Aunt Liz brought her new beau into our backyard by tugging him by his shirt. He was afraid of our dog Buff, but she wasn’t letting go of this one.
Walter. That’s right, Walter was his name and he had black patent leather hair and lots of it too. My sister Mamie thought he was Puerto Rican.
“Are you Puerto Rican?” she asked indelicately.
“Hell no,” he said back to her.
My father was inside yelling for someone to let on to where the heck they put the church key, while I helped my mother bring out the paper goods and platters.
“He seems nice enough,” she said, while holding the screen door open with her foot. “Why shouldn’t Liz have someone? At her age it only gets more tough.”
“At her age it only gets more tough” sounded as far away to me as the moon.
I thought about Aunt Liz’s others; such as the one who came to Thanksgiving after having sat under the sun lamp too long. Before that his nickname had been Whitey. Each time he was asked to pass the sweet potatoes, I cringed because I felt his pain. Then there was the one with the ums. “Yes, um, those Phillies can sure um take um the Yankees in six, um, yeah, um, in six um, I think.” Mamie and I would sit and count on top of the stairs. The one with the most ums was the winner.
I hesitated for a moment to remember Harry. He was the one Liz would have married. The last time he came to our house, he took a praying mantis off my nice clean pillowcase and saved it by placing it in the bushes outside. We heard a week later that his plane went down.
After everyone moved to the lawn - those old folding chairs would wait in a circle until the first frost – my father started peeling us peaches. “So Walter, what do you do with yourself when you’re not courting Lizzie?”
“Courtin’ Lizzie? Courtin’ Lizzie? What’s he still living in the days of the covered wagons?” Mamie whispered.
“Well, actually I sell shoes.”
“A shoe salesman! How’s business?”
“Well, not bad actually. My territory is, well, upstate mostly which puts me home only on the weekends.”
I could feel Mamie starting to count the wells.
“Where do you sleep?” she asked.
“Mamie,” my mother broke in, “that’s personal information you’re asking for and I don’t think Walter needs to answer.”
“Oh, that’s alright,” Walter said. “Well, I sleep in motels until I do a little business on Fridays and then, well, I rush to get home to Liz. I like getting home to Liz,” he said, his chocolate-colored eyes getting all misty.
Then his face took on a look like he was about to burst into song and said, “Well, why don’t I get my case so the girls can pick out a pair. Well nobody I’ve ever known squawked at a pair of free shoes.”
“No one in this house well!” cheered Mamie.
That summer I was just about as wistful as a kid could get. Could the shoes I saw in a magazine, the ones my mother told me to keep dreaming about, could they just happen to be in that big black case of Walter’s?
We watched as he struggled to wheel it on the lawn. I held my breath and prayed. Mamie was holding hers too, but she did that on occasion.
Worse than the fact that Walter’s shoes were totally made out of plastic and the most hideous things we ever saw, I think it became clear to Aunt Liz that her plans for a winter wedding needed serious reviewing. My mother glanced over to her with her usual veil of sympathy.
Without saying anything, thank god, Mamie got up to chase Buff off his leash. The dog pranced over to sniff Walter’s case. He lunged to take one of the wing-tips in his mouth and then he ran away.
