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she never got paid! Ask him about how when she left the company, he said he'd pay her vacation and sick days, and never did!" "Could we take a break?" LeGros's attorney. Rose nodded. The court reporter raised her eyebrows. "Sure," said Rose. "Fifteen min utes." She ushered Willet into her office as LeGros and his attorney huddled in the hall. "What's this about?" Willet shrugged. "The name sounds familiar. I could make a few calls ..." Rose nodded toward her telephone. "Hit nine," she said. "I'll be back in a minute." She hurried to the bathroom. Depositions made her nervous, and being nervous made her have to pee, and . . . "Ms. Feller?" It was LeGros's attorney. "Can I speak to you for a minute?" He pulled her into the conference room. "Look," he said. "We'd like to settle." "What happened?" The lawyer shook his head. "You can probably fill in the blanks. His girlfriend used to work for your guy. As best I can tell, she left without giving notice and figured she was entitled to all of her vacation and sick pay. Veeder told her to forget about it, and I think that my guy figured he could just bill Veeder for what she said she was owed." "You didn't know that?" The lawyer shrugged. "I just got this case two weeks ago." "So he'll . . ." Rose let her voice trail off suggestively. "Pay it back. All of it." "Plus interest. This has gone on for three years," said Rose. LeGros's lawyer winced. "One year's interest," he said. "We'll write you a check right now." "Let me run it by my client," said Rose. "I'll recommend that he accept." Her heart was racing, her blood pounding in her veins. Victory! She felt like doing a dance. Instead she returned to Stan Willet, who was staring at her diplomas. "They want to settle," she said.
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"Good," he said, without turning toward her. Rose swallowed her disappointment. Of course he wasn't going to be as excited as she was. To him eight thousand dollars was pocket change. But still! She couldn't wait to tell Jim how well she'd done! She ran through the terms. "They're willing to write us a check today, which means you won't waste time chasing after the money. My recommendation is that we accept." "Fine," he said, his eyes still on the glass frames and Latin writing of her diplomas. "Write it up, send it over." Finally, he turned toward her. "Good stuff in there." He cracked a thin smile. "Bury them in paper, right?" "Right," Rose agreed, feeling her heart sink. She'd been brilliant! Well, maybe not brilliant in a flashy way, but competent. Extremely competent. Goddamnit, she'd hunted down every last little memo, every single bill, every solitary scrap of paper that proved her client's case! She walked Stan Willet to the elevator, hurried back to her office, and dialed Jim's extension. "They settled," she said happily. "Eight thousand plus a year's interest." "Nice job," he said, sounding pleased. Pleased, and distracted. She could hear the click of his mouse in the background. "Can you write me up a memo?" Rose felt as though he'd dumped ice water on her head. "Sure," she said. "I'll have it done this afternoon." Jim's voice softened. "Congratulations," he said. "I'm sure you were great." "I buried them in paper," said Rose. She could hear Jim breathing, and the sound of other voices in the background. "What was that?" "Nothing." She set down the phone without saying goodbye. Instantly, a message popped up on her screen. From Jim. She clicked it open. "Sorry I couldn't talk more," it read, then—her heart lifted as she read the words—"can I stop by tonight?"
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She typed her response. "YES!" And then she sat back in her chair, beaming, feeling pleased, thinking that everything was finally alright in her world. She was a professional success. It was Friday night, and she wouldn't be alone. She had a man who loved her. True, she also had her little sister camping out on her couch, but that wouldn't last forever, she thought, and started typing up the memo.
Euphoria lasted until four in the afternoon; happiness until six; and by the time nine o'clock rolled around and Jim still hadn't put in an appearance, Rose's mood was dipping toward miserable. She headed to the bathroom, where her ever-helpful little sister had left an article from Allure taped to the mirror. "This Season's Best Brows!" read the headline. And there were tweezers on the sink. "Okay," Rose said to herself. "I can take a hint." At least this way, if—when—Jim came, he'd find her waiting with perfectly plucked brows. Rose peered at herself in the mirror and decided that her life would be easier if she'd just been born a different kind of girl. Not really different, but a better, prettier, more polished, slightly thinner version of the person she already was. The thing was, of course, she had no idea, really, of how to be anything other than what she was. And it wasn't for lack of trying. When she was thirteen years old, Rose and Maggie Feller moved into Sydelle's house. "It just makes sense!" Sydelle said sweetly. "I've got plenty of room." The house was a four-bedroom modern monstrosity painted a flat, brilliant white, and looked out of place on a street full of Colonials, like a spaceship that had crash-landed in the cul-de-sac. Sydelle's house—and Rose never thought of it any other way—had huge windows and odd angles and strangely-shaped rooms (a dining room that was almost a rectangle, a bedroom that was not quite a square). The rooms were full of glass tables, glass-and-metal furniture with pointed edges, and mirrors everywhere, including a mirrored wall in the kitchen that showed every stray fingerprint, every deep breath—and every bite or nibble that everyone in the kitchen ever took. Plus, there were digital scales in every bath In Her Shoes 63
room, including the downstairs powder room, and a variety of magnets with diet-related slogans on the refrigerator. The one Rose remembered best had a picture of a cow contentedly munching grass beneath the legend "Holy Cow! Are you eating again?" Every glittering, reflective surface, every magnet and every scale seemed to conspire with Sydelle to send the message that Rose was inadequate, unfeminine, not pretty enough, and way too big. The week they'd moved in, Rose had asked her father for money. "Is there something special you need?" he asked, staring at her with concern. Rose never asked him for money above the five dollars in allowance she got each week. Maggie was the one who regularly hit him up—she wanted Barbie dolls, a new lunch box, scented Magic Markers and glittery stickers, and a poster of Rick Springfield for her wall. "School supplies," Rose said. He gave her a ten-dollar bill. She walked to the drugstore and purchased a small notebook with a purple cover. For the rest of the school year she'd used it to write down her careful notations of what women did. It was her secret project. Sydelle, she knew, would be happy to tell her what women did and did not do, say, wear, and, most important, eat, but Rose wanted to figure it out for herself. Looking back, she figured she must have had some dim idea that she was supposed to have magically absorbed the pertinent information at some point in her girlhood . . . and the fact that she hadn't, and that Sydelle felt she had room to issue proclamations on skin care and calorie counting, was an indictment of her dead mother. Which, of course, made Rose all the more determined to puzzle it out on her own. "Nails curved, not straight!" she would write ... or "no dumb jokes!" She convinced her father to buy her a yearlong subscription to Seventeen and Young Miss magazines, and she'd saved up her allowance to buy herself a copy of a paperback called How to Be Popular! that she'd seen advertised in the back of both magazines. She had studied those pages as carefully as any Talmudic scholar had ever pored over the sacred texts. She would watch her teachers,
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neighbors, her sister, even the hair-netted ladies in the cafeteria, and try to figure out how girls and women were supposed to be. It was like a math problem, she told herself, and once she solved it, once she'd figured out the equation of shoes plus clothes plus hairdo plus the right kind of personality (and, of course, once she'd figured out how to approximate the right kind of personality), she'd get people to like her. She'd be popular, like Maggie. Of course it had been a disaster, she thought, wiping her breath off the mirror and leaning in close with the tweezers. All of her planning and note taking had been for nothing. Popularity was a code she couldn't crack. No matter how many pages she'd filled, no matter how often she'd imagined sitting with Missy Fox and Gail Wylie in the high-school cafeteria, her purse slung over the back of her chair, her Diet Coke and Baggies of carrots before her, it had never worked out right. By high school, she'd given up on clothes and makeup, on hair and nails. She quit reading the advice columns and the stories in her magazines that dictated everything from how to talk to a guy to the precise angle of an eyebrow's arch. She abandoned the hope that she'd ever be pretty or popular, and kept what was left of her fashion focus on shoes. Shoes, she reasoned, could not be worn incorrectly. There were no variables with shoes, no collars to turn up or down, no cuffs to roll or leave unrolled, no piece of jewelry or hairdo that would make or break (in Rose's case, mostly break) the outfit. Shoes were shoes were shoes, and ever if she wore them with the wrong things, she couldn't wear them the wrong way. Her feet would always look right. She'd look the popular-girl part, from the ankles down, even if from the ankles up she was still a loser. It was only natural that she'd be thirty years old and clueless about almost anything style-related except for the relative merits of nubuck versus suede or the shape of this season's heels. Rose sighed and squinted at herself. Crooked. "Shit," she said, and raised the tweezers. The doorbell chimed. "Coming!" Maggie sang.
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"Oh, no," said Rose. She hurried out of the bathroom, shoving past her sister, who shoved her right back. "Jesus, what is your problem!" Maggie demanded, rubbing her shoulder. "Just move!" said Rose, groping for her wallet, extracting a wad of bills, and shoving them toward Maggie. "Go away! Go see a movie!" "It's almost ten," Maggie pointed out. "Find a late show!" said Rose, and flung open the door. And there was Jim, smelling faintly of cologne and more strongly of scotch, with a dozen red roses in his arms. "Hello, ladies," he said. "Ooh, pretty!" said Maggie, taking the flowers. "Rose, put these in a vase," she said, handing them off to her sister. "May I take your coat?" she asked Jim. Jesus! Rose gritted her teeth and walked to the kitchen. When she got to the living room, Maggie and Jim were sitting side by side on the couch. Maggie showed no signs of leaving . . . and, Rose noticed, the money she'd given her had magically disappeared. "So Jim!" Maggie said brightly, leaning toward him, her bountiful cleavage on display, "how have you been?" "Maggie," said Rose, balancing herself on the arm of the couch, which was the only available seating, "don't you have plans?" Her sister gave her an evil smile. "Not at all, Rose," she said. "I'm in for the night."
SEVEN
On Monday morning, Maggie Feller hopped off the bus, slung her backpack over her shoulder, and wove deftly through Port Authority. It was nine-thirty, and the auditions started at nine, and she would have been earlier, except she hadn't been able to decide between the caramel leather Nine West boots (with boot-cut jeans) or the Stuart Weitzman Mary Janes (with pencil skirt and fishnet stockings). She turned the corner at Forty-second Street and her heart sank. There had to be a thousand people out in front of the MTV studio windows, jamming every inch of the sidewalk, crowding the little strip of grass in the center of Broadway. Maggie stopped a girl in a cowboy hat. "Are you here for the auditions?" The girl made a sour face. "I was. But they took the first three thousand people, and told the rest of us to go home." Maggie's heart sank even further. This would not do. This would not do at all! She hurried through the crowd as fast as her high heels would carry her, finally locating a harried-looking woman with a walkie-talkie and a jacket with a yellow "MTV" logo on the back. Confidence, Maggie told herself, and tapped the woman on her shoulder.
I
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"I'm here for the audition," she announced. The woman shook her head. "Sorry, hon," she said, without looking up from her clipboard. "Doors are closed." Maggie reached into her backpack, grabbed her purloined bottle of Midol, and rattled it in the woman's face. "I have a medical condition," she said. The woman looked up and cocked her eyebrow. Maggie wrapped her fingers around the label, but not fast enough. "Midol?" "I have debilitating cramps," Maggie announced. "And I'm sure that you're familiar with the Americans with Disabilities Act." Now the woman was staring at her curiously. "You can't discriminate against me just because of my troubled uterus," Maggie said. "Are you serious?" the woman grumbled . . . but Maggie could see that she was more amused than irritated. "Look, just give me a chance," she pleaded. "I came all the way from Philadelphia!" "There are people here who came all the way from Idaho." Maggie rolled her eyes. "Idaho! Do they even have cable there? Look," she continued, "I went through extensive preparations to be here." The woman raised her eyebrows. "Would it interest you to know," Maggie continued, "that I've had a very personal portion of my anatomy waxed into the MTV logo?" For one dizzying instant, Maggie thought the woman was actually going to ask to see. Instead, she laughed, scribbled something on her clipboard, and beckoned to Maggie. "I'm Robin. Follow me," she said. Once she'd turned, Maggie jumped into the air, clicked her heels together, and gave a little shriek of glee. She'd made it! Well, she'd made it part of the way, she thought, hurrying after Robin. Now it was just a question of wowing the judges, and she'd be home free.
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Inside, the corridors were even more jammed than the sidewalks had been. There were guys with cornrows and bandanas and jeans that drooped toward the floor rapping softly to themselves, gorgeous girls in miniskirts and low-cut tops preening into handheld mirrors. Maggie quickly deduced that most of them were in their early twenties, and subtracted five years from her age on the form Robin gave her to fill out. "Where are you from?" asked the girl in front of her, a tall, skinny girl who'd done herself up like Ginger Spice. "Philadelphia," said Maggie, figuring that she had nothing to lose by being gracious. "I'm Maggie." "I'm Kristy. Are you nervous?" asked the girl. Maggie signed her form with a flourish. "Not really. I don't even know what they want us to do." "Talk into the camera for thirty seconds," said Kristy, and sighed. "I wish they'd have us perform or something. I've taken dance classes since I was four. I can do tap and jazz, I can sing, I've got a monologue memorized ..." Maggie gulped. She'd taken dance classes, too—twelve years' worth—but no acting, and the only thing she'd memorized for the occasion was Rose's address, so MTV would know where to send flowers after she'd won. Kristy ran her fingers through her hair, "I don't know," she murmured, piling her hair on top of her head, then letting it tumble back down toward her shoulders. "Up or down?" Maggie studied Kristy. "How about a French twist? Here," she said, digging in her backpack for her hairbrush, hairspray, bobby pins, and elastics. The line inched forward. By the time Maggie made it to the front, three hours had flown by, and she'd done Kristy's hair and redone her makeup, smoothed glittery gold eyeshadow onto an eighteen-year-old named Kara, and lent Latisha, who'd been behind her in the line, Rose's Nine West boots. "Next!" called the bored-looking guy behind the camera. She took a deep breath, feeling no nerves at all, feeling nothing but a supreme confidence, a blazing joy as she stepped into the tiny
