The Comfortable Shoe Diaries

by Renée J. Lukas

  “Not until we’re with you,” Joanne said firmly. She unwrapped the furniture and began digging for cups and dishes in the cabinets. “We have to have lunch first, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Nooo!” Tayler wailed. His little face was scrunched up like a used tissue.

  Then Cabbot emerged from underneath a giant suitcase. He grinned sheepishly like he was up to something when I lifted him high into the air. At age ten, he already started to look like a handsome little man. It was painful to see. It meant I’d be getting older and dying sooner.

  “How’s my guy?” I nuzzled my cheek against his.

  “Fine.” He had that shy, just-getting-to-know-you-again face. It happened with every visit. Then after about fifteen minutes, he’d be explaining his Lego battleship features and what homemade rocket ships he’d demolished.

  “So you like building things?” I was always trying to figure out what he was going to do for a living.

  “Yeah.” He nodded proudly.

  “Why?”

  “’Cause I like tearing them down.” He smiled like a Cheshire cat and ran outside to torment his little brother.

  So I decided he’d either be an architect or a terrorist. I looked around the living room and tripped over all the bags.

  Joanne had packed as much as Ellie. There were more bags than furniture in the room.

  “I wasn’t sure what the last renters left,” Joanne sighed, glancing around in a circle.

  Down the hall were two bedrooms with one tiny bathroom we all had to share. After sizing up the sluggishly flushing toilet, I decided that while on this trip I wouldn’t eat any more fried foods, dairy, tomato sauce or anything with sugar. I began obsessing about my Irritable Bowel Syndrome and thought it might be best not to eat at all.

  We took nearly an hour to unpack all of our crap. And crap it was. We weren’t going to need most of what we’d brought. Or were we? Was there something I didn’t know? Then there were the silky, linen napkins. Why were they necessary?

  “They never have enough napkins at these places,” Ellie complained, looking for something under the bed.

  “Why all the stuff?”

  “I like to be prepared.” Ellie’s mouth hardened into a thin, tight line. I knew she’d lost something valuable but was afraid to say so. She was always losing things, and she spent half her life looking for them. I’d given her an expensive watch for Christmas, which was a huge mistake, because she’d promptly sucked it up in the vacuum. Then there was the charm bracelet, which was either lost in the car she’d just sold or thrown into the garbage with the cat poop. I had then vowed never to buy her anything over five dollars.

  “What did you lose?” I asked. “Your keys?”

  “Never mind. I’ll find it.”

  “Great, she doesn’t want to tell me. Must be something bad.”

  “No, just a phone number.” Her voice trailed off, and she began looking in weird places, like the closet neither of us had opened yet.

  “What number?”

  “Why do you have to be so nosy? Just a number. It’s no big deal!” She stormed out of the room.

  Nosy? She’d never called me that before. Maybe it was true what they said about the third year of a relationship. You start to get sick of each other and break up. I’d read in a lesbian magazine that if you can survive the third-year hump, you’d make it as a couple. We had been fighting a lot more lately. But the first Christmas when she got along so well with my family, who are all just older versions of me, I thought she had to be the one, because she came out unscathed. But now…here we were in this romantic place and she was already yelling at me. Not a good sign.

  Tired before the day had even begun, I went out to the living room and saw Joanne watching her husband tiptoe along the water’s edge. The ocean was liquid ice, which only made Tayler cry harder because he couldn’t go in.

  “I tried to warn you,” I said. “It’s not like a Florida ocean. It’s more of a taking-photos-holding-hands-at-sunset kind of beach. You can’t go in.”

  Joanne nodded. “Tell him that. He thinks he’s in that polar bear club.” She was watching Nathan and most likely frustrated that she was stuck unpacking everything.

  Then I noticed Ellie had found a brochure or whatever it was that had the phone number and had scurried toward our bedroom. It was strange that she didn’t want to tell me what it was. I looked at her like a kicked puppy. She met my eyes and a certain calm washed over her face.

  “I’m trying to surprise you,” she explained. “Sorry I yelled.”

  She hugged me and all was magically restored again. It was amazing how just one or two words from Ellie could change the entire landscape of the world. It was either coming to an end or just beginning. For me, that was what real love felt like.

  When Ellie retreated to the bedroom, Joanne turned away from the window and looked at me in that way you do if you have earth-shattering news.

  “Sydney,” Joanne said with a dramatic pause, “my face is falling.”

  I flopped on the couch, trying not to laugh. “It is not.”

  “Oh, yes it is,” she insisted. “My cheeks have been lowering for a while. I’ve measured them.”

  “I haven’t seen you since Christmas. You’d think I’d notice.”

  “No offense, but you don’t notice details.” She sat beside me.

  “Ouch!”

  “Seriously, when I made that Easter wreath and emailed you a photo, you never said anything about the tiny chicks in the middle.”

  “Chicks thought it was just some yellow fuzz.”

  “You only notice things that are about you.”

  “That is so not true!” I screeched indignantly, even though it might be true.

  “I’m considering a…lift. I’d like your approval. You’re my sister. I need to know you think it’s okay.”

  I gasped.

  “Before you give me the misogynistic society speech,” she continued, “I just really want to do it for myself.”

  “What if you come out looking like one of those Hollywood wax figure women?” I closed one eye then the other, trying to picture it.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Or get a really bad surgeon? Then your face won’t look like you anymore, and as you get older, you’ll look scary.”

  “I knew I shouldn’t have told you. Never mind.”

  As she got up, I noticed her face in the light. A few more freckles from the Florida sun, and some crow’s-feet creeping along near her eyes, but she still looked like herself, the girl with the knobby knees who I grew up with, the girl I rode down to Sanibel Island with every summer who fought with me over the last piece of grape gum in the backseat. I didn’t want that to change.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  “If You’re Happy and You Know It…”

  The sun shone so brightly on the water that it hurt my eyes. I turned away from the white glare, reminding myself that I was having a good time. This was a vacation, after all, the thing people take pictures of to put in brochures that demonstrate happiness.

  “Are you happy?” Joanne probed, digging her toes into the sand.

  There was that word again. I’d decided that “happy” was an ideal everyone strived for but didn’t quite know what it was.

  “Yeah.” Like it said on our Christmas card.

  “So you are…happy,” Joanne repeated.

  “Yeah,” I grunted. There was sand in my butt crack, little bugs zipping around my face, and bites itching on my legs from some sneaky mosquito. But I was on a beautiful beach, where it seems like something’s wrong with you if you say you’re not completely happy.

  “I mean with your life.” Joanne liked to get deep and dark to fill in the cracks of happiness that found their way into her own life from time to time. She couldn’t let that happen.

  Joanne had earned the nickname “The Angel of Death” in our family because of one particular Christmas. Years ago when Dad was alive and we were all singing carols around
the piano—in between songs when everything was quiet for a moment—Joanne suddenly said, “Just think, one of us will die first.”

  You can imagine the rest of that evening and following morning. Mom was crying over her Christmas coffee cake and Dad was reading the obituaries to see if any more of his friends had died. Good times.

  We didn’t celebrate Joanne’s birthday, at her request. I knew she’d have trouble aging ever since the first time she had to shop for her first bra. But I tried to send a card one year, and she blew up at me, so the boycott was official.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Well, how happy are you supposed to be? I’ve seen the vitamin commercials.”

  “What are you talking about?” I was completely confused.

  “You know, those multivitamins for every stage of your life. They show you graduating from college, then married, with kids, then with grandkids and riding bikes with your equally gray-haired husband. Your whole life is planned out for you. And I’m one scene before the old people on the bikes!”

  Was this what a nervous breakdown looked like?

  “Don’t…you can’t…” I was choking on sea air. “Don’t let Centrum dictate your life!”

  “But it does! Don’t you get it? Oh, you don’t.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You didn’t get married. You’re not following the plan.” Her words came down as a butcher knife. There was some resentment deep inside of her, though what other plans she had were still a mystery to me.

  “I guess not, unless same-sex marriage is legal everywhere someday.” I thought about it.

  I wasn’t exactly living the life I’d envisioned. But after three years with Ellie and Matthew accidentally calling me “Mom,” I can’t say I minded it. I don’t know why. It even made me smile sometimes.

  “Actually, I am living a similar life to you,” I corrected. “Now.”

  Joanne nodded, realizing I could now relate to her in a way I never could before.

  “I’ve changed,” I continued. “The old me used to freak out about adopting a cat, remember?”

  “Yeah. But you totally lost it when you found out about Ellie’s kids.”

  “You want to hear something weird?” I said. “We’re starting to feel like a real family.”

  Joanne smiled a different smile at me. It was a mixture of pride and awe, like she was proud of her baby sister. Maybe I wasn’t such a mess now after all.

  “Especially with her ex always out of town. He hardly sees the kids, so it feels like it’s just us.” I leaned back in a rare, contented posture.

  “You’re okay with that?”

  “Well, yeah,” I replied. “Sometimes I have to get over that ‘oh God, she slept with a man at least twice’ feeling. But it passes.”

  She was studying me carefully.

  “What?” I was beginning to get nervous.

  “I’m happy for you,” she said simply.

  There was a pause that followed, the kind of pause that wasn’t going to go away. “What’s wrong?” I finally asked. “You’re not happy or you wouldn’t have asked if I was.”

  “Nathan and I fight. I mean like crazy. We fight over which brand of hand soap to buy. After twelve years…you think that’s normal?”

  I wasn’t sure.

  “Is the hand soap worth divorcing over?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “The soap is a symptom. It seems like we fight over everything, big and small. And he’s always working. It’s his business. He could come home and let the employees work late.”

  “You think it’s an affair? I’ll kill him right now.” My butt was almost off the sand when she held me down.

  “I don’t know that! There’s no one good looking there. They’re all super religious nerds with acne even in their thirties.”

  “You still love him?”

  “Y…eah.” And there it was. She said it with two syllables, like she was thinking it over as she said it.

  My heart sank. A cold rock settled in my stomach. Joanne and Nathan were something I could count on, like the sun rising or the Rolling Stones doing their millionth tour. Now what would I do?

  I stared out at Nathan, taking Tayler by his little hand, skipping waves that crashed dangerously close to their feet, and I suddenly felt sorry for him, for what he didn’t know.

  “You only get one chance and life is short,” she said. “How do you know if you’re not missing out on something?”

  “Some people go looking for what they think they’re missing, then realize they had it all along and are now trapped in a new relationship with a drug dealer who somehow got custody of your kids.”

  “How did you get me married to a drug dealer? That’s not what I’m saying.”

  “Isn’t it? You always do the ‘road not taken’ thing, but maybe that road has a million potholes. Ever think of that?” I was on a roll.

  “I’m sorry. This is really bad timing.”

  “Why?” I looked around. Everyone was busy doing something else. “What’s wrong with the timing?”

  “Well,” she hesitated. “This weekend isn’t exactly…”

  “What?”

  “It’s not about me.”

  “Am I missing something? Not about you? What does that mean?” Something was strange, and she was a bad liar.

  “I’m not good at keeping secrets.” She tucked in her legs protectively and traced patterns in the coarse sand with her fingers.

  Before I could ask anything else, Nathan was shaking off his wet hair over me like a dog.

  “Is that a guy thing?” I snapped. “As much as I love getting soaked by you.”

  “Oh, sorry,” he lied, toweling off and puffing out his chest like he could convert me.

  “It’s funny how straight guys always wonder what lesbians do without a penis,” I told Joanne, pretending that’s what we had been talking about. “I wonder what gay guys do without a vagina.” I smiled to myself, enjoying Nathan’s stunned silence and my ability to still shock him after all these years.

  He let out a high-pitched, nervous laugh, and his flip-flops were a blur on the landscape as he scurried back up to the cottage. My work there was done.

  * * *

  That night, Ellie and I lay in bed with moonlight streaming in.

  “I’m worried about my sister,” I whispered. “She doesn’t seem happy with Nathan anymore.”

  “Well, they’re under a lot of stress. Tayler seems kind of hyper.”

  “I think it’s more than that. She said something about keeping secrets.”

  Ellie stirred uncomfortably. “Don’t make her problems your problems. Just focus on what you have control over.”

  “You sound like my therapist.” She couldn’t see, but I was smiling at her in the dark. “Do you think we’ll ever get to Paris?”

  “I’m happy just being here.” She squeezed me tightly. “There’s too much cheese there.”

  “Now I know you’re not with me for my money,” I whispered.

  Ellie turned. “Will you stop?”

  “You do know this is my brother-in-law’s cottage, not mine?”

  “You’ll get back on your feet soon. And maybe…you shouldn’t go back.”

  “I already have. What do you mean?”

  She sighed, her breath catching in her throat like she was holding something back. “You really seem to be hating it.”

  She was right. I’d lost the spark for advertising. I came home one night and said that I’d spent my whole life trying to sell things that people didn’t need to people who didn’t want them.

  “This job is the worst,” I admitted, resting on my arm. I remembered a photo shoot, spreading Vaseline across a green pepper to make it shinier. Food ads were harder than I’d realized. “I don’t know. I feel kind of lost.”

  “What about your dream of being a writer?”

  “We’ll never get to Paris if I go for that. You’ve heard the phrase ‘starving artist’?”

&
nbsp; “I believe in you. Screw Paris.”

  “All these galleries here…you think these photographers make enough to quit their day jobs?” I exhaled painfully. It was a reality I was always fighting with. And I knew I wasn’t the only one. I hated reality. I hated the words “reality,” “realistic,” and “practical.” There was definitely a theme there.

  “Your stuff is good,” Ellie insisted. She was that reassuring angel always sitting on my shoulder. When she wasn’t yelling, of course.

  “You only saw a seventh grade poem, a bad one.”

  “I saw your newspaper articles,” she said. “You actually put some suspense in a story about a bake-off. Would it be the reigning champion, Gladys Lisbert, from Fairfield, or her arch-enemy, Louise Compton, from Waterbury?”

  “The editor hated that.”

  She laughed. “What about some of that stuff in your blog? Did it all really happen? The drag queen who sang to you under a spotlight?”

  “Unfortunately, yeah. In a crowd of hundreds, I got the spotlight song.”

  We laughed, and the more we tried to be quiet, the harder we laughed.

  “I believe in you,” she whispered again.

  I rolled over and touched her cheek. “You say that to all your students.”

  “Only the ones who aren’t in gangs.”

  We laughed some more. “At age ten?”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  In the immortal words of Kenny Rogers, she believed in me. But there was a feeling gnawing at me. I wanted to make enough money to add on to the cute ranch house we shared. I wanted to make enough to whisk her away to Paris and have too much cheese. How would I ever be enough for her?

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  “The Woman I Love”

  Provincetown is a dream. You don’t believe it’s real because you think it’s a place that would have had to come from the imagination of some brilliant writer or artist. Maybe that’s why so many writers and artists flocked here—to absorb some of its mojo and put it into their work.

  Ellie and I and the rest of the gang made our way down the cracked sidewalks that reminded me of what winter must be like here. We scanned the shops on Commercial Street. I took Ellie’s hand under bright sunlight, out in the open, where all eyes would see us and other couples who were like us would smile secretly proud smiles at us.