Rita Hayworth's Shoes

by Francine LaSala

  A huge thank you to the folks at Diversion Books, for adding Rita Hayworth’s Shoes to their list and believing in the magic of the story!

  Lastly, thank you to my high school English teacher, Bob Albert, who first encouraged me to write, and to all my former college lit professors for opening my eyes to an amazing world of imagination and interpretation, most especially Dr. Morgan Himmelstein, who first introduced me to Candide. I was listening, I promise. I was always listening.

  More by Francine LaSala...

  1

  It was the kind of day that made Mina Clark feel every breath of her forty-two years—and then some.

  It would have been bad enough that the hot water heater had blown out the night before and that today, neither she nor her two-year-old daughter Emma would be able to wash up properly. A problem for Mina who hadn’t taken a shower since Tuesday…or Monday? And it was already Thursday. Or Wednesday? No, Thursday.

  But a bigger problem for Mina’s tastefully decorated home as during a regretful moment’s distraction on Mina’s part, Emma, with her improbably nimble tiny fingers, had managed to trip the lock on Emma’s husband Jack’s ancient art supplies. Delicious and dear, dark and demonic, Emma had not only managed to open the long-locked cabinet, but had also managed to unscrew all the tops of Jack’s acrylic paint tubes, and was now awash in color, from head to toe. And, alas, so were myriad walls and carpets, fixtures and furnishings. It was as if a Jackson Pollack painting had come to fiery life and “burned” through the bedroom, the hallway, and the living room of the Clark home. A trail of destruction that, like the water heater, there was no budget to correct.

  What could she do? Could she wrap the child in plastic garbage bags, haul her down to the community gym, and sneak her into the locker room showers in the locker room where she could rinse them both off? She considered this the only option for a minute until she remembered that her car was in the shop. Again. Hit and run. Again. And she had no means to collect it from the shop until the insurance adjuster cut her a check.

  This time, it had happened in the parking lot of Emma’s elitist nursery school. Mina had taken Emma to her classroom, and when she finally emerged after enduring a twenty-minute struggle with separation, she saw that someone had crashed in the passenger-side door of her car. Scum apparently knew no social station. The last time, Mina’s car had gotten rear-ended as she sat waiting for a red light to change to green. Without missing a beat, the driver of the other car slammed into reverse and took off. The blood-curdling screams that came from the backseat following the crash, a child seemingly unharmed but frightened beyond words, could have woken the dead. Mina considered that perhaps they had, and that maybe all the bad luck she’d been having lately was the work of one such disturbed spirit who was hot with revenge at being having been disturbed. And she also knew that was ridiculous.

  Terrified, Mina had bolted right to the pediatrician—without calling the police or trying to chase after the driver who hit her. It seemed like Emma would never stop crying and Mina was convinced that something was terribly wrong.

  Dr. Swenson, a kindly gentleman in his late fifties, had carefully examined the screaming child and concluded: “She’s just scared.”

  “Scared?” Mina near-shouted, as she tried to pull a wriggling, writhing Emma into her arms to console her. A raging octopus with chainsaws for tentacles. “Just scared?”

  “Just scared,” he said, sweet and soft-spoken, surprisingly audible over the cacophony.

  “Well how do I make her less scared?” Mina asked, and they both sized up the still-screaming tot, the mother with a face frantic with worry, the doctor with a cool, matter-of-fact gaze.

  There was a long pause before he spoke. “Benadryl,” he said.

  “Medication?” Mina gasped. “But if you say she’s okay, why am I medicating her?”

  And just at that moment, Emma stopped had stopped screaming. She gave a little shudder, a big sniff, and she let out a sigh. The drama was over.

  “Well, she isn’t crying anymore, is she,” Dr. Swenson said, and gave Mina a warm, friendly tap on the back. “The Benadryl would have calmed her down. Even knocked her out,” he whispered, with a wink and a warm smile.

  “Oh,” was all Mina could muster.

  Later that day, she had sat down with her neighbor, Esther, and told her what had happened. Esther gave her the same warm look and assured, “There’s just no way I could have raised my five kids without Benadryl.”

  Suddenly what the doctor had said made sense. Mina had no idea what she would do without Esther, her octogenarian next-door-neighbor. Esther had been so kind to them. And Emma loved her so much. Her fashion sense arrested in the 1960s. Her curiously black beehive hairdo. Her amazing costume jewelry collection—each day a new piece!

  And suddenly, Emma knew just who she should call to help straighten out the mess. Esther Erasmus. The only person who made living where she did bearable.

  But as Mina approached the phone, the thing that ruined her day, every day, every week, every month for what seemed like decades. It rang. She checked the caller ID and just as she had suspected, an identifiable 888 number. Her heart stopped, as it did. Her breath trapped in her throat as she watched the phone, praying for the ringing to stop. The machine would have picked it up if it wasn’t already filled with messages she couldn’t bear to listen to. Messages from people angrily making demands she couldn’t honor.

  With every ring she was reminded why she couldn’t replace the water heater. Why the dryer leaked through the kitchen ceiling. Why her car was still in the shop.

  On top of it all, her rear, bottom-left molar was throbbing in pain, and had been for weeks. She hated that she was going to have to make an appointment to see her dentist because she absolutely despised going to the dentist. But more than that was the dread she felt at how much it would cost, the same sense of dread she had felt over not being able to answer the phone. Whoever it was on the other end of that phone wanted money. And Mina had none.

  If you looked around Mina Clark’s suburban home, the fact that she had no money would make no sense at all; the expansive, well-appointed space pretty much screamed the idea that wealth lived here.

  For one, the home was located in the very exclusive enclave of Easton Estates, a gated community of soulless McMansions that all looked pretty much the same—and God help you if you didn’t like it that way.

  Step through the carved-mahogany double-door front entrance and you encountered a foyer the full height of the house, complete with a dramatic skylight, which splashed sunlight on the terrazzo marble floor and sparkled off the speckled silver bowl with the cobalt blue dragonfly pattern resting on the foyer table. Mina knew she’d had that bowl for years, long before living at Easton Estates, but she had no idea when she had gotten it—from whom or even why.

  Downstairs, a fully finished basement was used for pretty much nothing, and again, Mina had no idea why. It was yet another puzzle she was taxed to solve as she wandered daily around this strange house where she lived, desperate to piece back together the life that existed that she couldn’t remember before the past two or so years.

  To the left of the foyer sat a richly appointed dining room and behind it, a fully outfitted modern kitchen, sleek and cool with cobalt cabinetry and stainless steel appliances. Mina didn’t particularly like her kitchen, though. It reminded her somehow of being in a submarine.

  Behind the kitchen was a small alcove Mina had gated off and made into a playroom. She wasn’t exactly sure why she hadn’t decided to make the basement a playroom, except she didn’t like having Emma so far away from her. Ridiculous, yes, as there was already the distance of nursery school three hours a day, three days a week. In any case, the room was a crazy, colorful jungle of colors and soft things, a crazy juxtaposition to the submarine kitchen. Already awash in Day-Glo, it now took on a whole new level of color thanks to Emma’s “artwork.”

  To the other side of
the foyer was a formal living room, then a family room, and then behind that, another alcove that was purportedly Mina’s “office”—though she rarely did anything in that room but surf the Internet and listen to her tapes. She could have paid bills if she had money to pay them. She could have gotten some work done, if she knew what work for her was.

  Mina entered the small room and headed for the cassette player. She pressed play and she moved back through the house, heading back to the kitchen to try and call Esther again.

  “What do you believe?” the man’s voice emphatically implored throughout the house from the state-of-the-art speaker system.

  “I have no idea,” Mina absently answered.

  “What do you want to believe about you? What do you want to believe you are?”

  Mina wanted to believe something about herself. That she was something—was someone. That she had once done more with her life than sit around her house and try and remember who she was, and chase around a maniacal toddler.

  “Who do you believe you are?”

  “I don’t know,” she said softly. “I don’t remember.”

  The no memory thing was tough and seemed only to get worse by the day. As hard as she tried, Mina simply could not remember anything that had happened in her life before Emma was born. Even Emma’s earliest days were a fog. She had no recollection of the pregnancy—whether it was “easy” or not, whether she was sick or not. The birth. The other mothers always wanted these answers. They were obsessed with natural or epidural, vaginal or caesarian, breast or bottle—and they were also obsessed with bonding with the mothers who had done things just as they had, and obsessed with belittling, tormenting, alienating any mother that had done it differently. Mina hated The Mothers.

  “You can be WHO you think you are. If you think it, you can believe it!” the voice encouraged.

  Then there was Jack. Her “husband.” The phantom presence that shared this house and this life with her when he wasn’t working late and weekends, or traveling for business. She didn’t quite understand how they had no money if he worked as hard as he did; she didn’t want to think about what else he might be doing. Mina could not remember meeting Jack or falling in love with him. She could not remember their wedding day—any of the planning or preparation involved. It was hard to get a sense of him even now. She couldn’t remember if she loved him, if she ever really loved him. Though she felt she had—and that she still did. Even in the small pockets of time they spent together, she could feel a warmth, a crackling flame, a shared affection and a desire, even if it was seldom if ever acted upon by either of them these days.

  “If you feel it, you can know it to be true!” said the voice on the tape, and Mina took a deep breath and as she repeated the words under her breath.

  Perhaps the saddest thing of it all was that she had no idea where she came from. No recollection of childhood, of family. She had been able to piece together that there was no one left. But who was her mother? Her father? Did she have any brothers or sisters? It was these questions and a million more like them that distracted Mina daily—and opened the door for Emma to do crazy things like get into paint and ruin the furniture.

  “Out! Out! Out! Monny I want out!” Emma shrieked from her “prison,” and the phone started ringing again. Mina hoped it was Jack but when she saw it was a different 888 number, she angrily picked up the receiver and slammed it down again. Anyone who she wanted to speak to could call her on her cell phone, she rationalized. At least the vultures didn’t know that number. At least not yet.

  “If you could, just think for a moment if you could….” The voice paused and started up again with great passion and fury. “If you believe you could be what you want to believe, would you finally… Would you FINALLY… Would you finally believe in yourself?”

  “Not likely,” Mina surmised and dashed over to the playroom to collect Emma. Except she had forgotten to mop up a large puddle of water that had formed under the ceiling from where the dryer was leaking and she slipped, old-film-wipe-out-on-a-banana-peel-style on the Italian ceramic floor.

  “Monny! MONNY!”

  “I’m coming!” Her whole body hurt as she tried to get up. And then the doorbell rang.

  “What do you believe?” the man’s voice demanded of her. “What do YOU believe?”

  “You bad monny. Bad, bad monny. I gonna hit-choo bad monny!”

  Mina picked herself off the floor and headed for the door.

  “I gonna hit-choo in the head!”

  “What do you believe the Universe owes you?”

  The toddler just kept screaming. The phone started ringing again and now the doorbell. “Oh fuck, alright, I’m coming!” she said.

  “If you know what you believe you need, the Universe will bring it to you! But first you must know what you believe you need!”

  “MONNNNNNNNY!!!!”

  “I’m coming baby. Hang on!”

  “I want-choo now monny! Now! Now! Now!”

  Bedraggled, limping, covered in dried paint, Mina pulled open the door. And there, on the other side, stood her opposite. Serenity, manifest in a small-framed, advanced-aged “savior” known as Esther Erasmus, holding a covered plate that held the promise of something sweet, and today wearing a bright, bejeweled pin that reminded Mina of a Tiffany stained glass lampshade. Esther had arrived, as if beckoned by the Universe itself, and now Mina could finally breathe.

  “If you want it, you can bring it to you.”

  “You shouldn’t just open the door like that,” Esther chided, though with a gentleness Mina had come to depend upon. The soothing calm in the chaos of her life. “You have to be careful.”

  “Esther, my goodness,” Mina laughed as they stood in the doorway. “Here?” She shook her head. “I think the worst case scenario would be that creep that runs the Landscaping Committee. And I think I could probably take him.” Mina then made a pathetic attempt at a laugh, as she and Esther both looked to the planting beds outside her front door—or rather, what had been planting beds.

  “Those bastards,” Esther said, with a succession of tsks. “I mean, I knew they would do this. But those bastards, all the same.”

  “You mean that they would do this? To a neighbor?”

  “That Charlie Witmore is a pain in the ass and everyone knows it. But the head of a home owner’s association holds a lot of power,” she said. “Besides, widowers can be assholes in general. Trust me. I’ve known plenty of them.”

  “If you want it, it can be yours.”

  Starting off the seemingly never-ending list of what had been making this the proverbial day from hell was the discovery this morning that the flowers in Mina’s planting beds surrounding her front porch had all been brutally murdered. The night before, the entire landscaping committee had come and, with their bare hands, unearthed all of Mina’s flowers. As it turned out, peonies, in any shade, were expressly prohibited, as stated in the bylaws of the community. Peonies had been the favorite flower of Charlie Witmore’s now-deceased wife. At her funeral, there had been an ocean of purple and orange and magenta peony blooms. And now any time anyone at Easton Estates saw peonies of any kind, all they could see in their minds-eyes was Kitty Witmore, made up like a pasty showgirl in her pink-satin lined coffin.

  Shame rose in her face and she looked away. “It was insensitive of me,” she said. “I should have gone with Marigolds. No one ever uses Marigolds at a funeral.”

  “No one uses peonies either,” said Esther, and Mina half-nodded in agreement. Esther gently placed a hand on Mina’s elbow. “You don’t think it was insensitive of them to come here in the middle of the night and massacre your garden?”

  “What you welcome will be YOURS!”

  “You have company?” Esther asked, a perplexed look on her face.

  Mina didn’t answer either question.

  Esther craned her neck to look inside the house to find the source of the curious voice as she spoke. “I can’t t
ell you what I had done had they messed with my yard,” she shook her head and gave Mina a soft, powdery kiss on the cheek. “Honey, you’re going to have to stop letting people push you around like this,” she said, and she handed Mina the plate.

  “If you want it, it will come to you.”

  “What is that? Is someone here?” asked Esther, now gently pushing her way inside. “Who’s that man talking? And where’s the little one? Isn’t it Tuesday?”

  In the time that had elapsed since Mina chose door over daughter, Emma had gone silent. Almost too silent. Now Mina panicked.

  “Here,” she tossed the plate back to Esther and ran to the playroom. “Emma? Mama’s coming! Emma! Are you okay?”

  “If you want it, make it yours! Goodnight!”

  “Goodnight?” said Esther, befuddled “But it’s eleven thirty in the morning.”

  Mina raced to the playroom and found Emma crunched up in a little ball, holding her knees, rocking and scowling. When she saw her mother had finally come for her, she regarded the woman with a sour grin, and went on sulking. “I’m sorry baby,” Mina said, and bent down in front of the gate. “You know mama loves you?”

  Without warning, Emma’s scowl switched to a smile, the sweetest and brightest smile Mina had ever seen the little girl wear. Instantly, Mina’s heart filled with joy; with an intense and incredible sense of love just seeing her daughter like that, smiling at her so warmly, so beautifully. She wanted to scoop up the child, cradle her in her arms and plant kisses all over her little painted body. She wanted to snuggle with her so much, it made her heart hurt. She took a breath and reached out her arms.

  “Esda!” cried Emma, and she ran to the section of baby gate that “Esda” now occupied. Jilted by the toddler.