Someone Else's Shoes

by Jojo Moyes

She never has any time. She says it like a mantra, along with “I’m so tired.” But nobody has any time. Everybody is tired.

Sam is at that age, the age where all the wrong things seem somehow to stick, fat, the groove between her eyebrows, anxiety, while everything else—job security, marital happiness, dreams—seems to slip effortlessly away.

There are some advantages to being an American woman over forty who no longer has any fucks left on the shelf, and he can see it. It is the first thing she has felt glad about all week.

Imagine being the kind of woman who wears these shoes every day, she thinks. Imagine living the kind of life where you only ever walk short distances across marble floors. Imagine having nothing to worry about except whether your pedicure matches your expensive shoes.

The problem with having more than one home is that the thing you want at any given time is nearly always in another place. Likewise, the problem with only having rich people as friends is that they are always in the wrong damn country.

Nisha is used to being looked at—she has always drawn attention—but it is for being fit and beautiful and privileged. These looks, she sees, are suffused with pity, or wariness, or even revulsion.

suddenly grateful that, for this day in her life at least, she is not wearing a pair of beautifully handmade couture high heels, but a pair of cheap and nasty perfectly flat pumps.

There is a particularly vindictive tenor to the kind of hangover that occurs in your forties, as if the body, not content with acting as if it has been poisoned, also decides to send furious signals across all nerve endings: How old do you think you are? Was that really a sensible idea? Hmm? Think you’re still young enough to play hard? WELL, TRY THIS.

“How many of the decisions you make each day are because you actually want to do something, and how many are to avoid the consequences of not doing it?”

Sometimes Sam feels she has been so conditioned to be useful every minute of every day that there is almost nothing she does in which she is not simultaneously keeping a subconscious tally. Do men hear this constant inner voice, telling them constantly to strive to be better, to be productive, to be useful?

Nisha realized afterward, she hadn’t really thought she was going to be asked to do anything. She had thought perhaps she could just don the uniform and disappear into the bowels of the building, work out how she could make her way into her suite.

I can’t watch the news because it makes me want to bury my head under the duvet,

‘Never marry a man you wouldn’t want to be divorced from.’

Import-export.

“It is hard to be so angry if you have eaten good food,”

“But you don’t seem to . . . have a lot of room.” “I don’t. But you have none. So there we are.

“Maybe you have to think about all the things about your old life that you didn’t enjoy and say, ‘Okay, so here is an opportunity to start again. Perfect freedom. No ties. Maybe this is the dream.’ Maybe one day you will even be happier than you were.” “With no money, no home and none of my things? That’s the biggest bunch of Hallmark greetings-card self-help crap I’ve ever heard.” She inhales angrily. “Perhaps. But if you cannot change your situation, then you have no choice. You can only change how you think about it.”

“Jesus. Why are adults so complicated? You’d think you’d have sorted it all out by the time you were in your forties.”

as the only son you were the focus of a lot of attention. That much undiluted attention can be both a good and a bad thing.”

Strength—real strength—is not doing what someone asks you, necessarily. Strength is turning up every day to a situation that is intolerable, unbearable even, just to support the people you love. Strength is being in that terrible room hour after hour even though every cell in your body is telling you it’s too much for you to cope with.”

“It’s nice enough. But I don’t think anyone really sets out to end their days in a care home, do they?”

There is a shorthand in women this age, Sam realizes. There is none of the sharp elbows of their twenties and thirties, not an ounce of competitiveness. By their late forties and fifties, they’re all survivors, of death, divorce, disease, trauma, of something.

she feels icky about touching someone’s feet).

“You have self-respect. You have friends. You have satisfaction every day, of a job well done. You have agency over your own life. These are not small things.”

“I was wearing those shoes because . . . well, because sometimes you need to feel like a different version of yourself.”

“when we’re low, it can be easy to see everything through a prism of negativity. Human beings are remarkably bad at understanding other people’s motivations, even when they know them terribly well. We write all sorts of inaccurate stories in our heads.”

this makes me feel good, but it doesn’t make me feel like a good person.

The world is full of lasts, she thinks. The last time you pick up your child. The last time you hug a parent. The last time you cook dinner in a house full of the people you love. The last time you make love to the husband you once adored who will walk away from you because you turned into a crazy, resentful hormone-fueled idiot. And with all these moments you don’t know that this will be the last or you would be overwhelmed by the poignancy of them, hang on to them like someone unhinged, bury your face in them, never let them go.