The Movie Star's Shoe

There are a lot of rats in Los Angeles County; they find it very hospitable.  I don’t mean the metaphorical ones who drive Porsches and dwell in cliffside houses in Pacific Palisades, but big, brown Norway rats that slink around the fringes of bushes in the ocean-front parks and skulk across the damp Santa Monica sand, snuffling their whiskers in the breeze to catch a whiff of greasy French fries and chicken nuggets as they fall through the wide wooden planks of the Pier.

As a transplanted New Yorker I had never thought about rats sharing our Southern California paradise until our neighbor Debbie told me how relieved she was that Jean Pierre, another neighbor, was having his twenty-foot tall Washingtonia filifera palms pruned.  Not understanding, I asked why.  “Ask the tree guy when he gets here” she replied knowingly. 

Later that day I had a long discussion with the man pruning the trees; he told me that rats like to live in untidy palms, the ones with the dead fronds hanging down; they enjoyed the protection from the elements and the close food source that unwary humans provide.  To forestall this, the trees must be pruned twice yearly.  Chilled, I spent the entire rest of the day grateful for Jean Pierre’s garden diligence.

            That night sitting at an outside table at The Blue Plate Oysterette, watching the sun slip behind the forty-foot King Palms lining Ocean Avenue, I idly (and mistakenly) relayed the conversation to my husband, Jamie.  I say ‘mistakenly’ because for the next three years - until we returned to the East Coast - every time we passed a palm tree he’d grab my arm and yell “Rat!”  At first it creeped me out, but since I never once saw a rat, eventually I concluded that there couldn’t possibly be rats in all of them.  Nevertheless, those invisible rodents remained secreted inside a small, dark sliver of my mind.

Still rat-less, weeks later, in mid-July we were lying on our bed watching the 11 o’clock news when I heard a thwack. I turned to Jamie.  “Did you hear that?”

“What?”

“A smacking noise outside, like a bird hit the window.”

“So maybe a bird hit the window.”

“Jame, it’s . . . what, 11:20; what bird flies at that time of night?”

“Maybe it’s a bat.”

“Oooooh, do we have bats here?”

“Maybe it’s a rat jumping out of Jean Pierre’s palm tree.  Remember what the tree guy said.”

“Ewwwwwwwww.” 

“He’s coming to get you!”  Jamie grabbed my arm.  This time I did shriek.  What if the much anticipated, palm-tree-rodent had finally arrived?  He laughed.  “If you really want to know, look out the window.”

Ours is a very small house, a turn-of-the-century bungalow, set on a tiny, subdivided plot of land enclosed by a wrought-iron gate, barely ten feet away from the house across the paved path called a walk-street.  If that long-expected rat had appeared, he was sprawled on the porch roof, really close, maybe three feet away from the mattress.  I slid Spencer, our marmalade tabby, off my lap and faced the windows; approaching warily, I poked one finger tentatively through the blinds. Spencer padded after me eagerly, no doubt intrigued at the prospect of escaping through the window and seeing a rat.  I turned to plop him, squirming, on Jamie’s stomach and returned to the window.

Peering through the slats, I saw that something sat in the center of the pitched porch roof; it was sleek-looking with a long slender growth from one end, too sleek-looking to be a rat, even in overly groomed LA.   And while it was kind of rodenty in color, it appeared to have a red stomach.   Could it be a bloody rat? 

Grabbing the long blue plastic back scratcher I had gotten from a float-rider at the Fourth of July parade, I yanked at the blind cord, then slid up the window sash and leaned out.  I poked at the object with the scratcher.  With a clunking noise, it rolled over and displayed more of its red stomach.  Feeling somewhat safer - rats don’t generally clunk and roll - I leaned out further and tried to drag it toward me with the curled end of the scratcher.  It turned and clunked again, this time toward the edge.  Leaning out so far I feared tumbling out to join it on the small rooftop, I swatted again.  This time it caught.  I reeled it in.  It was a brown alligator Christian Louboutain stiletto.

Once I had the window closed, I sat on the rug examining my catch as it dangled expensively from the scratcher’s curved end.  It caught the light dully on its sable matte finish.  I lifted it gently and placed it beside me on the sea grass patterned carpet.  It gleamed; it was a left pump, its sole smooth and crimson, not yet scratched from use.  

I knew this shoe.  I had wanted a pair like this but saleswomen in every shoe department from Barney’s to Saks had sighed unctuously and inquired why I had not visited them sooner.  After all, it was the most important shoe of the collection and my size, six, was the most common in all of LA.    Covetously, I slid my bare foot inside my foundling’s cool newness.  Actually it was such a big shoe I could have inserted both of my feet. I hobbled around to Jamie’s side of the bed.  “Look at this.”

Intrigued by the news broadcast, he ignored me.  I removed the shoe from my foot and waved it in front of his face.  “Jame, look at this.  It wasn’t a rat; it was a shoe on the roof, a brand-new Louboutain.”

He glanced up distractedly and nodded. 

Perching on the edge of the mattress I twirled the shoe by its five-inch spike heel.  “How would this get here?” I mused.  “It’s expensive.  It’s alone and they come in pairs.  It’s big, too, look . . . size . . . oooh, eleven.  Wow.  And, anyway, they can’t fly, so how . . .” My voice trailed off.

Jamie looked up from the Marie Callendar commercial and jerked his head to the right.  “Her,” he said.

“Her who?”

He looked at me intently and spoke slowly, punctuating his words with a pointing index finger. “Her - across the walk-street.”  Then, just before he returned his face to the TV screen, he added, “And they can fly, by the way.”

Her Across the Walk-Street was an Oscar-winning actress known to the tabloids as America’s Sweetheart, a Chiclet-toothed girl-next-door, who earned tens of millions of dollars for every movie she made, regardless of how badly they bombed – and lately, several of them had.  While she and her manager-husband owned the bungalow opposite ours, they rarely stayed there, since they also had an estate in Malibu and another in the Palisades.   Being America’s Sweetheart paid handsomely.

After waiting for the next commercial to begin, I asked, “What are you talking about? What does Tessa have to do with a size eleven flying Louboutain?”

“It’s her shoe.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I have met some of its relatives.”

“You can’t have; it’s here alone.”

Jamie shook his head, as if amazed by my naïveté.  “More distant relatives, then - a red Jimmy Choo, a black Givenchy, and . . . I am pretty sure the first one was a crème Manolo.  And they all knew how to fly, although some didn’t land too well; I thought the last one was gonna break the living room window.”

My lips formed a little “o”.  He tapped my chin and grinned.  “Close your mouth or you may catch the next one.”

It transpired that our neighbor - America’s Sweetheart – possessed the interpersonal communication skills of a thirteenth century Mongol.  Whenever she didn’t get her way - say, Jared, her husband, came home too late or stayed on the phone too long – she threw a screaming tantrum.  “Threw” appeared to be the operative word, too, because a shoe most often accompanied the shrieking verbal complaint; her right arm wound back and hurled – although with less precision than enthusiasm, admittedly, since no one had yet seen Jared with a black eye.  And as our house sat immediately opposite theirs on the narrow walk-street, the shoes landed most often on our porch. 

I was amazed at Jamie’s story.  “When does this happen?  Where have I been?”

“I don’t know where you are - work, Debbie’s, school.  It happens at all different times.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” 

He shrugged. “I didn’t really think about it.”

“Where are they?”

Jamie swigged his Diet Coke and jerked a thumb in the direction of Jennifer’s house while he swallowed.  “I gave ‘em back; what do you think, I kept ‘em?”

“How?” I envisioned his knocking on the door and bowing, ‘Your shoe, madam’ like some Post Modern Hollywood Sir Walter Raleigh.

“Usually I leave them on their front steps on my way to work in the morning.”

“Really?”

He stared.  “What else should do with them?”

I considered.  Fill them with lemonade and freeze them, making shoe-shaped granitas.  Plant them with dill and tarragon for a fashionista herb garden. Amusing, yes, but highly impractical, and nothing that my husband would have ever come up with.

“I don’t know.  I just . . . wondered.”

“Yeah, well, wonder it down to the front door and I’ll drop it off on my way out tomorrow.”

“Okay.  I guess.”  I carried the shoe to the narrow staircase and descended into the inky darkness as the late night music of a Law & Order rerun blared behind me. 
I wasn’t sure I wanted to return the shoe, although I certainly couldn’t articuate a reason for keeping it, except maybe contagion, as two Yale psychologists had called it - when people believe that they can capture the reflected glory of a celebrity by touching an object that the star touched, like at those Hollywood auctions Julien’s in Beverly Hills was always promoting.  This shoe was my little brush with celebrity, except in this case said celebrity’s Us Magazine life had been found wanting.  Stars!  They’re just like us!  They feed their kids and phone their therapists and argue with their spouses, but their neighbors have to help them finding their matching shoes after they have thrown them across courtyards.

A tiny part of me wanted to feel morally superior and be sorry for Tess; while I couldn’t quite manage that, I did think that, despite the great clothes and red-carpet events, it must be weird to be her. She may well do all those real-people things but she does them with an aging Sober Life Coach rolling along behind her, clutching a map and guiding her hand. 

No, she is nothing like me.  I teach high school English and worry about rats in palm trees, not rats clutching cameras, waiting patiently for the unflattering shot that will define me to all of America.

I sat in the dark until I no longer felt anything at all, then I opened the door gently, tiptoed across the paving stones, and lay the shoe on the doormat.  

The One Left Behind

When I was an undergraduate I enrolled in an Introduction to Italian class.  It met from 8 – 10:30 am on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  Since I could hardly be considered a morning person, my mother fairly shrieked with laughter at the thought of my actually arriving there any time before 10, but there were no openings in any other sections and I was feeling Continental.  It had to be Italian, too – I mean, how could you not like a place that’s shaped like a high heeled boot?

The first day, I stumbled in, disheveled and grumpy, wondering just how badly I really wanted to do this, and saw that this whole becoming bilingual process was going to be better than I had imagined.  A lot better.

The instructor was already in the front of the room, leaning on the table that functioned as a desk, arms and legs crossed casually, elegantly.  He wore perfectly tailored khakis and an impeccable white linen button-down shirt.  This alone made me stare.  NYU in the early 1990’s was full of black-jeans-and-leather-jacket clad poseurs. Everyone looked like Lou Reed, including the girls.

Not this guy.  He looked like Jean-Paul Belmondo - tall, slender, dark hair, dimple in the chin, strong forehead, lush lips, and one slightly raised eyebrow, giving him an insouciant, Gallic air.  He smiled, exposing white teeth and a tiny dimple in his left cheek.   

“Buon giorno.  Il mio nome è Romano. Sono il vostro istruttore. Benvenuto ad introduzione ad italiano.”

I had no idea what he said but I was hooked. After that, I was never absent and smiled at him throughout the entire session.  He must have thought I swallowed Chiclets whole.

Every day he looked more or less the same, sharply pressed khakis, crisp white linen or cotton shirt.  Once a week or so, probably on department meeting days, he wore a silk tie.  They were always of casually elegant design, a foulard or small paisley.  I was dazzled.  After that first day, I went to class completely groomed, too.  I washed and blew dry my hair every morning.  I scoured places like Alice Underground for chic 60’s styles.  On a weekend visit home I even swiped my mother’s last bottle of Narcisse Noir.

Eventually, my own sartorial efforts paid dividends.  He smiled his crooked grin (I just knew a Gauloise should hang from the corner) and leaned over my shoulder smelling of something spicy whenever I asked for extra help.  He was always very encouraging to me, marveling at both the construct and subjects of my sentences.  (“Gradirei il rivestimento di Armani nella finestra, prego. Formato sei!”)

One day he asked me to join him for coffee after the class.  He had about an hour before he had to return to his office to grade papers.  I swooned.

I had hoped to converse in chic foreign tongues but since I didn’t actually speak anything but English, we talked like everybody else.  It didn’t matter.  I was enchanted.  We continued having coffee together nearly every day after class.  Sometimes we chatted about our backgrounds.   He was the only son of an Italian father and French mother and spoke 3 languages.  I never really said much, just listened to the timbre of his sonorous voice and slid into gossamer daydreams about walks around the Tower of Pisa in the moonlight.

One day I got to class a little late.  The lesson had already begun and since no seats remained up front, I chose one in the back row.  He looked up and smiled at me.  I smiled back.  I could see that it was a tie day, but the tie wasn’t one of his usual tasteful ones.  It was one of those garish, techno-colored Nicole Miller ties, the ones with fluorescent colored designs on a black ground.  The design was pink and white.  While I couldn’t make it out, I could tell it was awful. 

I had no idea what was the subject of that day’s lesson.   Vorrei voglio something or other, I think.   I couldn’t pull my eyes from the fabric strip hanging from his neck. It looked like. . . I squinted . . .Barbie?   I stared and twisted my neck as discreetly as possible.  Barbie?  Barbie.  

At the break midway through the class, I picked up my notebook (il taccuino) and tiptoed my way through the backpacks (i zaini) ostensibly to ask a question but really to get a closer look at that tie.  Praying I was wrong I approached.  It was Barbie, all right.  Her name was spelled out in big pink letters, randomly scattered with figures of the original ponytail Barbie and blonde bubble-haired Barbie and shoes, those little open toed mules that Barbie wore.

“Interesting tie.”  I gestured.  “Gift?”

“No, I bought it.  I wear it the first Thursday of every month.”

“Why?”

“That’s the day of our meeting.”

“Meeting?”

“Yes.  I am the President of the Long Island Chapter of the Barbie Club.”

At the exact second that those words left his mouth, my infatuation ended with a sharp internal yowl, like a cat’s tail caught in a door. 

Jean-Paul Belmondo would not wear a Barbie tie.  He would not join a Barbie club.  He would sneer at the thought as his Gauloise hung blithely from the corner of his mouth.

This story appeared in a slightly different form in What Was I Thinking: 58 Bad Boyfriend Stories; St. Martin’s Press; 2010

The Amount of Education You Have Determines Your Loot in Life

Lou Casella, my mentor teacher, used to say that teachers are born not made.  I wasn’t sure I agreed with that sentiment years ago when I first heard it and I’m less certain of it with each passing school year.  Certainly I didn’t see myself as a teacher for the first thirty-odd years of my life. 

When I was a kid, I thought teachers were overworked, underpaid, and got no respect from anyone.  (Funny how perceptive I was at such a young age.)  I’d seen all the teacher films on Million Dollar Movie – Up the Down Staircase; To Sir, With Love; The Pride of Miss Jean Brodie; The Blackboard Jungle – and certainly none of them glorified the classroom experience.   It wasn’t until later, as an adult, watching them again with a friend who was writing about the representation of teachers in the media for a graduate school project, that I began to think about what those films were actually saying about teachers and learners.  While some of the teachers’ experiences certainly weren’t enviable, maybe there really was something satisfying about showing kids something they’d never seen before, like Sylvia Barrett, the teacher portrayed by Sandy Dennis in Up the Down Staircase. 

Against nearly insurmountable odds, Miss Barrett obtains for her students new paperback copies of books she values, believing that, if her students will only read them, they will value those books, too.  Holding a fresh paperback in her hand, Miss Barrett stands at the front of her classroom and reads aloud the famous first line of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”.  She’s trying to show that literature isn’t old and dead. In fact, good writing knows no time boundaries since the observations about humanity contained in a book written in 1859 can help someone understand the paradoxes of Post Modern life.  Her restive students begin to pay attention as her modulated voice tells them a story.  And all things being equal in a Robert Mulligan film, of course she succeeds; her students find the book contemporary and interesting and discuss it enthusiastically.

That scene has remained with me since the first time I watched the film and I think of it often as I attempt to teach my students the same thing about literature.  I read aloud my favorite authors’ words (which I am lucky enough to teach) and hope that the message, so powerful to me, speaks to them, too.   So, is my mentor teacher right? Does the fact that literature speaks so profoundly to me and I want to allow it to speak to others indicate I am a born teacher?  If so, you’d never know it from my first teaching experience.  

My great-uncle Max remarried when I was twelve. The news astonished me because he had been single as long as I had known him: ex-Aunt Emily had divorced him years before I was even born and I’d had no idea he was in the market for a new wife.  It turns out that he wasn’t, at least not for just any new wife.  He wanted one in particular, a woman named Gisela, his adolescent sweetheart in Germany during the run-up to the Second World War.  They had lost each other when he fled Germany around 1938 to avoid a concentration camp: Gisela, a Catholic and in no immediate danger, remained behind.   After she and Max separated, each created a new life and married other people.  Gisela moved to a rural area in southwestern Germany while Max built his photography career in Chicago.  Eventually, both of their marriages came undone for one reason or another.  Apparently Max never forgot her and probably wondered more and more if what might have been could be still, so, early in 1971, he returned to Germany to look for her.  He found her, married her, and brought her to America and, within a few weeks, to our house.

The visit was intended to be a mixture of business with pleasure since, in addition to visiting us, Max was due to photograph the transformers illustrating Westinghouse’s newest catalog, published by my dad’s sales support division.  That meant that he and my father would be out of the house all day.  My mother and older sister would be at work, too.  Since it was summer and I was off from school, it didn’t take long to determine that I was designated to stay home all day with an old German lady while everyone else bundled themselves off to places more interesting.  At that age, the thought of spending an entire day with any adult bored me senseless, but a foreign one who, due to the fact that she spoke no English, couldn’t even talk with me was a living death.  Besides the communication situation, there was the unwelcome threat to my autonomy.  This houseguest would keep me from doing what I loved to do all day by myself: with her in the house I couldn’t lie on my bed and read until my mother got home from work.  I wasn’t pleased. 

After breakfast, when Gisela went to dress, I seized the opportunity to sit alone at the kitchen table and sneak a quick read of an Agatha Christie.  I became so engrossed in the adventures of Hercule Poirot and the Clapham cook I didn’t hear her returning footsteps. At the last moment, just as Gisela re-entered the kitchen, I tried to ditch Agatha.  Because I had started too late, Gisela caught sight of the book sliding under the chair cushion.  Something about what she saw made her face open.  She pointed to Agatha, then to me, and to the book again, then to herself.  I guessed that she might be indicating that she liked to read and asking if I liked to read, too, so I nodded and said, “Yes, I love to read; it’s my favorite thing to do.”  Although she didn’t understand my words, the enthusiasm in my voice must have spoken to her because she smiled, crinkling her blue eyes, and turned to leave the room.

She returned less than a minute later clutching a book, a children’s reading primer with Hans und Fritz printed on its cover.  She stood a few feet away and held it toward me with a hopeful expression on her face.  I had to stretch to reach the book, but I accepted it and riffled the pages.  It was simple story with pen and ink drawings of two children, telling of their adventures in clear, concise language designed to teach English to German children. I opened it to the first page.  She continued to stand by a chair and nodded toward me with an expression more intensely hopeful than the last.  I cocked my head to the left like a puzzled squirrel.  What was she saying?  She tugged at the chair and began to motion next to me.  “What? Oh, okay.  Yeah, yeah, yeah, “ I answered her absently, nodding while I spoke.  She pulled the chair closer to me and tried to see what I saw on the page. 

I read the book aloud, slowly, and Gisela listened attentively.  Sometimes she tried to follow along in the book but at that distance it was hard for her to see the pages so I gestured for her to move closer to me.  Now that she could see more clearly, she followed along even more intently.  Sometimes she reached out to run her index finger across the page under the words as she tried to determine which part of the text I was reading.  Her brow furrowed slightly as she whispered the words I spoke after I read them aloud.  She appeared so engaged in mastering them that I felt bad that it was such a short book and I started over.  Then I started again.  Sometimes she gazed at me as I read the words aloud and once or twice she turned my face toward hers by very gently placing her soft, cool fingers on my jaw or my lips so she could feel the shape of my face as I created the sounds.  Startled and, at first, puzzled by the gesture, finally I figured out what she was doing - she was trying to understand how to form the strange-sounding English words that seemed to possess the same meaning as the more guttural language she already knew.

Ultimately I was able to discern which chubby boy was Hans and which was Fritz and, flattered by her obvious appreciation of my reading skill, I began to alter my voice for each character.  Then I pointed at them when the drawing indicated actions, like jumping rope, shooting marbles, slipping down a slide, or eating a meal so she could learn the verb in English representing the action she surely recognized. Eventually, I must have read the whole book through ten or twelve times.

The hours passed and my family returned home.  Immediately upon entering the house, Max walked over to embrace Gisela and he asked her in German what she’d done all day.  She smiled, and then she picked up Hans und Fritz and read the entire book aloud with mostly correct pronunciation.  I remember the amazement on Max’s face as he heard her speaking English, a little haltingly, but still speaking it, and she beamed when he hugged her.   When he asked her how she had learned to do that in one day, she reached across the table and clasped the back of my wrist.   I smiled at them, surprised at the pleasure I got in having helped her.

This point is where a lesser woman would confide that this moment of interpersonal warmth and educational triumph subconsciously inspired her career choice by allowing her to discover that she was a born teacher.  Alas, life is not like the movies and I am not Sandy Dennis.  (Besides, I didn’t become a teacher until I was well into my thirties, having burned out of another career. Plus, remember those childhood observations about teachers?)

Here is also where a lesser woman would claim that this day’s triumph was just the beginning, that Gisela became a fluent English speaker, all thanks to my brilliant teaching skills.  And I would like to write that – I really would - but it isn’t true.  When I visited Max and Gisela four years later she still couldn’t speak a word of English, although she could read Hans und Fritz aloud from cover to cover, so I guess I taught her something. 

More importantly, Gisela taught me something, although I wasn’t aware of it until decades later: she taught me that teaching matters.  Showing someone how to do something and then watching that person attempt it on her own is the essence of teaching: this knowledge is the reason so many teachers go to work every day.  Likewise, learning how to think critically is among the key objectives of education and, as one of my students wrote, education is very important because the amount of education you have determines your loot in life.  In that case, we should all invest our loot wisely.