy, she thought. You could hear the sound of vacant minds. The first woman they met was tall and elegant, and seemed still with it, until she started popping and peeping, as if answering the mating song of a whooping crane: pop pop peep. Maybe this was what language sounded like to her, all pops and peeps. Several people were parked in wheelchairs in the hallway, staring. There were a couple of snappy, well-dressed women on a bench in one sunlit corner, and the director stopped to fawn over them, but Mattie couldn’t help feeling that they were shills, that when the tour was over he would start talking abusively to them, or hustle them back to their main jobs in the kitchen or laundry room.

  “Here we go,” said the director, holding the door to a room marked ACTIVITIES, where four vacant people sat slumped over.

  “Hello,” the director called cheerfully, and two of the four looked up.

&nb
sp; “Excuse me,” Angela asked. “What would you call this activity?”

  Mattie knew the answer; it was called sitting. And sitting was different from lying down near death. Sitting in community, in the sun, was different from lying down and staring at your own walls, which is what most people seemed to be doing here—except for the shills, and the popping-peeping woman, and the people in the activity room, actively sitting.

  On the way out, they saw the old man pictured on the brochure. When they passed, Angela clutched at her heart and fanned herself. “It was him,” she whispered, as if they’d come upon Paul McCartney.

  • • •

  Al and Mattie put their mother in The Willows a few days afterward, against her desperate will and their own. She sobbed. “It’s just for a week,” Al told her, “till you’re strong again. I promise.” Lewis drove with them and held Isa’s hand all day, gently telling her again and again that she needed to be here just for a while. She held her nose. The Willows stank of people’s urine, and it smelled of bad food going worse, left on trays, on nightclothes, in the hallway. Isa cried, she smoldered, she shrugged and flung hands off herself when anyone tried to console her. She looked over at a roommate who appeared to be dead.

  “Why can’t I come to your house, Mattie?” When Mattie couldn’t answer, Isa wept.

  Mattie cried too: “I can’t take care of you properly. You need more than I can give you. You need to get strong, and then you can go home.”

  Isa sat in her wheelchair and wept some more. Mattie and Al exchanged anguished looks. Mattie felt she might faint suddenly, and had to sit down in the room’s only chair. She could hear Al consoling Isa, promising that he would get her out soon, but Mattie wished he would shut up. Would Isa ever get her freedom back? Her mother stopped crying, and a puzzled look appeared on her face, as if someone was calling her from far away.

  • • •

  Mattie tried to visit Isa at The Willows every day. Al sat by her bed for an hour every evening while she ate. Both of them kept up a stream of light conversation, pushing stories that might cheer her, mostly about Ella and Harry. But Isa slept much of the time and then woke crying. Sometimes she seemed not to mind being at The Willows, and she reigned bossily from her bed, complaining about what she called the room service. Other times she wailed for her old life. The nurses and orderlies were kind yet firm with her, and she grew fond of one in particular, a heavy young woman in her twenties with huge Scrabble-tile teeth named Adrianne, who called Isa “Missus” and watched tennis with her on TV.

  In October, Adrianne announced that if the family could provide nursing care, Isa was ready to leave The Willows. Now new troubles arose. They had no plan B. Where would Isa live? Personal Care, the assisted-living program at The Sequoias, wasn’t covered by Medi-Cal; board and care facilities were several thousand dollars a month that they didn’t have. Nursing homes like The Willows would be paid for by Medi-Cal, and her apartment was subsidized by a HUD grant—so these were the two places she could afford to be. But while she couldn’t live alone any longer, she wasn’t ready for convalescent care.

  Mattie wrote a note to God—“Help!”—and put it in a shoe box.

  The heat came again, bright, rigorous overhead light. One Saturday, while they were on their way to the swimming pool, Mattie brought the children to visit Isa. The first two times they’d visited, Harry had cried about having to go. Mattie remembered when they’d all been able to go to the pool together. “Please, Harry,” she told him, “seeing you will help her.” She brought colored pencils and paper for them, but Harry was sullen and Ella equally wary.

  They had to make their way past the old people who sat in the hallway like deserted rusty appliances. One woman did endless tongue-thrusts from her wheelchair. The children’s eyes were wide open, huge, like shields. They were scared of the witchy old women in the hall who might clutch at them without warning. Harry pulled his arms in and took baby steps to keep himself safe. He did not leave anything out that might be grabbed or bitten or kicked by those bony, unearthly legs. In Isa’s room, Harry and Ella leaned into each other, became one big squat body, so that the scary people could not break through and get in. They were Siamese twins, united for once, joined at their sides. But after fifteen minutes or so, Ella softened and went to sit beside Isa in bed and draw. Isa was at her best, happy and patient. Harry glowered and fidgeted and turned in the swivel chair while his untied shoes wobbled, threatening to fall off his feet.

  They went to Isa’s at breakfast time a few days later. She was in bed, eating, but she shouted in joy to see the children. She seemed better, stronger, more her old self. She let Harry work the controls of her bed. Both kids crawled in bed with her, one on each side. Ella played with the familiar flesh of her grandmother’s upper arm. Then Adrianne came in and clapped her hands, chop-chop; time to get Isa out of bed. So Mattie and the children wandered the halls and worriedly watched the old people do things nice old people were not supposed to do—play with food, moan, gape at things that weren’t there. Grandparents were supposed to have looks of tender appreciation on their faces when they saw children; these people wore rubber Halloween masks of insanity and vacancy, their eyes rolling and weepy, their tongues thrusting, their fingers of bone.

  • • •

  Daniel called from a gas station in Idaho late one night. He and Pauline had been fighting—about nothing, he said, fighting about fighting. Pauline wanted him to go out and let her be in the motel room alone, but he couldn’t stand the banishment.

  “It’s bad this time. Everything’s gotten out of the burlap sack.”

  “Oh, Daniel.”

  “I’m so depressed, Mattie. But if I leave her, I feel like I’ll go nuts.”

  Mattie was gladdened by the news, even as she listened to his pain.

  “What would you do if you were me?” he asked.

  She didn’t answer immediately, because she could hardly draw a breath. It was the point of no return, and it was time. “I would come stay in our laundry room for a while, until I could figure things out,” she said. “And I’d trust God. He will either calm the waters, or He will calm you.”

  Daniel was silent for a moment. “I feel like my mind is breaking up. I’ll call again tomorrow.”

  And he did. He asked if the offer still stood.

  “Yep,” said Mattie. “We’ll get the laundry room ready.”

  “Okay. But Mattie? I snore.” He sounded congested.

  “I won’t be able to hear you from my room.”

  “What will you tell the children?”

  “That you’re going to stay with us for a while.”

  Again Daniel said he’d call back, and when he did, it was to say that Pauline had hit the ceiling. She’d told him that if he left now, it was all over. He hated himself for seeming weak, but he needed more time to think.

  Mattie felt both crushed and a little relieved. Boy, that was close, she thought. There would have been no going back to what they had now. Still, she got in bed at noon and wept.

  Later in the day, she called The Sequoias and asked about Personal Care. There were studio apartments with no doors or stoves or refrigerators, and people around during the day to help you dress, eat, take your medication. It was way beyond Mattie and Al’s reach financially, unless they sold Isa’s house. But then where would Mattie and the children live? Isa’s Social Security check was twelve hundred dollars, Mattie and Al had each kicked in nearly five hundred for the aides already. But Mattie had to get Isa out of The Willows.

  Every time she drove to the superette, Mattie hoped that Ned would take her aside to say that Abby had called. She kept thinking in a cracked way that the paint-can key came from a blue room somewhere, with money hidden away on which Isa could live. She expected Daddy still to have all the important answers. Al said, “Oh, honey,” when she told him.

  Lee had been ordered to bed for the last month of her pregnancy, so Nicky came by to take Harry and Ella out to dinner a couple of nigh
ts a week instead of keeping them on the weekend. Otherwise they were with Mattie all the time. Harry was withdrawn and angry about everything. He put chokeholds on Ella’s dolls to upset her, and slammed them on the floor. He had a perpetual sneer now, usually regarding Mattie with mild contempt.

  “Harry,” she asked one day, “could you take the garbage out?”

  “Doesn’t look like it,” he said.

  Ella seemed more and more to be unfurling. Her fair hair always escaped the barrettes and scrunchies intended to contain it. She chose clothes that no longer fit, or that wouldn’t for a year, and trailed loose threads and bits of yarn, as though she’d unknit completely if you tugged at a thread to remove it.

  One day when the phone rang, Mattie leapt to answer it, hoping it was Ned. It was Daniel, still in Idaho. “Okay,” he said. “I’m driving home. Could I still stay with you a couple of nights?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  Mattie started getting the laundry room ready for Daniel, and the kids agreed to help. She opened the window, made up the futon with her best sheets and comforter, put a low table beside it, with towels folded in a way that Harry said made them look fancier. Ella brought in flowers from the garden, and also taped some of her drawings to the wall. Harry organized pencils and a sketch pad on the table, a fresh package of dental floss, some moist towelettes, a glass for water. The cats arrived and plopped on the sunbeam that stretched across the futon.

  Harry and Ella even went willingly with Mattie to The Willows that afternoon. Al was already there. He and the kids found a stray wheelchair to push one another around in. Mattie and Isa listened to the children’s happy voices in the hall until Isa fell asleep. Mattie sat looking at a bottle of expensive lotion from Paris, a brand her mother had always worn, which Alfred used to give her. She breathed in the smells, urine and decay, flowers and feet, toast and tea, breathed in the warm, eternal almond scent of her mother’s skin.

  • • •

  Daniel called from Elko and again from Sparks. Each time she heard his voice, she figured he was calling to say he’d come to his senses, he had to drive back to Pauline. But he was still coming. “I’m going slow,” he said. “I’ve been stopping to fish. I’m so depressed.”