Baby Needs a New Pair of Shoes Read online

  “Aren’t you going to model them for me?” I’d asked.

  “No.”

  “Did you try them on yet?” I’d asked. I’d been dying to know, if only vicariously, what it felt like to walk in one’s very own Jimmy Choos.

  “No.”

  “But aren’t you going to—”

  “No! I’m saving them for our trip to Atlantic City on Saturday. It’s bad luck to try new shoes on before the special occasion you plan to wear them for.”

  “Huh?” This was a new superstition on me.

  “Oh, just eat your lasagna and go do your Sudoku.”

  But then Saturday came and Hillary brought the box of Choos right into the kitchen, trying them on with no more ceremony than if they were from Payless.

  “Huh,” she said, after trying to force her foot into Choos that were clearly too small for her feet. She picked up the box, studied the label. “The store sent me the wrong size.”

  “This is the first time you’ve even looked at them?” I was shocked. The woman had nerves of steel.

  “I thought I already told you, it’s bad luck—”

  “I know what you said about trying them on. But you didn’t even look at them? What kind of insane person are you?”

  “I’m the kind of insane person that makes you lucky I’m insane, that’s the kind of insane person I am. Look.” She held the box out to me, pointed to the label. “It says size six. You’re a size six. They sent me your size by mistake.”

  It was true. Everyone knew that about us. I was a six; Hillary was a nine. Even with a crowbar, she’d never get her feet into those Choos, not without ripping the seams.

  “But that’s awful!” I said. Then I sighed. “Oh, well. I guess there’s nothing for it. You’ll just have to exchange them. Still, you’d think a store as expensive as that wouldn’t dyslexically mistake a six for a—”

  “I can’t do that,” she said hurriedly.

  “Why ever not?”

  “Because it’s bad luck to exchange shoes once you’ve had them express mailed.”

  “Huh?”

  “So I guess you’ll just have to wear them today instead.”

  Suddenly, I smelled something, and it was dirty feet.

  “You did it on purpose!” I said.

  “What?” Her eyes were all innocence, so innocent it set me thinking her eyes doth protest too much.

  “You deliberately ordered the Choos in the wrong size!” Then my own eyes filled with tears. “This is all just so…so…so…so Gift of the Magi!”

  “What are you talking about? This is not a thing like The Gift of the Magi.”

  “Yes, it is! I give you the money I won at Foxwoods, you use it to buy Choos that could never fit you so I could have them instead. It’s exactly like The Gift—”

  “Delilah?”

  “Huh?” I spoke through my tears.

  “Just take the damn Choos. Wear them in good health.”

  But now as we settled into our seats on the bus and she extolled, “Don’t scuff the Choos on the metal footrest!” I wished she hadn’t been quite so generous with my gift.

  She’d taken the window seat, claiming she got carsick on buses. I’d have tried the same ruse, but she beat me to it.

  “You’d think,” she said, “that since you’re the one wearing the Choos, you’d have thought to dress in a more presentable fashion.”

  “What’s wrong with how I’m dressed?”

  She looked at my old jeans, my pink-and-green striped oxford shirt with the sleeves rolled up.

  “Everything?” she suggested. “I just think if you’re going to wear the Choos—”

  “Do you want them back?” I asked. “After all, your own outfit—” she was wearing a blue-green sleeveless linen dress that was a perfect match for the Choos in question “—more befits their…grandness.”

  There was a part of me that couldn’t believe we were talking this way about a pair of shoes, even if they were Choos.

  “Oh, no. No, no, no,” she demurred. “They’re yours to keep, my gift to you.”

  Some gift. I mean, I did pay for them.

  As the bus driver pulled onto the highway, Hillary extracted a book from her matching blue-green mesh carryall bag.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “A guide to Atlantic City. Hmm…” She wet the tip of one manicured finger with her tongue, turned the page. “Now, let’s see here…It says the first boardwalk opened on June 26, 1870, and was one mile long. Did you know it was designed by Jacob Keim and Alexander Boardman to keep the sand out of the tourist shoes? Did you know today the boardwalk extends just over four miles long?” She pondered. “Do you think it’s possible that boardwalk was named for Boardman?”

  I leaned closer, tapped her on the shoulder.

  “Hillary?”

  “Hmm?”

  “I don’t want a history lesson,” I whispered in her ear before practically screeching, “I’m just going there to gamble!”

  “So-rry.” In a huff, she reached into her carryall—how much stuff did she have crammed in that thing?—and extracted her iPod, covered her ears with it and proceeded to ignore me. Hillary was nothing if not technologically advanced, having at least one each of everything Apple or any of those other places ever produced. Me, I was a confirmed tech-not and when she’d asked me how I could live without my own iPod I’d merely replied, “By the time I can figure out how to program it, it will be rendered obsolete by some new and improved gadget. Besides, I’d probably strangle myself on the wires.”

  But as I sat there beside her, the sound of the bus’s exhaust and the overflow of whatever she was listening to were the only things disturbing my silent solitude—it was maddening not being able to figure out what song she was hearing clearly—I decided to switch seats. Despite her music and the no-doubt gripping guide to Atlantic City before her, she had fallen asleep and was snoring. Hillary could be a loud snorer.

  Toward the back of the bus, I found a pair of unclaimed seats on the other side of the aisle and slid in beside the window. At least I had a view now. Watching the green road signs and trees zip past me, I thought about Funny Girl.

  Okay, maybe that was an odd thing to be thinking about, but I’d been thinking about my parents’ relationship a lot lately and thinking about them as a couple always made me think about the 1968 movie starring Barbra Streisand as Fanny Brice and Omar Sharif as Nick “Nicky” Arnstein. The movie, about a talented girl with a big schnoz who talks her way into the Ziegfield Follies only to wind up falling head over tap shoes for a suave gambler, had long been a favorite of my family’s, at least of my mom and me; Dad had hated it. He said the character of Nick Arnstein was a “complete Hollywood fabrication” and that “no real-life gamblers would ever behave that way,” even though Nick Arnstein had in fact been a real-life gambler. So we could only watch it when he was out of the house, huddled together under a comforter on the couch, popcorn and cocoa at the ready as Streisand sang big number after big number.

  “But why does she have to leave him in the end?” I’d always sob.

  “Because he’s a gambler and a criminal,” she’d say, arm around my shoulders.

  “But he’s her man! She loves him so!” I’d memorized the lines from all of Streisand’s songs from the show so I knew this just as much as I knew that people needed people, that they were the luckiest people in the world, and no one was ever going to rain on my damn parade.

  “I know, dear, but he’s still a gambler and a criminal.”

  I’d look up at her, tears staining my cheeks. “Would you ever leave Dad like that?”

  “Of course not.” She’d always seemed offended that I’d even suggested such a thing. “Your dad’s not a criminal.”

  I’d had my doubts. If Fanny could leave Nicky, what else could go wrong in the world? But as the years went on and my mother never left, we watched the movie less and less often and my obsessive nature turned to other things. Still…

  �
�Nicky Arnstein, Nicky Arnstein,” I whispered-sang, face pressed against the window of the moving bus, just as Fanny Brice had done at the stage door after meeting him for the first time, except she hadn’t been on a bus. What can I say? I was alone on a bus and the romantic allure of those old Streisand songs never paled. “Nicky—”

  “Heh. Another one.”

  “Excuse me?” I looked up to see an elderly man with brown polyester slacks practically belted up to his chest and thick glasses making his eyes look magnified to a frightening degree.

  “There’s always one on every bus,” he said, “young chicks obsessed with Nicky Arnstein. Is this seat taken?”

  Before I could answer, he was sitting next to me.

  “My wife kicked me out,” he said.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” I said automatically. What else do you say to a total stranger’s problems? Do you ask if maybe his wife kicked him out because he calls women chicks? I tried again. “Have you two been together very long?”

  “For about three hours and a half.”

  “Oh. Well. That’s not very long.” How devastated could he be? He certainly didn’t look devastated.

  “Since we got up this morning.” He must have seen my stunned look, because he added, “What? You thought she kicked me out of the marriage?”

  “Well…”

  “What a crazy assumption! Betty would never do that. She just kicked me out of my seat.”

  “Oh.”

  He craned his neck over the seat in front of us, searching. “Oh, look,” he said, “I think Betty’s getting jealous.”

  I craned my own neck and saw, several rows forward, a blue-haired lady with glasses on a chain around her neck glaring at me. Shit. I didn’t want to get in bad with Betty. Still, if she kicked him out…

  “What did she kick you out for?” I asked, settling back into my seat.

  “A book.”

  “A book?”

  “What are you, an echo? A book!”

  “Must have been some book.” What was he reading while sitting next to Betty—porn?

  Thinking I should get away from this pervert, I craned my neck again, this time in search of Hillary to see if she was still snoring. But when I found the back of her blond head, I saw it bobbing in enthusiastic conversation and after briefly thinking that must be some great song she was listening to, further realized that she wasn’t talking to herself, either. Some other blond had snagged my seat.

  “Stop worrying about Betty,” my companion said, tugging me back into my seat. “She doesn’t even carry a gun in her bag anymore.”

  Gun?

  “Here’s the book.” He pulled out a skinny paperback.

  “‘Blackjack Winning Basics,’” I read the title, “by Tony Casino. Betty kicked you out for reading Blackjack Winning Basics while on a bus trip to Atlantic City? What did she think you two were going to do there, get sand in your tourist shoes?”

  He studied me. “You’re kind of an odd chick, aren’t you?” Not waiting for my answer, he adjusted his glasses and opened the book. Assuming he was going to mind his own business from now on, either because he thought I was so odd or because it was what any normal seatmate might do, I went back to gazing out the window, only to have my reverie intruded upon by…

  “In the event that the dealer’s upcard is a Two—”

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “I’m reading my book.”

  “But aren’t you going to read it to yourself?”

  “I have to read aloud. It’s the only way I can concentrate.” He went back to his book. “If the player has a soft Eighteen, meaning an Ace and a Seven—”

  “But why are you reading it aloud like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “You hit every third word with emphasis. It’s…annoying.”

  “Now you know why Betty kicked me out.” He shut the book. “She says it makes her crazy, but it’s the only way I can read. If I told you that in the first place, you probably never would have believed me.”

  “Do you and Betty, uh, go to Atlantic City often?” I was back to making small talk again, anything to avoid having him read out loud anymore, since Betty was right: it was annoying.

  “Since retiring, only every weekend,” he said.

  “And she kicks you out every weekend?”

  “Pretty much. But at least she doesn’t carry a gun anymore. The time I lost the thirty thousand dollars, she nearly shot me.”

  “You lost thirty thousand dollars?”

  “Did you hear me say she nearly shot me?”

  Of course I heard it. Hey, I’d have nearly shot him, too. Of course, back in the day, Black Jack Sampson had probably lost that much on a single jaunt. Maybe. Possibly. I’d never really given it much thought, until now, how much my dad might have lost in a single go, how much my mother put up with.

  “Betty pulled her gun on me and I was sure I was a goner when she cocked the trigger.”

  “So what did you do? How did you get out of it?”

  “I pointed out the obvious. I said, ‘Betty, I won thirty thousand dollars the week before!’”

  “You mean you won thirty thousand dollars one week and then turned around and lost it the week after?”

  “Pretty much.”

  It was a lot to digest. I couldn’t imagine winning that much, losing that much. If it were me, I’d have used the money for a round-the-world cruise or the down payment on a house. Of course, then Hillary would have to help me out with the mortgage.

  “You’re a professional gambler,” I said finally.

  “Pretty much.”

  “But then what are you doing reading Blackjack Winning Basics?”

  “Didn’t you see? It’s written by Tony Casino. And even an expert like me needs to bone up now and then.”

  When I debarked, Hillary was waiting for me, a handsome man at her side. He was well over six feet tall, his Adonis hair curling over the collar of his shirt. If Hillary’s life were a romance novel, he’d be on the cover and her bodice would be ripped.

  “This is Biff Williams,” she said, introducing us.

  Biff?

  “After you deserted me,” Hillary said, “he asked if he could sit with me.”

  “We have a lot in common,” Biff said, looking at her with more fondness than a mere hour of knowing a person should bestow. Then he offered her his arm. As casual as if she did it every day, Hillary took it.

  “We both work in jobs where we have patients,” Hillary said. God, could she simper any more?

  “We both want to see Scotland someday,” Biff said. What was with all this “we” crap all of a sudden?

  “We both have Warren Zevon on our iPods,” Hillary said.

  “But we’d never plug in while talking to each other,” Biff said. “Oh, and neither of us likes to gamble.”

  “We sure don’t,” Hillary said.

  “We don’t?” I said, stunned. “Then what are we doing here?”

  “I just like bus trips,” Biff said.

  “Me, too,” said Hillary.

  “We thought we’d just stroll along the boardwalk,” Biff said, “enjoy the sights, grab some lunch together.”

  “We thought we’d go to Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Museum,” Hillary said.

  “We thought we’d go to the Absecon Lighthouse,” Biff said. Apparently, since they weren’t listening to their iPods together, we’d been reading the same guidebook.

  “We thought we’d go to the New Jersey Korean War Memorial,” Hillary said.

  “Definitely,” Biff said.

  “Grab some dinner together, too,” Hillary said. “We’ll meet you back here at the bus when it’s time to go.”

  As I watched them walk off, they looked so good together, so right. Damn! Where was Betty and her gun?

  Hillary had hit the jackpot. Without even having a pair of Jimmy Choos on her feet, she’d hit the jackpot.

  12

  When Hillary had previously expres
sed concern that the cost of the bus trip would eat into my two-hundred-dollar Atlantic City stake—“Really, Delilah, I could just drive us,” she’d said. To which I now thought, “Ha! And miss the chance to meet Mr. Wonderful Biff?”—I’d told her what my dad always said, that places like Foxwoods and Atlantic City and Vegas paid you to gamble. Even as I’d said it, I doubted the veracity. How could that be? But as I took my first stroll along the boardwalk—not all four miles of it, but enough—my pockets fat with the complimentary coin rolls and food chits the bus driver had handed out on behalf of the casinos, I realized that once again Black Jack was right.

  A part of me felt as though my gal pal had ditched me. What did Mr. Wonderful Biff have that I didn’t have? Oh, yeah, right: muscles, a good-paying job, a penis. Plus, he wasn’t neurotically obsessed with the acquisition of expensive shoes. But then a part of me recognized my ditched feeling for what it was. I was jealous, jealous that someone else was with Hillary, jealous that Hillary had someone else to share the glorious day with.

  The day was indeed one of those gorgeous ones that lately had become typical of September, with a clear sky, temperatures in the low eighties and zero humidity, boats speckling the seascape of the ocean the city was named for, a strong sun shining overhead. In fact, it was too gorgeous a day to spend holed up in some smoky casino. I mean, I already had a pair of Jimmy Choos; Hillary had given me the ones I’d bought her. So what if they were the Momo Flats and not the Ghost, they were still Jimmy Choos. Hadn’t that been my original goal? There was just one problem. How could a girl, a girl like me who had never been known to eat just one potato chip or confine myself to just one anything, ever stop at just one pair? Still, I tried to resist the pull of temptation. Maybe I should do something else with my hours there? Maybe I should visit one of the video arcades? Maybe I should visit one of the XXX girlie shows? Maybe I should get my cards read, my palm read, my fortune told? Maybe I should pawn something?