North of Unreal
Cruel shoes and frostbite
Frostbite: (Noun) The freezing, or effect of a freezing, of some part of the body, as the ears or nose. (Verb) To expose to the effect of frost, or a frosty air; to blight or nip with frost.
I blame the painful matter of my frostnipped toes on the medical emergency that occurred in the shoe department. That day, the footwear was on sale at the department store inside the big mall. That day, I left my thick coat on, the better to snatch up the savings with both my unencumbered hands. I stashed my ugly hat and long scarf and fat mittens in the pockets of my puffy jacket. Even unzipped, my coat left me sweating and a bit desperate.
Meanwhile, my elderly mother struggled to keep my young daughter occupied on the thin bench of the shoe department. She offered her the opaque nylon sample stockings and the metal foot-width measuring gadget and a neon shoe horn that was at least a foot long. But young Daisy rejected them all. She wanted to play with the All-Plastic-Batteries-Not-Included Doctor’s Kit her grandmother had just bought for her at a store in the shopping mall. And so, while Dr. Daisy began her medical examination of Granny, the rest of us stripped down to our stockings.
We were hopeful shoppers. We flung off our shoes and kicked up our heels as we tried on display-model mukluks or carelessly left one of a pair of Blundstones widowed in the aisle. Outside, snow whipped around the cars we’d left in the parking lot. But we were full of hope. This very day, we’d ditch our insufficient shoes and flimsy footwear and walk out of the store in stout, stylish, sexy, warm winter boots, as presentable in Paris as they were suitable for perambulating the unplowed streets of Prince George.
So we zipped and unlaced and yanked and fretted. We tracked down clerks and begged them for half-sizes. We watched our legs in low mirrors. We slowly circled the aisles, like babies learning to walk, checking each potential pair for pinched toes or a sexy strut.
Meanwhile, my daughter had opened up her toy Doctor’s Kit and was offering free vaccinations. She button-holed two girls in long Mennonite dresses and thick glasses, but only one of them agreed to get a shot for the Mumbledy-Bumps. Daisy assured the girl that the shot would hurt quite a lot. She gave the plastic syringe several pumps for effect and urged her patient to cry. Meanwhile, the girl’s soft-spoken mother held up a box and offered me the last felt-booty boots left in the building, if I wanted them.
She was a generous stranger with a kind smile. And because I was now a wise woman of a certain age, and because I lived out in the bush, I told myself that warmth and comfort were really all that mattered. I tried on that pair of sullen Sorels and took them for a test tromp.
Now my mother roused herself from the thin shoe department bench. She warned me that felt booties might be bad for my marriage. But I knew better. If my teen years were anything to go by, I knew that even wearing white Moonboots did not rule out the possibility of a little boot-knocking in the back 40. And I was sold.
And there, in the midst of it all, I put down those boots and picked up my purse, ready to go and pay…when suddenly, everything in that shoe department got all tripped up.
Suddenly, there were sirens. Then, down the aisle, there came two naked feet and a sockless man on a stretcher, and paramedics pulling his pant legs up to his knees.
A matronly clerk told us there was nothing we could do and nothing she could say, but there was now a medical emergency in front of the stock room, and there would be no more boots brought out today.
And while I was busy gathering up my things, and the young clerks were busy admiring the paramedics by watching the shoplifting mirror on the ceiling, someone snatched up my Sorels—and disappeared. And that was the end of my boot shop.
Outside, the snow was still flying and it was hard to see.
Inside, I was sweating and sour and surly.
And I told my elderly mother and my young daughter: “Just wait here, inside the doors. I’ll just run out and get the car and come right back. I think it’s parked just right over there.”
And I ran outside in my shoes.
Later on, after they found me, Daisy tried to amputate my frostnipped toes with the plastic scalpel from her Doctor’s Kit.
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