Various Miracles (16 page)

It was more likely that she’d been sent away to Toronto or Montreal or St. Catharines for a job-upgrading course at some obscure community college specializing in the modern fitting of difficult feet. He mused, as he walked along, on what a narrow specialty it must be, the fitting of orthopedic footwear, but necessary, of course, and how, like chimney cleaning and piano tuning, it was a vocation whose appeal to youth might not be immediately apparent. Undoubtedly, she, Wendy, had come back from the east with a new sense of buoyancy, brimming with the latest theories and “tips,” which she now felt eager to pass on to her customers.

It was easy to see that her popularity with customers was established. The store manager—a fatherly type—might even refer to it as “phenomenal.” (Else, why this sign in his window? And why the Christmas bonus already set aside for her?) Customers doubtless experienced an upsurge of optimism at the sight of her wide blue eyes or at hearing her cheery early morning “Hello there!” Her particular humor would be difficult to pin down, being neither dry nor wry nor witty, but consisting, rather, of a wink for the elderly gents and broad teasing compliments for the ladies—”These shoes’ll
put you right back in the chorus line, Mrs. Beamish.” They loved it; they lapped it up; how could they help but adore Wendy.

“Our little Wendy’s back,” he imagined these old ones cackling one to another as they came in for fittings, “and about time too.”

From North Winnipeg they came, from East Kildonan and Fort Garry and Southwood and even Brandon so that their warped and crooked and cosmically disfavored feet could be taken into Wendy’s smooth young hands, examined minutely and murmured over—but in that merry little voice of hers that made people think of the daughters they’d never had. Into her care they could safely put the shame of their ancient bunions, their blue-black swollen ankles, their blistered heels. Her strong, unerring touch never shrank when it came to straightening out crippled toes or testing with her healthy thumbs that peculiar soft givingness that indicates a fallen arch. By sheer banter, by a kind of chiding playfulness, she absolved her clients of the rasp of old calluses, the yellowness of soles, the damp dishonor attached to foot odor, foot foulness, foot obloquy, foot ignominy.

All this and more Wendy was able to neutralize—with forehead prettily creased—by means of her steady, unflinching manner. These feet are only human, she would be ready to say if asked. Tarsus and metatarsus; corn, callus and nail; her touch is tender and without judgement. Willingly she rises from her little padded stool and fetches the catalogue sent from the supply house in Pittsburgh, and happily she points to Figure 42. “This little laced oxford doesn’t look like much
off,”
she concedes to Mrs. Beamish or whomever happens to be in her charge, “but it’s really a very smart little shoe
on.”

He imagines that her working uniform is some kind of
smock in a pastel shade, the nature of her work being, after all, primarily medical. A caring profession. A caring person. A person one cared about. Wendy! She was back!

And he loved her.

He admitted it to himself. Oh yes, it was like light spilling through a doorway, his love for her. Arriving at work and traveling in the elevator to the eleventh floor, he kept his eyes lowered, searching the feet of his fellow workers, noting here and there sturdy, polished, snub-nosed models with thickish heels. Had these people felt his Wendy’s warm ministrations? He might, if he were bolder, announce loudly, “Wendy is back!” as if it were an oblation, and watch as smiles of recognition, then euphoria and a kind of relief, too, spread across their faces.

Later, alone, at the end of the work day, while his wife lay reading the newspaper in bed, he examined his own feet under a strong light. Would they soon require professional attention? Might they benefit from extra bracing or support, a foam lift at the heel, say, or—well, whatever Wendy would care to suggest now that she was up on the latest theories from the east. But what could he say to her that would not seem callow or self-serving or, worse, a plea for her attention. She might look at his two feet, stripped of their socks and laid bare and damp, and suspect he had come because of ulterior motives. Namely love. He is sure she is vigilant against those who would merely love her.

He is a man who has been in love many times. Before the transfer to the Winnipeg office, he spent two years in Vancouver, and once, standing in line at a bakery on 41st Avenue, he found himself behind two solemn young women who were ordering a farewell cake for a friend. “What would you like written on top?” the woman behind the counter
asked them. They paused, looked uncertain, regarded each other, and then one of them said decisively, “So long, Louise.”

Louise. Gold hair set off by a blue cotton square. Louise was leaving. Instinctively, he felt she didn’t really want to go. All her friends were here. This was a beautiful city. She had a decent job, a pleasant apartment full of thick-leaved plants and bamboo furniture; she had a modest view of the mountains and a membership in a health club, but nevertheless she was leaving. SO LONG, LOUISE the pink icing on her farewell cake spelled out.

Something had forced the move on her—a problem that might be professional or personal, and now she would have to deal—alone, for how could he help her?—with storing her furniture, canceling her subscriptions, and giving away to friends the books and oddments she loved. Her medical insurance would have to be transferred, and there would be the last heartbreaking task of going down to the post office to arrange to have her mail forwarded. It seemed unpardonable to ask so much of a young woman who barely had had time to savor her independence and to study love’s ingenious rarefaction. She would have to face the horror of apartment-hunting elsewhere; a whole new life to establish, in fact. If only he could put his arms around her, his poor Louise, whom he suddenly realized he cared deeply, deeply, deeply about.

His lost Louise. That is how he thinks of her, a woman standing in the airport—no, the bus station—in her dark cloth coat of good quality and her two pieces of soft-sided luggage in which lay folded a number of pale wool skirts and sweaters, and her little zippered bag of cosmetics, toiletries, talcum powder and emery boards which would be traveling, ineluctably, with her out to the edges of the city and over the mountain ranges and away from his yet-to-be declared love.

Still, he won’t forget her, just as he has never forgotten his young and lovely Sherri, whom he first encountered thirty miles north of Kingston—where his first transfer took him. There he had seen, spray-painted in red on a broad exposed rock face, the message HANK LOVES SHERRI in letters that were at least three feet high.

He knows, of course, what the Hanks of the world are like: loud-mouthed and jealous, with the beginnings of a beer belly, the kind of lout who believes the act of love was invented to cancel out the attachment of the spirit, the sort of person who might dare to fling a muscled, possessive arm across Sherri’s shoulders while coming out of a coffee shop on Princess Street and later swear to her that she was different from the other girls he’d known.
His
Sherri, who, with her hyacinth cologne and bitten nails, was easily, fatally, impressed by male joviality and dark sprinklings of chest hairs. She would never stand a chance. For a while, a few months, she might be persuaded that Hank really did love her in his way, and that she, in return, loved him. But familiarity, intimacy—those enemies of love—would intervene, and one day she would wake up and find that something inside her had withered, that core of sweet vulnerability that was what
he
had loved in her from the first day when HANK LOVES SHERRI had stopped him cold on the highway.

And now it’s Wendy who sets off wavelets of heat in his chest. WENDY IS BACK! He walks by the orthopedic footwear store again the next day—but this time more slowly. The loose leather wrappings on his feet scrape the pavement absurdly. His breath comes with pleasure and difficulty as though the air has been unbearably sweetened by her name—Wendy, Wendy, Wendy. Of course, he is tempted to peer closely through the dark plate glass, but finds it to be full of
reflections—his own mainly, his hungry face. He might go in—not today, but tomorrow—on the pretext of asking the time or begging change for the parking meter or telephone. He’ll think of something. Love invents potent strategies, and people in love are resourceful as well as devious. Wendy, Wendy is back. But for how long?

The end of his love affairs always brings a mixed nightmare of poignancy and the skirmishings of pain. He feels stranded, beached, with salt in his ears. What is over, is over; he is realist enough to recognize that. But his loves, Sherri, Louise, Wendy—and the others—never desert him entirely. He has committed to memory the minor physics of veneration and, on dark nights, after his wife has fallen asleep and lies snoring quietly beside him, he likes to hang on to consciousness for an extra minute or two and listen to the sound of the wind rocking the treetops and brushing silkily against the window. It’s then he finds himself attended by a false flicker on the retina—some would say vision—in which long, brightly colored ribbons dance and sway before him. Their suppleness, their undulations, cut deeply into his heart and widen for an instant the eye of the comprehended world. Often he can hear, as well, the muted sound of female voices and someone calling out to him by name.

DOLLS
. Roberta has written me a long letter about dolls, or more specifically about a doll factory she visited when she and Tom were in Japan.

“Ha,” my husband says, reading her letter and pulling a face, “another pilgrimage to the heart’s interior.” He can hardly bring himself to read Roberta’s letters anymore, though they come addressed to the two of us; there is a breathlessness about them that makes him squirm, a seeking, suffering openness which I suspect he finds grotesque in a woman of Roberta’s age. Forty-eight, an uneasy age. And Roberta has never been what the world calls an easy woman. She is one of my oldest friends, and the heart of her problem, as I see it, is that she is incredulous, still, that the color and imagination of our childhood should have come to rest in nothing at all but these lengthy monochrome business trips with her husband, a man called Tom O’Brien; but that is neither here nor there.

In this letter from Japan, she describes a curious mystical experience that caused her not exactly panic and not precisely pleasure, but that connected her for an instant with an area of original sensation, a rare enough event at our age. She also unwittingly stepped into one of my previously undeclared beliefs. Which is that dolls, dolls of all kinds—those strung-together parcels of wood or plastic or cloth or whatever—possess a measure of energy beyond their simple substance, something half-willed and half-alive.

Roberta writes that Tokyo was packed with tourists; the weather was hot and humid, and she decided to join a touring party on a day’s outing in the countryside—Tom was tied up in meetings, as per usual.

They were taken by air-conditioned bus to a village where ninety percent—the guide vigorously repeated this statistic—where ninety percent of all the dolls in Japan were made. “It’s a major industry here,” Roberta writes, and some of the dolls still were manufactured almost entirely by hand in a kind of cottage-industry system. One house in the village, for example, made nothing but arms and legs, another the bodies; another dressed the naked doll bodies in stiff kimonos of real silk and attached such objects as fans and birds to the tiny lacquered female fingers.

Roberta’s party was brought to a small house in the middle of the village where the heads of geisha dolls were made. Just the heads and nothing else. After leaving their shoes in a small darkened foyer, they were led into a surprisingly wide, matted workroom which was cooled by slow-moving overhead fans. The air was musty from the mingled straw and dust, but the light from a row of latticed windows was softly opalescent, a distinctly mild, non-industry quality of light, clean-focused and just touched with the egg-yellow of sunlight.

Here in the workroom nine or ten Japanese women knelt in a circle on the floor. They nodded quickly and repeatedly in the direction of the tourists, and smiled in a half-shy, half-neighborly manner; they never stopped working for a second.

The head-making operation was explained by the guide, who was a short and peppy Japanese with soft cheeks and a sharp “arfing” way of speaking English. First, he informed them, the very finest sawdust of a rare Japanese tree was taken and mixed with an equal solution of the purest rice paste. (Roberta writes that he rose up on his toes when he reached the words
finest
and
purest
as though paying tribute to the god of superlatives.) This dough-like material then was pressed into wooden molds of great antiquity (another toe-rising here) and allowed to dry very slowly over a period of days. Then it was removed and painted; ten separate and exquisitely thin coats of enamel were applied, so that the resulting form, with only an elegant nose breaking the white egg surface, arrived at the weight and feel and coolness of porcelain.