And if I did, then what?”
Then the woman who lived in a shoe would go outside and sit on the toe and watch as the world went by in all its busy activity: the cities making money and the sun as it so very quickly went up in the sky and down in the sky and up and down and up and down like a yo-yo.
“My,” she would say to herself. “I don’t know how anybody finds any time to do anything in a day.” And she’d go back inside her shoe where it was one color of light and smelled of leather, and she’d knit or stitch or wring her hands, or not, or play cards with herself, or not.
One day the woman put up a notice on the door of the shoe. When the mailman came by, he shook his head and walked away, saying to himself, “It’s a changing world. Without the shoe it’ll be any normal street, any normal city, any normal day. There will be a great tall tower put up there, and it will be the burial ground of the shoe. And I’ll never see another woman who lives in a shoe ever again, and every shoe I see forever more will be just a shoe, just a shoe.”
Then the baker came by with a loaf of bread that he had been making every week for twenty years, perfectly sized for the woman who lived in a shoe. “No shoe!” he exclaimed, and hugged the bread in close to his chest. As the tears welled up in his eyes he started to pull off nibbles. And when the milkman came by to drop off a milk bottle, something he did only for the woman who lived in a shoe, he took several stunned steps back, shaking his head like all the rest. His heart was filled with an inexpressible sorrow, and he looked at the shoe, and at the horizon, and back at the shoe, and back at the horizon.
That was all very well. When the woman came out she found no bread, she found no mail, she found no milk, and she found no men. So she took down the sign, picked up her suitcase, and looked into the distance at the city with the watch setting over the hill. She left the door open as she walked from the shoe, and walked and walked and walked and walked and walked and walked and walked and walked.
There was little one could do in a day, in the outside world, outside the shoe.
THE MIDDLEMAN TO ELDA
THE MIDDLEMAN WAS very confident these days, having just been given a big salary, and having just found a blond-haired woman who he liked and could talk to. The other night in bed the blond-haired woman had said to him, “Come on now, no more of that,” and had pushed away his head. But this did not bother the middleman as he strode down the street with the sun on his face and his shoes all asparkle.
“It’s a good day for me,” he said to himself. “Yup, a good day for me.” And not even the blond-haired woman’s pushy hand could take that feeling away from him.
He passed a bird. He passed a very interesting ramshackle house and a house that was beautiful, and he thought, “I’d like to live there.” Then he continued walking with a more purposeful expression, when suddenly he felt a pain in his heart from the night before.
“She pushed away my face,” he realized, stopping short as the feeling of horror and humiliation welled up in him.
“It’s not good, it’s not good.” He hadn’t realized it at all until now. Rushing back in the other direction he hopped on a bus to her part of town, a ratty neighborhood with garbage cans and soot. He climbed the fire escape to her room, which was crisscrossed in the window with brightly colored stockings.
“Elda!” he cried through the window from the tiny landing on which was he standing. “Elda! Elda!” He had to speak to her quick.
Elda sauntered over. “Why, Henry,” she said.
The middleman took a step back. “May I come inside? I must speak with you.”
“Why, sure,” said Elda, and she stepped away. The middleman took one quick look at her before he entered: she looked high.
“Have you been smoking, Elda?” he asked, as he pulled in his wiry legs behind him. “You’ve been smoking