This is the first chapter of IN HER SHOES, published on September 24, 2002. It's the story of two sisters, Maggie and Rose, with nothing in common but the same size feet, and how they make peace with their family, their history, and with each other, in a totally non-improbable, un-sappy way that involves neither Hollywood or movie stars. Enjoy!
 
 

IN HER SHOES

"Baby," groaned the guy - Ted? Tad? - something like that - and crushed his lips against the side of her neck, shoving her face against the side wall of the toilet stall.

This was ridiculous, Maggie Feller thought, as she felt his hands busy at the back of her dress. But she'd had five vodka-and-tonics over the course of the last hour and a half, and at this point was not in much of a position to call anything ridiculous. She wasn't even sure she could pronounce the word.

"You're so hot!" Ted or Tad exclaimed, working the sides of her dress up over her hips and discovering the thong that Maggie had purchased for the occasion.

"I want the thong. In red," she'd said.

"Flame," the salesgirl at Victoria's Secret had replied.

"Whatever," said Maggie. "Small," she added, "actually, extra small if you have it." She gave the girl a quick scornful look to let her know that while she might not know red from flame, she, Maggie Feller was not worried. She might not have finished college. She might not have a great job - or, okay, after last Thursday, any job at all. The sum total of her big-screen experience might be the three seconds that a sliver of her left hip was visible in Will Smith's second-to-last video. And she might be just barely bumping along while some people, like namely her sister Rose, went whizzing through Ivy League colleges and straight into law schools, then law firms, then luxury apartments on Rittenhouse Square like they'd been shot down the water slide of life, but still, she, Maggie, had something of worth, something rare and precious, possessed by few, coveted by many - a terrific body. One hundred and six pounds stretched over five feet and six inches, all of it tanning-bed basted, toned, firm, plucked, waxed, moisturized, deodorized, perfumed, perfect.

She had a tattoo of a daisy on the small of her back, the words "BORN TO BE BAD" tattooed around her left ankle, and a plump, pierced red heart reading "MOTHER" on her right bicep (she'd thought about adding the date of her mother's death, but for some reason that tattoo had hurt more than the other two put together. Possibly because she hadn't been drunk when she'd gotten it done). Maggie also had D-cup tits. Said tits had been a gift from a married boyfriend of two years ago and were made of saline and plastic, but this didn't matter. "They're an investment in my future," Maggie had said, even as her father had looked hurt and bewildered and Sydelle the Stepmonster had pursed her lips and her big sister Rose had asked, "Precisely what kind of future are you planning?" in that snotty voice of hers that made her sound like she was seventy instead of thirty. Maggie didn't listen. Maggie didn't care. She was twenty-eight years old, at her tenth high school reunion, and she was the best-looking girl in the room.

All eyes had been on her as Maggie strolled into the Cherry Hill Hilton, wearing a clinging black spaghetti-strapped cocktail dress and the Christian Louboutin stilettos she'd swiped from her sister's closet the weekend before, after they'd gone out to brunch. Rose might have let herself turn into a fat load -- a big sister in more ways than one -- but at least their feet were still the same size. She could feel the heat of the gazes as she'd smiled, sashaying over to the bar, hips swaying like music, bangles chiming on her wrists, letting her former classmates get a good look at what they'd missed - the girl they'd ignored, or mocked and called retarded, the one who'd shuffled down the high school hallways swimming in her father's oversized army jacket, cringing against the locker-lined walls of Cherry Hill High. Well, Maggie had blossomed. Let them see, let them drool. Marissa Nussbaum and Kim Pratt and that bitch Samantha Barnett with her dishwater-blond hair and the fifteen pounds she'd packed on her hips since high school. All of the cheerleaders, all the ones who'd scorned her or had looked right past her. Looked right through her. Let them just feast their eyes on her now…or, better yet, let their wimpy, receding-hairlined husbands do the feasting.

"Oh, God!" moaned Ted the Tadpole, unbuckling his pants, bending his knees, putting one of his hands on the nape of Maggie's neck and using the other one to try to wedge himself inside her. Doggie style, she thought, grimacing. Of course.

In the next stall, a toilet flushed.

Maggie wobbled on her heels as the guy behind her aimed and missed and aimed again, jabbing at her thighs and backside. It was like being bludgeoned with a blind snake, she thought, and snorted to herself, a noise that Ted evidently mistook for a groan of passion. "Oh, yeah, baby! You like that, huh?" he groaned, and started poking her even harder. Maggie stifled a yawn and looked down at herself, noting with pleasure that her thighs - firmed from hours on the treadmill, smooth as plastic from a recent waxing - did not so much as quiver, no matter how violent Ted's ministrations got. And her pedicure was perfect. She hadn't been sure about this particular shade of red - not quite dark enough, she thought - but it was the right choice, she thought, as she looked down at her toes, gleaming back up at her …

"Jesus CHRIST!" yelled Ted. His tone was one of commingled ecstasy and frustration, like a man who's seen a holy vision and isn't quite sure what it means. Maggie had met him at the bar, maybe half an hour after she'd arrived, and he was just what she had in mind - tall, blond, built, not fat and balding like all the guys who'd been football gods and prom kings in high school. Smooth, too. He'd tipped the bartender five dollars for each round, even though it was an open bar, even though he didn't have to, and told her what she wanted to hear.

"What do you do?" he'd asked, and she'd smiled at him. "I am a performer," she said. Which was true. For the past six months she'd been a backup singer for a band called Whiskered Biscuit that did thrash-metal covers of 1970's disco classics. So far they'd booked precisely one gig, as the market for thrash-metal renditions of "MacArthur Park" was not overwhelming, and Maggie knew, in her heart of hearts, that she was only allowed to shake her tambourine because the lead singer was hoping she'd let her sleep with him. But it was something - a tiny toehold on her dream of being famous, of being a star.

"You weren't in any of my classes," he'd said, tracing his forefinger around and around her wrist. "I would have remembered you for sure." Maggie had looked down, toying with one of her auburn ringlets, debating whether she should slide her sandal along his calf, or unpin her hair, letting her curls cascade down her back. No, she hadn't been in his classes. She'd been in the "special" classes, the "remedial" classes, the classes with the scrubs and burnouts and the big-print textbooks that were a different shape - slightly longer and thinner - than any of the books the other kids carried. You could tuck them under brown paper covers, shove them in your backpack, but the other kids always knew. Well, fuck them. Fuck all of them. Fuck everyone who'd ever looked down on her, or right through her, fuck all the pretty cheerleaders and the guys who'd be happy to fool around with her in the passenger's seat of their parents' cars but wouldn't even say "Hi" to her in the halls the next Monday….

"Christ!" yelled Ted again. Maggie opened her mouth to tell him to keep it down, and threw up all over the floor - a clear spill of vodka and tonic, she noted as if from a great distance, plus a few decomposing noodles. She'd had pasta - when? Last night? She was trying to remember when Tad grabbed her hips and swung her around roughly so that she was facing the front of the stall, banging her hip against the toilet-paper dispenser in the process. "AGHH!" he announced, and squirted all over her back.

Maggie whirled to face him, moving as quickly as she could through the sloshing vodka/noodle mess on the floor. "Not the dress!" she said. It came out more like "Nodda dresh." Not good. And Ted stood there, blinking, his pants puddled around his knees, his hand still on his dick. He grinned a foolish grin at her. "That was great!" he said, and squinted at her face. "What was your name again?"

Fifteen miles away, Rose Feller had a secret - a secret that was currently splayed flat on his back, snoring, and had somehow managed to dislodge her fitted sheet and kick three pillows to the floor.

Propping herself up on her elbow and considering her lover by the glow of the streetlights that filtered through her blinds, Rose smiled a sweet, secret smile, a smile none of her colleagues at the law firm of Lewis, Dommell and Fenick would have recognized, and drew her legs close to her body, clutching herself. This was what she had always wanted, what she'd spent her whole life secretly dreaming of - a man who'd look at her like she was the only woman in the room, in the world, the only woman who'd ever existed. She felt as triumphant as a general who's captured a city, a quarterback who's completed the game-winning pass. And he was so unbelievably handsome, even better looking without his clothes than in them. She wondered if she could take a picture. But the noise would wake him up. And who could she show it to?

Instead, Rose let her eyes take a tour of his body - from his strong legs, hairy and pale from spending so much time trapped in drab suits of gray and pinstriped navy - to his broad shoulders, the left one kissed with a constellation of freckles, to his blond hair, thick and charmingly tousled on her pillow. His arms were outflung, one almost reaching her, the other one tilted off the bed, toward the floor. His third finger still had a tan line from his wedding ring. Rose didn't let herself look too long at that. Instead, she turned on her side, away from him, and drew the blanket up tight under her chin, and reviewed the events that had brought her to this moment of unbelievable bliss.

They'd been working late on the Veeder matter, which was so boring that Rose could have wept, except the partner on the case was Jim Danvers, and Rose was secretly in love with him. It got to be eight o'clock, and then it got to be nine, and finally they'd sealed the last of the pages into the messenger's pouch and he'd looked at her with that movie-star smile and said, "Do you want to get a bite to eat?"

They'd gone to the bar in the basement of Le Bec Fin, where a glass of wine turned into a bottle, where the crowd had dwindled and the candles had burned down until it was midnight and they were alone and the conversation had stuttered to a stop. Then he'd reached for her hand and murmured, "Do you have any idea how beautiful you are?" Rose had shaken her head because, really, she had no idea. Nobody had ever told her she was beautiful, except her father, once, and that didn't really count. When she looked in the mirror, she saw nothing but an ordinary girl, a plain Jane, a grown-up bookworm with a decent wardrobe - size fourteen, brown hair and brown eyes, thick, straight eyebrows and a chin that jutted forward slightly as if to say You and what army? She had long fingers, slender feet, full lips that looked especially inviting on the infrequent days she remembered to wear lipstick, and glasses that she couldn't see six inches in front of her face without. Move along, nothing to see here.

Except she'd always harbored the secret dream that someday, somebody would tell her that she was beautiful, that there would be a man who'd slide her hair out of its ponytail, slip her glasses off her face and look at her like she was Helen of Troy. It was one of the main reasons she'd never gotten contacts. And she'd leaned forward, every fiber of her being quivering, staring at Jim waiting for the words she'd always wanted to hear. But instead of telling her, he'd grabbed her hand, paid the bill, and whisked her out the door, up to her apartment, where he'd pulled off her shoes, shucked her skirt, kissed his way from her neck down her belly and spent forty-five minutes doing things to her that she'd only imagined in her dreams (and seen once in an episode of Sex and the City).

She shivered deliciously, pulled the comforter up to her chin. This could be trouble. Sleeping with a colleague went against her own personal code of ethics (an easy code to maintain, she admitted, because she'd never had a colleague who'd wanted to sleep with her). More problematic, relationships between partners and associates were explicitly forbidden by firm rules. Both of them could be disciplined if anyone found out. He'd get in trouble. She'd probably be asked to leave. And she'd probably have to find another job, start all over again - another round of interviews, boring half-days spent reciting the same answers to the same questions: Have you always wanted to be a lawyer? What areas of the law appeal to you the most? What kind of practice do you see yourself developing? How would you fit in with this firm?

Jim hadn't been like that. He'd interviewed her when she came to Lewis, Dommel and Fenick. It had been a beautiful September afternoon three months ago when she'd walked into the conference room, in her navy blue interview suit, with the folder full of firm PR clutched to her chest. It was her third interview of the week, and her feet, in Ferragamo pumps, were killing her, but one look at Jim Danvers had banished all thoughts of aching feet and other firms. He'd been standing at the window, looking out over the city, and when he'd turned to greet her the late-morning light turned his blond hair into a golden crown. He hadn't looked like a lawyer at that moment, he'd looked like a god, like a superhero, the kind of guy who'd always been strictly off-limits to Rose as she'd toiled through high school, college, and law school, keeping her nose to the grindstone and her grades in the stratosphere.
"Ms. Feller?" he'd asked, and she'd nodded, not trusting her voice. He'd smiled at her then, and crossed the room in three long steps and took her hand in his.

It had started, for her, at that moment - the sun behind him, his hand wrapped around hers, sending bolts of electricity shooting straight between her legs. She'd felt something she'd only read about, something she wasn't even sure that she believed in - passion. Passion as hot and steamy as anything you'd find in a Harlequin, passion that stole the breath right out of her throat. She'd felt something far beyond the tentative crushes she'd entertained, more than anything she'd ever felt for Steven, the guy she'd been seeing for a few months in law school.
She looked at the smooth skin of Jim Danvers' neck and wanted to lick it, right there in the conference room.

"I'm Jim Danvers," he said.

She cleared her throat. Her voice was breathy, husky, a wanton rasp. "I'm Rose." Shit. What was her last name again? "Feller. Rose Feller. Hi."
It had started so slowly between them, a simmering tension building for months - 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 the partners wound up together. Meanwhile, she'd gleaned whatever gossip she could during lunches with her fellow first-years and what she hoped were discrete chats with her secretary. "Married," said her secretary. "Separated," said a paralegal. "I heard he fools around," whispered a summer associate as she reapplied 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.

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 step class, but she'd last attended step class three weeks ago, and she'd been wearing tights to work every day, and…

Jim rolled over again, shoving Rose to the absolute edge of the mattress. Rose stared miserably at her living room, which might as well have born a sign "Single Girl, Lonely." There was a trail of clothes, his and hers, leading back toward the corduroy couch she'd inherited from a law-school roommate, stacks of unopened mail, five pound bright yellow dumbbells propped up beside a Tae-Bo tape that was still in its original plastic shrinkwrap. There was the treadmill draped with her dry cleaning, a half-empty wine cooler on the coffee table and four shoeboxes from Saks piled by the closet. Disaster, Rose thought, cringing at the sight of the wine cooler ("Passionberry Punch,") wondering what she could do before dawn to give her apartment the appearance of being inhabited by someone with a life. Was there an all-night emporium that sold throw pillows and bookcases? And was it too late to do something about her legs?

The telephone rang, jolting her out of an incipient dream about a hot bath and freshly-shaved legs. She sat up, her heart in her throat, and glanced automatically at the alarm clock next to the bed. It was 12:42 a.m.. She grabbed the portable telephone and hurried into the bathroom.
"Hello?" she whispered. She could hear loud music, voices - a bar, a party, something like that. 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. "Little sister!" Rose grabbed a bottle of shampoo whose label noted it was "specially formulated for thin, limp, lifeless hair," and tossed it under the sink, figuring that if Jim stayed for a shower he didn't need to be confronted with evidence that her hair was either thin, limp, or lifeless.

"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, only now she's kind of passed out, I guess. She told me to call you first, though," he added. "Before she passed out."

"How nice of her," said Rose, throwing her prescription zit cream and a box of pantyliners in after the shampoo. "Why don't you just take her home?"

"Look, um, I don't want to really get involved in this…."

"Tell me, Todd," Rose began pleasantly, in the voice she'd practiced in law school, the one she'd imagine using to sucker witnesses into telling her what she needed to know. "When you and my sister were hanging out in the bathroom, before you noticed that she wasn't waking up, what exactly was going on?"

There was a humming 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, we're at the Hilton in Cherry Hill, 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 again. She closed her eyes. The Cherry Hill Hilton. The high school reunion. Maggie had been talking about it for weeks. "I'll get there as soon as I can."

"She'll be in the ladies' room." Click. Todd was no more.
Rose leaned against the bathroom door. Here it was - her real life, the truth of who she was, barreling down on her like a SEPTA bus with bad brakes. Here, too soon, 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 her dusty, uncared-for apartment - the exercise tape she didn't have time to unwrap, let alone exercise to, the dust and dirty clothes, hairy legs and ugly underwear. The truth was Steven from law school. She'd thought their romance might turn into something. Then her sister had come for the weekend, and that was the end of that. "She looks like the digitally enhanced version of you," Steven had said. Well. How could you keep dating a guy who said that?

Her sister. The truth was her sister. The truth was that her sister Maggie, her gorgeous, messed-up, fantastically unhappy and astonishingly irresponsible sister would always need something…and that she, Rose, would always be the one to provide it for her. Only why tonight? Why couldn't Maggie have let her enjoy this one night?

"Fuck," she groaned softly, "fuck, fuck, fuck." And then, still in the dark, Rose padded back into her bedroom, groping for her glasses, her sweatpants, her 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 drooping from the front door. Rose wrapped her scarf around her neck, stomped through the lobby - all faux marble and crimson carpet - and into the deserted lounge, which smelled of cigarette smoke and beer. There were round tables covered in cheap red-and-white paper tablecloths with plastic pompoms 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 guy in a stained white shirt was putting away glasses and where her sister, in an ephemeral slip dress that was inappropriate for November - or, really, for any appearance in public - was slumped on top of 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 brown cloud until you got right up close.

The bartender gave Rose a sympathetic look. "She's been here 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 tapped 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, and her feet brushed the floor. "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 shoebox, 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 the passenger's seat. Maggie groaned.

"If you're going to throw up," Rose advised, yanking the seatbelt around her sister as Maggie flipped and flopped bonelessly, "give me a little advance warning."

"I'll send a telegram," said Maggie, reaching into her purse for her lighter.

"Oh, no," said Rose, "don't even think about smoking in here." She turned the key, flicked on the lights, 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 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," she mumbled.

"Why?"

"Because I got kicked out, okay?"

Rose made an exasperated noise and stomped on the accelerator.

"Look, I didn't ask for you to come get me," Maggie slurred. "I was gonna figure something out."

"I'll just bet you were," said Rose. "You're so good at thinking on your feet."

"Bitch," Maggie said thickly. Her head lolled against the back of the seat, rolling back and forth each time Rose yanked on the wheel to turn the car.

"You know," Rose said, in her maddeningly 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're passed out in the ladies' room."

"Whaddare you, my 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 swiped 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 yet?"

"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, ignoring 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 dressed like you," 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. 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 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, and her eyes were 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's car crunched up the driveway gravel. A light went on in an upstairs bathroom, and another light appeared in the downstairs hall as Rose put the car in park. She got out, opened the passenger's side door, grabbed her sister 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 ugly square four-bedroom brick box that their father and stepmother called home. The hedges were pruned into tortured curlicues, per Sydelle's specific instructions, and 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 leaned over. Rose thought she was throwing up until she saw that Maggie had flipped over one of the flagstones and had fished out a key. Clearly, her sister had done this before.

"You can go now," said Maggie, leaning against the door and fumbling with the key. She waved her hand without turning. "Thanks for the ride, now get lost."

At that instant, the door flew open, and Sydelle Levine Feller, their stepmother, stood there waiting, lips pursed, bathrobe belted tightly around her five foot figure, face gleaming with skincream. In spite of her strenuous, costly efforts, Sydelle Levine Feller was not a pretty woman. She was thin, well-coiffed, impeccably made up, extremely well-tended, but she wasn't pretty. She had tiny brown eyes, offset by enormous nostrils that Rose could imagine were each big enough to accommodate a Hebrew National salami. Plus, she'd had both eyeliner and lipliner tattooed permanently into place, so she always looked made up, even in the middle of the night.

"She's drunk," Sydelle said. "What a surprise." As always, she addressed her most hurtful remarks to the air three inches to the left of the intended recipient's face, as if she was directing her observation to some invisible onlooker who would undoubtedly see her side of things. Rose could remember dozens - no, hundreds - of those casual, catty observations that Sydelle had sent zinging past her own left ear…and Maggie's. Maggie, please finish your homework before you watch TV. 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 minute 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."

"Please," said Rose, as humbly as she could manage. She looked up and saw the glint of her father's glasses through the bedroom window, his tall, thin, slightly stooped figure floating in pajama bottoms and an ancient tee shirt. He looked like a ghost, she thought. In the years since they'd been married, Sydelle had gotten more vivid, and her father had faded, like a photograph left in the sun. "Hey, Dad!" she called. The instant the words were out of her mouth, the light flicked off, and her father vanished from view. "Shit," Rose muttered, although she wasn't a surprise. Her father's preferred mode of dealing with his wayward second daughter was avoidance, with the regular cash handout as compensation. Sydelle was the one who called Maggie on the carpet, lecturing her about her tantrums, her mood swings, her bad grades, her bounced checks, and, as Maggie got older, her lengthy spells of unemployment. And Rose, was the one who wound up picking up the pieces.

"Dad!" Rose yelled again, helplessly.

Sydelle shook her head, nostrils flaring. "Out of the question," she said.
Rose glared at her stepmother. She remembered the first day Sydelle had showed up at their house. Their father had been dating her for two months, and had gotten dressed up for this occasion. Rose remembered him tugging at the sleeves of his sports jacket, readjusting the knot of his tie. "She's very excited about meeting you," he told Rose, who was then twelve, and Maggie, who was ten. Rose remembered thinking that Sydelle looked like a fairy-tale queen. She'd been blonde, back then, and she'd worn gold bracelets and gold earrings and shiny gold sandals. Her hair was streaked with ashy highlights, her eyebrows were plucked to thin golden parenthesis. She wore a sweater - a long, slim tube of gold-colored mesh - and tight white pants. Her makeup was all bronze and copper; even her lipstick had a golden tinge. "Girls," she'd said, and shook both of their hands solemnly. "You're a very pretty young lady," she'd said to Maggie. Maggie beamed and simpered. "And you," said Sydelle to Rose, "could be a very pretty girl." She reached up, gathered Rose's hair in her hands, and smoothed it behind her ears. "There!" she said, pleased with herself. "That's a start!"

At dinner, Rose remembered, Sydelle had slid the bread basket out of her reach. "None for us!" she'd simpered, with what Rose thought was supposed to be a conspiratorial wink. "We girls need to watch our figures!" She pulled the same trick with the butter. When Rose had made the mistake of reaching for a second helping of potatoes, Sydelle shook her head. "It takes the stomach twenty minutes to send a message to the brain that it is full," she lectured. "Why don't you wait a while and see if you really want those?" It made Rose feel like throwing up….throwing up, and then sneaking back to the table and cramming down two bowls full of potatoes. Which, if she remembered, was exactly what she'd done.

Now she stared at Sydelle, imploring, wanting to be done with this task, to drop Maggie off and hurry back to Jim…if he was even still there. "We need to talk to him."

"Well, you can't," said Sydelle, and shook her head, drawing her bathrobe belt tight around her. "I'm very sorry," she said, in a tone indicating that she was really anything but sorry. "If she's been drinking, she can't come in."

"Well, I haven't been drinking. Let me talk to my father!"
Sydelle shook her head again. "Maggie is not your responsibility," she recited, parroting the speech she'd no doubt memorized from a Tough Love books. Or, more likely, a Tough Love pamphlet. Sydelle wasn't much of a reader.

"Let me talk to him," Rose said again, knowing it was hopeless.
Sydelle shook her head and turned her body so that she was blocking the doorway, as if Rose and Maggie might try to sneak in past her. And Maggie wasn't improving the situation.

"Hey, Sydelle!" she cawed, shoving her sister aside. "You look great!" She squinted at her stepmother's face. "You did something new, right? Chin lift? Cheek implant? L'il Botox? What's your secret?"

"Maggie," Rose whispered, grabbing her sister's shoulders and telepathically begging her to shut up. Which Maggie didn't do.

"Way to spend our inheritance," she shouted.

Sydelle finally looked right at them, instead of at the space between the two girls, and her flat brown eyes were disgusted. Rose could practically hear what she was thinking, which was that her daughter, the much-vaunted Marcia, would never behave in such a fashion. Marcia - or My Marcia, as she was commonly called -was eighteen and a freshmen at Rutgers by the time Sydelle and her father had wed. My Marcia, as Sydelle never tired of reminding Rose and Maggie, wore a perfect size six. My Marcia had been a member of the National Honors Society and the homecoming court. My Marcia had joined the best sorority at Rutgers, had graduated with honors, had worked for three years as an assistant to one of the top interior decorators in New York City before marrying a dot-com gazillionaire and gracefully retreating into motherhood and a seven-bedroom showplace in Short Hills.

"You both need to leave," said Sydelle, and closed the door, leaving Maggie and Rose out in the cold.

Rose closed her eyes. She should have been in her apartment, in bed with Jim. Instead, here she was, in the middle of the night, in the middle of a frozen lawn in New Jersey.

Meanwhile, Maggie stared up at the bedroom window, perhaps hoping that their father would toss his wallet down. Finally, she turned and headed to the driveway, pausing only to yank one of Sydelle's hedges out of the ground and toss it as hard as she could on the doorstep. As Rose watched, Maggie pulled off the purloined high heels and threw them on the lawn.

"Oh, please," said Rose. Maggie crossed the lawn on her bare feet and began limping down the road. "Where do you think you're going?"
"Somewhere. Anywhere." Maggie wrapped her arms around herself. "Don't worry about me, I'll be okay." She'd made it almost to the corner before Rose caught up.

"Come on," Rose said roughly. "You can stay with me." Even as the words were exiting her lips, all of her internal alarms were sounding great shrieking whoops of warning. Inviting Maggie inside was like offering to host a hurricane, which she'd learned the hard way, when Maggie had moved in with her for three horrible weeks five years ago. Maggie in your house meant that money would go missing along with your best lipstick and favorite pair of earrings, and your car would vanish for days at a time and reappear with an empty gas tank and brimming ashtrays. It meant that housekeys would disappear, shoes would waltz out of the closet, clothes would vanish from their hangers, never to be seen again.. It meant mess and confusion, dramatic scenes, tears and fights and hurt feelings. It meant the end of any peace and quiet she might have been foolish enough to hope for. Quite possibly, she thought with a shudder, it meant the end of the thing she'd wanted most - the end of Jim. How could she conceivably have a sex life with her sister sleeping on the couch?

"Come on," Rose said again.

Maggie shook her head back and forth, a child's exaggerated No.
Rose sighed, gathered herself, and moved toward her sister again, preparing to grab her up, to bundle her into the car, to get her to her own apartment, no matter what it took. "Come on," she said impatiently.

"It'll only be for the night." But at the touch of Rose's hand on her shoulder, Maggie whirled around. "No it won't," she said.

"What?"

"Because I got evicted again, all right?"

Rose sighed, not really surprised. "What happened?" she asked, and restrained herself from adding, "this time."

"I got mixed up," Maggie muttered.

"Mixed up," Rose had long since learned, was Maggie's shorthand for the myriad ways the world confounded her, the ways that her learning disabilities had her hamstrung and crippled. Numbers tripped her up, fractions and directions and balancing a checkbook were absolute impossibilities. Tell her to double a recipe and she couldn't. Ask her to find her way from Point A to Point B and Maggie would usually wind up at Point K where she'd unerringly locate a bar and usually have a few guys clustered around her by the time she called her sister, and Rose, as always, showed up to retrieve her.

Rose sighed. "Fine. We'll figure it out in the morning."

Maggie shook her head. "You don't want me." She wrapped her arms around herself and stood, skinny and shivering. She really should have been an actress, Rose thought. It was really a shame that all of this dramatic ability never got put to better use than extracting cash, shoes, and temporary housing from her family.

"Stop being a drama queen. Get in the car," said Rose.

"I'll be fine," said Maggie. "I'll just stay here until it gets light, and then…" She sniffled. Goosebumps dotted her arms and shoulders. "I'll find somewhere to go."

"Come on," said Rose.

"You don't want me," Maggie repeated sadly. "Nobody does."

"Just get in the car," Rose repeated. She turned and started walking toward the driveway, and she wasn't a bit surprised when, after a moment, Maggie followed. There were some things in life you could always count on, and Maggie needing help, Maggie needing money, Maggie just plain needing was one of them.