Shoe Addicts Anonymous (8 page)

“But it’s so stupid,” Sandra said miserably. She wanted ice cream. Pizza. That ice box cake made from whipped cream and Nabisco famous wafer chocolate cookies.

She wanted
something
to give her pleasure, because drinking a diet aspartame soda in a greasy fast-food joint wasn’t doing it.

“It is what it is,” Dr. Ratner said. She came up with those maddening “philosophical” phrases sometimes, and they were no help at all.

“It
is,
” Sandra said, “
ridiculous.
Everyone else in the world can walk down the street without getting palpitations. I
hate
this.” Boy, she was really being a brat about this. But she couldn’t help it. She
did
hate it. She was just expressing her feelings. Normally, Dr. Ratner would have applauded that.

“Sandra, you went out for half an hour today and it didn’t kill you. Doesn’t that tell you something?”

It was on the tip of Sandra’s tongue to give a flippant answer about how it told her she was a wimp for running home to get away from the big bad strangers, but she decided that would be counterproductive.

“It tells me I need to go on another field trip,” she said.

“Good!” Dr. Ratner sounded truly delighted. She obviously thought this was progress.

And maybe it was.

“What’s your next move?” she asked Sandra. “A museum? Maybe a sit-down meal at a real restaurant?”

“I made an appointment with a hypnotist,” Sandra said, half-expecting Dr. Ratner to express shock and disapproval. “To help hypnotize my phobia away.” There was a moment’s silence and Sandra asked, “Do you think that’s stupid?”

“Not at all,” Dr. Ratner replied. “I’m just kicking myself for not suggesting it to you sooner.”

“Really? So you think there’s some validity to it?”

“What I know is that it works wonderfully for some people. If you’re one of them, that’s terrific.”

“And if not?…”

“Then you’re no worse off than you are now. In fact, I’d say you’ll definitely come away from it better off because you’ll learn some new self-relaxation tips that can help you in any anxious situation. Good work, Sandra. I’m proud of you.”

Two days later, when Sandra was trying to talk herself into leaving her apartment five minutes before her appointment was due to start, she thought of Dr. Ratner’s words.

She respected Dr. Ratner a lot. Too much, in fact, to call her Jane, even though she’d told her to countless times. To Sandra, “Dr. Ratner” felt a lot more comfortable when it came to revealing her most embarrassing inner thoughts. And she respected her so much that she didn’t want to call and tell her that she’d chickened out of an appointment Dr. Ratner had felt so good about Sandra’s having made.

So she took a deep breath and went out the door.

When she got to the small square brick building where the hypnotist had his office, she was ten minutes late. On her way up to the third floor in the little steel box of an elevator, she tried to think of excuses to give the officious secretary she was expecting to see. But when she got to the office, there was no secretary. In fact, there was only a cramped room filled with books and pamphlets and an attractive middle-aged man who looked exactly like you’d imagine a guy in a messy office filled with books to look.

“Sandra?” he asked, breaking into a warm smile.

“Yes, I’m sorry I’m late. There was so much traffic—”

“Don’t worry about it.” He waved a hand. “A lot of people change their minds at the last minute and don’t show up at all. It’s hard to face your fears head-on.”

And getting harder by the minute. “Is there still time for…I’m sorry, I don’t know how this works. Is there a set time?”

“It depends on you.” He opened a door off the main room and gestured for her to go in. “I always block my appointments in hour-and-a-half slots so my client doesn’t have a feeling of being rushed.”

She went into the room and saw it was a smaller version of the one they’d just left. Bookshelves lined each wall and contained volume upon volume of psychology and hypnosis books, along with a good representation of other various health and well-being books and—Sandra noticed on its side at the top—a book on training your puppy.

“Have a seat.” He indicated an overstuffed easy chair and sat down at a desk a couple of feet away.

Sandra sank into the easy chair and let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. “Wow. This is really comfortable.”

“Isn’t it?” He was unwrapping a cassette tape and looked up at her. “Twenty years old, and it’s been patched more times than I can count, but I can’t find another one that’s nearly as cozy.”

She nodded. “What’s the tape for?”

“To record our session. Do you mind?”

Did she? She wasn’t sure. “Why?”

“Often my clients like to take the tape home and listen to it in private, to practice the progressive relaxation techniques I teach them. It’s completely up to you.”

“So I take the tape?”

“Yes. It’s for you. Value-added, you might say.”

“Oh. Okay.” She nodded. It made sense. And if she was serious about getting better—and she was—she needed to use every tool at her disposal. “Great.”

He put the tape into a machine, pressed a button, and a red light went on. “Now, if you’re ready to begin, lean back against the chair and close your eyes.”

She did so.

“Listen to the sound of my voice. Let me be your guide as you enter a new world of carefree, worry-free, existence….”

He had a good voice for this. Not too deep, but not too high. Mellow. Calm.

Familiar.

She tried to follow as he led her imagination down a flight of marble steps and into a great marble hall filled with doorways, but she was so distracted by trying to place his voice that she couldn’t concentrate on the exercise.

“When you look at the doors, you’ll notice each one has a word on it. Words like
love, hate, anger, fear…
whatever you see. It’s entirely up to you.”

She had it. He was one of her callers. Not frequent, like Steve, but she’d talked to him more than once. Whenever she asked him what he wanted, he’d say, “Surprise me. It’s entirely up to you.”

“Go through the door that says
relax
on it,” he went on, completely unaware of the revelation Sandra was having. “See what’s on the other side. See what makes you feel most at ease.”

Whatever it was, she was damn sure it wasn’t lying in a darkened room having a man who had, only a few weeks ago, told her to
spank me again, I’ve been a bad boy
lead her into the dark recesses of her psyche.

“What do you see, Sandra?”

“I—” She didn’t know what to say. She wanted to leave. This was a waste of time. There was no way she was going to relax and take this seriously.

But on the other hand, she couldn’t very well tell the poor guy she knew who he was and that he liked his balls sucked after having an orgasm.

So she did what she usually did with him.

She faked it until he was finished.

“I see a big green meadow….”

T
he first thing you’ll need to do is cut up your credit cards and give them to me.”

Lorna looked at Phil Carson—short, fifty-ish, bald—as if he’d just suggested she drop a kitten in a blender and push
FRAPPÉ
. “What,
now
?”

He laughed. He was kind, but he didn’t seem to fully appreciate how hard this was for her. “No, no.”

“Oh.” Relief. “Good.”

“First you have to read me the numbers and the bank names—” He took some scissors out of his drawer and passed them across the desk to her. “—
then
you’ll cut them up and give them to me.”

She looked at him, hoping for a sign that he was joking, but his small round face was still, his thin lips a straight line.

And he’d taken out a pen and poised it over a black leather-bound notepad on his desk.

“At that point, I’ll call your creditors and negotiate a lower interest rate and payment plan,” he went on, sweetening the deal marginally. “It will save you hundreds, maybe thousands, in the long run.”

“But…” She knew what he was saying was true and that she shouldn’t voice any objection to it at all. Still, she had to wonder, “What happens if I have an emergency? Will I be able to use the credit cards then?”

He glanced down, looked over the list of creditors and debts she’d printed out. “Emergencies?…I don’t see anything much here that looks like an actual
emergency
.”

Well, of course he wouldn’t understand how a little retail therapy could cure her of otherwise deep emotional problems. Look at him! He was wearing a suit that was obviously poorly made—she could see the stitching. And his shoes! Good God, his shoes—they were probably from Payless or maybe the dollar store. They were a bright unnatural shade of tan. The kind of color her father always said “took hundreds of naugas to make.” (For some reason, Naugahyde jokes were big in the Rafferty household.)

“I’m not
planning
an emergency,” Lorna said, “but what if there was something like, I don’t know—” What would he consider a reasonable emergency? “—I was stuck out of town. Or needed to pay medical bills. Or had car trouble,” assuming she could hold on to her car for another month, “or whatever.” She wondered if she should just keep
one
card, in secret. Just in case. But which would she choose? The Visa with the 9.8 percent interest rate but a $4,200 limit, or the American Express with the 16 percent interest rate but a $10,000 limit?

It was like
Sophie’s Choice
.

Phil Carson looked at her across his desk. He was a small man, but he had his hydraulic chair pumped up high, so he looked like a little kid on a high chair, looking slightly down at her. “Lorna, I’ve seen this before. You’re used to living a certain way, and you’re insecure about changing that lifestyle.”

He was right. He had her pegged. “That’s definitely true. Isn’t there another way to go about this?”

He shook his head. “Not at this point.” He picked up one of the pieces of paper. “You’re paying interest rates close to thirty percent. Your minimum payments take your debt-to-income ratio into the stratosphere. I’m no psychologist, and please don’t take this the wrong way, but living this way has to be hard on you.”

For some reason that last sentence, or maybe just the way he said it, made her suddenly feel like crumbling. Hot tears threatened to become a full-blown embarrassment. She swiped her hand across her eyes, looked down for a moment to compose herself, then said, “You’re right. I can’t keep doing this. I’ve got to do whatever it takes to get rid of this debt once and for all.”

Phil smiled. “I’ll be here to help. And I’ve got some ideas and suggestions for chipping away at the debt faster.”

“You do?” That sounded hopeful. “Like what?”

“Ever sell anything on eBay?”

She’d never even
been
to eBay. She’d always just thought of online auctions as a place where grown-ups who should have better interests got online and bought Beanie Babies and
Who’s the Boss?
lunchboxes and Hummel figures.

But maybe she was wrong.

The idea of selling stuff instead of taking on an additional job certainly appealed to her. “Like what? What do people sell, or buy, there?”

“
Anything
. Collectibles, cookware, knickknacks, clothes, even shoes—”

Shoes!

Oh, no, no. She couldn’t. It was bad enough that she had people coming over tonight to perhaps
trade
shoes with. She wasn’t going to sell them off to faceless strangers for money. Money that would just be thrown into a dark, deep, pool of debt.

She’d make sacrifices. Work longer hours. Babysit in her off time, if necessary. Mow lawns, like she did in junior high.

But she wasn’t getting rid of the shoes.

No way.

“You know, I just don’t think that’s my thing,” she said, cutting him off.

He stopped. “Okay. That’s fine. It was just a suggestion.”

“I appreciate it, don’t get me wrong.”

“You’ll come up with something,” he said. “Everyone has different levels of comfort with this. And I know it can be difficult to face at first.”

“I’m facing it,” Lorna said, perhaps a tad defensively. “Head-on. This is me facing it.”

He looked at her. “That’s good.”

She felt like an ass. “It’s just that…” The words dissolved. She was saying too much, without really
saying
anything at all. She did that when she got nervous. Better for her to just shut up now. “I’ve got a few ideas of my own about how to bring up my income,” she lied.

She did, at least, have a good idea about how to get shoes now that she couldn’t afford to actually purchase them, but something told her that Phil Carson wouldn’t be very impressed by her plan or the fact that she’d taken care of that before thinking about the more serious matter of her income.

“Excellent. Now.” He cleared his throat and held out his hand. “If you could pass all of your credit cards this way, we can get started….”

“I’m going to place a small metal bar into the cartilage of your ear right here.” Dr. Kelvin Lee pinched a spot on Sandra’s earlobe.

“Will it hurt?” Sandra asked. A silly question, considering the fact that she was lying on the acupuncturist’s table with about forty needles sticking in her at this very moment.

But Kelvin Lee had the tact
not
to point that out. “It might hurt for a moment when I insert it. But little more than a prick.”

“So how long does it stay there?” she asked, wondering if the fifteen minutes for the needles had passed yet.

“A month.”

“A
month
?”

“Auricular therapy is different from acupuncture,” he explained patiently. “It continues to work as you leave the bar in.”

The way it said that,
leave the bar in,
she pictured herself like one of those tribal women who put bigger and bigger tubes in their ears until eventually their lobes hung down lower than their sagging boobs. “I don’t know about this—”

“I assure you, it will not be painful.”

She swallowed. If it would help her get the hell out of her apartment now and then, she shouldn’t care if it
was
painful. “Okay.” She squinted her eyes shut. “Go ahead.” She waited a moment while he felt around on her earlobe for the spot. She opened her eyes. “It’s okay, you can do it.”

“I just did.” He smiled, displaying the kind of quiet confidence that made her wonder how she could have doubted him.

She lifted her hand to her ear and, sure enough, felt a little metal bar, much like the post of an earring, running through the back of her lobe. “That’s it?”

He nodded. “That’s it.”

She was still for a moment, trying to see if she felt any different. But she didn’t. “When will I notice a difference?”

“I cannot say for certain. It’s different for everyone. More than likely you will notice what you’re
not
feeling in terms of panic and stress, rather than feeling something new.”

Three hours later, Sandra, despite a healthy dose of skepticism, started to think maybe he was right.

It was hard to pinpoint exactly what the difference was. It wasn’t like she was suddenly ready to get on a crowded Metro car, but the idea of going out and, say, picking up groceries wasn’t quite so daunting as it would have been even yesterday.

The next morning, the improvement was still there. In a way, Sandra felt like she could take on the world, but she knew there was a bit of false confidence to that. If she went out and hopped on a bus, she’d probably be clawing her way out of it at the first stop.

So the bus was out. But the corner grocery store seemed doable. She went out for salad fixings and Skinny Cow ice cream bars. And while it wasn’t exactly a party, she found she wasn’t panicking so much as she usually did.

She went back to her apartment in some amazement, wondering if that little stick in her ear could
really
have the power to help her get over her agoraphobia.

There was one pretty good way to find out.

Tomorrow was Tuesday. The day Shoe Addicts Anonymous met. She could just go once, she told herself. If it worked, great. If it didn’t, she could at least say she’d done it and move on in her therapy with Dr. Ratner.

She’d do it.

Just once.

Just once.

She repeated that chant to herself as she went to the phone and picked it up to make the call.

The people were due to arrive in fifteen minutes, and Lorna was having serious second thoughts. What if they weren’t who they said they were? What if they weren’t women even? What if one was a deranged man who wanted to strangle her with her own underpants, take her belongings, and leave her to rot in the apartment until the smell drew the attention of the neighbors (something that could take a while, considering how foul the garbage outside sometimes got when the trash collectors were on one of their many strikes).

It wasn’t impossible. What about that guy who’d called? That was so weird. He kept insisting that he “needed to get out” and that he could
buy
women’s size 7½ shoes and participate in the swapping. Like they were baseball cards, or Hello Kitty puffy stickers, or something, and they’d all meet on the playground to swap. Really, it had been hard to get him to take no for an answer. Maybe he was just some hound dog who figured he could meet women that way, but on the other hand, maybe he was a psycho who had called back, done a convincing imitation of a woman’s voice, and gotten her address so he could come cause trouble tonight.

She’d been cautious and put her cell phone number in the ad so she couldn’t be traced—so much for Phil Carson’s suggestion that her cell phone might not be an expense she needed!—but when Helene, Florence, and Sandra had called, Lorna had readily given them her address after a short chat.

Maybe one of them…like Florence. Was anyone
really
named Florence, or had Lorna fallen for a really stupid ruse, perpetrated by some deranged
Brady Bunch
fan?

With a knot of anxiety in her stomach, Lorna went to the door and made sure the bolt was on. She could look through the peephole and make sure whoever came looked…normal.

Then she waited.

The first knock came at three minutes to seven. Lorna hurried to the door and looked out. It was a very tall, thin woman with frosted black hair that reminded Lorna of Cruella de Vil. She was holding three large shopping bags, and she was frowning.

Lorna opened the door. “Hi,” she said, suddenly aware that she hadn’t concocted any sort of opening line. “Welcome to Shoe Addicts Anonymous. I’m Lorna.”

“Florence Meyers,” the woman said, bustling through the doorway and knocking Lorna with a bag as she passed. “First thing, we’ve got to change the name.”

“Change the name?” Lorna repeated.

“Absolutely. It sounds like a drug or alcohol rehabilitation program. We don’t want that.”

Actually, that’s exactly what it felt like to Lorna. “We don’t?”

“Mm-mm. How does everyone else feel about it?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“You haven’t talked to them?”

“Not about that, no.”

Florence looked exasperated for a moment, then shrugged. “Where should I put these?” She lifted the bags.

“What are they?”

Florence looked like Lorna had just asked her what came after three. “Shoes, of course.”

That was a lot of shoes. “All of them?”

Florence began opening the bags, lifting out shoes, and laying them across the floor. Some of them were scuffed, a fact undoubtedly made worse by throwing them into a bag together, but most of them were…Well, they were ugly. And unrecognizable, style-wise.

“See these?” Florence lifted a pair of what looked like the kind of patent leather sandals Lorna would have
adored
as a child. They were the color Lorna thought of these days as
biological pink
. “Jimmy Choos. Limited edition.”

“Jimmy Choos?” Lorna repeated skeptically.

Florence nodded. Smug. “He almost never does flats.”

“Well, he does…” No sense arguing. Lorna reached for one of the shoes and examined it. The label
looked
like the real thing, but it was glued on a little unevenly. “Where did you get them?”

“New York.” Florence took the shoe back. “On the corner of forty-eighth Street and Fifth Avenue.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t really know New York that well. What store is that?”

“It wasn’t a store,” Florence said, like Lorna had just said something incredibly stupid. “It was a guy who had a bunch of high-end shoes and purses for sale. I’ve sold a lot of them online. Made a fortune. But these.” She glanced admiringly at the shoes. “They’re special. Someone might have to give me
two
pairs for these.”