was Joy and got that excited at seeing her that I invited her in before I remembered that I had them shoes sitting out in the middle of my living room floor.
She’d come carrying the rent money for her mother and wanting a receipt, so I told her to have a seat on my sofa. Of course, being a girl after my own heart, the first thing her eyes fell on was them royal blue shoes.
‘Golly, Mrs Ross, aren’t they the swishiest high heels! Golly! Golly!’ Joy cried out and plopped herself straight down by them on the floor, so she could oogle them up close.
I could tell from the fuss she made of the soft leather that she had a natural eye for a first class item, and it tickled me to see a little girl’s eyes dance more excited that afternoon about them shoes than I was when I bought them.
‘Papagallo,’ she read out loud holding up the box lid. She was sure a good reader and didn’t falter at that strange looking word like I did, and when I told Freddie B how good she could read it wasn’t long before he was paying her twenty-five cents every Friday night to read him Psalms out the Bible. Joy’s face beamed proud as she read the rest of what was on the shoebox lid. ‘Made in Italy.’ She looked at me. ‘Made all the way in Italy where Mama says all the best shoemakes come from and they’re my second favorite color after red.’
Boy, oh boy, my heart was doing a rumba to have that pretty child sitting on my living room floor grinning at them blue shoes like they was made of gold. The color of them heels actually clashed with the basic blue running through her plaid skirt and the baby blue blouse she was wearing, but I didn’t mention that. Instead I said, ‘They’d look good with that outfit of your’n. You want to try them on?’
‘Mama says we mustn’t put our feet in her new high heels, because we might break the bridge,’ Joy said sounding woeful while she pulled her long, thick ponytail around to stick the end of it in her mouth.
‘Don’t go sticking dirty hair in your mouth,’ I chastised her like I would of my own.
‘Sorry,’ she said right quick and her expression dipped from sunny to sad like she thought she’d done something real bad, all ’cause of what I’d said. Me. Miss Ham-Fisted.
‘You don’t have to say ‘‘sorry’’ ’cause there ain’t nothing to be sorry about. I didn’t mean to sound rough on you. Who am I to be telling you off. Stick that ol’ hair in your mouth if’n it makes you feel better.’
But she didn’t do it and shifted herself like she was fixing to get up and go.
‘Well,’ I said, dragging the word out and trying to think how I could stop her. ‘It might be the rule over in your mama’s place that you can’t wear her high heels ’cause it breaks the bridge, but here in Baby Palatine’s you can try on any of my shoes that you like and even clump about in ’em.’ With that I bent down to hand Joy the left Papagallo and curtsyed like I was a page giving Cinderella that glass slipper, and her face lit up like a Christmas tree.
‘You’ll really let me try them on, Mrs Ross?’ She giggled all the while unbuckling her brown school shoes that somebody had given a good polish.
‘Not only that,’ I said heading for the bathroom and unhooking the big oblong mirror from off the wall ’cause we didn’t have no full length one in the apartment, ‘but Baby Palatine is gonna get you a mirror so’s you can see yourself in ’em.’ I set it at a angle against the living room wall, ’cause that’s what I had to do anytime I wanted to see myself from the knees down.
Neither of us could believe how near them shoes came to fitting Joy’s feet and she looked like a zillion dollars teetering around in them with her white cotton ankle socks still on. She only wobbled a bit though, she said ’cause the shoes was about a size too big.
‘They belong to you now,’ I told her and meant it. Though they was my newest and favoritest thing in the world, I wanted to give them to her way more than I ever wanted them myself. ‘But,’ I added, ‘… and this is a big ‘‘but’’ … since your mama don’t want you walking in high heels, I reckon you better leave these over here in their box at the back of my closet, and you can come over in the afternoons and wear them. But they gotta be our secret from everybody, ’cause I don’t want your sisters getting jealous and Mr Freddie B don’t know I got them.’
‘I’m good at keeping secrets,’ said Joy running her forefinger across her lips like she was sealing them up. ‘I like secrets better than butter pecan ice cream.’ Then she shared a couple with me no sooner than she said that. She whispered in my ear so not even the walls would hear that she was in love with Bernie Finkelstein and that she wanted to marry Alan Ladd, the movie star, she thought Bernie looked just like. I swore on the Bible that I wouldn’t tell nobody.
Them secret Papagallo shoes was the first big bond me and Joy had between us, and the fact that nobody knew about ’em but us made Joy’s afterschool visits seem all the more exciting to her when she would slip over and double lock my front door leaving Brenda by herself to watch the cartoons as Tammy didn’t get in from work till six thirty by the time she’d also stopped off to pick Anndora up from the minder’s.
Joy loved to hang over in my place playing with that $2.98 doll I’d got her and tipping around like she was grown in them royal blue high heels, licking a popsicle or sucking a toffee I’d got in for her.
After her first few visits, I went to the dime store and bought some more for her to play with, ’cause I didn’t want her to get bored and that little cheap doll neither walked or talked and wasn’t that much fun. Remembering how I liked jacks when I was her age, I got her some and the woman in the dime store sold me a board game she said was popular with her own daughter called Chinese checkers that had pretty colored marbles. Lots of ’em in six different colors.
But Joy’s favorite turned out to be the ball and jacks. She’d sit cross-legged on my polished parquet floor and want to play game after game with me. I pretended not to notice if she cheated, and as my hand was way bigger than hers for scooping up the jacks, I had a advantage over her anyway. So I figured it was fair enough if’n she needed to cheat to win.
When I’d slip a saucer full of homemade lemon drop cookies over to Brenda, she’d hardly look up from the noisy TV set and didn’t seem to mind that my God-sent child played over with me. Though Tammy’d told the kids not to take food off folks, I told Brenda, like I’d told Joy, I wasn’t just folks, and if we didn’t tell Tammy about the cookies, she wouldn’t have nothing to get mad at no way. Both the girls seemed scared of her, but Joy more than Brenda, and it worried me.
Whereas I did a lot of mooning out the window at other women in the streets with their kids ’fore Joy and me got to be pals, I suddenly had her afterschool visits to look forward to, and like I told Freddie B who noticed how I’d perked up and kept my hair combed, I hadn’t never met no child as well behaved as Joy before. ‘You can be bad in here if you want,’ I’d say ’cause she was almost too good and could get so quiet I’d tell her, ‘Go on and bang some pots and pans if you want.’ She was so like a grown woman sometimes though, telling me how good my cakes and cookies was and how much nicer I kept my place than her mother did theirs as she didn’t bother to collect up Anndora’s toys. And Joy had perfect manners and didn’t never forget her pleases and thank yous neither.
My baby sister Helen was kind of jealous that Joy came into my life, ’cause ’fore Joy, I used to put up with Helen laying in a stupor around my apartment when it suited her. Her and my brother Caesar used to come and drink each other under the table, but I lost tolerance for their street corner shenanigans when I thought Joy was likely to pop by, ’cause I don’t hold with getting drunk in front of kids. And neither Helen nor Caesar was content unless they had a bottle of whiskey or wine at their lips.
Helen tried at first to poison my mind about Joy and claimed that the child was too good to be true, and that she wouldn’t trust no eight year old that was so full of compliments for everybody and didn’t never put a foot wrong. She said she had a second sense that Joy wasn’t all she seemed, but with drink in her, Helen’s got a mean streak and it ain’t wise to listen to