by Cynthia Robinson
Nathalia could see that her shoes were decomposing, and the African was the only one who could help her.
In the past, when her shoes had broken down, Nathalia walked to the end of the block, to the entrance of the subway station. The African was there every morning. He greeted the first waves of commuters as they ascended from under ground. He stayed all day, until dusk when the torrent of office workers descended again into the earth.
Gregory, for that was the African’s Christian name, would arrange his tiger print blanket on the sidewalk. On it, he displayed cakes of shoe polish stacked in a tidy pyramid. He set out a folding campstool for his customers, and a box for them to rest their feet on while he shined their shoes.
People who knew Gregory-people who lived downtown-knew that he could do more than just shine shoes. Gregory had a gift for making things last. Once he had re-built Nathalia’s shoes by tacking on rubber heels that he’d salvaged from another pair. Another time he had found a buckle for the left strap that almost matched the buckle on the right and he sewed it on for her. Gregory performed these small miracles with the tools he pulled from his pocket: a pair of needle-nose pliers, a little hammer, and a sewing needle that he kept stuck in a piece of cardboard.
After Gregory had repaired Nathalia’s shoes, he polished them-no extra charge. He told her that he enjoyed low overhead. And he was proud to pass on the savings to his customers. That was the word he chose. Proud.
“I can’t save these shoes,” Gregory told Nathalia. “Not this time.”
He pulled the shoes open to show Nathalia.
“Look,” he said. “The leather is now rotting from the inside. It disappears. There is nothing to hold on to, nothing to repair. These shoes have no more life.”
“I’ll have to buy new ones. Maybe I should go to DXW.”
“Their shoes can be less expensive,” Gregory said. “But with that comes the compromise. The quality may not be good.”
“How can I tell?” Nathalia asked.
“The soles must be strong,” Gregory said. “They must be thick like tires because for you, your shoes are your cars.”
“Sí, es verdad,” Nathalia said.
“The seams must be stitched, not just glued. Be sure they are leather, not man-made.”
“I think I would like shoes from Spain,” Nathalia said.
“From your homeland,” Gregory said.
* * *
Nathalia went back to her apartment and told her boyfriend that she was going shopping for shoes.
“Do you want me to come with you?” Byron asked. He was reading his computer screen.
“No,” she shook her head. “You have to blog.”
“Okay, good luck,” he said as he was typing.
Byron worked on his blog all the time now. And when he wasn’t working on it, he was talking about it. At first Nathalia thought the blog was like a job. Then she slowly came to realize that it wasn’t employment at all.
Every day, Byron would tell Nathalia how many visitors came to his blog. And there was one that kept coming to it, over and over again.
Byron was always excited to get messages from this daily blogger. He called her his biggest fan.
“She really gets me,” he’d always say about the woman he’d never met.
Nathalia used to smile when Byron said things like that. But it had been over a year since she’d arrived from Madrid, and her English had improved. Now she understood that Byron had paid to have his novel published. She realized that he had named himself Byron. And she knew that his
blog was not a job.
* * *
Nathalia walked out of the apartment and down the five flights of stairs on her broken shoes. The elevator had been broken ever since one of her neighbors-a tweaker named Sticks who had the legs of chorus girl and the face of a marmot-had trapped her self inside it. The fire department rescued Sticks by prying open the doors. That was months ago. And the elevator was still stuck on the first floor, the doors peeled open in torn strips of steel.
Nathalia darted out of her building and she threaded through the crowds along Powell Street: tourists and shoppers and business people. She knew that very few of these people actually lived in the neighborhood like she and Byron did.
The crowd was like an aggressive beast. People plowed along the sidewalk, three and four abreast. And most of these people were very large and hulking. They swung armloads of shopping bags from the department stores and the giant clothing chains. And the sidewalk was roiling in a frenzy because the people couldn’t seem to find enough to buy.
Nathalia had to be careful, and quick. She feared being trampled. She knew that she was an invisible woman who lived in an invisible room, tucked into a warren of invisible lives, above the busy street. And no one ever looked up.
* * *
Nathalia entered DXW through the electronic security gate. A security guard manned the gate. He was a diminutive Ethiopian. He wore a trim moustache and a navy blue blazer with a crest on the lapel. The blazer shoulders drooped down his arms and the cuffs nearly covered his hands.
The security guard offered Nathalia a shopping bag that was big enough to hold a dozen pairs of shoes. She didn’t need it, she told him.
DXW was self-serve. It was big and open like an aircraft hanger. The inventory of shoes was all out in the open-DXW gave shoppers the feeling that they were being allowed to rummage through the warehouse. They were discovering incredible bargains.
Shelf cases filled with shoeboxes mustered across the sales floor like battalions on a parade ground. And on top of the shelf cases stood the display samples: empty shoes, hundreds of them, posed in saucy stances.
The most expensive shoes were in the front of the store. These were the designer collections. The designer shoes were slender with wafer-thin soles. They had straps that were slicing thin-like baling wire.
Nathalia picked up one of the designer shoes. She held its spike heel in her fist and its skinny leather straps trailed to the floor. She examined the green glass bauble on the toe strap. And she realized that this was not meant to be a shoe at all. It was meant to evoke the ideal of a shoe.
She looked at the tag. It said the discount price was $549. Nathalia quickly put the shoe back.
She hurried to the far end of the store, to the everyday shoes. She found a pair of brown shoes that had thick soles as the African had advised. They were like men’s shoes, sturdy and sensible. She laced them up and walked back and forth on the carpet. She put them back in the box, took them to the counter, and paid for them.
“I will just wear them,” she told the cashier.
“Do you want the box?” the woman behind the counter asked.
“No,” Nathalia said. “I don’t have anyplace to put it.”
Nathalia left DXW wearing her new shoes. She walked one block to the apartment building, she walked up the five flights of stairs, she walked into the apartment and showed Byron.
“They look like good shoes,” he said. “Durable.”
“They were normally $87.99, but I got them for $34.99,” Nathalia said. And she thought about the word he chose: durable. She knew that to endure was to suffer hardship with patience.
That night Nathalia went to meet one of her students. She tutored several people, most tended to come and go, but Mike had stayed on with her lessons for nearly a year. He appreciated that she taught him to speak Spanish in a pure Castilian accent.
Nathalia walked to Opera Plaza, to the coffee shop where she always met Mike for his lesson. She wore her new shoes. And they were fine, but only for the first mile. After that, the new shoes started to hurt her feet in an unexpected place-at the top, just under the tongue. No matter how many times she stopped and knelt and shifted the tongue, it kept biting into the bone.
“I just bought these new shoes and they are hurting my feet,” she told Mike.
Nathalia removed her left shoe and rolled down her sock to reveal a red abrasion where the shoe had rubbed the skin raw, nearly to the bone.
“That looks bad,” Mike said, and he handed her his cell phone so she could call Byron.
Byron was there in less than an hour, carrying her black velvet slippers. She had bought them on the sidewalk in Chinatown for a couple of dollars. She had liked the beading sewn on top of them: a pair of little birds on a slender branch.
The next morning Nathalia went to see the African. She was wearing her slippers.
“Your shoes should not do that to your feet,” he said, looking at the red, raw patch on her foot. “Show me the shoes.”
She handed over the shoes to him. Gregory shook his head and reached for his canister of brown shoe paste. He swirled the paste on the shoes with a rag, then he buffed the shoes to a high shine with his soft brush.
“Now, take them back,” Gregory told her. “And show the people at DXW what those shoes have done to your feet.”
Nathalia returned to DXW carrying the shoes. She showed them to the woman at the counter. She showed the woman her foot-the terrible red abrasion-and she pulled her receipt out of her wallet. The woman told her that she could not give her cash back, but Nathalia could exchange the shoes.
Nathalia returned to the back of the store and carefully inspected the rows of sensible shoes. She rejected shoes with heels, even very low ones. She rejected shoes with sling-backs or open toes, because these shoes had to be suitable for work and for walking as well as for going to Mike’s house for dinner when he and his wife invited them over for Thanksgiving and Christmas. She rejected shoes with distinctive colors-shoes that were green like quinces and orange like persimmons-because these shoes had to look good with everything she wore.
She found a pair of black, flat shoes in a ballet style. She carefully considered them, she tried them on, and she bought them.
She exchanged the shoes and paid the cashier $10 because these shoes were marked $44.99.
She walked up Powell Street, up the three flights of stairs, and into the apartment.
“What’s wrong? Why are you crying,” Byron said, and he closed his laptop and rushed to her. He pulled her into the apartment and closed the door behind her.
“Mi zapatos!” Nathalia said, sobbing.
“Oh you have new shoes,” Byron said. “But they look nice.”
“They hurt,” said Nathalia. “They pinch my toes.”
Byron sat Nathalia down on the bed. He removed her shoes and rubbed her toes.
“You can just exchange them again,” Byron said.
He took the shoes into the bathroom. He wet a cloth under the tap and softly wiped the tops of the shoes with it. Then he ran the cloth over the soles of the shoes to wipe away the scuffmarks.
* * *
The next morning Nathalia returned to DXW carrying the ballet shoes. The same cashier was behind the counter. When Nathalia approached with the shoes, her face became hard.
“I’ll have to call the manager,” the cashier said, picking up the receiver of a heavy black telephone. She kept her eyes on Nathalia all the while that she spoke into the receiver.
“She’s coming,” the woman said. And she instructed Nathalia to stand to the side of the counter so she could help the next customer.
“Here she comes,” the woman bent over to whisper to Nathalia. Then she glanced upward, furtively, over her shoulder.
A staircase was suspended high in the air, over top of the sales floor. Nathalia understood that the stairs led to only one place-the manager’s office.
A loud bang echoed through the store. Then another. Then another. Each sounded like a heavy hammer hitting the hull of a ship.
The stairs swayed. Nathalia looked up and saw a large shoe hit the metal stair. Then the next shoe came down. And the entire store echoed with the report of it smashing onto the step.
The shoes were mules. A pair of feet-wide as oxen hooves-sprawled naked atop the cork soles. The feet were lashed down onto the mules by a macramé webbing of leather thongs. Bulges of flesh swelled out between the macramé knots and the toenails were lacquered a glistening, bruised purple.
There were no ankles. The calves rose solidly up from the feet like iron stanchions. With every step, the staircase quivered and threatened to come crashing down.
Presently Nathalia could see the rest of the manager. The woman swayed as she walked, pushing her enormous belly and breasts in front of her like the prow of a ship. Fat mounded up across her back and rounded her wide shoulders. She wore a lavender dress with cap sleeves like a child’s and it looked sinister blown up in this oversize.
On her head was a harum-scarum of copper curls. Snakes, Nathalia thought, she is a gorgon. And her gorgon hair shook in burnished brunette menace with every step she trod.
The woman pounded toward Nathalia. She entered the cashier’s island and asked her subordinate, “Is this her?” As she spoke, the manager did not look at the cashier. She looked at Nathalia.
“How can we help you this time?” the manager asked Nathalia.
A year earlier, Nathalia would have been confused by the dissonance between the polite words and the ironic tone. But now, she understood.
“I wish to exchange these shoes,” Nathalia said. “They hurt my feet.”
Nathalia could feel her own voice wavering. Cold air breezed across the sharp curves of her ankles. And she became conscious that she was standing before this woman barefoot, in her house-slippers.
“How many times do you think we can do this for you?” the manager said.
“I don’t understand.”
“This is the second time,” said the manager. The words slithered off her tongue.
“I would like to exchange the shoes,” Nathalia said.
Nathalia pulled her slight frame up as tall as she could and she willed her chin to stop quivering.
“Look, I don’t know how they do things in Mexico,” the manager said. “But here, in our country, we don’t wear shoes and then return them. This is ruined merchandise.”
Nathalia looked down at the ballet shoes. They looked just the same as they did yesterday when she picked them up off the shelf.
“We bent the rules for you already,” the manager said. “We let you exchange a pair of shoes that you had obviously worn.”
“I didn’t know they would hurt,” Nathalia said. “I didn’t know until I wore them.”
“Do you expect the store to pay for your mistakes?”
The woman reached beneath the cash register. She pulled out a black leather book and dropped it.
The leather smacked down hard on the counter. The silent women standing in line were startled by the sound.
“Sign your name here,” the manager said, opening the book and pointing to a line on the page.
“And print your name here. And we’ll need your phone number and address here.”
“Why do you need my name?” Nathalia asked.
She was now more frightened. She wondered if her name and address would be given to Immigration. They could come for her, late at night or early in the morning. They could put her on a bus to Mexico-a country where she knew no one, a country that she had never even visited. She had heard of these things happening.
“This is the store policy. If you want to exchange another pair of shoes, you have to sign the book,” the manager said.
“What is this book?” Nathalia asked.
“This is the list we keep of all the customers,” and when she said ‘customers’ the manager made quote marks in the air with her fingers, “who we have had problems with.”
“But I am not trying to make a problem,” Nathalia protested.
“I’m not going to stand here and debate you,” the manager said.
The security guard came over and stood beside Nathalia. He set down his armful of shopping sacks and his empty hands fidgeted in confusion.
Nathalia signed the book and exchanged the shoes. She selected a pair of brown penny loafers. When she took them home, Byron looked through their jar of coins and found the two shiniest pennies in the jar. He placed the pennies in Nathalia’s new shoes.
* * *
Nathalia and Byron were having coffee at a cafe with Gregory. It was several blocks away from Powell Street and there were no tourists there, no shoppers.
They sat at a table outside so they could smoke. Nathalia was wearing her penny loafers. She looked down at her shoes and sighed. They were not very attractive, but they felt comfortable.
“Have you ever thought about your funeral?” asked Byron.
“I would like to be sent home, to Chad,” Gregory said. “To lie with my family.”
“I have it planned,” said Byron. “When I’m dead, I want to be naked. Except for my backpack. I’ll have all my work in my backpack-my writing and my sketchbooks and my laptop. And then, I want to be wrapped up in a clear material.”
“Like Saran Wrap?” asked Gregory.
“Yes,” said Byron. “Only super-strength, to endure in space. I’d probably have to get it from N.A.S.A.”
“What is it you mean space?” Nathalia asked.
“I’m going to have them shoot me out into space. Like on a rocket. And I’ll float in outer space, naked, except I’ll have my work strapped to my back. And then if another life form-like super intelligent aliens from another planet-if they find me they can de-code my work. And the aliens will see that I’m a genius. And they’ll re-animate me.”
“I think when I die,” Gregory said. “It will be time for me to be dead.”
Nathalia and Byron and Gregory sat silently, considering the plan. They smoked and drank their coffee and Nathalia looked down at her shoes. She wondered how long they would last. And she tried to decide if what Byron said was absurd.