In Her Shoes 26
lemon over everything and giving the french fries a judicious sprinkle of salt. "What was Rumor Three?" Rose demanded. Simon Stein stuffed two fried scallops into his mouth, and looked at her with wide blue eyes, guileless beneath his curly, strawberry-blond lashes. "Mmhph er narphing mm mhmphair." "What?" said Rose. Simon swallowed. "That you were having an affair," he said. "With one of the partners." Rose's mouth fell open. "I ..." Simon raised one hand. "You don't have to say anything. I shouldn't have even brought it up." "Does everyone think that?" Rose said, trying not to sound shocked. Simon helped himself to tartar sauce and shook his head. "No. Most people are betting on either lupus or lower back trouble." Rose ate a few clam strips and tried to look nonchalant, and feel like she wasn't ridiculous. But she was ridiculous, of course. She'd ditched her job, her boyfriend had ditched her, she was dressed like an overgrown schoolgirl, and now a guy who was practically a stranger was salting her fries. Worst of all, everyone knew about her and Jim. And she'd thought it was a secret. How dumb could you get? "Was there a specific partner's name attached to this rumor?" she asked, trying to sound as if it didn't even matter, dipping a shrimp into the tartar sauce and hoping against hope that at least part of her secret was still safe. Simon Stein shrugged. "I didn't listen," he said. "It was just gossip, that's all. You know how lawyers are. They've got to have answers for everything, so when someone just disappears, you know, they want an explanation." "I didn't disappear. I'm on leave. As you know," Rose said stubbornly, and ate a piece of flounder, which was, all things considered, very tasty. She swallowed and cleared her throat. "So. Um. What else is going on at the firm. How are you?"
262 Jennifer weiner
He shrugged. "The same. I've got a case of my own now. Unfortunately, it's the Stupid Bentley Case." Rose gave him a sympathetic nod. The Stupid Bentley Case involved a client who'd inherited his father's millions and, apparently, none of his father's brains. The client had bought a used Bentley, then had spent the two years subsequent to the purchase trying to get his money back from the dealership. His contention was that the car had produced a cloud of oily black smoke since the first time he'd taken it on the highway. The dealership's belief—which was, unfortunately for the client, supported by the client's now ex-wife—was that the smoke was the result of the client driving the Bentley with its emergency brakes on. As Simon told some of the details, Rose could hear him trying to sound bored and cynical—disgusted that the firm's client was such a boob, disgusted with a process that had allowed the case to go as far in the system as it had—but the boredom and cynicism were a thin and easily cracked patina over Simon Stein's obvious enthusiasm for his work. Sure, it was a small case, and sure, the client was an ass, and no, his sparkling eyes and waving hands said, thi case wasn't going to set legal precedent, but still, she could tell that he was having fun as he described the depositions, the discovery, the subpoenaing of the subliterate mechanic named Vitale. Rose sighed, listening, wishing she still felt that way about the legal life, and wondering if, really, she ever had. "But enough about the Bentley," Simon concluded, popping the second-to-last fried shrimp into his mouth and tossing the last one to Rose. "You look terrific, by the way. Very rested." Rose looked down at herself ruefully, from her slightly sweaty T-shirt down to the calves that were tattooed with grease from her bicycle chain. "You're too kind." "Would you like to have dinner with me on Friday?" asked Simon. Rose stared. "I know that was kind of abrupt," said Simon. "It's the result of billing by the hour, I think. You just blurt out what you have to say, because the meter's running."
In Her Shoes 263
"Don't you have a girlfriend?" asked Rose. "And didn't she go to Harvard?" "Gone," said Simon. "It wasn't working out." "Why not?" Simon thought it over. "She didn't have much of a sense of humor, and the Harvard stuff. . . well, I guess I just couldn't see spending my future with a woman who referred to her period as the Crimson Tide." Rose snorted. The waitress took their plates and put dessert menus in front of them. He barely spared it a glance. "Hot apple cobbler," he said. "Want to split it?" He smiled at her, and she saw that even though he was shortish, and vaguely egg-shaped, and about as far from Jim looks-wise as Saks Fifth Avenue was from Kmart, she had to admit that he was funny. Nice, too. Sort of appealing. Not to her, of course, she thought hastily, but still . . . Simon, meanwhile, was staring at her expectantly, and humming the chorus of what Rose recognized as "Lawyers In Love." "So are we on for dinner?" "Why not?" said Rose. "I was hoping for a more enthusiastic response than that," Simon Stein said dryly. Rose smiled at him. "Yes, then." "She smiles!" said Simon; and when the waitress brought the cobbler, he said, "Let's put some ice cream on top of that. We're celebrating."
THIRTY#SEVEN
Ella sat in front of the keyboard at Mrs. Lefkowitz's computer, took a deep breath, and stared at the blank screen. "I don't think I can do this," she said. "What?" Mrs. Lefkowitz called from the kitchen. "Did it freeze up again? Just restart the computer. You'll be fine." Ella shook her head. She didn't think that she would be fine at all. She was in Mrs. Lefkowitz's spare bedroom, which served as a sort of office-cum-storage area, with the tangerine iMac perched on top of a ponderous claw-footed walnut desk, aside a red velvet couch with the stuffing leaking out, beneath a stuffed elk's head, flanked by a copper-and-bamboo umbrella stand, which housed Mrs. Lefkowitz's cane. "I don't think I can do this," Ella said again . . . but nobody heard her. Lewis and Mrs. Lefkowitz were in the kitchen, slicing up muffins and fresh fruit, and in the living room the television set was blaring Days of Our Lives. Ella squeezed her eyes shut, typed in "ROSE FELLER" and hit the "enter" key before she lost her nerve. When she opened her eyes, Mrs. Lefkowitz and Lewis were standing behind her, and the screen was full of words. "Wow," Lewis said. "Popular name," observed Mrs. Lefkowitz.
In Her Shoes 265
"How do I know which one's her?" Ella asked. "Just try one," said Lewis. Ella clicked one of the links, and discovered that the words "Rose" and "Feller" had brought her to Feller Florals in Tucscon, Arizona. She sighed, returned to the search page, and clicked another link. This one was a record of marriage licenses from Wellville, New York, for a Rose Feller born in 1957. Not her Rose. She backed up, clicked once more, and finally, her granddaughter's face, twenty-two years older than when Ella had seen it last, filled the screen. "Oh!" she gasped, and read through each word on the page as fast as she could. "She's a lawyer," she said, in a voice that didn't sound like it belonged to her. "Well, that's not the worst thing she could be," said Mrs. Lefkowitz, and cackled. "At least she's not in jail!" Ella stared. It was Rose. It had to be. She had the same eyes, the same serious expression, the same eyebrows that followed a straight line across her forehead that Ella remembered from when she'd been a little girl. Ella got up and collapsed on Mrs. Lefkowitz's love seat. Lewis took her place and starting scrolling through the text. "Princeton University . . . University of Pennsylvania law school . . . specialty in commercial litigation . . . lives in Philadelphia ..." "She was so smart," Ella murmured. "You can e-mail her," said Lew is. Ella buried her face in her hands. "I can't," she said. "Not yet. I'm not ready. What would I say?" "You'd start with 'hello,' " said Mrs. Lefkowitz, and laughed at her own wit. "Where's her sister?" Ella managed to ask. "Where's Maggie?" Lewis gave her a reassuring look that felt like his hand, warm on her shoulder. "I'm looking," he said. "Haven't found anything yet." But he would, Ella knew. The girls were out there, living lives she-couldn't imagine. And they were grown-ups now. They could make their own decisions about whether to let her into their lives
266 Jennifer weiner
or not. She could write to them. She could call. But what would she say? Mrs. Lefkowitz plopped down beside her. "You can do it!" she said. "Come on, Ella. What do you have to lose?" Nothing, Ella thought. Everything. She shook her head and shut her eyes. "Not today," she said. "Not yet."
THIRTY'EIGHT
Much to her surprise, Maggie Feller found that she was actually getting a strange sort of education at Princeton. She'd certainly never planned on it, she thought as she walked across campus with an armload of books. But the truth was, that first class had hooked her. And Charles had hooked her, too, with his books of monologues, his conversations about things no guy had ever wanted to discuss with her—character arcs, moods and motivation, books and real life and how they were the same and how they were different. Even the one fly in her ointment, Josh, the unfortunate and suddenly ubiquitous hookup, felt like a distraction instead of a real danger. She liked being a student, she thought ruefully. She should have given it more of a chance ten years ago. Take poetry. For Maggie, reading anything from the simplest sentence on up involved a sort of detective work. First, she'd have to sound out and decipher each individual letter of every single word. Once she had them individually, she'd have to string them together, nouns and verbs and the gaudy baubles of adjectives, and read it over and over and over again before she could extract the meaning, like a'chunk of walnut tucked into a gnarled shell. She knew this wasn't how it worked for most people. She knew
268 Jennifer weiner
that Rose could glance at a paragraph or a page and know what it meant as if she'd soaked the knowledge of it in through her skin, which was why she could devour thick romance novels, while Maggie stuck to magazines. But poetry, Maggie had found, was the great equalizer, because poetry wasn't made to be obvious on its surface, and every reader, whether they were Princeton smarties or community-college dropouts, had to go through the process of deciphering the words, then the sentences, then the stanzas, pulling the poem apart and putting it back together before it would yield its meaning. Three and a half months into her campus camp-out, Maggie walked into "her" Modern Poets class and settled herself in the back row, making sure to leave an empty seat on either side of her. Most of the students clustered near the front, hanging breathlessly on Professor Clapham's every word, practically dislocating their shoulders when they threw their hands into the air to volunteer an answer, which meant that Maggie was fine in the back. She sat, opened her notebook, and copied the day's poem from the blackboard, whispering each word to herself as she wrote it.
One Art
The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn't hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
In Her Shoes 269
I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn't hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.
—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident the art of losing's not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
"I lost my mother's watch," Maggie whispered as she scribbled down the poem. The art of losing. She could write a book about that. The things she found in the school's various lost-and-found boxes continued to boggle her mind—and keep her very well outfitted. With her textbooks and sweatshirts, hats and mittens from J.Crew or the Gap, she looked the part of a Princetonian. And she was starting to believe her own fiction. The semester was drawing to a close, and Maggie felt like she was close to becoming an actual, honest-to-God student. Except the summer was coming. And what did students do during the summer? They went home. And she couldn't. Not yet. "The art of losing's not too hard to master," she wrote, as Professor Clapham, blond, in her late thirties, and enormously pregnant, waddled to the front of the room. "This is a villanelle," she said, settling her books on the desk and herself, gingerly, into a chair, and flicking her laser pointer on. "One of the most demanding rhyme schemes. Why do you think Elizabeth Bishop matched this particular form to her subject matter? Why was this a good fit?" Silence. Professor Clapham heaved a sigh. "Okay," she said, not unkindly, "let's start at the very beginning. Who can tell me what this poem's about?"
270 Jennifer weiner
Hands shot up. "Loss?" offered a sleek blond girl in the front row. Duh, thought Maggie. "Of course," said the professor, in a tone only marginally kinder than Maggie's mental Duh had been. "But the loss of what, exactly?" "Losing love," ventured a boy with bare, hairy legs exposed by his shorts, and a sweatshirt bearing the bleach stains of someone not yet used to managing his own laundry. "Whose love?" Professor Clapham demanded. She put her hands at the small of her back and stretched as if her back hurt or, maybe, as if her students' ignorance was causing her physical pain. "And is the love lost already, or does the poet place that loss, out of all the others, in the realm of the theoretical? Is she talking about this loss as a possibility? A probability?" Blank stares and bowed heads. "A probability," Maggie blurted, and then sat, crimson, as embarrassed as if she'd farted. But the professor gave her an encouraging look. "Why?" Maggie's hands and knees were trembling. "Ummm," she said, in a faint and fading voice. And then she thought of Mrs. Fried, bending over her, her glasses swinging on a beaded chain, whispering, Just try, Maggie. It doesn't matter if you're wrong. Just try. "Well," Maggie began, "at the beginning of the poem, she's talking about real things, stuff that everybody loses, like keys, or people's names." "And then what happens?" the professor prompted. Maggie got it, almost as if she'd plucked a kite out of the sky. "It shifts from the tangible to the intangible," she said, the long words rolling off her lips as if she'd been saying them all her life. "And then the poet starts getting . . ." Shit. There was a word for this. What was the word for this? "Grandiose," Maggie finally managed. "Like, she lost a house—okay, lots of people move; but then she says she's lost a whole continent . . ." "Which, we can assume, would not be hers to lose," Professor Clapham said dryly. "So we see another shift."
