The State We're In: Maine Stories Read Online Free Page A

take me to Central Park. One had asthma.
    I was seventeen when Roy and Sophie separated and eighteen when they divorced. They’d never had children, but I always knew she wished I was hers. Sometimes when I was growing up, she’d point to little boys on the street and say she was glad she wasn’t stuck with one of them. I usually agreed, because they always seemed wound up and they tended to breathe through their mouths and to have dirt or food on their faces.
    I was eighteen when I saw her with the champagne baskets protruding beneath her blouse. She was absolutely straight-faced, because she was good at pulling a joke. She’d taught me not to pop my eyes like my mother and then immediately look down if we saw somebody strange or outlandish. She explained that their appearance might be intentionally funny, and we wouldn’t want to appear unsophisticated and react negatively to the joke. Of course the majority of people just passed us by, but I tended to take her word for which of those people intended to be funny with their attire and which didn’t.
    She could tell instantly whether someone was aware she was dressed ludicrously or was just a loser. Even weird, old-fashioned hats didn’t confuse Aunt Sophie. To me, the length of the feather or the amount of swirled netting or the rhinestone clips were indecipherable, but she could tell if a man dressed as a woman in line at the drugstore was kidding or serious. She explained that it would be rude to laugh at a man who thought he looked nice. Little old ladies—the ones that came out of certain apartment buildings—she discounted as being in a time warp. Age was a big factor in whether someone was putting on the audience, but I didn’t see clearly, as she did, whether someone was fifty or seventy; they just looked old.
    She coached me, but it seemed like almost every case was different and I would never have an eye for nuance. She dressed a lot of different ways herself, though I never saw her wear a hat. Sophie wore high heels, kitten heels, ballet flats in wild colors, tennis shoes, and espadrilles. When she went to work, she favored platform slings, though she sometimes wore red Keds and put on stiletto heels when she got to work. In her opinion, shoes were something people did not kid about. They might buy a dress because they knew it was ridiculously girlie, or wear a color such as bright orange that was meant to shock. But whatever shoes they had on, they weren’t joking: ugly shoes they knew to be ugly shoes, though thank heavens it had become as fashionable to wear ugly shoes as attractive ones—or really any kind of shoe you wanted. Many kinds of shoes cut across class lines, such as clogs with closed backs. Nurses wore them, waitresses wore them, but so did college students and rich ladies walking their little dogs on the Upper West Side (East Side shoes were totally different). I pretty much understood Sophie’s point, but I still found certain distinctions hard to make. Boots? She explained that because they always cost so much, boots automatically conveyed wealth. Sophie granted my point that if we were somewhere else, there might be some confusion about boots, but the bottom line was that they were not working-class footwear in New York City. Also, you had to invest a lot of time in breaking them in, so however strange they looked—reptilian or gold-cap-toed, bright purple with stacked heels—they were never a joke joke.
    I kept it in the back of my mind that if I married Bryce Seward (I had such a crush on him), I’d just ask Sophie to pick out absolutely everything I’d wear on my wedding day. I had previously thought I might marry McGann O’Marra and Jerry Underwood—in fifth and sixth grade, respectively. Then came the long stretch of believing that I would never marry anyone. That no one would ever want to marry me. All Jerry Underwood really wanted to do, it was clear to me, was to draw concentric circles around my budding breasts with