Going Away Shoes

by Jill McCorkle

Genres: Short Stories; Historical Fiction

Synopsis

"[A] remarkable collection . . . Bold and addictive, Going Away Shoes is a find." —People

The foibles of the people in Jill McCorkle’s world are so familiar that we want nothing so much as to watch them walk into—and then get out of—life’s inevitable traps. Here, in her first collection in eight years, McCorkle collects eleven brand-new stories bristling with her characteristic combination of wit and weight.

In honeymoon shoes, mud-covered hunting boots, or glass slippers, all of the women in these stories march to a place of new awareness, in one way or another, transforming their lives. They make mistakes, but they don’t waste time hiding behind them. They move on. They are strong. And they’re funny, even when they are sad.

These stories are the work of a great storyteller who knows exactly how—and why—to pair pain with laughter.

Release date: September 14, 2010

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 288

Sample

Praise for Going Away Shoes

“[A] remarkable collection . . . Bold and addictive, Going Away Shoes is a find.”

—People

“McCorkle is an expert at engineering catharsis through good salty rants, but the best thing about these stories is the sense of romance and wonder in long-overdue journeys of self-discovery.”

—The New York Times Book Review

“Come along on a journey of humor, regret and redemption with this collection of remarkable short stories. The title tale . . . offers an insightful look at the hopes we have for love and life . . . The rest of the stories fulfill the promise of the first, evoking laughter and tears with the strikingly real voices and lives of McCorkle’s 3-D characters.”

—Working Mother

“The best, most artful McCorkle stories ever. Going Away Shoes is laugh-out-loud funny, full of sharp, incisive humor that explains us to ourselves, opens the soul of the sweetest sadnesses with common-sense wisdom, and dispenses hard-won hope by the bucketful. Jill McCorkle is the guardian angel of American short fiction, and these stories are good news for literature. Readers, pack your bags and prepare for a journey home, wherever you are!”

—Jayne Anne Phillips, author of Lark and Termite

“McCorkle’s latest book gives us 11 reasons to smile . . . 11 cheerfully furious stories about women who have come to a screeching halt in their pursuit of happiness . . . The joy of reading and rereading each of these marvelous stories is to discover the truths encoded into each step of every hard-won journey —and to find ourselves along the way.”

—The Atlanta Journal Constitution

“Dazzles with its amiably risky mix of humor, pathos, and down-home Southern wisdom . . . McCorkle renders these familiar yet unique life passages and events with the compassion and sure-handedness she has shown in three previous collections, such as Creatures of Habit, and five novels.”

—Elle

“McCorkle is a talented writer with the ability to illuminate the tiny moments that lie within the larger substance of a woman’s life . . . [She] deftly captures those moments of quiet crisis and contemplation and shares them with the world.”

—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“There are writers who seem to write it like it is —the quietness of their characters is not exaggerated, nor is their drama. They could live down the street or in the next apartment. Jayne Anne Phillips, Antonia Nelson —these are writers whose characters have no special aura, no golden ticket. Jill McCorkle’s characters are like this.”

—Los Angeles Times

“These spirited and surprising stories are powered by humor and hard-won understanding of the lacerating effects of union. The result: admirable women who are ‘sure-footed and steady in real time.’ ”

—Amy Hempel, author of The Dog of the Marriage

“This sure-footed collection is a tribute to women’s power to choose . . . McCorkle’s strength is an earthy sensibility mixed with strong intelligence . . . The stories are small tributes to tenacity and spirit and choice —even when that choice is simply to keep putting one foot in front of the other.”

—The Miami Herald

“Jill McCorkle’s short stories are all little treasures —rich with humor and humanity.”

—The Louisville Courier-Journal

“Jill McCorkle’s new collection treads deftly into realms of family and women’s lives . . . [A] diamond-faceted work . . . McCorkle inhabits her characters . . . uniquely, authentically, humanly.”

—The Charlotte Observer

“Sometimes fiction gives us a close-up, and other times a wide-angle shot. When we’re lucky, a story delivers two-for-one, that intimate picture of a face, a kitchen table or a pair of work boots that illuminates the entire so-called human condition. Jill McCorkle has the eye —and the ear —for that kind of portrait . . . Every story has its share of rueful, kick-butt humor.”

—The Cleveland Plain Dealer

“One of our favorite short-story writers, McCorkle delivers 11 new tales of love, strong characters, and down-and-dirty life. Her characters say and do the things you always want to say and do but don’t.”

—American Way

“McCorkle is an acute observer of the foibles of domestic life . . . She blends empathy for her characters’ predicaments with an unsparing take on those grim circumstances. Still, McCorkle’s stories don’t lack for humor.”

—BookPage

“McCorkle’s name is synonymous with smart, funny, and perceptive fiction about the disappointments and comforts of ordinary life. In her new set of perfectly crafted, emotionally intricate, and welcoming short stories, McCorkle considers moral quandaries, and how people fumble their way into doing the right thing . . . McCorkle’s sharp humor is matched by moral acuity, and her down-to-earth sensibility is paired with a sense of higher powers.”

—Booklist

“By necessity, short story writers must craft details with precision, distilling a character into a few spot-on sentences. This is a skill well-honed in Jill McCorkle’s work . . . These small moments, which suffuse everyday life with meaning, are what make McCorkle’s stories so powerful.”

—ForeWord

“Another fine collection from short-fiction master McCorkle . . . The author’s trademark gifts —vivid, economical characterizations, distinctive voices, fierce intelligence —are evident on every page.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“Reading the stories in Jill McCorkle’s Going Away Shoes, I kept thinking ‘pleasure’ . . . These stories provide what brilliant fiction always provides —insight, felt life, voices of others, fascination —but more than anything else, they give pleasure. They take me places I have not been. They make me laugh and then cry by turns, and in short they make me feel my own life more vividly. There isn’t another thing anyone can ask of this superior art form.”

—Richard Bausch, author of Peace

Debby Tyler is a mythical stereotype, the oldest child who stays home to tend the sick and dying mother while her sisters marry and have prosperous lives elsewhere. They pity her, she can tell. They tell her stories of late-blooming love and how they want to send her on a cruise, something batted around every year before the holidays but has yet to materialize. “It could happen, Debby,” they say. “Remember The Love Boat?”

Does she remember The Love Boat? Shit. She still watches The Love Boat on those afternoons when she needs sounds and distractions but is too tired to read. What do they think she can possibly do all day while emptying a bedpan and answering to nonsensical screams and requests and more recently just monitoring vital signs and preventing bedsores. She knows all the reruns, nature shows, game shows, and soaps. Though when all is said and done, the soaps are the best place to be —vapid and dramatic people and situations and thus familiar to what she has witnessed her whole life in this very house.

The Tyler family myth is old, overused, and unoriginal and yet very much alive, as family myths are in so many households, feeding and thriving on the pretense that everyone is happy and A-OK, that in fact they are a unique family to be so happy and A-OK. And of course there are a few characters in the family. The lineage includes an Icarus type, brilliant but doomed Uncle Ted, who crashed his Cessna, killing himself and two women he’d met at a convention called BoyToysRUs while en route to another convention called Beat Me in St. Louis. And a Persephone, rescued by her mother from the underworld, in the form of Wanda, Debby’s sister, who was shacked up with Paulie Long in a drug den, and their mother got all dressed up and drove down to Smyrna to get her. Wanda then had to go to rehab, which was referred to as “Wanda’s much needed vacation from the stresses of young womanhood.” The experience returned her rigid and righteous and ready to save any and all who were on a different path, a choice in Debby’s opinion that was just as bad and should be illegal.

Debby’s other sister, Carly, would be Narcissus. She always has an eye in a mirror or window while watching herself conduct The Carly Show, which is all about Carly’s face and body, what’s new and changing. In fact, Carly, Wanda, and their mother all fit the Narcissus profile, whole lives jockeying for the hall mirror or those on the car visors. Even on Debby’s graduation day, when she needed somebody to button that shitty white eyelet empire-waist dress she was made to wear, she could not get help because they were all involved in doing their own hair and hose and zippers as if they were the ones about to stand up as salutatorian and say the prayer. God, don’t let me turn into them, she prayed in that moment, before really offering a more general prayer about healthy strong minds and those people who nurture them. She saw them there in the front row —her father dozing, mother turning to nod to those who wanted to tell her what a good job she had done with Debby, sisters looking around to see who might be looking at them and interested in asking them out.

“I still don’t see why you left out the Lord,” her mother said afterwards. “I had written it on your paper —‘In Jesus name I pray.’ Didn’t you see where I wrote that?” Her mother went on to say how her dress was buttoned crooked, how on earth did that happen. She bet the people there on the stage —the principal and vice principal and that girl she should have beaten out for the better spot —noticed it, too.

Sometimes Debby felt like Prometheus. Just when she got her liver healthy and plump again, the eagle descended to peck on it. The eagle with piercingly dramatic mascaraed eyes and talons done perfectly in Revlon’s Rich Girl Red.

Dear God, next time I have a whole liver, please break the chains and let me catch a Greyhound the fuck out of here.

It’s hard to watch a soap opera and not feel somewhat better about your own life —they have such huge problems and such stupid ways of expressing them. They say “I don’t understand” every other line, which is a stall tactic used to carry things over to a commercial. It’s like back before they had the shot clock in basketball and a team could just stand there dribbling and passing the time away. That’s what she’s doing there at her mother’s bedside, dribbling and passing the time away.

The caretaker. She is the caretaker. They call her this with praise in their voices, usually after mentioning the phantom cruise, other times after reciting all the wonderful things they have recently accomplished, a recital that never allows them to look her in the eye. They look so little they didn’t even notice she has recently highlighted her hair, that she is in great condition —better abs than either of them —thanks to Sunrise Pilates on the local channel.

And there’s the real answer: they can’t look and see her as a person with needs and desires the same as theirs. That would be way too difficult. There is clearly some shame, just not enough. They can rationalize that she gets to live for free because she is the one stationed in their mother’s house. That’s what the slave owners said, too. Good room and board. They have convinced themselves that were she not tending their mother, Debby would be all alone in some piece of crap house barely making ends meet. (She never came close to marriage, they often say.) They all know that the will provides for equal distribution of everything, including this house, and no one has ever suggested it should be otherwise. “If I have a dollar when I die,” their mother has said since they were children, “then each of my girls will get thirty-three cents and we will give that final cent to the Lord.”

“Wow,” Debby said once, laughing, “the Lord won’t know what to do with all that.” She was still working full-time at the local paper then, covering social events and activities in town: engagement and retirement and silver wedding anniversary celebrations, ceremonies for Eagle Scouts and 4-H and the DAR. She was thorough without being boring; in fact people often told her they felt that they had been present at an event, she described it so well. She tried to make the most modest attempts (a church fellowship hall strewn with confetti, plates of pimento cheese – stuffed celery) seem elegantly simple, and those that were ostentatious (goody bags that equaled a week’s salary for anyone earning minimum wage and floral displays trucked in from out of town) she let speak for themselves. It was a matter of selecting which facts to tell and which to leave out, obviously a tactic she had long observed and studied.

“I’ll give the Lord 10 percent then, and maybe even more,” her mother had said. Sometimes Debby’s mother promised the Lord more when she didn’t like the way Debby wrote something up. “Keep laughing at me, Debby Lynn Tyler, and the Lord will get every last goddamned cent.”

Who knows where Debby would be or what she’d be doing had she not stepped in to help her mother. At the time it was no big deal; it would be a temporary bridge to a retirement village, where her mother might play cards and go on little group trips here and there, have her own little kitchenette. But almost as soon as Debby moved in, things went from bad to worse, and the place they had in mind was no longer an option. Their mother was in between a place where people are still living and thriving and one that is a kind of death row. So Debby is still here and she doesn’t even know herself where she might be otherwise, and in recent years, she has stopped trying to imagine. Now she just freelances on occasion, sharing her expertise with younger reporters about how to describe a wedding without it sounding as awful as it was. “When the bride and groom read their own vows,” she tells them, “don’t even try to quote. And just tell the color of the bridesmaid dresses and that the bride wore white or ivory satin or silk or whatever. Simple is always best.” It takes a while for them to learn, and some of them never do.

Our sister, the caretaker, bless her heart. Of course, if not for mother, she’d be all alone herself.

Caretaker sounds like Debby might be wandering some lovely rose garden, snipping away thorns and breathing in a heavy heavenly perfume. Instead she is changing Depends while trying not to humiliate this woman who gave her life just in case there is a moment of consciousness and clarity, the desire to make amends or to offer something that might resemble love. Those moments of consciousness do not come very often now and haven’t for the last several weeks; the sound of the oxygen tank has taken over the house as if the very walls are expanding and contracting. If it were Debby lying there, she’d want to be unplugged. Nothing has been more horrible to watch than that woman on the news day in and day out, with her people arguing over her fate. If they’d cared at all, they’d have gotten those goddamned cameras out of the room and handled their business in a more dignified way. “Please Release Me, Let Me Go.” —that was her mother’s favorite song years ago, and whenever Debby thinks of it she pictures her mother at the kitchen sink, hair sprayed into a perfect little flip, apron cinched neatly around her wasp waist like all the mothers on the reruns —June Cleaver, Harriet Nelson, Margaret Anderson —only not like them at all.

Please release me, let me go.

Debby has contemplated writing a little note in what looks like her mother’s handwriting saying as much: I never want to be kept alive by unnatural means. Debby could find the note in the bottom of one of her mother’s purses and present it to her siblings the next time they pop in.

The purses —there are at least a hundred. Just two years ago when her mother was still mobile and before Debby moved in full-time, she would arrive to find her mother standing in the doorway waiting. If she came by from work at five in the afternoon, or if she ran outside to check the mail during a visit, when she reached the front door, her mother would be waiting there, purse clutched and ready to go. It reminded Debby of all those stories you hear about dogs, like Roosevelt’s Fala, who never stopped waiting for his master’s return. Or her mother’s ancient chihuahua, Peppy, who never took his cloudy eyes off of his mistress even when he couldn’t move from the tiny heating pad where he spent his last days. The vets would have you believe that dogs have no sense of time, that they don’t sit for a week worried and wondering what you’re doing on vacation. And isn’t it easier to believe that? Debby had hoped that the same was true of her mother, her tiny bird shoulders sloping down, gnarled knuckles clasping tight to a purse. Her world had gotten so small by then, reduced to a closet of shoes and purses that she changed often through the days, transferring a stick of gum and Kleenex, pen and lipstick —from leather to silk to straw and back, as she relived a lifetime of various social events.

Debby remembered the times that she rummaged her mother’s purses, sometimes finding things she didn’t want to see. She had often reached in during church looking for a pen to draw on the bulletin. She liked to do beards and earrings on the pictured preacher and all the deacons. Sometimes she did little speech balloons and made up secret letter/number codes in which she let them say things like, Give it to me, baby. Oh yeah, the kinds of things she had heard on occasion from her parents’ room during their big parties when she and her sisters got all dressed up and served canapés and then did a version of “So Long, Farewell” so their mother could feel like some kind of Maria von Trapp mother of the year.

In church she found hotel keys and toothpicks from a martini —faint fruity liquor traces held tight inside the lining. Lighter and cigarettes —Virginia Slims and then those long thin brown ones —Mores. “I want More,” her mother said often, her comic and dramatic effect demanding the spotlight, not knowing that her desire might arrive years later in the form of lung cancer and dysfunctional children. Inside the depths of those purses was a whole warehouse of information: theater stubs, grocery bills, drugstore receipts. Even now, Debby can stand in front of her mother’s closet and glimpse her own life there. The soft red calfskin purse that brushed her cheek when she grabbed her mom around the waist and begged. . .