Going Away Shoes (2 page)

She stands before her mother’s closet, this sealed treasure like Tut’s tomb of shoes and purses, and all she can think of is the miles traveled. The best article she ever wrote was experimental, a travel piece all about D.C. She was hoping to pitch it as a regular thing so she could explore new places several times a year. She did all the standard tourist stops but the focus of that piece was the Holocaust Museum because she could not stop thinking about that mountain of shoes. The orphaned objects held the memory of the person, arch to instep, leather molded to contours of flesh and bone. The click of all those heels lost to time, coming home, going to work, meeting a lover on the outskirts of town.

Sad times —lost souls, everyone looking for a good one. Everyone seeking a cobbler of the heart. She put that in the article. She also wrote that one way to determine a good soul is to imagine that there is another holocaust and that you are crippled or freckled or someone who loves monster truck pulls or has a body mass index slightly higher than average, an SAT score slightly lower, whatever the undesirable trait of the day might be, and you ask,
Will you hide me? Will you save me? Will you sacrifice your life to do so?

The editor told her that several readers had complained that people don’t want to hear sad things or take depressing trips.
“Our readers do not want questions that make them think,” he said. “They just want to be entertained.” He would like for her to write a piece about Disney or Six Flags or Myrtle Beach, something people can use.

Debby used to blame
her own sadness on her childhood and a lifestyle in which the kids were secondary, like pets, a lifestyle in which someone else, usually an elderly sitter, helped out with homework, tucked them in. Debby often fantasized that she was a child growing up in what her mother called “the cracker box houses,” a row of tiny mill houses out near the interstate. She knew the children who lived over there and knew people felt sorry for them. They wore hand-me-downs and got free school lunches. But she envied the freedom they seemed to have. Their parents were either not there or working too hard to monitor and comment on everything they did.

Her sisters had bought the happy picture that had been painted of their lives and even now pretend that it had been wonderful right up to the day their dad died and they discovered (and never mentioned again) that his coworker at the bank, a large coarse woman they had all referred to as Big-Butt Betty, was more than just a friend. He died young and with plenty of life insurance; Betty was not a gossip nor someone with a social life. These two facts allowed the family happiness myth to survive and even grow, becoming easier and brighter with each passing day.

After her purses
, Debby’s mother loved her mink stole. She wore it to church and to cocktail parties from November to February regardless of the temperature. Then there were her shoes, of course. There was box after box of the special dyed-to-match shoes (Debby’s mother made them say “peau de soie”) labeled like artifacts: Engagement Shoes 1947, Wedding Shoes 1948, Cotillion 1951, Valentine Ball 1955, and so on. She loved her little Joan & Davids with the silver heels and that cute little storage bag that came with them. She once told Debby and her sisters that she wanted to be buried in the spectator pumps she wore with her Going Away Suit after the wedding. “There’s still a little rice in one,” she said. “Take that out when it’s time.” She was young when she said that, their father still alive, and even younger those afternoons when she took out all the shoes and let the girls try them on and practice walking in heels. The one childhood game they could all agree on was Cinderella as they looked for the perfect fit.

One sister, Carly, became just as obsessed with shoes as their mother and now has a closet filled herself. She owns Manolos because she wants to be Sarah Jessica Parker. Some of her shoes cost as much as a used car.

Debby has been wearing the same pair of clogs for over five years. Once sturdy and solid, they are now wearing thin, and it is that part of her —the worn-thin part —that sometimes in
the midst of the oxygen sounds and murmurs from the soaps (
I don’t love you anymore. But I don’t understand. Bounty, the quicker picker-upper
) wants to get up and walk away from it all. It is that part of her that breathes,
Pull it, pull the plug
.

Memories of her father
are dim because he didn’t say much. Still, he drove them to school every morning, and there was comfort in the way he smelled of Aqua Velva and listened to the news. He was a man who knew what was happening in the world, and though their mother never listened to a word he said, Debby had felt sure that if a disaster should strike, he would know what to do. But maybe the comfort came simply from going to school. School was a haven; she loved the warm yeasty smell of those big rolls they served every single day in the cafeteria and the broad smiles and loud voices of the women back in the kitchen talking and cooking, their foreheads and underarms sweating as they talked and stirred big steaming pots of beef stew or macaroni and tomatoes.

One woman, the one who called children names like “smiley” or “curlytop” or “stinker” and who was known for giving them extra large portions of banana pudding, wore terrycloth slippers. Debby imagined a small dark bedroom where the woman rose from the warmth of her quilt-covered bed and slipped her strong sturdy feet into those worn shoes. Debby loved imagining herself
in that tiny dark house with the soothing calm of the woman’s voice.
Have some more pudding, smileyface
, she might say.
You haven’t had near enough
.

After lunch came quiet time, when the teacher told them to rest their heads on their desks and listen to a story. She could have stayed in that pose forever. She can still sometimes take off in her mind and be somewhere else far away. It’s not as easy as it was in school quiet time, but some days when there are no interruptions, she can do it. She can escape and travel for miles and miles.

“What is it with you and the coloreds?” her mother asked on more than one occasion. “What is
that
about?”

Debby’s sister Carly, who lives an hour away, leaves her engine running while she comes in to check. Debby has known herself to wish that Carly’s little Miata would get stolen, but then she’d have to listen to
that
drama, and there is already so much to hear. Carly is fifty but looks about thirty because she works out several hours a day and has gone vegan. She is on her second marriage to a much younger man and just had breast-reduction surgery. The new husband likes a more “boyish and androgynous” look. She also told Debby how ironic and interesting it was because the first husband, who was
not
capable of getting her pregnant, loved breasts big enough to hide in, which is why she had gotten them enlarged twenty years before. Why she would choose to tell
this is beyond Debby. The first time Debby ever heard the words
collagen
and
Botox
was right out of Carly’s newly plumped and lineless lips. For the most part, Carly talks only about Carly and whatever is a natural extension of herself: her Maltese, Tipsy, or her two-year-old daughter, Mary Claire, a child Debby only really knows from various photos Carly brings —a progression from fat bald baby with what looks like a lacy pink garter on her head up to cherubic plump toddler with a very big hair bow. Mary Claire doesn’t visit because Carly feels the atmosphere of sickness and impending death will scar her. Mary Claire is proof of Carly’s youth and vitality.

“I’ll do anything
to keep you,” an old anorectic-looking, liquor-swilling woman says on the television to a much younger man, who looks greasy enough to ooze. “Anything. I’m desperate.” And she
is
desperate, crawling there on the floor at his feet. He says, “I don’t understand,” but looks at her in a way that says,
Yes, I do, and as soon as I can shed myself of her sorry ass, I’ll be gone
. It’s a toss-up who is the sorrier of the two, but it doesn’t matter because the show goes to a commercial for a kind of shampoo that will make you orgasm in the shower. The next commercial promises that if you buy this cheese cracker over the other brand, you will be the life of the party and loved by all.

“Come join us for lunch,” Debby tells Carly, but Carly wrinkles
her sunburned nose and begs off because what Debby has fixed for lunch was once part of something that had eyeballs. The eggs that are now deviled and sprinkled with paprika came from a chicken, the milk from a cow. Carly complains about how the house smells. She is worried what the doctor who is a friend of the new husband will think when he makes that house call he plans to make just because of her. She is so proud of this house call, she has mentioned it nineteen times, because it will be her good deed —especially in the eyes of their other sister, Wanda —for several months if it ever happens. Wanda, the baby at forty-seven, cannot talk about anything except her son’s college applications. She hires so many tutors and planners you’d think the child was some rich invalid à la
The Secret Garden
. She babbles on and on about Justin’s many accomplishments while also complaining of the exertion and dedication it takes to make all of this happen. She said if it didn’t take so much out of her she would do more to help at this end. Her doughy pink face is identical to their mother’s thirty years ago. Her frown lines are permanently furrowed as she describes how hard it is these days to get in the really, really good schools. Since Justin was in seventh grade, she’s been reading a periodical called
Ivy Search
. Her husband, Justin Sr., had (though his family has never broadcast it) a grandmother who was part Cherokee, and they are hoping to make use of this on his application. The boy can memorize and copy and rephrase anything you throw his way, but Debby has yet to hear an original
idea come out of his mouth. If the topic is not something memorized in preparation for a standardized test, he seems dumb as a post. You can see his eyes glaze and jaw slacken when you ask a question he hasn’t been told the answer to; he has been taught not to try unless he’s absolutely sure he will get a correct score because otherwise he will lose valuable points.

Wanda is most excited about all the languages he is trying to speak —especially Russian —and during her last visit promised their unconscious mother that he would come and recite some one day as soon as they finish writing his college essay. Right after she left the crack den, Wanda used to speak in tongues and scriptures and homilies, so Russian is a huge improvement. And unlike Carly, Wanda does at least try to include Debby from time to time. Just the other month she invited her to go to the mall to get a pedicure —Wanda’s treat since Debby is the
caretaker
.

For someone with such a brilliant son, and so in touch, Wanda is not always the brightest star. The Asian women running the salon were talking and laughing and Wanda whispered that it made her uncomfortable, that if Justin were here he would know what they were saying but she hadn’t a clue.

“Well, I know what they’re saying,” Debby told her and managed to keep a straight face. “I did date a boy whose mother was Hawaiian, remember?” And of course Wanda remembered, as the family talked forever about how Debby dated a boy that was Korean or Chinese or Polynesian or something like that. Wanda did
not pick up on the sarcasm in Debby’s voice and instead took the reminder as proof that Debby could in fact interpret the words of the women. Wanda bit her lip and narrowed her eyes and demanded to know what they were saying. The women were still looking back and forth at each other and laughing. “Tell me,” she demanded.

“I’ll translate as best I can,” Debby said, leaning close to whisper when the women aimed a fan at their toenails and stepped out the doorway to smoke. “But don’t get upset.”

“I won’t. Why would I? It’s not like they’re writing me a letter of recommendation.” She clutched the locket she always wore that had pictures of Big Justin and Little Justin inside.

“Well, the one with short hair said, ‘Good God almighty, look at these ugly-ass feet.’ And the other one said, ‘Shit. I’d quit before I touched those things.’ ”

Wanda believed her, even after Debby laughed and confessed it was a joke. Debby had long wondered if a few too many brain cells got left behind in the crack den or scattered all those times Wanda fell out in a fit of evangelical ecstasy and hit her head on the floor. This confirmed it. Wanda refused to leave a tip, and when she decided she had to go back, a sacrifice made for Justin Jr. so her feet would look good when chaperoning his prom, they cut her to the quick (she said) and gave her yet another infection. Not unusual for Wanda —she has a lot of ailments, mainly the ones that have become popular, those diseases du jour that
have taken the place of severe menstrual cramps and sick headaches, two ailments their mother pleaded often when she wanted sympathy and attention and/or to recline and watch the soaps all day.

“I’m going to jump
,” a boozed-up broad calls from a fire escape on the television.

“You threaten it so often,” a blasé man swilling a martini says, “just do it already.”

And then there’s a commercial. It’s Friday so if she jumps no one will know what she lands on until Monday. For all we know she’s on the first floor, but at this point Debby is hoping for a high-rise. Wanda says she wishes she could help this weekend but there is so much to do she is about to die from exertion and will need to check in on Monday. Wanda says she is working on learning Korean and Thai. Justin is helping her, so she can go somewhere else and get her nails done. “Like you learned from that foreign boy you dated. Koi.” She says the name as if daring Debby to come back with something snappy.

“Like the fish?” her mother had asked years ago when she told them about her date, and Debby was hit with a barrage of questions that she answered as quickly and simply as possible. His name is Hawaiian. His mother is Hawaiian. No, his dad is from Charlotte. Yes, his eyes have a little bit of a slant to them. Yes, his hair is dark and straight.