Baby Needs a New Pair of Shoes

As I zipped my purple lunch bag shut, the morning talk show switched over to commercial and suddenly he was there again: the man of my dreams.

I guess that bears explaining and really he wasn’t the man of my dreams, since the man of my dreams was faceless, but certainly he’d inspired a lot of my recent dreams.

The man in question was The Yo-Yo Man.

I mean, it wasn’t like he wore a streaming superhero red cape with a giant yellow Y emblazoned on his chest, but I thought of him as The Yo-Yo Man. And the commercials he starred in had been airing for about a month.

There was a new yo-yo manufacturer, Ball & String, which had been trying to unseat Duncan as the manufacturer of yo-yos for some time now. Their latest gambit involved a commercial campaign where this incredibly talented yo-yoist—yes, I did just say yo-yoist like it was an actual word—did things that were, well, downright amazing. I guess the theory behind making these commercials was that it wasn’t enough for one company to try to say in print ads that they were better than another; when a medium was so visual, they needed to actually show, not just tell. The things that The Yo-Yo Man could do were amazing, and yet he made it look so effortless, as if anyone, including the viewer at home, could potentially do the same, if only they used the Ball & String. He could spin two yo-yos simultaneously, he could juggle fire in one hand while doing Round the World with his other and, man, let me tell you, he could walk my dog any day.

Not that I have a dog. I don’t even particularly like dogs. But, really, The Yo-Yo Man could walk my dog any day.

And he was cute. Did I mention that The Yo-Yo Man was cute? Not that you could tell height from a TV commercial, but I still guessed him to be about six feet even to my own five feet even. His hair was the opposite of mine, his being long, curly and blond. And his eyes were a crystal blue-green where mine were somewhere between the light and dark chocolates in a box of Russell Stover. So he was the opposite of me, plus he was cool.

He was certainly cooler than his backup yo-yoists, for of course the commercial did have a supporting cast. How better to get the message across that the Ball & String yo-yo was the best device ever invented to aid someone in their journey to becoming as cool as The Yo-Yo Man than to surround him with also-rans, less cool men and women dropping their own yo-yos, setting their hair on fire, because they were not as talented just yet, because they did not have the right yo-yo.

What, I ask you, is sadder than being an also-ran to The Yo-Yo Man?

I particularly felt sorry for the guy furthest in the background. Furthest Guy, as I thought of him, was kind of geeky-looking, with short-cropped brown hair and uncool clothes; I couldn’t make out his eye color. And I guess that was part of the point: to even rate eye color in the commercial, to be as cool as The Yo-Yo Man, a guy needed Ball & String.

And ever since this commercial started airing, nearly every night I had a dream about a man with a yo-yo. The man in my dream was faceless, so it was hard to tell if he was supposed to be The Yo-Yo Man or not, but whoever he was, he was just as amazing with his tricks as The Yo-Yo Man. I don’t want you thinking I was obsessed or anything and it wasn’t as though I dreamed of him all night long, but, as I say, he haunted me often enough.

As soon as the commercial ended, the strains of The Yo-Yo Man theme song abruptly cut short, I switched off the TV.

I grabbed my lunch bag and looked down at my attire: a black Coldplay T-shirt that had seen better days, faded khaki shorts, scuffed Nikes.

Sighing at the underachieving squalor that was me, I grabbed the last Ernest Hemingway book I needed to read to make my tour of him complete and my yellow bucket, in which were my squeegee, a shammy, a paint scraper and two rolls of paper towels.

My employer? Squeaky Qlean Window Washing.

Yes, I wash windows.

2

Even if I hated the name Squeaky Qlean—the name dreamed up by the business’s proprietor, Stella Davis, a woman who had yet to realize that there were misuses for the letter Q—window washing was the perfect job for me. The repetitive motions fit the internal rhythms of my obsessive personality, plus, although there was not a whole lot of prestige involved—precisely, none—at least my mind was my own. I’d had jobs where I was actually required to think on someone else’s time clock and I found the lack of opportunity for free association to be just too mentally confining.

“You’re twenty-eight years old now, Delilah.” Hillary would attempt to grow me up from time to time. “Isn’t it time you thought about getting a real job?”

Those words always rankled some, but it was hard for me to get mad at Hillary or if I did get mad, to stay mad for too long, because Hillary Clinton was the best friend I’d ever had. She was not only my best friend, though, my mother long dead, she was like a mother to me, too. We may have squabbled like family members constantly, but I loved her. She was my favorite living woman in the world.

And, yes, her name really was Hillary Clinton.

But this was no time to be thinking about Hillary Clinton, or the fact that she was my best friend, or the fact that she’d remained my friend even though I was not much of an achiever and she was a huge one, or the fact that maybe I was something of a charity case for her, her continued friendship toward me making me something akin to her more lost-cause clients—Hillary always said that my obsessions were both a comfort to me and what victimized me most, making it a perfect vicious circle—because Stella Davis, my boss, was pulling up in the Squeaky Qlean van outside my condo, South Park. The van was pristine white, with a picture of a tuxedo-wearing penguin cleaning a window on it, the window having those little sparkly star thingies all over it, not unlike on a Windex bottle, in order to symbolize the acme of window-cleaning perfection.

South Park always seemed to me to be a silly name for a condo in Danbury, since Connecticut is north and there was no park in sight, but we at least had a stamp-sized balcony—fraternal twin to the minuscule kitchen—off the living room of our unit that afforded a view of the pool down below, so I tried to suck it up about the nonsensical name.

Another thing that impressed me as silly, as it did every workday, was Stella’s appearance and attire. Stella had her blond hair in an honest-to-God bouffant style, her green eyes highlighted by full makeup, her buxom top encased in a faux tuxedo T-shirt that had tails down the back, her perky bottom in pristine white shorts, with black socks on her feet and white leather sneakers over those that she polished every day. When we picked up Stella’s two other employees, Conchita and Rivera, both from Brazil, they would be similarly dressed, sans the hooker makeup.

“If we look better than the competition,” Stella was fond of saying, “people will want to use us instead. After all, who would you rather hire, a window washer that looks like she’s ready to accept an Academy Award or one who’s dressed sloppy like, well, you?”

I’d pointed out to Stella, repeatedly, that while penguins were my favorite non-cat animal, loving penguins and wanting to look like a penguin were two very different things and that with my shortness, I couldn’t help but look like a waddling refugee from Antarctica in one of her getups. If I were any other member of the crew, undoubtedly Stella would have fought me on this—Stella was big on fighting—but she grudgingly acknowledged that I was the best worker she’d ever had. My nickname among the crew, The Golden Squeegee, ensured that I’d have a job with Stella for as long as I wanted one. And, besides, the pristine white shorts they all wore always wound up splattered with gray window sploodge by the end of the day anyway, kind of spoiling Stella’s desired effect of bucket-carrying Hollywood stars on the red carpet.

As for Conchita and Rivera, and the all-girl crew, Stella was also fond of saying, “I don’t hire men anymore. The EOE people can sue me if they want to, but have you ever hired a man to do hard work? What a bunch of whiners. ‘It’s too hot out here.’ ‘When do we get off work?’ ‘I have a second job to get to.’ ‘That ladder’s too high.’ ‘I’m taking my break now.’ I swear to God, I always thought it was just me. But then I talked to a colleague who owns a landscaping service and he said the exact same thing. ‘Ask a 100-pound girl to pull a tree out of the ground with her bare hands and she gets right to it. Ask a 200-pound man and before he’s even touched the damn thing, he’s calling Worker’s Comp on his cell phone to verbally file papers for his bad back. Give me a six-pack of chicks any day.’ Naturally, I poked him in the gut with my pool cue for saying ‘chicks,’ but, believe you me, I know from whence he speaks.”

“So what did you do last night?” Stella asked, snapping her omnipresent gum as she keyed up the ignition. “What’re you reading today? Not that Hemingway guy again. Isn’t he the one who hated chicks?”

I knew that the barrage of questions—Stella was a relentless talker—would continue until we picked up Conchita and Rivera, at which point Stella’s attentions would focus solely on them. Unlike me, but very much like Stella, Conchita and Rivera were big talkers.

Like me, Conchita and Rivera were short and dark. But unlike me, where in Stella’s uniform I would have looked like a reject extra from March of the Penguins, Conchita and Rivera looked hot hot hot, like maybe they worked at an upscale Hooters or something.

“Stel-la!” Conchita and Rivera jointly trilled as they hopped into the van.

Conchita and Rivera lived in a neighborhood that would have depressed me, one of Danbury’s few rough neighborhoods, but they never seemed to mind, greeting each day of being alive with an exuberance I could only envy. Of their former home in Brazil, obviously worse, all they would ever say was, “You don’t even want to know, Delilah. Better for us here.”

The Girls From Brazil, as Stella and I referred to them, were illegal aliens. But I was sure not going to be the one to turn them in. If their situation here wasn’t scary enough, the tone they got in their voice when they told me I didn’t even want to know what it was like where they came from. During the three years I’d been working for her, whenever Stella had put ads in the paper prior to hiring them, despite the fact that Stella offered a generous hourly wage, the only people to apply were other Brazilians. The way I figured it, they weren’t stealing jobs from legal people, because no one legal wanted their jobs; no one except me, that is.

The Girls From Brazil also always greeted Stella as though they were trying to pick her up, in that way, which was not far from the truth since Conchita and Rivera were free-living lesbians, always willing to expand their circle of love. But while they incessantly flirted with Stella, they never once flirted with me, making me feel somehow pathetic in the extreme: my hot meter was turned so low, I wasn’t even hot enough to be desirable to free-living lesbians.

Oh, well. At least I owned the title of The Golden Squeegee.

And I did love the women I worked with, if for their sheer vibrancy alone, even if they did have a tendency to pick on me.

“Stel-la.” Conchita poked her head between the front seats. “How come she always gets to sit in front?”

“She” was their name for me.

“Because she gets carsick,” Stella explained for the umpteenth time. “And I don’t want her vomiting in my hair.”

“Sounds pretty flimsy to me,” said Rivera. “Have you actually ever seen her get carsick?”

“Well, no,” Stella conceded. “But do any of us really want to?”

A valid argument, I thought, even as I muttered, “‘Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.’” Honestly, did there have to be three of them to devil me?

“What did she say?” Conchita asked.

“Something about fire and bubbles,” Rivera said. “I don’t know. Maybe she’s singing some kind of dumb-ass song?”

“Where are we working today?” Conchita asked.

“First job, a big house in Westport,” Stella said. “Movie star.”

Westport and the towns around it had more movie stars per square mile than anywhere else outside of Hollywood and it seemed that they were all clients of Squeaky Qlean. In fact, we did so many homes belonging to famous people that Stella occasionally flirted with the idea of adding “Window washers to the stars!” to her business cards but worried that her upscale clientele would find that too presumptuous.

“So no salsa dancing on the ladders,” Stella cautioned. “You girls need to act like professionals today. The job is way overpriced and I’m hoping to talk them into having us back each month.”

Monthly window cleaning might seem like a ridiculous expense for a private homeowner, but Stella had secured one such client already, a famous record producer who lived out on the water. When we first did his house, he hadn’t had it done in ten years and he spent the whole morning following me from room to room—I was always the inside person—stoned out of his mind, laughing and muttering, “Clean windows. Way cool. I can see. I can see!” Mister Famous Record Producer had moved in around the time of the Clinton impeachment, something he still hadn’t gotten over all these years later. “The man got impeached for a blow job—a blow job! If people in the music business got fired for that, there’d be no music left anywhere in the world.” Stella had actually needed to talk him out of having us come every week, which was what he originally wanted, and, good as the money was, none of us wanted to listen to him do his “I can see!” number that often or listen to him whine about how Bubba had gotten treated, even those of us who agreed with him. If every window washer lost their job over a…

If traffic was kind and Rte 7 wasn’t one long parking lot, Westport was a good thirty-five minutes from Conchita and Rivera’s apartment, so I pulled out my book and went back to my Hemingway, figuring on getting some reading in. A few more chapters—I’d started the book the night before—and I would have read everything Papa’d ever written.