Baby Needs a New Pair of Shoes Read online

  Personally, I always thought the yellow-orange rubber ladder mitts made those noble aluminum ladders look neutered, their proud masculine edges compromised, not unlike a guy in a condom: a necessary evil, true, but still. As far as Mr. Clean was concerned, though, even if Stella washed down the ends of her ladders with soap and water right before his very eyes, there was just no way those ladders were flying commando.

  Then, once he had them set up outside, the real fun started.

  Mr. Clean, who was well over six feet, balding and with a slight paunch, would start trailing my work on the inside. Keep in mind, most of our regular customers had day jobs that took them out of the house, as did Mr. Clean, but the others were more than content to leave a key discreetly hidden on the property. Hey, we were fully insured and bonded. There was nothing to worry about. But not Mr. Clean. Mr. Clean’s appointments always needed to be carefully scheduled so he could take the day off. I guess watching someone wash your windows was so damn much fun, he didn’t want to miss a thing.

  Of course there’s nothing fun about watching someone wash windows. I mean, after you’ve seen the first, they’re all pretty much the same, although like with Olympic gymnastics, there are degrees of difficulty, like the windows over kitchen sinks or the ones over the tubs in these giant bathrooms everyone seems to be installing. But it’s still hardly exciting stuff. And I don’t think even Mr. Clean found any of it exciting; if anything, it was probably his most nerve-racking activity of any season and he put himself through it in both fall and spring.

  He just couldn’t help himself.

  “Here,” he said, “you can leave your sneakers outside.” I hated climbing my stepladder with stocking feet.

  “Here,” he said, bringing me a sheet that was still warm from the dryer as I set up my little stepladder in his living room. “The ladder won’t slide on the floor and it’ll pick up any fluid splatter.”

  I was tempted to huff at him that I never splattered. He should know that by now. But I knew there was no point. If I resisted, his anxiety level would only rise.

  I reached for my can of Stella’s Magic Spray and waited to hear the pitter-patter of his stocking feet leaving me in peace. But of course that wasn’t going to happen.

  So I just went ahead and did it. I just sprayed.

  And then I picked up exactly three wadded-up sheets of paper towel and started to wipe…

  “What about the squeegee?” Mr. Clean stridently yelled at me. “Aren’t you going to use the squeegee?”

  I sighed.

  A part of me was tempted to explain to Mr. Clean just how I’d won my Golden Squeegee Award, an honor that was awarded for both perfection and speed. Over time, I’d come to realize that once we had done a job, removing sometimes years of neglect in the form of grime, so long as the customer had us back regularly, I could do just as good of a job—I would argue, better—by simply performing the tried-and-true procedure of spraying and wiping. Magic Spray, in its cheerful blue-white-and-silver canister, was a product made in window-cleaner heaven. Foaming on contact with the glass, it left no streaks; and, as good as I was with a squeegee when compelled to use one, it always left some streaks that needed to be wiped away. So right-handed I can’t even scratch a mosquito bite with my left, I could still push a spray nozzle with it. Spray with the left, wipe with the right: with Magic Spray in my life, I was a two-armed cleaning bandit.

  But now, just like he’d neutered Stella’s poor ladders, he wanted to neuter me.

  “It’ll actually come out better this way,” I started to say.

  “Oh, no.” Mr. Clean shook his head. “There’ll be dirt left in the corners.”

  How, I wanted to ask, could there be dirt left in the corners, when there was no dirt to begin with?

  “Really—” he nodded his head emphatically, as though he’d just won an argument with himself “—I’d feel much better if you used the squeegee.”

  “But—”

  I was thinking to point out that it would go quicker my way and then he’d have my grubby little self with my dusty little sneakers out of his way that much sooner, and wouldn’t that be a good thing? But he never let me finish. “Please?” He was practically begging now, I swear I saw sweat popping out on his domed forehead. “Use the squeegee?”

  “Well, if you insist…”

  And so the next hour passed.

  Mr. Clean wasn’t a bad guy. Believe me, we had plenty of evil customers and he wasn’t one of them. In fact, deep down inside, no matter what I said to Stella, I liked Mr. Clean. I felt sorry for him, pitied him. The only problem was, every time I was with him, I worried we were two peas in a pod. He was such an odd guy and every time I was in his house, we each had to get used to the other all over again.

  I knew a little bit about Mr. Clean from previous visits because, once he did get used to me, Mr. Clean—a man people probably tried to avoid talking to whenever possible—was quite a talker. I knew he worked in some kind of investment capacity in the city (I’ll bet the train ride in just killed him, despite that Metro North had spruced up some of their train cars), I knew his first marriage ended in divorce (I’ll bet his first wife wanted to kill him), I knew he had a habit of…collecting things.

  Mr. Clean had a sunroom that housed a plant collection to rival the Botanical Gardens. Okay, maybe not that grand, but you get the picture. And he treated them each as lovingly as other people treated their kids or pets. Now, don’t get me wrong. I like plants as much as the next person, unless of course the next person is Mr. Clean, and it’s not as if I go around deadheading rosebushes willy-nilly, but it seemed to me he took his horticultural love a bit too far when he gave his plants names: the spider plant, I heard him murmur “Cassandra” to, the fern was “Sally,” which seemed like an odd choice of name for a fern. Not that there’s a right name for a fern, but you had to wonder, why “Sally”? It got even odder when he got married for a second time earlier that year and his second wife’s name turned out to be Sally. I mean, when he said “Sally,” did the right living thing know which he was talking to?

  “Sally,” I heard him say now, but when I turned I saw he was talking into his cell phone, so I figured he was talking to the wife. “Ophelia—” that was the ficus “—is looking peaked. Do you think you could pick up that special plant food she loves on the way home? I’d get it myself, but I’m stuck here with the window washers all day.”

  “RAHRUHRUHRAHRAH!” I heard shouted through the cell phone. I had no idea what Sally The Person was saying, but I knew she was shouting it because I could hear her sounding like the teacher from those old Charlie Brown specials all the way on the other side of the room.

  “I know it’s out of your way,” Mr. Clean said, “but I really think Ophelia won’t last the night if we don’t make her feel special. Come to think of it, Sally’s not looking so hot, either.”

  “RAHRUHRUHRAHRAH!”

  “I can’t leave now!” Mr. Clean shouted, or at least he shouted as much as a meek person can shout. “The window washers are here! I can’t leave the window washers all by themselves, alone with the—” he lowered his voice here “—windows.”

  But he needn’t have lowered his voice. Discreetly, I moved off to another room. It was just too painful to listen anymore.

  Unfortunately, the next room was one of Mr. Clean’s hobby rooms, this one being the one where he kept all his model cars, each one of which he’d glued together with such precision you couldn’t even see any remnant glue left around even the tiniest pieces. All that painstaking small work, thinking of him sitting alone with the plastic and chrome pieces of his models spread out all about him and his airplane glue—maybe he’d sniffed too much?—and no doubt worrying all the while about smearing any of it. That made me sad, too.

  And the thing I heard next made me saddest of all: Mr. Clean saying, “Okay, dear, but if you could just pick up that special plant food on the way home” into the phone as he came into the room to check up on me, and realizin
g that Mr. Clean’s second marriage would go the same way as the first. His obsessions would get the best of him, Sally The Person would get sick of his obsessions even while Sally The Plant thrived under them, and before long, he’d be alone again.

  Sometimes, it just didn’t do to let obsessions rage out of control.

  “I finally found out what was wrong,” Stella said in hushed tones as we were loading up the van side by side; Conchita and Rivera were still folding up their ladders.

  “Yeah, you’re telling me,” I said. “Mr. Clean is fucking nuts.”

  “I didn’t mean that,” she said. “I mean about Conchita and Rivera.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “For the first time ever, they’re both dating other people…exclusively.”

  “Oh, man,” I said.

  “Exactly. Each is upset about what the other is doing, each insists she has the right to do it herself.”

  “It’s like a mammary nightmare,” I admitted.

  “What?”

  “Never mind. I was just being small-minded.”

  “Like, when aren’t you? But I’ve got a business to run here. I can’t have them acting like this in front of the customers. Earlier today, Conchita punched Rivera so hard she nearly fell through a window. Thank God, Mr. Clean was too busy inside with you to notice what was going on.”

  “Yes, thank God Mr. Clean was with me. Really, what would I ever do without him?”

  17

  The weeks preceding the Vegas trip passed quickly, even if I was often solitary. Hillary now spent so much time with Biff that if it weren’t for the fact that there were still two refrigerators in our home, you’d swear I lived there alone. Elizabeth Hepburn had put off my overtures to visit, saying she was recuperating nicely and that she was so busy reading Chick Lit and enjoying her Jimmy Choos, she didn’t have much time for chat, adding that Lottie had been just barely tolerable lately (“She may want me to hurry up and die,” she said, “but I don’t think she’s putting arsenic in my food…yet.”). Conchita and Rivera were engaging in a silent war, both supposedly in love with other people, both acting more miserable than you’d think two people in love would act. Stella was unusually quiet and seemed wrapped up in her own mysterious preoccupation, although she still did have enough time to harass me (“The sun is your harshest critic, Delilah. I can see streaks on that window. Whatever happened to The Golden Squeegee?”).

  Of course, The Golden Squeegee had her own preoccupations, being simultaneously obsessed with Billy Charisma and blackjack. The former called her every day and said he couldn’t wait to see her again; he even took her—that would be me—on a few dates, but they were always dates that ended chastely with Billy saying he wanted to hold off on the grand event until Vegas. As for the latter, in the hopes of hitting the jackpot in every way with Billy in Vegas, I’d been trying to enlist my dad’s aid, but he kept pleading off, saying he had meetings to go to, saying he had to work. I still couldn’t believe he’d taken a job as a security guard. Finally, in desperation, on the Monday before I was scheduled to fly west for my big adventure, I showed up on his doorstep unannounced, intuiting that if I called first, he’d only say no again.

  “No,” he said as soon as he saw me, after I’d once again pounded on the door for what seemed like minutes.

  “I haven’t even said what I’m here for yet,” I said.

  “I know what you’re here for,” he said, starting to close the door in my face. “And the answer is no.”

  “God, Dad,” I said, quickly inserting my Nike into the breach so he couldn’t close the door all the way, “you’re acting like I’m trying to sell you Girl Scout cookies.”

  “You’re trying to sell me something worse than Girl Scout cookies,” he said, still pushing the door against my foot as though he might push right through it. “You’re trying to sell me the road to hell.”

  “What are you talking about? I have good intentions!”

  “I’m not going back to that life, Baby. I’m finally out. I won’t let you drag me back in again.”

  “Crap! Who are you? Al Pacino? And what have you done with my dad? Where’s Black Jack?”

  “I’m not Black Jack anymore.”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “I’m Jack. I’m just Jack.”

  “Wha—”

  “This hasn’t been easy for your father,” a voice said, a very feminine if throaty voice, I might add.

  Then the door swung open and I saw behind my dad, who was dressed in his security guard’s uniform, a pretty older woman, about ten years younger than him, with auburn hair and sparkling blue eyes. Oh, and she was wearing the velour robe my dad had been wearing the last time I visited.

  Uh-oh.

  “Who are you,” I asked, “and why are you wearing my dad’s robe?”

  “It’s my robe, actually.” She thrust out a confident hand for a shake and I took it dumbly. My dad was sometimes wearing some woman’s robe? “Vanessa Parker. And I know who you are. You’re Baby. Your dad talks about you all the time.”

  He did?

  “Come in,” Vanessa said.

  I entered, still dumbly, feeling odd to be invited this way into my dad’s home as though she lived there and I was the guest.

  “Something to drink?” she offered. “Diet Pepsi Lime? Jake’s Fault Shiraz?”

  “I see he has been telling you a lot about me,” I said.

  “Michael Angelo’s Four Cheese Lasagna?” my dad offered, hopefully. “If you’re hungry, I can whip some up in six minutes, tops.”

  “Thanks, no,” I said. “I seem to have lost my appetite.”

  “I’m sorry, Baby. I kept meaning to tell you, but the time never was just right.”

  “You could have called, you could have sent a letter. It’s not exactly like I’m the hardest person in the world to get a hold of. Tell me what, by the way?”

  Vanessa took my dad’s hand as though one of them needed support for the announcement they were obviously about to make.

  “I’ve been living here,” she said defiantly.

  “Well, apparently,” I huffed. “My dad’s been wearing your robe.”

  “I knew she’d be upset,” Vanessa said, turning to my dad. “I told you that even if she is twenty-eight years old, she wouldn’t like the idea of someone taking her mother’s place, not after having you to herself for ten years.”

  “Nobody’s replacing anybody,” my dad said. “You and Lila, you’re like those apples and oranges. She’s dead. You’re here. That’s hardly what I’d call replacing.”

  “I don’t care about that!” I interrupted their little tête-à-tête. I mean, I did care about it, just not right then. “What I care about—” I looked straight at my dad, ignoring That Other Woman “—is that for weeks now, I’ve been trying to get a hold of you, I’ve been trying to get your help with something I desperately need your help with—” it was true, for while I might have been Billy’s talisman, I felt as though my dad was the talisman I needed to win enough to impress Billy, or at least I felt as though I couldn’t take on the mecca of Vegas without the benefit of my dad’s expertise “—and you keep being unavailable—”

  “I can’t be available for you in that way anymore, Baby. I’m sorry. I’m giving all of that up.”

  I looked at Vanessa. “What kind of witch are you?”

  “A good witch,” she said, “a very good witch who loves your father.”

  “Don’t talk about the woman I love that way, Baby,” my dad admonished.

  It really was too much.

  “I met her at Debtors Anonymous,” my dad said.

  “Bettors Anonymous,” Vanessa corrected. “And we didn’t meet there. Remember?”

  This was just getting worse and worse.

  “She’s right,” my dad said. “We met in the supermarket. She made those cherry tomatoes look like just so many cherry tomatoes.”

  “I invited him out for a drink.”

&n
bsp; “I said yes.”

  “I had a strawberry milkshake.”

  “For me it was the coffee.”

  “One thing led to another.”

  “She found out what I did for a living, what I used to do.”

  “I told him he couldn’t have both me and the gambling, that he had to pick between the two, that I didn’t mind living in a tiny apartment with him for the rest of my life but I’d be damned if I’d ride the emotional-financial roller coaster of bouncing back and forth between apartment and mansion, apartment and mansion.”

  “So I promised I’d go to Debtors Anonymous meetings with her.”

  “Bettors Anonymous. I used to be a gambler myself.”

  “And now we go together, a couple of times every week.”

  “You’re evil!” I said to Vanessa.

  “Stop that right this minute, Baby.”

  “But don’t you realize how bad the timing sucks for your…your…your…your conversion?”

  “Hey, I’m never too old to learn a new trick.”

  “But I’m going to Vegas this weekend!”

  “Vegas? You want to talk Vegas?” Without comment, he left the room.

  “Where’s he going?” I asked.

  “Who knows?” Vanessa shrugged. “He’s your father.”

  A minute later, he returned, his hand clutching several small slips of paper.

  “Here,” he said.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “That’s Vegas,” he said. “You’re holding Vegas right in your hand.”

  “Gee, it doesn’t look like an oasis with casinos and neon lights in the middle of the desert. Who would have thought that Vegas was just a bunch of little white slips of paper?”