TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 50

[Tobie Shapiro]

November 5, 20000000000000000006


Dear Tree,

	It's Sunday, and that's the day we go house hopping.  That 
means we make a tour of open houses for sale in Berkeley.  But 
today's listings are pretty sad.  We may not even go.  So the market 
is slim right now.  My house goes on the market a week from today.  I 
should go see it in its fixed up form.  It might depress me, but what 
the hell, I have a key, and the piano is still there.  My piano!  I 
have a piano!  It's a Steinway concert grand built in 1876, before 
they revamped the action.  It's got a rosewood case and it's heavily 
carved.  What a beauty.  And the bass notes are luscious.  Where will 
I put this piano when the house is sold?  I can't bring it to my 
mother's house.  It won't fit.  I can't put it in storage.  It's too 
fragile.  What can I do?

	What I did.


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If the Shoe Fits

	My mother took my sister and me to a corner shoe store.  This 
was in downtown Washington, D.C.  The bustle overwhelmed me.  I was 
used to the relative quiet and sparseness of the home.  Suddenly to 
be thrust into busy streets with big noisy cars and population 
density was too much for a six year old.

	Shoe stores were fun in those days.  They had these big 
machines, like podiums with wooden binoculars mounted on top that 
were aimed into the machines.  You stuck your little tootsies into 
the hole below and stared at them through the view finder.  What did 
you see?  An X-ray of your own two feet!  The idea was to see how 
your skeleton feet fit into the shoes you were trying on.  The idea 
was also to attract families with kids who loved to look into the 
machines at their skeleton feet.  Did we have any concept of the 
effects of prolonged exposure to X-rays?  We had no such concept.  I 
wiggled my toes and watched the skeleton wiggle its toes.  All the 
metacarpals lined up and working together to make a functioning foot. 
Two feet together  --  the skeleton can cooperate and walk.  This is 
how my bones work to get me from one place to another.  The bones 
looked so big and my own feet were so small.  Later, when the dangers 
of exposure to X-rays were revealed, these X-ray podiums were 
outlawed, and we all had to take a look at our feet in the shoes 
without the special effects.  What a disappointment!

	In the shoe store, they put our little feet on a metal form 
and slid a metal bar over to measure our feet in length and width. 
This correlated with the sizing of the shoes.  My sister got her 
shoes first.  I twiddled my thumbs and looked at all the shoes while 
she tried on a few pairs and selected one pair that she liked.  While 
she was busy with this, I found the perfect pair of shoes for me.  As 
I remember them is probably not as they were, but I envision them as 
black Mary Janes with colourful embroidery on the toes, maybe a 
picture of a dragon with flowers.  How impossible is that?  I coveted 
these shoes and when it was my turn, I announced immediately which 
shoes I wanted.  The shoe salesman scurried off into the invisible 
guts of the store to search for the shoes in my size.  The closest he 
got was a size five and I was a size six.  I tried on the size fives. 
Maybe the shoe was cut large.  Maybe they would fit.  But they didn't 
fit.  I squeezed my foot into the size five Mary Janes with the 
colourful embroidery over the crest of the toes.  And I couldn't get 
my whole foot into it.  My toes were all cramped, and the X-ray 
machine revealed that my bones were all scrunched up, and curled 
under, like some aristocratic Chinese woman with bound feet.  These 
shoes did not fit.  Did they have them in a size seven, or even an 
eight?  I could grow into them.  The salesman disappeared into the 
store guts again.  When he returned, the news was bad.  No, the 
largest size they had them in was the size five.  Disappointment was 
not something I was going to entertain.  I wanted those shoes, even 
if they were a size five.  I would ungrow my feet for these pretty 
shoes.  I would insist that my feet fit into these size fives, even 
if the physicality proved otherwise.  I didn't like what was real, 
and preferred to dream on.  Maybe dreaming would make it so.  My feet 
would fit into those size fives.  My mother tried to quiet me, but I 
would not be quieted.  I wanted those shoes.

	"You can't have them.  They don't fit."

	And that's when the tantrum began.  I screamed and hollered 
and cried, and kicked and when my mother took my hand to lead me out 
of the store, I dragged my feet.  I fell on the carpeted floor and 
would not walk.  I was a weight at the end of her arm.  She pulled 
me, yelling and bawling, out of the store and down the street to the 
car.  People came out of their shops to watch the scene parade by.  A 
woman with one eight year old happily carrying her bag with the box 
of new shoes in it, and a six year old shrieking her head off, lying 
down on the sidewalk, wailing and weeping and kicking and screaming.

	Forty years later, my own daughter brought a pair of yellow 
rain boots to school.  They were two sizes too small for her.  But 
she doggedly insisted that they fit her.  She tried so hard to shove 
her little feet into the rubber boots, but she couldn't get her heels 
to cram down into the heel of the boot.  They just wouldn't fit.  And 
we had someplace to be.

	"These boots don't fit you, sweetheart."  I said.  "We can 
get you another pair of boots that fit."

	"No. These fit.  They do.  They do."

	And she tried again to stuff her feet into the miniscule 
boots, those yellow rubber boots.  She couldn't even get her feet 
into the feet of the boot.  Still, she screamed that they did fit, 
all evidence to the contrary.  She screamed and cried that her feet 
would fit, if I'd just wait.  She could squeeze them in there.  Size 
doesn't matter!  We had someplace to be.  So I picked up the boots in 
one hand, and picked up the girl in the other, and swung her around 
on my hip, holding her close as she kicked and struggled, shrieked 
and tore her hair.  She beat her fists on my bony body.  But she 
couldn't make those boots fit.  I limped out of the school with her 
flailing and hammering.  The impossible would be forced to happen. 
Even if it took forty years.

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-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net