Secrets of a Shoe Addict

by Harbison, Beth

  There was something almost meditative about it, sitting quietly in the car. And she needed that peace after the day she’d endured. It helped her collect herself. Until the phone rang, that was. Then it was just all carnival.

  “How’s this?” she asked, reclining the seat and looking out the window at the collection of rakes and shovels Brian had hanging neatly on the wall in order of size and function. “Tight enough?”

  Her caller let out a squall that was probably supposed to be his imitation of a baby, but it sounded more like a balloon losing air. “Spank me again. I’ve been so bad!”

  God, she hoped this guy didn’t have kids. Given his poor imitation of a baby, and his insufficient understanding of how a diaper works (tight? they didn’t get that tight without the tape pulling off), she was pretty sure he didn’t. In fact, she was prepared to go out on a limb and say the guy was completely unattached.

  “Now put me in one of those outfits with the feet,” her caller said.

  “Pajamas?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Footsie pajamas. Made of cotton. With a really hot zipper. Like, they just came out of the dryer.”

  And so it went. She diapered him. She dressed him. She undressed him when the zipper was too hot. She worked on potty-training him. She decided this was the year to take out her raspberry bushes and grow some heirloom tomatoes. (The tomato cages in the corner of the garage reminded her of that—she’d bought them last year but never got around to using them.)

  And she accumulated four solid hours’ worth of billable minutes.

  In the end, it wasn’t what she’d call easy—she’d never dreamed there were so many whack jobs out there just waiting for the chance to share their depraved fantasies with a stranger.

  But it was a good thing there were, because she needed the money.

  So she turned off her phone and put it in the glove compartment of her car, figuring this was the perfect place to do business. No one could sneak up on her and surprise her, and if Brian or Parker did head out this way looking for her, she’d see them long before they saw her.

  It wasn’t exactly an executive’s corner office in Manhattan, but it suited her needs just perfectly.

  Chapter

  10

  So how long have you been a ventriloquist?” Sandra asked Louis Feller (aka McCarthy2 on Match.com) as she steered her Toyota away from Clyde’s of Georgetown. She was just filling the silence during the ten to fifteen minutes it would take her to drive him to the Metro at Tenley Circle, but she had already given up hope of good conversation.

  The blind date had, so far, lasted an hour and ten minutes but had felt like years. She’d asked herself all night, Was forty-five minutes long enough for her to politely cut out? An hour? At an hour and ten, she’d decided she’d given him plenty of time.

  “I’m not a ventriloquist,” Arlon said, in Louis’s grating falsetto. It was like nails on a chalkboard at this point. “He’s the one with his hand up my ass.”

  That was a new twist on what had already been a tedious act. Now Arlon/Louis was getting foul. Nice.

  Before tonight, Sandra had not imagined she would ever think about whether the ventriloquist or the dummy was more annoying. Then Louis had spent the entire dinner having Arlon tell Sandra the long and painful story of his life.

  Arlon’s, not Louis’s.

  She knew that Arlon had been “born” in Brooklyn twelve years ago, and that he’d traveled to D.C. by train and had gotten lost at the 20016 post office for three weeks until finally someone had found the box under a bunch of mail that was being kept on hold. By the time he was presented to his new owner, his head was loose and Louis had to interview numerous craftsmen before finding someone he trusted to safely repair the doll.

  The “surgery” had, apparently, been painful.

  His hair hadn’t originally been black, but he and Louis decided it would look better in contrast with his light brown molded plastic porkpie hat.

  Plus, it covered the occasional imaginary gray hair.

  Arlon had an interest in girls with good posture and warm hands. He did not like to vacation near water, though he had a fantasy about “getting it on” in the sand because it reminded him of sawdust. It was an image that was not only disgusting on several levels, but also highly disturbing. Something about the dummy wanting to do that in sawdust—even if it were possible—was uncomfortably akin to a person wanting to do it on piles of human flesh.

  Yes, it had been a long night. So long that Sandra was actually contemplating the implications of a ventriloquist dummy wanting to have sex on the beach.

  Arlon didn’t reveal much about Louis, though Sandra could safely guess Louis had an interest in girls who had an interest in his stupid ventriloquist act.

  It was hard to imagine who that would be.

  So much for Loreen’s grandiose ideas of what Sandra’s romantic life must be like.

  As they drove on the cracked pavement of the street, Sandra figured she had nothing to lose by goosing Louis for information, if only so she could give a full accounting of this night to the Phone Sex Group later. “Louis, this has been really funny. Especially that thing you did at dinner when you asked the waiter for a glass of water? That was comedy gold.” She cringed, remembering, and automatically put a hand to the place on her shirt that was still wet. “But can we put Arlon in the backseat for a while and get to know each other on a more, um, real basis?”

  Granted, Sandra had not had a lot of—okay, any—boyfriends in her life; nevertheless, she had never anticipated having to ask a date to put his imaginary self in the backseat so she could talk to the real thing.

  But her Match.com profile hadn’t exactly gotten a lot of visitors, so she was reluctant to dismiss a date out of hand before she was beyond sure things wouldn’t work.

  Maybe Louis was a great guy whose one glaring fault was that he didn’t know when a joke should end.

  Maybe that was something he could learn.

  Maybe then he’d be perfect for Sandra.

  “What are you saying?” Arlon asked, his hinged jaw flapping and clapping. “You don’t like me?”

  Then again, maybe not.

  She glanced at Louis. “Yes, of course I like the puppet. I think you’re enormously talented,” and until now she’d thought he was kind of cute, with his dark eyes and light, curly hair, “but you’ve been doing Arlon all night long now and I’d like to get to know Louis.”

  “The nuns were mean to him in school,” Arlon said.

  “What?” She couldn’t help but look into the puppet’s flat, lifeless eyes. Consciously, she shifted her gaze back where it should be, to Louis. “What is he—? What are you talking about? Nuns were mean to you?”

  “No, they were fine.” Louis tightened his lips into a flat line—much like Arlon’s, actually—and looked out the window.

  For a moment, Sandra remained hanging between interest in the fact that Louis himself was finally talking, and apprehension at the fact that he was disagreeing with something he’d just said.

  “O . . . kay. Well, Arlon just said—” She stopped. She was not going to start quoting Arlon and making this into an argument between her, her blind date, and a puppet. “That is, you just said the nuns were not so nice to you in school.”

  “Arlon said that.” Louis gave an exasperated sigh. “He’s such a fucking liar.”

  Harsh words for a puppet that he, himself, was animating.

  Where had she gone wrong? Was it obvious on his profile that the guy was a whack job? Had she missed it because she was so eager to like him when he wrote? Her last date—no, her last fifteen dates, all of them with Mike Lemmington—had been gay, so she had to give a more than fair shot to anyone else who came along. “Okay, Louis? Seriously, drop the act.”

  It wasn’t bright in the car, but there was enough light to see that he looked sincerely befuddled. “What act?”

  Sandra noticed that Arlon’s wooden head turned to look at her the same time Louis did.
/>   “The ventriloquist act.” She was losing patience. Enough was enough. And this was way more than enough. “When you wrote to me on Match, I had the impression you were interested in getting to know me, not just performing for me.”

  “I didn’t write to you.”

  “What?” Now, Sandra had certainly been eager to get a response to her profile, but not so eager that she’d imagined he’d written first. Frankly, given his profile answers, he probably wasn’t someone she would have picked out and approached herself. “You did write to me.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “But . . . yes, you did.” Was this all some big crazy misunderstanding? Had he meant to write to someone else, perhaps a mime in Alexandria?

  “No, I didn’t,” he said yet again, with exaggerated patience. “Arlon wrote to you.”

  Oh, my God. “I don’t think so.”

  “You’re not my type.”

  Incredibly, she felt insulted. “I think that’s something we can safely agree on, but when I got the note, it clearly said the account was that of Louis F., and you are Louis Feller, aren’t you?”

  Louis nodded. “Of course. But Arlon needed to use my credit card information, obviously. You didn’t think he had his own card, did you?”

  No. Because expecting a doll to have human qualities was insane. “So let me get this straight,” she said, a creepy feeling coming over her. She knew where this was headed, but she couldn’t stop it. “You’re saying you aren’t the one that approached me, Arlon is.”

  “Correct.”

  “And you just helped him out.”

  He shot a finger gun in her direction. “Exactly.”

  “So I’m on a date with—” She hesitated, hideously aware that she was about to hit a new low in dating. “—Arlon?”

  Louis nodded again.

  Like, of course.

  “Got a problem with that?” Arlon snapped.

  “Yes, I have a problem with that.” Sandra turned the car onto Wisconsin Avenue and accelerated as much as her conscience would allow. She didn’t want to hit a person, but she was willing to take her chances with the police in order to get this lunatic out of the car. “I don’t date puppets.”

  “First of all,” Arlon screeched, “stop calling me a puppet. I have a name.”

  “Okay, sorry, you’re a dummy. Is that better?” Now she was getting sarcastic with her wooden date. Great.

  “Both of you calm down,” Louis said, sounding oddly like the voice of reason.

  The traffic loosened and she drove up the hill out of Georgetown, looking for the comforting sight of the National Cathedral.

  “Sorry,” Sandra said, without meaning it. “You’re right, let’s just get to the Metro station and call it a draw. This obviously isn’t going to work out.”

  “You’re a bitch,” Arlon said.

  She was looking at the road, but in her peripheral vision she saw Arlon’s head crank to face Louis and—she hated that she knew this—they both nodded.

  Sandra’s foot went a little heavier on the accelerator.

  Louis’s voice was next. “Now, that’s not entirely fair, Arl.”

  Arl. He had a nickname for his puppet, who, really, already had a nickname.

  “—she’s just ignorant.”

  Sandra adjusted her grip on the steering wheel and wished she could floor it past all these slowpoke law-abiders who were stopping for red lights and pedestrians.

  “I am not ignorant,” she objected, though, God knew, she should just have kept her mouth shut until they got to the Metro stop. Clearly there was nothing more to say. “I’m normal. Anyone would react this way to this situation.”

  “I’d think you’d be glad to have a date,” Arlon said.

  She drew the car to a halt at a stoplight and turned a murderous gaze on the dummy. “I beg your pardon?”

  “It’s not like your profile had a lot of hits.” The jaw clapped with every word.

  “How dare you—”

  “It’s true.”

  The light turned green, and she lurched forward. The Metro stop was within view. Thank God. “I am not so desperate that I am willing to date a puppet with an insensitive freak along as chaperone.” She didn’t care if she got a ticket; it would be worth the price just to get these creeps out of the car.

  “You’re lucky I gave you a chance,” Arlon said as Sandra pulled over to the curb in front of the station.

  “Funny, I’m not feeling so lucky about that.”

  “You should be. Have you had any better offers?”

  Pat Sajak and Alex Trebek and a pint of Ben & Jerry’s was a far better offer.

  But Sandra refused to engage in this argument any longer. She was taking the high road, damn it.

  Or at least the higher road. The exit for the high road had passed a few miles back.

  She put the car in park and hit the button to unlock the doors. “Get out of the car, please.”

  “Now, come on,” Louis began.

  “Out!”

  Louis rolled his eyes and moved to get out of the car. “Fine. We’re going. But you’ll be sorry later.”

  “I’m sorry now.”

  He stopped. “Then I accept your apology.”

  “Not that kind of sorry. Go.” He started to move toward her, and she held up her hand. “Go!”

  “No kiss good night?” The exaggerated wooden face came toward her like a specter in the dark.

  She pushed him away. “No, jeez, stop it!”

  “You’re fat!” Arlon shrieked, apropos of nothing.

  That did it. Of the many sensitive buttons Sandra had, that was the hottest. Without thinking, without even pausing to question the wisdom of it, she balled up her fist and punched Arlon hard, right in his painted bulbous nose.

  His head went flying off, slamming against the window and bouncing into the backseat.

  Louis looked at Sandra, stunned.

  Actually, in that moment, he looked quite a bit like Arlon.

  Her heart was pounding. What the hell had just happened? She hadn’t meant to break the thing.

  Polite to a fault, she started to apologize. “Louis, I didn’t mean to—”

  “Help! Help!” Incredibly, the voice actually sounded like it was coming from the backseat. It was even muffled. Sandra was slightly impressed, despite herself.

  “I’m coming, buddy.” Louis dived into the back and retrieved the head, trying to put it back on the severed neck. It was like some sick parody of the Zapruder film. He looked at Sandra with tears in his eyes. “You stupid cunt.”

  Her guilt dissolved. There were only a few words that got her ire up immediately and completely, and that was one of them. “That is verbal assault. Get out of the car before I call the police.” She had no idea if she could actually call the police on a date she had gotten herself into, but the threat seemed to work.

  He’d probably heard it before.

  “I’ll send you the bill for this repair,” he said, cradling Arlon’s body in one hand and his head in the other. “And if you don’t pay, I’ll sue!”

  “Good luck, Gepetto.” She jammed her foot onto the accelerator, and the door slammed shut, making the perfect statement. Fortunately there was no oncoming traffic, because in her frenzy she hadn’t even looked.

  She rounded a corner, and the sidewalk where she’d left Louis fell out of view, and she breathed a sigh of relief. What a nightmare! The entire thing had left her rattled. Her foot shook on the accelerator, and she struggled to keep her focus on the road.

  Up until about a year ago, she used to have a standing weekly appointment with Dr. Ratner, a therapist who had helped her with her anxiety and agoraphobia. That last appointment, knowing she was through, had given her a great feeling.

  But an experience like this might be enough to drive her straight back to Dr. Ratner’s loving armchair.

  She was almost home when a dark Volvo swerved in front of her to avoid hitting a drunk who had stumbled into the street. Sandra�
��s reflexes were good, and she got her foot on the brake immediately, but the pedal wouldn’t depress. Frantic, she swerved her own car into the oncoming lane—which was mercifully empty—to get around the Volvo.

  All she could think was how sad it would be if this was the last night of her life.

  Fortunately it was late and the streets were fairly empty, and Sandra pumped at the brake, trying to get it to go down. It was barely budging; she couldn’t figure out what was wrong with it. But she knew her time of being able to coast without danger was short, so she put the car in neutral and slowly lifted the emergency brake.

  Luckily, that did it, and she was able to pull over safely into a noparking zone.

  It was better than crashing.

  She sat for a moment, her hand on her chest, trying to calm down. Could this night get any worse? She was afraid to ask, for fear that fate would give her an answer she didn’t want.

  Taking a deep breath in, the way she’d been taught in the yoga class she’d attended briefly during her Weight Watchers run, she tried to will herself to calm down. It worked somewhat.

  So she reached for the glove compartment and took out the flashlight she kept there for emergencies, aiming the beam toward the brake.

  Something was behind it, physically blocking it. Which was potentially good news, as it would mean she could hopefully fix it herself and drive on home. She bent down and reached for the thing, pulling on it with a little difficulty, then, frowning, raised it in front of the flashlight beam to try to figure out what it was.

  “Oh, good Lord.”

  Arlon’s hat.

  For a long moment she stared at it, turning the molded plastic over in her hands, hating how neatly and ironically it summed up the misery that was her dating life.

  Then she lowered the window, tossed the thing out into the street, and drove home.

  Chapter

  11

  You punched a puppet?” Tiffany asked incredulously.

  It was Monday night, four days after they first met, and they were sitting in Loreen’s modest living room with Abbey while Loreen banged around in the kitchen.