Dark and Deepest Red(11)

And this would be the thing to remind them that I was nothing like them. It would call attention to my brown skin and brown-black hair. It would remind them that whenever I bought something new, I wore it twice the first week, while they all had so many tags-on things in their closets that they forgot about them.

This would be what set me aside from them, that a pair of red shoes enchanted with this year’s glimmer had yet to appear on my windowsill or by my bed.

But when I got home from getting the crunchy, fluffy ice my mother and I loved, pieces of beaded red satin and velvet lay on the floor of my room.

Without bending for a closer look, I recognized them.

The cut-up scraps I’d saved eleven years ago. The last I had of my grandparents’ work, both of them dying within months of each other when I was seven.

I let out a breathless laugh, both at the memory and the beauty of the stitching.

For eleven years, I had kept them in the back of my closet, wrapped in mushroom-colored tissue paper, and now they had swept out like a whirl of bright leaves. It felt like both a blessing from my abuelo and a pointed remark from my abuela.

This was how I could honor the beautiful pair of shoes my grandmother had cut into confetti.

I had learned since that night that if I never wanted families like the Tamsins or the Everleys to make me give up a piece of myself I had made by hand, the best way was to become like their daughters. I had done it for years, and I would do it again. Like their daughters, I would wear red shoes this fall.

But I would do it the way my abuelo and abuela would have wanted.

I had grown up among leather awls and dyed thread. At three, I played with empty wooden spools instead of blocks. At eight, I knew how to measure a shoe’s side seam, and at ten, how to run a drawstring through a slipper’s casing without bunching it.

I picked up the scraps of beaded cloth.

I was an Oliva. If I wanted the kind of shoes my friends were wearing—shoes that might spark love, or inspire the making of midnight polvorones—of course I would have to sew them myself.





Strasbourg, 1518


“Try it for yourself.” Melisende holds out a dish of pale yellow coins. Small rounds of butter.

Lala stares at the dish. She has never seen anyone eat butter on its own, not even the wealthiest Strasbourgeois. Is this a test, to see if she will do it? Will they laugh if she places one on her tongue?

Being liked by these girls has shielded Lala from Strasbourg’s inquiring glances. But it comes at the cost of them thinking her strange and intriguing, with her rough palms, her confusion about delicate manners, and the fantastic rumors Tante has started to explain their brown skin.

She looks to Enneleyn, the first of the burgher’s daughters who ever offered her friendship, and the one whose lead Lala follows whenever she is unsure.

All Enneleyn says is, “You must be joking.”

“It works,” Agnesona insists, taking one and rubbing it into her cheek.

Then Lala understands.

There is no end to Melisende and Agnesona’s schemes to render their hair more gleaming, their complexions more luminous, their forms more radiant. Two girls, considered the most beautiful in the city except Enneleyn, and they work without rest for it. Last week they dabbed on brimstone ground with oil of turpentine for red spots.

Their limbs are delicate as carved alabaster, their fingers slender and uncalloused. It is the look of having been raised within the city walls, in the wealthier quarters. They let the sun on their faces so little they must pinch their cheeks for the slightest blush. If not for the brilliant red of their curls, the sisters would seem almost colorless, while Enneleyn, with her cloth-of-gold hair, has lips as pink as stained glass.

It took months for Lala to learn not to stare at Enneleyn, trying to guess how she might become such a girl, so adored it would make her and Tante a little safer.

Melisende turns her face toward the window. The grease gleams on her cheekbone. “Look.”

Lala would sooner pocket a coin of butter than smear it onto her skin.

“Has she shown you the one she will not even share with me?” Agnesona snatches a jar from a low table.

“Give that back!” Melisende shouts.

But Enneleyn has already taken the jar, filled with a deep amber liquid that holds a point of light at its center.

Enneleyn lifts the jar. “What is it?”

“It’s birch sap.” Melisende tries to snatch it back.

Enneleyn holds it out of reach.

“With a pearl in it,” Agnesona says, laughing. “See how the sap is dissolving it.”

“Lavinia, look.” Enneleyn tilts the jar toward Lala, showing how the sap eats at the creamy sheen.

These girls, with their Veronese raisins to brighten their complexions, the Tuscan oil they comb through their hair, their dust-rose gowns for Carnival. These girls from whom Lala hides her hands so they will not see the stains and calluses wrought by work. These girls, who only showed interest in Lala when rumors Tante started took hold. Tante planted the bulb, the first whispers that she and Lala were the cast-off issue of Italian noblemen. And it bloomed, quietly explaining the brown of their skin. It flowered so well that no one remembers that Tante herself started it.

It has had the unexpected advantage of making Lala interesting to girls such as Melisende and Agnesona. They would never bother with her otherwise, no more than they would bother with Geruscha and Henne.