A GHOST WHO LOVED SHOES

Holly was one of the bad girls from high school. She spent most of her life overweight but well dressed and well made up. She married my brother the day before I was supposed to marry my high school sweetheart, but we sort of eloped two months early to beat them out. My brother and I had always been competitive.

And we weren’t the only ones. I have a family full of brainiac geeks who sit around after dinner talking software platforms, the “community” of Linux and the latest lawsuit against Microsoft that my father will be a chief witness in. We all look alike, so it’s a matter of figuring out who’s going to be the best at some micro-field of computer science, and there’s never any let up. We don’t compares cars or house sizes so much as the latest project assigned or whose boss is the boss of whom.

Holly thought we were all crazy, except for my brother Jamie, who was possibly the smartest and the sanest of the bunch. During high school he threatened several times to move out, and he could have. He made enough money working part-time as a computer programmer even then to support himself and probably a family. Once he was married, the college graduation was just icing on the cake.

Jamie was the most social of all of us, but that doesn’t mean much compared to the normal social landscape. Holly was always trying to keep him away from family gatherings and getting him to go dancing with her or to a play or an opera where they could get dressed up. She was unhappy about her weight, though. And with her first pregnancy, it got worse. A lot worse.

And then, she had surgery. Her stomach was restricted to a tiny four-ounce space and she lost weight like the Wicked Witch of the West. She melted in front of our very eyes. She became beautiful in a way she never had been before. You noticed how tall she was, for one thing, as tall as my brother, and a lot taller when she wore the heels she decided made her legs look extra long. She cut her hair short, to her ears, and wore it slick and straight. The eye makeup that she had always worn used to seem too thick to me, but now it fit her cheekbones and made her dark eyes pop out and look a little oriental.

She started cheating on my brother. And using drugs. And not coming home for days on end. He tried what he could to help her, but then he hit a point where he had had enough and he filed for divorce. She was distraught. She promised anything he asked. She did not want to lose him. She loved him still.

He gave her some terms. No more sleeping around. No more drugs. No more staying out all night.

But she couldn’t do it.

And so the divorce happened.

And when he told her one fateful night that they would never, ever, get back together, she closed the door on his face, went to the bathroom and drugged herself up. Slid her sleek, long form into the bathtub, and cut her wrists.

She was supposed to pick the kids up from my brother’s the next day. I think she thought he would take them her place, and find her.

He didn’t.

He figured she was out doing something wild, and she would call when she was ready to be a mother again.

Three days he told himself not to worry.

It was a neighbor who found her, who hadn’t seen her out in too long, and became worried.

The police came. The note was read, and put away as evidence, to be returned to my brother nearly a year later.

And the calls began.

I found out in the afternoon and it wasn’t something that I felt hard at first. Just a piece of news. Someone got killed in a car accident on the highway. A photo appears in my head, and then fades away. She was my brother’s wife. Not one of my best friends in high school. I hardly saw her. I hardly knew her. She didn’t particularly like me.

The funeral was set for Friday. Three days. I had four small children and a part of me thought that I didn’t really have to go to the funeral. After all, they didn’t know who she was. I didn’t want them to hear the story of how she died. It might be easier to pretend that she hadn’t ever been part of the family. She hadn’t been in the last family photo. It had been a small mixup over the time. No intention on my father’s part, I’m sure, to tell her thirty minutes later than the time the rest of us arrived. We were finished when she got there, and the photographer hurriedly made his way away. No one took even a snapshot of her and my brother and their children in their nice photo clothes.

I woke up early the morning of the funeral and went out on a walk/jog. I had some knee trouble and swam three days a week, but it was hard to get over to the pool every day and I needed some exercise and some time away from the kids. So I went out walking at the local park where a track had been made out of the sidewalk and I started to try to run some of the laps.

I was on lap two when I heard her.

My dead sister-in-law. She was taller than I was, and she was right behind my left shoulder. Like she was jogging there, but in perfect rhythm with me. No, that wasn’t right. Like she was floating along behind me, whispering in my ear.

“What is wrong with you today?” she said. “You look like crap.”

“I’m jogging,” I said. “Hello! You’re supposed to look like crap while you’re jogging, you know.”

“You’re supposed to look like you don’t care how you look. But you can’t really not care how you look,” she said.

“I’m wearing sweats and a T-shirt. What’s wrong with that?”

“The sweats are about ten years old, they have paint stains on them, and they make your butt look about as big as an elephant. Plus that T-shirt is a man’s T-shirt.”

“So what? It’s comfortable and big and it’s modest.” I flung that at her because since the weight loss, she had not been particular modest.

And of course, this whole conversation was going on in my head. Silently.

I hoped it was silent.

I kept looking around at the other joggers, hoping they didn’t notice how I was tilting my head to the side whenever I wanted to focus on her.

It was a real conversation, though, back and forth. She said things that were not things I would have said to myself. Someone had invaded my head and it felt a lot like when I was pregnant and I knew that I had an alien being inside my stomach that I could not control. It had its own ideas of what food it wanted, and when it wanted to sleep or turn over. And if it got mad, it would kick me hard in the ribs. I had the bruises to show for it.

“Look, leave me alone. What are you doing here, anyway? It’s not like we were friends or anything? Don’t you have anyone else to talk to?” She was the one who said our family was anti-social and that she had to train Jamie how to act in a normal social situation so he didn’t offend people. So she must have gobs more friends than I did. I like a solitary existence. I have a few, very good friends. But I also enjoy quiet time to think to myself.

While running.

Like, right now.

“You have got to do something with that hair when you’re at the funeral. You’ll completely embarrass me.”

“Embarrass you? You are dead. What do you care how I look at your funeral? They’ll have your body looking all nice, and you’re the one people will be staring at.”

“It says something about a person, who comes to her funeral. And how much they dress up. That’s all. If you knew anything about real life, you’d know that. But you’re probably thinking about the quadratic equation or something useless like that.”

I started to jog home, thinking that once I was inside my house, with my children making noise, she would leave. She liked her kids—I think—but she wasn’t fond of my family’s idea of a get-together that included more than twenty kids running around a park and inevitably finding the mud and screaming at the top of their lungs.

I walked in the door, and it seemed like she’d gone.

Relief.

I made breakfast for the hordes and then went into my bedroom to take a shower.

I probably should go the funeral, I thought. I could find someone to watch the kids for an hour. It would be ruse not to go. Whatever it was that happened before, it was just guilt speaking. I didn’t help her enough. I should have kept contact with her, noticed that things were going bad. Tried to help. Even if I hadn’t been able to stop her, I would have had the satisfaction of knowing who it was who had died.

I got out of the shower and combed through my hair, which was the extent of my normal hair styling method. It was just starting to grow out of a shorter cut which I had hated, and I could pull most of it back into a ponytail if I put barettes in on the sides.

“It looks awful.”

There she was again, whispering in my ear, over my left shoulder. I stared at myself in the mirror, but there was no hint of a ghostly shadow in the glass. Not that I believe in those kinds of ghosts. The spooky, white sheet, Halloween kind. But spirits who have unfinished business walking the earth? I always thought that was a remote possibility. And Holly definitely had unfinished business. But why with me?

“I could leave it down,” I said, taking out the barettes and the ponytail.

“Can you at least curl it?” asked Holly.

“Fine,” I said, and got out the very ancient curling iron under the sink. I plugged it in and went out to my bedroom to get dressed.

“Not that one,” said Holly, when I reached for a skirt and blouse in tan and black.

“But this is a funeral.”

“I don’t want everyone to look like they’re dead. And besides, you don’t look good in black.”

“Fine, what should I wear?” Holly had never shown this much interest in my fashion sense while she was alive.

“Something with color. I don’t know. You don’t have much, do you?”

“Mother with four children here.”

“That’s no excuse. I have kids and I have a nice wardrobe.”

She had some other stuff I didn’t want, too. But I didn’t say that to her, in my head.

“They throw up on you all the time. You have to make sure it’s all washable. And I don’t have time to iron.” Which had left me with a wardrobe full of knit dresses in different colors, and not all of them were stain free.

“That one,” she said finally.

Was there a little wave of wind that shook the yellow and orange skirt that I hadn’t worn for two years because it was too small for me?

“I don’t know.” I took it out dubiously and put it on. It was a tight fit.

“Live with it,” said Holly. “It’s not like you’re spending the rest of your life in that skirt. Two hours, max, and you’ll be out of it. Besides, it will help you think about how much you want to lose weight.”

“I don’t want to lose weight. I’m still nursing a baby and you’re not supposed to try to lose weight then. You need a little extra fat.”

“Yeah, you tell yourself that.”

She had become awfully prejudiced against fat people in the last two years since she lost all that weight. I wasn’t nearly as fat as she’d been, anyway.

But I put on the yellow skirt.

“And a nice blouse. Something white.”

“I don’t own a white blouse,” I said. That was just asking to waste money. Little children wipe noses on their mothers long before they learn about tissue paper. And there are other things that tend to get on white shirts. They’re a magnet.

“Fine. A yellow shirt, then. Or a red one.”

I found one that she approved of, and then went back to do my hair. I curled it the way I used to curl it in high school, but it didn’t look right. Either my hair cut was different or my hair was different. Or it just never looked that good to begin with.

“You look like a bowling ball,” said Holly.

“I can put the barettes back in.”

“Comb it over to one side more. Then curl it over instead of under.”

I did as she said.

“Well, that will have to do.”

“Isn’t there someone else you could—you know—play dress up with? You have lots of friends coming to the funeral. Friends who like fashion and stuff.”

“They’re busy,” said Holly.

“Yeah, busy getting dressed.”

“If you must know,” she said. “I did try to spend time with them. But they wouldn’t pay any attention to me. I guess they don’t believe in ghosts. You’re the only one who can hear me.”

Well, that put me in my place. I was the only person who made her feel like she was still alive—a little bit, anyway.

“What’s going to happen next?” I asked. “After the funeral?” I was thinking, did you drift away into nothingness? You know, that’s why the old pagans used to put bodies into the ground, to make sure their spirits didn’t haunt the earth.

“Like you care.”

“I do care.”

“You need shoes,” said Holly.

I opened the closet door and held back the dresses to show her my shoes. I had three pair. One pair of sturdy winter moon boots, in black and silver, stolen from the children’s department. One pair of running shoes that had seen better days. I think they used to be white and blue. And one pair black casual shoes that I thought of as church shoes. They were flat with a rubber sole, and they had elastic on the sides so that I could take them on and off without bending over, very useful when holding a sleeping baby on your shoulder.

“That’s it? Jamie has more shoes than you.”

“I don’t like shoes.”

“You’re crazy. Shoes are the best thing about living. You have to have shoes for every outfit. Shoes are the way you connect with the ground. They keep you from disappearing.” She sounded as passionate about shoes as I’d ever heard her about anything.

“Sorry,” I said.

“You should shave your toes. They look really hairy.”

“I don’t shave my feet,” I said.

“Why not? You shave your legs? Don’t you”

“Usually, when I have time. Once a week at least.”

She made a sad, ghostly sound like when a wind shivers through the timbers. Or probably like that, anyway.

“My best friend in high school used to say I had Hobbit Feet.”

“Well, you do,” said Holly. “They are fat and wide and hairy. Just like in THE LORD OF THE RINGS.”

“Did you watch THE LORD OF THE RINGS? I thought you hated geeky stuff like that.”

“You think Jamie would have let me escape from watching that? No way. Plus, I have a geeky side that I let out sometimes. When it’s appropriate.”

“I kind of like having Hobbit feet,” I said.

“Eww!” she said. “Hobbit feet are for hobbits. Not for humans.”

I could tell she was staring at my feet some more. I crossed my toes over each other. I generally tried to cover up my feet as much as possible. I knew they looked strange, but I didn’t think some shaving and toenail polish would accomplish much.

Sure enough, Holly noticed the same thing. “You know, you have huge feet for your height. I’m, what—six inches taller than you. And you and I actually wear the same size. An 8.”

“Really?” I didn’t care.

“I have dozens of shoes just your size at my apartment, and back at Jamie’s house. He never sent them to me. I think he was holding on to them for sentimental reasons.”

That didn’t sound much like Jamie to me.

“I could tell you how to sneak in the window.”

“I am not going to your apartment and taking your shoes.” The thought was very creepy. And besides, the police had probably not even started letting people into it. If they had, her parents would be cleaning stuff out. And that was not how I wanted to introduce myself to them for the first time since the wedding.

“Look, I’ve got to go.” I put on the black casual flats.

“Those are so ugly. They make you look even shorter, with even bigger feet.”

It was now thirty minute until the funeral. I had to get the kids to a babysitter and drive to the church. I had to leave in five minutes. And with five kids, you never leave in five minutes.

I didn’t hear from her again.

I figured the kids scared her away.

At the funeral, I walked in late and stepped in to hear my brother Jamie speaking. He was having a hard time with it, kept having to stop and take a breath so he could wipe away tears. And Holly had complained he wasn’t in touch with his emotions, or that he didn’t have any, like the rest of us.

I was an idiot. I had forgotten to bring any tissue. I didn’t go to funerals a lot, and I didn’t usually cry at them. I had not expected to cry at this one. But at the thought of Holly taking her own life, and all those moments with her children, because of despair over the mistakes she’d made—I had to run to the bathroom and get some toilet paper. When I was growing up, we never had tissue paper. We always used wadded up toilet paper which my mom carried around in her purse, because it was cheap.

I half expected Holly to drift in over my shoulder and make some comments about my mother’s penny pinching which has abused us all socially and personally. But she isn’t there.

She’s probably watching the funeral, I thought.

Or maybe she’s just gone. Maybe once the funeral starts, the ghosts have to go back to the body and wait to be buried and that’s why she was so frantic about spending time with someone—anyone—who would listen to her. Even me.

I went back and dabbed at my eyes with wadded up toilet paper until the funeral was over. I talked to a few of her old friends, who, it turned out, were not so very friendly with her anymore. I didn’t talk to anyone at the funeral who had spent time with her in the last two years. If she had friends, they hadn’t come here. And what did that say about them? That they didn’t like funerals?

There was a luncheon following the funeral, in the gym of the church. Hardwood floors covered in many layers of lacquer. Basketball hoops over head, and lines painted for the pine wood derby beneath. Scratch marks that had been coated years back. Card tables covered with wooden circles and white lacey tablecloths. Funeral potatoes. Green jello salad with carrot bits floating in the top, but thankfully, no cottage cheese. White rolls that could have been turned into balloons. And ham, lots of ham.

I sat by my brother Jamie and we chatted about the weather, about his job, about my parents, who were out of the country and couldn’t make it in time. Then I got daring.

“Jamie, did you and Holly ever talk about—people who came back to just hang out, you know, after they were dead?”

Jamie admitted that Holly had had a couple of friends who died, and who she thought hadn’t really gone away. “They were drug addicts mostly. Maybe they didn’t want to go to wherever they were permanently headed. Or maybe they just didn’t know where to go next. They were pretty mixed up.”

I took a bite of funeral potatoes. I didn’t look him in the eye. “Jamie, you’re going to think I’m crazy, but I think that Holly came and talked to me this morning. I have no idea why.”

Jamie took this pretty well. He didn’t shift away from me or lean in closer to see if my pupils were dilated from drug use. “Huh. Could be,” he said.

“It was really weird. She kept giving me fashion advice. I think it was really her. Why would I tell myself how ugly my feet were?”

Jamie, wisely, did not comment on this. I suppose I have Holly to thank for that. Any of my other brothers would have loved to tell me about my feet issues.

“Was she angry?” asked Jamie.

“Well, sort of pissed. But not at anyone in particular. Just at life in general. Kind of like she had PMS or something.”

“Well, maybe death does that to you,” said Jamie.

I stared at him, trying to figure out if that was a joke or not. It was sometimes hard to tell in my family.

“Look, Jamie. She said something about shoes. She had a lot of shoes at your house that you never sent her. And she said they were all in my size.”

Jamie’s eyes went wide. “You want her shoes?”

I felt like an idiot. “No, no. I’m just telling you what she told me.”

“Seriously,” said Jamie. “I need to get rid of her shoes. She left—like—a hundred pair of them. She would never come get them. I have them all boxed up in the basement. I feel bad just throwing them out, but I don’t know if anyone at goodwill wants shoes from a dead person.”

“I’m sure they don’t care,” I said. “I bet they get lots of clothes and stuff from people who die. There’s nothing wrong with their stuff, just because they’re dead.”

“But the stuff they were wearing when they died?” asked Jamie.

“Well, yeah, that would be kind of gross.” But I thought about the fact that Holly hadn’t been wearing anything when she died. And I didn’t want to go there.

“So, will you come over to the house and take the shoes?”

“All of them?” I didn’t know what I would do with a hundred pairs of shoes.

“Take as many as you want. Like I said, I will probably just throw the rest away, eventually. When I can stand to do it.”

“Why didn’t she just take them to her apartment with her? Why did she leave them with you?”

“I don’t know. I think it was this sentimental thing with her. She’d bought those shoes in that house and she felt like they had to stay there. Or she wanted to have shoes there in case she ever came back to stay for the night. You know, like she was marking her territory, and as long as she kept the shoes there it was still her house.”

“Even after the divorce?” I asked.

He shrugged. “That was Holly for you. She had weird ideas about shoes.”

“What about all the other shoes? The ones in her new apartment?”

“Yeah, she had hundreds there, too. I think her mother is taking them. I don’t care. I don’t want to have any other stuff to deal with. I have enough.”

I felt bad then, talking to him about shoes in the middle of his wife (ex-wife’s) funeral luncheon.

“Promise me you’ll come with me right after to get the shoes?” he asked urgently.

“OK,” I said.

I thought he would forget about it. He had to go around talking to a bunch of other people, relatives that we only saw at funerals these days. Holly’s parents. Her mother draped over Jamie’s shoulder and wept and hugged him a lot. Holly’s father hugged him a lot, too.

Finally, the funeral potatoes had been eaten, the rolls had been smashed and the green jello had gone down the sink. The tables were cleared, the tablecloths in the washing machine, and the big brooms were taking care of the basketball floor.

I was ready to go. I’d stayed long past the hour I’d told the babysitter. I hoped she hadn’t just left the kids alone.

I was about to leave when Jamie caught me. “You’re coming to get those shoes, aren’t you?” he said.

“Well, if you’re sure,” I said.

“I’m sure. I do not want Holly’s shoes. We fought enough about them when she was alive. I swear, she had to have more shoes than she had all her other clothes put together. It was like she thought buying shoes would fill something inside her. She’d put a pair on and the world would be different.”

“Was it?” I asked.

“Maybe for a little while, but it never lasted. And she had to go buy more shoes.”

“Uh—Jamie. Do you mind if I ask a personal question? Did you ever tell her she had ugly feet? Or big feet? Or say anything bad about her feet to give her some kind of phobia?”

“Her feet? Why would I care about her feet? Feet are for walking. I didn’t even notice her feet.”

Well, maybe that was the problem. Especially when she was overweight, she might have wanted him to notice nothing but her feet. I didn’t know!

I drove behind Jamie back to his house. It was huge, twice as big as mine, and immaculate as when they had been married. I always thought she was the clean freak, but clearly it was not true.

“Come down here,” he said.

I went down to the basement with him. Sure enough, there was a room full of boxes and boxes of shoes, all thrown together haphazardly, some next to mates and some not.

“Try them on. See which ones you want to take.”

I put on a pair of sandals. They looked great. Also, they were comfortable.

“How long ago did she buy these?” They looked very fashionable to my eye, but I guess my eye wasn’t very current.

“A couple of years ago, but she never wore them much. She never wore any of her shoes much. They’re still practically brand new.”

I tried on another pair, pumps. They fit perfectly. They looked great. With a little shaving of the top of my foot, I could even wear them without nylons.

“Please, take as many as you can,” said Jamie.

“I’ll take them all,” I said in a burst of enthusiasm.

“Are you sure? You’re not just going to take them to the dump, are you?”

“No, I’m taking them home. I’ll put some in my closet and some in the basement. They’ll be like a shoe store that I don’t have to pay for, where everything is the right size.”

Jamie helped me put everything in the back of the minivan, but when I drove home, I had to leave the shoes out in the car while I dealt with kids.

It wasn’t until after dinner and bedtime that I had a chance to go back and unload.

And that was when Holly came back. I guess the funeral hadn’t dissipated her, after all.

“I told you they were good shoes,” she said.

“Yeah, thanks. I appreciate it.”

“I’m a nice person, you know. You always thought I was selfish, but I’m not. I never was.”

“I can see that.”

“Plus, it’s painful to think that my shoes are going to waste. You know, ghosts don’t have any use for shoes. I think that’s the worst thing about being dead.”

“Well, I’ll take care good care of your shoes.”

“Will you? I think that’s all I needed to know. Goodbye.”

I never heard from her again after that. And it wasn’t until my first daughter got married that I had to go shopping for a pair of shoes that wasn’t in the basement.