Something for Everyone

by Lisa Moore

  Cathy is stuck with a mother and three sugar-blitzed youngsters, the youngest of whom is headed for a full-on implosion because she wants shoes with blinking lights in the heels which are not one of the brands of shoes where you buy one get the second pair half price and because she (the little girl) has a lollipop the size of her face, slimy with saliva, and because some children are born with a willpower so fully formed and flinty they are ungovernable after the first gasp of oxygen and ever on.

  But what can you do for me? In terms of price? This is the mother, nervy, a knee jiggling, arms crossed tight over her chest, a nicotine patch on her neck.

  Cathy does not care to explore the possibilities of a reduced price on the shoes that flash with each step. All she cares about at the moment is Marty and possibly getting back into the storage closet with Marty because of what happened last weekend, even though Marty is gay and grief-stricken.

  Marty, in the meantime, is still dreamily looking on as Steve comes out of the storage closet with five boxes of shoes held in place with his shovel chin, handing them out to four women now. And Marty is not doing anything else except holding up the Saucony display unit, practically draped all over it, because his grandmother has died and because he has been doing MDMA for three nights in a row and last night, at a house party, he took a handful of prescription pills from a big glass salad bowl next to the front door that everybody at the party had contributed to, and he hasn’t really slept very well since he found her.

  It’s actually making him physically weak, this grief, and he got home from the dance bar that everybody went to after the house party and put on his work clothes without ever going to bed and then stepped outside into the below-zero frost and fat tumbling snowflakes and slanting light and power-walked to work at the Avalon Mall.

  So he’s draped that way, over the display unit, unable to do anything at all, because she raised him, his grandmother, and he understands with a one-time, ultra-sensitive drug-enhanced clairvoyance that nobody will ever love him like that again, not with that depth and intelligence and appreciation for who he is in the very marrow of his bones no matter how much he fucks up or triumphs. Because she knows him. Knew him.

  Cathy is on her knees before the youngest child, who is probably seven, pasty and shrill with desire for the shoes with red lights in the soles, shoes that are unforgivably expensive and built to fall apart in less than a month. Cathy has altered her tone, a child-friendly falsetto, airy and uncertain. She closes her eyes tight and turns her shiny red fake fingernails toward her own face and rakes down the air between the tips of her fingernails and her face, several times, the nails floating down over her face without actually touching it, showing the child how one can calm oneself down if one needs to: Come on, try this with me.

  And here she flings her fingers to the side, the way you might flick water off your hands after doing the dishes — and with her eyes still closed, she tells the little girl: The whole mall is alive with negative ions, but we’ve just basically brushed them away.

  Steve is full of admiration. She’s theatrical; she brings a theatrical touch to selling shoes. If all three kids get new shoes she’ll be ahead in sales and they’re just fifteen minutes to shift change. Once their shift is over, their sales will be tabulated at central office, and the winner of the cross-country sales initiative will be announced and the airline tickets to Toronto and the tickets to Kinky Boots awarded.

  Marty is not a contender. Though he has insisted on showing up for his shifts, Marty has not actually sold any footwear at the Shoe Emporium since his grandmother died. In fact, he has given two full cash refunds for previous sales—in both cases, without the customer showing proof of purchase in the form of a receipt, which the return policy at the Shoe Emporium requires, and without which it cannot honour the request for a cash refund, as Marty well knows. He also fully reimbursed one customer for a can of Scotchgard suede protector although the can was clearly empty.

  All the grief Marty feels for his grandmother, he realizes, has been turned into a hard opal of love/lust for Steve/Aiden. And he’s draped over the Saucony display unit not willing to sell anything but his heart.

  Because: Shoes? Is this what he’s doing? Selling shoes? Under this kind of lighting, which washes him out, basically? Coming to a mall three times a week?

  He’d let himself in with his key and called out to her and stood listening and he could hear an inhale-exhale that was reptilian, like rubbery scales, sliding and unsliding, and even as he approached the living room with its white corduroy curving sectional couch with the round glass table between, and the bevelled glass in the windows throwing rainbows and the crystals too, throwing little rainbows everywhere, and the gold-trimmed china plates lined up on the white marble fireplace with the big hearth and the cold lemon roll on the side table on a silver tray with a white paper doily under it and the silver pie server with the pearlized handle, he both knew and didn’t know what the hellish hissing could be.

  And at first he thought: just asleep. Her head drooping forward and a line of drool still attached to the lower lip, the sauna bag inflating, deflating, like it was breathing for her.

  The zipper on the sauna bag was pulled up on the inside, and it had got stuck in a fold of the rubberized fabric that had bunched in the head of the zipper.

  The heat: she had been as good as poached alive. Of course he picked up the silver pie server with its pearlized handle and serrated edge and hacked through the plastic and tried CPR and called 911 on his cell, but she had been dead, the doctor estimated, two hours or more before his arrival.

  The moose on its side, Steve/Aiden thought, foreleg bent in the wrong direction and the bone sticking out, trying to lift its head, the sloppy, swinging eye, humanly begging, wielding its dying like a cudgel, begging limply for mercy. Begging you to pick up a Jesus boulder off the side of the road and bash its skull but you get back in the car and reverse away from the rising sun and swerve around the animal with its panting ribs and terrible eye. You find yourself at forty-two years old, poster boy for what happens if you don’t finish high school and go instead after the big bucks in Alberta all swagger and look at me. House taking up every square inch of a building lot and the ATVs and flat screens and barbeque big as a Cadillac, all in hock to the bank.

  The legs on you like the bloody water, standing on the side of the highway with that dying animal, and then driving into the inky dark. The fine from the Santa Claus fishing, and the commercial flights and then it’s fuck Suncor, the move into St. John’s, the one-room apartment, the job at the Shoe Emporium at the age of forty-fucking-two with the manager who is twenty-four, hot as a barbeque coal, the lip gloss and the languid flick/curl, flick/curl of a strand of her long, shiny hair around a finger and then holding it out, the split ends, lost in that inspection for a solid thirty seconds, and the lava boil of chartreuse and turquoise and molten copper that is her nipple in the heat-sensing pad, while the mall breathes and coils around all three of them.

  You’re standing there with somebody else’s nametag, and yes, you’ll bloody well win the fucking trip to Toronto just to see she doesn’t get it and then give it to her, just to spite her. To see if she’ll take it.

  Go on girl, have it. Have the trip. I insist.

  You don’t get the right shoe, Steve/Aiden says, you could be misaligned for a long time and the joints grind together, become dust inside there. Dust to dust. You may have to quit running.

  I just started, says the junior high school ukulele teacher. Incredulous blinking. The woman with the suede hiking boot waving it in the air, saying she needs a six-and-a-half.

  I don’t ever say quit to a customer, says Steve. His ancient blue eyes and how easy for Marty to imagine him in the dory waving the bottle over his head, the white cotton batting beard, the red velveteen hat with fur trim, water all aglint and the black rubber boots sunk to the knees in writhing silver bodies and fish stink, rag
ing in the chuffling air, whipped up by the helicopter that dips and zooms, and drunk, yes, loaded, yes, but lamenting the loss of something big.

  Anybody tells you quit running that’s a different story than I’m going to tell, Steve/Aiden tells the customer. In the end, you make the decision. But I have something for you.

  He’s speaking with his back to her. He has put the foot measurer down on the bench beside her. The colours fading, the gelled pad a cold, murky blue, opaque and mute.

  Steve/Aiden whirls around to face her. He’s holding a Saucony runner by the toe and heel, balancing it on the tips of his fingers. It’s the most expensive runner they have, and pushes him well over Cathy’s commission balance.

  I want you to try this, he says.

  But I can’t afford that.

  I’m not saying buy it, Steve says. He sounds affronted.

  That’s more than double my budget, she says.

  I just want you to put it on. I want you to feel what that’s like on your foot.

  And here’s what Cathy thinks: The last fifteen minutes of a shift, there is a lulling of everything. A lulling of all that you are because you don’t have time to notice anything but the roar of whatever it is in the ceiling—mall air conditioning, maybe? Or the noise of the glass elevator near the food court, rising, descending, the torpid stomping of a beast full of sinew and cables, huffing the sugary, charred food-court breath of fat and fries. And this amorphous monster, coming, always coming for them, to drag them under, is maybe the mall itself, the exoskeleton of a serpent, swishing its weltering tail of withdrawal and spend, the thrashing of swipe, insert, tap, charging through the ether, all bling and brand, pleather, sequins, sex, and here at the Shoe Emporium, a lot of garish neon, spiked heels, leopard print, and Can I help you.

  This is the sort of situation that arises: You can fall in love with your co-worker without deciding to even though he’s so not straight. All of what you believe to be your “self” does an about-face and stands at attention, salutes all of what you believe your co-worker’s “self” to be.

  The mother says, No, not today sweetie. And the child opens her mouth as wide as it will go, clutching a single shoe so the heel lights up her chin, bright red, the hollow cave of her open mouth glowing red, and her eye sockets sunken and red, her very irises, red, on/off, on/off, while the mother tries to wrestle the shoe from her.

  And your co-worker with his sunrise hair, the winding rosebush tattoo tucking under the sleeve of his employee-issue Shoe Emporium T-shirt, still high from whatever all-nighter and foxy eyes, whose grandmother was the leading expert in cold-water sea cucumbers, no joke, at the Marine Institute and who (Marty) is not even bi but straight-up gay for gosh sakes, like definitely that end of the spectrum, according to him. Sea cucumbers.

  I mean, this is involuntary, but what gets unleashed is a pressure hose of, whoa, love. You turn evangelic, the lingo/babble of gel sole versus extra-foam sole and soles with lights and now the first blasting howl welters out of the child’s open mouth.

  The wham-splat, a hose in your chest is spraying this pillar of, my god, love all over your unsuspecting, gay, not even slightly interested in girls co-worker. And who is more surprised than you?

  So there she was last week, Cathy, in the storage closet where she had wedged a heel against the second-lowest shelf, her back jammed against the shoeboxes stacked from floor to ceiling, these shoeboxes wedged in one against the other like the stones in an archway, one shoebox (inside which happened to be sling-back, kitten-heeled patent leather shoes with velvet bows and clasps of rhinestones) kept jutting out, like jut, jut-jut, once Marty had penetrated her, first tearing a hole in the leg of her nude nylons because let’s face it, this is happening, this is really happening, and how wet she is, how slippery, how yes, yes, but silent, because she’s the manager, and after all some sense of professionalism, please.

  The hole in her nylons that Marty has torn has a creep, it creeps, widening in an oval big as the palm of her hand, peeling back or unravelling, a gazillion filaments, small and laddering down the leg, invisibly giving, breaking, no, not breaking exactly, more evaporating, and it is her desire, a spreading, licking, a hole in the nylons because even though she comes to work put together because what are these stockings but a petroleum product made as thin as a lick of light, tickling, so that her skin pudges through, like dough rising or anything that rises, and then the keystone shoebox is knocked maybe half an inch with each — let’s take a moment to acknowledge the paradox — very gentle, controlled, but forceful, holy thrust/bang, tinged with maybe a little love for her, however ephemeral, so that the tightly jammed shoebox, maybe twelve shoeboxes above her head, juts itself out of the tightly packed wall of shoeboxes that rises from floor to ceiling all the way down the very narrow storage closet, and keeps jutting further and further with each lovemaking rock of Marty’s hips and buttock contraction and the tilt of his head, bent as if in prayer, but also, pouf, blowing a mouthful of her hair away from his lips because, he stops just for a sec, because a hair, one of her hairs, seems to have got into his mouth and they’re both caught up in the micro-work of what is it? A hair?

  Phwah-phwah, he’s trying to get it off his tongue, and there he has it, have you got it? It’s pinched between finger and thumb and saliva shine, and he rubs it away, and the engorged freckled dong deep inside now, slow at first but deliberately slow, sea cucumber slow, in the deep cold is what they have down there, holes in the bottom of the ocean where everything is eyeless, groping but sentient, and phosphorescent and just as if they were not in the mall, as if the blow-out sale were not in progress, as if you couldn’t buy one, get the second pair half price, as if Steve would not be in here any second to get a load of shoes, slowly and at the same time, warp speed, she is kissing his white eyelids.

  Marty, like some kind of expert, knowing exactly what to grind against, attentive to the tenderness of dumb lips, inner cling and grab and slippery ripple, and the shelving unit digging into her spine but never mind, let Steve barge in, and the shoebox with the patent-leather slingbacks shoots out another whole inch here, two inches, another half inch, and the tempo picks up because she’s coming, which doesn’t always happen, let me tell you, the shoebox above their heads topples free and a seam opens then, a seam in the wall of tightly packed boxes opens up, a gaping, jiggling crevasse, unzippering, so that they begin to topple, each box losing its lid as it falls, spitting puffs of white tissue paper — pwah — and a New Balance running shoe, a stiletto, and a hiking boot toppling down while Cathy digs her nails into Marty, who she knows, or intuits, well, how could you miss it, is gay, really, and they are, yes, having sex in the storage closet, and she is having, yes, a second orgasm, and because she has it, seems to be falling in love with him which can happen in the hepped-up exhaustion of working two jobs and going to school full-time especially with the added but uncompensated responsibility of the title manager which will look good on a resumé, but fuck them, whoever they are, fuck them.

  And the truth is, it is Cathy’s experience that orgasms are hard to come by, multiple, come on, who has that, really, a myth, right? And two and one so fast on top of the other that the pleasure-ripples of the first one bash right into the pleasure-ripples of the second and what’s this my god, a third fucking orgasm, pounding home the second that’s still riding on the back of the first, so who cares if he’s gay. What is gay? What is anything?

  In the midst of which: Steve. Just as Marty slumps against her, Steve steps into the storage closet, boxes tumbling, shoes birthed from tissue cocoons, a corner of a cardboard lid hitting the top of her head, hurting, actually, a surprising amount, before wafting to the floor, and Steve blocking the door of the storage closet, standing there, unable to understand what he’s seeing, and therefore not moving out of the way.

  What was this?

  And it’s completely different from sea cucumbers, which are, if you put your ha
nd in the aquarium that is fed by the actual sea and pick one up, leathery, with the mouth at one end surrounded by tentacles, but clammy and cold.

  He’d paid with his grandmother’s credit card and it arrived and though he said don’t try it until I’m there, after he left she got in and put the thing on max though he’d asked her to wait for him to visit and whatever happened, some kind of stroke they said, and when he went over, because he went over every day to walk the cockapoos, Minke and Killer, she was in that bloated bag with steam hissing like a goddamn dragon and her head tilted and the eyeglasses askew and Nanny, Nanny, because he loved her more than anything and wanted to please her and everything he did was for her, and he hacked through the bag and holy shit it was hot and the zipper, crying and pulling at the vinyl around the neck and CPR and the dogs licking her face, but you know he just had to accept, leaning back on his heels, wringing his hands.

  And here he is at work, trembling against the Saucony display unit because what was he supposed to do, not go to work? He had nowhere to go, and he just followed her into the storage room, he did, and turned her around and leaned her against the shoeboxes and he had kissed the very full lips of his twenty-four-year-old co-worker/manager who he out and out told he wasn’t into women kissing him and stuff. And then, full-on fucking, like nobody’s business.

  And Steve standing there had a religious visitation: the inlay heat-sensing impression of her nipple and the Kinky Boots tickets, roaring at the helicopter overhead waving the sunstruck amber bottle and the fish, boxes tumbling.

  There she is on her knees getting the crying child to run her own fingers over the thick living pelt of negative ions that coats them all and to shoo it away. Shoo.

  Shoe.

  Fuck it, Steve/Aiden says to the junior high ukulele teacher he is about to ring in and thereby secure the record of highest commission in the Shoe Emporium for the 2016−17 fiscal year.