Baby Needs a New Pair of Shoes Read online

  South Park always seemed to me to be a silly name for a condo in Danbury, since Connecticut is north and there was no park in sight, but we at least had a stamp-sized balcony—fraternal twin to the minuscule kitchen—off the living room of our unit that afforded a view of the pool down below, so I tried to suck it up about the nonsensical name.

  Another thing that impressed me as silly, as it did every workday, was Stella’s appearance and attire. Stella had her blond hair in an honest-to-God bouffant style, her green eyes highlighted by full makeup, her buxom top encased in a faux tuxedo T-shirt that had tails down the back, her perky bottom in pristine white shorts, with black socks on her feet and white leather sneakers over those that she polished every day. When we picked up Stella’s two other employees, Conchita and Rivera, both from Brazil, they would be similarly dressed, sans the hooker makeup.

  “If we look better than the competition,” Stella was fond of saying, “people will want to use us instead. After all, who would you rather hire, a window washer that looks like she’s ready to accept an Academy Award or one who’s dressed sloppy like, well, you?”

  I’d pointed out to Stella, repeatedly, that while penguins were my favorite non-cat animal, loving penguins and wanting to look like a penguin were two very different things and that with my shortness, I couldn’t help but look like a waddling refugee from Antarctica in one of her getups. If I were any other member of the crew, undoubtedly Stella would have fought me on this—Stella was big on fighting—but she grudgingly acknowledged that I was the best worker she’d ever had. My nickname among the crew, The Golden Squeegee, ensured that I’d have a job with Stella for as long as I wanted one. And, besides, the pristine white shorts they all wore always wound up splattered with gray window sploodge by the end of the day anyway, kind of spoiling Stella’s desired effect of bucket-carrying Hollywood stars on the red carpet.

  As for Conchita and Rivera, and the all-girl crew, Stella was also fond of saying, “I don’t hire men anymore. The EOE people can sue me if they want to, but have you ever hired a man to do hard work? What a bunch of whiners. ‘It’s too hot out here.’ ‘When do we get off work?’ ‘I have a second job to get to.’ ‘That ladder’s too high.’ ‘I’m taking my break now.’ I swear to God, I always thought it was just me. But then I talked to a colleague who owns a landscaping service and he said the exact same thing. ‘Ask a 100-pound girl to pull a tree out of the ground with her bare hands and she gets right to it. Ask a 200-pound man and before he’s even touched the damn thing, he’s calling Worker’s Comp on his cell phone to verbally file papers for his bad back. Give me a six-pack of chicks any day.’ Naturally, I poked him in the gut with my pool cue for saying ‘chicks,’ but, believe you me, I know from whence he speaks.”

  “So what did you do last night?” Stella asked, snapping her omnipresent gum as she keyed up the ignition. “What’re you reading today? Not that Hemingway guy again. Isn’t he the one who hated chicks?”

  I knew that the barrage of questions—Stella was a relentless talker—would continue until we picked up Conchita and Rivera, at which point Stella’s attentions would focus solely on them. Unlike me, but very much like Stella, Conchita and Rivera were big talkers.

  Like me, Conchita and Rivera were short and dark. But unlike me, where in Stella’s uniform I would have looked like a reject extra from March of the Penguins, Conchita and Rivera looked hot hot hot, like maybe they worked at an upscale Hooters or something.

  “Stel-la!” Conchita and Rivera jointly trilled as they hopped into the van.

  Conchita and Rivera lived in a neighborhood that would have depressed me, one of Danbury’s few rough neighborhoods, but they never seemed to mind, greeting each day of being alive with an exuberance I could only envy. Of their former home in Brazil, obviously worse, all they would ever say was, “You don’t even want to know, Delilah. Better for us here.”

  The Girls From Brazil, as Stella and I referred to them, were illegal aliens. But I was sure not going to be the one to turn them in. If their situation here wasn’t scary enough, the tone they got in their voice when they told me I didn’t even want to know what it was like where they came from. During the three years I’d been working for her, whenever Stella had put ads in the paper prior to hiring them, despite the fact that Stella offered a generous hourly wage, the only people to apply were other Brazilians. The way I figured it, they weren’t stealing jobs from legal people, because no one legal wanted their jobs; no one except me, that is.

  The Girls From Brazil also always greeted Stella as though they were trying to pick her up, in that way, which was not far from the truth since Conchita and Rivera were free-living lesbians, always willing to expand their circle of love. But while they incessantly flirted with Stella, they never once flirted with me, making me feel somehow pathetic in the extreme: my hot meter was turned so low, I wasn’t even hot enough to be desirable to free-living lesbians.

  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 M
acallister, 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.