Sputterpub's Blog

They hardly conversed in the car. The few sentences they exchanged concerned where to eat (Karen picked Liaison) and a place to park. As further evidence of divine caretaking they found a meterless space one short block from the bistro. Karen couldn’t walk far but she was able manage that distance.

They were seated immediately. Annie winced when she saw the table; they’d eaten at the bistro many times in the old days when they walked together, and this was the table they were often given. The sight of it reinforced some unpleasant memories. Karen had always been a trial in public. It seemed she was either arguing with Annie about a business practice, in which case she’d let her volume increase and salt her phrases with fuck and shit and other words that made neighboring diners cringe and parents cover their toddlers’ ears, or she was laughing in apparent pleasure at the conversation, which meant she loosed a loud witchy cackle across the room.

Karen took the banquette. Annie draped her purse strap over the back of the chair and sat facing the window to the street.

The waitress stopped by their table. She rolled the aperitif stamp onto the paper, but the women had already selected their food. Karen ordered iced tea and quiche. Annie disapproved but said nothing. It was better than the old days, when Karen would have gone for the eggs Benedict and finished all the potatoes too, but it wasn’t good enough. Annie asked for a glass of Sancerre with her salad Nicoise.

Karen had been on a collision course with disease for as long as Annie had known her. From the beginning she’d had the emptiest refrigerator Annie had ever encountered. The woman stocked nothing but bottled water in there, and her cupboards didn’t hold much more than jelly beans and some chocolate. She breakfasted at Starbucks, on drinks that had a bare acquaintance with coffee and pastries that contained more sugar and butter than grain, tended to go most of the day on handfuls of sweet snacks, dined late and without regard to nourishment, and kept crazy solitary hours. Annie wasn’t perfect on personal health herself, but she was light years beyond her companion. She exercised every day. She didn’t eat meat or poultry. She drank in moderation and got lots of water. She didn’t color her short silvery hair and she managed to look a decade younger than she was. But she still took drags on other people’s cigarettes, and she smoked almost as much pot as she used to do tobacco. She was addicted to the sensation of inhaling burning material, her peak flow was down around the level of untreated asthma, and still she didn’t quit. She knew she shouldn’t criticize others. But that didn’t stop her.

Karen had been so stubborn about her unhealthy habits that Annie had been certain there would be consequences. Not wanting to witness them is the main reason she’d backed away from the relationship. She was surprised that her old friend still had all of her limbs.

Karen had acquired her Type 2 diagnosis just three years earlier. Annie remembers a walk they took shortly afterward, when Karen declared that she’d sooner die than take insulin shots, and vowed to improve her diet. She did buy some yogurt and a few frozen meals around then.

But she degenerated rapidly. The oral meds didn’t control her sugar and she didn’t seek attention for a troublesome foot until it swelled too large for any of her shoes. She learned in the ER that she had broken it, but she hadn’t felt the pain signals. She had to go on insulin. She learned to inject herself, and by this lunch, of quiche and potatoes at Liaison, she was up to four shots a day. She was also just released from six weeks of wound care at the hospital and then a rehab facility, because she had developed a sore in that troublesome foot, ignored it till the infection had dug into bone, and now her walking-for-pleasure days were over. She was glad to be out of a chair, but she really couldn’t amble more than a block or two.

So Annie watched her old acquaintance make her way through egg pie and fried potatoes, and felt sorry. But she didn’t comment. She didn’t argue. And Karen was mostly slow and calm, eerily so. The only contentious moment was when she described her goddaughter’s recent diagnosis of Type 1. Isabella was 17. Karen reported that Isabella and her mother had just returned from a session in San Francisco where Isabella had an insulin pump implanted.

“They don’t implant pumps,” Annie stated.

“Yes they did.”

“No. Really. You wear the pump, and a tube from it is inserted into you. But you have to change the insertion site at least once a week.” Annie spoke from actual knowledge. Her best friend and former college roommate had developed Type 1 when they were both 35, and Annie had taken on the science aspect of Mary’s disease. That’s how work had always been allocated between them; Mary was the sociologist and Annie’s strength was math & science. So Annie had been a member of the ADA and a reader in the subject for almost 30 years. She knew how a pump works.

Karen reasserted the implant idea and started to raise her voice. But then she closed her eyes for a moment, shook her shoulders a little, and calmed herself. They changed the subject.

The new Karen did not seem to get angry or yell or use obscenities. She acted warmer and humbler and more appreciative. She laughed readily. Unfortunately the laugh was still a startling loud cackle.

Karen called Annie at 12:25 but she didn’t speak any words Annie could hear. The connection abruptly ended. Annie knew it was Karen from the caller ID. She pressed the green button on her landline, but all that came through was two clicks and some static.

She expected confusion from Karen. She waited a minute and then tried again, this time with her cell phone. Karen picked up.

“I’m outside your place,” she informed Annie, “but there’s no parking.”

“That’s weird; I was just out front and there were places everywhere.” Annie couldn’t see the street from her garden cottage, but she knew the block wasn’t busy. “Are you in front of 2611?”

“Twenty-six eleven? Oh. I must have read my phone wrong. I thought your address was twenty-eight eleven.”

“I get it. I know where you are.”

“Right near Russell Street.”

“Sure. Let’s see: You’ll have to turn around, and …” Annie paused as she considered the traffic barriers. What a muddle. “On second thought,” she concluded, “stay right where you are. I’ll come to you.”

“You sure?”

“Oh yeah. Stay there. Just give me five minutes.”

Annie locked doors, picked up her keys and sunglasses, draped her bag across her torso, and left her yard. She took her weekday route, south toward the BART station. Within a few minutes she crossed Stuart and began looking for Karen’s car.

“A boxy silver SUV,” was Karen’s description. Which meant Annie was looking for one of the commonest cars in Berkeley, and a major difference from the Mustang convertibles Karen used to drive.

Annie perused the street as she paced south. She saw a few SUVs, all boxy and silver, but most of the parking spaces held Priuses. She was reminded of pop-beads – same-shaped car bodies of every color, all parked parallel and appearing bumper-connected. She glanced into the driver’s windows of the boxy few and didn’t see her friend. Then she shifted her focus from curbside to street center.

She saw what she concluded must be Karen’s car. Not parked but idling. Not at the curb but in the middle of the southbound lane, at the stop sign, immediately before the right turn onto Russell.

As Annie approached she was overtaken by a moving Prius. Of course she didn’t hear it, but she glimpsed the blue body in her peripheral vision and then watched the vehicle edge up, dolphin-like, behind Karen. The Prius driver hesitated only a second before pulling left and around Karen’s car.

“Wow,” Annie murmured. “I guess she took me at my word when I said ‘Stay right there.’ Wow.” She went right and opened the passenger door.

“Hey there,” Karen said. Karen always opened a conversation with “hey there,” and concluded with “bye now.” The phrases annoyed Annie but there were other qualities about Karen that annoyed her more. Annie’s friends marveled that she still spent time with Karen, but she had no skill at breaking up with friends, and she and Karen went way back. And it wasn’t like they spent much time together, any more. It had been three months since they’d conversed and almost a year since they’d been together without others.

Annie looked her old friend over as she strapped herself into the passenger seat. Karen had reported that she’d lost some weight, but to Annie she looked as large as ever. She’d aged ten years in as many months. She still wore big tops and loose pants, still sat like a truck driver and walked like a cop, had traded her old sensible oxfords for truly orthopedic footwear, continued to pull her hair straight and have it colored pale red. But the freckles that had concealed her face wrinkles had given up the battle; now her round spotted face was fully lined and her light blue eyes peered out from sagging lids. The skin on her hands looked a little shiny. Her always trimmed and unvarnished nails showed ridges and discoloration. She was halfway through her 60th year and she looked 80.

She drove like an 80 year-old too. Karen used to enjoy fast cars and aggressive maneuvers, but on this cross-town jaunt she never reached the speed limit. She didn’t pull into an intersection to start a left turn until the traffic had cleared: like she was navigating the streets of Eugene instead of Berkeley. She was eerily calm and oddly slow, and no one honked at her. It was as if the other drivers knew she was “special,” and gave her extra room. The short trip reminded Annie of the adage about the Lord taking care of fools.

Jane complained to her mother about her marriage. Martha counseled her to try to work it out with Alan. Jane began wearing better clothes and tried to be gracious. Alan didn’t notice but other men did.

By the time Jane stopped growing at seventeen, she was five foot six and wore size eleven shoes. She didn’t buy heels until she experienced the dullness of Alan and loveliness of John Jerra pumps.

They were plain strapless shoes, not too pointy in the toe, with three inch heels that got stuck in the silicon grout between the sidewalk bricks on Market Street. But they looked so good and felt so comfortable that she bought them in five colors and learned to tiptoe on those bricks. For the first time in her life she felt like she had pretty feet. She wore shorter skirts. She moved with more confidence.

One day she walked by the shoe store and saw the pumps, her John Jerra pumps, in a perfect shade of forest green. She owned a new dress that begged for those shoes; she had to have them. She went into the store and learned that the closest they had to her size eleven medium was a ten narrow. She asked the clerk to stretch them, and she bought them anyway.

She decided to wear the new shoes and dress the following day. She had an important morning meeting at work and was then to lunch with Charlie at his favorite restaurant.

The shoe stretching was not sufficient. She got through the meeting, but by the time that was over her pain was excruciating. She limped into her office and pried off her new pumps. The problem was that most of the nail on her right big toe came off with the shoe. Beneath her nylon she was bloody.

She couldn’t wear the new shoes to lunch. She didn’t have others with her. She had to go to the restaurant via her place, which meant she was late for her date with her brother.

And lived to tell about it. Charlie knew about the restaurant from one of his outlaw buddies. He had so many friends to drink and smoke and gamble with, some of them were bound to be real criminals. It probably wouldn’t have surprised Charlie to learn that his favorite restaurant was a likely place for a violent act, if he thought about it. But Charlie didn’t think about it. Sitting at a table, drinking Johnny Walker Black Label over ice, waiting for his sister, Charlie didn’t think about anything as the three men in dark clothes filled the doorway and then sprayed the place with bullets from their automatic guns. Jane in her old comfortable black flats was still two blocks away from the restaurant when her brother breathed his last.

Three months after Charlie’s death, a woman showed up with a four-year-old son. Her name was Kathy and she had a story everyone believed about an affair with Charlie. The boy’s name was Kevin and he even looked like Charlie. Kathy thrust Kevin into LeAnn’s arms and ran away. Literally. No one ever saw or heard of her again.

LeAnn wasn’t having any of Kevin. She said she had to get on with her own life. There was no one for it but Jane and of course Martha. That’s how Jane got to be Kevin’s mom.

Nowadays, in the new millennium, many women are wearing slide shoes. Toeless backless things on platforms of various thicknesses. They have to shuffle a bit, or risk kicking off their footwear. They all paint their toenails, and many wear silver toe rings.

Jane’s surprised by the style of showing so much foot. Again. She thinks feet are in general ugly. Fundamentally lumpy. Contorted by use.

She and Kevin are walking side by side down a street in the financial district. They’ve been talking about silly slide shoes and bright colored nail polish. Kevin is fifteen and he looks remarkably like Charlie. Jane is now fifty and she looks a lot like Jane. Kevin has just been explaining how important the big toe is for balance. He learned that in his martial arts class. Jane understands, remembering. When Charlie died and even months later when Kevin came into her life, Jane had an injured big toe. She discovered then how important that toe is for walking. She recollects how exposed and vulnerable it felt.

Kevin and Jane look at the feet of women walking toward them in slides, big toes lifting with each stride, big painted toenails facing upward while all the other nails scrunch forward and down. Aunt and nephew observe those feet. Alike repulsed.

There’s a picture of Jane and Charlie at ages eighteen and fifteen. It was taken on a family vacation and they are in swimsuits on a dock by a lake. Their father is a blurred shadow in the background, which everyone in the family agrees is perfectly symbolic. Jane and Charlie look like an attractive young couple, dark-eyed, dark-haired, healthy. In typical fashion Jane is standing with one foot crossed over the other while Charlie is flat-footed confident. She looks directly into the camera, a little curious and impatient. He gazes sideways like he’s searching for fun.

That’s how they grew up: Jane awkward/angry/impatient and Charlie easygoing and eager to be happy. Both of them got rather large feet, but only Jane was bothered about it.

Large feet, dark hair, well-shaped. They looked like each other to Martha but no one else saw it; everyone focused on the gender differences, and Jane’s curly hair, and Charlie’s glasses. Their father died…first he faded away as a personality in the family, growing quieter as he aged, shorter and paler…then he got lung cancer from his incessant Marlboros, and the cancer and the doctors chipped away at his body until he finally gasped his last one morning, at home in a hospital bed, ninety-two pounds light and colorless as his laundered sheets. Their mother was by then well-connected enough to get a job at the oncology center. Jane and Charlie were in college.

They shared a two-bedroom apartment near the north side of campus. They’d tried different roommates but they liked living together better. Each had an active independent social life, anyway. Charlie was as easygoing as ever: never without a beer, a joint, a cigarette, and a woman. Jane was practical and less carefree, but even she engaged in more than one romance. She had a sexual relationship with her boyfriend Alan. But she also had a flirtation going with Gary in her Greek class. He was a brilliant linguist with a tall firm body, and he confessed to Jane that he had a major thing about feet. Gary didn’t think his attraction rose to the level of a fetish, but he was fascinated with a shapely foot, and he found Jane’s foot shapely. He told her she drove him a bit crazy when she wore the flats with the cutouts that showed toe cleavage. He confided in her that he had a girlfriend named Sandra, whom he loved and admired, but he thought Sandra’s feet were ugly, and that was a big problem for him.

Gary’s confession had a dual effect on Jane. It made her consider her feet as something someone could consider lovely, which was strange and wonderful. And it creeped her out. She felt self-conscious, inhibited to the point where she just didn’t wear those flats. She loved to study Greek with Gary, but she tended to hide her feet from him.

Jane and Charlie got married within weeks of each other. Martha stood up for both of her children during the summer of 1975. She thought Jane and Alan had a good chance; they divorced four years later. Martha was less optimistic about Charlie, but he stayed with LeAnn (unfaithfully) for the rest of his life. It was Gary and Sandra she should have put her money on: they remained married and relatively happy, once Gary learned how to put his fantasies on a shelf and ignore his wife’s feet.

Jane missed living with Charlie when she got married. Alan was a nice man but he wasn’t her brother; no one could get her to lighten up like Charlie. Alan bored her.

Charlie found LeAnn boring too, but she was a good wife. She kept a home for them, ran all the errands, provided a warm atmosphere. She didn’t ask questions when Charlie stayed out weeknights till nine or ten. So Charlie went from work to drinks with friends, told jokes and laughed and sometimes spent a little time with people he shouldn’t have spent time with, but he never made plans and he always came home. He never wore shoes in his house. He strode barefoot through the place in drawstring pants, beer in hand.