Shoes To Die For

by Laura Levine

  “Let’s save our comments for later, shall we?” I said. “Go on, Mrs. Stein. You’re doing beautifully.”

  Looking somewhat shaken, Mrs. Stein resumed her narrative and told us about her honeymoon, how she and Max drove across country on Route 66, taking in such sights as the Grand Canyon and the Black Hills of North Dakota.

  “Another mistake!” Mr. Goldman shouted. “You can’t get to the Black Hills from Route 66.”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake,” Mrs. Pechter said. “Put a sock in it, Abe.”

  “I’m just making a simple correction. After all, I was a traveling salesman for fifty years. I oughta know where Route 66 goes.”

  By now, Mrs. Stein was close to tears.

  “Mrs. Stein is not writing an atlas, Mr. Goldman,” I said. “She’s writing a memoir. Let’s listen to her, shall we?”

  There was no mistaking the anger in my voice.

  “Go on, Mrs. Stein,” I said, with an encouraging smile.

  Reluctantly, Mrs. Stein picked up her paper, which was now damp with sweat, and continued.

  “My Max was always a good cook, and after we settled in Los Angeles, he opened a restaurant. He called it Max’s Delicatessen.”

  Once again, Mr. Goldman sprung to life.

  “You owned Max’s Deli?” he asked.

  Mrs. Stein nodded.

  “On Fairfax Avenue?”

  She nodded again.

  “I ate there all the time!” Mr. Goldman said.

  Mrs. Stein smiled gratefully.

  “It wasn’t so hot,” he said, with a shrug. “The pastrami was too fatty.”

  Mrs. Stein’s lower lip began trembling, and before I knew it she was crying. Here it had taken me more than a month to get her to read, and thanks to Mr. Goldman, I doubted I’d ever see her in class again.

  “For crying out loud, Mr. Goldman!” I snapped. “You are the most irritating man I have ever met. In my entire life. You are like nails on a blackboard. Like slow drivers in the fast lane. Like cell phones in a movie. Can’t you just shut up and let the poor woman read!”

  Yes, I really did say that.

  The whole room sat in stunned silence. No one looked more stunned than Mr. Goldman. Suddenly the color drained from his face.

  “My heart!” he said, clutching his chest.

  And with that, he keeled over and fell to the floor.

  “My God,” Mrs. Pechter said. “He’s having a heart attack.”

  “Somebody call 911!” someone kept shouting hysterically. And then I realized I was the one shouting. I grabbed my cell phone and made the call. Minutes later, the paramedics came and loaded Mr. Goldman on to a stretcher.

  “Wait,” he said, in a feeble voice, as they were about to wheel him out the door. “I’ve got something to say.”

  “What is it?” I asked. “What is it?”

  “The Black Hills are in South Dakota,” he said, a faint smug smile on his face. “Not North Dakota.”

  Chapter 8

  Sleep was out of the question. I was up all night, calling the hospital, begging them to let me know how Mr. Goldman was doing. But because I wasn’t a relative, they wouldn’t tell me a thing.

  To say I had trouble concentrating on the Passions ad campaign would be putting it mildly. I felt about as creative as a washcloth. After a few fitful hours at my keyboard, the best I could come up with was:

  Put Some Passion in Your Fashion!

  I know it stinks, but you’d stink, too, if you thought you’d just given a helpless albeit irritating old man a heart attack. By the time the sun came up in Beverly Hills, I knew I’d blown whatever chance I had of landing the job.

  At 9 A.M. I typed up my ideas, fed Prozac her breakfast, then stumbled into bed for a refreshing half-hour of sleep.

  Then I padded off to the shower, where I stood under a spray of icy water, hoping to infuse some life into my body. Too tired to blow-dry the curls out of my hair, I yanked my mop into a careless pony tail.

  You’ll be glad to know that Prozac went nowhere near my Prada suit that morning. No, this time, I found her sitting on my last pair of pantyhose, happily clawing them to shreds. Oh, great. Now I’d have to go bare-legged.

  After sucking down some tap-water coffee, I got dressed, careful to tuck my price tags out of sight. Then I surveyed myself in the mirror. Let’s take inventory, shall we? Bags under my eyes the size of carry-on luggage. Bare legs that needed a shave. Topped off with a headful of Harpo Marx curls. If the folks at Prada had seen me, they would’ve taken out a restraining order to keep me from wearing their suit.

  I tried phoning the hospital one more time, but they still wouldn’t give me any information. Then I grabbed my car keys and headed out the door, praying that Mr. Goldman would live to drive me crazy again.

  “What happened to you?” Becky said, when I showed up at Passions. “You look like warmed-over dog poop.”

  Okay, so her actual words were: “Hi, Jaine.” But I could tell that’s what she was thinking.

  “Guess what?” she said. “Frenchie’s been in Grace’s office for the past hour. With the door shut. Grace was really steamed when she learned about Frenchie making fun of Mrs. Tucker. Isn’t it super? It looks like Frenchie’s finally getting the ax.”

  “What a nasty thing to say.” We turned to see Maxine, the bookkeeper, clutching a clipboard to her chest. The woman had an uncanny knack for materializing out of nowhere.

  “I’m sorry, Maxine, but I meant it. I’ll be happy to see Frenchie go.”

  “How can you say such a thing?” Maxine said, anger flashing in her tiny raisin eyes. “Frenchie’s a wonderful person! One of the nicest people I know.”

  If Frenchie was her idea of wonderful, she definitely needed to get out more.

  “Where’s Tyler?” Maxine asked, consulting her clipboard. “He should’ve been here an hour ago.”

  “I don’t know,” Becky said. “I was just wondering the same thing myself.”

  “Let me know when he gets here. I’m going to have to dock his pay.” She started to scuttle back to the cubbyhole where she kept the company books when the door to Grace’s office opened.

  Frenchie came sailing out, a big grin on her face, not looking the least bit like someone who’d just been fired.

  Grace followed her, her face drained of color, like she’d just been socked in the gut with a pair of brass knuckles.

  “Listen up, everybody,” Frenchie said. “Grace has an announcement to make.”

  Grace stepped forward and cleared her throat.

  “After thirty years in the business,” she said, her voice barely audible, “I’ve decided to retire.”

  Then she looked over at Frenchie, like an actor in a play who’d forgotten her lines.

  “And…?” Frenchie prompted.

  “And I’m selling the store to Frenchie.”

  “What?” Becky gasped.

  “You heard her,” Frenchie said. “She’s selling the store to me.”

  Becky stood there, wide-eyed with disbelief. Maxine, on the other hand, didn’t look the least bit surprised. Was it my imagination, or did I actually see her wink at Frenchie?

  “You can come back for your things later, Grace,” Frenchie said. “Why don’t you go home now?”

  Grace nodded mutely, as Frenchie handed her her purse.

  I’ve never seen anyone sleepwalking but I imagine they’d look a lot like Grace did as she stumbled out the front door.

  “So you’re back,” Frenchie said, turning to me. “Here to pitch your ad campaign?”

  I, too, nodded mutely. Frenchie seemed to have that effect on people.

  “Come in to my office,” she said. Accent on my.

  I followed her as she marched back into Grace’s office and opened a large pine armoire. There among assorted loose-leaf binders and fabric samples were some bottles of wine. Frenchie searched until she found the bottle she was looking for.

  “Château Neuf du Pape,” she said, holding up a bottle of
fancy red wine. “Grace was saving this for a special occasion. And I guess this is it.”

  She opened the bottle and poured some into a wine glass. Then she swirled it in the glass and sniffed. Nodding appreciatively, she took a healthy swig.

  “Yummy,” she said, not bothering to offer me any.

  Not that I wanted a glass of red wine at 10:30 in the morning. But it would have been nice of her to ask. Of course, by this time I already knew that Frenchie wasn’t exactly familiar with the concept of nice.

  She took another swig of wine and looked around the room, surveying her new domain.

  “First thing tomorrow,” she said, “I get rid of that.”

  She pointed to the battered mannequin that Grace had saved from her first window display. “You hear that, Bessie?” she giggled. “You’re headed for the Dumpster.”

  Poor Bessie, staring out at us from paint-chipped eyes, almost looked as if she knew what fate was about to befall her.

  “You can throw out whatever ideas you’ve been working on,” Frenchie said. “I’ve already thought of a brilliant campaign.”

  She plopped down into Grace’s white wicker chair.

  “The slogan is going to be Drop Dead, Gorgeous!”

  I suppose it was better than Put Some Passion in Your Fashion! But not much.

  “And here’s the brilliant part,” she said. “We’re going to have dead people in all the ads. And in the store window, too. Get it? Dead people? As in ‘Drop Dead, Gorgeous’?”

  “I get it,” I assured her.

  I loathed it, but I got it.

  “They won’t be real dead people, of course,” she babbled on. “They’ll be professional models—in coffins, in electric chairs, on operating tables. Beautifully dressed in the latest fashions from Passions. Won’t that be fun?”

  Right. About as much fun as a hysterectomy.

  She slung her feet up on Grace’s pine desk, crossing her Jimmy Choo knockoffs and admiring her slender ankles. “All I need from you is some body copy. Stuff about me, and how I’ve just taken over the store, and my fabulous sense of style.”

  She wasn’t too in love with herself, was she?

  “How much was Grace going to pay you?” she asked.

  “Five thousand dollars.”

  She had a hearty chuckle over that.

  “I’ll pay you three hundred,” she said, when she was finished laughing. “And I want the ads on my desk tomorrow morning.”

  “So soon?”

  “It can’t take you that long to dash off a few ads,” she said. “I’ll meet you here at seven A.M.”

  “Seven in the morning?”

  “I’m a morning person. If you don’t like it, I’ll get someone else.”

  No way was I going to work for this bitch.

  And I was just about to tell her so when the door flew open. Tyler stood there, his boy-next-door features contorted with rage.

  “You bitch!” he screamed, taking the words right out of my mouth. “How could you do this to me?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Frenchie said, with mock innocence.

  “Oh yes, you do. You broke into my apartment and trashed my computer. You burned the floppies in my fireplace.” By now the veins in his neck were standing out like pieces of twine. “You destroyed my novel. Three years of work down the drain.”

  “Is that so?” Frenchie smirked.

  “I’m filing a police report.”

  “Go ahead,” she said. “You can’t prove it was me.” She sipped her wine and smiled a sly, taunting smile. “I told you you shouldn’t have dumped me.”

  Then he lost it.

  His eyes blazing, he lunged at her, sending her wine glass flying across the room.

  “I’ll kill you!” he shouted, his hands around her neck.

  Good heavens. He was going to strangle her! Not that I blamed him, but it was still awfully scary.

  If Frenchie was frightened, she sure didn’t show it.

  “Go ahead,” she challenged him. “You don’t have the guts.”

  And she was right. Slowly Tyler took his hands away from her neck, his shoulders slumped in defeat.

  “Now get out of here,” she said. “And by the way, you’re fired.”

  He shot her a final look of loathing and headed for the door.

  It was then that I started screaming hysterically. No, it wasn’t a delayed reaction to seeing Tyler strangling Frenchie. It was because I looked down and saw that my $3,000 Prada suit was splattered with red wine.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Frenchie asked.

  “My suit,” I moaned. “It’s ruined.”

  “Not only that, your price tag’s showing.”

  She was right. In all the excitement, the price tag had loosened from its rubber-band mooring and was now dangling around my wrist.

  “So you pulled the old ‘buy it, wear it, and return it’ trick,” she said. “I do it all the time myself.”

  The thought of sharing the same moral zip code with someone like Frenchie made me blush with shame.

  “I didn’t think the suit was really yours,” she added. “You’re not exactly the Prada type, are you?”

  Now I was the one who wanted to strangle her. Needless to say, I restrained myself.

  Just then, there was a knock at the open back door. Two burly men stood in the doorway.

  “Delivery from Hollywood Props,” one of them said.

  Frenchie’s face lit up.

  “My coffin. Bring it in, guys.”

  They started wheeling in a gleaming mahogany coffin.

  “Bring it out front,” Frenchie ordered.

  Frenchie and I followed as they wheeled the coffin out onto the sales floor.

  “Put it there, in the window,” Frenchie said.

  “We’ll put a corpse in the coffin,” she mused aloud, as they hoisted the coffin into the window. “Maybe string one up from a noose. Wow! This’ll be hotter than heroin chic!”

  Maxine scuttled to her side like Igor at the Frankensteins’.

  “Oh, Frenchie,” she gushed, her eyes shining with admiration, “you’re so creative.”

  By now, several shoppers had shown up and were watching with interest as the coffin took center stage in the window. No doubt they’d heard the scene in Grace’s office. And they were about to witness another one. Because just then, Becky walked up to Frenchie, her jaw tight with anger.

  “Tyler told me what you did to his novel, and I think it’s just rotten.”

  “Like I give a shit what you think,” was Frenchie’s gracious reply.

  “Come on, honey,” Becky said to Tyler. “Let’s get out of here.”

  She and Tyler started for the door.

  “Honey?” Frenchie said. “Wait a minute. Don’t tell me you’re his new girlfriend?”

  “Yes,” Becky said, raising her chin defiantly. “I am.”

  “You left me for this twirp?” Frenchie laughed. “Your loss, Tyler.”

  “I don’t think so, Frenchie,” Tyler said. “My loss was ever knowing you.”

  That seemed to get to her.

  “Get out of here, both of you,” she hissed. “You’re both fired.”

  Then she turned to me, pointedly ignoring Becky. “Yes, we’ll have corpses in the window. Maybe even a few scattered around the store.”

  But Becky wasn’t about to be ignored.

  “Here’s an idea, Frenchie,” she said. “How about one of those corpses is you?”

  A hushed silence filled the room as Becky grabbed Tyler by the elbow and stormed out the door. It was so quiet you could practically hear the sound of Frenchie’s blood pressure rising. Flushed with anger, she lashed out at the handiest whipping boy. Namely, me.

  “You’d better get started on those ads, Jaine,” she snapped, “if you expect to finish on time.”

  “Are you kidding? You can take your job and shove it up your coffin,” were the words I wish I’d been brave enough to utter. But lest you fo
rget, I was now $3,000 in debt, thanks to those wine stains on my Prada suit. I couldn’t afford to turn down any job. Not even from an unmitigated bitch like Frenchie. So what I actually said on my way out was:

  “See you tomorrow. Seven A.M.”

  Chapter 9

  Happy to make my getaway from Frenchie (or, as I was beginning to think of her, Little Hitler), I headed for the parking lot, where I saw Becky and Tyler standing in the shade of a large jacaranda tree.

  Tyler, gaunt and drained of color, looked like a mug shot of himself.

  “Are you guys okay?” I asked.

  What an idiotic question. How could they possibly be okay? They’d both just lost their jobs, and Tyler had lost his novel as well.

  “I’ll be fine,” Tyler said, “as soon as I’ve had a martini or three.”

  “Oh, Tyler,” Becky said, frowning. “Do you really think that’s a good idea?”

  “Yes,” he said, “I think it’s a spectacular idea.”

  Frankly, I thought it was a darn good idea myself.

  “I don’t want to drink on an empty stomach,” Becky said. “Let’s get something to eat instead. We’ll walk over to Pink’s. Want to come with us, Jaine?”

  The last thing me and my thighs needed was to eat at Pink’s. A Los Angeles institution since 1939, Pink’s is the Holy Grail for L.A. hot dog aficionados. People come from miles around for their chili cheese dogs, which have approximately nine zillion calories a pop. No, I really had to start watching myself if I ever expected to fit into a single-digit dress size. So Pink’s was out of the question. Absolutely, positively out of the question.

  “Sure,” I said. “Sounds great.”

  Fifteen minutes later, we were sitting at one of Pink’s picnic tables, scarfing down chili cheese dogs and fries, grease dribbling down our chins. Correction. Fifteen minutes later, I was scarfing down a chili cheese dog and fries. Becky and Tyler, too upset to eat, barely nibbled at theirs. Why couldn’t I be one of those lucky people who lose their appetite when they’re upset?

  Becky, the vegetarian, had stymied the guys behind the counter by ordering a chili cheese dog without the dog and without the chili. Basically it was a mountain of melted cheese on a bun.