Baby Needs a New Pair of Shoes Read online

  I looked at the five of them. It wasn’t that they were shabbily dressed. Indeed, they all looked better than I looked most days, but they were still all relatively casual, in summer slacks, light blouses and sandals. Really, I was the only one who looked like she might be going out on a Saturday night to a casino that had nightclubs in it.

  “Oh, no,” Elizabeth Hepburn said softly. “This is your big night.”

  7

  Foxwoods Casino was a fair drive from where we’d started, but when we walked into the casino en masse it felt as though no more time had passed than the length it would take for a reader to turn the page.

  Maybe it was that Conchita drove like a maniac. Or maybe it was the single drink I’d allowed myself from the minibar—“Never get drunk while you’re playing—” my dad’s words rang in my brain “—only losers get drunk at the table”—the champagne going down like silk bubbles as I listened to the Brazilian music Conchita was blaring on the stereo.

  “Hey.” Hillary smiled at me lazily over the top of her own flute of champagne. “You’re drinking something with alcohol in it and it’s not even Jake’s Fault.”

  For a moment, I felt a frisson of anxiety. I was starting to get hungry and I wondered if they had any Michael Angelo’s Four Cheese Lasagna kicking around the casino kitchen, but then I pushed the anxious feelings away. This was a special night. I would do special things.

  Whatever the case, whether the ride went so quick because of the speed of the driver or because of the buzz from the champagne, I felt great as we walked through the door.

  I’d never been part of a group like that before. Much in the way of people who are serially monogamous in their romantic relationships, I’d always been serially monogamous in my friendships. My mother was so sick for so many years before she died, we’d spent so much time one-on-one, it was as if I could only relate to other women one-on-one. Back at the private junior high, there’d been the best girlfriend I got drunk with during the science fair. During high school, there’d been another best girlfriend. And, ever since then, there had been Hillary. Hillary herself had other friends she sometimes did things with, and sometimes I went along, but for whatever reason, the dynamic never worked for me, unless it was something fairly innocuous like a group going to a movie. I didn’t mind her other friendships, wasn’t jealous of them in any way; the group thing just wasn’t for me. Oh, for years I wished I could be the kind of woman you see in the middle of a group of other women—laughing louder than anyone else, living large—I just didn’t know how.

  It was hard to believe then that, as we strode through the casino, for the first time in my life I had a posse.

  In the entryway, just outside of the casino proper, there was a woman with balloons pinned all over her clothes—she even had on a balloon hat—who was blowing brightly colored balloons into all different shapes: flowers, animals, one even looked weirdly like Bill O’Reilly. She was handing out her creations to anyone who wanted them.

  “That’s kind of an odd thing to have in the entryway,” I said, “don’t you think?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Hillary, “it’s probably one of those little extras, like free rolls of coins for the people who get bused in, that are devised to lull gamblers into forgetting how much money they’re pissing away at the tables.”

  She must have seen my expression, because she quickly added, “Oops, sorry.”

  “Plus,” said Stella, “they need to give people something to entertain them when they’re not gambling.”

  “Yeah,” said Conchita, “but every time one of those things pops, I’m going to be wondering about who’s getting shot.”

  “I once dated a balloonist,” said Elizabeth Hepburn.

  And then, before I even knew it, my posse was splitting up.

  Going up to an information desk, Stella grabbed a bunch of brochures that she distributed to the others.

  “Ooh, I want to go to the Club BB King,” Hillary said. “Look—” she pointed “—Hall & Oates are playing later on tonight, with Todd Rundgren.”

  “I used to hang with B.B. King,” Elizabeth Hepburn said.

  “I want to go to the Hard Rock Café,” Conchita said.

  “And how,” Rivera said. “They’ve got a ‘Pimp and Ho Party’ going on with The Dizzy Reed Band.”

  For once, Elizabeth Hepburn looked perplexed. “I don’t think I know anyone from the Pimp and Ho band,” she said, then she brightened, “but I did used to go out with Dizzy Dean! He played ball for—”

  “I’m hungry,” Stella said, flat statement.

  “Oh, I’m sure there are lots of great places to eat here.” Hillary cheered her. “How about this, I’ll go with you to get a quick bite…and then we’ll both go to the Club BB King!”

  “Meanwhile,” said Conchita, “we’ll go see Dizzy and then we’ll all meet up after the shows. How does that sound?”

  Rivera turned to me. “What are you going to be doing while we’re all doing all of that?”

  It was all I could do not to grit my teeth at my posse.

  “I’m going to do what I came here to do,” I said. No matter how hard I was trying, the words still came out like bullets. “I. Am. Going. To. Gamble. And, hey, why’d you all help me and pay for my makeover if you’re just going to take off?”

  “Hey right back at you,” Hillary Clinton said, always the voice of reason. “Just because you feel the need to gamble all night, it doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t each have our own brand of fun. Don’t worry. We’ll be back in time to take you home.”

  “Besides,” Elizabeth Hepburn added, “does the Fairy Godmother stick around after waving her magic wand and giving Cinderella the perfect dress and coach? Never.” She shuddered. “The stage would look too crowded.”

  And, just like that, I was alone.

  I cruised the inside of the smoke-filled casino—there were designated nonsmoking areas, but I knew from the brochure that for the bulk of the action, I needed to be right where I was—for a while on my own, taking the lay of the land. After all, even if one hundred dollars seemed like a lot of spare change in my usual life, I knew that if I sat down at the wrong gaming table, that C-note could disappear quickly like so much cash right down the toilet. So I strolled around, studied the slot players, even saw one blue-haired lady hit it big on the jackpot. Maybe, I thought, I should just get two thousand nickels and play until the one-armed bandit caused my arm to fall off? Maybe that way my fortune lay?

  I shook my head.

  Then I watched the roulette games for a time. It was a game that could be as precise or as general as the player wanted it to be. Sure, Black 27 would be a daring bet that could pay off big, but what were the odds? Then again, how hard could it be to choose between red and black? Fifty-fifty seemed like great odds to me. At least those odds were even.

  But, no, I hadn’t come for that, either. Nor had I come for poker or baccarat.

  I had come for one thing: blackjack.

  As I meandered through the tables, though, looking for a place to start, I saw that except for the tables that had the highest minimum bids, bids I couldn’t even meet to open, most of the seats were filled. Besides which, my dad had cautioned that it wasn’t good enough to just find any table; you needed to find a table where, after studying the dealer for a bit, you had a strong sense you could win.

  “But isn’t that kind of, oh, I don’t know, unscientific?” I’d asked him.

  “Hey, if it was a science,” he’d said, “anyone could win. Besides, you’re too new at this to worry about something more scientific like counting cards. So you’ll just have to go with your senses. Oh, and try if you can to get a seat to the far left facing the dealer. Even if you can’t count cards, at least from there, the anchor seat, you can get a sense of how the cards are running as the dealer chutes them out.”

  And, suddenly, there he was: the dealer of my dreams! He had short red hair and freckled skin with a Vandyke beard and mustache, making him loo
k kind of like the grown-up version of that kid from The Partridge Family. But that wasn’t what made him the dealer of my dreams. Who cared what he looked like? He’d just busted at twenty-three, having been forced to deal himself an Eight to a King and Five. Whatever his luck had been earlier, it was taking a turn for the worse now and I was sure that meant mine would take a turn for the better.

  There was just one problem: the seat on the far left was taken up and then some by a big guy in a purple shirt who reeked of cigars.

  Oh, well, I sighed, taking the one vacant seat left at the table, right next to Cigar Man, if I waited for conditions to be perfect, I’d never play.

  I tossed my hundred on the table as if I’d been tossing hundreds on blackjack tables all my life and felt a tingle inside as the dealer pushed twenty red chips back at me, valued at five dollars each. The table itself had a red sign on it, meaning it was a minimum five-dollar table. Red was my favorite color, despite that I hadn’t cared for any of the red Jimmy Choos, and I was feeling incredibly lucky.

  Let the games really begin.

  Apparently the last game had caused the supply of cards to go so low in the six-deck chute that the dealer needed to reshuffle, a dexterous display I really enjoyed, plus it delayed my moment of truth.

  “C’mon, c’mon,” Cigar Man muttered.

  I sniffed something unpleasant and realized that, underneath the Havana stench, Cigar Man was sweating like crazy. And when I looked over expecting to see a stack of chips in front of him at least as big as mine, I saw he had only one lonely red chip left.

  Apparently, red wasn’t his favorite color.

  When the dealer finished shuffling, he offered me the deck to cut. I knew, from my conversation with my dad, that as the newest player to a table, this might happen. But now that it was actually happening, I was unsure.

  “Do you want me to cut that into two piles,” I nervous-laughed, “or three? It is kind of a big stack…”

  “Oh, Christ,” Cigar Man said, snapping his one chip back off the table as he heaved his bulk off of the seat, “I hate playing with pikers.”

  Well, at least with him gone, I could slip into that far-left seat, just like so…

  “You can split the deck into as many piles as you’d like,” said this incredible voice in my ear, a voice good enough to blow Hall & Oates and Todd Rundgren off the stage at the Club BB King. “And while I really don’t mind your staying in my lap while I gamble, I do believe that two players gambling from one seat is kind of frowned upon around here.”

  “Oh!” I reddened as I raised myself from the lap of the body that was connected to that amazing voice. “Sorry!”

  All I could think of that could have happened was that as I was sliding over from the left, he must have been sliding into the seat from the right and just got there before me.

  I cut the deck several times without counting, only looking to the side to check out the bearer of The Voice as the dealer began to deal.

  If Rivera were with me right then, I knew what she’d say. “Chica,” she’d say, “that guy is whack.”

  At which point Conchita would probably slap her across the head. “What are you talking about, whack? That guy is more than just whack. He’s beyond whack.” At which point, I’d need to ask them to define whack for me again. Then I’d need to remind them that they were both lesbians, so why were they hornying in on my game anyway?

  And if my mother were here, my late mother, she’d have said the same thing she always said about my father: “He’s so dreamy.”

  And he was, he really was, with short blond hair, blue eyes and a strong jaw that made him look as if he’d just walked out of the pages of a Fitzgerald novel, not to mention he was wearing a tux that he wore like he owned, rather than rented it.

  Then Stella and Hillary would knock each other out trying to give him their phone numbers, leaving only Elizabeth Hepburn left to play the field and, given her track record, she’d probably slept with him at some point already.

  But since there was only me…

  “Come here often?” I asked, immediately wanting to slap myself in the head.

  “Yes,” he said.

  The word yes is usually a positive thing; certainly it provides a more obvious conversational opening than a flatly dismissive no. But when I looked at him, I realized his yes just as well might have been a no, because his eyes were all on the cards, his gaze shifting around the table as he took in what other people had, what the dealer had, what he had.

  Then I noticed something else: like Cigar Man before him, The Voice had one lone red chip on the table in front of him, which he had pushed forward as his ante. Well, at least we had that in common, since wanting to start out cautious, I had only wagered one red chip, as well.

  I began wondering what else we might have in common…

  “Card?”

  The dealer was studying me with mild impatience, his left hand drumming on the top of the chute.

  “Oh!” That was fast. It was already my turn and I hadn’t even looked at my cards yet. I looked then and saw I had a Queen and a Six: Sixteen. The dealer was showing a Ten and I wouldn’t know until all the players had finished, what he was hiding in the hole.

  “Card?” He tapped the chute some more.

  Looking around the table fast, I saw a preponderance of low cards and, remembering some of what my dad had said, instinct told me the cards might be about to run high. I didn’t want to take a chance on busting with my first hand, which would be demoralizing that early in the evening, so I held out my hand flat over the card as my dad had shown me.

  “Pass,” I said.

  The Voice was showing a combined Twelve. The only cards that could bust him were those worth ten, but he was taking his time deciding.

  “Card?”

  The Voice looked at my Sixteen rather than at his own cards, then he laid his hand out flat. “Pass.”

  The dealer at last turned over his hole card to reveal a Six, so he and I were pushing at Sixteen, but House rules said the dealer always had to pull at Sixteen, stand on anything Seventeen or higher.

  I felt another tingle inside as the dealer slid the next card out of the chute and saw that my dad had been right: it was a Queen. The dealer now had Twenty-six and was busted.

  The Voice beside me let out a deep breath. Then he turned to me with a winning smile.

  “Wow,” he said, “that’s the first hand I’ve won all night. It must have been a stroke of luck, me sitting down at this table just in time for you to sit in my lap.”

  His words made me feel good because what single woman wouldn’t want to be thought of as good luck by a man who looked like The Voice? Plus, his words made me want to sit in his lap again. Plus, it’d been a long time since I’d sat in any guy’s lap, so I was really wanting to sit there.

  “‘Herein Fortune shows herself more kind than is her custom,’” I started to say, but then a new hand was before me on the table and I realized I’d better get serious and stop quoting ol’ Bill. Sure, I’d felt great making the right decision and winning the last hand against the dealer, because if I’d asked the dealer to hit me instead it would have been me who busted. But let’s face it, I had only won a single round, and one red five-dollar chip does not a Jimmy Choo buy.

  I realized the only thing to do was to follow what my dad had told me: narrow my concentration down until it was the size of a dime, ignore the noise and the smoke and everything else that was going on around me except for what was happening right at that table, and just play. Hell, I was sure if my dad was right there, he’d tell me to ignore the beautiful sound of The Voice, as well. There would be time for that—or not—once I was finished with doing what I came there to do.

  So the only thing for it was to concentrate totally on the hand that was dealt, making the best decision possible based on the cards I held and the cards I could see in front of the others.

  Except there was no decision I needed to make because when I looked down, I s
aw the dealer had dealt me a Jack and an Ace: Twenty-one. It’s the name of the game, baby.

  My first blackjack.

  “You’re better than a stroke of good luck,” The Voice said exultantly. “You’re a talisman!”

  I looked over at The Voice sitting next to me and the cards on the green table in front of him.

  He had blackjack, too.

  It’s the other name of the game, baby.

  For the next hour, we played side by side. We each lost a few, but mostly we won, and I quickly realized he was a more adventurous gambler. I was adhering strictly to what my dad had told me in terms of strategy: when I increased my winnings at the table by fifty percent, I increased my bets to double; but when the ten-value cards and Aces were being used up rapidly, I reduced my bet to the minimum. The Voice, on the other hand, while keeping a close eye on what I was doing, steadily increased his bets. This meant that when we won, he won bigger; but when we lost, he lost bigger, too.

  When the dealers changed shifts, I took the opportunity to count my chips and was surprised to see I was up to over seven hundred dollars; I even had a fair number of green chips now, valued at twenty-five dollars, that I’d been using for my bets for the last few hands.

  “Don’t you realize it’s bad luck to count your winnings while still at the table?” The Voice said, leaning in to whisper from the side.

  “Well, but how else will I know…?” I let my voice trail off, recognizing how absurd it would be to utter the complete thought, “But how else will I know when I’ve won enough to buy some Jimmy Choos?” The way I figured it, at the rate I was going, in another hour I’d have enough money to buy the shoes I so desperately wanted.

  There was no time for that now, though, because the new dealer was the dealer from hell.

  If the last dealer had looked like Danny Bonaduce all grown up, the new one was a thin Asian woman, resembling no one so much as that villainous lawyer who used to be on Ally McBeal. In fact, there was something about her that rattled me so much that when she dealt my hand—a Queen and an Eight—I got so nervous I started tapping my finger on the table, using the universal sign for “hit me,” and before I knew it I’d busted at Twenty-eight.