Baby Needs a New Pair of Shoes Read online

  Maybe even better.

  8

  “What’s this?”

  We were sitting out on our balcony the following day, enjoying the late-summer sun while drinking some recuperative Bloody Marys, and I’d just handed Hillary three hundred dollars in cash.

  “Are you sure you can stand to drink something other than Diet Pepsi Lime or Jake’s Fault Shiraz?” Hillary had said when I’d suggested the Bloody Marys. Then she’d put her hand to my forehead. “You don’t feel feverish,” she’d said.

  “Cut it out,” I’d said, brushing her hand away. And, hey, hadn’t I just drunk champagne the night before? “I’ve been doing so many things lately that I wouldn’t normally do, what’s one more?”

  In truth, all of the “doing so many things lately that I wouldn’t normally do” was making me feel edgy in the extreme, like I’d gone ice skating on a lake that was about to melt through. But if doing things like going to Foxwoods the night before and the prospective trip to Atlantic City was to become a part of my new reality, I was going to have to break from my old “I only eat the same foods at each meal” mode. Either that, or become the crazy lady on the bus carrying her own purple lunch bag with her to the casinos.

  “It’s for you,” I said now, referring to the three hundred dollars.

  “I don’t get it,” Hillary said.

  She might not get it, but I certainly did. For years now, she’d been a great friend to me. Not only was she undyingly supportive—wasn’t that her the night before telling me I’d done great and encouraging me to do even better in the future?—but she was also the codependent who was always letting me be just as weird as I needed to be…except for when she was making fun of me for it, that is. Despite the latter, Hillary deserved some kind of reward for being the greatest friend I’d ever had and I was determined to give it to her.

  “At first, I thought maybe you could get the Pippa with it. It’s a metallic flat thong that retails for three hundred and thirty dollars—I found that out when I looked online last night.”

  “Wait a second,” she said. “You were in my room after we got home last night, surfing on my computer, while I was sleeping?”

  “Yes, and it’s getting kind of messy in there. I think you should clean—”

  “You were in my room—”

  “Hey,” I said, “what can I say? I couldn’t sleep. So I started planning for my Choo shoes future. But then I started thinking about you.”

  “And you thought I should have the Pippas?”

  “Well, yes, until I realized they were a little more than I can budget right now, so I think you should get the Momo Flats.”

  “Why does that name sound familiar?”

  “Because Elizabeth Hepburn flirted with them briefly when we went to New York, before rejecting them for the Fayres as being the shoe that will finally knock out Bacall at the Oscars. You remember the Momos, don’t you? They were a metallic laser-cut shoe. The label underneath said they were available in blood-orange, bronze, charcoal, chocolate, gold, purple and silver.”

  “How do you remember all that detail?”

  “I looked under all the shoes and committed the information to memory. It was important to me, like knowing that ‘I am almost out at heels’ comes from The Merry Wives of Windsor, not the Jimmy Choo catalog. But that’s neither here nor there, because here’s the best part.”

  “I can’t wait.”

  “I really don’t think those colors I listed for the Momo Flats would be the most exciting for you, but the display model was in that blue-green color we all liked the best. I think you should get those with the money. They’re only two hundred and ninety-five dollars. I want you to get those with the money.”

  “You’re paying for it all?”

  “Well, no. I can’t pay the taxes. You’ll need to pay the taxes yourself.”

  “But this is supposed to be part of your stake money for Atlantic City.” She tried to hand the money back to me. “I can’t take this!”

  I shoved the money back at her. “But you have to take it!” I said.

  “But I’ll feel lousy if you don’t achieve your dream on account of me!”

  “But I’ll feel lousier if you don’t let me do this for you!”

  “But why, why, why, Delilah, is this so important to you?”

  I cupped my hand behind my ear. “Did someone let Tom Jones in?” I asked.

  “What?” She was exasperated.

  “Never mind.” I brushed it off. There was no point in letting her in on just how much weirder I was getting, meaning that ever since we’d set foot into the casino the night before, I’d been hearing an undernote of Tom Jones singing all the time. Really. She’d been psychoanalyzing me for years for free. I certainly didn’t want her to start medicating me.

  Instead, I speechified for a bit.

  “Ever since our first day at college, you’ve taken care of me. You cheered for me the two times I actually got boyfriends, even though their nicknames were The Weasel and The Rat, respectively, and mourned with me the two times I lost them. You cheered for me when I aced my Shakespeare class, held my hair whenever I vomited after too many Singapore Slings, cried with me and helped me carry my things to the car after I flunked out. Then, as soon as you graduated yourself, you found us an apartment I could actually afford half the rent on—I know if you were just looking for yourself, you could have gone higher, lived somewhere grander than South Park—so that I could finally move out of my dad’s place. And since then, you’ve been just as supportive as ever.”

  “But I tease you,” she interrupted, “sometimes mercilessly.”

  “But I deserve it,” I countered. “If it weren’t for you, I’d never stop and think about the bigger picture or the fact that at age twenty-eight all I’ve got to show for myself is the Golden Squeegee Award.”

  “But you worked so hard for that.”

  “See?” I pointed the celery stalk from my Bloody Mary at her accusingly. “You’re doing it again.”

  “Ohh, don’t be so pointing-things-outish. In a minute, I’ll be giving you a hard time again.”

  “True,” I conceded. “But I need someone to give me a hard time. My dad never does it, my mom didn’t live long enough to do it now.”

  We bowed our heads for a moment of silence over the dregs of our Bloody Marys in honor of Lila Sampson, may she rest in peace.

  “You do everything for me,” I said, breaking the moment first, “but I never get to do anything for you, Hillary. Let me do this one thing.”

  “But if I wanted the shoes that desperately, I could afford them myself.”

  “But you already said you wouldn’t buy them until I could afford mine. Besides, if you bought them for yourself, then I’d be denied the chance to do something for you for once. Don’t deny me that.”

  “Ohh…all right. You can buy me the damn shoes.”

  “Yea!”

  What an odd exchange: you’d think I’d talked her into doing something distasteful; you’d think I’d just won something other than the right to spend most of my stake on someone else.

  But Hillary, at least, hadn’t forgotten about the need for that stake.

  “Those shoes really are going to look great on me,” she said, “but what about your stake for Atlantic City?”

  “Oh—” I pooh-poohed her concerns “—it’ll be fine. Don’t forget, at Foxwoods I started out with one hundred dollars and came away with five times that much. I’ll be going to Atlantic City with twice that stake, so I’ll probably turn that two hundred dollars into a thousand before I get home. I still won’t be able to afford the Ghost, but I’ll be damn close. I’ll just make up the rest some other way.”

  “Gee, your math skills are great, Rumpelstiltskin, but don’t you think you’re getting a bit ahead of yourself here?”

  Apparently, we were back to giving me a hard time again.

  “Hmm?” I prompted, not sure I wanted to know.

  “I just mean, what makes you
think you can keep spinning straw into gold? What makes you so sure you’ll go on winning, that you’ll never lose?”

  “Well, for one thing,” I said, feeling huffy, “since I’m taking money and turning it into bigger money, your straw-into-gold analogy sucks because what I’m doing is something more akin to turning a little bit of gold into a lot of gold. And for another thing—”

  “Stop.” She stopped my madly waving celery stalk with her hand. “I just wanted you to entertain the notion that there’s no sure thing about what you’re doing. If gambling always equaled winning, everyone would do it. I just wanted you to be aware that you could conceivably lose, that there are always consequences.”

  “Of course,” I said, calm once more, leaving my celery stalk at peace. “I understand that.”

  But, secretly, inside I was thinking: No way was I going to lose, not ever. I was Black Jack Sampson’s daughter and sole heir, wasn’t I?

  True, Black Jack Sampson had lost as many fortunes as he’d won, but it was going to be different for me.

  I was not going to lose.

  9

  “Of course you’re going to lose.”

  “Gee, thanks, Dad.”

  I was at my dad’s apartment for Monday night dinner, meaning I’d need to leave before Monday Night Football started or risk offending him with my lack of knowledge. Just because my dad had trained me to sit through sporting events, it didn’t mean I understood them.

  “Oh, now, don’t get huffy,” he said. “Your mother used to do that all the time, too, get huffy.”

  “Mom never got huffy!”

  “Okay, but she had every right to get huffy and I could hear her carefully trying not to be huffy underneath her nonhuffiness which is almost the same thing.”

  “Huh?”

  “Hey, I make sense to me. Don’t worry so much if I don’t make sense to you. Anyway—” he stirred the pasta in the pot “—all I’m saying is that if you’re going to gamble, you have to expect to lose occasionally, too, maybe lose big.”

  “Whatever.”

  Ever since I’d moved out, Monday night dinner had been an on-again, off-again tradition with us. When my dad was in a good mood about his prospects for the future because he’d recently won big, it was on. When he lost or was depressed about the future, it was off.

  At the time of my mother’s death, my dad knew how to cook exactly two things: he could boil water for instant coffee (“instant tastes like liquid dirt, Baby, but what are you gonna do?”) and s’mores (“they have all your major food groups”).

  “Your mother did everything for me,” he’d said at the time. “She even ironed my underwear. How will I ever survive without her?”

  “For one thing, you’ll start wearing unironed underwear like normal people,” I’d said. “But you’re a grown man. Don’t you think it’s time you learned how to use the microwave?”

  “Feh,” he’d said. Whenever Jackie Mason played any of the casinos my dad was working, he’d always take time out to catch the show and some of the Borscht Belt lingo had worn off on him. He’d never pass Conchita and Rivera’s test of Portuguese-Spanish, but he could say gesundheit or schmuck with the best of them. “Feh. I hate all that modern-technology mishegas. I’ll learn how to cook for myself. How hard can it be? Your mother always said if a person could read, a person could cook. I’m pretty sure I can read.”

  But his earliest efforts gave the lie to that.

  “Is pasta supposed to look like that?” he’d asked in dismay, showing me the contents of the pot—it was a cream-colored sodden mess without a complete noodle in sight.

  “You bought gluten pasta,” I’d said, studying the box. “I think that maybe you weren’t supposed to cook it that long?”

  “Shit,” he’d said. “I didn’t know pasta could melt.” Then he’d tossed it over the fence of the family home—he’d still lived there right after Mom’s death—into Mr. Finnigan’s yard.

  “Brownie’ll eat it,” he’d said, referring to Mr. Finnigan’s gray-and-white schnauzer. “That mutt’ll eat anything.”

  “I hope that stuff doesn’t kill him.”

  “I should be so lucky.”

  Then there was the time, that very same first year after Mom’s death, when he’d tried to make my birthday cake.

  “I wanted it to be so special for you,” he’d said.

  “I don’t think an angel cake is supposed to be charcoal-broiled, Dad.”

  “I wanted it to be so special for you,” he’d said again.

  “Maybe we can just scrape some of the black stuff off the outside and dunk the inside into the leftover pink frosting.”

  And that’s exactly what we did.

  But as time went on, my dad got better at it.

  “I found some of your mother’s old recipe cards! I can read! I can cook!”

  If not exactly a Julia Child or Emeril Lagasse, he could now do a lot more in a kitchen than I could, which may not be saying a lot but it was enough.

  And he knew my habits.

  “I’ve got the lasagna you like as backup!” he said, opening the freezer to reveal my beloved Michael Angelo’s Four Cheese. In the past year, he’d even broken down and learned how to use the microwave.

  “Are you making one of Mom’s recipes or your own version?” I asked.

  “Your mom’s.”

  “Then I’ll have what you’re having.”

  Despite my devotion to all things frozen, I was always okay with eating the foods I’d grown up with.

  What was okay to eat, what wasn’t okay to eat—Hillary often said most people saw their lives in terms of choices. But not me. I saw my life in terms of a series of compulsive obsessions that were like touchstones for me—things I had to do, foods I had to eat in order to stay sane. I didn’t want to be like that. How I would have liked to learn how to be one of those people who saw their lives in terms of choices. How I would have liked to be like everyone else.

  I set the table and Dad got a bottle of Jake’s Fault Shiraz out of the fridge.

  “Do I know my girl or do I know my girl?” Dad asked.

  “You know your girl,” I admitted.

  “Good.” He sat down, put a real linen napkin in his lap. (“It’s important, no matter how Fortune is going,” he’d often tell me, “to eat like a man of consequence. And the hotels never even miss the napkins.”) “Then you’ll understand when I say I know you well enough to know what’s going through that head of yours. You’ve convinced yourself that you can’t be beat, that you’re somehow smarter than the old man.”

  “How…” I stopped myself before finishing the thought, which would have sounded something like, How did you know that?

  “Hey,” he said. “Before I was old, I was young once. And I know how you think because it’s the way I used to think, ‘I’m invincible. No one can touch me.’ It’s my duty to tell you this because, as Hamlet says, ‘I must be cruel, only to be kind.’”

  “Yeah, well, ‘neither a borrower nor a lender be,’ right back at you. But, anyway, I’ve never thought that about myself, Dad. I’ve always thought, ‘I suck. Just about anyone could destroy me.’”

  “Stop swearing. Salad?”

  “Are you kidding? There are green things in there.”

  “Sorry, my mistake. Next time, I’ll try to make the salad without vegetables. As I was saying—”

  “I know what you’re saying,” I said. “You’re saying I’m like you. But I’m not. I never have been.”

  “Oh, no? Then how come you’re all of a sudden so cocky about gambling? Sure, you made a little money in Foxwoods. Hell, you did great. But that doesn’t mean you’re ready for the big time.”

  “I’m not looking for the big time. I’m just looking for a little…more.”

  “Oh, right, ‘more’—I know all about ‘more.’ ‘More’ is what everyone wants after getting just a little taste. ‘More’ is dangerous.”

  I put my fork down. “Does that mean you’re not going
to help me any more?”

  “Who ever said that? I’m just trying to do what a father is supposed to do—protect his little girl from harm. Now clear the plates while I get the cards. I’m going to teach you how to win with the correct strategy.”

  An hour later, with Monday Night Football ready to start any minute, I knew what to do if the dealer dealt me two Eights and was showing a Ten for his own upcard.

  “Always split Eights,” Black Jack said, “no matter what the dealer is showing.”

  “What if I pull another Eight?”

  “Split ’em again.”

  “But won’t all the other players think I’m crazy?”

  “Who cares what the other players think? You’re not playing against them. You’re playing against the House and you should never care what the House thinks, either. The only thing that matters, is how the cards are running and how you play the hand you’re dealt. Split the three Eights. I’m telling you, you can’t go wrong.”

  For practice, he dealt a hand that included four imaginary players, stacking the deck so I wound up with two Eights.

  My hand hesitated over the cards.

  “Split ’em,” Black Jack commanded.

  I did what he said, in effect doubling my bet since I now had to match the bet on the second Eight so that the bets were equal.

  “Don’t look so white,” Black Jack said. “Those hundreds you’re playing with are just Monopoly money.”

  Black Jack dealt me my third Eight.

  “Split ’em again,” he commanded my hesitant fingers.

  Great. Now I had three hundred dollars’ worth of funny money on the line. Should I be sweating?

  Black Jack dealt cards to the imaginary players. Two busted, one stood on a soft Seventeen, one on a hard Sixteen.