Insoles

Inside the cobbler’s shop, it is just a few degrees cooler than the August heat on the other side of the glass door. It is a small space, crowded with dusty and well-worn equipment, every surface stained and worn. A large sheet of plexiglass hangs from the ceiling separating the woman in front of Elaine and the man behind the counter. The woman pushes two small purses through the space between the bottom of the plexiglass and the top of the counter. Both purses have broken straps that hang limply over the edge, their ends split. Stretched to the snapping point. The man behind the counter is small and hunched and she cannot make out his face as he concentrates on a scrap of paper.

He and the woman are having a hard time understanding one another. His speech is slurred, hers, clipped. The woman is petite, thin, and well-kept: a perfect grey bob, a skirt and blouse neatly tucked, taupe heels without a blemish. It is difficult to imagine her in a situation where purse straps would break.

Elaine turns to the wall behind her, a row of four black plastic folding chairs lined up beneath a peg board filled with dangling shoelaces. Just to her left the pegs hold plastic boxes of leather insoles. A photo at the top of each box depicts a preppy white man and woman in a bedroom, their pastel-shirted torsos and grinning faces fill the foreground, the edge of a bed behind them. They are holding one another, looking eye to eye, in a pose that suggests they are about to have sex. There are no feet, no shoes in the picture.

Elaine is trying to connect the dots between leather insoles and lust when the woman in front of her steps away from the counter and out the door, a bell clanging in her wake. The man behind the counter clumsily grabs the purses and moves them to a shelf behind him.

“Hello,” he says with his back turned to her. “My name is Victor. What can I do for you?”

Elaine steps up and pulls black sandals and brown fleece-lined boots out of a shopping bag. She slides them beneath the divider and sets the bag at her feet as Victor shuffles back to the counter, his head ducked low.

“Hello, Victor. I have two pairs of shoes in need of repair. Well, actually boots and sandals, are those shoes? A dog got to them, either a puppy or maybe my old dog. I can’t remember. It’s been years since I’ve worn these. I can’t even remember the last time I did. But they seemed in too good condition beyond the dog chewing and broken zippers to throw away. See, the leather strap is just completely gone on this one and the boots, well, the zippers don’t work, which I just said, see how they’re pulled out here? But that isn’t due to a dog, although you can see he chewed on this top part but I don’t need you to fix that. Just the zippers. Can you do this, Victor? Is it worth the cost? What do you think?”

Victor looks up now and she takes in the whole of him. A jack-o-lantern mouth slid to one side. Small, brown eyes nested in a deeply lined face. Thick, black hair clumped in shiny tufts. His left hand is clawed and gnarled, fingers of odd length twisted at angles. He lifts his right arm onto the counter where the hand flops lifelessly. He maneuvers it with his left hand so it holds down a fresh scrap of paper on which he begins, with some difficulty, to write.

He drops his head to focus on the task. “I don’t fix the shoes,” he mumbles.

Her neck prickles. Her face flushes. Of course he has seen her thoughts. The door opens and closes and the bell bangs loudly against the metal frame.

“I was waiting for my girlfriend in the car but she’s taking a long time and it was hot so I’m coming to sit in here,” says a man’s voice. She hears him slide into the seat directly behind her, surfaces rubbing together, the creak and soft whine of metal against plastic.

“Oh,” says Victor. “Is she in another store?”

“No. She’s right here. This is my girlfriend.”

“Oh,” says Victor looking first at Elaine and then at the person behind her shoulder. He shrugs. “Miss, what do you want me to do with these shoes?”

Elaine traces her finger along the chewed edge of the boot on the counter. Her pulse pounds in her ears and a trickle of sweat runs down her back. She can feel it slide all the way down to the waistband of her underwear.

In her head she says, what I want is for someone to say, “Damn, it must have been hard to clean that closet, to get down past the memories of a shared life to the layer where these old shoes were. To bag up the detritus of 23 years and reorganize the present.” What I want is to be seen and heard and held in my brokenness.

Aloud she says, “I want them to be fixed so I can wear them again.”

An air conditioner clicks on though the air hardly moves. It is loud but beneath the clatter she can just make out the man in the folding chair speaking low.

“Yeah baby. You’re my girl. Fine fat ass like that. Those legs. Juicy. I can tell what’s up there is going to jiggle. Hell yeah. I’m going to slap that.”

Her loose red dress hardly touches her skin but Elaine feels his eyes on the two round spots where the fabric rests. She tries not to move. Through a faint reflection in the plexiglass in front of her she can see that the voice belongs to someone half her age. He is wearing a t-shirt and jeans, his legs splayed open, his arms across the backs of the other seats. She has never seen him before.

“So I am going to write down what you want and have my boss look,” says Victor. “I need your name.”

Elaine spells as quietly as she can. She does not want to say her name loud enough for the man behind her to hear. But then he hisses “Elaine, I like your name. Now he’s going to get your number so I can call you and we can fuck.”

All weekend as she cleaned the closet she rehearsed the conversation she would have with her husband when he returned. She would explain her loneliness, her longings. She would highlight how much better off they would both be if they were free. She would help him see that a life apart would be better than this frigid life they’d morphed into over the past decades. He would agree. They would separate amicably. She would start over again.

“I’ll write my number," she says quickly. Victor meets her eyes. A flash of recognition flits across his broken face. We are the same, she wants to say, as she scrawls her number on the paper.

“Oh baby. Why you doing me like that?” the man behind her groans. “I need your number so I can call you and we can go back to my place. I know just how to touch you. I know just how you like it.”

She pushes the paper back across the counter. She should turn and kick him. Punch him. Hit him hard. Spit in his face. Claw out his eyes. Ask Victor to call the police. She should throw a fit. Put him in his place. Embarrass him. Stop him.

“Okay Elaine,” Victor says. “My boss will call you this week and tell you how much it costs.”

She thanks him profusely, excessively, buying time, working out her exit because she knows she will not do any of the things she ought to do. She never, ever does. She is picturing where the man behind her has his hands. She is imagining what he could do when she bends to pick up her bag.

“What’s your name?” Victor suddenly asks the man. She can hear that he is stirring now, shifting to get up.

He pauses for just a beat. “My name? Carlos.”

In one continuous movement, Elaine bends ever so slightly, grabs her bag, and strides three paces to the door. She wrenches it open, unleashing a cacophony of bells on metal, and bursts outside.

Carlos is one step behind her.

“Hey baby, where you going so fast? Come on. You’re my girlfriend. You so fine.”

“I am not your girlfriend,” Elaine blurts, not turning around. “I am a grown, married woman and I don’t even know you.” She takes fast, long, stiff steps across the sidewalk, into the parking lot, straight to her car.

She gets in, locks the door, turns the engine, and checks the rearview mirror. Carlos stands on the curb 30 feet from her. He turns and walks away.

The air conditioning whirrs over the beads of sweat on her temples and though it is blowing tepid air, she can feel the cold where her bra is soaked through. She eases out of the parking spot, and onto the street.

All the way home she thinks about the floor beside the preppy couple’s bed, a space the photo didn’t capture. She suddenly understands that this is where one would find the shoes. They would be lying on their sides, the leather insoles - those thin but comforting cushions for the body - would be falling out.