Baby Needs a New Pair of Shoes

Oh, well. At least I owned the title of The Golden Squeegee.

And I did love the women I worked with, if for their sheer vibrancy alone, even if they did have a tendency to pick on me.

“Stel-la.” Conchita poked her head between the front seats. “How come she always gets to sit in front?”

“She” was their name for me.

“Because she gets carsick,” Stella explained for the umpteenth time. “And I don’t want her vomiting in my hair.”

“Sounds pretty flimsy to me,” said Rivera. “Have you actually ever seen her get carsick?”

“Well, no,” Stella conceded. “But do any of us really want to?”

A valid argument, I thought, even as I muttered, “‘Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.’” Honestly, did there have to be three of them to devil me?

“What did she say?” Conchita asked.

“Something about fire and bubbles,” Rivera said. “I don’t know. Maybe she’s singing some kind of dumb-ass song?”

“Where are we working today?” Conchita asked.

“First job, a big house in Westport,” Stella said. “Movie star.”

Westport and the towns around it had more movie stars per square mile than anywhere else outside of Hollywood and it seemed that they were all clients of Squeaky Qlean. In fact, we did so many homes belonging to famous people that Stella occasionally flirted with the idea of adding “Window washers to the stars!” to her business cards but worried that her upscale clientele would find that too presumptuous.

“So no salsa dancing on the ladders,” Stella cautioned. “You girls need to act like professionals today. The job is way overpriced and I’m hoping to talk them into having us back each month.”

Monthly window cleaning might seem like a ridiculous expense for a private homeowner, but Stella had secured one such client already, a famous record producer who lived out on the water. When we first did his house, he hadn’t had it done in ten years and he spent the whole morning following me from room to room—I was always the inside person—stoned out of his mind, laughing and muttering, “Clean windows. Way cool. I can see. I can see!” Mister Famous Record Producer had moved in around the time of the Clinton impeachment, something he still hadn’t gotten over all these years later. “The man got impeached for a blow job—a blow job! If people in the music business got fired for that, there’d be no music left anywhere in the world.” Stella had actually needed to talk him out of having us come every week, which was what he originally wanted, and, good as the money was, none of us wanted to listen to him do his “I can see!” number that often or listen to him whine about how Bubba had gotten treated, even those of us who agreed with him. If every window washer lost their job over a…

If traffic was kind and Rte 7 wasn’t one long parking lot, Westport was a good thirty-five minutes from Conchita and Rivera’s apartment, so I pulled out my book and went back to my Hemingway, figuring on getting some reading in. A few more chapters—I’d started the book the night before—and I would have read everything Papa’d ever written.

“What you reading today?” Conchita asked.

I held up the book, showed them the cover.

“No shit, chica,” Rivera said, “but the sun also sets, too, you know, every damn day.”

Indeed.

Stella had not been whistling Windex when she said the client we were doing was a movie star. Elizabeth Hepburn, star of stage and screen, may have been as old as television, but even I, who preferred pages to celluloid, knew who she was. She had two Academy Awards on her mantel—I was tempted to dance with them when she went down for her morning nap, book in hand, but resisted the urge—and had starred in my all-time favorite movie, A Bitter Pill, about a starlet who overcomes her strumpet past only to be taken out by brain cancer on the night of the Oscars. “Did someone turn the lights out in here?” was a line that always made me bawl like a baby and always made Hillary laugh at me for bawling like a baby.

Due to my fear of heights, I was always the inside person. Still, even though there were three of them outside and only one of me inside, despite Stella’s earlier admonitions to take this job seriously, they all goofed around so much that I was done long before they would finish.

Hey, they don’t call me The Golden Squeegee for nothing.

So I grabbed my lunch bag from the van and sat out on a far corner of the fieldstone terrace, figuring no one in the house could object to that too much so long as I cleaned up after myself, and pulled out my now-cold Amy’s Cheese Pizza Pocket, popped open my Diet Pepsi Lime and polished off my Hemingway.

Food done; drink done; book, and therefore all of Hemingway, done. Crap, I hadn’t thought to bring a backup book. What was taking the other three so long?

“Miss?” The voice was tentative and a bit shaky, as though the speaker was recovering from something. And yet somehow the voice was confident as well, as though the speaker was also sure that whoever her audience was, that audience would immediately burst into applause. “Oh, miss?”

I looked up to see Elizabeth Hepburn, wearing a plush pink satin bathrobe despite the warmth of the day, standing in the sliding-glass doorway. She may have been close to ninety, but she was still a stunner, with blue eyes like a chip from the sky, hair as white as a new Kleenex tissue and a perfect smile that defied the viewer to claim those teeth weren’t real; poking out from the bottom of her robe, she had white fur mules on her pedicured feet. If I hadn’t worried it might be taken amiss, I really might have applauded for her.

But from doing other stars’ homes with Stella, I’d come to realize that stars could be, well, strange. It was like they didn’t know what they wanted. On the one hand, they wanted you to know who they were—“I am important!”—but on the other, they didn’t want you to acknowledge who they were, as if somehow that acknowledgment might be an intrusion.

I jumped up from where I’d been sitting, wiped my hands off on my khakis.

“I’m sorry,” I started to say. “I shouldn’t have—”

“Of course you should have.” She pooh-poohed my concerns away. “I just looked out the windows—they’re so clean! I can see!—and saw you sitting out here while you waited for the others to finish and I thought you maybe could use some company.”

There was something lonely-looking about her, making me think that maybe she was the one who could use some company, but I couldn’t say that. So I merely accepted the seat she indicated at the white-painted wrought-iron table.

“Here,” she said. “You sit here and I’ll go inside and get dessert. I baked cookies last night,” she added proudly.

Elizabeth Hepburn baked her own cookies?

She was back in a flash, cookies and fresh lemonade on a tray, and damn if those cookies weren’t good. The rest of the crew didn’t know what they were missing, being such slow workers. Of course, if the rest of the crew were fast workers, I probably would never have gotten to taste those cookies, so there was that.

“What were you reading?” she asked.

Why did everyone always ask me that? It seemed like it was a question I answered several times a day.

Like I’d done with Stella, Conchita and Rivera earlier, I flashed the book’s cover.

“Ernie?” she said. “People still read Ernie?”

Ernie?

“Once I start reading an author, I read everything they ever wrote,” I said. “This is the last and I don’t know what to read next. Why? Did you know—?”

“Oh, my, yes. When I was a lot younger, I hooked up with Ernie—is that how you say it these days, ‘hooked up’?—in Key West.”

“Really?” I found this amazing. For while some people might be thrilled to talk to a movie star, I was even more thrilled to be talking to someone who had met a writer.

“Yes, really.”

For the first time, she seemed miffed at something, maybe miffed that I had doubted her. But then I realized it was something else that had her going.

“Pfft.” She dismissed Papa with a wave of her manicured hand. “Ernie wasn’t such a big deal. All he used to do was go on and on and on about that goddamned fish.”

Before I knew it, Elizabeth Hepburn was telling all, everything about Ernie and everything about several of the other famous people she’d ever met or been with over the years. This might have seemed strange to some and I guess it was strange, but I was kind of used to it. I don’t know if it was that I was a former Psych major who had flunked out, or that Hillary’s own psychologist instincts had rubbed off on me by association, but whenever I found myself in similar situations, whenever I was done before the rest of the crew, whoever’s house we were doing wound up spilling the beans to me like I was Delilah Freud.

And, yes, it did turn out that Elizabeth Hepburn’s biggest problem was that she was lonely….

“There’s almost no one left in the world,” she said, “who shares the memories I do, nobody who can testify that the things I remember really happened or not. Why, when Ernie and I—”

“Yo, chica, get the lead—” Rivera skidded around the corner of the house but stopped talking abruptly when she saw me sitting, eating cookies with the client.

“Oops,” she said, “sorry to interrupt. But we’re all finished and we need to get to the next—”

“That’s quite all right,” Elizabeth Hepburn said, rising. “I’ll just go get my checkbook.”

A moment later, we were still packing up the van and tying down the ladders, when Elizabeth Hepburn met us out on the gravel drive. That drive was so perfect, I’d have bet money someone regularly raked the gray-and-white pebbles.

“For you.” She handed a check to Stella. “And for you.” She handed one crisp ten-dollar bill each to Conchita and Rivera. “Gracias.”

I wondered if the girls were going to hit her. Anytime someone tried to speak Spanish to them they got all hot under their penguin collars. “We’re Brazilian, you know? What do you think, that everyone who speaks with a certain kind of accent comes from the same country or speaks the same language? We speak Portuguese in Brazil, not Spanish. If you want to thank us, say obrigado, none of that gracias shit, obrigado very much.”

I found their reaction a bit extreme, especially in relation to me but also because it was often Stella’s customers they were going off on and it seemed like the people were just trying to be polite. I know I was. But then I would think how I would like it if someone came to America from, say, Germany, and started talking to me with a Texan accent because that’s what they mostly heard on TV, and I wouldn’t like that at all.

But perhaps they saw the same vulnerability in Elizabeth Hepburn that I’d seen earlier, because they let the ostensible insult pass, merely muttering “Gracias” in return.

Elizabeth Hepburn turned to me. “And for you.” She handed me a large paperback book.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Well,” she said, “you said you were out of reading material.”

“But what is it?” I asked.

I’d never heard of the author, Shelby Macallister, nor the title, High Heels and Hand Trucks: My Life Among the Books. And the cover, on which was one perfect blue-green stiletto, was pink pink pink.

Elizabeth Hepburn’s famous blue eyes twinkled as she answered, “Chick Lit.”

“Chick Lit? But I’ve never—”

“Go on,” she said, “treat yourself. They’re tons of fun. Myself, I’m addicted to them.”

Addiction was something I could well understand…

“Go on.” Elizabeth Hepburn nodded her chin, as if she were trying to persuade me to try crack cocaine rather than just a book outside of my normal realm of reading. “Try it. I swear to God, you’re going to love it and want more and more. And, oh—” she put her hand to her face in awe “—those Choos.”

“Choos?” I said. “Did you say ‘Choos’? Don’t you mean to say ‘shoes’?”

“Oh, no,” she said, awe still in her eyes, “those Choos, those Jimmy Choos.”

I had no idea what she was talking about and my expression must have said as much, because she reached out a hand, placed it reassuringly on my arm.

“A girl needs more than a fish in her life for fun, Delilah. Now don’t forget to come back and visit me sometime—” oddly enough, she was not the first customer to thusly invite me “—and don’t forget to tell me what you think of those Choos. I’d bet both my Academy Awards you’re going to love them!”

3

“How’s that Michael Angelo’s Four Cheese Lasagna working out for you?”

Startled, I dropped my fork, causing some of the red sauce to splash up, speckling my wrist and the open pages of the book I was reading. I’d been so engrossed in High Heels and Hand Trucks: My Life Among the Books, which was about an underachieving independent bookseller who takes a job as the lapdog to a publishing bigwig, that I hadn’t even heard Hillary come in.

“What’s that you’re reading?” she asked.

See what I mean? People always ask me that question.

Before I could answer, Hillary flipped the book over to the jacket to look for herself as I wiped at the red speckles on my wrist.

Hillary sniffed. “Not exactly Hemingway, is it?”

“It’s better than Hemingway!” I enthused.

Hillary cocked one perfect blond eyebrow in my general direction, an eyebrow that was waxed and sculpted regularly by the nice Asian ladies at Nail Euphorium, a place I’d never set foot in but heard tell of from Hillary.

“Okay,” I conceded, “maybe it’s not Hemingway, but this book is fun!”

She still looked skeptical as she opened her refrigerator, the one on top, and removed fresh vegetables. I had no doubt she was going to make some kind of amazing homemade sauce, but my Michael Angelo’s really was working for me just fine.

“As a matter of fact—” I enthused on “—after I finish this one, I’m going to—”

“Don’t say it.” Hillary stopped me cold, brandishing a sharp knife. “You’re going to go down to the bookstore and buy everything else this woman, this Shelby Macallister has ever written…right?”

“Wrong,” I said, a touch snottily, but it was so nice to uncover someone else’s wrongness for a change. “You are so wrong.”

“Oh?”

“Shelby Macallister hasn’t written any other books before, meaning I can’t get any more of hers until she writes them. So there.”

Hillary shrugged, contrite, and went back to chopping. “Then I stand corrected.”

It was a good thing her back was to me, so she couldn’t see my blush when I said, “But I am going to go to the bookstore and buy a stack more of this kind of book.”

“I knew it!” She slammed the knife home so hard that poor little green pepper didn’t stand a chance. “Every time you get going on something—”

“Hi, honey—” it was my turn to cut her off “—how was your day?”

This was how Hillary and I plugged along in our merrily dysfunctional way, had done so since back in our college days, at least before I flunked out: I was wacky, she called me on my wackiness, I sidetracked that call by being solicitous, and on we went.

Hard as it was to tear myself away from High Heels, I put the book down and reaching behind me—the eat-in kitchen was that small—opened the door to the lower fridge.

“May I interest you in a libation?” I asked, going all waiterly on her. “Tonight we have Jake’s Fault Shiraz, Jake’s Fault Shiraz and, hmm, let’s see, Jake’s Fault Shiraz.”

Hillary tried to be stern, but before long she started to laugh, which was just fine, that was the way it always was with us.

“Oh, I don’t know.” She rolled her eyes. “I guess I’ll take the Jake’s Fault Shiraz.”

“Good choice, madam.” I rifled in the utility drawer for the rabbit-ears corkscrew. “Why don’t you go change out of your work clothes while I pour you a glass.” Hillary wore the pants in our family and had a great selection of spiffy suits that didn’t deserve to get ruined. “I’ll even finish chopping your vegetables for you.”

“Thanks, it has been a day.”

Sure, she should change so as not to get anything messy on her nice suit, but I really wanted her out of the room so she wouldn’t see what I was about to do with that corkscrew. Hillary had given it to me in my holiday stocking the winter before because I always had trouble opening bottles with the old-fashioned, cheap, blue, plastic corkscrew I’d been using for years. But what she did not yet know was that even with the high-tech marvel she had given me, a corkscrew so wonderful it could make a sommelier out of a five-year-old, I still had problems with the damn thing, always pushing down on the ears too prematurely so that the cork only rose partway out and I wound up mangling it as I twisted it between my legs, trying to uncork it the rest of the way.

The cork came out almost without incident, meaning it snapped a bit at the bottom and I had to press that snapped part through into the wine down below. I poured us each a glass, but Hillary must have decided to indulge in a second shower and by the time she emerged, I was too deep into High Heels and Hand Trucks again to make polite conversation while she ate and did whatever else she did, only taking in her words in the most peripheral way. The written word being the way I connected with the world, my imagination caught up in the mere prose descriptions of all those Choos.

Her: “Do you want more of this wine?”

Me: (stretching out glass without looking) “You wouldn’t believe these shoes.”

Her: “Want to watch American Idol 25 with me?”

Me: “You would not believe these shoes.”

Her: “How about Jon Stewart?”

Me: “You would not believe these shoes.”

Her: “I guess I might as well hit the—”

Me: “You would not—”

Her: “Oh, stuff it, Delilah. ’Night.”

Well, that was rude.

But here was the thing: you would not believe these shoes, no one would, unless you read about them yourself, I thought, shutting the book after the last page.

Damn! It was after midnight. I’d need to wait until after work the next day, technically that day, to go to the bookstore and pick up more books like High Heels. I was definitely going to be reading more books like High Heels.

But then I realized something else: reading about the shoes, which the author constantly described as “architectural marvels” as if there were no other words for them, was a far cry from actually seeing the shoes. I mean it’s always show, don’t tell, right? And as good as the author was at describing the shoes—there were so many of them!—I suddenly was struck by an overwhelming urge: I needed to see those shoes.

But what to do, what to do…

I had no idea who in Danbury might actually sell Jimmy Choos, probably nobody, and even if I took the last train into Manhattan, all the shops there would be closed at one in the morning.

What to do, what to do…

There was only one computer in our apartment and it wasn’t mine.

I gently turned the knob on the door to Hillary’s bedroom, tiptoed over toward her computer, tried not to trip over anything in the dark—“Ouch!”—and shushed myself, silently cursed my own clumsiness and immediately thanked my stars I hadn’t woken her, sat down in her desk chair, turned on the monitor and Googled the obvious.

The PDF file for all things Jimmy Choo was on the screen before me—the Asha, the Asha, I really wanted the Asha!—when…

“Delilah, just what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

But I was too caught up in the pretty images on the screen before me to feel as appropriately guilty, snagged and embarrassed as I might otherwise have felt.

“Oh, never mind that.” I pooh-poohed her. “Look. Look!”

“I don’t want to look,” Hillary said, totally peeved and sporting quite a case of bed head, I must say. “I want my sleep.” She grabbed the mouse and moved it toward the shut-down menu. “And I want you to—”

“No!” I stopped her hand. Then, feeling totally contrite, I wheedled, “Please look.”

“Oh, all right.”

At first, she just looked annoyed, but as I ceded control of the mouse and she started to click on the images of the shoes and boots and sandals, enlarging some of the images as I had done earlier…

“Well—” she was still resisting the pull “—I’m not crazy about some of the red ones.”

“Oh, me, neither,” I said quickly, trying to sound agreeable. And it really wasn’t much of a stretch since, despite red being one of my favorite colors, the red pairs didn’t grab me as much as the others.

I saw her eyes stray back toward the comfort of her rumpled sheets. Thinking I couldn’t let her get away, since I really did need a cohort here, if for nothing else than to keep me from being so lonely in the midst of my own obsessions, I grabbed the mouse back and quickly clicked on a different image.

“Look at this,” I said eagerly.

It was the Asha.

“Oh, my!” Hillary said, her eyes going all glittery, as my own had no doubt done a short time ago.

“And this,” I said, clicking again.

It was the Ghost, which was maybe even more spectacular than the Asha, if such a thing were possible.

“Oh, my!” Hillary said again.

“And this.” I clicked one last time.

It was the Parson Flat.

“I would buy that shoe!” she trumpeted.

I knew the Parson Flat would get her.

“How much…?” she started to ask.

In another second, she’d be racing for her Dooney & Bourke bag to fish out her Amex.

“But that’s the whole problem!” I all but whined.

“What?” Hillary said. “Are they too much money?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I keep clicking around, but I don’t see any prices here.”

“Oh, dear,” Hillary said. “That’s never good.”

“What do you mean?”

“Have you ever eaten in a restaurant where they don’t list the prices on the menu?”

“Um, no. Who do you think I am, you?”

“Trust me, it’s never cheap when they don’t list the prices.”

We both stared at the screen.

I tried on a nonchalant shrug.

“So?” I said. “How expensive can a little bit of leather and maybe some glitter be?”

“Who knows?” Hillary said. “But I’m guessing very.”

“There’s only one way to find out,” I said.

“Hmm?” She was still transfixed by the Parson Flats.

“Road trip!”

“Oh, no,” she said, successfully tearing her gaze away. “This is your insanity, not mine.”

“Please.” I was back in wheedle mode. “Wouldn’t you like to at least see if you could afford them?”

Before she could answer, I clicked to the part of the catalog where boutique locations were listed. I didn’t think I’d ever persuade her to go to London or Dublin or Milan or Moscow or Kuwait City or Hong Kong, Korea, Bangkok or even São Paulo to shop for shoes, although I suppose Paris might have been nice. Hillary always said she wanted to see Paris. But at least I could try…

“There are two stores right in Manhattan,” I said. “One in the Olympic Tower on Fifth Avenue, the other on Madison. We could each use a day off from work. Come on, just one day. Nobody says we have to buy anything…”

“If I say yes, can I go back to sleep?”

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

Five minutes later…

“And turn off that computer!”

“Sorry.”

Still, for good measure and so that I’d have something to remind her with should she change her mind, I printed pictures of our three favorites: the Asha, the Ghost and the Parson Flats.

“And stop using my printer!”

“Sorry.”

Then I went to sleep, too.

And all night long, I dreamt of the faceless Yo-Yo Man. I was in his arms, on my feet a pair of Ashas.

I was dancing in my Jimmy Choos.

4

But getting a day off from Squeaky Qlean was not as easy as I thought.

“If you absolutely need to be sick,” Stella said when I called her up with my lie, “then be sick tomorrow. We’ve got four jobs today and I need all squeegees on deck. Tomorrow there’s only one.”

This turned out to be not such a bad thing because, while eating my cold Amy’s Cheese Pizza Pocket in the van after I’d finished the inside of the second job, I was struck by inspiration.