Pandora's Closet

She passed her old high school painting, still hanging on the landing despite Phil’s scoffing. She had tried, in her amateur way, to capture the colors, to remember them. Now the sun had faded them to the same brown she saw everywhere around her.

Lin’s bedroom door opened on chaos, the bed unmade, the floor littered with clothes, shoes, scattered schoolbooks. The years of her daughter’s childhood seemed to Dorothy at once endless and unbearably brief. She couldn’t remember the last time Lin had kissed her, or hugged her. When, she wondered, as she bent to pick up a pair of black jeans, had her daughter begun to disdain anything she said and everything she did? It had happened gradually, inching up on Dorothy until, all at once, her daughter had escaped her. She hadn’t seen it coming. She didn’t know what she could have done about it, or should have done about it. Maybe it was because Lin’s childhood was so different from her own. Or maybe Lin was following Phil’s example. He had not hugged or kissed Dorothy in a long time, either.

Dorothy crossed to the hamper with the jeans, and as she reached for the lid, she caught sight of herself in the mirror above the bureau. She stopped and stared at her reflection.

The jeans hanging from her hands were impossibly narrow. Had she ever, when she was twelve, been so slim-hipped? She straightened, holding them before her. She was twice the size of these jeans now, round-bodied, soft of breast and stomach. Even her hair had begun to gray in the front, the way Aunt Emily’s had. In fact, she had begun to look like Aunt Emily. It was a look she had taken for granted when she was young, as if Emily had been born that way, looking as if the sun had baked her dry, the prairie winds weathered her like the boards of the barn. And now the sun and the wind-and her life-were doing the same to Dorothy.

Dorothy dropped the jeans in the hamper and bent across Lin’s bed to untangle her sheets and blanket. She plumped the pillow, letting her hand linger a moment in the shallow depression where her daughter’s head had lain. She picked up the quilt to fold it across the foot of the bed.

Aunt Emily had made the quilt, in a wedding-ring pattern, its blue and red circles faded now. Dorothy traced them with her finger, remembering her long-ago wedding shower. How different the world had seemed on that day. It had been full of promise. Full of color.

Dorothy’s vision blurred with sudden tears. She dropped the quilt, turned her back on the mess, and hurried to her own bedroom. She ignored her own unmade bed-Phil had pulled the sheets loose again-and went to the closet. She slid the mirrored door aside and knelt to reach far into the back.

Her fingers scrabbled through boots and pumps and old sandals until she felt the stiff edges of the heavy, old-fashioned pasteboard box. She pulled it out and then stopped, listening to be certain she could hear the grumble of the tractor moving compost behind the barn. Phil must have found some oil after all, she thought resentfully. He could have told her, could have apologized, but he wouldn’t do that. She couldn’t remember him ever having apologized for anything. At least he was occupied, so he wouldn’t interrupt her. This box was her secret.

She got stiffly to her feet and carried the box to the bed, setting it on the tumbled blanket. Slowly, slowly, she lifted the lid and gently folded back the layers of tissue.

She had not looked at them in a very long time. They lay i

Of magic.

She touched the shoes with one finger and felt their power surge through her skin, tingle up her arm, shiver in her chest.

Dorothy pulled her hand back. She glanced up at the mirror that lined the closet door, seeing a plain woman with one pudgy hand at her throat. A dull woman, whose life had lost every shred of its magic. She looked back at the ruby shoes, yearning toward them.

No, no, she told herself. She couldn’t. She shouldn’t.

She left the open box on the bed and crossed to the window. She lifted the print curtains she had made on her old Singer machine and gazed out at the fields. The sky was a flat, lifeless bowl, as if the sun had faded it, too. The sun glared on the house and the barn, the pigsty, the milk cows huddling in the shade of the silo. None of it had seemed so bleak in her childhood. In those days, possibility shone from every leaf, every wheat stalk. When she was young, enchantment rose with the sun every new day, and she had run, with her little dog at her side, to meet it.

Dorothy rested her forehead against the glass and let the tears roll down her cheeks. How had she come to settle for this? How had she let this happen, that her husband spoke to her only to criticize, and that her only child treated her like a piece of furniture?

It was her own fault, of course. She had drifted into it, letting the independent girl she had been transform into someone else, someone she didn’t recognize.

Dorothy turned back, letting the curtain fall closed behind her, and stared at the vivid shoes sparkling from their box. Lin would sneer at them, call them old-fashioned. Phil would have a fit if he even knew she had them. She had hidden them away the day he asked her to marry him.

The sudden wish that he hadn’t married her, after all, made her press her hands to her eyes. That wasn’t right. If she hadn’t married Phil, if they hadn’t taken over the farm after Emily passed away-she would never have had Lin. She could hardly wish her daughter away, could she? She could hardly… no matter how bad things were…

Dorothy dried her cheeks and dropped her hands. The shoes glimmered their scarlet invitation.

She had resisted their temptation for such a long time. Not for her the scotch bottle, or romance novels, or soap operas. For her there were only these ruby shoes.

As if in a trance, one foot before the other, she moved back to the bed. She knelt on the rug and reached for the shoes.

She turned them this way and that, letting the sun glint on their sequins. Their rounded toes and stubby heels were out of date, but Dorothy didn’t care about fashion. What she cared about, what she longed for, was magic.

She cradled the shoes against her chest. She knew why she had kept them in the back of her closet, why she had hidden them all these years. They signified something that threatened her life with Phil and with Lin. They seemed to sing in her hands, to call her away. They invited her to step out into enchantment. They were, like the Dewar’s and the romance novels, an escape.

Her toes curled with the urge to put them on.

Dorothy set the shoes neatly on the floor, side by side. She kicked out of her house slippers. She fitted her feet, first the left, and then the right, into the shoes.

They felt wonderful on her feet! She had thought the heels might be uncomfortable after years of wearing flats, but they were perfect. They made her ankles looked trim, her calves seem longer. Even her cotton skirt looked crisper above the ruby glow of the shoes. Smiling, Dorothy lifted her eyes to the mirror.

Her eyes shone with a gleam of excitement. Her cheeks glowed, and the gray in her hair looked like threads of silver in the morning light. Even her waist looked smaller, perhaps because of the heels, or perhaps…

Perhaps the magic still existed.

Dorothy took a step closer to the mirror, pulling off her apron as she moved, dropping it to the floor. Behind her the jumble of bedclothes, the glare of sun on the wheatfields, faded to a blur. She caught her lower lip between her teeth. She shouldn’t do it, of course. It was silly, and childish, but…