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rasp. "I'm Rose." Shit. What was her last name again? "Feller. Rose Feller. Hi." It had started so slowly between them—the glance held a beat too long while waiting for the elevator, a hand that would linger at the small of her back, the way his eyes would seek her out in a crowd whenever the associates and partners wound up in a meeting together. Meanwhile, she gleaned whatever gossip she could. "Single," said her secretary. "Extremely single," said a paralegal. "Serial heartbreaker," whispered a first-year associate as she reaplied her lipstick in the ladies' room mirror. "And I hear he's good." Rose had blushed, washed her hands, and fled. She didn't want Jim to have a reputation. She didn't want him discussed in bathrooms. She wanted him to be hers alone. She wanted him to tell her she was beautiful, again and again. In the apartment upstairs, a toilet flushed. Jim grunted in his sleep. When he rolled over, she felt his foot brush against her shin. Oh, dear. Rose ran an experimental toe up the length of her calf. The news was not good. She'd been meaning to shave her legs, had been meaning to shave them for some time, kept promising she'd shave them before she went to her aerobic class, but she'd last attended class three weeks ago, and she'd been wearing tights to work every day, and . . . Jim rolled over again, pushing Rose to the absolute edge of the mattress. She stared unhappily at her living room, which might as well have borne a sign: Single Girl, Lonely, Late '90s. A trail of his-and-hers clothing lay on the floor beside five-pound bright yellow dumbbells propped up next to a Taste Bo tape that was still in its original plastic shrink-wrap. The treadmill she'd bought to fulfill a get-in-shape New Year's Resolution three New Years ago was draped with her dry cleaning. There was a half-empty Passionberry Punch wine cooler on the coffee table, four shoe boxes from Saks piled by the closet, and a half-dozen romance novels beside her bed. Disaster, Rose thought, wondering what she could do before dawn to give her apartment the appearance of being inhabited by some In Her Shoes 1
one with an interesting life. Was there an all-night emporium that sold throw pillows and bookcases? And was it too late to do something about her legs? As quietly as she could, she reached for the portable phone and crept into the bathroom. Amy answered on the first ring. "Wassup?" she asked. In the background, Rose could hear Whitney Houston wailing, which meant that her best friend was watching Waiting to Exhale for the hundredth time. Amy wasn't black, but that didn't stop her from trying. "You won't believe it," Rose whispered. "Did you get laid?" "Amy!" "Well, did you? I mean, why else would you be ringing me now?" "Actually," said Rose, flicking on the light and studying her glowing face in the mirror, "actually, I did. And it was . . ." She paused, and gave a little hop in the air. "It was so good!" Amy whooped. "Way to go, girlfriend! So who's the lucky guy?" "Jim," Rose breathed. Amy whooped even louder. "And it was unbelievable!" said Rose. "It was ... I mean, he's so . . ." Her call waiting beeped. Rose stared at the phone unbelievingly. "Ooh, popular girl," Amy said. "Call me back!" Rose clicked over, glancing at her watch. Who'd be calling her at almost one in the morning? "Hello?" She could hear loud music, voices—a bar, a party. She slumped against the bathroom door. Maggie. Big surprise. The voice on the other end was young, male, and unfamiliar. "Is this Rose Feller?" "Yes. Who's this, please?" "Um . . . well, my name's Todd." "Todd," Rose repeated. "Yeah. And, um . . . well, I'm here with your sister, I guess. Maggie, right?" In the background, Rose could hear her sister's drunken shout.
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"Little sister!" Rose scowled, grabbing a bottle of shampoo—"specially formulated for thin, limp, lifeless hair"—and tossed it under the sink, reasoning that if Jim stayed for a shower, he didn't need to be confronted with evidence of her problem locks. "She's . . . um. Sick, I think. She had a lot to drink," Todd continued, "and she was . . . well ... I don't know what else she was doing, really, but I found her in the bathroom and we were kind of hanging out for a while, and then she kind of passed out, and now she's, um, getting kind of loud. She told me to call you first, though," he added. "Before she passed out." Rose c ould hear her sister shouting, "I'm King of the World!" "How nice of her," she said, throwing her prescription zit cream and a box of pantyliners in after the shampoo. "Why don't you just take her home?" "I don't want to really get involved. . . ." "Tell me, Todd," Rose began pleasantly, in the voice she'd practiced in law school, the one she imagined using to sucker witnesses into telling her what she needed to know. "When you and my sister were hanging out in the bathroom, what exactly was going on?" There was silence on the other end. "Now, I don't need to know specifics," said Rose, "but I'm inferring that you and my sister are already, to use your word, 'involved.' So why don't you be a stand-up guy about it and take her home?" "Look, I think she needs help, and I've really got to go. ... I borrowed my brother's car, I've got to get it back ..." "Todd ..." "Well, is there someone else I should call?" he asked. "Your parents? Your mother or something?" Rose felt her heart stop. She closed her eyes. "Where are you?" "The Cherry Hill Hilton. The high school reunion." Click. Todd was no more. Rose leaned against the bathroom door. Here it was—her real
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life, the truth of who she was, barreling down on her like a bus with bad brakes. Here was the truth—she wasn't the kind of person Jim could fall in love with. She wasn't what she'd made herself out to be—a cheerful, uncomplicated girl, a normal girl with a happy, orderly life, a girl who wore pretty shoes and had nothing more pressing on her mind than whether ER was a rerun this week. The truth was in the exercise tape she didn't have time to unwrap, let alone exercise to; the truth was her hairy legs and ugly underwear. Most of all, the truth was her sister, her gorgeous, messed-up, fantastically unhappy and astonishingly irresponsible sister. Only why tonight? Why couldn't Maggie have let her enjoy this one night? "Fuck," she groaned softly. "Fuck, fuck, fuck." And then Rose padded back into her bedroom, groping for her glasses, sweatpants, boots, and car keys. She scribbled a quick note for Jim ("Family emergency, be back soon") and hurried to the elevator, steeling herself to drive off into the night and pull her sister's chestnuts out of the fire yet again.
The hotel had a "Welcome! Class of "89" banner still drooping from the front door. Rose stomped through the lobby—all faux marble and crimson carpet—and into the deserted lounge, which smelled of cigarette smoke and beer. There were tables covered in cheap red-and-white paper tablecloths with plastic pom-poms as centerpieces. In the corner, a guy and a girl were making out, leaning drunkenly against the wall. Rose squinted toward them. Not Maggie. She walked to the bar, where a man in a stained white shirt was putting away glasses and where her sister, in a tiny dress that was inappropriate for November—or, really, for any appearance in public—was slumped on a barstool. Rose paused for a minute, considering her strategy. From a distance, Maggie looked just fine. You didn't notice the smeared makeup, the reek of booze and barf that surrounded her like a thick cloud, until you got up close. The bartender gave Rose a sympathetic look. "She's been here
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for half an hour," he said. "I've been watching out for her. She's just had water to drink." Terrific, Rose thought. Where were you when she was probably getting gang-banged in the bathroom? "Thanks," she said instead, and shook her sister's shoulder. Not gently. "Maggie?" Maggie opened one eye and scowled. "Leame lone," she said. Rose gathered the straps of her sister's black dress and lifted. Maggie's butt rose six inches off the seat. "Party's over." Maggie tottered to her feet and kicked Rose sharply in the shin with one silver sandal. Make that one Christian Louboutin silver stiletto sandal, Rose noticed as she looked down, one silver sandal coveted for three months, purchased just two weeks ago, and, she'd thought, still snug in its shoe box. One silver sandal now stained and splotched with the sticky residue of she didn't want to know what. "Hey, those are mine!" Rose said, shaking her sister by her dress. Maggie, she thought, feeling the familiar fury coursing through her veins. Maggie takes everything. "Fuck youuuu!" Maggie brayed, and twisted her body from side to side, trying to free herself from Rose's grasp. "I can't believe you!" Rose hissed, hanging on to the straps as Maggie thrashed, and the toes of Maggie's shoes—her shoes— kicked at her shins. Insult to injury, she thought, imagining the bruises she'd find in the morning. "I haven't even worn them yet!" "Easy there," the bartender called, clearly hoping that this was going to turn into a sister-on-sister catfight. Rose ignored him and half dragged, half carried her sister out of the bar and deposited Maggie in her passenger seat. "If you're going to throw up," Rose advised, yanking the seat belt around her sister, "give me a little advance warning." "I'll send a telegram," Maggie muttered, reaching into her purse for her lighter. "Oh, no," said Rose, "don't even think about smoking in here." She flicked on the lights, wrenched the steering wheel to the right,
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and started driving out of the deserted parking lot and onto the highway, heading toward the Ben Franklin Bridge and Bella Vista, where Maggie had the most recent in her extended series of apartments. "Not this way," said Maggie. "Okay," said Rose. Her hands tightened on the wheel in frustration. "So where are we going?" "Take me to Sydelle's," Maggie mumbled. "Why?" "Just take me, okay? Jesus. I don't need to play twenty questions." "Of course not," Rose said tightly. "I'm just your personal taxi driver. No need to give me an explanation. Just call my number and I'll show up." "Bitch," Maggie said thickly. Her head lolled against the back of the seat, rolling back and forth each time Rose yanked on the wheel. "You know," Rose said, in her most reasonable tone, "it is possible to attend one's high school reunion and not wind up drinking so much vodka that you don't even notice that you've passed out in the ladies' room." "Whaddare you, a DARE officer?" asked Maggie. "It's possible," Rose continued, "to simply attend, to reacquaint yourself with old friends, to dance, to dine, to drink responsibly, to wear clothes that you've bought for yourself instead of the ones you've taken from my closet ..." Maggie opened her eyes and stared at her sister, noting the large white plastic hair clip. "Hey, 1994 called," she said. "It wants its hairstyle back." "What?" "Don't you know that nobody wears those anymore?" "So why don't you tell me what the really fashionable girls are wearing when they have to go pick up their drunk sisters in the middle of the night," said Rose. "I'd love to know. Have Nicky and Paris Hilton launched a line for us yet?"
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"Whatever," Maggie mumbled, staring out the window. "Are you happy this way?" Rose continued. "Drinking every night, running around with God knows who ..." Maggie rolled down the window and ignored her. "You could go back to school," said Rose. "You could get a better job." "And be just like you," Maggie said. "Wouldn't that be fun? No sex in, what's it been, Rose, three years? Four? When was the last time a guy looked at you?" "I could have plenty of guys looking at me if I wore your clothes," Rose said. "Like they'd fit," said Maggie. "Your leg wouldn't fit into this dress." "Oh, right," said Rose. "I forgot that being a size zero is the most important thing in the world. Because it's obviously made you so successful and happy." She honked the horn longer than was necessary to get the car in front of her to move. "You've got problems," Rose said. "You need help." Maggie threw back her head, cackling. "And you're just perfect, right?" Rose shook her head, thinking of what she could say to shut her sister up, but by the time she'd formulated her line of attack, Maggie's head was resting on the window, her eyes shut tight.
Chanel, the golden retriever—Sydelle the Stepmonster's dog— turned in wild circles up and down the length of the yard as Rose drove up the driveway. A light went on in an upstairs bedroom, and another light appeared in the downstairs hall as Rose grabbed Maggie by her straps and hauled her onto her feet. "Get up," she ordered. Maggie stumbled in her sister's grasp, weaving up the driveway until she arrived at the front door of the oddly shaped modern house that their father and stepmother called home. The hedges were pruned into tortured curlicues, per Sydelle's instructions, and
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the doormat read, "Welcome Friends!" Rose had always figured the mat had come with the house, as their stepmother was neither particularly welcoming nor especially friendly. Maggie staggered up the path and bent over. Rose thought she was throwing up until she saw Maggie flip over one of the flagstones and fish out a key. "You can go now," said Maggie, leaning against the door and fumbling with the lock. She waved good-bye without turning around. "Thanks for the ride; now, get lost." The front door flew open as Sydelle Levine Feller stepped out into the night, lips pursed, bathrobe belted tightly around her five foot figure, face gleaming with skin cream. In spite of hours of exercise and thousands of dollars' worth of Botox shots and the recent addition of tattooed eyeliner, Sydelle Levine Feller was not a pretty woman. For one thing, she had tiny, dull brown eyes. For another, she had enormous, flaring nostrils—the kind of thing Rose always figured that the surgeons couldn't correct, because surely Sydelle had to have noticed that she could easily fit a Hebrew National salami up each one. "She's drunk," Sydelle said, her nostrils flaring. "What a surprise." As always, she addressed her most hurtful remarks to the a ir three inches to the left of the recipient's face, as if she were directing her observation to some invisible onlooker who would undoubtedly see her side of things. Rose could remember dozens— no, hundreds—of those catty observations zinging past her own left ear . . . and Maggie's. Maggie, you need to apply yourself to your schoolork. Rose, I don't think you need a second helping. "Can't get anything by you, can I, Sydelle?" asked Maggie. Rose snorted in spite of herself, and for a moment, the two of them were a team again, united against a common, formidable enemy. "Sydelle, I need to talk to my father," said Rose. "And I," Maggie announced, "need to use the facilities." Rose looked up and saw the glint of her father's glasses through the bedroom window. His tall, thin, slightly stooped frame was floating in pajama bottoms and an old T-shirt, and his
