My Life in Shoes

It’s 1963 and I am two and a half, sitting in the back seat on the passenger’s side of Mom’s car. She is driving the used brown Chevy she got from cousin Irwin Burack, the car dealer. It belonged to his sister. Mom is still pregnant, expecting David to be born in August. She may have just been to lunch at B. Altman’s at the Short Hills Mall with Grandma’s friend, Dorothy Kraft, who lived nearby. Maybe she had taken Dorothy home. Maybe she had left me with a baby sitter while they had lunch and was picking me up. Maybe I was annoyed at being left with a sitter.

My hair is curly. I am wearing a sundress with a blue chambray skirt. The top is striped. It has a red belt with a tie bow. I am wearing red sandals with buckles. We are driving up Eagle Rock Avenue in West Orange across from Sherwood Place, where she grew up. All of a sudden, I roll down the window and throw my shoes out onto the street. She stops the car. Runs outside and gets the shoes. Gets back in the car.

She tells this story over and over for more than fifty years. I can never live it down.

I found two photos in an old album I keep in the garage. In one, I’m sitting in the green leather armchair in my bedroom. I’m wearing the sundress with the red belt. It has red shorts underneath. The red buckle sandal is in my left hand. I have taken the shoe off my right foot. I have on white anklet socks. In the next snapshot, I am walking down the hallway carrying the shoe in my right hand. This has to be the same day as the shoe throwing incident. Why have I removed the shoe? Clearly, I can remove it, but cannot put it back on. 

Mom’s college friend, Norma, called to see how Mom was doing. I had to tell her how ill Mom was and that she was in the hospital. Norma reminisced about their long friendship and how when she met her husband, Charlie, who wasn’t Jewish, Mom was very modern about it - not minding that he wasn’t Jewish. Mom encouraged Norma to marry him. Eventually, Charlie converted. Norma told me Mom helped organized her wedding since her sister and brother were not very close to her emotionally. Norma was with Mom when she bought my first shoes. Mom cried. They were white leather baby shoes that tied.

I’m in elementary school - maybe first or second grade. All the kids from my neighborhood walked to and from school together. This was before they built Eisenhower Parkway, which would come around fifth or sixth grade and we had to take a bus instead. I’m walking home along Old Road and come to the bridge that crosses the little creek. It must have been winter because I’m wearing boots and carrying a bag with my shoes in it. They are dark red leather. By the time I get home, the shoes are gone and a gaping hole in the paper shopping bag is the guilty culprit. Mom always packed an orange for lunch. She cut it up and wrapped it in foil. It always soaked through the brown paper lunch bag and made a mess. This time, it must have soaked through to my satchel and by the afternoon walk home, the wet orange juice had done the damage.

I’m twelve - a month shy of thirteen. My bat mitzvah is soon and Mom and I are shopping for shoes to go with the dress we have already bought. It’s 1974. The dress has a knit top with a white background and orange and turquoise horizontal stripes. The long skirt is multi-colored flowers in the same hues as the top. I’m a hippie flower child. We’ve gone from store to store in South Orange village and have finally found a pair of shoes to match the dress. We get home and the phone rings in the kitchen. It’s the hospital telling us my grandfather, Jacob Lenox, has died. It’s October 25. My bat mitzvah is a few weeks later in November. The party I’ve been looking forward to will be somber and music-less.

Grandma and Grandpa used to go to Florida in the winter. They’d fly to Miami or Ft. Lauderdale and visit with friends and relax away from the freezing New Jersey winters. Grandma would shop for Amalfi shoes there on the fancy shopping streets. Her favorite stores carried the extra narrow AAA size Amalfi shoes she wore and she would buy many pairs and send them home.

She had the shopping gene and passed it on to me. I became obsessed with shoes. When I worked in New York, I would shop for shoes during my lunch hour, taking advantage of my Rockefeller Plaza location and the endless shoe shopping possibilities nearby, from Saks Fifth Avenue to Italian boutiques. If I found a style I liked, I would buy it in several colors. Sometimes, if I liked a shoe so much, I would buy two pairs of the same shoe in case the first pair wore out. Heels, sandals, boots. In our old house on Scotland Drive, they were crammed into small closets and I had to search for a particular pair. But in the Fowler Drive townhouse, they are spaced out clearly in the numerous closets.

I ordered two different sizes of Land’s End red suede slippers for Mom to wear when she could no longer fit into her favorite red fleecy pair. It was mid-February, when she was first diagnosed. Her feet had swelled from taking Prednisone and she couldn’t put on a single pair of shoes. I ordered size 9 and 10. The slippers came after she was already admitted to Saint Barnabas Medical Center. The two boxes are stacked next to the entertainment center in the living room - unopened. She is wearing yellow socks in her hospital bed and has not walked in three weeks.

I wore grey knitted Ugg sneakers, jeans and a tee shirt every day for the 49 days Mom was in the hospital. I kept alternating the shirts as I washed them.

I put on a black dress, the Rachel Roy one I have also in Peach. It was raining and I didn’t want to ruin a pair of heels in the muddy grass at the cemetery. So I put on black tights and black knee-high plastic rain boots that have black laces Whisper, my cat, likes to chew on. I wore them to the funeral, where I got up and stoically read my eulogy, hiding behind the blur of reading glasses when I looked up at the gathering of family and friends. I wore them to the burial, traipsing across the wet lawn to the open grave, where we had to shovel muddy earth onto the casket in keeping with Jewish tradition. I wore them all afternoon while we welcomed visitors at the Shiva.

A few days later, I returned the two oversized pairs of red suede Land’s End slippers to Sears in Livingston. I had kept them in the car, along with her black canvas bag full of toiletries, night clothes, tee shirts and sweat shirts I thought she would need when she went to sub-acute rehab and would be doing physical therapy. She never got there. The slipper boxes were never opened. Returning them was simple.

Nothing else has been or ever will be.