by Marla Becking

Tommy wants new shoes; he wants shoes that light up with each step. They are special shoes, ones that don’t need batteries but have a special kind of sensor; when the heel of a shoe touches the ground, a light goes on. The pressure of the heel makes it all work. I joke with Tommy and tell him the shoes will become really useful when we can’t pay the hydro bill and our electricity is cut off. He can wear the blinking shoes around the house and I will follow him like radar.

He plans to save one hundred and twenty dollars in two months. The court will be waiting for him in the spring, he says. This year the town has promised to repave and even-out the asphalt. No more puddles of oil and rain that leave a purple rainbow when you run a stick thought it. To show me he’s serious Tommy puts his Spiderman piggy bank in the middle of the table and announces that it is Tommy’s Shoe Fund and all donations are welcome. I wince at hearing this; he has other shoes.

Tommy makes his rounds after each snowfall, and his regular customers, like Mrs. Tabin and Mrs. Jackson, give him three dollars each time. He claims that his sales tactics have improved; if a lady says no, my husband will shovel when gets home, Tommy says he says: look, wouldn’t it be nice for your husband to come home after a long day’s work to a freshly shovelled walkway? and the lady agrees. He asks for two dollars but Mrs. Tabin and Mrs. Jackson give three.

Mr. Foord has phoned twice to ask for Tommy’s help to cord wood. Mr. Foord is ninety-five years old and very spry. A true outdoorsman, his muscles are sinewy, his body is lean, and his skin looks like fried chicken—very crispy in the summer. Every summer he paints his house a new colour. Last year it was yellow and there is talk at Pronger’s that this year it will be blue.

Mr. Foord uses his mountain climbing equipment to paint his house. He attaches a rope to the roof and then latches it to a harness he wears—and his arms are free. He uses his feet to push off his house and swing away and then back, painting with a paint gun and thick sweeps of his arm. In the summer I am fascinated, watching him dangle from the roof of his house like Spiderman.

Mr. Foord is an intelligent man and not lazy so I give Tommy permission to help him cord the wood. Tommy earns five dollars an hour and when he comes home for supper his eyes are shining so brightly that light reflects off the forks and knives and explodes all over the kitchen.

*

We go to the shoe store twice a week, and this time Tommy has forty-five dollars to give Mr. Venti. Mr. Venti is nice enough to let us turn out the lights in the back room and test the shoes. I sit on a fitting stool while Tommy walks the length of the room and back. The shoes blink as he moves and I sit in dumbfounded silence. It is as if they are spelling out a secret code, using an alphabet I cannot know. Tommy practices his jump-shots and shouts out in mid-air, “how do I look, mum?” I tell him, from what I can see he looks good, that it is strange how he disappears into the darkness for a few seconds, but when he hits the ground his shoes stay lit for fifteen seconds. We time it.

Tommy’s fingers seem fluorescent as he traces the laces and heel before he puts the shoes back in the box. Mr. Venti puts the box behind the cash with a reserved sticker on it and as we say goodbye he calls me Mrs. Babushki. My voice breaks as I try to say Ms., as if I’ve been stung by the buzzing sound I make.

Mr. Wagner needs help getting groceries, climbing stairs and taking his medication. He sometimes needs his walkway shovelled, and I do it although Tommy says he could make two dollars if only I’d let him ask Mr. Wagner.

Every weeknight I am at Mr. Wagner’s by six, and relieve Nancy Jennings of her twelve to six shift. On the weekends Mr. Wagner’s daughter Laura stays with him. Mr. Wagner broke his hip a few years ago and has a replacement hip. He tells me he can hear the metal in his side singing when he walks. Mr. Wagner has diabetes and suffers from a painful cancer. He tells me the pain does not compare to the burden he feels in his heart over the kind of man he has been, over the life he wasted.

*

My mother does not want Tommy to have the shoes; she says they are a waste of money and if she knew what the word meant I think she’d call them frivolous. My mother doesn’t understand what the shoes do to begin with. I describe them to her, about the pressure and the heel, how they will act as reflectors at night when Tommy bikes home from Jason Verhoek’s house. She thinks the lights will encourage Tommy to stay out later at night, but I ask her what am I supposed to do? The summer nights are long. He is going to work for the shoes; they will mean something. She dismisses me with a wave of her hand and mutters zaboolah, zaboolah, you crazy, you crazy.

My mother never uncovers her right arm. When she reads in the living room the purple quilt is wrapped around the arm so tightly that it makes her brown hand turn blue. The arm was broken on the swing set of the Kamsack School playground when she was six years old. My mother kept her arm a secret; she did not tell her mother about the arm and instead let it fuse itself back together.

There are photographs, dated summer 1922, of my mother and her brothers and sisters in caps and Babushkas. Blurry and distorted, I can never tell who is who, except for my mother, who is holding her arm, cradling it as she later would my sisters and me.

*

Mr. Wagner has to eat a lot of grains and fibres to help his digestive system along. He cannot tolerate dairy products of any kind. For dessert he asks for a popsicle and his head lolls around it like a little boy’s. While we play Crazy Eights he tells me about his wife, Clara, who has been dead for twelve years. Mr. Wagner used to drink; he’d be at the Legion every night. My mother used to warn me and my sisters to stay away form Mr. Wagner, he’s a roaring drunk, she’d say. Now Mr. Wagner is sorry about the way he treated Clara, about the way he used to drink.

I bathe Mr. Wagner as if I am bathing a baby; I am careful to hold his neck and head with one hand and soap and rinse him with the other. He keeps his hair in a brush cut and it is easy to wash. Mr. Wagner is patient and tells me about the winter birds that eat from the bird feeders on his lawn. He wears his thick eyeglasses even in the tub and says he is blind without them.

Mr. Wagner’s pills are grouped: first by colour, then by size. He swallows the biggest ones first: two pink, then yellow, white, and blue. Before he puts his pyjama top on I give him an insulin shot. Mr. Wagner is a thin man but his skin is too soft, like over-kneaded dough, and I cannot find a vein. The slap of the rubber tie resounds and makes my mouth dry, and later I will dream of this; I will dream of the slap of a rubber tie that chokes veins to the surface of my skin.

*

Tommy first saw the shoes on Jason Verhoek’s feet, standing outside the school yard two days back from the Christmas Holidays. Tommy still tells me about the gentle glow of light that flowered in the snow, how Jason jumped and when he landed the light was lost in the glare of the snow for a while, and when it came back it seemed all the more brilliant. With his felt-lined boots Tommy tells me he felt heavy, as if he couldn’t jump even if he bent his knees and tried. I tell him the shoes won’t make him jump any higher, won’t make him run any faster; I say you have three other pairs of running shoes, and only two feet and he says in a desperate whisper, “I know, mum, but I want them.” Tommy’s thin body is leaning toward mine and I am leaning on the kitchen counter trying to remember what it is like to want so much.

*

Mr. Wagner is in bed by nine, unless there’s a hockey game on. Sometimes I read to him, from the newspaper or from one of the A.A. booklets he keeps on his bed stand. Tonight he falls asleep before I even begin to read. At nine-thirty I phone home to make sure Tommy’s in bed and my mother has taken her medication. Tommy answers, and says before you yell mum, I’m just brushing my teeth. He tells me my mother has fallen asleep in her chair in the living room and he is going to wake her and help her to bed. When we say goodbye and good night I blow a kiss into the receiver though I know it will not reach him. When Mr. Wagner is asleep I do the laundry or iron his shirts, dust, and sweep the floor.

The spare bed at Mr. Wagner’s is firm and warm but I cannot sleep. Sometimes I lie on the bed and force myself to sleep, other times I lie on the hardwood floor in the living room and stare at the ceiling. When I drift off on the floor my sleep is light; it is as if the floor is tilting and I am sliding. My dreams are always disturbing and sad, and when I wake I feel as if I haven’t slept at all. Lately I have tried to sleep on the empty half of Mr. Wagner’s bed; I lie on top of the covers and watch his chest rise and fall and hitch once in a while. Mr. Wagner often wakes in the night, and tonight he calls me Clara until I switch on the light and reassure him. There is a red band imprinted on the back of his head between the folds of skin; it’s from the elastic band he had me tie to the arms of his eyeglasses.

*

Tommy can’t wait; he tells me he dreams of the shoes at night. We are going for our second visit of the week, and tell my mother she must come along. In the back room she sits above Tommy and me in a shoe shine chair. I parade Tommy around in the dark, and want to impress my mother but can only see her when Tommy’s heel touches the ground. Her face is stern and the lights glare back at me from the lenses of her eyeglasses. Tommy demonstrates his jump-shot and my mother disappears for a while. In the fifteen seconds Tommy’s heel touches the ground, my mother’s eyes seem to burn holes in me with the red light of the shoes, as if she were a super hero. She tells Tommy zaboolah, they look like the devil’s eyes. For one hundred and twenty dollars of shoes he will trade his soul.

*

Saturday morning Mr. Foord calls again and Tommy nearly forgets to put on his boots as he rushes out the door. There are three piles of carefully stacked wood in Mr. Foord’s front yard across the street, enough to heat his house for two winters. From the kitchen window I watch Tommy and Mr. Foord chop and stack wood all afternoon.

Later Tommy tallies up his earnings: twenty-five dollars from Mr. Foord, and even before he crossed the street Mrs. Schollie waved him over to shovel her walkway for two more dollars more. He is earning more than he anticipated, and will be able to buy the shoes well before the spring thaw. I tell him not to bother putting the money in his Spiderman piggy bank, but to get his coat on and take it to Mr. Venti. I watch Tommy run down the street on the slick, sun glare-glazed snow and when he curves around the corner he disappears from my sight, like the flash and stun of a light bulb.

*

When my mother does the dishes she lets her tight arm dangle in the water. She uses little soap. My mother leans on the skinny counter between the sink and herself and lifts every dish high out of the water, holding tight, as if it might fly away if she lets go.

My mother curls her toes when washing the dishes, also when she makes toast or peels potatoes. This, her doctor says, has become a problem. The toes are so used to bending that they no longer lie flat. Finding shoes for her clawed, bird-like feet is an ordeal.

Mr. Venti’s collection of orthopedic shoes is twenty-five per-cent off, and when my mother sees the advertisement in the paper she sucks her teeth. She needs as much coaxing to get into the store as she does to get her feet into the shoes. Relax your foot, let your toes s-t-r-e-t-c-h; I say the word slowly as if my tongue is teaching her toe. Mr. Venti brings us twelve pairs of shoes and her toes fit into none of them. I suggest a size larger and my mother clucks her tongue. We leave the store with shoes a circus clown would wear: too large, too awkward, too freakish.

*

After Tommy leaves for school in the morning I try again to sleep and only stare at the ceiling or lazily let the sun in my eyes. At Pronger’s Linda pours lukewarm coffee into a steaming cup. The cups are fresh from the dishwasher, the industrial-sized dishwasher they have in the back. She tells me it takes a month to fill the plastic racks of the machine, and only three minutes to wash and two to dry. I guess that she can fit two cups for every person in town into that machine and Linda says I guessed right.

Pronger’s used to be a bakery, until a few years ago when Linda put the 649 machine in. Still there is a sun-faded FRESH BREAD BAKED DAILY sign beside the LOTTO TICKETS SOLD HERE sign masking-taped to the window. She tells me the way she sees it, she could slave away back there with the ovens or push a few buttons and make twice as much. Nobody wants fresh baked bread any more anyway.

I have coffee with Linda every weekday afternoon. There are ten people in Pronger’s for coffee, to talk or to get the winning numbers. Mrs. Schellenburg tells me my son has quite a business going and wants to know if he will mow lawns in the summer.

My mother’s feet curdle under the hot water I pour from the waiting kettle. I tell her to spread her toes, to flex her muscles, to flap her toes as if they were wings. She taps the shallow basin of water with her right foot, and balances herself in the chair with her left arm. The purple quilt is wrapped around her right arm and it flows behind the chair, the weight on her arm so heavy that it tilts her wiry frame. I kneel on the floor and massage her feet as the doctor instructed, wetting each foot with a handful of water, easing each foot into the warmth. She tells me her feet hurt so badly she cannot bear to move them even a little, and she lets out a gasp as I lower her feet into the basin.

My mother has very long hair, grey and beautiful. She cannot wash it herself; I wash her hair in the same basin I use for her feet. I lather the shampoo in my hands and on to her scalp, and work my down to the tips. When I pour warm water from the kettle on to her hair she tells me to mind the quilt, and I do.

*

Tommy will have his shoes my month’s end; he’s already asked to break them in at school. Tonight I will tell Mr. Wagner about Tommy’s shoes; I will explain the sensor and lights, how he and Jason Verhoek plan to play tag in the dark. The night is calm, and the warm air warns that snow will fall tonight. Tommy can earn maybe ten dollars tomorrow, if he goes out before school. I see the first flakes of the evening fall and if Tommy asks I think I might let him wear his shoes in the snow just once; I’d like to see the glow of his shoes redden the snow around his feet like a cut on smooth skin that’s just begun to bleed.

Source: Headlight Anthology, no. 1, 1998, pp. 120–28.