Baby Needs a New Pair of Shoes

“What you reading today?” Conchita asked.

I held up the book, showed them the cover.

“No shit, chica,” Rivera said, “but the sun also sets, too, you know, every damn day.”

Indeed.

Stella had not been whistling Windex when she said the client we were doing was a movie star. Elizabeth Hepburn, star of stage and screen, may have been as old as television, but even I, who preferred pages to celluloid, knew who she was. She had two Academy Awards on her mantel—I was tempted to dance with them when she went down for her morning nap, book in hand, but resisted the urge—and had starred in my all-time favorite movie, A Bitter Pill, about a starlet who overcomes her strumpet past only to be taken out by brain cancer on the night of the Oscars. “Did someone turn the lights out in here?” was a line that always made me bawl like a baby and always made Hillary laugh at me for bawling like a baby.

Due to my fear of heights, I was always the inside person. Still, even though there were three of them outside and only one of me inside, despite Stella’s earlier admonitions to take this job seriously, they all goofed around so much that I was done long before they would finish.

Hey, they don’t call me The Golden Squeegee for nothing.

So I grabbed my lunch bag from the van and sat out on a far corner of the fieldstone terrace, figuring no one in the house could object to that too much so long as I cleaned up after myself, and pulled out my now-cold Amy’s Cheese Pizza Pocket, popped open my Diet Pepsi Lime and polished off my Hemingway.

Food done; drink done; book, and therefore all of Hemingway, done. Crap, I hadn’t thought to bring a backup book. What was taking the other three so long?

“Miss?” The voice was tentative and a bit shaky, as though the speaker was recovering from something. And yet somehow the voice was confident as well, as though the speaker was also sure that whoever her audience was, that audience would immediately burst into applause. “Oh, miss?”

I looked up to see Elizabeth Hepburn, wearing a plush pink satin bathrobe despite the warmth of the day, standing in the sliding-glass doorway. She may have been close to ninety, but she was still a stunner, with blue eyes like a chip from the sky, hair as white as a new Kleenex tissue and a perfect smile that defied the viewer to claim those teeth weren’t real; poking out from the bottom of her robe, she had white fur mules on her pedicured feet. If I hadn’t worried it might be taken amiss, I really might have applauded for her.

But from doing other stars’ homes with Stella, I’d come to realize that stars could be, well, strange. It was like they didn’t know what they wanted. On the one hand, they wanted you to know who they were—“I am important!”—but on the other, they didn’t want you to acknowledge who they were, as if somehow that acknowledgment might be an intrusion.

I jumped up from where I’d been sitting, wiped my hands off on my khakis.

“I’m sorry,” I started to say. “I shouldn’t have—”

“Of course you should have.” She pooh-poohed my concerns away. “I just looked out the windows—they’re so clean! I can see!—and saw you sitting out here while you waited for the others to finish and I thought you maybe could use some company.”

There was something lonely-looking about her, making me think that maybe she was the one who could use some company, but I couldn’t say that. So I merely accepted the seat she indicated at the white-painted wrought-iron table.

“Here,” she said. “You sit here and I’ll go inside and get dessert. I baked cookies last night,” she added proudly.

Elizabeth Hepburn baked her own cookies?

She was back in a flash, cookies and fresh lemonade on a tray, and damn if those cookies weren’t good. The rest of the crew didn’t know what they were missing, being such slow workers. Of course, if the rest of the crew were fast workers, I probably would never have gotten to taste those cookies, so there was that.

“What were you reading?” she asked.

Why did everyone always ask me that? It seemed like it was a question I answered several times a day.

Like I’d done with Stella, Conchita and Rivera earlier, I flashed the book’s cover.

“Ernie?” she said. “People still read Ernie?”

Ernie?

“Once I start reading an author, I read everything they ever wrote,” I said. “This is the last and I don’t know what to read next. Why? Did you know—?”

“Oh, my, yes. When I was a lot younger, I hooked up with Ernie—is that how you say it these days, ‘hooked up’?—in Key West.”

“Really?” I found this amazing. For while some people might be thrilled to talk to a movie star, I was even more thrilled to be talking to someone who had met a writer.

“Yes, really.”

For the first time, she seemed miffed at something, maybe miffed that I had doubted her. But then I realized it was something else that had her going.

“Pfft.” She dismissed Papa with a wave of her manicured hand. “Ernie wasn’t such a big deal. All he used to do was go on and on and on about that goddamned fish.”

Before I knew it, Elizabeth Hepburn was telling all, everything about Ernie and everything about several of the other famous people she’d ever met or been with over the years. This might have seemed strange to some and I guess it was strange, but I was kind of used to it. I don’t know if it was that I was a former Psych major who had flunked out, or that Hillary’s own psychologist instincts had rubbed off on me by association, but whenever I found myself in similar situations, whenever I was done before the rest of the crew, whoever’s house we were doing wound up spilling the beans to me like I was Delilah Freud.

And, yes, it did turn out that Elizabeth Hepburn’s biggest problem was that she was lonely….

“There’s almost no one left in the world,” she said, “who shares the memories I do, nobody who can testify that the things I remember really happened or not. Why, when Ernie and I—”

“Yo, chica, get the lead—” Rivera skidded around the corner of the house but stopped talking abruptly when she saw me sitting, eating cookies with the client.

“Oops,” she said, “sorry to interrupt. But we’re all finished and we need to get to the next—”

“That’s quite all right,” Elizabeth Hepburn said, rising. “I’ll just go get my checkbook.”

A moment later, we were still packing up the van and tying down the ladders, when Elizabeth Hepburn met us out on the gravel drive. That drive was so perfect, I’d have bet money someone regularly raked the gray-and-white pebbles.

“For you.” She handed a check to Stella. “And for you.” She handed one crisp ten-dollar bill each to Conchita and Rivera. “Gracias.”

I wondered if the girls were going to hit her. Anytime someone tried to speak Spanish to them they got all hot under their penguin collars. “We’re Brazilian, you know? What do you think, that everyone who speaks with a certain kind of accent comes from the same country or speaks the same language? We speak Portuguese in Brazil, not Spanish. If you want to thank us, say obrigado, none of that gracias shit, obrigado very much.”

I found their reaction a bit extreme, especially in relation to me but also because it was often Stella’s customers they were going off on and it seemed like the people were just trying to be polite. I know I was. But then I would think how I would like it if someone came to America from, say, Germany, and started talking to me with a Texan accent because that’s what they mostly heard on TV, and I wouldn’t like that at all.

But perhaps they saw the same vulnerability in Elizabeth Hepburn that I’d seen earlier, because they let the ostensible insult pass, merely muttering “Gracias” in return.

Elizabeth Hepburn turned to me. “And for you.” She handed me a large paperback book.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Well,” she said, “you said you were out of reading material.”

“But what is it?” I asked.

I’d never heard of the author, Shelby Macallister, nor the title, High Heels and Hand Trucks: My Life Among the Books. And the cover, on which was one perfect blue-green stiletto, was pink pink pink.

Elizabeth Hepburn’s famous blue eyes twinkled as she answered, “Chick Lit.”

“Chick Lit? But I’ve never—”

“Go on,” she said, “treat yourself. They’re tons of fun. Myself, I’m addicted to them.”

Addiction was something I could well understand…