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Maria Mazziotti Gillan Page 3
Jacobs
Department Store
When I was
growing up, we’d go to
Jacobs department
store in
Paterson, New Jersey, my
mother, brother,
sister and I
made our way to the shoe
department
to get our
shoes. They carried brown
oxfords, Buster
Brown, the
only name brand item my
mother ever
bought for
us. No ballerina shoes for
us. Only those
chunky
oxfords, trying to insure
our feet would be as
safe as she
tried to keep us. In the
shoe department,
they had a
machine that X-rayed your
feet so they
could fit you
with the perfect size
shoes. I loved that
machine,
sliding my feet into it so I
could see the bones
in my feet,
the shape of them like
silver shadows. How
easy it was
to see the interior of the
foot, the bones
of the toes,
but today nothing is easy.
I’d like to slide my
life into
that foot measuring machine,
figure out why on
a day so
bright with autumn, my worry
is darker than
all beauty
and nothing is easy. Not
the email I get
from my son
in Texas saying, “I don’t
want to talk
about it, but
Texas stinks,” and I know my
son, a man
of few words,
has sent out a distress call
louder
than a sonic
boom, and if I ask him, he
won’t tell me
what’s wrong,
though he used to tell me
everything
when he was a
boy and I sat on the side
of his bed
and held his hand until he
fell asleep
and nothing
is easy, not my worry about
my husband
whom I left
behind yesterday even
though
his head is
bent sideways on his neck
so it looks
as though he’s going to hit
doorways
and walls and
often does, not my guilt
that when
I went to bed
the other night I heard him
cursing
and shouting,
and I heard the aide who now
lives
with us
because he can’t be left
alone, go downstairs,
and I fell
asleep anyway, and my guilt
when the aide
tells me the
next morning that he was
trying to get
to the
bathroom and he fell and wet
his pants
and she had
to calm him down and change
his clothes
and wash him,
the way I did so many times
before she
moved in and I am ashamed
that I have
hired someone else to do
what I can’t
manage any more. I don’t
need
that foot
machine to see how
devastated and broken
the lines of
my life have become, and no
shoes, no shoes
to fix what
is wrong.
© Copyright, 2013,
Maria
Mazziotti Gillan. |