by Molly Giles
Francis nodded. That was true. And there was no one to blame—or praise—but himself for the way his way had turned out. Again, he looked at Glo and this time, as her eyes at last met his, he saw the miracle—a Chlmayo morning, fresh winter air, and a pretty widow in turquoise boots determined to save what was too late for salvage. He had always known, as his idiot ancestor had not, what a treasure was; the trick was how to keep it. He winked, enjoyed Glo’s unblinking look back, and mouthed, Let’s get out of this hellhole. She smiled, polite, not understanding. He sighed and looked down at Peg’s hand, still pressed over his, the same warm hand that had nervously picked the gilt letters off the piano the night he told her it was over. She was agood sport, Peg. But not for him. No one for him, really, ever. But Ida.
He joined in the clapping that followed Ansel’s speech but when Mimi Johns rose and started to talk, Francis excused himself and slipped outside.
There was an enclosed courtyard outside the kitchen door and he stepped into it with a deep breath, grateful for the fresh air and silence. So this was the petit jardin the restaurant was so famous for. He made his way along a brick wall to a stone bench by a lemon tree and sat down. Sunset streaked the sky and somewhere a bird sang. Life is good, Francis thought, in its way. Terrible things happen but they don’t happen every minute. He smoothed his linen trousers over his knee. His own hand, he noticed, looked ancient. All wrinkled and splotched. The wedding ring Glo had given him was even worse than the one Ida had made him wear. The diamonds made him look like an old queen. He clenched his fist and suddenly remembered a game he used to play when Kay was a child. He’d put his hand over her knee, say “Go ahead, hit me,” and she’d always try; she never said, No, I love you Daddy, why would I want to hit you? Not Kay. She’d wind up her little punching arm and let loose. She was fast. But he was faster. He’d move his hand and she’d strike her own leg. Then she’d do it again. She never seemed to tire of it, hurting herself. Still doing it, as far as he could tell. Some things never change, Harry had said, and that was true and that was too bad. But what could you do. People were what they were. He heard another feeble roar of geriatric laughter from the restaurant behind him and rose from the bench, walked to the gate, opened it, and stepped onto the street. No one would miss him. He had to get out.
Kay sat outside on her front porch eating rice pudding warm from the bowl. Ever since the accident she had been craving baby foods, mashed bananas, oatmeal, creamy digestible sweets. It was disgustingfare but it was doing the trick. She hadn’t had a drink or a cigarette, but she hadn’t had the nerve to confide her “secret”—eat like a baby, be like a baby—to anyone either. Certainly not to her AA group. They were such a sober set. They laughed, big phlegmy laughs between drags on their mentholated cigarettes and gulps from their oversugared coffees, but they never smiled. Saddicts, she called them. Well, she shouldn’t joke, she was one too. She turned the spoon over in her mouth and licked it clean. When she graduated from baby foods she supposed she would go on to kid foods, peanut butter and white rice, and then on to adolescent food, french fries and diet Cokes. She would never graduate to the culinary sophistication of Zabeth, who had served black-bearded mussels in something she called “cum sauce” at her wedding shower last week, but she didn’t need to be like Zabeth. She could be what she was, a woman on parole from arrested development perched on her half-painted porch with an estranged husband, an estranged father, and a just plain strange son.
She dropped the spoon in the bowl as Nicky came out and sat down beside her by the open bucket of yellow paint. He was listening to a football game on his transistor radio and he seemed at least eight inches taller than the last time she’d seen him, ten minutes ago. “Mom?” he asked. “Are you going to be late?” He sounded worried, and she remembered what Dr. Tamar had told her last week: Nicky was never to feel she was his “job.” He was never to feel it was up to him to make her a better person. She reached to hug him, feeling the deep ache in her clavicle where the fracture still had not healed. He tensed against her, giving her the same guarded look Mrs. Holland had given her when she had announced she wanted to stay on at the library until the bitter end—an end which still had not come. The voters seemed to like the West Valley branch as much as she did and had approved the new bond to retain it for another four years. “If you’re not careful,” Mrs. Holland had warned just before she herself transferred to Rancho Valdez, “you’ll stay here forever.” Good, Kay had thought. I want to. By forever she would have earned her M.L.S., just in case the county demanded she produce a degree that Charles Lichtman couldn’t forge.
She showed Nicky her watch, which, like all the clocks inside the house, was set ahead twenty minutes. Another baby trick that worked. “Honey, I don’t have to be at Charles’s art show opening until seven and it’s only five-thirty. But you’re right. I’ll look slippy.” She covered the can of paint, put the brush to soak, regarded the work she had done so far, which, yellow painted over brown, looked like cold butter over cold toast, told herself it would look better when it was done, and went inside to change. She inched into the seamed hose and red dress Charles wanted her to wear—still dressing for others, she thought as she combed her hair and applied the lip gloss he liked. But if I dressed for myself, she admitted, I’d never get out of my bathrobe. She made a face at her reflection in the mirror. All this recovery work. One step forward, two steps back. And in the end where were you? She set her comb down, noticing with resignation that somehow it was Neal’s old white comb again, and glanced at the photo on her bureau. Ida and Francis at an outdoor café in Paris, both in dark glasses, with cigarettes and drinks in their hands. Toujours gai, those two. Too bad they had to be her parents. No. Not too bad. Without Ida’s hot courage and Francis’s cold wit she never would have made it this far. Wherever this far was. She touched their faces lightly with her finger and turned away. One of these days she would phone Francis, introduce herself, and start another stunted conversation. But she needed to wait until she was sure she wouldn’t cry, or rage, or expect her basic unalienable daughterly rights. And that might take a while.
“Dad’s here,” Nicky called. She looked through the curtains and saw Neal walking up the path, his step light and almost springy. Being out of the marriage, losing the stables, and filing for bankruptcy had restored him to the nice gentle bachelor she’d fallen for years ago. He held a bouquet of limp carnations—how could carnations loll like that?—and whistled off-key when he saw her. “Break a leg,” he said.
“Don’t wish that.” Kay grabbed her music and her keys and hurried out to the car Victor had sold her. The first car she had ever chosen, bought, and paid for on her own. So what if it was eight years old, purple, and had two broken back windows? The sound system was great. She put a Glenn Gould tape on, one she had listened to over and over during the weeks of convalescence. She had tried to explain to Dr. Tamar what it had meant to her, lying on her back in the hospital, in pain, truly in pain for the first time in her life, and for the first time in her life understanding a little of what Ida had lived with, day after day, while the perfect piano notes rushed past her. She had not been able to articulate how much she had hated that music. It was like some river of life she was not allowed to ride. And then one day, no reason, no special event, no one said anything to her, nothing in particular happened, the sunlight just moved across the blanket, a hummingbird hovered outside the window, a leaf fell off the weeping fig tree Zabeth had sent her, Gould muttered something ghoulish to himself under the Bach Prelude, and suddenly she was on that river, riding. She was back, intact, alive. That must be what the saddicts meant when they said “Let Go and Let God.” That must be what Victor meant when he said “Jesus Saves.” Kay did not think she had ever experienced it before. Except once, maybe, years ago, when Nicky was a baby and she and Neal were still being kind to each other and the three of them were floating in her parents’ swimming pool on an autumn afternoon. They had heard Ida storming inside the house, somethin
g about Greta, something about what Greta had or hadn’t done, and then they heard Francis’s quiet footsteps, moving away, the garage door closing behind him as Ida’s clear voice continued to stab the air with its anger. “Your poor mother,” Neal had said. And for no reason Kay had started to laugh, and then Nicky had started, and then all three of them were laughing so hard they had to cling to the sides of the swimming pool, not tokeep from drowning but to keep from levitating, to keep from rising like bubbles over the cold glass walls of her parents’ house. That had been a moment of grace she’d always remembered. It hadn’t lasted long, but while it had lasted she had glimpsed some of the peace she sometimes glimpsed now.
She guided the car through West Valley, past the EVERYTHING MUST GO signs on Neal’s stables, past the dark open door of the White Oak. As she passed Le Petit Jardin she recognized the Forrests’ car parked outside and slowed. She glanced toward the garden gate of the little brick restaurant, which was open, and that’s when she saw him, standing there looking up at the sunset as if he’d been waiting for her all this time, dapper, relaxed, and solitary.
“Daddy,” she said.
He didn’t turn. Why would he? Daddy wasn’t a name he had answered to in years. She drove on half a block, stopped, double-parked, got out, and slowly walked back to where he stood. He turned, unsurprised, taking in the red dress, the lip gloss. “Well, Kay,” he said. “What are you doing, streetwalking?”
He was sick, she could tell that, something was wrong. His skin was flushed and pink, his breath was thick. She stopped two feet away from him, feeling the old force field holding her there, repelled, then she took a deep breath and took a step forward. It was like being drunk, trusting like this, stepping into the dark, and, like being drunk, it was easy. She raised her arms, put them around him, let the blue ring on her hand will his shoulders close to hers. “I love you,” she said. She didn’t care if he said nothing or if he resorted to his standard “Ditto,” but when his own hand came up and patted her back, one-two, and his voice, mild, cool, said, “Why, I love you too,” she thought she might be excused from the rest of her life. Many things might happen to her in the years to come, but this was as happy as she was going to get. “I was thinking about you,” he added.
She sniffled. “You were?”
“The games we used to play.”
She nodded, bent her head, took the handkerchief he handed her and blew. She had always blown her nose a little too noisily for a lady. She knew that. She knew too what games he meant. The game where he’d trick her into trying to hit his hand, the game where he’d bet she couldn’t hold her breath through the tunnel and then slow to three miles an hour, the game where he’d take giant steps and invite her to match him when they walked on the beach, the game where he’d hold his ringer in the candle flame, say “I don’t feel a thing,” and widen his eyes with amazement when she pulled back, scorched.
“Waste of time, weren’t they,” Francis said.
“Oh I don’t know,” Kay said. “I suppose we got something out of them.” The word “time” reminded her. “I have to go, Daddy,” she said. “Will you and Glo come to the house next week?”
“Whatever for?” Francis asked.
“I don’t know. Reconciliation. Redemption. Coffee. Cake.” She held him again, the frail collapsed weight of him, stepped close again to kiss his cheek, stepped back, alive, and walked back up the block to her car. As she slipped behind the wheel she glanced at her watch again. Five-thirty. Still? Had it stopped? Her heart sped up, panicked, and for a second she could see nothing in front of her but darkness. The desire never to move again overcame her. She bowed her head and, with effort, began to review the music she would be playing at the gallery for Charles’s opening. It was dance music, insistent, inviting, and it nudged her forward, forced her to move. She started the car and put it in gear. If she hurried, she’d make it. She still had time.
About the Author
Moily Giles is an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Arkansas and the author of two short-story collections, Rough Translations and Creek Walk and Other Stories. She has won several awards for her writing, including the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and the Small Press Best Fiction/Short Story Award.
A SCRIBNER PAPERBACK FICTION
READING GROUP GUIDE
IRON SHOES
DISCUSSION POINTS
Iron Shoes deals with characters who are stuck, unable to move forward in their lives. Kay, of course, is the prime example, but Francis, Ida, Victor, and Neal are also weighted down. Discuss their own styles of iron shoes. Did you find that Ida, the only real cripple in the book, is in many ways the freest?
Were you impatient with Kay? Could you think of things she could have done to free herself? Could you see why she was unable to do these things?
Giles took a risk killing off her most vibrant character midway through the book. How did you react to Ida’s death? Did you put the book down? Why did you pick it up again?
Were you initially put off by the book’s emphasis on physical pain and mutilation? What qualities in the writing helped you get through the first opening pages?
Discuss Giles’s treatment of male characters. Is she fair to them?
What role does Zabeth play in the book? Is she a good foil for Kay?
What’s your take on the blue horse? Does it work as a fantasy? Can you accept that Ida’s hallucination becomes Kay’s guardian angel? If so, what does this say about the deeper connection between mother and daughter?
Kay feels no one loves her. Is this true? Who does she most want to love her? Who does she most love?
The book uses a lot of quick, snappy dialogue. Take any scene and look at the ways dialogue advances toward or skips away from the central conflict. Did you find it believable?
Neither conventional religions nor alternate twelve-step programs receive much respect in these pages. Were you offended?
The sex scenes between Neal and Kay are some of the saddest in print. Did they also seem realistic? Why do you think bad sex is easier to write about than good sex?
What do you think will happen with Kay’s marriage? With Kay herself? Where do you think she will be in ten years? Would you be interested in reading a sequel?
Giles has described this book as “a comedy about alcoholism, incest, cancer, and death,” adding, “I had trouble with the tone.” Do you see Iron Shoes as a comedy? A tragedy? Neither? Does it seem real to you? Did it make you think about your own life?
A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
This book grew out of the title story, “Creek Walk,” from my last collection of short stories. The characters stayed with me. I changed them a bit (many have different names) but their essential natures remained unchanged. “Creek Walk” is about grief; Iron Shoes is about growth. I wanted to follow the main character, the forty-year-old daughter, as she comes to terms with her mother’s death and her father’s rejection, and finds her own way at last. I have joked that the book is a comedy about cancer, alcoholism, and incest, but it is, in fact, that, and one of the hardest problems has been trying to maintain a tone that captures the humor and horror without cheapening either. This book took seven years to write, primarily because as a full-time college teacher, I wrote it mainly in Januarys and Julys, but also because I was trying to balance that tone. The manuscript was written on eight different machines (old typewriters and borrowed computers), it was singed in a bar fire, three chapters in a briefcase were stolen from the trunk of my car, it’s traveled with me to Mexico and Hawaii in a backpack, it has been with me so long I don’t know what I’ll do without it. It has been totally rewritten five times and has gone from 417 to 287 pages. The hardest part to get right was the end. In the first version I killed Kay off. It felt great. In the second version I maimed her badly. She would never play the piano again. That also felt great. In the next version I gave her a hit song, a successful romance with a wonderful man, and a good job. That felt, as you can imag
ine, lousy. The end I have now feels exactly right to me. She is going to be fine. Just not right away.
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