TODAY SHE HAD a morning appointment with Dr. O and Rusty was going with her. “I need a pair of shoes,” Rusty said. “And Dr. Osner said he’d fix my chipped tooth at the end of your appointment. Two birds with one stone.”
The shoe store, Kolber Sladkus, was next to Three Brothers Luncheonette on the street level of the Martin Building, where Dr. O had his office. While Rusty was trying on shoes, black suede pumps with three inch heels and a peep toe, on sale to make room for the spring line, Miri slipped her feet into the fluoroscope machine, where she peered into the viewfinder to see her bones, eerily green inside her shoes. Seeing her bones that way made her think of something from outer space. The boys at school were all walking around like zombies with their arms outstretched, making the girls scream. Winky Herkovitz said a flying saucer was causing the planes to crash. You couldn’t see it. It was hovering above Elizabeth and when it wanted to cause a plane to crash, it did. What was it with the boys in her class? Was it that they liked the idea of spaceships and zombies? Was it too scary to think about what really made the planes crash?
Rusty paraded around the shoe store in her peep-toe heels, admiring them in the mirror. “What do you think?” she asked Miri.
“Nice,” Miri said.
“They’re for dress, not work. I might leave them at the office for special occasions.”
How often did Rusty wear dress shoes? Maybe to the theater. Maybe to a holiday party.
Miri wasn’t listening as Rusty went on about the shoes, until Rusty surprised her by asking, “How about it, honey? Would you like a new pair of shoes for Passover?”
“Passover? That’s not until April this year.”
“I know…but look at these patent-leather slingbacks. Aren’t they cute?”
Rusty was acting strange today, but if she was offering new shoes, Miri wasn’t going to argue.
Mrs. Kolber, who had fitted Miri for shoes as long as she could remember, brought out the slingbacks for Miri to try. “They’re expensive,” Miri said, eyeing the price on the box.
“You know what Nana says,” Rusty told her. “They’re your feet. You’ll need them for the rest of your life. Treat them well.”
Irene was proud of her pretty, well-shaped, well-cared-for feet. She massaged them with Pond’s cold cream every night. No bunions for her from wearing shoes that didn’t fit. Mrs. Kolber didn’t have to pad Irene’s shoes, like she did with some of her friends, to make sure she’d be comfortable in her everyday oxfords and her black pumps.
“You only live once,” Mrs. Kolber sang. That was probably how she got customers to shell out money for expensive new shoes.
Miri got out of her saddle shoes, pulled off her thick white socks and pulled on the peds Mrs. Kolber offered. When she slipped her feet into the new shoes and stood up, Mrs. Kolber pressed on her toes to see how close they came to the toe box, then told her to walk around to make sure she wasn’t slipping out of the slingback. She’d never had slingback shoes. They made her feel like dancing.
While the shoes were being wrapped, Rusty wrote a check to pay for them. Instead of biting her lip the way she usually did when it came to parting with money, she was humming to herself. She hummed in the elevator all the way to Dr. O’s office on the third floor. Miri wasn’t sure about this happy-go-lucky Rusty. It made her nervous. On the way down the hall they passed the medical lab and Miri poked her head in the way she always did, to see the fat white rabbits in their cages. Natalie told her they had something to do with finding out if you were pregnant. Something about urine was involved. But neither of them understood how it worked. Once, Miri had a blood test at the lab to see if she was anemic. She wasn’t.
In the waiting room of Dr. O’s office, a little boy played with a small dog on the floor while his mother sat on the sofa and leafed through a magazine. As soon as Miri entered, the dog ran to her. “Fred!” Miri picked him up. “What are you doing here?”
“You know Fred?” the mother asked. Her English was heavily accented and she was good-looking, with big blue eyes, blond baloney curls hanging down her back, big breasts and just plump enough to make the boys whistle.
“Fred belongs to my friend Mason,” Miri said, trying to talk slowly, pronouncing every syllable in every word, in case she didn’t understand.
“Very nice boy, Mason. I know from Janet. Always making us laugh. I’m Polina and this, my son, Stash.”
Oh. Polina. Miri got a pang, thinking that Mason was friends with her.
Rusty looked up from the magazine she’d been flipping through. “I’m Rusty Ammerman, and this is my daughter, Miri.”
“Very nice meeting,” Polina said.
“Mason told me you live…” Miri began. “I mean lived in one of the houses that was hit but you were lucky because you weren’t home.”
“Very lucky. And lucky Miss Daisy took us home to stay. Miss Daisy so wonderful. Like mother to us. But we need find new place to live.”
“Maybe we can help,” Rusty said. “We have a family friend who owns apartment buildings.”