Shoes - Carol Arnold

If anyone had told me I’d marry a shoe salesman, I would have told them they were as crazy as my father who once told my mother, just before he walked out, that she might as well marry the cat for all the attention she paid to that old tom. Thinking about it though, marrying the cat doesn’t seem so bad. At least he had a silky head that you wanted to stroke, and a long striped tail that stood up straight. Marrying Ronald is another thing entirely. I never want to stroke his bald old head, and nothing on him stands up straight, if you know what I mean.

What would you do with a man who comes home smelling like other people’s feet? It’s the question of the century why I did marry him. He’s pretty good at foot massage, I must say that, and the fact that I like that better than the other things he thinks he’s good at, should have given me a clue. Ronald rubs away on my tired old feet just like they’re Cinderella’s or something. I have to give him credit for that because my feet look more like the wicked stepsisters’ feet. They look like a pair of gun boats my father used to say. He was in the Navy so he should know.

My father thought it was a good idea for me to marry a shoe salesman. He’ll always keep you supplied, he said, he’ll always know where to get those size 15 triple A shoes. I wished he wouldn’t have talked about my feet so much, how ugly they were flapping there at the bottom of my legs which in and of themselves weren’t so bad. If I didn’t have these feet my legs might have qualified for a Betty Grable contest or something. I heard my father talking about her once, how he’d like to have those gams wrapped around him. I was jealous of Betty Grable. I thought I would like to wrap my gams around my father, not knowing at the time what gams were. When I think about it now, I want to throw up. For one thing, how could anyone’s gams fit around my father? He was so fat he could have been the blimp to my gun boats. No wonder my mother paid more attention to that old tomcat. Maybe I’ll get a cat for Ronald, a sweet little thing with dainty feet. But I’d miss those foot rubs. Yes I would.